OER Funding: Ask the Right Questions

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Michael Feldstein

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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When It Comes to Content, Say “Yes” to Wrappers But “No” to Containers

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Michael Feldstein

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.

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Posted in Build This, Please, Openness, Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!) | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Phil Hill

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.

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Posted in Blogging, Guest Bloggers, Higher Education, LMOS, Notable Posts, Openness | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Instructure Makes Its Move into the K-12 Market

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Audrey Watters

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.

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Apple and Textbooks, Part 1: The War on Paper

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Michael Feldstein

Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of good coverage of the Apple announcements already. I’m partial to Phil Hill’s pre- and post-announcement write-ups here at e-Literate as well as Audrey Watters’ analysis at Hack Education. Nevertheless, I do think there are a few more things that can be said about the announcement.

From a functional perspective, there really isn’t anything new about the e-textbooks that Apple is touting. Pretty much all of the functionality can be found in one, several, or even all of the entrants in the product category that I have occasionally referred to as “nextbooks,” e.g., Inkling, Kno, MIYO, DynamicBooks, and my own employer’s MindTap product. In fact, as I’ll go into in a later post, Apple’s entrants are missing some features that are critical to this product category. But the facts of the product announcement alone don’t tell the whole story. I don’t think you can really tease out the full impact without understanding the company’s commercial goals—particularly when the company is Apple, which has a history of moving markets in ways that other companies can only dream of. In the next couple of posts, I’m going to tease out what I believe Apple is trying to accomplish for itself, and then use that context to explore where their efforts are likely to have progressive effects on education and where there are gaps or problems.

Let’s start with Apple’s prime motivation. They want to kill paper.

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Posted in Tools, Toys, and Technology (Oh my!) | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments