There was a very interesting article at Huffington Post today that I suspect is rapidly making the rounds through the blogosphere. Given the author and title of the post, “What Silicon Valley Executives Keep Getting Wrong About Education” by Dr. Keith Devlin of Stanford, I had high hopes for an insightful explanation of mistakes by ed tech executives. While the investment exemplified by Silicon Valley has great potential to improve education, there clearly is a lack of understanding by much of the investment and technology industries about how education works.

The summation of Dr. Devlin’s argument is that Silicon Valley is not listening to the right people to understand K-12 education.

When it comes to making important business decisions, they will regularly seek the advice of domain experts, often at considerable cost in consulting fees, but they fail to recognize the equal importance of domain expertise in education.

The rest of the post is an argument that in a TechCrunch post Vinod Khosla showed his ignorance of education expertise by citing Khan Academy as an example of many “out-of-the-box approaches”. I have no problem with the use of anecdotes to illustrate a point, but I do have a problem with the logic of this argument.

The always interesting and provocative reflections of the legendary Silicon Valley investor (and Sun Microsystems co-founder) Vinod Khosla provided the latest example of this when, in his Feb. 19 blog-post in TechCrunch, he wrote:

“Education 2.0 [...] we have not experimented enough with [...] out-of-the-box approaches but have instead tried to force-fit [...] traditional (often broken) ideas into the ‘computerized’ model.”

Which might sound fine if this statement were not preceded by his explicit mention of Khan Academy as one of the new experiments. For KA is precisely a traditional approach transported onto the Web, namely one-to-one instruction, sitting side-by-side with the teacher. Is KA valuable? Sure it is? But “all” Sal Khan has done is take the traditional textbook instruction and put it up on YouTube.

The Power of Technology is What it Enables

With all due respect, Dr. Devlin’s argument itself is flawed – while Khan Academy videos are based on instruction models (traditional), the platform actually enables out-of-the-box approaches that could and are transforming education. To claim that Khan Academy merely computerizes traditional approaches misses the real role that Khan Academy can play. Dr. Devlin himself hints in an aside how Khan Academy enables one of the most promising K-12 approaches – the flipped classroom (which is also applicable to higher education, but Dr. Devlin’s argument is on K-12).

(BTW, Khan himself recognizes the importance of the teacher, and advocates using his videos as part of a “flipped classroom” model of teaching, a concept that goes back well before YouTube was launched.)

The role of technology is to enable changes and effective academic and business models, not to be the change itself. The “technology” of Khan Academy takes the instructional part of math education (as well as others) and makes it available anytime, anywhere, at the discretion of the student. The student now controls when, where, how often they view the videos, and as Dr. Devlin describes:

It proved to be a significant leap forward, in large part because Khan is a good instructor — he explains well in a highly non-threatening, “I am your friend” way.

And did I mention that the instruction is provided free, without typical boundaries of classroom, institution or software / publishing license? Not only that, but Khan Academy encourages its usages as components of online or face-to-face courses, combined with the appropriate pedagogical model.

Did I mention that Khan Academy now frees up the instructor in a traditional course to focus their attention on interactive, bi-directional, very human interactions?

Khan Academy is technology – by itself it merely replicates instructional models. However, like all technology, it should not be viewed by itself. What is important is what the technology enables. Khan Academy enables the flipped classroom, it enables teaching-and-learning to break the course, institutional and software / publishing license barriers. In short, Khan Academy enables out-of-the-box approaches.

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Great Title, Flawed Post – Khan Academy Enables Out-of-the-Box Approaches by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

NERCOMP is holding an unconference on the LMS in Worcester, MA on March 5th. I will be delivering the unkeynote on the unLMS. Since it is an unkeynote, I will tell the audience nothing important about the LMS, instead relying on them to have more of the answers than I do.

In other words, it’s a lot like a regular keynote, only we’re more honest about it.

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My UnKeynote by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

Today I had a guest post at WCET’s blog. WCET is a great organization that “accelerates the adoption of effective practices and policies, advancing excellence in technology-enhanced teaching and learning in higher education”. They have been leaders in sharing best practices for online education, including taking a leading role on explaining State Authorization regulations as well as others. You can read the full post here.

The topic of the post is how the changing LMS / Learning Platform market is, or should be, changing institutional decision-making.

We have seen a great deal of change in the higher education Learning Management System (LMS) market over the past year, as has been described in several blog posts. One of the biggest changes to the market that I’ve noticed 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.

As Ritchie Boyd has described, the WCET LMS Common Interest Group (CIG) is recasting itself this year as ”the ‘Beyond the LMS’ Common Interest Group. The idea is to not ignore the LMS, but rather to acknowledge that there is so much more going on in the broader academic technology ecosystems and their impact on our campuses, and that much of this activity often includes or is enveloped by the formal LMS.”

In last year’s WCET-sponsored Managing Online Education survey, 47% of respondents indicated they are reviewing their LMS strategy and 27% are planning to change LMS within 2 years. A key question arises, however, about how institutions should adapt their technology decision-making processes based on these market changes. It’s all well and good for the market to change and provide more choices and new approaches, but how should schools decide which system(s) best fit their specific academic and administrative needs? The emergence of new, often free, cloud-based learning platforms may require changes to our decision-making.

The article goes on to describe how traditional RFP processes can bias an institution towards legacy enterprise LMS solutions.

The traditional route of institutional decision-making is based on an extended Request For Proposal (RFP) process that typically takes 4 – 12 months. These RFP processes are subtly built on the same assumptions as the traditional enterprise LMS systems – focusing heavily on evaluation of a complete set of features delivered today, often at the expense of understanding the longer-term road maps of the different learning platform providers.

If an institution follows a traditional RFP process without adaptations for today’s market, then there are several risks inherent in the approach.

In the comments, Ritchie also had a great point helping to clarify how institutions might default to standard RFP processes.

As the primary author of one of those thick RFP’s bound to a 4-12 month process, I note that, in the absence of a deliberate, and frankly somewhat cultural introspection about the role of technologies in teaching and learning within the institution, the enterprise approach has a way of becoming the default path. And institutions should be wary of that – if you find, even when required by law, that the easy or obvious solution is to simply go forward with a features-based RFP, you probably haven’t had that serious discussion with stakeholders about the evolving role of the LMS and other personal learning tools in your school. What better indicator of the changing market than the fact that some vendors won’t even respond to an institution-wide RFP!

It is also convenient, though flawed, to look at this as simply an IT challenge. When it comes to these tools, an institution’s strategic needs have to be defined far beyond just their IT strategy, and be closely bound to the drivers of the broader academic affairs enterprise.

There’s more to the article that might be worth reading, including a call to not abandon RFPs, but to augment with strategic evaluations. I encourage you to both check out the full post and to spend some time checking out WCET if you are not already a member.

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Guest Blog at WCET: Institutional Decision-Making and Changing LMS Market by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

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

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

An analog textbook is, by its very nature, separated from the rest of the activities of a class. It is constrained to whatever the publisher put into it, regardless of what teachers and students want or need to do with it. It is literally bound. But that’s an artificial boundary, and it’s not a good one. Learning content wants to be as close to learning activity as possible. Consider, for example, the now famous Stanford course in artificial intelligence by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun. In their course, the video content actually morphs into a quiz:

Of course, iBook textbooks have quizzes. But they are the quizzes that were placed by the authors, not the teachers. In Apple’s vision, the textbook remains an artifact that is what it is, regardless of how well or poorly it lines up with what the actual class is doing. Teachers take what they are given in the iBook, ignore the parts that they don’t like, and do their other activities—regardless of how closely related those activities are to the learning content in the book—elsewhere. Just like with an analog textbook. As Dan Meyer wrote:

The textbook is now digital but students still encounter it as they always have: wisdom to be received, perhaps highlighted, annotated, and memorized, but not created, constructed, or made sense of. Teachers still interact with students as they always have. The platform doesn’t offer them any new insights into the ways their students think about mathematics. As far as I can tell, the iBook doesn’t establish any new link between the student and teacher, or strengthen any old ones.

What I’m saying, basically, is that I’d have to modify, adapt, and extend the McGraw-Hill iBook in all the same ways that I modified, adapted, and extended the McGraw-Hill print textbook. We’d pull out the iBook just as infrequently as its printed sibling.

But why? There is no binding here except the one that Apple chooses to make. Why should the educational experience limited to what the publisher thought to include? The linear organization of educational content is a useful aspect of the analog book that is worth keeping. But the notion that what is published is what makes up the textbook represents a failure of imagination. (There’s a related flaw in iTunes U, by the way. Resources are relatively atomic, organized only by a menu, and you often have to launch out into a separate environment to interact with those resources. Their notion of context is paper-thin.)

It just doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not like Apple didn’t have models for alternatives. As I discussed in an earlier post, the new product category of innovative e-textbooks start with a baseline assumption that instructors should be able to edit the content. They can add, remove, re-order, and in some cases even change the provided text itself. For that matter, a lot of OER content is available on wikis. iBooks textbooks offer no editing capabilities for the users. So already, the product cannot be customized to the needs of the particular class. Far from being personalized, it is needlessly generic. Furthermore, the interactivity that is in the iBook is similarly bound, isolated from the rest of the class experience. Sure, you can take a quiz, but can your do anything with that quiz? Does it have any relation to the rest of what you do in class? No. OK, you can take notes, but can you share your notes? Again, no. There is content that is worthy of discussion, but can you actually have an online discussion that’s directly tied in to the text? No, both because there are no class discussions and because if there were their placement wouldn’t be up to the teacher. Does it let students insert their own content and create a collective narrative that helps to make sense of the content? Once again, nope. The iBook is an artifact, bound, inert, and completely separate from the rest of the class experience. And yet, these books are software. They are web pages. Epic failure of imagination.

This isn’t likely to change much as long as Apple is constraining iBooks to a proprietary format that can only be rendered in their reader because that reader limits what you can do with the pages, technologically speaking. This decision, in turn, is tied to their apparent view that a book is mostly a static thing that is good for solitary interaction. In a class, reading is a fundamentally social activity. You are engaging with the content together. The “book” should be shaped (dare I say constructed?) by the collective needs, goals, and contributions of the class. By extension, an educational eBook reader should be a collaborative learning environment. But Apple hasn’t designed iBooks as a learning environment, and they have prevented you from taking your iBooks Author output to one that is.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Apple really wants to be in the business of providing a learning environment. If they did want that, they could have done it a long time ago. Their current blockbuster success with mobile really goes in the opposite direction. The whole idea of a mobile app is that if I can narrow the context of your world to a small enough slice, I can do something really cool for you. That works for, say, learning angular momentum (c.f. Angry Birds). But if you want to go beyond those atomic concepts and really get students to make broader connections, you need a wide-ranging, flexible, and social environment. That’s not Apple’s gig.

The irony is that iBooks Author is a tool with real educational value. It’s just that the value isn’t in creating the digital re-imagination of the textbook. Rather, it is in making it easy to author a (relatively) new genre of multimedia publications. As both D’Arcy Norman and Joe Ugoretz point out, it would be a wonderful tool for students to use to create new kinds of narrative. I would love to see it replace Microsoft Word as the tool of choice for term papers, for example. They have built a beautiful authoring tool that can create great educational content. They should free that content so that it can be used in learning richer learning environments that allow the creation of broader learning contexts. I also think that, insofar as Apple is successful in convincing people that academic content really should be digital and students really should be working on tablets, they will be doing everybody a favor in the long run. With ubiquitous, low-priced, browser-enabled touch tablets at schools, we will see the development of a whole range of highly innovative and effective educational technology products blossom.

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Apple and Textbooks, Part 2: Is There a Class In This Text? by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

I just wanted to drop a quick note to point out that the always interesting Rob Reynolds will be running a webinar on the future of the textbook on Friday. Here are the deets:

The Future of Digital Textbooks in U.S. Education (And What That Means for
You)

Date: Friday, February 10
Time: 1:00 CST
Open registration – http://bit.ly/x8EGIw

Textbooks will be predominantly digital by the end of the current decade
and that means big changes in both the publishing and education markets in
the U.S. In this webinar, Dr. Rob Reynolds will explore the current trends
in the textbook publishing industry, the continued evolution of digital
textbooks, and the rise of open textbook and OER content. His presentation
will feature research from his forthcoming book (The Future of Learning
Content: E-textbooks, Open Content, Apple and Beyond!), and is also based
on his professional experience as an educator, author, administrator,
educational technologist, and publishing executive. Specific topics
addressed in the webinar include:

Current and future trends in educational publishing
Top 10 obstacles faced by traditional textbook publishers
Market projections for print and digital textbooks through 2020
The impact of tablet devices on digital learning content and the
curriculum
The evolution of the open textbook and self-publishing markets in
education  (and their challenges)
The rise of low-cost, digital-first publishing in education
Trends in e-reader software platforms for e-textbooks
The real impact of Apple, Amazon, and Google on textbooks

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Webinar on Textbooks by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

One of the trends that I’ve been tracking in the LMS market is a move away from the monolithic, all-things-to-everyone enterprise LMS solution. There are several different approaches challenging this model, but the general theme is that the ed tech market needs more flexible, targeted approaches to directly support teaching and learning needs.

