A while back, I had the privilege of being the keynote speaker at the NERCOMP LMS Unconference. I had never attended an unconference before, nevermind keynoting one, and I found the prospect to be fascinating and exciting. And nerve-wracking. On the surface, a keynote appears to be the antithesis of the unconference spirit. I needed to do something different than the usual fare in order to make it work. I needed to do an unkeynote. And yet, Stephen Downes had warned me that he, Brian Lamb, and D’Arcy Norman had tried giving an unkeynote before and, in his words, “They almost lynched us. They were not happy to receive an unkeynote.” (D’Arcy’s post-mortem of their effort is definitely worthwhile reading.) So, what to do?

The approach I tried seemed to work, judging by the feedback I got from the attendees and, to a lesser degree, by the influence of the presentation that I was able to observe on the rest of the unconference. I had intended to blog about the experience a while ago but it fell off my to-do list. However, prompted by the good folks of the NERCOMP LMS SIG, I am now returning to the topic.

A Word About Unconferences

Let me start with my own observations about the role of the unconference in the wider world of conferences. For those who aren’t familiar with the idea, unconferences don’t have set agendas with pre-defined speakers. Instead, people come with ideas of topics that they want to discuss, the group votes on which topics people want to talk about, and the people who post the topics lead the discussion. At the NERCOMP event, people wrote their ideas for topics on index cards and posted them on a wall. The participants then put stickers on the cards that interested them the most. The top four or five topics became breakout sessions.

Some folks are attracted to the unconference format because they are allergic to the “sage on the stage” syndrome and have a commitment to democratize the conversation. That’s not such a big driver for me. I find that the traditional conference format can be very useful sometimes. For example, in a truly academic conference, where people are presenting their research, I often don’t have a whole lot to say. I want to hear about the research. Yes, we could “flip” the conference by having me read the paper beforehand and spend the entire session in discussion, but that has a number of disadvantages for me. First, I often don’t have time to read the paper beforehand. The presentation helps me decide if I want to invest that time in getting the details by reading it afterward. Second, I’m the kind of learner who absorbs more by hearing it than by reading it. And third, I like to be able to ask questions while I am absorbing the material and it is fresh in my mind. So I appreciate the traditional conference format when the content is truly new to me and the speakers know a lot more than I do.

That said, a lot of conferences aren’t primarily about presenting original research. Instead, they are about presenting what people have learned in the course of doing their work, which may be research but often is just best practices or lessons learned. These conferences are highly vulnerable to the law of diminishing returns for participants. The first year, the event is great and you learn a lot. The second year, you start seeing some repeats. By the third year, it all starts to seem like the same conference over and over again. The only people who learn are the inexperienced ones. The sessions do very little to advance the state of the art. Whenever you observe this kind of phenomenon, you probably have a good candidate for an unconference.

In an unconference, you get to harness the collective knowledge of the participants. If there’s a thorny problem that nobody has quite solved but that a lot of smart folks in the room have tricks for dealing with or thoughts about potential approaches, then having a discussion-focused brainstorming session is much more productive than having one presenter talk about one sliver of the expertise in the room that can be brought to bear on the problem. Also, if there is some collective action that can be taken to further research the problem or develop a solution afterward, then conversation may reveal potential coalitions for taking action. At the same time, because the sessions are democratic in nature, they seek their own level. For example, I ended up moderating a session at the NERCOMP event on the pros and cons of open source. But because there was only one other person in the group who had experience with open source, the session turned out to be more me answering questions and giving guidelines, so closer to a traditional presentation (although still very audience-driven in the sense that my presentation was 100% focused on questions asked in the moment).

The point I’m trying to make is that we get a lot of insight into what unconferences are good for when we think about them in pedagogical rather than ideological terms. I used the same lens when thinking about how a good unkeynote should work.

Priming the Pump

You have a certain advantage in an unconference that you often don’t have in classes in that the participants are attracted to the event specifically because it is participation-focused. Even so, you still face some form of the tyranny of the blank sheet of paper. Getting started can be hard. So the point of an unkeynote should be to prime the conversational pump. We want to generate a surfeit of potential topics so that the group can immediately begin the work of identifying the best ones and focusing on them.

If the point of an unconference is to generate productive, self-directed educational group work, then we are dealing with a pretty familiar pedagogical problem. In fact, it’s ubiquitous in any sort of creative work. And usually the solution to the problem involves two ingredients: stimulation and time to think. Creative writers go through exercises that are not necessarily focused on writing the story or novel or poem that they want to create but rather on generating ideas and opening up creativity. For example, Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way contains lots of exercises like this one:

Collage: Collect a stack of at least ten magazines, which you will allow yourself to freely dismember. Setting a twenty-minute time limit for yourself, tear (literally) through the magazines, collecting any images that reflect your life or interests. Think of this collage as a form of pictorial autobiography. Include your past, present, future, and your dreams. It is okey to include images you simply like. Keep pulling until you have a good stack of images (at least twenty). Now take a sheet of newspaper, a stapler, or some tape or glue, and arrange your images in a way that pleases you. (This is one of my students’ favorite exercises.)

Notice that the task here involves no writing. This is about preparing to write. It is about harnessing both the conscious and unconscious mind to look for patterns and, more generally, to engage with something.

But the technique is not just important for the disciplines that are traditionally seen as creative. When I taught eighth grade science, I used a great curriculum out of the University of Hawaii called Foundational Approaches in Science Teaching (FAST). On the first day of class, I showed the kids a giant graduated cylinder. It was filled with two liquids of different colors, one of which was clearly heavier than the other because it sank to the bottom. Also within the cylinder were three vials filled with varying amounts of green liquid. The vial that was completely full floated at the top of the cylinder. The vial that was two-thirds full sank to the bottom. And the vial that was one-third full floated at the interface between the heavier and the lighter liquid in the cylinder. I would show them this and ask them, “Can you explain this?”

Rather than having them talk about it immediately, I had them write their ideas down and think about them. Then we discussed it. That session kicked off a series of experiments at the end of which the kids would tell me what buoyancy is and how to calculate it. The experiments were defined in the curriculum, but often the kids came up with ideas of their own that they wanted to test. I usually let them do that as long as it wasn’t dangerous. That, after all, is science. There was no textbook per se in the FAST curriculum. Students had no Source of Truth from which they read answers. However, it was very important for them to have experiments that were structured as generative touch points that pushed them to think about the problem from new angles. The point is, we need stimulation and time to think if we’re going to be creatively engaged.

