elearnspace

Since Blackboard announced its acquisition of several Moodle partners, numerous voices have chimed in to explore what it means to education. In particular, Michael Fieldstein (as usual) has a wide ranging and thoughtful response: What the heck happened? and Phil Hill captures the tone/responses from major players.

A common response to the longterm impact of these acquisitions has been to link Blackboard’s manoeuvre with the IBM’s transformation into a services company. This comparison is particularly silly because IBM was heavily invested in a hardware field that was being commoditized, whereas Blackboard is a software company (i.e. Microsoft). And the LMS is not being commoditized – it’s being integrated with new value adds including curriculum, eportfolios, analytics, learner relationship management, advising, mobile, etc. The IBM model of transformation may be a goal of Blackboard, but the demand side of the equation does not yet exist for Bb. Michael Fieldstein quotes Ray Henderson as saying “50% of the company’s revenues are now from sources other than LMS licensing, “and it’s going to get larger.””. My first thought is that it’s likely not revenue growth in new offerings that drives that number, but a collapse in LMS licensing.

Blackboard has a history of not knowing what it is. Or the type of market in which it operates. Signal Hill’s Trace Urdan, in an investment report, stated that Bb is “a shark in waters that aren’t used to seeing sharks” (i.e. higher education market). (OT: Trace is hands down the best investment strategist/advisor in edtech. He used to do a monthly newsletter, but that appears to have been discontinued. I’ve tried a few times to connect with him to deliver a presentation on his work and how he sees the higher ed tech market, but no luck).

Blackboard’s legal moves rank as one of the most significant missteps that I’ve seen by an education company. The name Bb evokes almost unanimous snickers/vitriol/disgust, largely based on their patent lawsuits. Bb is the most hated company in education (I briefly tackled their reputation here). A few folks that I respect greatly have recently softened in their disdain for Bb and are willing to give them a chance. I personally have never had a hugely negative or positive view of Bb. Their move to synchronous tools, their tactics of buying competing company to eliminate competition (Elluminate and Wimba), acquisitions of iStrategy, etc., are sound business strategies. (Disclaimer: They have been generous in allowing us to continue using their Collaborate tool (formerly Elluminate) for open online courses).

Back to the main point: Bb has identity issues. They badly misjudged the reaction of the education community to their patents suits. They were no longer content to be an LMS provider and broadened their product line (good idea – Elluminate/iStrategy). Now they have decided to become a service layer for education (i.e. consultancy of sorts – PwC/Deloitte).

What confuses me is that I’m confused.

I don’t know where Bb is going and what target they are pursuing in the education space. Private companies have the benefit of not revealing their plays. Bb is at a precarious point and is making a significant gamble: they don’t want to be an LMS provider, they want to a services company. The problem, of course, is that higher education has not yet signaled, broadly, that they need or want this. From my discussions with university presidents and senior admin, their most significant concerns rest around content, reputation, curriculum, international partnerships, etc. Does Bb want to play a consultancy role of this type? If so, they need to really ramp up their capacity, especially since universities like to do knowledge-type things themselves.

Ok, let’s leave Bb.

What’s left in the LMS space? I see two primary companies: Desire2Learn and (based on momentum) Instructure. I’ve left out Moodle mainly because their deployments are smaller-scale. Instructure states “We rarely see Moodle or Sakai make it to the short list of any education institution.” With several university LMS selections that I’ve been involved with, Moodle is not a contender. Plus, purely anecdotally, Moodle has been tainted by their lovefest with Bb.

Desire2Learn

I’ve met John Baker (CEO) on several occasions and was a keynote at their annual conference in Memphis (disclaimer: Desire2Learn is a sponsor of the LAK11 and LAK12 conference) and have had numerous interactions with company over the past six years. There was a time – peak of Bb lawsuit – where both John and D2L seemed somewhat troubled (stressed?). Obviously their future was uncertain. As the lawsuit headaches cleared, D2L has been making tremendous progress. They’re poaching numerous Bb clients and succeeding in numerous systems-wide and state-level deployments. They’ve continued to flesh out their product line: eportfolios, design wizards, mobile, etc. They have a very loyal customer base. Instead of growing through acquisition (Bb’s model), D2L has grown through internal R&D which has produced an integrated product line with strong end-user satisfaction.

