SmartlyEdu

Pearson’s "Free" LMS Kind of Scares Me

2011-10-17T12:30:00-04:00

For full disclosure for first-time readers, we are working on our own “LMS”, so take what we write here as you will. Based on what I’ve read, OpenClass is a good platform. I don’t doubt that it’s an enjoyable experience, and Google Apps integration is no doubt a nice feature to have. This article is purely questioning the power that should be granted to such a big contender in the education space.

A few days ago, Pearson announced a new free learning management platform, OpenClass. Not crippled free or fremium as is now popular in the tech world, but legitimately free. But as I’ve let the news soak in over the past few days and as I’ve done more research about it, I’m beginning to wonder what the real cost of using such a platform is.

To give some background on Pearson, they’re one of the largest international educational publishing companies in the world. I have nothing against Pearson — in fact I’ve used many of their textbooks in my classes, however the shift that they’re attempting to ignite in the education industry is profound. They think that the content delivery tool, the LMS, is a commodity and should be treated as such. What matters, they say, is their content, which will be available on a content marketplace in OpenClass. The content marketplace will act as their revenue stream. Though they will be allowing third-parties to provide content on their LMS, there’s no doubt that this is a frightening notion; one of the biggest publishing educational companies will be determining whether or not certain information goes through. I won’t make any claims based in fact regarding the visibility of third-party content and whether or not they will be heavily promoting their own, as I’ve never used the system, but it would surprise me if they didn’t marginalize content that isn’t their own.

Up until this point, one of the reasons the web has been so phenomenal is because of free information flow. Textbook companies like Pearson seemed to be going the way of the floppy as information becomes so ubiquitous and free. Pearson seems to be aware of this and has been purchasing and investing in technology companies for the past few years such as Schoolnet, IntelliPro, TutorVista and Knewton. Creating an LMS with a focus on providing content feels like a step back as they attempt to lock in their position as the premier content provider. The next step in LMSes is not closed content. The next step is shared content from around the web, from other students and from other teachers.

I’ve seen solutions in the LMS market that deal with open content, but nobody has really hit the nail on the head quite yet. Textbooks should, and will, be a thing of the past eventually, and Pearson desperately want their content to stay relevant for the next decade. It remains to be seen as to whether or not other publishing companies will embrace OpenClass, but I don’t see any of them being thrilled that they’re being controlled by one of their competitors.

If you’re an educator or administrator, I urge you to think twice before using OpenClass. Shared content is a beautiful idea, but it hasn’t arrived… yet.

Image source

The Making of Our First Customer Testimonial Video

2011-08-08T15:41:00-04:00

In an effort to bring real people into the equation, we’re going to be interviewing some SmartlyEdu users over the course of the next few months and posting testimonials from them. First up is Jason Welker from the Zurich International School who teaches AP and IB Economics.

We wanted to highlight what we learned in the process of making our customer video as well as what we think would make for a much better video.

I want to be clear, we had basically no money to dedicate to making a customer video. All equipment was borrowed and all filming was done by us. We don’t have experience making videos, but given our shoestring budget, we figured an amateur video is better than no video at all. Here are some tips for making your own customer video as a bootstrapped startup.

Use 3 times more lights than you think you need.
This is something we learned the hard way. I was very conscious that we needed a lot of light, but it was only once the footage was on the computer that I realized that it was just too dark. No matter how good your equipment is, good, strong frontal lighting is entirely necessary. Also, preferably choose lights with a uniform light distribution. If you look at the first few face shots in our video, the light we chose left an odd striping effect on Jason’s face.

Pick someone genuine.
This seems obvious, but it really makes the difference. Pick someone who is genuinely excited about what you’re doing. Prospective customers aren’t stupid and they can tell if something is fake. Nothing is a bigger turn off than completely staged customer videos. On the other hand, don’t pick someone who’s going to be overly enthusiastic, even if it’s genuine.

Get much more footage than you think you’ll need.
We made the mistake of getting too little footage. When you’re editing, you’re going to want the luxury of choice, and getting too little footage will severely hinder that. Making a 30 second clip? Get at least 5 minutes of that person talking about your product. We really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get all of the footage for the video because we didn’t record enough.

Borrow, don’t buy.
Even if you’re going to be making a lot of videos, try to borrow your equipment instead of buying it. We actually borrowed a camera from a friend and used a bunch of lights that were already in the building. Odds are, you know someone who loves photography and has a DSLR capable of taking video. For editing software, we used a combination of software provided by my school and open source software.

Check out your footage on the spot.
While doing the video shoot, we were too worried about wasting our customer’s time, so we got our footage and ran only to see some things we could have easily fixed should we have exported the video to the computer. It’s important to look at your footage on a big screen while you still have the opportunity to make some revisions to your filming.