The news today is that LoudCloud Systems is officially announcing their LMS solution’s entry into the general higher education and K-12 markets as described in a Campus Technology article. In this announcement, LoudCloud promises what they describe as the “first fully adaptive and configurable Learning Management Systems for Higher Education and K12″. While I cannot judge yet how successful this vendor will be with their strategy, I think the announcement is significant for the LMS market for two reasons.

• LoudCloud appears to be providing the first disaggregated LMS on the commercial market; and
• The system has an integrated analytics engine that supports personalized content delivery.

Disclaimer:  I do not endorse any one company over another and am not doing so here. My point here is to describe the general product release and to describe how this announcement further changes the LMS market.

LoudCloud is a two-year-old company based on a team formerly at Tata Interactive Systems, a provider of corporate LMS solutions. This team, led by CEO Manoj Kutty, started LoudCloud in 2010, and in 2011 had some significant wins in the for-profit sector of the higher ed market (Grand Canyon University with an enrollment of 40,000 students, and Career Education Corporation with an enrollment of 116,000 students) as well as the K-12 market (Jefferson County, the largest K-12 school district in Colorado with 84,000 students).

Last September I wrote about some early news for LoudCloud here and here.

… During my phone call and online demonstration, they mentioned that Career Education Corporation is migrating to the LoudCloud LMS from their homegrown LMS, tool by tool. This is significant – LoudCloud has designed their system as a suite of web services, where each tool is designed to use role-based authentication and to be available on its own merits – architectural disaggregation. Furthermore, LoudCloud Systems has been designed for personalized learning environment driven by analytics. As the system tracks the students usage and a demographic profile from the Student Information System, the LMS will serve up specific content that appears to fit that students learning preferences and learning style.

At the time of the previous posts, LoudCloud was working on projects with these early customers, but it was not clear if they would develop a business strategy to support this approach for other customers. It now appears that they are fully releasing the products and marketing to the broader higher education and K-12 markets.

Disaggregated LMS

LoudCloud is betting on a vision of each customer configuring the system they need, based on choosing learning tools in a best-of-breed approach – using IMS standards and having each tool with its own API. The idea is if you already have a working LMS ecosystem but mostly need to change a discussion board or adaptive reader, for example, why should you have to change the whole system? In addition to this vision, I’m sure that they would be happy to sell the entire LMS as well.

This concept of a disaggregated LMS is not new, and in fact goes back at least to the SUNY Learning Network (SLN) effort from 2005 that would have leveraged open source components and built a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS). As described in a SLN2 whitepaper:

After considerable research, SLN has identified the best solution to be a component strategy, as no single-platform LMS solution exists today to meet our needs. This powerful component strategy would integrate several carefully chosen Open Source projects, each with strong technical compatibility, resulting in a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.

Collectively, the component technologies provide the requisite compatibility through standards compliance, complementary function, and strong alignment between their supporting communities.

Unfortunately this vision was not realized at the time, partially due to organizational resistance, but there has been progress in terms of the standards such as IMS LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability). From the open source world, Sakai 3 is also offering portions of a component approach.

Adaptive Content Through Analytics

The second part of LoudCloud’s bet is that analytics are the key to allowing a personalized learning experience that is adaptable to each student. The analytics engine in the LoudCloud LMS appears to take data from three primary sources – assessment results, demographics, and student engagement. According to Kutty,

We also believe that to deliver a better educational experience, a high quality educational platform must capture, profile, statistically analyze, and help improve content, student learning, and instructional engagement.

Most other LMS providers are also investing heavily in analytics, particularly in the ability to visualize and report assessment data. What appears to be new with LoudCloud is that their analytics engine can adapt the end-user experience for both instructors and students. According to the Campus Technology article:

Adaptive Reader Technology is a retention tool that captures and statistically analyzes more than 300 variables from student demographics, course engagement, and assessment data to deliver preferred learning resources, remedial instruction, tutoring support, and personalized feedback based on each learner’s individual profile.

What to Watch

For this strategy to work and LoudCloud to succeed, I see two big issues that need to be addressed.