Last week, I visited D2L’s main offices in Kitchener as part of a possible research project in analytics. The mood or feel of the company can be described in one word: optimism. They are an organization that knows what/who they are (an LMS vendor) and have not wandered from their mission since they started. Apparently, they’ll be at about 500 employees by year end. Tony Bates states that LMS are here to stay and D2L’s success through being focused on that market supports his assertion.

Instructure

Instructure is a new player in the LMS market with the “purpose of disrupting the Learning Management System (LMS) market by setting a new, open standard for education technology”. I don’t know their product well and they’re still a small company. It may be premature to lump them in with Bb and D2L. However, Instructure has a certain coolness factor.

They are Google to Microsoft (Bb, but I didn’t really have to spell that out, did I?): designed for the cloud, using openness as a lever, and VC-backed.

And they do the odd cool thing like giving DS106 $5000 to continue their work. (btw, Instructure, if you’re really in a mood for something new, why not work with Stephen Downes and me in building the technical platform for MOOCs? We have ideas, but need good programmers!).

The LMS space is a bit uncertain now, reflective of the education field as a whole. The change pressures are enormous: edtech startups, OERs, globalization, public divestment of educational support, new university models (Udacity, Minvera), and west to east and north to south capital and economic shifts.

Bb has embarked on a bold strategy, one that will essentially see it exit the LMS market. It’s risky. Very risky. Education may be ready for this type of player, but I haven’t seen it in my interactions with leaders and educators.

Desire2Learn and Instructure don’t generate the confusion in end users that Bb does today. D2L is clear: we are an LMS company and we offer value adds to this core product. Instructure has brashness on their side and as their creed: we’re cloud and open.

It will be an interesting few years for the LMS as the higher education market begins to acclimate to dramatic change pressures.

I had to do a quick double take on this article (first, to determine if it was April 1, anywhere in the world): Evolution Unbound: Blackboard embraces open source. This is what I imagine the experience would be like if one dropped hallucinogenics and browsed the web – a feeling of incredulity and weird confusion that can only come from time and reality being featured in a will it blend video.

I’m not surprised that Blackboard is interested in openness. They’ve made overtures in the past. At the EDUCAUSE conference in October, they were clear that they wanted to partner with the open educational resources movement. I discussed this in a post on the race to platform education. At that point, Pearson had announced open class (look Ma, free LMS!). I’m still convinced that the only reason Open Class makes sense is because Pearson can mine the data of student interaction with their content – a critical piece they were missing. Perhaps Open Class will allow Pearson to sell more content, but that is secondary to having insight into what students actually do with the content. It’s Apple-esque in a way – control the learning process from end-to-end.

Blackboard obviously makes its money from selling their LMS. How do you respond to Open Class? Why, give away what your competitors are trying to sell, of course. Blackboard touted its open education resources initiative in response. One way or another, dammit, we’re gonna compete on openness.

Imagine my surprise to read that:

Today we’ve announced the acquisition of two of these firms: Moodlerooms Inc., a leader in North America, and NetSpot Pty. Ltd., an international leader in Moodle services located in Australia…our meetings were productive in outlining areas where Blackboard can best contribute to the Moodle project as we set out on a journey.

And the pleasant understatement:

Longtime participants in the open and community source communities may be concerned about our corporate intentions, and how we’ll conduct ourselves given that we are governed by an interest in business growth.

(haha. said the fox to the rabbit.)

I’m trying to understand the economic value point is in this move for Blackboard. I’ve seen a few folks call this a “good business” move. I don’t agree. I liked Blackboard’s acquisition of Elluminate because it made sense to broaden their platform and offer an integrated solution. I was a bit confused by the company going private, but felt that it made sense if the new owners started to integrate their numerous education offerings. Education, after all, is a huge business and growing rapidly.

This current move, however, I don’t understand. Blackboard is making a mistake.

It splits the LMS market by adding another layer. Currently, you can a) buy an LMS like Blackboard or Desire2Learn or b) host your own or c) go with a Moodle-partner. With this acquisition, Blackboard now has a place at a & c. Hosting an LMS can be difficult. A small school or college simply doesn’t have the resources to host their own LMS. I’ve taught in numerous different Moodle installs (recently as a course in emerging tech to a school in Africa) and the spam and fake accounts are a big issue. Why not pass that off to a trusted vendor?