That’s what an unkeynote should do. Rather than trying to push people into immediately taking charge of the conversation, I wanted to stimulate them to think of things that really excited them to talk about. Then all I would need to do, as one of my mentor teachers once put it to me, is get out of the way and let them learn. I wanted to do the equivalent of presenting that giant graduated cylinder. I wanted to find the participants’ zone of proximal curiosity. These folks came to talk about LMSs, starting with their experiences and their problems. I wanted to get them to reflect on those experiences and problems in fresh ways. So I gave a talk that didn’t demand immediate group participation, but it was all questions. I gave no answers. I wanted to start with some of the concerns that may have already been on their minds walking in the door and take them just a few steps further. “OK, you’ve all wasted months of your lives wrestling with bad LMS grade books, regardless of the particular brand of LMS you have. Why are LMS grade books all so bad? Are we trying to solve the wrong problem with them?” Or “Many of you have done LMS tool usage surveys and, regardless of which LMS you use, the usage patterns look roughly the same. Lots of use of announcements, file sharing and grade book. Some use of discussion boards and test engine. Everything else falls off the cliff. Why is that, and what does it tell us about what we need from an LMS?” These questions functioned similarly to the assignment bank in DS106: “Here are some ideas for discussion. If they don’t excite you, then find something that does. Maybe just looking at the list will give you inspiration for a better idea.”

My impression is that the approach worked (although I welcome unconference participants to comment with their own perspectives here). But the larger point is that, no matter how strong our commitment is to empowering people to participate (whether at a conference or in class), it’s important to focus on their learning process rather than on the instructor’s position in it. The question of “guide on the side” versus “sage on the stage” still makes the conversation all about the teacher rather than the learner. Sometimes it’s OK to be the “guide on the stage” if that helps the students/participants through the cognitive and creative processes that we call “learning.”

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One of the trends I highlighted last summer was that the LMS or learning platform market was overlapping the educational content market.

The lines are blurring between content delivery systems (e.g. Cengage MindTap, Pearson MyLabs, etc) and LMS.  Content delivery and ability to keep students engaged within the content will drive much of the broader ed tech market.  This integration of markets is being seen as a strategically important issue for institutions, particularly for online programs.

While I feel quite confident in having made that description, I did not have a model, or explanation, of what was driving the trend. Nine months later, I believe the trend has proven itself empirically, as more examples emerge: Apples iBooks2 / iTunesU App, Online Education Service Providers such as 2tor combining online programs with custom learning platforms, Pearson OpenClass, MOOC startups with custom platforms such Coursera, Udacity, etc.

Last week Roger McNamee, co-founder and managing director with venture capital firm Elevation Partners, gave a presentation to the Mashable Connect conference titled “How to Revive the Web”. The presentation described how Apple won big by betting against the web and its prevailing culture (Mashable post here and Roger’s full presentation here). Roger’s theory is that Apple’s strategy was to move away from commoditized content, which most of the PC-based web (HTML4) assumed,  by delivering content in a differentiated, elegant manner – tightly combining content and the delivery mechanism. Furthermore, as HTML5 emerges, this move will accelerate.

If this theory is correct, I think it helps explain the trend of the LMS market combining and blurring with the educational content market.

McNamee Theory

From the Mashable article:

“Most of all what Apple did was they charged $400 to $1,000 for the hardware that was necessary to get a differentiated user experience on data that 100% of their customers could get for free off a desktop device,” he said. “Every Apple customer has consciously voted with $400 to $1,000 against the world wide web.”

The result of that vote is a move away from the desktop experience of free, undifferentiated content. Mobile users don’t navigate the Internet with Google searches. They use apps, which deliver a better experience. And they spend much more time within those apps than on any web story.

McNamee’s point is that by combining content and delivery into an engaging experience, there is increased engagement. Investors see tremendous value in content-based platforms that can engage consumers, getting them to interact and spend more and more time with the systems. In another interesting aspect of this theory, the power and value of content publishers and consumers increases with differentiated content, and the value of middle men decreases.

Application to Ed Tech Markets

While I would not go so far as to make a direct comparison between iOS / HTML5 with today’s learning platforms, and while educational content has been anything but free, the macro trend described by McNamee is a key driver to what we are seeing in ed tech markets. From the investment side – private equity, venture capital, publisher internal investment, even university investment – there is a lot of money going into the concept of differentiated content that can engage students. Ed tech is also seeking tight integration of content and delivery into a differentiated, engaging experience leading to increased student engagement.

Note that the educational publishers have been making aggressive moves lately to take back control of the e-textbook or e-content experience from the middle men such as Inkling and Kno. Publishers want to own and control the differentiated experience, and it is a valuable market worth fighting for. The stronger middle men will also want to own the experience, but their relationship with publishers is tenuous in my opinion.

Furthermore, I think that the open content movement – OER – will need to develop an ecosystem that can deliver the differentiated experience to students and faculty. It will not be enough to provide free, high-quality content. For increased adoption of OER to occur, delivery platforms that can provide the overall experience will need to be developed and available to the market.

On the learning platform side, we are probably at the stage where we are seeing more choices in innovative systems, but we are not to the stage where students are truly benefiting from the overall experience and engaging with educational content in a meaningful way. Expect to see more investment in this area, but eventually the concept has yet to prove itself as a permanent change to the marketplace.

Update: Removed Boundless Learning as example of middle men

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A handful of you have let me know that you are getting 403 errors when you try to access e-Literate. There seem to be some residual caching issues from an anti-spam plugin that I deleted. I have cleared the cache on the server, and most folks have been reporting to me that when they clear their browser cache, the site loads just fine.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

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A few weeks ago, Audrey Watters wrote a great piece on her concerns about robo-grading of essays. (I tend to take a lot of inspiration from the things that annoy Audrey, in part because they usually annoy me too.) Here’s the crux of her argument:

According to Steve Kolowich’s Inside Higher Ed story, [educational researcher Mark] Shermis “acknowledges that [Automated Essay Scoring] software has not yet been able to replicate human intuition when it comes to identifying creativity. But while fostering original, nuanced expression is a good goal for a creative writing instructor, many instructors might settle for an easier way to make sure their students know how to write direct, effective sentences and paragraphs. ‘If you go to a business school or an engineering school, they’re not looking for creative writers,’ Shermis says. ‘They’re looking for people who can communicate ideas. And that’s what the technology is best at’ evaluating.”

