e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Pearson-PLC

  • More on Pearson and Change

    I am amazed at the number of comments we have gotten already on the other day’s Pearson post. Don’t you people have better things to do on a holiday than read and comment on 7,000-word blog posts about textbook publishers (asks the man who spent his holiday writing a 7,000-word blog post about a textbook publisher)? Seriously, I am humbled by your commitment. For those of you who subscribe to comments on this blog by email, I’m afraid that is no longer a reliable way to track the conversation. We have integrated Google+ into our blog posts which has the benefit of attracting more commenters and longer conversations at the cost of having two different commenting systems running simultaneously and no good way to track or integrate them. Unfortunately, we are back to the days where you have to go to the page periodically to see what is happening, at least for now.

    Anyway, unsurprisingly, there is a lot of skepticism about Pearson and also the notion of “efficacy” among the commenters. There is also some discussion about the complexity of how we define (or fail to define) the goals education and how the lack of clearly articulated goals makes any attempt to measure efficacy problematic. (Efficacious at what?) This is a point I’ve been trying to make in different ways and for different audiences in several recent posts. Larry Cuban has a timely blog post up on the history of this problem in math education.

    Meanwhile, Carrie Saarinen has a more positive take on the idea of efficacy. I met Carrie at the NERCOMP LMS unConference, when she was working at Brown University. She has since been hired by Instructure (to their great credit). I highly recommend reading Carrie’s post and following her blog.

  • Can Pearson Solve the Rubric’s Cube?

    Love ’em or hate ’em, it’s hard to dispute that Pearson has an outsized impact on education in America. This huge company—they have a stock market valuation of $18 billion—touches all levels from kindergarten through career education, providing textbooks, homework platforms, high-stakes testing, and even helping to design entire online degree programs. So when they announce a major change in their corporate strategy, it is consequential.

    That is one reason why I think that most everybody who is motivated to read this blog on a regular basis will also find it worthwhile to read Pearson’s startling publication, “The Incomplete Guide to Delivering Learning Outcomes” and, more generally, peruse their new efficacy web site. One of our goals for e-Literate is to explain what the industry is doing, why, and what it might mean for education. Finding the answers to these questions is often an exercise in reading the tea leaves, as Phil ably demonstrated in his recent posts on the Udacity/SJSU pilot and the layoffs at Desire2Learn. But this time is different. In all my years of covering the ed tech industry, I have never seen a company be so explicit and detailed about their strategy as Pearson is being now with their efficacy publications. Yes, there is plenty of marketing speak here. But there is also quite a bit about what they are actually doing as a company internally—details about pilots and quality reviews and hiring processes and M&A criteria. These are the gears that make a company go. The changes that Pearson is making in these areas are the best clues we can possibly have as to what the company really means when they say that they want efficacy to be at the core of their business going forward. And they have published this information for all the world to see.

    These now-public details suggest a hugely ambitious change effort within the company. Phil and I have consulted for a few textbook publishers, including Pearson, and I worked for Cengage for a year and a half. We have a pretty good idea of the magnitude of the change management challenges these companies face right now and the strategies that various publishers are bringing to bear in an effort to meet them. I can say with absolute conviction that what Pearson has announced is no half-hearted attempt or PR window dressing, and I can say with equal conviction that what they are attempting will be enormously difficult to pull off. They are not screwing around. Whatever happens going forward, Pearson is likely to be a business school case study for the ages.

    As if all of this drama weren’t enough, Pearson’s strategy raises another question which should be fascinating for educators; namely, can a rubric transform a multi-billion-dollar company?

    Fair warning: This post is ridiculously long. Even by my standards.

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  • No, really, courseware is a thing now

    In the operating plan slide deck that Cengage recently released as a consequence of their bankruptcy proceedings, the executive summary slide says that a key element of their strategy is “driving aggressive digital growth in a course model.” “Course solutions” is mentioned three times in the deck as well. Cengage, as a company, is essentially betting its future on courseware. Not just digital products in general, but courseware in particular.

    But they are hardly the only provider building content in this relatively new category. I thought it might be useful to provide a run-down of who is doing what in this space. It turns out that there is a pretty wide range in terms of approaches to the product category.

