Friday, March 30, 2012

Digital Brings More Options But Will Not Lower the Cost of Traditional Learning Content


I'm always surprised when I read headlines such as this one: "Tablets in the Classroom Could Save Schools $3 Billion a Year." I'm surprised because going digital today does not mean going cheaper -- it simply means going differently. Especially not when you're talking about it as a way to maintain the current status quo at a lower cost. At least this article points out that some of fallacious assumptions around that kind of thinking when it comes to tablets.

Here are some things I would like to remind everyone about when it comes to digital content and its delivery.
  • When it comes to commercial digital content (textbooks etc.), the general rule of thumb is this: the more closely ownership of digital content resembles its physical counterpart, the more likely you are to pay the same price as you would for the print product. So yes, a digital textbook may be less expensive than the print version of the same book, but that is because you are only licensing that book for a limited period of time. If you want a longer license, the price will not be significantly less.

  • Traditional publishers are searching for ways to make the same amount of money from digital content as they have from print content. This is actually a necessity if they want to maintain their current market ownership and increase their profitability. The primary strategy is to create what I call integrated technology solutions, such as MyLabs or MindTap, that remove the textbook as the hub of the learning product and replace it with an integrated combination of media, assessments, textbook, learning objectives, and adaptive algorithms, all designed to deliver an innovative learning solution that focuses on institutional needs and individual learning paths. These products are impressive but they are not and will not come with a lower price tag. In fact, they are designed to raise the average price point of digital content by adding new types of functionality and services.

  • As with the Apple announcement about digital textbooks in February, gatherings such as the one referenced in this article generally feature leading textbook publishers and technology companies. It would be more profitable for all of them if the K-12 market moved to tablet devices and digital content. I'm not saying they aren't sincere, but simply that they have vested interests and that these media opportunities are good for driving the value of their brands and establishing them as thought leaders in the space.
Please notice that I am speaking specifically about commercial learning content. Which brings me to the fact that digital content can and will lead to lower education costs over the coming decade. Here's how that will happen:
  • The shift to digital content will lead to a rise in the adoption of OERs and other free digital content -- OERs and free learning content have proliferated through digital technologies. They already represent a measurable portion of the learning content market and continue to grow rapidly. In the coming years we will see better tools for discovery and re-use, all of which will translate into increased usage by faculty and students. This will continue to drive down the average price paid for learning materials and reduce overall learning costs.

  • Digital technology will lead to more digital-first publishers that offer learning content at much lower prices than traditional textbook publishers -- cases in point are Flat World Knowledge and Textbook Media.

  • The digital transition does lead to new business models that will provide more reasonable cost options for consumers -- in particular, we are going to see two predominant trends develop throughout this decade -- content subscription and content consumption models. Content subscription business models will likely replace a good piece of the traditional textbook market, and will allow consumers more granular control over how much content they purchase and for how long. This does not necessarily mean that we will spend less (take note of purchase behavior around iTunes music or Amazon e-books), but we will have the real option of spending less on content. Content consumption models will target enterprise or institutional sales. These models will track the actual amount and efficacy of the content consumed by students; and institutions will pay accordingly.
In the end, what digital will mean is greater flexibility and choice that comes from new players and new business models. And speaking of new business models in education, here are a few to consider:
Also of interest today (the last day of a long week!) is Nielsen's latest report on mobile, which shows nearly 50% of U.S. mobile phones owners now have smartphones. Unfortunately, that's not helping out a company like RIM (BlackBerry). Their latest earnings report fell short of investor expectations again and the company is now officially in freefall and absolute crisis mode.

Finally, David Jones picks up on one of my five trends from yesterday's post -- curriculum -- and asks how the openness and flexibility we need to develop might actually occur given the current educational paradigm.


Suggested Reading

Tablets in the Classroom Could Save Schools $3 Billion a Year - Peter Kafka - Media - AllThingsD
The New LMS Product: You
Excelsior aims to help take other nonprofits online | Inside Higher Ed
No Financial Aid, No Problem. For-Profit University Sets $199-a-Month Tuition for Online Courses - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Algorithmic Essay-Grading: Teacher’s Savior Or Bane Of Learning? | TechCrunch
Nielsen: Smartphones account for nearly 50 percent of US mobile phones as of February -- Engadget
Google to Sell Tablets on Its Own This Year - Amir Efrati - News - AllThingsD
RIM Blows It Again - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD
Curriculum innovation as an educational technology trend « The Weblog of (a) David Jones

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Five Trends to Watch in Educational Technology


Thanks to EdSurge for providing a link to this informative presentation by Frank Catalano on trends in educational technology. In it, he outlines five trends that cross K-12 and higher education, and it's certainly hard to argue with any of them.
  1. Tablets
  2. Digital Chunked Content
  3. Games/Simulations
  4. Paradata (Learning Analytics)
  5. UnCollege Movement
Reading through this made me think about my own lists of trends and, more importantly, the reasoning behind what research I am pursuing at the moment, and why I clip the articles I do. In general, everything I pursue is related in some way to learning content itself. That is my primary interest and filter. So, for example, I definitely place iPads and Smartphones in my top-five educational technology trends list, but my interest is in their impact on learning content -- delivery, formatting, design and reading.

With that brief bit of context, here are five trends that I am actively watching, along with fresh news for each.
  1. Curriculum -- Across education, the very notion of curriculum is changing in a number of ways. We are seeing a shift to newer literacies and are even beginning to entertain significant changes to what core content needs to be taught/learned. There is certainly a growing realization that curricula today must be more flexible and open, and that the idea of fixed/static bodies of important information to be taught no longer works. Within this broader curriculum trend is an evolving sub-trend around the popularity of Web development courses. These are not part of General Education today but I think it's fair to ask whether or not they should be introduced. In particular, why wouldn't we include Web development languages like Ruby, Python, or PHP as part of the languages component in the Gen Ed core (and remember, this is a languages teacher suggesting this)? The whole purpose of requiring students to study "foreign" languages is to help them develop a broader understanding of the world and to communicate better with everyone. I think it's fairly easy to make this argument for Web languages and I think such knowledge would be at least as beneficial as learning Spanish or French for many students.

  2. OER Learning Platforms -- This is another big bucket but my specific focus here is on the evoluton of learning platforms specific to the introduction and use of OERs and other free/open learning content. This content is a critical component of the future of education in the U.S. and while commercial learning content and platforms have a strong symbiotic relationship, there continues to be a lack a general coordination or roadmap for OERs and learning platforms. That's why I have an interest in newer platforms such as GoodSemester. I think Audrey Watters is correct in suggesting that GoodSemester could be like a Basecamp for OERs and I know we will soon be seeing a number of other platforms that take this approach as well.