• Market Acceptance – This announcement is significant, but the real judgement will come from the LMS market and whether LoudCloud can pick up new clients. There are a lot of changes to the market with new approaches, not to mention that the incumbent LMS solutions are not standing still. Will LoudCloud be able to expand beyond the for-profit sector and sell to public online programs and even to traditional higher ed? I would have expected to see more progress in terms of signing up new clients by now – the higher education market relies strongly on word-of-mouth, so sales success and momentum is important for this business strategy to succeed.
• Interoperability with Other Systems – While the IMS LTI standards are making tool interoperability easier and richer in end-user experience, early system integrations will most likely arise where the institutions control the product. Note that CEC was one of the first customers to implement components of the system, and they have a home-grown system. I suspect that clients with either a homegrown solution, or using Moodle and Sakai will be in the best position to take advantage of LoudCloud’s best-of-breed solutions.

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LoudCloud Systems Announces Adaptive LMS General Release by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

David Wiley writes:

You have to admit that some of the things the publishers are working on are both cooler and better than almost everything that currently exists in the OER space. Can you name a single OER project that does assessment at all (and I don’t mean PDFs of quizzes)? Can you name one that does diagnostic assessment or handles mastery in any meaningful way? We’ve narrowed the entire field of OER down to CMU OLI, Khan Academy, and possibly Thrun’s new stuff. Now, can you think of one of these three that openly licenses their assessments and the engines they run them on? No.

Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. And believe me – if it took $100M to get the field to where it currently stands in terms of relatively static openly licensed content, it will take at least that much investment again over the next decade for the field to do something truly next gen.

Because this stuff costs so much to do, if no one steps up to the funding plate the entire field is at serious risk. Much has been written about 2012 being “the year of OER.” Let’s hope it’s not the year OER peaks. We need brains, energy, and funding on the next gen OER/OAR problem NOW. [Emphasis added.]

I have long argued that for-profit companies are neither the mortal enemies nor the white knights of education. In this particular case, given the heavy lift involved in funding this sort of effort relative to the resources available in the academic and philanthropic communities—and David is in a position to know—I think it is important to think about for-profit entities in roles that are potentially cooperative with rather than in opposition to OERs. We should be asking the following questions:

• What sort of commercial ventures could prosper in an ecosystem where quality educational resources are abundant and free rather than scarce and expensive?
• Specifically, what sorts of ventures could make money ethically by adding real value in the context of abundant and free educational resources?
• What are the barriers preventing those ventures (either existing or yet-to-be-formed) from helping to create such an ecosystem?
• Who are the right people and what are the right institutions to forge the relationships that could foster such an ecosystem?

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OER Funding: Ask the Right Questions by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

Scott Leslie has a good post up ruminating on the moving target of open textbooks which reminded me that I have long intended to write a follow-up to an exchange that he, I, and Rob Abel had in the comments section of a post a I wrote a while back. Scott lamented that the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges was releasing its open course content in IMS Common Cartridge format, which seemed to him to be not so easily accessible or universally usable as one might like. I wrote in response,

Fundamentally, I don’t believe in cartridges. I don’t believe in forking a copy of a digital resource and stuffing it into another system. It’s bad for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the implementation challenges that Scott ran into with Moodle (although it’s fair to say that some LMSs handle CC import better than others). Common Cartridge made more sense 5 or 10 years ago, but it’s late to the game and is ultimately destined to be eclipsed by in-place APIs, including but not limited to IMS LTI. (By the way, I’m not so sure it’s such a good idea to let Google own our integration API either.)

Unsurprisingly, Rob Abel, as CEO of the IMS, took issue:

If there is agreement that CC helps with the issue of content in an LMS then, well in your scenario the content is inside the publisher “LMS” (or equivalent).

Can I tailor it? Can I put things in there – like a syllabus – and get it out? If I’m the student and I create something in there can I get it out? Can I mix and match with other publisher materials? Can I archive that mixing for next term? Can I share what I did with my faculty peers who might want to learn from it? Can I create assessments in there and then use them somewhere else or just put them somewhere so that I can use them in the future?

Common Cartridge – or something like it – helps solve those issues. Fits right into the topic of openness. But, most importantly, in the digital education age we need to make digital education easy for the faculty and the students. Otherwise there won’t be a digital education age 

Perhaps a mixture of OER and publisher proprietary stuff might be a solution. IMHO, some stuff needs to be tailored, remixed, moved in, and moved out. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a publisher platform or an LMS. Faculty want their stuff. Students want their stuff. Publishers need to help them, not thwart them.