Well, that’s what Moodle Rooms did. So what does Bb gain?

It’s inconceivable that Bb got into this game for hosting revenue. Why, if you’ve spent years promoting your platform as the best one for complex implementations, do you suddenly start hosting an open source alternative? It seems that they’ve acquiesced significant ground to Desire2Learn with this move. Bb looks scattered and unfocused by moving outside of their core (or even integrated) revenue model. Are they losing that many clients in their main LMS?

Bb=Go Daddy? That makes no sense economically. Unless they plan pricy hosting options. This would then result in a rush of new low cost hosts.

Alright, so if hosting makes no sense as an economic model, what can Bb gain?

I can only see a few options:

1. Bb can stem the flow from their main platform (i.e. Oh, if you don’t like Bb, why not try our Moodle install! I already feel sorry for the salespeople navigating this discussion).

2. Data. Data is an economic value point. If Bb is hosting Moodle, depending on the end user agreement, they may be able to gain significant value from data and this data might inform the development of their main platform.

3. Move Moodle Rooms clients into their other offerings. I love Bb Collaborate. Best synchronous tool available. By far. Maybe Bb is trying to flesh out this revenue stream? What about Bb Analytics? Learning analytics are currently a buzz-wordy concept. This as an optino for-sale add-on might make sense.

My final assessment: It’s a mistake. It leaves the impression that Bb doesn’t have the confidence to compete on their own product.

There may be small benefits that Bb can gain from the acquisition, but any benefit will be offset by the message it sends about their main LMS offering. The only way that this acquisition makes sense economically is if Bb is moving OUT of the LMS space…or at least repositioning themselves so that the LMS is no longer their main offering. What we have here is a message that a tired product can be augmented by offering hosting for open source products.

D2L wins. Bb looks unfocused (and a bit scared).

What am I not seeing?

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are getting attention on various blogs and news sites. I’ll try and synthesize the conversation over the last few weeks and describe the role of MOOCs in education.

The Conversation so far…

Clark Quinn kicked of the current conversation in MOOC Reflections where he explores the distinctions between the current generation of Coursera/Standford open online courses and the connectivist model that Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, and I have offered. Clark states:

The Stanford model, as I understand it (and I haven’t taken one), features a rigorous curriculum of content and assessments, in technical fields like AI and programming. The goal is to ensure a high quality learning experience to anyone with sufficient technical ability and access to the Internet. Currently, the experience does support a discussion board, but otherwise the experience is, effectively, solo.

The connectivist MOOCs, on the other hand, are highly social. The learning comes from content presented by a lecturer, and then dialog via social media, where the contributions of the participants are shared. Assessment comes from participation and reflection, without explicit contextualized practice.

(note the comments section where Seb Schmoller describes his experience in the Stanford AI open course).

Tony Bates responded to Clark’s post and asks the provocative question: “To what extent do MOOCs really change the nature of the game, and to what extent are they more an extension and development of what has gone before – and hence should aim to incorporate previous best practices? Or will that destroy them?”

Stephen responds to Tony’s question:

I’m generally pretty reluctant to compare MOOCs with what went before, and I’m generally pretty reluctant to suggest how MOOCs improve on the previous model, because what we’re trying to do with MOOCs is really something very different from what was attempted before. The best practices that previously existed, insofar as they were best practices at all, were best practices for doing something else.

MOOCs don’t change the nature of the game; they’re playing a different game entirely.

Sui Fai John Mak, who has been an active consistent participant in our MOOCs since CCK08, comments: “The focus of MOOC would then relate to the creation of environment and the practice of learning and reflection, in a community, rather than the mere “teaching the content” to the participants as typical in a traditional online course.”

In a follow up post, he expands on this idea:

MOOC provides an environment upon which learning with complex learning ecology is experimented and explored, so as to inform learners, technologists, educators and administrators (k-12, HE) and managers, engineers and learners from various businesses on the pros and cons of learning using various platforms or spaces in a complex digital landscape.

