Last Friday there were a couple of vey interesting developments, related to the Senate Education Committee’s investigation of for profit education. The first came from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, in an article entitled, “Online and For-Profit Colleges Face Beefed-Up Aid Audits from Department of Education.” When this article first came out I couldn’t help but smile when I looked at the Twitter feeds. Everyone was broadcasting it as another level of scrutiny being applied to the for-profits. What no one seemed to be paying attention to was the AND in the title.

 When Sen. Harkin embarked on his crusade against the for-profits I heard everyone saying that it was about time someone took a hard look at what was going on in this segment of higher ed. When asked what they would do when the focus turned to the not-for-profits, everyone responded that that would never happen because, of course, we all know that traditional higher ed is without sin. Guess what? Apparently, it appears there are some folks on Capitol Hill who don’t seem to think that way. Now for all of those who set back and watched the for-profits get hammered by a Congressional fact finding committee (and I use the word fact in its most liberal form), its now your turn.

For all of my friends in the not-for-profit sector of online HED, don’t be surprised when you get a notice asking to present all of your institutional data, including but not limited to emails, forms, aggregated SIS and LMS data, and any internal logs of communication, within 30 days. Further, don’t be too surprised when the findings are distilled into 30 second sound bites if they don’t paint a very accurate picture. Rather, be prepared for those files to have been thoroughly cherry-picked to reveal the worst possible actions taken by anyone at your institution. The fact that these “findings” really don’t paint an accurate picture wont really matter all that much, because they make for great drama on the Sunday morning talk show circuit.

Now, for all of those faculty and institutions who are in the offline, not-for-profit sector, many of you are probably setting back saying to yourself that all of these people who are involved in online education are getting exactly what they deserve – are you so certain you wont be next? Sen. Harkin’s fervor, constrained budgets, exposes of students with crushing debt loads, backlash against the tenure system,  and Tea Party vigor for accountability have created a perfect storm that could very easily put all of HED under the microscope.

Along the lines of universal HED accountability, Friday’s second development relates to comments made by Alexa Marrero, spokesperson for Rep. John Kline. In response to Sen. Harkin’s desire to single out the for-profits, Marrero said, ““The best approach to protect students and taxpayers is for greater transparency across all sectors.” To me this certainly sounds like a reiteration of the intent to start investigating not-for-profit online HED and potentially the offline component of the enterprise as well.

 In his July remarks to the National Press Club, Sen. Dick Durbin said:

"By the way, I think we ought to have better outcome data from all colleges and universities that receive federal aid, not just for-profit institutions. The American people have a right to know what their tax dollars are paying for, and the government has a responsibility to make sure those tax dollars are well-spent. For that, you need real numbers."

Of course, in July, one party rule was a fact of life on the Hill and no one seriously envisioned that changing overnight. We now live in a much changed political environment and, with respect to the HED debate, this likely means that compromise will have to occur if the HELP committee still wants to pursue the issue of quality. So, at long last we may be seeing Sen. Durbin’s call for outcome data from all institutions become a reality.

From my perspective nothing would be more welcome. If every institution were required to federate all of their siloed data, followed by aggregation of all of those data sets on a national basis, then we would have complete transparency. At that juncture, there is no longer a need to pull anecdotal evidence; all of the quantitative data would be available for making meaningful comparisons.

Given that there appears to be a glimmer of hope that HED will be forced to move to a true data-driven enterprise, administrators should probably spend at least some of their upcoming Holiday break considering the fact that an overwhelming majority of institutions are probably not even remotely prepared to federate and analyze their data at meaningful levels. 

First we hear that Blackboard is buying Elluminate and Wimba. Next comes the announcement of their partnership with Barnes and Noble. Then I start seeing tweets, blog postings and email chains in which some in academia are suggesting we start buying guns, gold and bottled water because the Apocalypse is surely nigh. Rubbish, complete and utter rubbish. In fact, I believe that Blackboard's acquisitions are probably good for higher education, at least in the long-run.

With all due respect to my friends at Blackboard, it is not exactly an earthshaking platform in terms of innovation, but it is a comprehensive suite of products wrapped up in one package with a nice bow on top. At the end of the day this is important to higher education because simplicity is key to executing enterprise scale operations. Did that sound like it came right out of Business 101 and fits better with corporate strategy than education? If it does so be it, because large scale eLearning is an enterprise level business whether it is being delivered at a for-profit, public or private institution. Anyone who wants to dispute this please consider for a moment the unending pressure to grow FTE's at public institutions - that my fellow academics is just as corporate as the for-profits looking at tuition in terms of EBITDA.