I said that the binary choice Rob was offering up wasn’t the right one and promised to elaborate in a future post. Here, at last, is that response.

Let me start by reviewing an argument that I have made here before, which is that there should only ever be one copy of a learning resource except under very limited and specific circumstances. In this era of iframes, you can embed content pretty much wherever you want. By keeping the single canonical copy at one URL and surfacing it where it is needed (as opposed to copying it), you both maintain access to the most updated version from the authoritative source and preserve the ability to do in-depth usage and learning analytics. Who is using this content to learn what in which contexts? If you have a thousand copies of the same resource floating around, you can’t effectively aggregate this data (especially if you don’t know whether or how the content has been altered in those copies). There are only two circumstances under which it makes sense to make a second copy of a web-based learning resource: (1) you want to cache it locally for access in offline or bandwidth-constrained environments, or (2) you deliberately intend to fork the content and create a new version of it. And the first case should be addressed as a caching problem rather than a copying problem.

We have a number of formats today that are designed to take web-based resources and organize them for a particular type of consumption. Common Cartridge is one such format. It provides the content wrapped in metadata so the LMS knows where to put it. EPUB and the .ibooks derivative are other examples; they pull together disparate web-native resources into a book-like sequence and user experience. That’s fine. I have no problem with it. My problem is when those resources are copied and stored locally for no good reason. If you want to use one of these formats as a metadata wrapper to surface the remotely stored content within a context and user experience that makes it most useful, then yay. Use iframes or some similar technology and wrap them in the metadata you need. But don’t make local copies of the resources unless you have good reason to do so.

I would argue that efforts like the one by Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges should make the OER content available in canonical copies on their servers as plain old web pages and then provide cartridges that include pointers to those copies. Since one of the values of OERs is being able to remix, then maybe Common Cartridge should be extended to include an option to pull down the remote resource for local editing, constrained by the particular machine-readable license of that remote content. (I actually have an idea that would allow remixing but still maintain the “chain of custody” to the original resource for the purpose of learning analytics, but that’s another post for another time.) But the decision to download should be a deliberate one, not a default one, and all resources should be available on the naked web and not locked up by default in some metadata container that you have to crack open if you want access to the content.

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When It Comes to Content, Say “Yes” to Wrappers But “No” to Containers by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

Along with others, I have written several times over the past 12 months here, here, here and here about the significant changes occurring in the educational LMS market. In my opinion, when we look back on market changes, 2011 will stand out as the year when the LMS market passed the point of no return and changed forever. What we are now seeing are some real signs of what the future market will look like, and the actual definition of the market is changing. We are going from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market.

What I mean by ‘enterprise LMS’ is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A ‘learning platform’, by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS).

The 2011 EDUCAUSE event captured the zeitgeist of the changes, as it seemed most of the buzz at the conference centered on new LMS solutions and paradigm changes. Instructure made their debut at the conference, Pearson’s OpenClass was announced, Blackboard announced a new move in open content focused on CourseSites, and Cengage demonstrated their MindTap platform. Rather than slowing since EDUCAUSE, we have seen several additional announcements in the past three months.

• CourseKit was released as a free learning platform targeted at faculty adoption.
• Apple’s iTunesU app was announced alongside the iBooks / Author textbook offering, extending iTunesU as an iPad-based learning platform.
• Facebook made a move within its higher education roots, starting a pilot program with Groups for Universities.

In my post from last summer, I characterized the changes we were starting to see, but with all of the recent changes, I think it would be useful to extend the first two trends mentioned.

The question is, what will the LMS market that is emerging from these changes look like?  No one can know for sure what will happen over the next 3 – 5 years, but I do think there are some key trends that are worth understanding.

• The market is more competitive, with more options, than it has been for years.  Instructure is a real player that has shown that it can win against established LMS vendors with big wins in Utah and at Auburn.  LoudCloud has new clients at CEC, Grand Canyon U and an unreported win at a public state university.  BrainHoney won at BYU.  Pearson LearningStudio has major wins at Arizona State and Columbia online programs.  Desire2Learn has roughly doubled in size in the past year.  Moodle and Sakai, including through providers such as MoodleRooms and rSmart and Unicon, continue their impressive wins in the market.