I’ve argued something similar to Sui Fai John Mak in the past, namely that MOOCs are platforms on which learners build and construct their learning. They exist to bring people together…and when you have a group of smart, motivated folks in one area, neat things will happen. The “bringing together” may be one of the most important aspects of a MOOC.

Tony then followed up with another post arguing that:

MOOCs and MITx are more a threat to current university continuing education departments than they are to the traditional credit programs. In recent years, most university continuing education departments have been forced to move away from providing a free (or very low cost) public service to adult learners. Instead their mandate is to to provide profit to support the more formal side of the university. MOOCs are a direct challenge to this part of conventional universities.

Dave Cormier jumps into the conversation and throws MOOCs, rhizomatic learning, and the Cynefin framework into a blender and produces:

MOOCs as a structure – and rhizomatic learning as an approach – privilege a certain kind of learning and learner. The MOOC offers an ecosystem in which a person can become familiar with a particular domain…MOOCs offer a complex ecosystem in which you ‘can’ learn, not one where you ‘will learn.’ It doesn’t come with many guarantees.

Getting some mainstream love

NY Times also joins the MOOC discussion in Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls:

Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses — known as MOOCs — a tool for democratizing higher education. While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free).

Taking a step back…

It might be helpful to take a quick step back and talk about why Stephen and I started with open online courses. We were both at a Desire2Learn conference in Memphis in 2008. And we were both tired of arguing about connectivism (“is it a theory”). We decided that experiencing networked learning was important to understanding networked learning.

Instead of talking connectivism, we wanted to create an experience that was essentially connectivist: open, distributed, learner-defined, social, and complex.

In designing courses, educators often make important decisions on behalf of learners. The educator forms a “boundary” around the knowledge that will be explored in a particular course. Finding your way through, and making sense of, a chaotic landscape is the learning experience. Traditional learning design tries to reduce complexity. We try to increase awareness of complexity. Duplicating what someone else has decided is important is still a type of learning, but not one that exists outside of classroom settings. Real world learning is messy and chaotic.

We decided that we wanted to do for teaching and learning what MIT had done for content with their OCW initiative.

In our first open course – CCK08 – we emphasized learner’s control in orienting themselves to complex information. Many learners found this very confusing. But, when in an environment of abundant information, they began to adopt new approaches for interacting with information and with each other. Social networks became critical to making sense of readings. Creating and sharing artifacts helped learners to communicate how they had come to understand a topic or concept. Language games – negotiating meanings, naming things – also became an important learner-controlled activity. We provided readings each week to start the conversation, but learners largely defined the domain of knowledge exploration by providing resources and shaping the discussion.

We weren’t the first to offer open courses. We had played around with open online conferences in 2007 (these conferences contributed significantly to the initial design of CCK08). Alec Couros and David Wiley had both offered open courses in 2007. And, if you look at the literature around open universities, open learning, and distance education, you’ll find over 40 years of discussions of similar learning approaches.

What is unique about MOOCs?

In a previous post and presentation, I detailed how MOOCs (CCK08, ds106, EC&i831) differ from the courses now offered by startups like Coursera. Our MOOCs value ontology first and epistemology second. We have an ideology of developing learners who create and share artifacts of their learning, control their own learning, and own their own spaces of learning. In the process, we emphasize social networked learning (connectivism). We make sense of complex knowledge by connecting to others, creating and making “stuff”, and engaging in discourse and interacting with the ideas of others.

The Stanford MOOCs are more traditional as they emphasize knowledge development not ontological development. The primary innovation of these MOOCs relates to scale and economics: the numbers of learners that can take a course (currently for no fee, but I think that will be short-lived).

Tony is correct in his assessment that MOOCs challenge traditional continuing education departments in universities. However, this is only true because that is to date the primary approach of MOOCs. We haven’t experimented with MOOCs that challenge traditional undergraduate education models.

While MOOCs currently track the work of Freire, Illich, and Knowles, I think it would be a shame to relegate them as only being an innovative alternative to existing education models.

We interact with information differently today than we have in the past. Digital technologies have changed power and control relationships in many sectors of society. Mediating agents are less critical than they used to be. Information moves with less friction than it did in the past. It is malleable, easily mashed-up. It changes quickly. It’s impossible to keep up. (I addressed these themes and others in my book Knowing Knowledge – download here if you’re bored).

