Last Thursday I participated in a Future Trends Forum, hosted on the Shindig platform, with host Bryan Alexander on the topic of “What’s next with the LMS?”. I have to admit this was one of the best virtual discussions I’ve had, and more than half of the session was driven by audience questions. You can check out the Twitter discussion, Storified , or listen to an audio recording of the whole session, thanks to Roxanne Riskin. More...

On Thursday, June 29th at 2pm EDT I will be participating in a Future Trends Forum discussion with Bryan Alexander. The topic will be the LMS Market and the future of learning platforms. The Future Trends Forum uses the Shindig platform and is designed to allow active conversations and not just Bryan interviewing his guests. More...

In much of our coverage of the LMS market as well as media stories, there is a natural tendency to focus on change. Institution x abandons LMS y and adopts LMS z. In our recent post on Moodle, I described the trajectory of Moodle, noting that “the data seem to indicate a collapse of Moodle selections in the US and Canada, and potentially a significant slow-down in other regions”. More...

First of all, I love what this says in general about the relationship between teaching and academic work. My high school English teacher Mrs. Galighani used to say, “If you’re not writing clearly, then you’re not thinking clearly.” Feynman takes this to the next level. If you can’t explain your research clearly to a smart novice in a manageable amount of time—say, the amount of time you have in a single lecture period—then maybe you don’t fully understand what you’re talking about. More...

We’ve just released a refresh of the web site that is the first of what will be periodic updates. Don’t expect anything too flashy, though. We’re old-fashioned; we believe that the content makes or breaks the site. So we’ve deliberately kept the web design simple and content-focused. More...

Last week was the first meeting for the board of trustees for NewU, the working name for Kaplan University now that it has been “acquired” by Purdue University. And yes, the scare quotes are intentional given the $1 purchase price. I’ll give the group high marks for transparency by the press release. More...

On e-Literate and even more so with our LMS market analysis service, we have called out many times the broad dominance of Moodle in terms of active installations worldwide. In every region outside of North America (US and Canada), Moodle has largest market share by far, and it is second place in North America. More...

Last week the Brookings Institute published an article in its Economic Studies: Evidence Speaks series titled “Promises and pitfalls in online learning,” by Eric Bettinger and Susanna Loeb of Stanford University. The article is a condensed summary of a lengthier draft research paper, “Changing Distributions: How Online College Classes Alter Student and Professor Performance” that was supported by the Stanford Center for Education and Policy Analysis (CEPA). More...

A little while back, I wrote a post reflecting on how close we are to getting a next-generation, modular learning platform and how the next steps in the IMS standards-making process can influence whether and when we might actually see this elusive beast in the wild. More...

One trend that struck me as new at the recent IMS Global and ASU/GSV conferences was a ramping up of activity around digital badges. At the moment, they seem to be filling in cracks that more formal credentials don’t cover. While there are some efforts to convert formal certificates and (more rarely) degree programs into stackable micro-credentials, those activities are mostly happening around the edges at the moment. More...