  3. Learning Analytics -- This is a relatively new area in educational technology but it will absolutely explode in the next 3-5 years. Universities and schools are focused on student outcomes and engagement, and the emphasis on assessment and student success makes improved analytics imperative. As with any newer area of research, however, there are concerns about how it is used, what it measures, and the reliability of its assumptions/data. Gardner Campbell outlines his concerns with learning analytics in this LAK12 talk, and David Jones provides links to this and other discussions here. A worry shared by many, it seems, is that learning analytics attempts to provide simple, linear data related to a very complex and organic process -- learning. I definitely agree that this is a problem with current commercial approaches, That said, with the evolution of complex big data solutions, I believe we can get to the point where we provide analytics that are truly meaningful. From a content perspective, learning analytics means gaining an understanding of the learning efficacy of our content as well as the optimum ways we can construct any content for ideal learning results.

  4. Smart Mobile Devices -- For future reference, I include both tablets and smartphones in this category. And this is a key trend for learning content because it has and will continue to have a huge impact on how we design that content. Display flexibility, granular construction, and ubiquitous distribution are all critical. The latest numbers from IDC show that close to 1 billion smart mobile devices were shipped globally in 2011, and that number will more than double by 2016 to 1.84 billion. Also of interest in this category are numbers from Samsung showing that the company has shipped 5 million of its Galaxy Note phone/tablet devices since October. This is a better-than-expected showing and highlights the attractiveness of a stylus for many users as they interact with touch devices.

  5. E-books and Digital Reading -- Obviously, general trends in consumer reading and content formats have a big impact on learning content. The most recent numbers from AAP show a great overall January performance by the trade book industry and continued strong growth for e-books. "Total trade revenues were up to $503.5 million in January 2012 from $396 million in January 2011, a 27.1% increase. E-books led the way with $128.8 million in revenue in January 2012 versus $73.2 million in January 2011, a 76% increase." With regards to specific publishers, Random House recorded "record triple-digital-percentage" digital revenue growth and a "surging demand" for Random House ebooks helped by the "increasing availability of lower-priced e-reading devices and tablets" that offset declines in print sales."
Suggested Reading

A Surge in Learning the Language of the Internet|- NYTimes.com
GoodSemester: Basecamp for OER? | Inside Higher Ed
How Open Education Can Transform Learning | MindShift
How Are Learning Analytics Being Used in Education? | Emerging Education Technology
“Here I Stand” – Campbell’s concerns on analytics and other stuff | The Weblog of (a) David Jone
s
IDC: By 2016, Android Devices To Outnumber Traditional Windows PCs | TechCrunch
Samsung Ships Five Million Galaxy Notes, a.k.a "Phablets" | AllThingsD
eBook Sales Up in January, AAP Reports|- eBookNewser
E-Books Drive Revenue Growth Across Book Trade in January 2012 | Digital Book World
Triple-Digit Digital Growth Drives Random House Profits in 2011 | Digital Book World

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

For-Profit Enrollment Increases Could Hasten Content-Consumption and Content-Subscription Models For Textbook Publishers


Well, a single year does not make for any kind of historical trend, but it's safe to say that folks in the music industry are breathing a small sigh of relief. The numbers are in for 2011 and, for the first time since 2004, the industry registered market growth. The growth was fueled by a 9.2% rise in digital sales (the sale of physical units dropped by only 7.7%), and overall digital made up more than half of industry revenues for the first time ever. There's obviously plenty of irony here, given that industry leaders once viewed digital formats as the death nail in their business coffin.

And speaking of growth, did you see the U.S. data for 2011 higher education enrollments? Overall, the numbers show a 2.8% increase from 2009 -- 21.6 million students -- with the greatest rate of growth in the for-profit sector. For-profits grew by 8.3 percent in 2010 compared to a 2.3 percent increase for public universities and 2.4 percent for private nonprofit colleges. For-profits enrolled a total of 2.43 million students, or 11.2% of the students in higher education.

I bring up both of these items -- digital music sales and for-profit enrollments -- as reminders of one key trend driving the increase in digital textbook sales in the U.S. While for-profits represent only 11.2% of the overall market, their adoption rates for digital content (not just e-textbooks) is as much as 3X-4X that of their not-for-profit counterparts. For-profits will continue to grow throughout the current decade and will likely top 20% of higher education enrollments by 2020. During that time, given current trends, we will see their adoption of digital content usage increase from an estimated 10%-12% today to more than 75%.

Unlike the music industry, however, the long-term tension for textbook publishers isn't necessarily found in the battle between digital and analog. OERs and other free learning content will also see huge gains due to the digital shift; and the focus of for-profits on overall cost management could lead to much heavier use of open content over commercial in that segment (particularly in General Education materials).

What's the solution for traditional textbook publishers? Follow the path of Blackboard and embrace services over products, maybe? Over the next five years, in fact, I think we will see two important business models emerge that actually drive the industry and define the services offered by traditional publishers -- content consumption and content subscription. Content-consumption models will be tied to publishers' (and any other content provider distributor) ability to wrap services around learning content that demonstrate usage and efficacy. Large for-profits will eventually gravitate to this model as it will allow them to pay only for what students actually use and what helps them achieve their goals. The content-consumption model will be fueled by analytics and adaptive learning services that allow the for-profits to manage costs and the publishers to replace lost content revenues with analytics and reporting services. On the not-for-profit side, subscription models will emerge. Most importantly, these will allow publishers to provide all-digital services through controlled, direct-to-institution distribution channels that help them eliminate losses due to used books, rental, and direct-to-consumer distributors.

Naturally, the flies in the ointment for these strategies are open content and the fact that, as the music industry has shown us, consumers don't always do things the way industry leaders want them to. I think we got a weird glance of that yesterday when the Pottermore site began selling digital versions of the Harry Potter series. The popularity of these books allowed an independent Web site, for the first time, to actually dictate terms to Amazon and other major online retailers. First, the books have no hard DRM -- they bear only dynamic watermarks. Second, the books may only be purchased from the Pottermore site. It was indeed strange to see Amazon and Barnes & Noble driving consumer traffic to an external Web site to purchase content. There are certainly potential implications there for the learning content market but I'll have to ponder them further before drawing any concrete conclusions.

And finally, today, I remind everyone that just when you think you have things figured out, new disruptive elements have a disturbing way to upsetting your neat numbers and charts. Such has been the case of smartphones, tablets, and apps. We thought we understood the world and its future pretty well before apps became the mainstream and now we can't imagine life without them. Along those lines, here's an article with some interesting statistics on how Apple's appstore reached 180,000 applications.




