eLearning Roadtrip

For my .EDU friends: Here's How Venture Capital Works

The education sector's current fascination with innovation, distruption and entrepreneurship is being fueled by the emergence of start-up commercial ventures that create new products and services as solutions for big hairy audacious problems plaguing today's schools and students. 

An April, 2014 post by CB Insights noted that investments in education technology hit a record high in Q1 2014 as investors poured more than $559 million across 103 deals in the first three months of this year.  Of note, Ed Tech funding in Q1 2014 represented nearly 45% of total funding to the sector in all of 2013. The record quarter comes after Ed Tech investments hit $1.25B across 378 deals in in 2013, the second-straight year of over $1B invested across the Ed Tech sector.  With everything from MOOCs to tutoring marketplaces to standardized APIs for K-12 schools getting funding, investors are clearly bullish on the education industry.

So what could possibly be wrong with getting rounds of other people's money to help you grow your big educational idea into a product that becomes the NEXT BIG THING?

Well, nothing...except you need to pay back all the money that everyone had given you. With interest and at a prenegotiated rate of return. That means that once you take someone else's money as an investment in your hot shot edu-preneurial company, EVERYTHING you do is going to be focused on paying your investors back. 

Aral Balkan recently blogged about his experience with a new social media platform called Ello. His post caught my eye because it included a pointed summary of how venture capital works. Having just spend the past several months at various educational technology meetings and trade shows where the buzz over acqusitions and investments is ever-present, I found myself sharing the following paragraphs with my friends from education who may not have had the experience of working with investors:

"Here’s how venture capital works: you go to an investor, before you’ve even built the thing you’re building and you tell them how you’re going to exit. It’s called an exit plan or exit strategy. You tell them, for example: “Hey, we’re going to get 100 million people using our new platform in two years time, how much will you give me for 100 million people?” And they go “Umm, we’ll give you this much for 100 million people because we’re pretty sure we can get that amount back several times over when we sell those 100 million people in an exit either to another company or in an IPO.”

"When you take venture capital, it is not a matter of if you’re going to sell your users, you already have. It’s called an exit plan. And no investor will give you venture capital without one. In the myopic and upside-down world of venture capital, exits precede the building of the actual thing itself. It would be a comedy if the repercussions of this toxic system were not so tragic.

"Let me put it bluntly: if a company has taken venture capital, you have already been sold. It’s not a matter of if, it’s simply a matter of when. (Unless the company goes under before it can exit, that is.)

"A venture-capital funded startup is a temporary company that has to convince enough people into using their platform so that they can make good on the exit they promised their investors at the very beginning. It is the opposite of a long-term, sustainable business." (Italics are mine).

You can read Aral Balkan's complete "Ello, Godbye" blogpost by clicking here.

I draw your attention to this article because every time I hear someone confide that their platform provider is a rising VC funded firm that is going for its next round of money, I wonder if these education customers understand the degree to which EVERYTHING their vendor provider must now do is focused on meeting their investors' expectations.

When I realized how easy is was to get started with learning analytics, I laughed out loud

I've always wanted to write a headline like that.  

If you are like me, any link suggesting that learning analytics can be easy is worth a quick look. Even if only to sneer at the temerity of whoever would say that. So, thank you for being curious enough to click. Now that I have your attention...

Getting started with a learning analytics initiatve doesn't need to be hard. What's hard is sustaining a learning analytics initiative IF one is only doing something, anything, as a pet project, an exploration, or a trial run because someone gave you free software. 

To paraphrase the incomparable Tina Turner, we're gonna start this learning anaytics conversation nice and easy (don't worry, no dancing required). Here we go. Five quick easy steps to get started:

(1) Start with a real problem to solve. Scope your problem statement so that you maximize your probabiities of  success. Do you have market conditions to address, sneaking suspicions that there might be trouble in River City that you'd better find out about before someone else does? Maybe places where you are pretty sure you can do a better job? You might want to think of something that will help you test the waters of change without putting yourself at risk of total humiliation if it doesn't work.

(2) Figure out who needs to be involved in creating the business case to get this problem solved. How much of a priority is solving the problem you identified going to be for others in your organization? Who need to be engaged and on-board to get this done? 