Compounding the administrative push for unified systems is faculty resistance. Chances are if you are reading this blog then you are in the 16% that are 1 or 2 standard deviations out on the innovation curve. But what you have to remember is that there is another 84% of faculty who are way behind you in terms of what they are willing to do with technology. You know these people well; they are the faculty members who you finally got to open a Facebook account and they now have all of 10 friends and three updates in the last six months. Granted, this majority might follow the lead of the innovators and early adopters and run an experiment with twittering in parallel with their courses, but if you think for a minute that these folks are going to Frankenstein together a dozen cloud-based apps to teach a course then I am sure there are some people who would love to talk to you about real estate ventures in sunny southern Afghanistan. This group of faculty want applications that are well established on the Plateau of Productivity in Gartner's Hype Cycle.

Since one of my passions is playing with emerging technologies for eLearning, the above may sound like I am selling out; not at all, I am simply being a realist. I think that it is the job of the innovators and early adopters, who have high pain thresholds, to experiment with all of the shiny new toys and make the case for why they need to be adopted. But at the institutional level the idea of radical changes in learning technologies is a non-starter. I have fought that fight too many times and have way too many scars to think that it is plausible. Even the most promising developments that I see materializing are grounded against very traditional platforms. So how does all of this relate to the recent spurt of Blackboard acquisitions and partnerships being good for the market?

In her recent blog on Elluminate, Wimba and Connect, my friend Ellen Wagner, laid out a very compelling argument for how the Blackboard deal opens the door for tight integration and partnerships between other video conferencing providers and platforms. With the full disclaimer that I am an ardent Connect fanboy and a member of Adobe's Education Leaders group, I believe that Connect is by far the best product in its space. Thus, the door is wide open for one of the other LMS providers (proprietary or open source) to do tight integration with Connect and suddenly the Blackboard application doesn't look so ominous. The same, of course, is true for the Blackboard / Barnes and Noble deal. We have already seen the Pearson / eCollege acquisition and I am sure that McGraw Hill and Sunguage are assessing options for making their products native components of one LMS or the other; as well as the remarkable work that the folks at Flat World Knowledge are doing. I would suspect that given the right incentive even Amazon would be interested in having a place at the table similar to Barnes and Noble. The same potential follows for every variety of social media and eLearning application out there.

At this point I can hear some readers screaming that Blackboard is so monolithic that there is no one who can compete with them, Blackboard is extending their tentacles into all of higher education, elaborating on the whole Blackborg mythology, etc. etc. Again, I say rubbish. There are over 120 LMS's currently on the market. Granted some of these are very small implementations and intended for niche markets, but there are a lot that have significant promise for eLearning; its not just D2L fighting the good fight. On the proprietary side there is a very long list starting with some of my favorites such as 360Scholar and Learn.com. In the open source arena there is a myriad of choices, including Moodle, Sakai and (my personal favorite) OLAT. Each and every one of these LMS providers or communities has the ability to build out API's and work with solutions providers to create robust comprehensive platforms that offer full service options for the education market. 

Blackboard is good at what they do because they have developed a comprehensive solution for academia. There are problems and its far from an ideal solution, but it is the market leader because they concentrated on meeting the demand for the largest segment of their audience. However, in doing so they have shut out a tremendous number of partners in favor of the ones that they believed would be most compatible with their platform. That said, all of those solutions providers who got shut out must surely want a part of the very lucrative education market and are looking for partners of their own. So, let the dating game begin and the platform wars start in earnest; hopefully the result will be the emergence of ever more robust, comprehensive platform solutions that benefit the large majority of educators. If this happens then we have Blackboard to thank. If it doesn't then academia and Blackboard's corporate competitors have only themselves to blame.

Back in April I found myself in a Bucharest hotel room, waiting for the volcanic ash over Europe to clear, and decided it was finally time to get serious about starting a blog. Unfortunately it took me this long to actually get my TypePad account set up, but I believe it is still as relevant as when I wrote - perhaps, given the latest political rumblings about outcomes in higher ed it is even more relevant.

As I wait for news on when flights will resume I contemplate the ocean between here and home and how it is the perfect metaphor for the concept of "boiling the ocean" for data driven decision making in online learning.

Though I have enjoyed being in Bucharest, and attending the eLSE conference I know it's not where I want to be at this time. Across an ocean lies home; a place where things may not be perfect, but it is a place where I can function efficiently (though I have friends who may argue about the degree of my functionality). However, between here and home lies a vast expanse of water that, from 38,000 feet, takes on the appearance of a never-ending opaque gulf. Fortunately, the giant aluminum tube that transport me across this chasm is a means by which passage from my current state to my desired state is assured with a very high degree of confidence.