Why are nuance and originality just the purview of the creative writing department? Why are those things seen here as indirect or ineffective? Why do we think creativity is opposed to communication?  Is writing then just regurgitation?

What sorts of essays gain high marks among the SAT graders – human now or robot in the future? Are these the sorts of essays that students will be expected to write in college? Is this the sort of writing that a citizen/worker/grown-up will be expected to produce?  Or, for the sake of speed and cost effectiveness, in Vander Ark’s formulation, are we promoting one mode of writing for standardized assessments at the K–12 level, only to realize when students get to college and to the job market that, alas, they still don’t know how to write?

How can we get students to write more? How can we help them find their voice and hone their craft? How do we create authentic writing assignments and experiences – ones that appeal to real issues and real discourse communities, not just to robot graders? How do we encourage students to find something to say and to write that something well?  Is that by telling them that their work will be assessed by an automaton?

How do we support the instructors who have to read student papers and offer them thinking and writing guidance? When we talk about saving time and money here, whose bottom line are we really looking out for?  Who’s really interested in this robot grader technology?  And why? [Emphasis added.]

This is a classic case of a market gone awry. Machine learning is sold as an “efficiency” tool, because there is money in squeezing cost out of education. In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with wanting education to be cost-effective. David Wiley’s formulation of “standard deviations per dollar” has both a numerator and a denominator. You can attack either number and still affect the ratio. The problem with obsessing over the denominator is that you start forgetting that “cost-effective” has to be effective. If you want to know what the ongoing industrialization of education looks like in the post-industrial world, robo-grading is it. We are reducing the evaluation to the least common denominator, where the denomination is in dollars.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if we looked at machine learning (the technology that makes robo-grading possible) from the perspective of trying to raise the numerator, i.e., effectiveness, while keeping cost the same? How could the technology be used as a force multiplier for good teachers, helping them to focus on what they do best in roughly the same way that flipping the classroom is supposed to do? If the goal is teaching better rather than just teaching cheaper, then what is machine learning good for?

One of the links in Audrey’s post was to an excellent three-part series on the topic by Justin Reich at Education Week. I found this particular passage in part 3 to be particularly thought-provoking. Reich suggests that he would like to train a robo-grader to give rubric-based feedback on student short answer questions as a first draft, so that the second draft that they submit for human review by their teacher would be further along and ready for more nuanced comments:

Before I evaluate the essays, I’m going to craft six messages that I anticipate having to use to give feedback. One might be “This paragraph starts with a fact. In short expository writing, it’s often more effective to start with your argument, and then support that argument with evidence.” Another might be, “You make a clear argument here, but you need to support your assertions with evidence from the Balfour Declaration and your knowledge of the period.” A third might be, “It is not clear what the argument of this paragraph is. Re-read the paragraph, and try to craft a single sentence that summarizes the key point you are trying to convey.”

I have students submit their essays to the Lightside add-in for Moodle (this doesn’t exist yet, but is technically very feasible). Lightside is an open-source, free, automated essay scoring tool. When I evaluate student essays, I give them their 1-6 grade, check any of the six relevant boxes for the pre-scripted feedback, and write any additional comments that I’d like to make. In year 1, this feedback is all that students get.

Fast forward to year 2. Students do the same assignment (my curriculum evolves from year to year, but good stuff is retained). They submit the assignment to the Lightside add-in for Moodle, but this year, something very different happens. Lightside uses my feedback from last year to provide immediate feedback to this year’s students. Upon receiving a student submission, Lightside instantly sends a message saying something like “Essays similar to this one earned a 4/6 on this assignment. Essays similar to this one also received the following feedback: ‘You make a clear argument here, but you need to support your assertions with evidence from the Balfour declaration and your knowledge of the period.’ Please review your submission, and see if this feedback helps you improve it.” Instead of waiting a minimum of 3 days for feedback from me, students instantly get advice they can use to sharpen their writing.

Not only do the students receive instant feedback on their submissions, but as an instructor, I receive a report that details the overall performance of the students. Perhaps my report indicates that 51 out of 80 students received the message: “This paragraph starts with a fact. In short expository writing, it’s often more effective to start with your argument, and then support that argument with evidence.”

For many students, they will have some sense of how they might respond to that feedback, but many won’t know what to do. So in class the following day, we do two things. First, I have a short mini-lesson on writing topic sentences for paragraphs, where I offer some general principles and workshop a couple examples on the board. I video record this mini-lesson, so that in year 3 when students get this feedback, the Lightside add-in will link to this mini-lesson when it gives the related feedback. Then, I give students 10 minutes to peer edit each other’s topic sentences. Finally, I tell them all to revise their paragraphs and resubmit them for homework.

Now, when those final submissions come in, I still grade all of them for 3 minutes each, 240 minutes total, but that time is spent totally differently. Students have used my algorithmically-generated feedback to improve their pieces beyond the achievements of the previous years’ students. Having used technology to coach students algorithmically, I now use my specialized experience as a teacher to continue pushing students to the next level. This is exactly how I have my students use spellcheck, grammar check, plagiarism check, and other algorithmic tools now. It’s worth noting that many educators decried the creation of spellcheck and grammar check as degrading student writing, but nearly every professional writer depends upon these two tools and most educators expect students to use these algorithmic writing coaches in their practice, since they allow students to focus on more cognitively demanding editorial routines.

Now that is interesting. But is it feasible? I called up Elijah Mayfield, the primary developer of LightSIDE at Carnegie Mellon University to ask him about that as well as other application questions.

As I suspected, the sample size from one teacher is too small. It would likely take a very long time of hand-grading to gather enough data to train the machine. But what if you could couple it with a social platform for scoring and norming? If you could identify a handful of teachers who have similar student populations and grading styles, then you could gather enough scoring information in an acceptably short period of time. You use crowd-sourcing to train the machine. You use the machine learning to score basic, first-draft kinds of concerns. And you use the time freed up from human scoring of first-draft concerns to focus on the real craft and nuance questions that require good teachers.

Better Class Discussions

Some of the most interesting research that Elijah and his colleagues are doing regarding machine learning and education goes well beyond robo-grading. For example, they have been studying whether machine-detectable conversation styles in student group work can impact learning outcomes. Starting from a theoretical framework called systemic functional linguistics, they looked for linguistic markers of students’ “authoritativeness” in group work, which might be thought of as expressions of confidence in one’s knowledge. As they put it, ‘[A]n authoritative presentation of knowledge is one that is presented without seeking external validation for the knowledge.” Note that they explicitly distinguish “authoritativeness,” which is a social stance you take in conversation, from “self-efficacy,” which is your actual internal level of confidence. A person can take an authoritative stance in a conversation even though they are not actually self-confident, or they can choose to lean back and defer to other group members even though they are confident. Interestingly, the researchers believe that they can detect and measure authoritativeness and self-efficacy separately.

