On the heels of the passage of a historic tax increase to cover deficits in the California higher education system, the UC system is apparently already warning that they may need to raise tuition again. In response, Governor Jerry Brown has called for action and discussion about rising tuition costs, and in particular, to discuss how […]
Phil Hill
Where xMOOCs and Adaptive Analytics Both Fail (For Now)
No, this isn’t just an attempt to cram as many sexy keywords into one post title as possible. xMOOCs and adaptive analytics share an ambition: They both are at least partially motivated by a desire to teach at scale. With MOOCs, the goal is obvious. With adaptive analytics, less so, partly because there are multiple […]
Everybody Wants to MOOC the World
You may have seen this week’s announcement from Instructure of their new Canvas Network to support MOOCs and other open courses. Blackboard has already been dipping its toe in this water, having had Curtiss Bonk run a MOOC on CourseSites. I also find it significant that Blackboard (somewhat awkwardly) made an attempt to remind the market […]
The Future of Sakai: My View
As a member of the Sakai Foundation Board, I have at least the appearance of conflict of interest in any analysis I write about Sakai. That’s why I encouraged Phil to write his own, independent analysis of the recent developments around Sakai OAE. I was happy to support him as one source for the article […]
What Are Ed Tech Entrepreneurs Good For?
The recent ASU Education Innovation Summit, which brought together venture capitalists with aspiring ed tech entrepreneurs, created quite a stir in the edublogosphere and the edutwitterverse. A lot of the reaction came from people who were watching from a distance via video. Audrey Watters, for example, wrote an epic rant on her frustrations. There were […]
What is a Learning Platform?
While I have written (along with others) about the shift we are seeing in the LMS market, where it is moving from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market, there has not really been a good definition of what a learning platform is. As Jeff Bohrer asked via Twitter, “What are the hallmarks of […]
Blackboard Confronts Erosion of Market Share, Makes a Major Change in Strategy
In a series of announcements that has the educational technology world buzzing, Blackboard reversed their strategy of their core LMS business. Blackboard acquired two Moodle hosting and service providers – MoodleRooms in the US and NetSpot in Australia. Blackboard created an Open Source Services Group, which includes helping “institutions successfully manage open source learning management […]