For eLearning there are no giant aluminum tubes that will rapidly transport us to a highly desirable state. Though eTime can take on the feeling of dog years, we are still involved in an enterprise that is in it's infancy. For institutions and practitioners there are some rudimentary maps, but they are much like those produced by 16th Century cartographers. There is a fairly well defined outline of Europe and a very hazy New World coastline, with a vast expanse between that is overlaid with the words, "Here there be monsters." For those in eLearning the maps are much the same; our knowledge of the current landscape is fairly well defined and we have some vague idea of where we want to go, but in between lies a very dark and mysterious expanse.

Don't get me wrong, there are some great explorers out there who have started to hoist sails and explore hostile waters. In fact, I have had the pleasure of being a passenger on some of these ships, most notably Sloan-C and WCET. While these vessels have highly skilled pilots and navigators, it is important to note that they are limited by the crude instruments and incomplete maps they have at their disposal. For eLearning the invention of an airplane is somewhere in the impenetrable mists of time. For the foreseeable future we are destined to forge ahead aboard tiny ships. However, the journey need not be perilous or fraught with unknowns. We have the ability to boil the ocean and expose the chasms and monsters that lie below if we have the will.

 In 1993, Peter Drucker issued the following challenge:

“Indeed, no other institution faces challenges as radical as those that will transform the school. The greatest change, and the one we are least prepared for, is that the school will have to commit itself to results. The school will finally become accountable."

As we survey the eLearning landscape the prophetic nature of Drucker's words become apparent.

Though the recent DOE metastudy decisively concludes that online learning can be more effective than face-to-face learning there remain a multitude of issues plaguing the industry, ranging from fraud in the financial aid process to low completion rates, as well as the ubiquitous criticisms related to low quality. Proponents of eLearning counter that there is a wealth of research supporting the efficacy of the medium. Granted there is a lot of very fine work that has been produced over the years, however, now is the time that we must ask if the existing data is truly adequate.

 There are a lot of critical assumptions about effectiveness in eLearning that are based on studies with an n of less than 1,000 and a multitude of qualitative studies with n's that are a fraction of that. A few years ago, at on online learning conference, I saw the audience collectively gasp when a study with an n of 22,000 was presented. Since that time I personally have worked with data sets in the 100,000 range. Similar data initiatives are also being generated by Rio Salada, Capella and Kaplan, to name a few. However, in the greater scheme of things these are still relatively small studies that focus on very well defined populations. If these same approaches were applied to pharmaceutical testing, mortality rates would skyrocket. In the financial sector, reliance on similar sampling techniques would all but guarantee that our credit card information would regularly fall into the hands of nefarious individuals in the third world. And, last but not least, consider if Amazon used equivocal methods, the "books you might like" advisories would have about a 10% rate of accuracy. To revert back to the seafarer metaphor, we are still only mapping the continental shelf of our homeland and not venturing out into the "deep blue."

Despite the obvious need for using empirically driven measures to explore the eLeanring landscape and create informed solutions, there is still a strong reluctance to do so in the academic community. Sheltered by the traditions of Bologna and Oxford, academia refuses to view itself as an enterprise, but rather clings on the idea of the Professoriate being the center of wisdom. Thus, the pathway to change is not guided by fact, but the collective wisdom of those of us with letters denoting some form of doctorate following our name. The by-product of this process is that we often create new monsters instead of exposing the real ones that lie beneath the waves. As the old adage goes, "A camel is a horse designed by a faculty committee." However, there are signs of a seismic shift starting to occur in eLearning.

Earlier this month I was invited to a Quality in Online Learning Summit, at the Gates Foundation, where many potential avenues for improving the quality of online education for underserved populations were discussed. The focus group I was part of discussed the concept of analyzing extremely large, multi-institutional data sets to inform our current state and drive program / course development. The recent RFP from the Lumina Foundation highlights the need for quantitative measures to inform eLearning practices. In a recent NYT article, Victor Vuchic, the Hewlett program officer responsible for open education at the Hewlett Foundation said, “We’d like to see data being gathered, and see these materials being improved, and we’d like to see new models of learning.” At the conference I just attended, in Bucharest, there was a great deal of discussion about how basic and advanced eLearning courses can be improved to insure quality education experiences for those entering the work force. From Washington, there is a persistent drum-beat calling for accountability and proof of learning effectiveness for online programs. Finally, there is the shocking dismantling of the UT Telecampus, based on assumptions that could neither be empirically proven or disproven.

From all directions there is a sense of urgency revolving around the realization that we need to know more, a lot more, if we want to catalyze the pace and accuracy of the eLearning enterprise. We have at our disposal the ability to modify well forged tools to produce accurate compasses and maps for practitioners. With respect to our vendor partners, the sharing of data would help build ever sturdier ships upon which our voyages could be launched. Below the eLearning ocean there dwell some ugly creatures and perilous landscapes, however, understanding their nature is the way to create a clear path to our goals. The question that remains, is "Do we have the will to boil the data ocean or are we content sailing about the safe shoals of our current coastline?"