e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Pearson-PLC

  • A Quick Follow-Up on the OpenClass Post

    I’m already getting quite a bit of public and private feedback on my earlier post on Pearson’s OpenClass, and it is all over the map in terms of what people seem to think I was trying to say. This was really a complex topic to try to handle in one post, and I may not have done it justice. So let me lay out a few points as clearly as I can:

    • I think Pearson is trying to create a platform in the way that Google and Facebook are platforms. What I mean is that Pearson will get value not so much from selling their products (although there will definitely be some of that) as from (a) becoming a marketplace for other people’s products (think Apple’s iTunes and App stores) and (b) from getting rich data about student learning needs and behaviors that can enrich both Pearson’s products and those of the third parties that sell through Pearson’s platform.
    • I think there is a lot that is compelling about the idea of such a platform, and that it could deliver improvements to the learning experience that would be difficult to achieve without the kind of scale and centralization that Pearson is trying to create.
    • I also think that a platform approach entails a very different relationship with the vendor than simply licensing a hosted LMS and raises some very serious concerns, including issues of privacy and control over the market for learning content. Schools should make sure they understand the tradeoffs they would be making and discuss them carefully with Pearson (or any other ed tech vendor that brings a platform approach to market) as well as with their peers before jumping in with both feet.
    • Pearson’s marketing efforts have been finely tuned to emphasize free and easy, which I believe is a strategy designed to foster very fast adoption by disrupting the market, starting at the low end and moving up. In doing so, their message emphasizes low cost and ease of use over direct improvements to teaching and learning. In essence, the message is that Pearson will get the LMS (and its price tag) out of the way so that, in Adrian’s words, teachers can focus on “climbing the value chain.”
    • So far, there is relatively little public detail about the product itself. On the one hand, the deep integration with Google Apps is new to the market and suggests that OpenClass will have its own take on things. On the other hand, there is not yet evidence that OpenClass is trying to fundamentally re-imagine what an LMS does or how it does it as a delivery platform. The deeper innovation will likely come from the content marketplace and the analytics, neither of which has been publicly unveiled yet.
    • While Pearson has made what could be characterized as a couple of PR missteps in the introduction, I view these as mostly minor and not indicative of any nefarious intent. Nor am I suggesting that their overall product and marketing strategies are intended to deceive. However, I am suggesting that Pearson will need to raise its game if it wants to foster the kind of trust necessary to build the new customer relationships that it appears to be shooting for.

  • Why Pearson’s OpenClass Is a Big Deal

    The big buzz at EDUCAUSE last week was around OpenClass, Pearson’s new LMS entrant. Much hyped but only rarely glimpsed, speculation has been rampant about whether it is a big deal or just a gimmick. Because most people (including me) don’t have access to the product yet, the best source of information on it at the moment is Adrian Sannier, eCollege’s VP of Product. I had the good fortune to both listen to  him give a presentation on OpenClass and chat with him about it one-on-one. My conclusion is that this product could be a very big deal indeed.

    In a previous post here on e-Literate, Phil Hill characterized OpenClass as potentially disruptive. I think he’s right, but I also think this is one of those times where we have to be careful about how we use that term. Adrian Sannier is a big fan of Clayton Christensen, the man who coined the term “disruptive innovation.” If you really want to understand what OpenClass is all about, go out and read The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution very carefully.  There are very specific reasons why “free” and “easy” are the words you will hear most often from Adrian when he is speaking about the product.

    The audacity of what Pearson is attempting should not be underestimated. If they succeed, they could cause major tectonic shifts across several markets that are currently critical to higher education. Colleges and universities need to pay close attention to the kind of deal that they will be striking for themselves. Overall, I don’t think the biggest concern is whether Pearson will fail to maintain the platform as free. Rather, the more serious question is what will they be getting if they succeed.

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  • The Evolving LMS Market, Part I

    As Casey Green said in my recent interview with him, the LMS space is a “market in transition.” In 2005, the year that Blackboard acquired WebCT, the two platforms had a combined total of 75.6% U.S. higher education market share, and the next closest competitor had barely cracked 2% market share. Today, the situation is substantially different and changing rapidly. But the narratives around exactly what’s happening tend to be off. Typically, I hear the frame as being a contest between Blackboard and “open source.” Has “open source” (by which we mean Moodle and Sakai, the two open source LMSs with significant market share in the United States) made inroads into the market?  If you read what the majority of sell-side financial analysts ((Sell-side analysts are financial analysts who work for major brokerage houses and provide stock analysis to retail investors. Comments by analysts that you read in business news articles are typically from sell-side analysts.)) are writing, you may see the claim that “open source” is not putting a major dent in Blackboard. If you talk to Moodle or Sakai advocates, you might hear that they are crushing the company in sales. Neither account is really capturing what’s happening in the market, so I’m going to try to explain what we know about what’s really going on in a two-part series. In this post, I’ll talk about what the data are telling us so far about the recent shifts in the market, describe how colleges and universities come to decide that they need to go to market for an LMS, and assess the degree to which we may see an uptick in the number of schools that decide to look around and evaluate their options. In the second post, I’ll describe how the next four years of market transition may be different than the previous four and what signs we should be watching for to see which way the market is going to break.

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  • Pearson Announces Support for IMS Learning Information Services

    Pearson just announced that they will be supporting the IMS LIS standard (and with Oracle’s SAIP implementation of it) across a number of their products. First, they’ll support it in MyLabs, which are subject-focused learning environments (e.g., MyChemLab, MyMathLab, etc.)—sort of a fusion between an online textbook and a lightweight LMS. This kind of provisioning cuts out the middle man of the full LMS. (Up until now, the course roster information would typically be provisioned to the LMS, and the LMS would then provision it to MyLabs.)

    Pearson will also be supporting LIS integration for their newly announced LearningStudio product, which is a fusion of their eCollege and Fronter acquisitions. I haven’t seen LearningStudio yet, but I have seen Fronter, and I was seriously impressed. It may just be the most powerful and flexible LMS on the market today. It has been focused on the K12 (European) market up until now, but I saw nothing that would prevent it from working well in higher education as well.

  • Patents and IMS Common Cartridge

    A while back, IMS CEO Rob Abel was kind enough to comment on my post regarding the potential impact of patents on educational technology standards. As part of his summary at the end of the comment, he wrote,

    It’s difficult for Blackboard or any other vendor to “game” the standards process in IMS due to our IP policies. So, in fact the standards organizations are a great way to bring issues like this out so they can be known – and, in the case of standards, potentially go in a different direction if one organization’s IP is encumbering. The standards become the known ground that vendors must share without claims.

    While I appreciate Mr. Abel’s effort in sharing his thoughts, and while I am glad to hear his optimism, I’m afraid that recent history with technology patents shows that it is not so easy for standards bodies to protect themselves from abuse by aggressive patent holders. (more…)