(3) Determine what you need to answer questions related to solving this problem. What information do you need? Who owns it? Where does it live? How are you going to secure it? How will it be analyzed? Who can see it, work with it, publish it? How will results be used? How long will the results live, and who will have access?

(4) Determine the necessary project talent to make sure you can get the work done. It's not just about having access to people who understand how to work with data. It's about having the right team in place across the board who can execute to plan and deliver results, and making sure that you have planned for enough of their time to be effective. How will you find them? What will you need to attract their attention and keep them engaged?

(5) Develop a bottom-up budget to see if you can afford to do what you want to do. Odds are, you will need more money than you have on hand. (Well... odds are that you will end up needing more money than you think you do, too, but that's a conversation for a later time). So, where might you find the funding to do what you want to do? Who else might be interested in getting involved in your great adventure?

Obviously each one of these steps can take on a life of its own once you get going, but as a place to begin these are a great way to get your arms around your big idea and see if its possible to move ahead.

The Reason THIS EDUdotcom May Not Be As Different From Last Time As You Think

If there was ever any doubt that we are in the midst of a new dot.com boom for education, that doubt was removed at this week's SXSWEDU. The event brought entrepreneurs and educators to Austin, Texas for four days of panels and a competition for education start-ups. I had the great fun of participating in a panel discussion on "Are Courses a Commodity?" with Myk Garn, Mickey Revenaugh and Michael Horn. Vanessa Dennen and I helped Curt Bonk rehearse his "cage match" answers while sharing beers and ribs at one of the Cengage social events. I enjoyed hearing Bill Gates speak to the crowd about his vision for a transformed education system. It was definitely an interesting mix of energies.

Gotta say, not all of it felt all that good. This morning's Chronicle of Higher Education led with a headline that explicitly named the tensions between entrepreneurs and educators. You can read the Chronicle report here.

While I was there, I kept hearing that THIS dot.com is different because it's about education, and because the tech is better and data will inform us and investors are smarter and the market is ready, and there are business plans and people aren't just throwing exuberant ideas at the wall and hoping that something sticks. 

Really? 

I have to say that the confident assurances that this educational technology boom is different just didn't make me feel any less skeptical. Because in the same way that there are some who really DO believes that MOOCs are the birth of online learning, it is clear that there is an entire generation of investors and entrepreneurs who really DO seem to believe that the ideas thrown against the wall of the 1990s are somehow less legitimate than some of the ideas that are currently being thrown against the wall today.

So let me tell you why this particular new EDU.dot.com isn't as different as visonaries and investors would have you believe.

Ready?

It's because no matter how new your tech is or how great the idea is, or how impressive the possibilities are, or the circumstances or the bandwidth or the platform or the operating system we won't figure out how to crack the code on transformation until we change the most important part of the equation. And that is the human factor. Eventually it comes down to people being ready to embrace the change. The ability to ride out the hype cycle and get oneself to a true plateau of productivty will all come down to the degree we can induce people to change their ways, completely rethink their practices, and help them figure out how to use new tools toys, apps and the like deliver on their promises.

The excitement around innovative technology futures for teaching and learning has energized educational researchers to think broadly and deeply about the possibilities they represent.  The venture capital communities’ recognition that education may be ready for its “Internet moment” has also generated massive interest in developing promising ideas for products with commercial consideration.

Between these two exciting arenas of exploration live equally important opportunities for transformation that come from practice-focused solutions contributing to demonstrable improvements in student engagement, faculty performance, and institutional accountability. 

People. We've got to get ready, too.

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The Burden of Knowing

Important questions can get swept aside when the rumble of excitement about future possibilities are loudest. Nowhere is this more clear than in the emerging arena of learning analytics.

The fact that we can track information just about anytime, anyplace and on any device boggles the mind with possibilities. But it also begs a few questions: Does the fact that we will eventually be able to collect, track, link, visualize, tokenize, correlate, factor or parse data pulled through APIs mean that we should? When we can collect everything, will we know what to look for when applying various analysis technique among the research protocols? Will we recognize the answers we are looking for when we see them forming in the mists or hanging from the branch of a CHAID tree?

Perhaps even more to the point - will we be able to do anything meaningful with what we find? What are we going to DO, once we know?