When control of information creation and dissemination changes, those fields that are information dependant also change: business, government, journalism, education. As goes information so goes education. What we lack in education today is the ability to envision a new future based on what technology allows us to do today. Jim Groom is right in stating that “And while I know it is far fro[m] perfect, I feel like the last two or three years have witnessed pretty amazing strides towards seeing some real possibilities for a technical and conceptual shift that can and will happen in institutions.”

Where does that leave us with MOOCs?

It is important to realize that MOOCs are not (yet) an answer to any particular problem. They are an open and ongoing experiment. They are an attempt to play with models of teaching and learning that are in synch with the spirit of the internet. As with any research project, it is unlikely that they will be adopted wholesale in traditional universities. Most likely, bits and pieces will be adopted into different teaching models. Some systems will offer open online courses as a means of drawing attention to their university. Others will offer MOOCs because it’s an effective way of getting out an important message or to raise awareness about certain topics.

Any or all of those adoptions of MOOCs are not really a concern for me. I’m more interested in experimentation and exploring new modes of interaction online. I’m not concerned about whether or not existing university systems adopt MOOCs for undergraduate education or whether they serve to improve continuing education. That kind of discourse appropriates MOOC concepts to support the narrative of the existing education system. Which is fine.

But that is only one way to look at MOOCs.

We are still learning other possible perspectives and trying to shape vision of what education could be. For now, MOOCs are a ripple in the education system that causes people to question “hmm…I wonder what would happen if…” or “I wonder how I could teach with…” or “I wonder what learners will do when I…”. For some, that ripple will produce an entirely new conception of higher education. For others, it will result in iterative small-scale improvements in their teaching. I favour the former, and certainly appreciate the work of those who adopt the latter.

In case you are urgently looking for opportunities to learn something online, have a look at the Follow the Sun online conference. Great group of keynote speakers. It’s open, free…sign up here.

I’m currently involved in three open online courses: Change, CCK12, and LAK12. Altogether, I’ve facilitated about a dozen of these courses, with about 15,000 participants being involved in various ways. Some participants, such as in the current CCK12 iteration, take the courses for credit. The vast majority do so for other reasons (and I’m not sure what those are – personal interest? desire to connect with others? general curiosity?).

Participation varies significantly. The Change MOOC has about 2400 participants, yet we get typically get about 40 participants per live sessions, 5-10 blog posts a day, and 20+ daily tweets related to the course. Some are active throughout the course (though when I did an analysis on CCK08, only a few of the most active participants in week 1 were still in the top ten by week 12), some have spurts of activity, and others subscribe to the daily but don’t engage in ways that are visible to us as facilitators. Consistently, as the course progresses, active participation declines.

This isn’t unique to our courses. Even the current darling of open courses – Udacity – suffers from this. Their course on “building a search engine” had 2303 views for the introduction video and only 486 views for one of the last lecture videos of week 1. Video counts are a great way to track what people are actually doing in a course as creating something (artifact, blog post) is done less frequently in open courses than listening/reading. Wonder how long until companies like Udacity move away from YouTube to keep hit counts on videos in-house.

While active participation in our courses declines as the course progresses, subscribers to the Daily increase. I’m not sure what to make of that. If I was getting five emails a week on something I wasn’t interested in, I would unsubscribe. Does that mean we can view Daily subscribers as a) people are still engaged, b) people can’t find the unsubscribe link, or c) that we’ve subjected over 15,000 people to guilt about not being active in MOOCs?

While I’m not sure of the impact of open courses, I can state I’ve absolutely loved the learning experience of open courses since 2007. I enjoyed reading Laura McInerney’s post on the best learning of my life:

In the last few weeks I have experienced some of the best learning of my life…But even more amazing for me was that as the presentation was going on I could check information online, pull research articles as they were mentioned, broadcast ideas I had to twitter and get feedback from teacher colleagues here in the UK who were sat in their hous watching tv quite unaware of what I was listening in to. There was just so. much. learning. And it was awesome in the literal sense of the word – for the entire hour I was in awe of how much information I was able to take in and make sense of in so many different ways.