e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sebastian Thrun

  • Is Coursera Facebook, Amazon, or Pets.com?

    Before I get started, let me just say that Phil can vouch for the fact that I had already planned to use “Pets.com” in the title of this post before MIT Technology Review used it in their article on Minerva. As we’ll see, there are reasons to reach for that particular analogy at this particular moment in educational technology.

    Anyway, it’s an uncomfortable truth for educational folks that one of the principal innovations of the xMOOC is the store front. It is the ability to find courses in a catalog. If you look at what Coursera is right now from a platform perspective, it is primarily a store front on top of an LMS. The same could be said of edX. And as Phil and I have both written about recently, this is also the primary innovation in Instructure’s Canvas Network. I don’t expect that innovations in MOOC platforms to stay confined to the store front in the long run; for example, Daphne Koller, the co-CEO of Coursera, is also a leading expert in Bayesian machine learning. I think the scale of usage will drive other innovations. But right now, it’s the store front that is the most obvious differentiator between an LMS and a MOOC platform. As we game out which of the various xMOOC entrants will be successful, it’s important to understand how the store front works and the degree to which the growth of one dominant platform could impact the ways that colleges and universities function. I think there are at least three possibilities.

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  • Apple and Textbooks, Part 2: Is There a Class In This Text?

    When Apple announced both the release of their iBooks 2 and upgrades to iTunes University, I was curious to see what kind of integration they had between the two. If you do a web search on the subject, you will find plenty of articles that tell you that iBooks textbooks “fully integrate with” iTunes U—but without providing any details. What does that mean?

    From what I can tell, it means that you can put a deep link from iTunes U to a specific page in an iBook. That’s what “fully integrates” means. What it apparently doesn’t mean is the ability to insert iTunes U content directly into the book via an iFrame or some other means. Technically, speaking, it would have been easy for them to do this. The iBook format is essentially EPUB. It’s HTML, CSS, and Javascript. A collection of web pages. They even have explicit support for widgets. It wouldn’t have been hard at all for them to create an iTunes U widget. But they didn’t go there. I think that omission, while not a huge deal in and of itself, is deeply revealing about the limits of Apple’s vision about textbooks and education.

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