All the rest.
Music is really important. Get a pleasant tune from online, we got one from AudioJungle And yes, make sure you buy the music. This was our only expense for the whole video, a $10 audio clip. We think testimonials add a great personal touch to your product and even a more amateur video is better than no video at all. We’ll make sure to post our next video which we expect to be significantly higher quality.

Our customer video will be on our marketing site that will go up this week or next.

Jason, the teacher in our video, blogs about economics and has several textbooks coming out in the near future. We wanted to thank him for appearing on what was a very experimental videoing adventure. We also want to thank Jad Zeidan for helping with the videoing.

Feature Spotlight: Conversations

2011-08-01T05:02:00-04:00

One of the most frustrating parts about current online learning offerings is that interaction is quite minimal. Most platforms have a forum, but that’s about where it ends. Our Conversations feature, simply put, is like a dynamic chatroom.

Any student or teacher can invite as many people that they want to participate in a private chatroom. This room is perfect for studying for tests, doing group work, or getting some online tutoring from a classmate. The room is completely live and allows the addition of new participants on the fly. One also has the ability to make a chatroom public. If someone doesn’t have any specific people in mind to work with, they can extend an open invitation to any other student in that class, and others can join that public room.

No longer will students have the issue of adding every one of their classmates on Skype or Facebook in order to work on their group projects. All they have to do is start a room with their fellow students. If you’re working on a project, files no longer need to go back and forth through IM or email. All you have to do is drag and drop the file(s) into the conversation window and it’ll automatically display the file for the recipient.

The recipient doesn’t even have to download the file. SmartlyEdu has a build in word and powerpoint file viewer. This means your desktop doesn’t get cluttered anymore with multiple versions of a file.

We have a lot of great stuff planned for Conversations in the future, but we think that the version of it that we already have done feels great to use and makes working together a much more enjoyable experience. In the next feature spotlight, I’ll be explaining how assignments work on SmartlyEdu.

Feature Spotlight: Gradebook

2011-07-27T21:20:00-04:00

As we approach the launch of SmartlyEdu this August, we thought it would be appropriate to spotlight a feature every few days. Today we’ll start off with something quite standard in learning management platforms, the gradebook.

When you first go to the gradebook, the first thing that you’ll notice is that the content here is populated by the assignments you’ve already created. That means that there’s no double content adding; once something is added on the gradebook, it appears as an assignment and when an assignment is added, it appears on the gradebook.

To edit a grade, simply click one of the content cells and the gradebook automatically shows the number of points that the assignment is out of. Simply type in a number and hit enter and the grade is saved. To quickly navigate the cells, you can use your keyboard keys. In order to add a comment to the grade, you simply have to press the speech bubble icon within the grade cell.

Assignments in the gradebook are sorted by due date by default, but if you’d like to reorder them, simply drag the headers to wherever wherever you please. Sometimes, teachers want to throw in grades that aren’t necessarily based on an assignment. If you want to factor in “effort”, for example, it’d only a click away, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Assignments in the gradebook are all color coded based on custom assignment types that you define. For example, all tests could be yellow, and this color tag appears throughout the site. Each teacher can define their own grading boundaries, too. For instance, if one teacher has a standard A-F grading system, but an IB teacher would like to assign a value of 1-7 for their assignments, there would be no problem setting that up. Finally, if you’d like to weight specific assignment types, SmartlyEdu makes that very quick and painless to set up.

That about wraps up the basics of the gradebook. If you have any questions about it, leave us a comment and we’ll make sure to get back to you.

In our next feature spotlight, we’ll be talking about “Conversations”, our on-the-fly study group and messaging system.

Why Google Plus’ Invite System is the Best Approach Google Could Have Taken

2011-06-30T20:08:00-04:00

Ever since Google unveiled their Facebook competitor, Google+, I’ve heard numerous people say that the fact that the system is invite-only is potentially harmful to Plus’ activity. Often, Google Wave is cited as an example of Google’s invite systems failing. But I have some beef with this, because it actually seems like the best idea Google could have possibly had.

When you first sign up for a new social network, the most important part is obviously how many of your friends are already on the service. If Google were to have launched Plus as a free to sign up” service, there wouldn’t be as much demand for sign ups. It’s not exciting, and it’s not exclusive. However, this isn’t what makes their invite system great. What makes their invite system great is the fact that people have as many invitations as they want. This means you can invite your whole group of friends easily (and Google have made mass invites extremely easy to do, because they know how powerful this could be). Because of the exclusive feeling, spamming your friends with invites to a social network isn’t as awkward because the demand for the system is there. The exclusivity mixed with the fact that you can invite a group of your closest friends who will most likely all be more eager to try it out than to try out any other network makes for a solved problem. Rather than hoping your friends jump on a service because you do, your friends will jump on the service because they want to and that’s a fundamental difference. From the get go, you will have a bunch of people that actually matter to you using the service regardless of whether or not they were on Google Plus before you.