The notion that all learning should be tracked, or that there is value to tracking activity stream level information, or that Hadoop-like pattern-seeking technologies will serve the needs of the learning enterprise in meaningful ways, must also consider what that capability is really worth to the enterprise. 

It  presumes that once we DO recognize new patterns of loss, momentum and opportunity that we are going to be able to do something about what has been found. 

But most people do not understand how long it is going to take the learning world at large to think of data as his or her friend. To see the results of analyses as benchmarks for better understanding performance, not as red flags requiring an intervention. One can only wonder how many enterprises will be slow to collect learning data worrying that they can't afford the Burden of Knowing what their data will reveal. 

 

 

 

Lines are being drawn...over learning technology standards and specs?

Interesting article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus about a growing shitstorm around learning technology standards.

Per Jeff Young, author of article in question: "The issue centers around a single line of the 53-page grant guidelines for the program, known officially as the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants Program: “All online and technology-enabled courses developed under this [program] must be compliant with the latest version of SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model).”

So what's the big whiff?

And then I read a little bit further and all became clear: Dr. Rob Abel, IMS Global CEO, is pitching an absolute hiss over this particular requirement. Why? Because his group supports a different standard.

There is a rich and storied pissing match history that has developed between Dr. Abel and the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative of the US Department of Defense over the past several years, and I am very sorry to see that the stains are going to get all over this exciting new collaboration between the US Departments of ED and Labor. 

A bit of perspective -The federal government made a decision 11 years ago to develop SCORM as a specification to serve as a cost-saving criterion for RFP / vendor selection. ADL/DOD have been the keeper of SCORM on behalf of all the Feds. So it seems to me that the US Dept of Labor is well within their rights to adhere to their own government spec. Especially since the SCORM spec is built upon the standards coming from IMS Global, and other standards bodies, including AICC, IEEE-LTSC, and ARIADNE.

Hats off to Dr. Abel, he has done a great job persuading .edu that the IMS Global is the only standard that really matters. I mean that sincerely. IMS's Common Cartridge helps institutions get better value from LMS vendors and publishers. Even the most technically skilled educators don't want to worry about learning technology standards. The tap dances required to get things to interoperate in the old days of LMS ops were excruciating. Common Cartridge is a good thing, and he should be commended for his leadership on offering a solution to the big audacious higher ed  problem of content distribution and management.

But CCCT is a whole different initiative, one of several federal projects designed to force issues of openness precisely to have the different conversation. Because the IMS conversation only addresses part of the new opportunities. And the CCCT efforts are about tying education to training, jobs and development. Not the other way around.

(inserted note - SCORM dominates in corporate and government and  non-profit learning platform tech as an RFP "checklist" item. IMS dominates in higher ed. They are not mutually exclusive. They are different.)

It is pretty amazing to watch the lines getting drawn. Time to pull up a chair, grab some popcorn and get ready for some great pyrotechnics. 

What Big Brands - Including The Apollo Group - Are Spending on Google

Over the weekend, an article published in Advertising Age discussed the significance of search optimization, the importance of Google, and just how much certain big brand companies are spending on Google advertising. 

The focus of the article dealt specifically how BP rose in the ranks of Google advertisers as a way to manage information about the Gulf oil spill. It was also a way to manage their reputation. Interesting piece. BP spent $3.9 million USD on Google advertising in June, 2010.

But the most interesting part of the the story was the "just how much certain big brand companies are spending on Google" part, because it also named the other Google advertising mega-spenders. 

Take a look. The Apollo Group, parent organization for the University of Phoenix, is second on the list. That would be Apollo Group. EDU, thank you very much. One of those for profit education companies we have been reading about lately.

 $6.67 million USD in June of 2010. In one month. The former public educator in me is blown away. 

I have a lot of admiration for what the Apollo Group and the University of Phoenix have done for adult learners and for the world of higher education. Not saying it's perfect, not saying that there aren't a bunch of ways for improving the experience, or for actively dealing with the problems of student recruitment and financial aid defaults. But I really can't think of any other institution that has put traditional higher education on notice as has the Univ of Phoenix. 500,000 students, growing at the size of a good sized land-grant institution per month.