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  • MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact

    As Phil mentioned in his last post, he and I had the privilege of participating in a two-day ELI webinar on MOOCs. A majority of the speakers had been involved in implementing MOOCs at their institutions in one way or another. And an interesting thing happened. Over the course of the two days, almost none of the presenters—with the exception of the ACE representative, who has a vested interest—expressed the belief that MOOCs provide equivalent learning experiences to traditional college courses. Keep in mind, these folks were believers. They were enthusiastic about MOOCs in general. But they tended to describe the value of MOOCs as reaching a different audience than the traditional matriculated college student and provide a different value. They talked about it extending the university mission. By and large, they did not talk about it as being an improvement on, or even equal to, a traditional class. Now, there were well over 400 participants, so it wouldn’t be fair of me to say that there was unanimity, about this point or any other. But the level of agreement was remarkable.

    On the other hand, there was widespread enthusiasm for using MOOCs as essentially substitutions for textbooks in classes that included instructors from the local campus. Vanderbilt created what they called a course “wrapper” around a Coursera MOOC on machine learning. Folks from Stanford talked about the notion of a “distributed flip,” i.e., a group of flipped classrooms participating together in a MOOC. And SJSU talked about using an edX course in a blended course environment on one hand, and a Udacity course with Udacity-provided “course mentors” on the other.

    The obvious conclusion is that MOOCs are more of a threat to textbook companies than they are to universities. I think that’s true, but I also think it’s an oversimplification. There is a deeper (and older) trend to boil down a course into a set of digital artifacts that can be “played” by the student at will. It’s worth taking a deeper look at that trend, where it’s going, what’s useful about it, and what’s pernicious about it. (more…)

  • The OpenClass Vision: An Example

    In my last post, I described a vision for combining elements of MOOC-like scale with a more traditional face-to-face classroom experience, as articulated by Pearson’s Adrian Sannier. (Full disclosure: Pearson is a client of MindWires Consulting.) A couple of months ago, I suggested in an interview with Josh Kim for Inside Higher Education that this is where MOOCs would go next:

    Question 6. Will MOOCs replace accredited curriculum? Why or why not?

    I don’t know how to answer this question, because I’m not convinced that we know what a MOOC is yet. Will there be massive elements that are integral to many curricula? Almost certainly, although I don’t know how much of it we will see in 2013. Will the curricula be all massive? Probably not in most cases. Will we consider the mix of massive and non-massive elements to be “MOOCs”? I don’t know.

    The problem that we have right now is that we have very few models for how this might work. So when Sannier mentioned a course called Habitable Worlds being developed by Professor Ariel Anbar and Lev Horodyskyj at Arizona State University that will eventually be brought to OpenClass to support this model, I asked to speak with Professor Anbar in order to get some specifics. The conversation shed some light not only on possibilities for the mixed model, but also on possible futures for the liberal arts and the role of the professor.

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  • OpenClass vs the MOOC

    When Pearson’s OpenClass was announced about a year and a half ago, the natural question to ask was whether it would disrupt the LMS market. But that was then and this is now. (Full disclosure: Pearson is a client of MindWires Consulting.) The more interesting question today is where OpenClass stands vis-à-vis the MOOCs. To begin with, it certainly appears that the LMS and MOOC markets may be on a collision course. But beyond that, Pearson is a content provider first and foremost. With both the content and the platform at their disposal, as well as an array of assessment tools, they certainly have all the raw materials to build MOOCs. Is that where OpenClass is going? I recently had a short conversation with Pearson’s SVP of Product, Adrian Sannier, to find out. And the answer appears to be, “Not exactly.”

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  • Perhaps ‘Open’ Is a Flag of My Disposition…

    Anyone who went to EDUCAUSE this year had to come away with the impression that Open is the new black. This product now comes with 50% more openness! That one’s openness is 99.44% pure! It’s easy to get jaded about all of this and cry “openwashing,” as Anya Kamenetz did, among others (including me, at times). But while it’s perfectly appropriate to hold vendors accountable for hype, it’s also important to look carefully at the announcements beneath the hype. Because they are not all the same. I proudly serve on the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors and proudly provide all content on this blog under a Creative Commons license, but I also recognize that there are different kinds of “open”—and different kinds of “free”—vendors can provide that have different kinds and levels of utility.

    Case in point: The respective announcements by Pearson and Blackboard last week reflect very different ideas of both “open” and “free.” Those differences matter. If we simply throw up our hands and declare the use of these words by all for-profit entities as meaningless marketing babble, then we will miss some valuable information.

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