Anyway, they went into their research with a couple of hypotheses. First, students who adopt authoritative conversation styles in group work will tend to learn more (as shown by differences between pre- and post-test scores) than students who don’t. Second, the conversation style of one participant can be influenced by the styles of the others. Without going into details (which you can read for yourself here), they found that both of those hypotheses proved to be correct. In a later paper, they showed that they could train LightSIDE to detect authoritativeness in student discussion. This is initial research, but if it holds across broader testing, then students could be coached on both how to conduct more effective class discussions and also elicit more productive conversational styles from their partners. I can imagine a gamification system in which students get points and badges both for taking more authoritative positions in discussion themselves and from eliciting more authoritative positions from their classmates. I can also imagine a system that provides machine scoring of certain characteristics of students’ class participation and provides links to examples for teachers to evaluate for themselves. Once again, the idea would be to have the machine evaluate and coach students on things that machines are good at evaluating and freeing up the humans’ time for more nuanced work. It is a kind of classroom flipping.

Hacking the Markets

So far, the educational markets have rewarded applications of the technology that enhance efficiency, which is one major reason why we haven’t seen much in the way of the kinds of applications I just described in commercial products. I think the market dynamics are shifting, though, for a couple of reasons. First, Federal and state money is starting to get tied to demonstrations of effectiveness. If public colleges and universities (and K-12 schools) want to survive, they increasingly have to do more than just operate more cheaply in shrinking budgets. The size of their budgets will be determined by their ability to demonstrate educational effectiveness. Second, as both LMS and textbook markets commoditize, the key way to fight off commoditization is to demonstrate that their solutions are actually more educationally effective. For example, an LMS that actually gives teachers reason to use the discussion boards because it gives them specific tools that have been proven to help students have more educationally effective discussions will have a differentiator that adding a new blogging tool or Google Apps widget no longer does. Schools and teachers can help drive this by emphasizing effectiveness in their educational technology and etextbook selection processes.

But I also think that we need to get better at having broader, more application-focused collaboration between educators, their institutions, and their vendors. One of the interesting aspects of LightSIDE is that it is designed for non-experts in Machine Learning to use. We should be building up a collective body of knowledge regarding how to use machine learning and other innovations to improve education. We have let the markets shape the potential uses of the technology rather than letting the potential uses of the technology to improve education shape the markets.

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What Is Machine Learning Good For? by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

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 many angry tweets from a number of quarters. First-hand reporting was relatively scarce, though. George Siemens, who attended the conference live, wrote a thoughtful and nuanced post on the topic. The question of how entrepreneurs can productively play a role in educational progress, innovation, and reform is a topic that I think about a lot. In fact, I already had a post planned in my backblog from an interview I did with the Instructure founders and CEO on this very topic. So now that e-Literate has successfully migrated to a new host, and before Blackboard buying somebody else forces me to write another post series, I’d like to take some time to lay out my thoughts on the topic.

Let me start by saying that I believe in a free market in roughly the same sense that I believe in gravity. Markets are powerful forces. They are neither inherently good nor inherently evil. Whether they are helpful or harmful depends on whether you are building a water wheel or falling off a cliff. Companies are machines that are designed to take advantage of the physics of markets. They are also neither inherently good nor inherently evil. They do what they are designed to do. The internal combustion engine can be used to rush a person to the hospital or run a person over. It generates great power, at the cost of producing exhaust that is harmful to the environment. If you want to do something big—like improving education globally, for example—then companies and markets are powerful tools. But there is a difference between power and magic. We can make a gun, but we can’t make a silver bullet.

ASU Summit As Petri Dish

If I were watching the ASU summit from a distance and mainly caught the tweets and the webcasts of the keynotes, I’m sure I would have felt the way Audrey did. Listening to Chris Whittle talk about how he plans to democratize exclusive prep school education for all the bond traders on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was a maddening experience. I think he had one throw-away line about how improvements in education for the rich will eventually make their way to reaching a broader range of people. Trickle-down education. Awesome. But the keynotes were really a side show. This was a working conference. The real action happened in the hallways. It was about finding and funding ed tech projects. Which meant that there were basically two types of people in attendance: potential funders and potential fundees.

A lot of the talk about the conference has focused on the funders. And frankly, there has been some charicaturing going on. I was there, and my experience of the crowd there was relatively…polychromatic. For example, I sat next to one gentleman who was an angel investor and did not fit the Twitter stereotype at all. He has a long history of making charitable donations to inner city school projects. But his expertise is in business, and he is excited at the possibility that he might finally be able to use that expertise to help those same children by funding companies that could have a positive impact. Yes, there certainly were plenty of funders at the conference who have money they need to invest and are just looking for good targets without regard to the net social good or ill of those investments. There were also funders who genuinely care about improving education but have politically conservative views of what that means. Some were almost completely and blithely ignorant of educational issues, while others were thoughtful and sophisticated. Famed venture capitalist Mitch Kapur talked about how important it was for entrepreneurs to partner with educators who have vital “lived experience,” and I’m pretty sure he made an approving reference to the Audrey Test of what every ed tech entrepreneur should know about education (although he couldn’t remember who wrote it). At the end of the day, regardless of their motivations, all of these funders are bound by the laws of market physics, and those laws are what matters. Some ed tech companies will make money. Others—most, in fact—will not.

So what really mattered at the ASU conference was not the funders, except for the fact that funders were there looking for things to fund. What mattered was the fundees. What ed tech ventures are being started? Which of those will make enough money to grow? And of the ones that can grow, what good and/or harm do to they do? Who are these people, and what are they trying to accomplish? As you might imagine, they are a diverse bunch. There certainly were a few Chris Whittles in the crowd. But doing a startup is usually really, really hard. Often, these folks are working 90 hours a week, maxing out their credit cards to get started, and living on a roller coaster, not knowing from day to day if they’re going to make it. Many tech folks who are willing to go through all of that pain are looking to create some better way of selling ads that they can sell off for billions of dollars. As Inigral founder Michael Staton told me, you generally have to have an irrational affinity for education in order to do an ed tech startup. There is a passion that is not entirely different from the passion of good teachers.

