PILOTed

Trends I learned from Educause

In the classroom

There is an expanding market for technology inside the classroom as postsecondary is moving away from the lecture/readings/papers/tests paradigm. Online capabilities and technology continue to evolve and to play an increasing role, and not just in the growth of online classes.

 

Lectures are increasingly being captured, either so that students can use them as reviews, or so that students can miss the live lecture. Institutions are increasingly creating collaborative assignments, completing the assignment in a group. This increases the engagement of the students, and also gives them an additional life skill, that of working as part of a group. Solutions that capture lectures, increase engagement, and help collaboration are in demand.

 

For recording lectures, the trend is for the software to integrate with the LMS (Blackboard, Sakai, Angel, etc.), and for it to be tagged and searchable. Thus, if the instructor’s computer has notes about a particular point, students should be able to query that point and go directly to the section of the lecture-capture that addresses it without having to listen to the entire lecture.

Some of this material will need to be reusable, while some will exist just for that one course in that one semester. For example, the student in Psych 101 in the winter will have no interest in watching the lectures from the previous term. But, the professor may decide to save a particular demonstration for other classes, especially if it cannot be replicated.

To increase engagement, classrooms increasingly have projectors, elmos, smartboards, speakers, and student response systems. New SRS systems allow the students’ PDAs and Cellphones as input devices. Classrooms may also have classroom networks that allow the instructor to dynamically give control of the projector to a student’s laptop, share applications with the students, set up a backchannel for classroom chat, and send and receive files.

 

Technology helps students and researchers visualize, map, and tag data, collaborate, and share resources. There is continued demand for solutions that are more powerful, easier to use, and meet new applications. For example, researchers in different locations may record data on different but related phenomena. Institutions want applications that make it possible for students or researchers in different locations to access, analyze, chart, map, tag, report, and present this information. In another example, highly specialized or expensive equipment can be remotely controlled; imagine an astronomy class being able to control a telescope in Australia or the probe on Mars.

 

With today’s mobile students, there is also demand for applications that can function through smart cell phones with tiny screens, individual computer screens, and shared large screen output devices, depending on the location and needs of the student at the time. Issues around these applications don’t just revolve around the user interface and screen size, but also the processing power of the device and the collaboration needs of the project.

 

Collaboration can involve special group work areas, software that let students see and control a central machine, and share virtual screens and applications.

 

There has also been some evidence that institutions and publishers are working together to design materials (print and electronic). This may be due to the abovementioned changes in the classroom dynamic, an attempt to reduce the cost of textbooks, and the desire of institutions to brand and differentiate themselves. While the for-profit schools were the first to institutionalize custom materials, a number of community colleges and technical state schools are also starting to move in this direction.

 

Changes in administration

 

Over the past twenty years, institutions have installed different technologies to meet their various needs, including student information systems, LMS and CMS systems, accounting systems, ERP systems, security systems, CRM systems, portals, etc. While these systems often perform their functions well, they break down when the same data needs to be used in different departments or contexts.

 

Efforts to increase effectiveness are forcing academic, student, financial, and administration systems to share information. Postsecondary institutions are desperately looking to integrate this data in a secure way; but they are also looking to continually enhance the functionality of each solution, cut costs, and be green.

Meet all of these needs, and you’ve got a winner.

 

The large ERP systems are trying to round out their offerings, but in the absence of a single product that meets all of a university’s needs, interoperability, standards such as PEST, consulting services, and outsourcing are filling the gap.

 

Many of the large companies are looking to provide ERP systems that do everything. Niche players are working to ensure that their best of breed solutions integrate easily with general-purpose ones while improving functionality, ease-of-use, and/or security. Consulting services companies find ways to construct custom solutions for institutions, to integrate legacy systems with new additions. Middleware companies are building solutions that pass data between applications; one of the most pervasive of which are document management systems that have been tailored for the postsecondary market.

 

There is a bias in many postsecondary institutions toward using open source software. Universities will join together to design software that meets all of their needs, and then offer that software to others once it is usable. Past projects have died on the vine once the product reached a certain level, but increasingly, for-profit firms are joining in the consortia. They offer the group the ability to hold the development efforts together while they gain the advantage of being part of the project from the beginning and the source of choice for support, installation, and customization. One such effort just starting to bear fruit is the Kuali project; an open source ERP initiative with financial, student-facing, and human resource modules. Each module has a five year development cycle, with five institutions supporting it with $1 million per year. The first module, Kuala Finance, is being rolled out in Spring, 2009.

 

Changes in Infrastructure

 

Institutions feel pressure to reduce costs, increase flexibility, and go green, while facing a hostile environment for fundraising, withdrawing money from their endowment, and increasing tuition.

 

IT is often called in to solve these problems, yet there is an inherent conflict between IT, which needs a stable controlled environment to maintain security and reliability, and the academic environment, which often encourages openness and experimentation.

Sometimes, C-level jobs are being filled by people coming from the private sector. Often trustees are highly successful private sector executives. Either way, the institutions are being asked to show the ROI for their expenditures, and the current term for this is cost recovery.

 

There is a growing need for systems that allow institutions to track the costs, life, and usage of their assets. Not just sticking an RFID tag on a computer, this includes tracking all capital and operational expenditures, and then following usage of those assets. A surprising example involves tracking light bulb expenditures and expected replacement dates, because the significantly higher initial cost, extended lifetime, manufacturer guarantees, and lower power usage of CFL bulbs.

 

There is a huge consulting opportunity for service organizations to guide institutions through the process of tracking and analyzing their assets, and then using the data to increase effectiveness and efficiency.