Now, just think about how good they will be when they spent some percentage of that amount of money toward student success programs, once they get those students in the house. As in focusing on retention, progress, completion. 

It will be an interesting tide, floating all online boats. Might be time to get out the life-jackets, chart a course, find ourselves a fleet of like-minded sailors, and get ready for the journey. 

Mobile Trends that Matter for 2010

CTIA is the international association for the wireless telecommunications industry, dedicated to expanding the wireless frontier. Its most recent annual conference was held in Las Vegas March 23-25. It is considered a leading industry trade show and premiere marketplace for all things wireless (e.g. what we need for our cell phones and personal digital devices like iTouches, iPhones and now iPads, at 2.5G, 3G, and 4G).

I enjoy tracking events like this since it is such a great place to find mobile industry statistics. I used to be totally fascinated by the possibilities for mobile learning until I came to understand that the swirling world of mobility was even more fascinating. I've been was especially interested in this year's CTIA conference, given the outrageous growth in interest in all things mobile this year.

During the recent event, the CTIA released the results of its Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey. Some interesting data tidbits: 257 million data-capable devices in consumers' hands. 50 million of these are smart-phones or wireless-enabled PDAs, and nearly 12 million are wireless-enabled laptops, notebooks or aircards. As of December 2009, there were over 285 million wireless connections in the United States.

The conference was also a great reason for press releases and summary reports. Here are some of the highlights of CTIA's 2010 in Review Top Trends in Mobile:

• 4G Networks - Imagine having the network speeds you have become accustomed to at home on your mobile device. Sprint is the first to market with WIMAX, in 27 cities and 15 more by the end of the year. When it is released this summer the HTC EVO 4G will be the first commercially available phone to use WIMAX. AT&T and Verizon are backing a network specification called LTE (Long Term Evolution) that won't be available for another year.
• Android - Android, the open-source system for mobile feature and smartphones, was the big platform winner at CTIA, with new handsets and tablets announced by a variety of manufacturers.
• Mobile Video - Cisco CTO Padmassree Warrior (I follow her on Twitter at @padmassree) asserted that by 2013, 91% of all Internet traffic will be video content. She also noted that video will constitute 66% of all mobile network traffic by 2013. Mind-blowing.
• Internet of Things - @padmassree also noted that by the end of 2010 we can expect to see 35 billion devices connected to the network, by 2013 that number is expected to climb to 1 trillion. These include RFID chips, Bluetooth, network-connected sensors and other devices beyond phone and laptops that will increasingly be talking to each other.

(Kinda nice to see that the Roadtrip has been been following the right trends. There have been several posts on Internet of Things, mobility and Internet video.) Looks like it is going to be a great year for the "unplugged" crowd.

By the way, do you have your iPad yet?

When Publishers Buy LMS Companies

I'm pleased about Sage Road's recent collaboration with the eLearning Guild on their new "Deep Analysis" Report on the Evolving LMS. You need to be an eLearning Guild member to get a copy of this report; Might I suggest that now is as good a time as any to join if you are not a member. 

The Report is a brief summary of top issues that eLearning practitioners are likely to encounter where LMSs are concerned in the next 18 months. It is not meant to size the LMS market  - or evaluate LMS platforms  - or to identify Moodle Service Providers. It IS meant to give people in the trenches a look at the biggest issues they will mostly likely encounter where LMSs are concerned, to get a head start on planning for how these trends are likely to affect their elearning business.

So, with this in mind, one of the trends we did NOT discuss in the recent LMS report was an observation from the world of educational publishing.  Educational publishers such as Pearson have acquired LMS companies such as eCollege (Pearson acquired eCollege in 2007) and Fronter (acquired by Pearson in 2009) and publishing houses like Thomson's Cengage forge LMS relationships with companies like Angel (now part of Blackboard). 

This week's announcement about Sungard and Epsilen's new partnership is raising a flag on the horizon that eLearning practitioners might want to observe over the next several months - specifically, keeping and eye on what publishers and LMS vendors are doing together related to strategic partnerships and market consolidation.  