I’d like to tell you a little bit about one such entrepreneur that I met at the conference.

Unigo

When Jordan Goldman was a high school student in Staten Island, his parents, who are teachers, couldn’t afford to take him to visit colleges. So he started emailing students at the colleges he was considering and asking them what their schools were like. By the time he was done, he had 30,000 college reviews. He got into Wesleyan University. He also got a book deal, first with Simon and Schuster and later with Penguin Group, to take those reviews and turn them into a guide to colleges. It became the best-selling guide in America. But Jordan wasn’t satisfied with it. He decided that a book wasn’t the best format for what he was trying to do. He needed to do something on the web. He approached Penguin with his idea, but they weren’t interested. Furthermore, they said the noncompete they had with him prohibited from doing anything on his own. So, at the age of 22, Jordan killed his book deal and set about starting his own company. But he didn’t know anything about starting a company. So he contacted 1,500 people listed in the Wesleyan alumni database as having some relevant expertise in finance or business, and offered to take each one out to lunch if they would be willing to talk to him about his business plan. About 150 of them responded. Most of the time, they paid for lunch. Each time, he presented his plan and they helped him refine it. Somewhere near the end of the process, one of them offered to write him a check to get him started. And thus, Unigo was born.

The core problem Unigo addresses is this: In the United States, we have a polar system of college counseling. On one end, there are private consultants who can get paid $40,000 per student to help them get into college. On the other end, you have public school counselors, who are often responsible for counseling 1,000 kids in a year and who sometimes don’t even have any training. And there’s not much in the middle. Unigo starts with Jordan’s original idea of having students write reviews, but it also acts as a market for good college counselors from public and private schools, as well as college students, to get paid for counseling sessions with high school students. A session with a counselor costs $100 and a session with a college student costs $30. Unigo takes part of that fee. In order to attract clients, the counselors and college students contribute free content to the site and are rated by customers on how helpful they are.

There are a couple of important lessons in this story (beyond the fact that ed tech entrepreneurs are often both hard-working and a little crazy). First, Unigo addresses a real and serious problem in our education system. After telling our children how important it is for them to go to college throughout their K-12 educations, we have radically under-invested in the support they need to make decisions around actually going. Unigo tackles that problem by creating a market that helps high school students get the support they need while rewarding good but badly underpaid counselors. It uses market forces to solve an important educational problem and make money in the process. In fact, the ability of people to make money is the very force that makes the solution work. Second, while Unigo addresses a very important educational problem, it doesn’t address a learning problem. It doesn’t directly address a question of how people learn and how we can teach them more effectively. Jordan isn’t an expert in teaching or, for that matter, college counseling. He is thinking about hiring a college counselor as a Unigo employee, but it’s not entirely clear how that person would help. So it’s worth asking what sorts of educational problems can be solved well by entrepreneurs who aren’t educators and where educational expertise is important. What is entrepreneurship good for in education?

This brings me to the aforementioned conversation with the folks at Instructure.

Instructure

The founders of Instructure aren’t educators, and they think that’s a good thing. The way they see it, educators tend to build software that solves their own problems from their own perspective, and the results are often idiosyncratic. As technologists coming in with no strong opinions about how teaching “should” be done, the Instructure leadership feel they have an advantage of humility and open-mindedness when considering solutions. As CEO Josh Coates put it, educators “are experts in their context. But their context is one or two classes in a specific university in a specific part of the country. Software developers don’t even pretend to know the domain.” So they have to go out and do the research. Instructure co-founder Brian Whitmer added, “And we know that we have to do it. We know that we have to validate it against a bunch of different people.” And they do. Instructure, as a company, is extremely attentive to the conversations among educators, to the point where they have Twitter feeds from various ed tech folks sucked right into the IRC channel that all their developers use for internal communications. They do their homework.

Educators tend to get hung up on the profit motive and, ironically, miss the disciplinarity of starting a company. Co-founder Devlin Daley talked about a “new style of development” that was “not true in the ’90′s,” and all three of them talked a lot about Agile development. As they see it, a lot of companies that implement Agile miss the fundamental aspect of the methodology that is about getting closer to customer needs. I think that’s true, but I also think part of what they were getting at is not about Agile so much as it is about Lean. The Lean Startup movement  is about inventing a methodology for startups to identify real solutions to real problems that people are willing to pay for. Startups, because they have a limited amount of money and start with no income, have a limited amount of time to find a successful product before they run out of money and have to call it quits. So they have to develop a series of techniques to find out what problems people really care about that the entrepreneurs know how to solve in a scalable, cost-effective way. That’s a handy set of tools to have if you want to have global educational impact.

The Edupreneur and the Teacherpreneur

Instructure’s philosophy is in direct opposition to the Eric Raymond “scratch your own itch” open source formulation that is implicit in the aforementioned Audrey Test as well as many educational software projects, both open source and private source. Kirsten Winkler (another edublogger you should be reading) writes about “teacherpreneurs,” who are educators that start up companies, as opposed to “edupreneurs,” who are entrepreneurs that get into education. Which approach is likely to be more educationally impactful? Which one is more likely to find successful adoption (and profit, if it is a for-profit effort)? Which one is more likely to produce a “better” product? I don’t think there is any one right answer. Moodle, founded by teacherpreneur Martin Dougiamas, has been enormously successful as measured by adoption. Instructure Canvas, started by edupreneurs, has had unprecedented early growth in the United States. (As of the interview on March 12th, they had 120 customers and 102 employees.) Each of these successes can be at least partly attributed to their characteristics in one category or the other. Moodle has thrived in large part because it succeeded in building an enormous community of educators who were attracted to Martin’s vision as an educator. Instructure has taken off like a rocket in part because they created a clean architecture and user experience that solve real problems for a broad range of educators. On the whole, I think the disciplinarity of the edupreneur tends to be grossly undervalued by educators, but both have their place. The more interesting question, to me, is when is it important to have education experts inside the company?

First of all, it is important whenever your solution is directly involved in cognitive processes. For example, Memrise produces a solution that helps people…well…memorize things. They claim that their solution is designed around a theory of cognitive science about how memory works. Likewise, I think deep and effective learning analytics solutions are going to require educators to make sense of the data that comes in. Learning is a complex series of heavily mediated cognitive processes. Figuring out why people tend to perform the way they do in certain educational situations involves a lot more than correlating events. Machine learning is a gun without a silver bullet. And of course, there is the long tail of solutions to teach specific disciplines, skills or concepts. I often tell the story of when Beth Harris and Steven Zucker (formerly of FIT but now of Khan Academy) took me to see an image annotation tool developed by Columbia University that they were excited about. They were looking for a tool for teaching art history online. Columbia’s tool was really cool, but it was developed for a histology professor. It turns out that the way histology professors want to use and annotate images in the classroom is completely different than the way art history professors do. Some of these may not be sustainable as commercial applications and may work better as non-commercial open source. But, for example, teaching good writing is a pretty large niche application spanning multiple disciplines and should support significant commercial efforts.

