eLearning Roadtrip

Are YOU the Chief Online Education Officer at your Institution?

If so, we'd like to ask you to invite you to participate in a survey research project.

For the third year, WCET is partnering with the Campus Computing Project to conduct the Managing Online Education survey.  The survey focuses on the instructional, operational, and technology infrastructure of online education programs of institutions throughout the U.S. and Canada.

My colleague, Russ Poulin, has written an eloquent post on the WCET Frontiers blog, encouraging your particitation in this survey. To save you the hassle of clicking all the way through, I have excerpted part of his message, below. Please click here for the full post.

YOUR INSTITUTION NEEDS TO RESPOND TO THE SURVEY.

 <Sorry for yelling at you>

To avoid confusion, we would like one response from each institution. Given that some institutions are centralized, some are decentralized, and some laugh at the notion of organization, it is often difficult to know who is the correct person to invite to take the survey. There is no common position of “chief elearning officer” like there is with a CIO.

How Do You Participate?

Review the 2011 Managing Online Education survey to see what questions are being asked. If you are not what passes for a “chief Elearning officer,” ask around at your institution to see if someone has received an invitation and is completing the survey.  If you need an invitation or have other questions about the survey, contact Casey Green at[email protected].  He will help you out and get you access to the survey.  Survey responses must be submitted through the online survey software and not by completing the .pdf linked earlier in this paragraph.

I’m looking forward to your participation, seeing the results, and sharing them with you!  NOTE:  THE SURVEY DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO DECEMBER 16.

Thanks!!

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).