Reducing the Clicks from User to Content

As the back-to-class season draws closer, a number of course materials systems are hooking up.

At its own BbWorld annual conference in New Orleans, Blackboard announced plans to develop one-click access to Ingram’s Vital Source e-textbook platform directly within the Blackboard Learn learning management system. The integration, intended for both computers and mobile devices, will allow faculty and students already logged into Learn to click into digital course content without messing around with software or additional logins. Vital Source has 80,000 titles.

Blackboard is also getting a little cozier with CourseSmart. Since last November, the two have been working with 20 campuses to pilot integration of CourseSmart’s Building Block digital catalog with Blackboard Learn. Like the Vital Source arrangement, the integration enables users to access the course materials with a single sign-on. The pilot was apparently successful as Blackboard will now make Building Block available at no charge to all schools using Learn 9.1.

For its part, CourseSmart has also been dancing with Desire2Learn. In an enhanced integration announced recently, CourseSmart’s 30,000-title e-textbook catalog will be available through Desire2Learn’s learning management system. Once again, students and instructors will be able to get there via just one click.

MHE Offering LearnSmart Directly to Students

McGraw-Hill Education announced plans to make its LearnSmart adaptive learning program available directly to students in time for fall 2012 classes. The plan, an effort to open new revenue streams for the company, is the first time MHE has marketed and sold technology directly to students.

“Making these study tools available directly to students—and their parents who want to help them succeed—signals a new era for our business as we work to ensure that more students are getting the most out of their college education,” Brian Kibby, president, McGraw-Hill Education, said in a press release.

Use of LearnSmart has grown to more than 40 introductory courses since it was introduced in 2007, with MHE reporting more than 800,000 students use it to answer questions each day. But many college store professionals view publishers bypassing them in favor of selling directly to students as a threat instead of just “good business” on the part of the publisher, according to Mark Nelson, chief information officer of NACS and vice president of NACS Media Solutions.

“On one level, it is a threat, but if stores were providing sufficient value to publishers, particularly on the digital side, the publishers would have no need to go around the stores,” he said. “Stores have good mechanisms when it comes to print, but their mechanisms for handling new business models and technologies are inadequate.”

Another issue is that MHE plans to continue to sell the product in campus stores as part of the McGraw-Hill Connect online course-management platform, which combines digital learning with class materials. But rather than a call to arms, Nelson sees the news as an opportunity for stores to work with publishers to define better solutions.

“Publishers themselves would be stronger working with us,” he said. “If stores want it to stop, then they must more effectively demonstrate value. Complaining or continuing to do things the way they have always done them or resisting change does not do a whole lot to get the publishers to alter their practices.” 

Blackboard Allows Sharing of Content

The Chronicle reports that Blackboard will add a “Share” button that will allow faculty to share course materials free and open to nonregistered students.  This is a big win for the Open Education Movement and for schools since they will  not be charged extra for additional viewing.  Blackboard’s “Share” initiative is partnering with Creative Commons where faculty will have the option to attach a Creative Commons license to the content.  Cable Green, director of global learning for Creative Commons, says his “goal is to have this kind of option in every commercial learning-management system and also open-source ones,” according to the article.

Pearson to Offer Free Learning Management System

This week Pearson announced a new learning management system that will be free to colleges without having to pay any of the usual licensing or maintenance fees.  The new platform, called OpenClass, will offer free support, hosting and upgrades in addition to the service itself making it very attractive to current open-source users since open source systems still charge for services. 

OpenClass is  “absolutely for free,” says Adrian Sannier, senior vice president of product at Pearson and former CIO at Arizona State University. “No licensing costs, no costs for maintenance, and no costs for hosting. So this is a freer offer than Moodle is. It’s a freer offer than any other in the space.”

“By freeing the LMS, Pearson seems to want to steer higher education dollars away from e-learning platforms and toward e-learning content,” says Phil Hill, executive vice president of the Delta Initiative, an I.T. consulting firm.   In doing so, Pearson is “potentially outflanking Blackboard,” because while Blackboard still relies heavily on revenues from its LMS licenses, Pearson has its “core business in digital content,” says Hill. Relegating the LMS to commodity status, while elevating content, plays to its strengths, he says.

According to the article, “Pearson says it is taking a strategic cue from Google, which offers its cloud-based e-mail and applications suite to colleges for free in an effort to secure “mind share” among the students and professors who use it. Like Google with its Apps for Education — with which Pearson has partnered for its beta launch — the media conglomerate is hoping to use OpenClass as a loss leader that points students and professors toward those products that the company’s higher ed division sees as the future of its bottom line: e-textbooks, e-tutoring software, and other “digital content” products.”

“Whether Pearson can pull off its end-run around the LMS market depends largely on whether it can convince its competitors in the publishing world to play nice with OpenClass, says Lev Gonick, the Case Western CIO.

“Integrating sophisticated digital content into a cloud-based LMS involves a lot of coordination between the platform provider and content provider, says Gonick. So Pearson might have to court its fellow publishers before it can guarantee to professors that OpenClass will support the content they want, he says. “I don’t think that’s a slam dunk,” says Gonick.

‘If the endgame of taking on the LMS market with OpenClass is to up-sell Pearson’s line digital content products,” he says, “Why would any other publisher want to give that advantage to a competitor?” Pearson might be using Google as a model, but Google did not have to partner with Microsoft to get institutions to adopt its suite of education apps, he says.

“Certainly, we’re aware of this issue,” says Matt Leavy, CEO of Pearson’s eCollege, adding that “there’s probably a lot of negotiating and deal-making to come” with both publishers and distributors. But he said he does not think instructors will require OpenClass to support all types of digital content from other publishers as a prerequisite to signing up. “A lot of professors don’t have that expectation of deep integration,” Leavy says, “and shallow integrations” — i.e., embedding simple links inside the LMS — “are still available to them.”