These may seem like they are edge cases, but that’s because up until now, LMSs have really been focused on educational access rather than educational effectiveness. I believe that is going to change. In general, educational spending is going to be more and more focused on some variation of David Wiley’s formulation of educational impact: standard deviations per dollar. One way to address this challenge is build learning platforms (to borrow Phil Hill’s formulation) that enable educators to crowd-source the development of specific teaching and learning solutions. But I think there will also be a need for companies that have in-house expertise on teaching and learning.

We Are the Market

I want to get back to the analogy of the physics of the market and, specifically, to where that analogy goes awry. People often think about The Market in stark, 19th-century, social Darwinistic terms. But there is no Market. There are only markets. Markets, like companies, are human creations, and while they have their own rules, they can be shaped. The LMS market is a good case in point. Want to know why the LMS industry has a reputation for building crappy, expensive products? Here are a few clues:

1. College LMS procurement processes are long and complex, which means that they are expensive for vendors to participate in.
2. Procurement decision-making processes also tend to be relatively opaque and political, which means that in addition to being expensive for LMS vendors, they are high-risk and the risk in each case is not easy to evaluate.
3. Historically, the processes have tended to emphasize long check lists of functionality, which means that quantity of features has been valued over quality.
4. Until recently, colleges have tended to go with companies that they perceive to be “safe,” which generally means large.

All of these factors have heavily determined the characteristics of companies that can succeed at selling LMSs. I believe that the recent evolution toward learning platforms are partly a direct consequence of the fact colleges are getting more sophisticated in their approach to the product category and therefore are changing the success criteria in the market.

Rob Reynolds’ astute observations about the limitations of startups as engines for educational reform are spot-on, but we can help ensure their focus is on the right things by hacking the markets themselves. The Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative’s single most important effect was to provide financial incentive to schools and the vendors who serve them to provide real, measurable improvements. But you don’t need a Federal initiative to change the markets. Schools, teachers and students, as customers, can change the ways they make purchasing decisions. They can become better consumers. And companies can hack the markets too. Unigo hacked the market for college counseling, which was dominated by high-end players. To me, the most interesting ed tech challenges involve changing the market dynamics for the better. How can we create an environment in which companies can sell solutions that add educational value based on the premise that high-quality educational content is cheap and plentiful rather than expensive and scarce? How can we get employers to look beyond the degree and evaluate students based on more granular and authentic measures of achievement? These are the areas where entrepreneurship can have the most impact. But in order to make sure that gravity is driving the water wheel rather than just pulling us down, we have to accept that forces of nature exist and actively work to harness them. Whether or not educators are working inside and driving ed tech companies, they need to be full and sophisticated participants in the educational markets.

 Update: Just after I published this post, I got a pointer (thanks, Audrey) to teacherpreneur Michael Staton’s great post about the state of K-12 ed tech start-ups. It is highly relevant. All I can say in reply is, “Dude, why didn’t you publish this on e-Literate?”

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What Are Ed Tech Entrepreneurs Good For? by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

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 LMS as a “learning platform” (beyond SaaS)? Any posts you can point to?” Mike Zackrison offer some very helpful thoughts in his response of “A few I’ve observed: cloud, multi-tenant; open API; social, analytics, mobile baked in; apps/content discovery too”.

Rather than reply within the limits of 140 characters, I’d like to offer a response here (I have trouble with being pithy).

Platform Definitions

First, let’s look at the metaphor. A platform is typically defined in the generic sense as a raised surface of some type that supports other interacting objects. Within computer and software terminology, a platform can be defined as “A platform is any base of technologies on which other technologies or processes are built”. The idea is that the platform is not intended to stand on its own, as its definition includes the support of other technologies or applications.

Given this context, there is a rather extensive Wikipedia entry on learning platforms with some useful definitions included. I have excerpted several below.

A learning platform is an integrated set of interactive online services that provide teachers, learners, parents and others involved in education with information, tools and resources to support and enhance educational delivery and management.

The term learning platform also includes the personal learning environment (PLE)

Description from Becta: A learning platform is a framework of tools that work seamlessly together to deliver a student centric learning experience by unifying educational theory & practice, technology and content. Learning platforms can be described as the next generation of Virtual Learning Environments or Learning Management Systems used by educational institutions. The major difference is that a VLE and LMS is an application, whereas the Learning Platform share characteristics with an Operating System (or CoursePark Platform) where different educational web based applications can be run on the platform.

Hallmarks of a Learning Platform

Based on these definitions and Mike’s initial reply, I’ll offer my list of hallmarks of learning platforms. For the purposes of commentary, I’ve numbered them.

1. Learning Platforms are next-generation technology compared to legacy LMS solutions arising in the late 1990′s / early 2000′s. While many features are shared between legacy LMS and learning platforms, the core designs are not constrained by the course-centric, walled-garden approach pioneered by earlier generations.
2. Learning Platforms tend to be SaaS (software as a service) offerings, based in a public or private cloud on multi-tenant designs. Rather than being viewed as an enterprise application to be set up as a customized instance for each institution, there is a shared platform that supports multiple customers, leveraging a shared technology stack, database, and application web services.
3. Learning Platforms are intended to support and interoperate with multiple learning and social applications, and not just as extensions to the enterprise system, but as a core design consideration.
4. Learning Platforms are designed around the learner, giving a sense of identify that is maintained throughout the learning lifecycle. Learners are not just pre-defined roles with access levels within each course, but central actors in the system design.
5. Learning Platforms therefore are social in nature, supporting connections between learners and customization of content based on learner needs.
6. Learning Platforms include built-in analytics based on the amalgamation of learner data across courses, across institutions, and even beyond institutions.
7. Learning Platforms allow for the discovery of instructional content, user-generated content, and of other learners.

We should be careful not to view learning platforms as a panacea and that they have all of these characteristics. However, I hope this list of hallmarks can help describe learning platforms at least in terms of our known enterprise LMS markets.

