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You may have already heard a bit about NIXTY, since they have managed to make a significant media splash in the last few weeks. There have been a number of interesting analyses, both pro and con. I’d like to highlight a few aspects that haven’t gotten much coverage.

For starters, here’s a screencast that NIXTY CEO Glen Moriarty was kind enough to make for me:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: NIXTY, OER, Open content, Open Educational Resources

I wasn’t planning on writing this post, but I’ve become aware of several recent conversations that have led me to the conclusion that it would be useful to get this out.

For people who adopt software, trying to judge the value of so-called “standards support” in a product can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Standards implementations often fail to live up to their promises and, worse, it can be very hard to tell in advance of installing and running the software whether or not the “standards support” it supposedly provides is actually going to meet your needs. There are several reasons for this. First, creating a standard is hard. You have to think of all the different ways people might want to use the technology in all kinds of different environments, and then find some overlay that can meet all of those needs while still being able to work with existing software packages that are very different from each other. For example, Peoplesoft Campus Solutions and SunGard Banner are both SISs, but their architectures and data models are substantially different from each other. The same is true among the various LMSs. If you have a standard that is supposed to represent data from any SIS to any LMS (like, for example, the IMS Learning Information Services standard does), then you have to come up with a representation of that data that maps to the different data models and works with the different architectures. This is always hard, and it’s harder on some software developers than on others. For example, if your system doesn’t already have some pretty robust generic ways to interact with web services, then it will be more work for you to support a standard that is built on web services.

Further complicating the picture is that, while it is almost always in vendors’ interest to say that they support a standard, it often isn’t in their interest to do the hard work of actually supporting the standard, especially in the short term. Standards tend to reduce the total amount of money that customers spend on integration, which generally means that somebody is going to make less money. This hits companies that depend on service revenues harder than it hits companies that mostly sell product because at least with the product you can build the cost of the standards implementation into your license fees. But the truth of the matter is that, most of the time, everybody makes less money after a standard has been implemented, at least in the long run. This is because a standard, by definition, commodifies the function it is standardizing. A capability cannot be a differentiator if everybody does it. Therefore, while you might be able to continue to charge for the capability, particularly if you implement it very well and early, customers will, over time, increasingly expect it to be an affordable part of the package rather than a major expense (including the ongoing expense of maintenance that comes with a consulting-based custom integration).

The net result is a situation where it is both technically easy and financially convenient for the outcome of standards implementation to be nothing more than one more meaningless bullet point that vendors can add to their glossy product brochures. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can hold your vendors accountable for delivering the actual value that the standards promise, if you know the right questions to ask.

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© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: IMS LIS, Oracle-Corporation, SAIP

As promised, here’s the interview:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have a couple of take-aways from both the interview and the conference. First of all, I was astonished at how much D2L is growing. Based on what I saw at the Sakai conference, what the market surveys have been saying, and what I know from talking to people, it was already clear to me going in that there’s a big shift happening in the LMS market. I expected to see D2L benefiting from that. But I wasn’t prepared to see the number of new clients they’re on-boarding. I’m trying to get a list to illustrate the size of the growth. In his keynote, John had three slides’ worth of new logos. These aren’t expanded client relationships, which is the kind of thing that Blackboard tends to highlight these days. These are new clients.

Second, the economic downturn is affecting the market, but the effects are somewhat unpredictable. John’s story about PASSHE, a system with fourteen different universities, migrating to D2L in a couple of months, is remarkable. There’s only one thing that can drive a fractious group of state colleges to act that quickly in unison: a budget crisis.

And finally, I do see a vision for the future of the LMS emerging from D2L’s development work (although it’s hard to convey a clear sense of it in the interview format). It’s a vision that is significantly different in some ways from Sakai’s, Moodle’s, or Instructure’s. My sense is that it’s also different than Blackboard’s, but I’m not familiar enough with the details of Blackboard 9.1 and their roadmap to say so with a great deal of confidence. Desire2Learn is headed straight into the thicket of some thorny cultural change management problems at the university. Adopting and sharing learning objectives, sharing learning content, taking a systemic approach to ePorfolios, discovering metrics in student activity and performance data—each of these efforts individually is hard to sell in a university culture and results in failure more often than success. D2L appears to be betting that the problems are actually easier to solve together than separately because you can get synergies from integrating the technologies behind them. It’s not clear to me whether they’ve fully articulated their approach that way, even to themselves, but it is, in fact, what they appear to be trying to do.

