Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

Stephen Downes on the e-learning market

A quick reminder to myself: reread Stephen Downes’s July 10/05 article, The Economy of E-Learning, where he responds to a reader who wrote to him as follows:

I just finished a PhD in elearning, and I’m looking for my next steps. Thankfully I have many options but I realize that elearning looks more like a non-profit, charity sector than a normal, economically-viable activity. So I’d like to ask you a question: Where do you see the money being made in elearning today?

I’m skimming through this inbetween doing 15 other things, but I’ll get back to this for a reread:

There will be a short-term market for software tools designed to produce content, distribute content, to manage content and to display content (by short-term, I mean about 3-5 years). A good analogy is the market for MP3 creation tools; in the Windows environment, there existed a proliferation of tools available for recording and storing audio content; these tools marketed for $30 – $60. However, with the development of a free and open source audio content creation tool – specifically, Audacity – the market for these tools disappeared. In blogging, we see a similar phenomenon: early bloggers desiring a tool would purchase Userland or Typepad, however, the free Blogger service essentially closed that market; similarily, the thriving market for Movable Type was significantly impacted by the free WordPress alternative.

Therefore, the spending on learning content will drop significantly over the next decade, with allocations shifting from the purchase of commercial content on a restricted license, to the production of content in-house for free or effectively free distribution; this content will be viewed essentially as a public service (and may eventually qualify for tax credits) and, in commercial environments, as a loss-leader for greater value-added services. For example, IBM is investing heavily in the production of Linux and other free and open source applications, and has shifted its business model from hardware and software sales to services and consulting. Smaller markets will open up for other companies in more specific niches; Vancouver-based Bryght, for example, contributes to the open source Drupal online community application, and generates income through support and service.

(…)

Software, as numerous commentators have already observed, is rapidly becoming a commodity, and at a pace even more accelerated than content, is rapidly becoming [something?] people can produce for themselves. There is no inherent constraint on the continued expansion of open source, though factors similar to those related to content – substantial lobby support by commercial publishers, their membership on college and school boards, quality-assurance and quality-control concerns, existing (and increasingly broad) copyrights, existing royalty-holders within the educational system, lack of marketing and distribution for non-commercial software – will ensure that the expansion of open source software is gradual. As noted above, there will be short windows for commercial applications, but since in most markets these applications will not be protected by software patents this window will be a short one (in the United States, patent protection will not protect the market, and the development of free and open source software, along with its economic advantages, will move offshore). [More...]

That last bit about sitting on boards…. Hmmm….

Virtual High School dot com

Via Darren Cannell, a link to an excellent article by Christina Wood, Highschool.com, in the April 2005 issue of Edutopia Magazine. The article gives a great overview of online education’s place in high schools today. At present, about 25% of US high schools offer some form of virtual instruction, but the key word may well be instruction. The Concord Consortium and the Hudson Public School system (both in Massachusetts) pioneered the Virtual High School back in the second half of the 1990s. The key to their success might well be that they place great emphasis on the role of the teacher in the virtual environment. In exchange for providing a teacher for an online course, a school can enroll up to 25 students in that course. VHS essentially cherry-picks from the best teachers in the system, nation-wide. As well, training, provided by VHS both to teach the virtual classes as well as to develop courses for VHS, is mandatory. “To date, VHS includes nearly 300 public and private high schools in 27 states, as well as 24 international schools, and offers more than 200 Internet-based courses.” [From Wood's article.] The system can work exceptionally well, with teachers making the student feel as though s/he has a private tutor on hand. It can also be an eye-opener for the teachers:

Students also demand more of their teachers. “One of our professors made an interesting comment,” says Allen D. Glenn, professor and dean emeritus in the University of Washington’s College of Education, an expert in teaching teachers to use technology. “He said,’I never realized how many of my students’ questions I never answered until I taught online.’” [More...]

But note, the emphasis is on having a teacher teaching the online course. Students can also have experiences that are far less positive, either because they’re doing the courses on their own (à la “correspondence school” model) or have untrained markers or teachers who put in a truly minimal effort to provide feedback… At this point, e-learning falls apart.

Adequate training and screening for virtual teachers becomes a crucial part of the package. The best virtual schools pay enormous attention to teacher training, but others use their programs as a way around traditional teacher requirements.

A good teacher makes a good class. Even with excellent training, some teachers simply don’t work well online.

(…)

Another critical issue is course quality. As in traditional classrooms, the caliber of virtual classes can vary considerably. More established schools have developed rigorous content and curriculum standards and require a high level of interactivity in the courses. But the same can’t be said for all online courses offered to highschoolers today. [More...]

Read the whole article, it’s very interesting. Explore the Virtual High School site further, and read about their 2001 Stockholm Challenge Award for Global Excellence in Information Technology.

Tech epiphany?

It’s like a tech-epiphany. I now have a bit of an inkling as to why (some) people frolic over (some) tools. Several entries back or so, I mentioned that I’m keenly interested in learning about the latest developments in e-learning, and that I’d expanded my reading to include several new blogs, sites, etc., that focus on this field. But how to keep track?

Well, I am now a dedicated user of RSS, having installed Sage RSS reader (which is an extension of Mozilla Firefox), and it does the trick like a charm. I’m not looking for a “relationship” with the ed-tech bloggers, I just want their information. RSS, like a good tool, puts that needed distance between me and them, and away we go, together, on a project that has some shared goals.

Wait, it gets worse.

I have signed up for …watchlists …on Technorati. I’m still exploring this one, but here’s a results page for e-learning, one of my watchlists. Because of the symbiotic linkages between Technorati and Flickr (eurgh, pangs of guilt arise because I never did find the time to order my Flickr photos into sets, etc., nor to follow up with more photos of those development projects around town….), anyway: because of this linkage, my Technorati watchlist page for e-learning shows me Flickr photos that have been uploaded with that “tag.” I click on that link and am taken to this Flickr page, one of several photos uploaded by Design Online Content. Would I ever have learned about this, without using those other tools…? At the same time, how useful is it to see the photos?

On the downside, I’m still unclear as to how to subscribe to a site’s RSS feed if the site doesn’t display the little orange logo on the bottom right of the page. The Sage RSS reader needs that icon, and most blogs have it. But if the site doesn’t have that icon, I can’t use the reader — or at least not the simple one-step click version offered by the Sage tool.