Also, the problem with Wave’s invite system that Plus improves upon was that upon inviting people, the invitees had no context, no connection; they might as well have signed up for the service without being invited. When inviting people on Google Plus, one invites people into the context of a wall post, or some sort of shared content. Anybody you choose to share your Plus content with gets an invite, and they immediately have a purpose. This really takes advantage of the fact that people immediately know what the service is for, and have a real-life example of how it’s supposed to be used. Wave lacked this immensely.

I applaud Google for making Plus invite-only, and from what I’ve seen, people I know on Plus have been sending invites in droves instead of sparingly waiting for the next round of invites like on Google Wave. Hopefully Google Plus’ invite system ends up a success, as Plus a very refreshing take on social networking.

Image credit: Google Plus Homepage

What We’ve Been Up To

2011-06-23T11:28:00-04:00

We’ve been hard at work preparing for our summer SmartlyEdu launch. A lot has changed over the course of development, and because of our long development time, we’re launching a far more polished product than originally planned.

As we announced on our Twitter, SmartlyEdu will be launching some time within the next 8-10 weeks! Ideally sooner, but we’re working on a “launch when it’s done” basis.

At this point, we’re finishing up necessary features and styling the administrative portion of the website. Our marketing website is coming along, and we’re setting up all of the necessary infrastructure.

It’s been more than a year in development, and we hope to get the beta to people soon. If you’re curious, the image accompanying this post is a preview of our marketing website. When we launch, this blog will also be getting a small facelift. Thanks for sticking with us; keep track of the blog for updates.

April Progress Update

2011-04-03T13:17:00-04:00

It has been a crazy few months since our last post, and we apologize for the infrequent updates on our Twitter page. School is nearing its end for the three of us at SmartlyEdu and so our workloads have ramped up. Development has continued, albeit slower than usual, and we intend to have more information soon. During this time, we’ve come up with some pretty great ideas that will hopefully enhance learning.

By the way, in case you haven’t seen it yet, check out the founder of Khan Academy’s TED talk, Let’s use video to reinvent education. We’re big fans of the concept of shifting learning roles (work in class, learn at home), and Salman Khan really puts it all into words so elegantly

Until next time, enjoy the picture of the streets of Paris during April. We promise to have more information soon.

The Tech Community is Quick to Hate

2011-01-25T14:24:00-05:00

We’ve noticed a recent shift in how entrepreneurs treat each other in the press and on discussion forums (namely, Hacker News). Whenever a new product comes out or a new funding round is announced, entrepreneurs and spectators of the industry are incredibly quick to say that the product a company has made is lacking or their valuation is inflated. In 2006, it seemed that everyone was more welcoming of other people’s ideas and would congratulate one another on product launches and VC attention. It’s time this has been brought to the attention of entrepreneurs so that we can get back into the spirit of support that we once had.

This really came to our attention with the recent buzz surrounding the “information experience”, Qwiki. Many have criticized the 8 million dollar funding round they recently got, exclaiming that fQwiki was able to do the same for a budget of essentially $0. However, what many seem to be purposefully overlooking is that fQwiki and Qwiki are hardly in the same ballpark in terms of quality. Conceptually, they are similar, but in terms of their architecture and quality of design, Qwiki is far superior. They are a company that plan to expand and make deals with publishing companies. Generally, this is not a cheap task. Perhaps $8mm is too much, perhaps it isn’t. At the end of the day, some venture capitalist thought it was worth the investment and we should be congratulating the Qwiki team for getting so much attention and raising such a hefty round.

Mahalo, a video how-to website, launched a new version today. The new version is a complete overhaul of their core purpose and brings about many new and interesting features. The launch has been met with mixed feelings from the community despite the fact that it’s a far better product than it was 24 hours ago. Some have scorned Mahalo’s tendency to change directions with each major version, but if a smaller company did the same thing, they would be praised for their versatility and willingness to try new things. We’re sure Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo, would be far happier to hear constructive criticism about what the tech community thinks could be better rather than hear snide remarks about what is weaker.

It could be related to how everyone calls everyone else’s job easy and the fact that all entrepreneurs (including members of the SmartlyEdu team) have a chip on their shoulder. “Qwiki got $8mm in funding? Well screw them because I could have done that and they didn’t deserve it. Look at them, the epitome of the internet bubble.”

We’re not saying pat people on the back regardless of the quality of their work, but detrimental and negative responses to other people will not advance the community, nor will it make it a place where people want to be. When we launch SmartlyEdu, we know that it will be met with criticism; we just hope that it’s as constructive as possible.