I have more to say about what I learned about the conference, including about the company’s announcements about their mobile plans and how they stack up against the other market entrants, but I also have a Jim Farmer post, a post about another new LMS entrant called NIXTY, and probably the most important Sakai conference post to get up as well. And next week I’ll be at Campus Technology all week, which both limits the amount of blogging time I have and will undoubtedly provide fodder for new posts.

I’ll crank it out as fast as I can.

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1. Interview with an East Texas IP Lawyer on Blackboard v Desire2Learn
2. Bizarre Chapter in Blackboard, Inc. v Desire2Learn
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© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Desire2Learn, edunomics, John-Baker

I’m going to be posting a video interview of Desire2Learn CEO John Baker, probably in the next 24 hours. It seems likely that I’ll be doing more interviews in the future. I’m discovering that I have a particular philosophy about how to do the interviews, which is in line with my attitudes toward guest posts and technology demo posts. I’m very lucky to have e-Literate as a platform to get information out to a pretty large audience. There are lots of people out there who are very smart and have very interesting things to say that deserve to be heard. So part of what I try to do here is to help them reach a broader audience.

Here’s how I approach that goal:

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© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: guest blogging, interview

Xplana has published some interesting growth projections on digital textbooks in the U.S. higher education market. If you’ve been frustrated by the slow adoption rate, then you’ll like what they have to say. First of all, and unsurprisingly, they see the proliferation of mobile devices (e.g., the iPad and other tablets, netbooks, smart phones, etc.) as one of the drivers of the change. As I have written here before, I believe the lack of a ubiquitous form factor that works well for eBooks has been a very serious limiting factor on the growth of digital textbooks in general and OERs in particular. But here’s the passage of the report that really caught my eye:

Current product publishing and finance forecasting within textbook publishing are based on traditional models of print textbooks sales. Viable textbook projects are generally required to have projected revenues of at least 6X plant costs in order to justify company investment. Within this traditional model, digital textbook sales are currently counted as incremental volume, or as added revenue (again, incremental to print), when bundled with a course cartridge or internal assessment solution.

Once digital textbook sales reach 13%, however, the finance model breaks down significantly as digital textbooks are no longer incremental and, instead, actually begin to pirate print sales deeply (6.5% decrease in revenue on the average title). When digital textbooks sales reach 20% of new textbook sales, based on current production and revenue models, textbook publishers will see a 10% decrease in revenues and a 13% decrease in project margin. At this point, publishers will have little choice but to change product, production and distribution strategies in favor of digital versus print.

Textbook publishers shoehorn their digital textbook sales into a pretty traditional revenue model. It’s an afterthought rather than a main driver, and it usually gets treated that way. But there is a tipping point. Once digital textbooks begin to cannibalize a surprisingly low percentage of traditional print sales (13%), then the traditional revenue model for textbooks starts to fall apart quickly. At that point (which the Xplana authors project to hit some time in 2014),  expect the textbook publishers to become a lot more aggressive about eTextbooks if they haven’t already. It will be life or death for them then.

But that’s not the end of their worries:

Currently, textbook publisher production models are based on print workflows. Digital textbooks are created at the end of the production cycle when compositors create final production-ready files. As sales of digital textbooks begin to cannibalize print sales, and as their inevitable future as the replacement of print textbooks becomes more apparent, publishers will be forced to alter current production workflows to favor a digital-first process with POD available from XML files and templates.

Textbook publishers have production models that are optimized for producing—wait for it—textbooks. Many of them are going to have to retool their processes in order to make their costs manageable when their main product is digital.

It’s not all bad news for them, though. Even though the costs of the digital textbooks will significantly lower than paper textbooks, the publishers may make up the revenues by “renting” the textbooks via some form of DRM. Basically, it will kill the used textbook market, which hurts their sales badly within a couple years of producing a book and forces them to invent reasons to create new editions in order to keep selling. Students, in turn get lower prices for assets that they usually don’t want to own after the end of the semester anyway. Prices will come down for this reason alone. Add to that the increased competition from new entrants, including but not limited to OERs, and there should be significant downward price pressure on college textbook costs in the next five years. Given that the U.S. Government Accountability Office has found that textbooks and supplies account for 72% of the cost of a 2-year college education, that’s a pretty important change.

Update: You can find the GAO report here.

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© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: digital textbooks, E-book, edunomics, Textbook, Xplana