 

Cloud computing can intersect all three infrastructure needs. The computer center is a major user of electricity, and can be the number one use. Cloud outsourcing can reduce electric costs as well as the carbon footprint of the institution.

 

Another advantage, in difficult financial times, is that cloud computing can move a solution from requiring a large initial capital outlay, to just an operational expense while also adding the flexibility for the institution to only pay for what is used.

 

IT has often resisted outsourcing, but significant pressure to reduce costs is forcing them to reconsider and define their core competencies. Many IT operations, which were state-of-the art ten years ago, have now become commodities. For example, running an Exchange email server used to be a highly value added job. But, while every university needs email, what student picks a college because of its email system? Using a shared service, the institution can free up an IT employee for more strategic work and reduce costs.

 

The term most often used is to outsource what is critical but not strategic.

 

 

While thin-computing never took off, its current day analogue, desktop virtualization, may be hitting critical speed. Institutions are interested in desktop virtualization when they can be shown dramatic reductions in software licensing costs, support costs, and use of electricity. One of the larger postsecondary consulting firms acknowledged that its desktop virtualization consulting services increased 40% a year over the last two years.

Why so many businesses fail

I just listened to a lecture that really summarized why we are in business.

To set the stage, barely one out of a thousand companies become big successes. Of those 999, fewer than one out of ten are there because their product doesn’t work; more than nine out of ten fall in that group because they fail to find customers or a market.

We (Academic Business Advisors) are in business to lower that sales and marketing risk for education technology companies.

I got that insight listening to Steve Blank’s talk in Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Series. Here is the summary of his talk; these are valuable concepts for anyone thinking about launching or expanding a product or business.

Here’s the standard, accepted model for launching a business:

Most entrepreneurs, reinforced by their investors, advisors, and board, are focused on getting a product out and to the first customer. But, most of the failures aren’t because the product doesn’t work; they are because the product couldn’t find a market. The model above causes hiring of staff, sales, and marketing based on events in the product development cycle; that’s backward. You design, build, test, and refine for a successful business based on market need and feedback.

What entrepreneurs need is a model and tools that reduce sales and marketing risk, because that’s where businesses are most likely to fail. If you don’t find the right market and you don’t figure out how to get lots of customers early in the process, you’re just going on a random walk. As Blank summarizes:

The job of an entrepreneur is to become a domain expert enough to understand a day in the life of their customer, their buyer, and anyone else in their organizational exchange. If you can’t do that, don’t do it, and become like almost every other entrepreneur who goes out of business.

If you’re thinking of creating a product or company, the first rule is to understand that you have made a lot of guesses or assumptions about the market. You’ve assumed that there is a problem, and that you know what it is. You’ve assumed you know the people who have that problem, and that there are enough of them to matter. You’ve assumed that you can get those people to pay you to solve that problem with your product.

You need to figure out how to turn those assumptions into facts. How do you do that? Get out of the building and talk to the people who will be using and buying the product. Is the problem that you think you’re solving really a problem for them? Is it so important to them, that they would actually pay you to solve it with your product? Do they have the authority and funds to pay what you need to continue in business?

The best way to do this is to find early ways to get them to buy. Discover the minimal feature set that customers will buy; and use an agile development methodology so that you can iterate quickly to meet how they really use the product. A good launch is when you’re able to define your customer archetype: what they do every day, what they think is important, why they think it’s important, what they buy and use, and how they pay for it.

A startup is not a junior version of a large corporation. You don’t need to start with a CRM system, or a VP of this and a VP of that. The entrepreneur and developers have to be listening to customers and hearing their feedback directly, not filtered through a vice president of sales or marketing. Can’t you just hear the entrepreneur saying to the VP of sales, “No, you’re wrong, we don’t need to change the specs; you just need to explain the features better, then they’ll get it. If you can’t do that, we’ll find a VP of sales who can.”

Everyone in the company needs to be part of the customer development team.

Yes, you need to develop a great product or service and sell it to your first customer.

The goal of the startup isn’t launch to first customer; the goal is to develop a scalable sustainable model, so you know that $X in increased sales or marketing results in $Y of increased sales and usage. You can only do this when you know how your customers think.

To be a successful entrepreneur or developer in the education sector, you have to understand how your customers think. When you know who they are, how and why they buy, how they process information, what they think they need, and how they pay for it, and you’ve got the product or service they can buy and use to solve those problems, you’re on your way.

Here’s an exercise to try.

If you have a great idea for an educational product; write down the problem that that idea solves. Then write down who will use it, who will buy it, and how they will pay for it. Then talk to 10 of those people who you think will use and buy it. Ask them, do they have that need, do they think your solution solves that need, would they be willing to pay that much for that solution, do they have the ability to get those funds, and what other significant or bigger problems do they face. I’d be very surprised if you come out with the exact same product you came in with; but I’d expect that your product and potential company would be significantly stronger.

This dovetails with what we at ABA do. Every day, we see really smart people who are passionate about kids and have created products that can impact the way they are educated. Our job is to help their team understand where they have made assumptions about the marketplace, test those assumptions, modify their approaches, and then develop that scalable, sustainable model to success.

New blog on teaching writing

We have just started a new blog, The Writing Teacher, which will contain tips, techniques, and strategies for teaching writing.

It turns out that only about one third of US students are grade-proficient in writing, and teaching good writing also entails teaching skills such as critical, analytical, and creative thinking; organization, engaging an audience, and clearly conveying ideas.

In an interview with Steve Graham, chair of special education in the College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, the first article covers six classroom techniques that multiple studies show as effective.

The newsletter/blog will have two articles a month, and is being sponsored by Learning Express and their eFolio automatic essay scoring product.