It is nice to see more education focused startups in the news and more importantly, it is nice to see them get funded.

This looks like a great tool for Colleges to adopt that would lessen the burden on both science educators teaching online courses, as well as Instructional Designers tasked with building out course content.  The trade-off comes with price… How willing are campuses to pass along another $50 cost to students? 

The argument is that it is like requiring another textbook… provided students really could afford textbooks as things currently stand.  My suggestion… Universities, especially the larger ones, should use their leverage to work out licensing agreements with the company to lower the per student cost.  This cost could then either be subsidised by the University using funds that would have gone into developing home-grown content, or possibly folded into a lab fee which would be easier to have picked up by financial aid.  In any case, this type of initiative and the money being raised to support it is a great boon for Science Education.

This piqued my interest going back to my time working with Faculty Recruiting.  I remember pushing the use of Facebook as a recruiting tool, which was met with interest, but little follow-through.  Since we often see Higher Education lag behind other fields in adopting new technologies, I hope that colleges and universities come to embrace these tools to help recruit top talent.  This is a trend that needs to be monitored. 

For those in Higher Ed who care about Learning Management Systems or just teaching online in general, it seems that Blackboard has always been the thousand pound elephant in the room.  Concerns have ranged from Blackboard allegedly holding institutions ransom with their high maintenance costs to the giant company gobbing up much of the competition in the market.  Whether or not these are fair concerns is not necessarily the issue, but rather illustrates how they are often the center of the conversation.

On Friday, the company announced it was being sold to a private equity firm and I thought it was important to note two quick takeaways from this announcement:

1. New Ownership will likely want to make their mark on the company.  This could translate into even more aggressive purchases (again reducing competition) and/or consolidation among their various brands as we have seen with Wimba and Elluminate becoming Blackboard Collaborate.
2. Private Companies do not have to disclose as much information. This issue is important because without stockholders to answer to, the public will no longer have as much access to information regarding the general health and business plan of the company.  For institutions deciding whether to stick with Blackboard or look for alternatives, this could mean that they have less information on which to base their decisions. 

Again, this is all food for thought, but it would be wise to try to keep closer tabs on the company moving forward, especially if you are currently evaluating your own LMS platform.

I am excited that a company is looking to take the lead in this arena that is mostly populated by confusing and often misleading marketing sites.  My only hope is that they can help the average person better understand the differences in accreditation and why these differences may be important when choosing a school.

For-Profit Universities are already feeling the affects of preparing for some of the new regulations in terms of the exorbitant lobbying costs and a restructuring of their recruiting efforts.  It will be interesting to see how it affects the bottom line… 

Not necessarily related to education, but very important to the future of books and subsequently the whole book finding/reading experience. 

Fantastic Resource!!!  Find Your County!!!

There is some very encouraging news that publishers are taking mobile learning seriously.  Although this will undoubtedly be helpful to developing countries, I am hopeful it will begin to push Universities to begin developing strategies to leverage this content for use in mobile devices here in the US.  The issue is not that students need an ipad or iphone to learn, but rather schools have to become better at reaching students on the devices that they use most frequently.  We are past the point where learning needs to wait until someone can get to class or can make it to their laptop in order to share their ideas. 

word comes today that McGraw Hill is jumping into the mobile education market with their upcoming mConnect platform: “an open-standard mobile learning platform designed to bridge the skills gap in emerging markets.”