Tag: NobleStream

We just finished the third of our three-part webinar series on“The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”, hosted by our friends at NobleStream. In the first discussion, Michael and I laid out our vision for why we are analysts for the LMS market and what we hope to achieve, capped off by Michael’s comment “Depending on how you define it, I have a feeling that, for better or for worse, long after humanity is dead and gone, cockroaches will still be using the LMS.”  In the second discussion, we took the institutional view and had Pat James and Anna Stirling, from the California Community Colleges, talking about how they approached LMS selection and in particular how they focused on the academic and strategic needs first, treating the LMS as plumbing to enable the house to be built. In the third discussion, we took the vendor view and had legendary Ray Henderson take a break from his well-deserved steelhead fishing excursions and describe how vendors understand and manage the LMS vendor selection process. This conversation was capped off by my mention of “the miniature elephant in the room”, where strategically-beneficial LMS decisions are typically made in spite of the RFP process, not because of it.

Michael and I thoroughly enjoyed these discussions and we hope you will, too.

We have now had 2 of our 3 webinars (or colloquiums) with NobleStream organized around “The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”. In our first webinar, Howard Weiner from NobleStream interviewed Michael and me about the work we do as consultants and market analysts. Video available here. In the second webinar, we had Pat James, executive director of OEI, and Anna Stirling, director of @ONE training and professional development. OEI is the Online Education Initiative from the California Community Colleges, and @ONE is providing key elements of OEI’s faculty and student support services. This Wednesday (Nov 16th), we have Ray Henderson to discuss the vendor perspective, but more on that at the bottom of this post.

This was a fun discussion with Pat and Anna, as we discussed the LMS decision in context of overall academic strategy, using OEI as a case study. We seemed to end on the metaphor of the LMS as plumbing that needs to be in place to build the house you need. For OEI, the house is the course exchange as well as a shared set of services to help faculty develop online courses throughout the system. Resources, quality rubrics and design support, professional development, support students, etc.

Coming next: we have Ray Henderson as our guest on Wednesday, Nov 16th, at 2pm EST to discuss the vendor perspective. Ray has a long history on the vendor side, working with eCollege, ANGEL, and Blackboard as a top executive, and he current sits on the board of several ed tech companies. This should be a great discussion. Sign up here for the third webinar.

Thanks to the good folks at NobleStream, Michael and I are participating in a series of three colloquiums (or colloquia or webinars, you choose) hosted by Howard Weiner. This past Wednesday, the three of us discussed the vision that Michael and I have for e-Literate and our consulting practice with a focus on learning platforms. In fact, the title of the series is “The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”.

At one point Howard asked us about why the LMS is so important and why we started our subscription service around the LMS, to which Michael responded in Feldstein fashion (question starting at 39:00):

Depending on how you define it, I have a feeling that, for better or for worse, long after humanity is dead and gone, cockroaches will still be using the LMS. It’s just this durable category. People talk about it dying or disappearing or morphing, and what happens is that it slowly evolves. It’s become this critical piece of infrastructure.

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