Suggested Reading
The Music Industry Is Finally Turning Around!
U.S. data show rate of enrollment growth slowing in 2009-10 | Inside Higher Ed
A Surge in Learning the Language of the Internet - NYTimes.com
Blackboard Confronts Erosion of Market Share, Makes a Major Change in Strategy
Community College Spotlight | Software predicts who’ll pass the class
What’s the greater fear for publishers? Amazon or piracy? – The Shatzkin Files
Two Years Post-Launch, A Close Look At The App Store For iPad

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Blackboard Makes a Services Play and People Watching the Learning Content Market Should Pay Attention


The big news over the past twenty-four hours has been Blackboard's announcement that it has acquired two major services providers for the open source LMS, Moodle -- Moodlerooms and NetSpot. Blackboard also announced its new “Open Services Support Group,” a division that will sell support services to colleges that use free and open-source LMS platforms.
This bear hug of the open-source movement marks a dramatic departure in strategy for Blackboard, which previously has brushed off the threat of open-source LMS alternatives, even as they have chipped away at the company’s market share in recent years. While Blackboard has watched its share of campuswide LMS adoptions among U.S. nonprofit colleges fall from 71 percent to 50.6 percent in the last five years, Moodle has seen its own share grow from 4.2 percent to 19.2 percent over the same period, according to the Campus Computing Project. Factoring in Sakai, which has grown at a slower clip (though its clients tend to be larger), open-source platforms now serve more than a quarter of nonprofit colleges.
It's not hard to imagine that this move has touched off quite the reaction from the educational technology world. The titles alone give you a sense of people's "gut" reaction.
  • You Can Acquire Open Source Companies, But You Can't Buy Open Source -- "I think there are any number of reasons why we should be deeply suspicious of this "open-washing." Why now? Why does Blackboard suddenly care to make this move? Is its share of the LMS market in that much danger?  And where is the open source community in this?  How will it respond -- I don't just mean in terms of angry pitchfork-wielding hackers.  I mean in terms of willingness to keep contributing code?"

  • This kids, is why hallucinogenics and the internet don’t mix -- "It’s inconceivable that Blackboard 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. Blackboard 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?"

  • Yet Another Sign That the LMS Is Dying – Blackboard “Embraces” Open Source -- So, is the LMS really dying… or being slowly choked to death by The Borg? You be the judge.
The real reason Blackboard made this move can be found in this quote from BlackBoard Learn President, Ray Henderson: "One of the drivers for us, as I mentioned, is that the services element has been a very rapidly growing part of our portfolio, particularly as our client satisfaction in that area has moved northward quite nicely for us over the last three years. We're experiencing very strong growth there. And that's exactly what both NetSpot and Moodlerooms bring to the party here."

At some point over the past two years, Henderson and others realized that they could reinvent their LMS division by making a shift away from platform adoption into the services arena. Profit margins are higher, sales are easier and not subject to RFPs, and the market has been void of a single major player in the U.S. education space. As Phil Hill points out, this move means "that it doesn't matter what LMS you want, we'll support them all. That is the real message, in my opinion, more so than the open- source angle. This is a huge change in strategy.”

In the end, it's the only rational move Blackboard could make to preserve this part of their company. Mature markets that become saturated with product competition inevitably evolve into a services play. Just as IBM once made the transition from hardware to consulting to revitalize its brand, Blackboard wants to transform itself into the go-to company for learning in general.

If there's a major takeaway from all of this (other than the obvious, immediate ed tech market shift), it's this -- products in the education space are a tougher sell than they used to be and open source will continue to drive down the overall product price most are willing to pay. We are seeing this in the LMS market and, very quickly, we will see the same thing take shape in the learning content space.

Major textbook companies are facing the same issues related to open source that the LMS vendors have experienced. Over the next 3-5 years, OERs and free content will take over a significant share of the textbook market. This, along with competition from low-cost alternatives such as Flat World Knowledge and Textbook Media will reduce traditional product prices and profit margins. The logical move, which we are already seeing by Pearson (Ray Henderson's former employer), is to embrace services over product as the future revenue source.

Suggested Reading

Blackboard buys Moodlerooms, creates open-source division | Inside Higher Ed
You Can Acquire Open Source Companies, But You Can't Buy Open Source
Community
elearnspace › This kids, is why hallucinogenics and the internet don’t mix
EduGeek Journal | Yet Another Sign That the LMS is Dying – Blackboard “Embraces” Open Source

Blackboard Speaks Out on Open Source Move -- Campus Technology
5 Key Talents of Successful Startup Founders
Extending the life of bookstores is critical, but devilishly difficult – The Shatzkin Files
Vook Launches E-Book Publishing Platform to Public | Digital Book World

Monday, March 26, 2012

Re-coding the Curriculum and Our Learning Content

I read with particular interest this item about Gil Elbaz, the founder of Factual, and his goal of identifying and cataloging every fact in the world.
Since its start in 2008, Factual has absorbed what Mr. Elbaz terms “many billions of individual facts we’ve collated.” Geared to both big companies and smaller software developers, it includes available government data, terabytes of corporate data and information on 60 million places in 50 countries, each described by 17 to 40 attributes. Factual knows more than 800,000 restaurants in 30 different ways, including location, ownership and ratings by diners and health boards. It also contains information on half a billion Web pages, a list of America’s high schools and data on the offices, specialties and insurance preferences of 1.8 million United States health care professionals. There are also listings of 14,000 wine grape varietals, of military aircraft accidents from 1950 to 1974, and of body masses of major celebrities.
For me, Factual is yet another example of how our information models in education (curricula, textbooks and other learning materials) are hopelessly outdated and based on knowledge assumptions that border on being comical. Just think of Factual as a new type of reference volume, only consider that it houses more than 500 terabytes of data in a local facility and even more in the Amazon cloud. For context, 500 terabytes is more than twice the capacity needed to hold the entire Library of Congress. Furthermore, there is a crew of statisticians and information scientists that constantly cleans and connects this data.

How can our "static" learning materials compete with that type of dynamic information on a big data scale? Even more importantly, how can we possibly equate learning with information absorption in a world where information, by definition, is more than we could ever master? If our learning materials (and education goals) are intended to store and convey basic information and explanations, they are inevitably obsolete and incomplete. Even in digital form, they still mirror a design based on assumptions of finite information sets that will have value that endures for a lifetime.