Higher education publishers and administrative management systems companies appear to be exerting their influence in the area of higher education learning management services provision. In addition to helping to carve out a new learning resources management niche NOT completely dominated by Blackboard, publisher/LMS partnerships are looking for ways that make it easier to cluster, bundle and (eventually monetize) digital learning content assets, giving publishers a new digital revenue stream.  

eLearning content authors may find that they may be increasingly caught between a rock (commercial publishers who are deconstructing professionally produced content assets and buying LMS companies to help take that content to market in new ways) and a hard place (the user-generated content producers, who are creating "good enough" video, audio and apps that are relatively easy to find and share on the open web). 

Where Do You Get Your Market Research?

Where do connected, practicing elearning professionals who wants to keep an eye on market forces go to get smarter about choosing which solutions to build without hitting the adoption curve too soon? We SAY we're doing market research....but I wonder.

Research is one of those things that just about everyone does at some level or another. It can be as simple as reading a short article on a topic about which you know nothing, or as complicated as a longitudinal scientific experiment involving hundreds of human subjects.

There are a lot of mixed feeling about research in the elearning practitioner community. When asked, execs admit that they simply don't have the time to pay attention to research, as they are too busy doing billable work. Not too surprising really, as elearning people tend to be doers. Producers. Designers. Developers. We think in terms of creating solutions, not in terms of crafting the arguments for proving or disproving a hypothesis.

But still, it’s not safe to go plunging into new business directions without having a good handle on the environment, the opportunities, the pitfalls. So maybe it’s a matter of shifting gears. Such as figuring out how to using research strategically. or moving away from empirical studies toward metrics that measure more of what we are actually doing.  

Surprisingly, when Sage Road conducted focus group meetings with elearning professionals to hear what they want from their research, we also heard that business research can be hard to make relevant. When a Forrester Research or a Gartner Research or an IDC produces a research report on elearning related topics (being mindful that they don't really talk about elearning all that much these days, at least not by that name) it is typically written on vertically segmented topics for companies with research and strategy departments who are slicing and dicing vertical markets to figure out how to sell stuff to people like us. 

eLearning research vendors like Brandon Hall Research and Bersin & Associates do a nice, more targeted job with their market descriptions about the things that matter in elearning. Nevertheless, I find that these reports are often written for prospective elearning customers rather than for elearning service providers themselves. For market leading practitioners, some of these reports can seem positively recursive. But of course, there's a lot more "newbies" interested in elearning these days than every before so I completely understand the positioning.

The eLearning Guild is a great resource for eLearning professionals, since it provides a safe haven for practitioners to find others who are dealing with many of the same issues, to find useful advice, tons of resources and safety in numbers. But still - it's more descriptive research about the practice, not about the market(s) in which we are all trying to do our work.

So let me ask again...where DO connected, practicing elearning professionals who wants to keep an eye on market forces go to get smarter about choosing which solutions to build without hitting the adoption curve too soon? Or do we still tend to cross our fingers, go all in on the innovation we believe in and hope that something sticks?  

mLearning at the Tipping Point

A few months ago (March 4th to be exact) I asked a question in this blog about whether it was possible to successful deploy mobile learning and performance support initiatives at the enterprise level. I am happy to say that, thanks to ongoing developments in several key market segments, we seem to have reached a tipping point for mobile learning. After years of watching and waiting and poking and pushing, the market variables that needed to be in play to push mobile learning over the top of mainstream awareness and adoption seem to have finally converged.

I was pleased to be at BlackBoard World 2009 this week for Michael Chasen's announcement that Blackboard has acquired TerriblyClever Design LLC, makers of MobilEdu((TM). As noted in the PR release, MobilEdu apps "allows education institutions to deliver a rich set of campus life services and content to mobile devices, uniquely branded for each institution, to better connect current students, parents, faculty, prospective students and alumni to the campus experience in a way that wasn't possible before. With an Apple((R)) iPhone, iPod Touch((R)) or other device with a mobile Web browser, MobilEdu users can navigate course catalogs and campus maps, e-mail professors and classmates and get real-time updates on their course schedules, campus events, news and sports teams."

When a mainstream company like BlackBoard makes an investment in a small edgy mobile apps company like TerriblyClever, LLC, that's a big deal. It means that there is finally enough evidence that the education market will support demand for mobile applications. I also like that Blackboard is strengthening its previous commitment to mobile services that it initiated with its acquisition of ConnectEd, now known as Blackboard Connect. This successful emergency notification business now has a number of use cases that point to how higher education customers are deploying notifications systems for campus security and operational announcements, as well as now extending their infrastructure to do more with student services, enrollment management, business continuity, and even with learning support and campus community-building. 