What are your thoughts on the definition and hallmarks of learning platforms?

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What is a Learning Platform? by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

I have written several articles (posted here at e-Literate, here at the Delta Initiative website, and as a guest post at WCET) about the significant changes that the LMS market is undergoing, moving from an enterprise-class, mini-ERP, system to a learning platform. The folks at WCET provide a great set of resources for the higher ed community, and the asked me to set up a webcast on the subject, to allow a more interactive discussion. As part of this webcast, I will be joined by Patrick Masson, Chief Technology Officer at UMassOnline. Patrick and his team have created a Needs Identification Framework for Technology Innovation (NIFTI) that is a much more robust approach to technology selection and innovation that the standard RFP process.

The webcast is scheduled for May 22. You can go to the WCET site here for more information or to register.

From the description:

We have seen a great deal of change in the higher education Learning Management System (LMS) market over the past year. One of the biggest changes to the market is that we seem to be moving from an enterprise LMS market, with full-featured monolithic systems, into a learning platform market, with many cloud-based platforms that don’t attempt to have all the features in one system. Key questions arise, however, about how institutions should adapt their technology decision-making processes based on these market changes. Solely relying in a traditional Request for Proposal (RFP) process is no longer sufficient.

This session will take a look at a framework for strategic evaluation of learning platform options along with specific examples from UMassOnline. We will consider how market changes could or should change an institution’s processes for evaluating, selection, piloting and implementing various learning platforms and applications. Presenters include Phil Hill, Executive Vice President at Delta Initiative, and Patrick Masson, Chief Technology Officer at UMassOnline.

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Upcoming WCET Webcast: “Why the RFP Process Doesn’t Work in Today’s LMS Market” by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

We will be taking e-Literate offline while we switch over to a new web host.

Back soon!

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e-Literate Down for Maintenance Tuesday by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

This morning, Microsoft and Barnes and Noble announced that the software giant is investing $300 million in a new B&N subsidiary that will include the Nook and B&N College divisions. Microsoft’s investment gives it a 17.6 percent stake in the newco and ensures that Windows 8 will launch with the Nook digital bookstore in tow.

The question in the education segment is this: what does this new spinoff and the Microsoft investment mean for e-textbooks? In order to frame this question a bit more, let’s consider the current e-textbook market for a moment.

First, there is the B2C or direct-to-consumer market. In this sector we have a number of players, small and large, that include Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Chegg, CourseSmart, Google, Inkling, Kno, and Textbooks.com. This market is relatively new and CourseSmart has been the leading brand because it possesses that largest catalog (it is owned by the top five higher educational publishers). The competition in this area has focused on (in order) availability, price, and cool user features that might differentiate competitors.

The B2C market is currently much smaller than the B2B side of the e-textbook market, but it is growing and will evolve quickly. In my recent five-year forecasts, I have been projecting an eventual consolidation around the major brands and technology companies, which would reduce the field to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Google (I have generally listed B&N in gray or with a question mark). I think the new B&N subsidiary and Microsoft’s investment will keep the company on the list and solidify its place in that horizon.

Less talked about, but more lucrative, is the B2B or direct-to-institution market in education. This sector consists of enterprise sales to independent schools, small colleges, for-profits, career colleges, and distance education divisions. The customers in this market do not have traditional bookstores, their students are generally distributed, and the purchase and distribution models guarantee a much higher sell-through for e-textbook providers. While promising much more revenue, this market is also much harder to penetrate as it requires sales, services, and distribution scale that are hard to achieve overnight.

Currently, even though B&N College is a leading campus bookstore provider, it does not play in the B2B e-textbook market. The reason is that its NookStudy product was developed before the Nook and utilizes software and content frameworks/formats that are not compatible. This means that B&N College does not have any kind of a mobile solution for its e-textbooks, nor does its product address accessibility issues.

The partnership with Microsoft clearly promises to address B&N’s weaknesses both on the B2C and B2B fronts for e-textbook sales. The company will likely move to merge its NookStudy product more formally into the Nook digital library, which will put e-textbooks on newer Nook models (coming this fall), and on Windows 8 devices. This will give B&N a technology reach comparable to Amazon but with a much more direct play in higher education. Moreover, because major textbook publishers are so afraid of Amazon, they will move quickly to ensure that their titles are broadly available through the newco.

Keep in mind that both Amazon and B&N lack the complete suite of services to compete in the B2B market, but rumors are that both companies have developed executable strategies to remedy those shortcomings within the next 12 months.

Of course, that still doesn’t tell the complete picture regarding the newco’s real impact on the e-textbook market. Here are some of the possible implications.

1. Competition for Amazon — From the publisher perspective, the most important thing here is the potential of a major competitor for Amazon in the education space. Textbook publishers, like trade publishers, understand that, left unchecked, Amazon will become the major retail distribution point for e-textbooks, which will diminish the publishers’ brands and profits. Look for publishers to work closely with Barnes & Noble on catalog availability, special formatting deals etc.

2. B&N in the B2B Market in Education — The second  big consequence is that the B2B market will become more crowded. B&N/newco will play aggressively here, as will Amazon. They have much ground to make up but they will be disruptive.

3. B&N Gets E-textbooks on Mobile Devices — This is not insignificant. By pushing e-textbooks out both through the Nook and Windows 8 devices, B&N/newco could have considerable clout. Naturally, much depends on the popularity of Windows 8 among young adults, and on newco’s ability to maintain a decent market share in the tablet space.

4. More Digital Titles from Publishers — Most important, the emergence of the B&N/newco in the e-textbook space will push more digital titles into the market. As I have written in my annual reports and in my recent book, the availability of content is one of the key factors int he increase of digital textbook sales in the U.S. This new company will ensure that e-textbooks represent more than 6% off the education market at year’s end, and more than 12% by the end of 2013.

5. The Price of Textbooks Will Drop Within 3-5 Years — Finally, more competition, even among the major players, will help accelerate the price ceiling for textbooks. Most of the market factors determining price decreases result from new content business models and competitors, but the continued growth of the digital textbook space will also facilitate the change. In particular, publishers will move more quickly to digital-first workflows, which allow them improve unit sales and maintain or improve gross margins and profits in spite of lower unit costs.

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What the Microsoft Investment in Barnes & Noble Means for E-textbooks by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

As I have mentioned here before, the Sakai and Jasig foundations are in the process of evaluating a merger to create a kind of Apache Foundation for higher education. The new organization would be called the Apereo Foundation. The two communities will be voting on the merger some time in the next month or so. Documentation and discussion can be found here.