This, of course, is tied to our core notions about curriculum and Grant Wiggins does a fine job addressing the limitations of our current thinking in this post.
What else might follow from thinking of performance, not knowledge, as the aim of education? We might finally realize the absurdity of marching through textbooks. You want to learn English or be a historian? You would think it very foolish if I said: OK, sit down and let’s march for years through a dictionary or an encyclopedia, A to Z. Yet, that is basically what textbooks do: march through content, logically organized. Want to learn to cook? Read the Joy of Cooking all the way through its 700+ pages – before ever setting foot in a kitchen??? Yet, this is what we do and have always done in conventional textbook and lecture-driven schooling. It is also absurd to teach novices lots of technical jargon upfront, as if that will somehow have meaning and stick for later use. Yet, from Friday vocab. quizzes to almost all tests,  terminology is an absurdly major focus. We must only still do it, like medieval monks, if at some level we still think that giving things names and possessing plus appreciating (eternal?) knowledge is the point of education.
At least in the background, this kind of thinking was likely on the minds of many participants at last week's Beyond the Textbook focus groups held by Discovery Education. Dean Shareski, now with Discovery, does a good job synthesizing the discussions by participants, and says that we can simplify all the conversations by rolling them up into the three Cs: Collaboration, Curation and Creation.

Of course, this gathering was mostly focused on platform and technology, which reminds me of Stephen Downes' comment last week about how online content like the videos from the Khan Academy could serve a as "MacGuffin, something [that] provokes learning, but which isn't." Audrey Watters picked up this thread with her post on Inside Higher Ed, and reminds us that "Ed-tech objects do make good MacGuffins nonetheless. The hardware, the software, the online content -- they're all very compelling. They generate plenty of that initial intrigue and interest. ...  But the MacGuffin, remember, is just the thing that draws us in. It isn't what drives the plot forward. That requires people, human connections, processes (and okay, in the case of Hitchcock, things like greed, vengeance, and other complex psychological motives)."

The difficulty, as Watters points out, is making sure learners get beyond the MacGuffin. And part of the problem there is that, for many, technology tends to become an end as opposed to the means.
To my way of thinking the real revolution, the ultimate hack, is at a much more basic level. It is re-envisioning and re-coding the textbook itself, along with other learning content. In fact, I've been devoting a good deal of thought to this over the past month and have decided to make it the topic of my next book -- The Ultimate Hack: Re-coding the Textbook and Other Learning Materials. I have posted an initial draft of the Introduction over at e-literate, and will be housing the final versions and the accompanying open textbook here on this site.

Naturally, a big part of our content re-thinking must be around discovery. How do we structure and code our learning materials so that they are easily found and re-used by others. This was a key topic at the recent Th(ink) E-Reading Summit and, as senior analyst David Renard of mediaIDEAS put it, "the problem is how to find what products you want, but don’t know a name, just a category. 27% of buyers who bought an ebook first went to a retail store to find the book they wanted. Discovery is not just about getting someone to look at a product, but to also get them to download or use it."

Finally today, I liked this review of the different approaches to the stylus in the tablet market. It seems there are still plenty of people like me who like the notion of making "natural" notes on the screen without having to access a keyboard. Here's hoping that this movement continues to gain momentum.

Suggested Reading

Factual's Gil Elbaz Wants to Gather the Data Universe - NYTimes.com
Beyond the Textbook | Ideas and Thoughts
The Ed-Tech MacGuffin | Inside Higher Ed
Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. « Granted, but…
Half an Hour: Education as Platform: The MOOC Experience and what we can do to make it better
Th(ink) E-Reading Summit: Content Discovery in the Age of Tablets, E-readers and Google | TeleRead
The current state of styli and the iPad: does the stylus still blow it?

Friday, March 23, 2012

OER Makes Financial Sense and Mobile is Just Plain Inevitable

In The Economics of Open (thanks to Stephen Downes for the reference), Paul Stacey does a noteworthy job of exploring the actual business value of open educational resources (meaning why it makes financial sense). Everyone should add this to their reading/reference list as a resource. Here are Stacey's reasons (there is plenty of explanation under each of these):
  1. Open enables rapid market entry, market penetration, and market share.
  2. Open generates revenue through advertising, subscriptions, memberships, and donations.
  3. Open generates revenue through services.
  4. Open generates revenue through direct and indirect sales.
  5. Open generates innovation.
  6. Open makes better use of what we already have.
  7. Open works don’t end, they expand and evolve on and on through others.
Also, if you're looking for some good current information on mobile trends, look no further than this deck, The Future of Mobile. In particular, the presentation does a nice job of showing how people are using mobile and connecting the dots about the impacts of that use.


Of course, one of the big questions when it comes to mobile is whether or not it will be an app-based future or one played out mostly in a browser. Pew conducted a recent survey of Internet experts and has released this report. Lots of interesting reading. Remarks from futurist John Smart provide the report's summation.
“Apps are a great intermediate play, a way to scale up functionality of a primitive Web,” he said, “but over time they get outcompeted for all but the most complex platforms by simpler and more standardized alternatives. What will get complex will be the ‘artificial immune systems’ on local machines. What will get increasingly transparent and standardized will be the limited number of open Web platforms and protocols that all the leading desktop and mobile hardware and their immune systems will agree to use. The rest of the apps and their code will reside in the long tail of vertical and niche uses.”
And by the way, those loud noises you hear are evidently the walls of the higher education monopoly tumbling down. At least that's the view of this article from The New Republic. The structural problem? A gradual loss of ownership over credentials. Personally, I think it's early in the credentials and badges war. It may be less a case of competition (i.e., badges become as important as degrees) than one of irrelevance (we simply become focused on proven competency and don't care at all about formal credentials).

Finally, Audrey Watters has this review of the startup Kickboard. Analytics are indeed important but, as Audrey points out, so is ease of use.

Suggested Reading
The Economics of Open | Paul Stacey
The Master Course: A Key Difference in Educational Delivery Methods
The Future Of Mobile [DECK]

The Future of Apps and Web | Pew Internet & American Life Project
How Tech Will Transform the Traditional Classroom
Kevin Carey: The Higher Education Monopoly Is Crumbling As We Speak | The New Republic
Kickboard: A Data Dashboard for Teachers

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Learning and Letting Go -- The Imagination Runs Wild


Talk about the pure joy of geeking out on something. I got home last night after a fantastic dinner and great conversation on learning with folks from different independent K-12 schools, and then discovered the new "street view" of the Amazon river available through Google Maps.
The apparent result of this discovery was that I went to sleep way too late. The real outcome was that I rediscovered (yet again) the importance of imagination in learning.

As a matter of fact, I have actually navigated down the Amazon river in a boat and. I have also watched many movies that either showed the real Amazon river or at least depicted people having adventures on what was purported to be the Amazon,

And yet, none of those gave me as much pleasure, I think, as traveling down the Amazon river on Google maps last night and imagining what it would feel like, I thought about what might be in the jungle (rain forest) beyond the river banks. I thought about the animals and people beyond my sight. I imagined the feeling early Europeans must have had when they first encountered this magical place (along with fear and trepidation). After all, they were seeing something for which there was really no analog in their experience or understanding.

In fact, like me, they could only grasp it fully with their imagination, by filling in the gaps between what they were seeing and what it must really mean/be (or what it might mean/be).

And isn't that so much of what learning is really about -- the connecting of the dots and lines between what we initially see (the information we are presented) and our eventual understanding of it that results in real knowledge?

At any rate, I need to buy some popcorn and get ready for my next adventure (probably tonight).

For a more structured take on these and other thoughts, I recommend you read Stephen Downes' post on Knowledge, Learning, and Community. Stephen does a good job of articulating what knowledge of something actually is, how we go about learning, and the importance of community in the process. If you don't already have a good personal theory of learning this one is a pretty good place to start.

In a similar vein, although moving slightly sideways, for some reason the Amazon river, imagination, and learning make me think of the Everything is a Remix presentation I attended at SXSWi a couple of weeks ago. In particular, I'm reminded of the ideas shared in the third video installment of Kirby Ferguson's project.


Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Back to Stephen's post, community does indeed play an important role in the learning paradigm. I was reminded of this yet again last night when two colleagues on Google Circles responded to a query I had posted earlier in the day, and then participated in some follow-up dialogue with me. This is precisely the kind of thing I really like about Google Circles. If you would like to check out some of the activity and conversations, check out some of these circles for educators.


Finally, I'll finish this morning's post with a link to this informative post on Beyond the Textbook by Wes Fryer. In it, Wes does a great job of synthesizing posts by Bud Hunt and David Jakes, and helps frame the general discussion of textbooks and what they can/should be (I'm using the term "textbook" very loosely here). Wes also has great notes on the event put on my Discovery, and I highly recommend them.

Suggested Reading

Visit The Amazon Through Google Maps “Street View” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
Educational Technology Guy: Interactive Biology - free videos, quizzes and study guides on Biology
Knowledge, Learning and Community ~ #change11
Top 50 Google+ Circles for Cutting-Edge Educators | Online College Tips - Online Colleges
Moving at the Speed of Creativity - Required Reading for #beyondthetextbook

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Over the Hills and Through the Textbook (Beyond the Textbook Redux)


Doug Belshaw has a response to the questions asked at this week's Beyond the Textbook gathering hosted by Discovery. In it, he argues that, similar to the problem with assessment, the issue with textbooks isn't so much what they are but rather with what we ask teachers and students to do with them.

I agree with his general premise -- particularly the latter part -- and would say that the fundamental dilemma regarding textbooks is our lack of common understanding with regards to what they are actually supposed to be and what purpose they serve in the educational process. In the early years in the U.S., textbooks were reference materials that served to augment the knowledge provided by the instructor. They shifted from reference material to pedagogical guide or mirror in the 19th century, and then moved to their current role of curriculum template in the second part of the 20th century.

While we may have argued at length in the last 50 years about what should be included in a textbook (Creationism, facts about Thomas Jefferson, etc.), few have asked the more fundamental questions -- what purpose textbooks should serve and, based on that answer, how should we redesign them? Even when I was writing textbook materials a decade ago, I always operated on the assumption that we all knew what the purpose of a textbook was (a fallacious assumption, obviously).

If we want to redesign the textbook, we will first need to answer the more fundamental question about its purpose. I doubt a majority of us believe it should really define our curriculum. I doubt that many of us think it should significantly inform or drive our pedagogy.

The answer to the future of the textbook and what lies beyond is in our definition of its purpose. As a starting point, here is my working definition. It is both the collection and presentation of information designed to foster successful learning (defined as the acquisition of information and the accrual of knowledge and wisdom). This answer may or may not be similar to yours, but having provided it, I realize that it must be at the core of any effort I make in the future when it comes to redesigning learning content.

I also note this morning that Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicts Apple may sell as many as 66 million iPads in 2012. That number is up from the 55 million some had predicted before the launch of the iPad 3. Of course, Apple isn't the only one with good news in the tablet market. Citi conducted a recent survey and found that 6% of respondents (U.S.) already owned a Kindle Fire. That's not bad considering the newness of the device. Not so surprising is the fact that the preferred usage of the Kindle Fire skewed to reading (35%), Web surfing (18%), and playing games (18%).

Finally today, I have clipped a couple of items on LMS platforms. In the first, Keith Kampson outlines the motivations institutions have in using LMS paltforms and how those institutional goals often supersede the desires of individual faculty. The second article, over at Inside Higher Ed, reports on efforts by traditional colleges to boost LMS usage among faculty. Hmmmm...Does it occur to anyone else that, perhaps, the best way to motivate faculty to use LMS platforms is to make sure that the goals of the institution align somewhat with what the faculty are actually trying and needing to accomplish? Just saying.

Suggested Reading
 
Beyond the Textbook? | dougbelshaw.com/blog
Apple Could Sell 66 Million iPads in 2012: Analyst | eWeek.com
People Mainly Use the Kindle Fire to (Gasp) Read - eBookNewser
The LMS: It’s Not All About You | Higher Education Management
Traditional colleges aim to boost LMS usage | Inside Higher Ed

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

An Abundance of Learning Content and a Model of Delivery


I read Kathryn Rusch's take on scarcity and abundance in the publishing world with great interest yesterday.
In an abundance model, scarcity looks like a mistake. Consumers who expect everything they want at their virtual fingertips get angry when they can’t get something. We’re seeing that a lot with traditionally published bestsellers. For a while, traditional publishers tried to release the e-books six months after the print books. All that did was anger the consumer, who wanted their e-book now.
Traditional publishers thought scarcity—the lack of an e-book—would drive consumers to the hardcover. Instead, it made the consumers so mad that they actually wrote nasty online reviews of the books in question. Not a nasty review of a book’s content, mind you, but a nasty review of the book’s lack of availability.
Abundance definitely confuses those accustomed to scarcity thinking. By the way, I think we may be seeing this play out in education on a number of fronts. First, we are definitely seeing a rift between consumers and providers in Higher Education. Many traditional universities still act as if their commodity -- a college diploma -- is a scarce commodity, when in reality there are so many opportunities for a good education that the biggest problem students have is deciding which school suits them best. Second, textbook publishers have long operated under the assumption that good quality learning content is scarce, and therefore can carry a high price. The truth is that there is an abundance of inexpensive, free, and open learning quality that is of equal quality. In fact, the primary thing allowing publishers to keep charging high prices is the fact that there is still isn't a convenient mechanism that allows instructors and students to find what they need and to reuse it easily.

Of course education isn't the only industry in which consumers need improved means of content discovery. On the entertainment front, if you add the entire Internet of TV programming to the already bloated cable offerings and you have a list of possibilities that no one can get through without some solid help.
This is in big contrast to the two paradigms driving the web – search and communication. The two largest web companies — Google and Facebook are driven by these two fundamental behaviors. But the vast majority of users turn on their TV without any intent — they aren’t planning to search for a particular piece of content or use their TV to communicate with friends. Instead, they’re engaged in channel surfing and looking for inspiration.
According to Richard Bullwinkle, Rovi measured behavior on over 100 million set-top boxes and Connected TVs, and only 14% of the time users search for a particular item or navigate to a given channel. 86% of the time users navigate to the guide and flip to something of interest. This means that new TV experiences must be designed differently than web experiences — TV experiences must be built around Discovery.
Well, it turns out that those predicting that the iPad 3 launch might result in a slowing of the Apple tablet juggernaut got it all wrong. Apple reports that it sold more than 3 million of the devices in less than 4 days. That's three times the number of iPad 2 devices sold in the same period at launch last year and has some analysts predicting they will sell 12 million of the new iPads this quarter.

Oh, and just when you thought the tablet wave couldn't get any bigger, try these two bits of information on for size. First, the rumors are becoming more serious with regards to Google's plans to launch its own Android tablet in May that is designed to compete with the Kindle tablet. The price point being thrown around is $149-$199. With a sub-$200 price tag, these devices could indeed prove disruptive.

But wait, there's more. We are also learning that Microsoft is aiming to release WIndows 8, along with a slew of tablet and smartphone devices, in October this year. This OS and the devices that will launch on the ecosystem will also provide interesting disruption and impetus in the tablet arena.

And speaking of disruption, Audrey Watters has posted a storify recording of the Discovery's "Beyond the Textbook event yesterday, and has also written this reflection on the textbook in general and its obsolescence as a construct (echoing the details I layout in my book, The Future of Learning Content).
Even if you have the most up-to-date edition of the very latest textbook, I think it is generally recognized that the textbook -- as an object, as instructional practice -- is still a relic. It is a relic of a time when information was scarce. It's a relic of the way in which we manufactured and scaled the industrial model of education -- a teacher at the front of the classroom, assigning the lessons and readings from an authoritative text. One that was bound by print. One that was distributed state and even nation-wide. One that was uniform. Somewhere along the way, "textbook" became "curriculum" -- and under today's testing regime, that all became wrapped up in "assessment."
In other news, Pew has released another report, on teens and their smartphone behavior, and the results probably won't surprise you.
The volume of texting among teens has risen from 50 texts a day in 2009 to 60 texts for the median teen text user. In addition, smartphones are gaining teenage users. Some 23% of all those ages 12-17 say they have a smartphone and ownership is highest among older teens: 31% of those ages 14-17 have a smartphone, compared with just 8% of youth ages 12-13.
Finally, take note that MIT is launching a new enterprise unit around its MITx initiative. As part of this effort, the institution has manadated the development of an open software platform to support online learning. I suppose I am in agreement with Tony Bates' reaction to this announcement. "I am surprised that MIT finds the need to develop yet another open source platform. I’m wondering how this will differ from say Sakai or Moodle or the host of new cloud-based open source LMSs now hitting the market."

Suggested Reading
 
Apple: We Sold 3 Million iPads in Less Than 4 Days - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD
Google Expected To Release Tablet In May - eBookNewser
Microsoft aiming for October 2012 release of Windows 8, tablets and PCs on deck -- Engadget
Teens, Smartphones & Texting | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project
With TV Everywhere, It’s All About Discovery | TechCrunch
The Business Rusch: Scarcity and Abundance | Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Abundance vs. scarcity in the publishing world | TeleRead
MIT to develop new Open Learning Enterprise unit for online learning
Publishing Business Conference: Keynote 10 predictions for the future of book publishing | TeleRead
Pew: Twitter, Facebook Aren’t Moving As Much News As You Think | paidContent

Monday, March 19, 2012

Beyond the Textbook, Beyond the Tablet, and Back to Basics

Many years ago, in what seems like a far-away universe, I rode an old beat-up bicycle in a triathlon event. The bike weighed an incredible 43 pounds, had a strange 3-speed shifter, and was a big embarrassment to the friends competing with me.

A funny thing happened that day, however. In spite of the shoddy hardware and extra weight I set a personal best for the bike portion of a race.

I was so inspired that I went out and bought a much nicer ride, a real professional dream that weighed almost nothing and had tires so fancy you couldn't even use a regular pump. I trained with that bike the following spring and summer and even rode in the same race at which I had established my personal record the year before. And yet, even with the extra technology and the diminished weight, I wasn't able to beat my time from the beat-up bike era.

Of course, the new bike had nothing to do with my lack of improvement. I had extra family and professional commitments, trained fewer hours, and was generally less motivated.

In the end, I was simply reminded of what I had always known to be true. It's the legs that make the bike go faster.

I'm reminded of that experience as I read the contributions of various folk leading up to Discovery Education’s Beyond the Textbook Forum. David Warlick asked readers of his blog to make suggestions about the future of the textbook and they responded that it will be:
  • like a quest
  • like a production studio
  • like an extension of our brains
  • like a reality game
  • like a video playlist
  • like swiss army knife
  • like a personal assistant
  • like a platform that provokes conversation
  • like a holodeck
  • like a choose your own adventure story
  • like a Palantir
  • map for a learning journey
  • like an interaction engine
  • like a Matrix up-link
  • like an aggregator that searches and updates content
  • more like a word problem than a calculation problem
Bud Hunt had a few suggestions of his own for the people attending. I really like this thought in particular.
The best textbooks moving forward are likely those that start with small building blocks from publishers, OER repositories, classrooms, websites, movie studios, and pretty much any other source for interesting information; and they become textbooks when they are hung onto a curriculum frame by a local school district. This might be done by a committee of teachers, or a small group of curriculum coordinators in a front office somewhere, but what's important is that it’s not done by a salesperson seeking to please a state official in Texas or California.
I think the reason I liked it so much is that it places the emphasis on the content end of the discussion. When we talk about the future of learning content it's easy to get caught up in devices, software, and interactive games. In the end, however, the future of textbooks will be very much like the past in many ways. It will be about better content, more structured content, and content with a new kind of narrative that can support all of the other stuff. The technologies may improve but they won't improve learning without better content to accompany them. After all, it's the legs that make the bike go faster.

Oh, and by the way, of course the future of textbooks is digital. I know no one is doubting this, but I thought it worth pointing out that Amazon digital content sales were up 21% from December to January.

As Michael Feldstein points out, the shift to digital learning content places a greater emphasis on tools for dynamic social interaction, such as highlighting and comments in the margins of textual content. Along those lines, Michael provides a nice introduction to a social highlighting solution for education -- Classroom Salon. His discussion of the potential pedagogical impact alone merits the read. Here's a portion of his comments.
While it is true that you can highlight and annotate analog books, the fact of the matter is that many students haven’t really been taught that it is fine and good to do so. To the contrary, for some students, marking up a book feels a little like vandalism. But digital highlighting feels different. First of all, it’s non-destructive and reversible, so you lose that feeling of vandalism. Second, the ability to highlight and annotate isn’t just incidental. Somebody had to put it there deliberately. It is obviously an affordance that was created for people to use. So it invites usage in a way that analog book margins don’t. The feedback that I’ve heard from instructors and students using products with digital annotation capabilities is that the students tend to mark up their content more than they did with their analog books. There is a lesson here that should infuse any attempts to add social capabilities to annotations for educational products. Whatever we add should point the way to better learning practices.
Of course, if you're still thinking of tablets as the textbooks of the future, you'll definitely be interested in the rumors of a Google Nexus tablet coming out with a price tag as low as $149.

And on another note, I enjoyed Bill Fitzgerald's post on the limitations of most current LMS platforms to address informal and non-traditional learning workflows.
In very general terms, the current crop of learning management systems are designed to reduce a complex process down to a series of manageable steps. This reduction makes it more difficult to account for informal learning alongside more traditional learning. But, as more learning occurs in informal ways or in informal settings, the shortcomings of how learning is "managed" gets in the way of people learning.
Finally, if you didn't see the "Audrey Test" (by Audrey Watters), check out her list of things every techie and aspiring edtech entrepreneur should know about education. I know I'll be passing it around to a number of colleagues and acquaintances in the near future.

Suggested Reading
Beyondthetextbook Forum : 2¢ Worth

#beyondthetextbook – Considering Inputs | Bud the Teacher

Not #beyondthetextbook. #betterthetextbook | Bud the Teacher

Amazon Digital Content Sales Up 21% In January: eDataSource - eBookNewser
Classroom Salon: Social Highlighting for Education
Rumor: Google Nexus tablet a ‘done deal’, could cost as little as $149
Why Is Your LMS All Up In My Learning? | FunnyMonkey
"The Audrey Test": Or, What Should Every Techie Know About Education?

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Good Questions for Open Content Sustainability

I've had a good conversation with Peter Reed this week in the comments section of my post on open learning content over at e-Literate. Peter has been doing research and thinking on the topic of sustainability and asks some good questions. He has a good post up on his site that I recommend as well. I will be writing more about sustainability in OER and broader open learning content next week, but I think the issues Peter and I discussed are the heart of the matter:
  1. Which group(s) of users should be the ultimate audience/target for OER?
  2. What kind of ongoing time and effort commitment will faculty and/or institutions be willing to make regarding OER?
  3. Is there sufficient usage of current OER projects to warrant continued funding?
  4. Is there enough momentum to sustain open content projects after current funding ceases?
  5. What might entice for-profit groups to consider long-term partnerships with OER projects?
Of course, if you've read my recent posts, you'll know that I believe more attention needs to be devoted to aggregating and curating the open and free content we already have. Sustainability is ultimately about market penetration and demand (defined as actual use). This means creating greater consumer awareness and developing mechanisms of convenient consumption. Along those lines, I enjoyed this article on the desconstruction of OpenLearn units. It is really interesting to look at the glossary items and learning outcomes in this way.

In my recent presentations I generally have a slide about how hard it is to predict the future. While that may be true, who among us hasn't had a go at it? After all, predicting the future is fun, even if you're not a super genius like Stephen Wolfram. All kidding aside, Wolfram's presentation the future of computation at SXSW last Sunday (I was lucky enough to attend), was enlightening. I also enjoyed this list of twenty-one things that will become obsolete in the future.

Finally, I encourage everyone to take a look at the new series Phil Hill has started over at e-Literate. Phil is diving in to the old and the new as he examines the current models of course design/delivery in Higher Education. I'm really looking forward to the coming posts.

Suggested Reading
 
The Future of Open Learning Content Hinges on Ease of Use
eLearning at Science & Engineering: Is OER mainstreamed and sustainable?
Deconstructing OpenLearn Units – Glossary Items, Learning Outcomes and Image Search « OUseful.Info, the blog…
5 Things I Learned About the Future from Stephen Wolfram
The personalized web is just an interest graph away — Cloud Computing News
TeachPaperless: 21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020
The Emerging Landscape of Educational Delivery Models
Flipping the Conference | Inside Higher Ed

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Are Things Really Broken or Is This How Change Really Feels?

I have often wondered how my daily research might (or might not) be affected by travel, sleep (or lack thereof), and my different speaking engagements or presentations.

Take yesterday, for example. I gave a presentation to the great faculty at Culver-Stockton College in Missouri, held a Next Is Now webinar for a large group of folks later in the day, and then flew to Orlando so that I could talk about digital learning content with the folks at Full Sail University. I worked on research for my next book on the flight so by the time I made it to the hotel sometime after midnight, my head was swimming with all kinds of ideas about learning content and how to fix it.

Maybe that's why I was drawn to Michael Feldstein's post about a different approach to the LMS paradigm, GoodSemester. Michael sums the product up by saying, "Their product model is so different from the conventional LMS business that there are no clear precedents for how well it might work even in principle. It’s uncharted territory." Having registered for the product and poked around, I would agree. But my real takeaway is that GoodSemester is the kind of thing you get when you don't start from the same point of departure as everyone else. It may or may not last, but you can't argue about it being fresh or about the fact that it could take us to a different teaching destination.

And maybe all the time I spent talking about how learning content is changing attracted me to items on MOOC experiments by Stephen Downes and Audrey Watters. In his presentation, Downes argues "that to the extent that a MOOC focuses on content, like a traditional course, it begins to fail. A MOOC should focus on the connections, not the content." This is reminiscent of George Siemens' statement that "MOOCs are not (yet) an answer to any particular problem." Watters looks at MOOCs from a different perspective, that of the learner. Based on her experience as a lurker in multiple MOOCs, she wonders who the other learners really are (novices or experts), and asks about how motivation works in these online courses. More importantly, "How will this 'open and ongoing experiment' proceed now that alongside the institutional and cross-institutional MOOCs, we have a whole cadre of for-profit startups?"

And, maybe all my nagging internal questions about the efficacy of our current learning content attracted me to a couple of critiques of the Khan Academy. For the record, I'm a big fan of the Khan Academy as a source of valid supplemental learning content. There are many things to like about the simple, informal approach, and the content design. On the other hand, I can understand why David Andrade might say that the videos are just a bunch of lectures and not good pedagogy, or why Tony Bates would comment on the lack of contextualization for learners using the videos. " Just jumping at random into a video suddenly makes me aware that I need lots of prior knowledge before I can understand this video, but there’s no help on that. Also, where’s the feedback? If I still don’t understand after watching the video several times and doing the exercises, what do I do?"

My opinion is that maybe we're asking these videos to be more than they actually are -- individual tutorial snippets designed to help someone studying a particular subject gain a better understanding. Again, I have never seen this content as stand-alone but rathe as supplemental. As such, I think it's both significant and extremely innovative. Maybe we're trying to make it more than it really is?

Of course, we could probably say the same thing for Google Search. The WSJ has an article today touting some new changes upcoming. Essentially, Google is going to add a more semantic element to our search results in order to make them more relevant. The end result will be the addition of more factual (think encyclopedia) information to make our search results. For Google, this is certainly an opportunity to build up more advertising opportunities in search. And, it makes me ask if they aren't over-thinking things a bit. Do we really want the extra stuff? If I wanted actual information,  I would simply go to Wolfram Alpha, a computation/search engine that was designed to deliver these kinds of results (and does them much, much better).

Yes, maybe walking up without having the right amount of beauty sleep makes me churn on what needs fixing instead of focusing on what I can be creating. Not that there aren't some things that need fixing, mind you. Just take the Tour de France, for example...

Suggested Reading
 
GoodSemester: Not an LMS, but a Learning Platform

Education as Platform: The MOOC Experience and what we can do to make it better ~ Stephen's Web

Learning from MOOCs | Inside Higher Ed

Educational Technology Guy: Khan Academy - not good pedagogy and not #edreform

A short critique of the Khan Academy

YouTube Opens Up Live-Streaming to Non-Profits First

Google Gives Search a Refresh - WSJ.com

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Students Will Prefer Tablets So We Can Expect More Change

The Pearson Foundation has released the results of a new poll on students and tablets in Higher Education. Cnnducted in partnership with Harris Interactive, the poll reinforces what I have been saying for the past 18 months -- by fall, tablet ownership among first-year students across all of Higher Education will reach 25%.
One-fourth of the college students surveyed said they owned a tablet, compared with just 7 percent last year. Sixty-three percent of college students believe tablets will replace textbooks in the next five years—a 15 percent increase over last year’s survey. More than a third said they intended to buy a tablet sometime in the next six months.

This year’s poll also found that the respondents preferred digital books over printed ones. It’s a reversal of last year’s results and goes against findings of other recent studies, which concluded that students tend to choose printed textbooks. The new survey found that nearly six in 10 students preferred digital books when reading for class, compared with one-third who said they preferred printed textbooks.
Also, I read with inerest yesterday that the start-up company SalesCrunch had made an unsolicited bid for Cisco's WebEx. SalesCrunch's plan, if successful would be to "grab Cisco’s WebEx assets, including its engineering teams, and put them to work on building out SalesCrunch."

This is not as crazy as it might sound really, as SalesCrunch is really a more modern and social conferencing solution than WebEx. Think of it as WebEx meets Web 2.0, with critical social networking tools and feedback analytics. By acquiring WebEx engineering and its user base, SalesCrunch could transform itself overnight into a worldwide social business solution.

Now, while I use WebEx for company presentations and therefore have a bit at stake in such an acquisition, what really interests me is how this pattern -- newer, more modern versions of workforce platforms acquiring the legacy versions to help them scale -- might play out in education. Take the LMS market, for example. It would be exciting if a LoudCloud or Instructure were to acquire BlackBoard's LMS platform business Or, what about the publishing industry. How might the market change if a digital-first start-up publisher like Flat World Knowledge acquired Cengage or at least its core Higher Education list?

This is likely a ways off, but no one should be surprised if and when it happens. Legacy LMS and publishing platforms were designed and constructed on old notions of pedagogy, the Web, and business. Eventually, one of the next-generation solutions is more than likely to make a legacy acquisition to grow its user base and to scale its growth.

Speaking of legacy products, did you catch the new yesterday that Encyclopaedia Britannica has dropped its print products and will now be digital only? Check out the infographic below for more Britannica information. And no, going digital only does not mean that it will be free (like Wikipedia).

One of the areas where the premium Britannica reference hopes to differentiate itself is in the mobile space. The entire Encyclopaedia Britannica package is also accessible through an app for the iPad and iPhone, which is a great platform choice considering comScore's latest stats on mobile platform usage. According to that company's latest chart, Apple iOS is still controlling more than 60% of mobile Web traffic.



This may seem a little surprising, what with all the buzz about Android and its domination in mobile device activations. comScore spokesperson Andrew Lipsman explains it this way. "I think there are two main explanations: 1) iOS includes iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.. iPad in particular provides a big advantage vs. Android; 2). iOS users tend to be heavier media consumers on average."

This is an interesting trend to keep an eye on in education. Another such trend is the surging tablet adoption in the enterprise market, although the news here is better for Android and Microsoft.
Tablet adoption is increasing among corporate tech buyers. ChangeWave Research recently polled a group of 1,604 business IT buyers and found that 22 percent of them planned to purchase tablets for their employees sometime in the second quarter of 2012. Of those, 84 percent say they’re likely to buy Apple iPads — an increase of 7 percentage points from ChangeWave’s November 2011 survey.
Finally, I don't know how I missed this but the Chronicle of Higher Education has delivered a great set of data on graduation rates for 3,800 colleges. I'll have to admit that the stats made me fairly proud of my alma mater, The University of Texas.

Suggested Reading
 
Tablet Ownership Triples Among College Students - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Start-Up SalesCrunch Makes Unsolicited Bid for Cisco Unit WebEx - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD

Encyclopaedia Britannica drops print and goes digital only | Digital Media - CNET News

CHART OF THE DAY: This Chart Tells The Real Story Of Android Versus iOS

iPad and Kindle Fire both strong in recent quarter, says IDC | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

Tablet Adoption Surging in Enterprise - John Paczkowski - News - AllThingsD


College Completion: Graduation Rates and Data for 3,800 Colleges

YouTube Opens Up Live-Streaming to Non-Profits First