It's taken long enough to get to this point of recognizing the value and impact of enterprise mobility. I had my first real brush with mobility and learning in 2004 when my former boss at Macromedia asked me to take a look at scoping out the mobile market for education, to see what we could do to support Macromedia's agenda for getting Flash on mobile handsets around the world. I was thrilled. I worked with Bob Regan (now Director of Adobe's Worldwide Primary and Secondary education marketing) and Adi Sideman (CEO of Oddcast) to develop a Spanish language tutorial called "Let's go to Peru" for deployment on my Flash-enabled Nokia phone. We featured mobile learning at our Macromedia Higher Education Forum. I carried a variety of Nokia mobile phones that were loaded with Flash apps that I could demo at a moment's notice. I gave a presentation on mobile learning during a somewhat infamous Forum session with Curt Bonk and Chere Gibson at the University of Wisconsin Teaching and Learning at a Distance Conference.  I submitted an article called "Enabling Mobile Learning" to EDUCAUSE Review in May of 2005, and was very pleased when it was accepted for publication.

And then we waited. And waited. And wondered why mobile learning wasn't the killer app we thought it was going to be. It's not that individual innovators didn't keep trying to do cool things with mobile phone apps - it was just that individual pockets of innovation don't make a very good business case for supporting enterprise or institutional deployment. I wrote an article about THAT particular phenomenon in June, 2008 that was published by the eLearning Guild. The biggest reason, in my humble opinion, was that we completely "mis-underestimated" the complexity of the infrastructure - and organizational change and IT support required -for enterprise mobility to be achieved. Also the need for many early adopters to craft their own, "gerry-rigged" solutions for making their mobile services/ apps come together in any meaningful way limited adoption to those organizations with the tech capacity for building one's own mobile apps. And guess what else- it wasn't as much about Flash as many of us had hoped.

We in the US are still somewhat constrained by the need to choose either a handset OR a carrier. For example, I've had my eye on a Palm Pre. Problem is, the Pre only works with a network carrier that I don't currently use. I have resisted getting a new iPhone because AT&T has made it fairly unattractive for current subscribers to purchase a new phone, given the required service contract.

But regarless of these little irritations, it is really nice to see manufacturers taking smart-phones seriously. There are lots of choices, whether you are looking for an iPhone or a Pre, a Blackberry or a Nokia or an HTC Android phone. Depending on whether you want ATT or T-Mobile or Sprint or whoever else happens to be in your area there are choices for phone plans and data plans. I suppose it's not surprising that that phone companies are the largest advertisers when it comes to Internet ad spending (Download ComScoreDataPassport_1H2009).

It is also really wonderful to see that the market for mobile apps has been exploding thanks to the very successful Apple iPhone Apps portal. It is clear that mobile infrastructure needs to be robust enough for apps to be reliably connect users and distribute apps and content on demand, but that the real differentiators are the applications themselves. When the Apple App Store team celebrated its 1st birthday a few weeks ago they could point to more than 1 billion downloads of more that 50,000 different applications.

It's fantastic to see the number of mobile app designers and developers growing, seeing how many design schools are featuring mobile app development as part of their curricular offering. It's also especially nice to see more instructional designers who have specialized in mobile learning applications receiving more and more attention in the literature and on community websites.

And it's great to see a mainstream provider of learning management, transaction and notification solutions giving "the mobile lifestyle" such a vote of confidence. In tough economic times, people want to stick with enterprise solutions providers that can weather the slings and arrows of recessions and hype cycles. Looks like Blackboard has voted with its venture capital.

Will mLearning stand on its own? Frankly one of the big problems with enterprise adoption of innovations is that until there is a clear differentiating reason for people to change at an enterprise level innovation is not likely to get the kind of attention and support it needs to be successfully deployed. We've learned the hard way that mLearning will be successful when enterprise mobilty makes it economically feasible to do so. But it sure is a lot easier to consider when there is an enterprise-ready platform to help with the aggregattion, distribution and management of mobile experiences.