I’d like to tell you why I think this merger is vitally important for higher education in general and Sakai in particular.

The Economics of Community Source

“Community source” is the label for a particular brand of open source practiced by the Mellon Foundation-funded family of projects, most prominently Sakai, Jasig, and Kuali. Its meaning has always been somewhat fuzzy and has gotten more so over time as the communities associated with those projects have grown and higher education’s attitudes toward open source have evolved. But fuzziness aside, I do think there is a certain attitude that infuses all of these projects and has profound implications for their sustainability models. Community source, as a movement, has stressed choice and independence for schools rather than a desire to conquer a product category. In the Sakai community, for example, there never was a strong sense that Sakai should “win” in the market by “beating” other LMSs because it’s the “best.” Rather, the community has tended to see itself as a group of fellow travelers who are looking to build something together and minimize their collective risk. As long as the project had enough participants to be sustainable, they never worried too much about growing market share.

The sustainability models of these communities reflect those values. Ongoing development is funded primarily through direct contribution of labor or funds from participating schools. There are dues paid, but that money goes primarily toward maintaining the community rather than the software. And you don’t have to pay dues to use the software. They are strictly voluntary support for the community. There are commercial affiliates who do contribute to the code, but there is no structure binding their success and growth to the growth of resources for developing the software, the way there is in Moodle.

This model works well when the cost of the commercial entrants in the product category are high and resource pooling makes economic sense. In the early days of both Sakai and Jasig’s uPortal project, the commercial entrants in the LMS and portal categories had pricing power, and there was a sense that they were holding colleges and universities hostage. It seemed worthwhile to the early investors to put more money in up front so that they could gain control of their destiny, and they could be assured that others would follow on at lower investment levels because their contributions, while significant, would be less than the license cost of the commercial alternatives. Kuali enjoys this advantage today; the cost of commercial ERP software, both in licensing and in implementation, is so high that they have a compelling economic case to make even to those schools that don’t particularly care about open source.

But pricing power for both portals and LMSs has dropped in recent years as other viable open source and commodity private source candidates have come onto the market. Also, as Sakai CLE and uPortal have matured, the schools that have adopted them are more or less satisfied (or, at least, satisficed), making it harder to get them to invest in ongoing development. A commercial licensing or hosting fee is something that’s easy to keep in a budget on an ongoing basis; a developer, less so. These two factors have combined to make both Sakai and Jasig sustainability brittle. While neither Sakai CLE nor Sakai OAE is in any immediate danger, the threat of erosion of support below a critical threshold is always there. These projects are not in the red zone, but neither are they in the green.

The way these respective communities tend to deal with the problem is to send their Executive Directors out to be salespeople and drum up more financial commitments. In fact, the most common concern that I hear voiced about the prospective merger is that the EDs will be “distracted” from raising vital funds. But pushing the ED to focus on squeezing out a few more commitments every quarter is a tactical approach to a strategic problem. Unless the fundamental dynamics change, the EDs will always be paddling upstream. We will never get into the green that way. All we will do is raise the risk of burning out good Executive Directors.

Affinity Marketing, the Sales Funnel, and Growing the Pie

I’d like to go back to a point I made in passing earlier in this post: Dues paid to the foundations are voluntary support for the community. I have been a Sakai Foundation Board member for several years now, and a community member for more. I have heard many, many versions of the same discussion: How can we increase the number of dues-paying members by emphasizing the value of the community? The answer is simple: Increase the value of the community. The Apereo Foundation, by creating a brand separate from the individual projects but supported by those project brands (in somewhat the same way that the Apache Foundation’s brand is boosted by housing projects like Maven, Hadoop, and ActiveMQ), could become the place that first comes to mind when college and university folk think about collaborating around open source software or related practices. It could attract more participants. And it is my sense that the barrier to participate in an open source project is the highest when it’s your first. Once you’ve had a successful experience with one, you’re more likely to try another—especially if some of the same folks are involved. There is great value in building a strong community of practice around open source in higher education. That value far transcends the value of any particular project. As such, it can create a halo effect for projects that are associated with the community.

The objection I typically hear at this point is that Apache has a common audience of techies who are interested in the bottom portion of the IT stack, where Sakai and Jasig do not have that common thread with each other. In my view, that concern misses the point. The real value is in creating common and neutral ground for higher education to collaborate on open projects rather than to serve some particular set of IT functions. Take the case of Blackboard, for example. When they announced their intention of becoming more involved in the Sakai community by hiring Chuck Severence, it stirred up a lot of concern. It feels weird for Blackboard to be involved in Sakai because they are long-time competitors in the LMS category. But it would be far less weird for Blackboard (or Desire2Learn, or Instructure) to participate in an Apereo Foundation, where they could, for example, contribute to developing LTI-based teaching tools that could integrate with both LMSs. More importantly, it would be less weird for Blackboard customers to participate in Apereo on such projects. Likewise, it would be easier for the IMS to build open source reference implementations of new specifications that are housed in the Apereo Foundation than in the Sakai Foundation. Some of these new projects will have infrastructure requirements. You don’t need to develop your own single sign-on software to tie a couple of ed tech applications together with SSO, but it sure is convenient to have SSO experts in your network. Apereo could be a premier place for schools to work together on solving their end-to-end academic technology problems. As such, the community could grow, both in numbers and in value. Some of the new participants would join the Sakai or Jasig projects as they got closer to them, thus boosting their sustainability without requiring us to turn the Executive Director into a traveling salesman. But even more importantly, the community itself would become valuable to a wider range of schools regardless of which projects they do or do not join. A rising tide lifts all boats.

I do not dismiss the questions I hear about the merger. There are many important tactical details to work out. And precisely since these projects are brittle (again, not under immediate threat, but not as safely sustainable as anyone would like them to be), anxieties are high. These concerns need to be addressed, and I am confident that they will be. But let me be clear: I strongly believe that this path is the most viable path to long-term sustainability for all of the projects involved. If you are a believer in the benefits of Open, then the best way to support it and prove out its value is to be open. The health and robustness of the software is a second-order effect of the health and robustness of the community.

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3. Sakai Conference: Teaching With Sakai Innovation Awards One of the best aspects of the annual Sakai conference...
4. The Datatel-SunGard Higher Education Merger This is a guest post from Jim Farmer, Chairman of...
5. Open Thread on Blackboard/ANGEL Merger Update: It looks like “bbplusangel” has already gotten some momentum on...

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