Commentary - Blackboard's purchase of [insert name here]

From George Siemens - commentary on the way things are.  And as usual, I agree with Siemens, so in the sincerest form of flattery, I encourage you to read his full commentary but was particularly interested in sharing the following.  Areas of emphasis are mine.

elearnspace › Well Played, Blackboard

Blackboard’s purchase marks an important shift in trajectory – even maturation – for the LMS marketplace. Integration, not the platform itself, is now the critical focus. LMS companies have for years formed partnerships with content producers and with synchronous tools – I believe both BB and Desire2Learn had partnerships with Elluminate and Wimba. To be effective in the long term, large LMS companies will need to pull more and more of the education experience under their umbrella. Why? Well, technology is getting complex. Very complex. Which means that decisions makers are motivated (partly out of fear of appearing ill-informed, partly out of not wanting to take risks) to adopt approaches that integrate fairly seamlessly across the education spectrum. Why buy an LMS when you can buy the educational process?

This puts companies like Desire2Learn in a bind. I’ve met John Baker – CEO of Desire2Learn – numerous times. He’s an extremely informed and capable person. I suspect he has a good sense of the shift from LMS-as-platform to LMS-as-integration. And, in a small field like ours, the Elluminate/Wimba acquisition was probably signaled to insiders. But what does D2L do now that it has a competitor that has pulled a key market segment under its umbrella?

The most obvious response is to look for similar companies to purchase. But who is left? Blackboard did not buy into the synchronous education market with the Elluminate and Wimba purchase – they bought the market.

Organizing for Distance Education debate hits the mainstream media

What had been a lively discussion among distance education professionals has now gained a little steam and moves into a more mainstream media outlet - no doubt to draw some attention from more folks in academe.  Just passing this blurb from the Chronicle of Higher Education along as example of the conversation.

Texas A&M's Restructuring Stirs Debate Over Best Way to Run Online Programs - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Texas A&M's Restructuring Stirs Debate Over Best Way to Run Online Programs

By Marc Parry

One university's decision to close its central distance-education office has stirred a national debate over the best way to operate online programs.

Under a restructuring at Texas A&M University at College Station, individual colleges will now manage online learning. And tuition paid for those programs will flow directly through those colleges.

The decision follows a related move at the University of Texas system. As online education continues to grow, those reorganizations have prompted many educators to share their opinions about e-learning management on a listserv run by the technology cooperative WCET.

To some, decentralization is "doomed to failure." To others, a separate bureaucracy "simply doesn't make sense anymore." A third camp advocates a hybrid approach.

Chad Wootton, Texas A&M's associate vice president for external affairs, frames the question of managing online and traditional education like this: "Are we thinking of them as two separate educational opportunities? Or are we thinking of them as the educational opportunity of course delivery, and it just so happens to be a different delivery method?"

Family Arguments: No One Wins - the ongoing debate over online vs. face-to-face education

From Inside Higher Ed's Steve Kolowich comes this story about yet another study of online versus face-to-face education.  At risk of offending federal bureaucrats (and I have friends who are federal bureaucrats), this sounds an awful lot like a bureau (Education) vs. bureau (NBER) argument.  Or, put in terms to which we can all relate - it's a family argument where no one is likely right.

So, here's the gist of the debate.  Worth a read, but I don't find anything compelling in the new paper.

News: Seed of Doubt - Inside Higher Ed

...since a Department of Education meta-analysis last summer concluded that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction,” many advocates now consider the matter closed.

Not so fast, say researchers at the National Bureau of Economic
Research.  The Education Department’s study was deeply flawed and its implications have been overblown, say the authors of a working paper released this month by the bureau.“None of the studies cited in the widely-publicized  meta-analysis released by the U.S.  Department of Education included randomly-assigned students taking a full-term course, with live versus online delivery mechanisms, in settings that could be directly compared (i.e., similar instructional
materials delivered by the same instructor),” they write. “The evidence base on the relative benefits of live versus online education is therefore tenuous at best.”

And on the other hand...a refutation of the refutation:

Barbara Means, director of the Center for Technology and Learning at SRI International and lead author of the Education Department’s meta-study, says the bureau's paper, in addition to being rife with erroneous claims, draws conclusions that are essentially irrelevant to the debate over online education.
By taking pains to isolate the online-versus-classroom variable while keeping other variables constant, Means says Rush and his collaborators miss a crucial point: that what distinguishes online education from classroom education has little to do
with the fact that one comes on a computer screen and the other does not.
That narrow distinction “is something that most people in the field of technology feel is not particularly interesting,” Means says, That that is not how online education works. To the contrary, most modern online programs expressly try to present course content in a way that is unique to the online environment. If videotaped lectures are included, they are often a small part of a larger package. “The point of using the online technology," Means say, "is to do things that you cannot do face-to-face."

For a look at the new paper by Figlio, Rush and Yin, see this link.   To see the original DOE meta-analysis, check this link.

Is this the biggest news in higher education for 2010?

Did everyone sleep through this announcement?  Did we fail to notice this landmark agreement that has the potential to reshape higher education?  And oh yeah, it's distance education related.  Implications: public private partnerships in a new way; education the 'Walmart way'; reaching an unserved population; expanding educational opportunities; exploring the value of higher education for firms and their workers. 

Some will decry the potential for a 'Walmartization' of education, but hello - what's wrong with a major employer understanding the needs of their workforce and building something that supports it.  Not one thing wrong. 

Watch this one.  Let's see where it goes. It's not a slam dunk but it sure has potential to shake things up for all of us.

Wal-Mart’s Partner in Education Earns High Profile - NYTimes.com

What promises to be a lucrative arrangement between the country’s largest retailer and an education company based in West Virginia started with an unsolicited e-mail message in October.

The retailer, Wal-Mart Stores, was looking for a partner to offer online college courses to its work force in the United States. Might American Public Education — which runs two Web-based universities — be interested?

By January, American Public put together a team devoted to landing the Wal-Mart contract, and last week, the two companies announced an agreement. Wal-Mart committed to spending $50 million over the next three years in tuition and other assistance for employees who enroll.

Mayadas is a funny man: wry observations on the nattering nabobs of negativity at UC

In Crisis, U. of California Outlines a Grand and Controversial Online Learning Plan - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

The University of California's decision to begin its effort with a pilot research project has also raised eyebrows. The goal is to determine whether online courses can be delivered at selective-research-university standards.

Yet plenty of universities have offered online options for years, and more than 4.6 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall-2008 term, notes A. Frank Mayadas, a senior adviser at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation who is considered one of the fathers of online learning.

"It's like doing experiments to see if the car is really better than the horse in 1925, when everyone else is out there driving cars," he said.

If the project stumbles, it could dilute UC's brand and worsen already testy relations between professors and the system's president, Mark G. Yudof.

As the system studies whether it can offer quality classes online, the bigger question might be this: Is California's flagship university system innovative enough to pull online off?