• Related to the above, there is a trend towards software as a service (SaaS) models for new LMS solutions.  The SaaS model offers some compelling advantages in terms of deployment time and ability to mine and report transactional data that might not be possible with other approaches.  SaaS is not a panacea, but this is a growing trend in the LMS market.

The trend towards SaaS could perhaps more accurately be described as the default model now for new offerings. In the LMS market from just short two years ago, the default model was enterprise LMS. The only exception was Pearson’s LearningStudio (the artist formerly known as eCollege.com). Today, every single new offering mentioned above is SaaS-based. Apple’s iTunesU app is a mobile app, but the content is served from a behind-the-scenes SaaS platform.

Perhaps more significantly – there has not been a new enterprise LMS created since around 2004. Yes, each legacy LMS provider has major new releases available, but the one exception you could argue is that Sakai 3 is a new LMS and not just an upgrade from Sakai 2. Other than this exception, every new LMS solution to enter the market in the past two years has been based on a learning platform. I doubt we will see any more enterprise LMS solutions created given the cost-benefits of creating SaaS offerings.

Another trend that is becoming apparent is that many of the new offerings are not attempting to fully replace the legacy LMS, at least all at once. Rather than competing with all of the possible features that are typical in enterprise LMS solutions, the new platforms appear to target specific institutional problems and offer only the features needed. Perhaps inspired by Apple’s success in offering elegant solutions at the expense of offering all the features, or perhaps inspired by Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation model, the new learning platform providers are perfectly willing to say ‘no – we just don’t offer this feature or that feature’.

My colleague Jim Ritchey has written about the changes that SaaS models are starting to have in the higher education ERP market, put in context of the Datatel+SGHE merger. His key point:

Therefore the challenge for the vendors is how to get the ERP, with its slow development and implementation cycles, to provide the solutions to the new needs of the institution.

In the LMS market, the new answer to this question – how to adapt and respond to new institutional needs – appears to be based on learning platforms.

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Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

The learning management system upstart Instructure is unveiling Canvas K-12 today, a version of its platform aimed — as the name suggests — for the K-12 level. The company says that it’s already had over a dozen school districts adopt Canvas, even before this roll-out of a specially designed LMS.

Traditionally the LMS has been something implemented primarily by colleges and universities, but as more and more K-12 schools move to online learning and digital curriculum, there’s a growing demand at that level. It’s a hot market, and according to research published in December 2011 by Simba Information, “the LMS segment is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 7.3%, reaching $377 million by the 2014-2015 school year.”

As such, it’s hardly surprising to see some of the big education companies make their move to offer schools these services. The acquisition of Edline by Blackboard last fall made it clear that the learning management giant was serious about its push into that market.

But as the Simba research suggests, it’s a market that’s still up for grabs. While Blackboard still holds a little over half of the higher ed LMS market, Blackboard, Pearson and Moodle altogether share only about 30% of the K-12 market.

That provides an interesting opportunity for Instructure, which officially launched its cloud-based LMS this time last year.

Its new K-12 offering includes several new features aimed at this level: it contains Common Core standards and objectives so that it’s easy to align assignments with them. There are also analytics for districts, schools, teachers and parents to be able to assess student progress. And that parent piece is particularly important as parents will have access to their child’s information, and just as importantly, have access to Instructure’s messaging system — so you can get an SMS when your child doesn’t turn in a homework assignment or an email with the week’s spelling list and so on.

Despite competition from some of the big LMS players, Instructure has made some inroads into higher education. Can it do the same at the K-12 level? When I spoke to CEO and founder Josh Coates yesterday, he noted that the company’s recent trip to FETC made them realize that a lot of K-12 teachers are fairly unfamiliar with the idea of what an LMS even is. (That’s something that should make us ask if an LMS is even necessary.) Of course, Instructure isn’t selling to teachers (although it does offer a free product that any teacher can adopt). It’s selling to districts.

But that the LMS is a new(ish) thing to the K-12 level might just work in Instructure’s favor, even if the startup remains a relative unknown. If schools choose to adopt an LMS because of their move online, then a Web-friendly, user-friendly, cloud-based tool (with easy Google Apps for Edu integration) might just fit the bill. That is, if the price is right, something that makes the future of that K-12 market — what with shrinking K-12 budgets and options for free and low-cost alternatives (“apps” not “systems”) — more than a little uncertain.

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Instructure Makes Its Move into the K-12 Market by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate