Voice from the Field
Ed Tech Trends 2011
Eliot Levinson, CEO of the BLEgroup — Friday, June 10, 2011
This blog article, reprinted from the BLEgroup’s internal web community, describes the trends that were seen in the group’s panels at the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) Annual Convention and Exposition, which was held in Austin, Texas last February.Technology is now strategic to education. The movement of education from print to the Web is happening. The products that the BLEgroup worked with at TCEA were the best that we have ever seen in one set of panels and signify a leap forward for an era of web-delivered education.
The four trends are based on the focus groups the BLEgroup did for 20 firms at TCEA in February 2011. The following are the major trends we saw:
- Schools are increasingly outsourcing work that is not core to their educational mission.
- Content is being delivered virtually.
- New Learning Management Systems continue to enter the market.
- Assessments are moving to the next generation.
1. Outsourcing – A way for schools to cut costs and stick to their knitting.
These are products or services that streamline district performance and outsource non-educational work. They tend to lower district costs.
Facts Management: With the tightening of budgets, schools are collecting fees for activities. Schools do not do this very well, and it takes lots of personnel time. Facts Management is the largest fees management provider for private schools and is moving into public schools. Facts can streamline the collection of everything from football to band to after-school care. This should increase revenue and cut down on administrative costs.
End of Truancy: Truancy has become a major issue for schools as dropouts increase and the money goes with them. There is an opportunity for technology-based firms to assist schools with truancy issues. End of Truancy is a mobile phone device that tracks truant students’ movement combined with mentoring by disabled veterans, who talk with the students regularly, providing anonymous intimacy and support. The combination of a tracking device and mentoring is impressive and a product that will be effective in the age of GPSs and social networking. It will not completely do away with truant officers but is very promising and should keep some kids in school and provide districts with revenue.
NCompass: GIS web-based tools and service for planning and decision support. This is a system that starts with household demographics and layers on levels of data. It is fabulous for transportation, school boundaries, closings, and growth, marketing, and other decisions. Our panelists thought this was a disruptive tool which will improve decision making, make the planning process more efficient, and enable scenarios for schools in the future. This is a real winner. NCompass illustrates that a firm with specialized technology and skills can be of great value in areas where schools do not perform services efficiently or effectively.
2. Virtual Content Delivery – The trend is accelerating.
Interactive web-based products are taking the place of textbooks at a rapidly increasing rate. This transformation is due to a combination of issues including changes in state textbook adoption laws and the relative savings for e-materials. Within the next two years, the old textbook business model will likely be replaced by repositories of interactive learning objects linked to standards. Schools will pay for using the objects and develop their curriculum around it. We are still not seeing a lot of simulation and gaming, but we expect that to increase as virtual devices come online. The traditional textbook companies have not quite figured out the business model yet, and innovation is coming predominantly from new digital companies.
At the TCEA panels, we worked with two new products in the virtual curriculum category that were outstanding:
Capstone Digital Learning is a library of virtual books delivered online. The student takes a Lexile placement test and then chooses books of his interest; for example, cowboys, dolls, Australia, and receives the books to read. There is a social networking component where they can discuss the books online with their teacher. The books come in different forms, such as comic books and regular books and with sound. This is the first of the truly individualized products that we have seen.
Middlebury Interactive Learning-Virtual Online Foreign Language Immersion Instruction: Middlebury Interactive is a joint venture between Middlebury College and K12.com. The product integrates the Middlebury immersion process with K12.com’s online delivery. The quality of the language instruction and learning is very impressive. The value proposition is that foreign language courses are expensive to deliver because classes are small and hard to staff with quality people. MIL comes in three flavors: full online instruction with online teachers, supplementary materials for the existing classroom, and a hybrid model. THE QUALITY OF THE VIRTUAL LEARNING IS SUPERB. MIL will release French and Spanish 1 next September and gradually provide courses in ten languages.
3. Learning Management Systems (LMS) – This is the year of the LMS. In a year, half of them will be gone.
LMSs are central to the delivery of online materials, and they often connect content, assessment, and data analytics. The new LMSs are getting better and better. The BLEgroup has done panels on ten LMSs in the past two years. We see movement toward systems that are much more user-friendly, utilize social networking, and provide portals for the major stakeholders: parents, students, and teachers.
The problem is how to define what an LMS is, as there are three types of LMSs that are morphing into each other:
- Content Management Systems – the original, products that deliver content over a platform.
- The Instructional process systems like Global Scholar or Schoolnet have a process flow of standards, lesson plans, formative assessment, data analysis.
- The web products like Edline or Schoolwires that started as school websites and are now moving into content delivery and data analysis.
Follett Software’s Cognite is very impressive and improving. It is very easy to use for three kinds of stakeholders: parents, teachers, and students. It is more like the original LMSs but has very large amounts of standards-based content and good collaboration. Unfortunately, it is not well-known, as people think of Follett as a library group, and at the moment, schools need to have Follett’s library management system to use it. Cognite is much simpler and light-years ahead of Blackboard, but it needs to address sales and the new types of interactive content. On the content delivery side, this is the best product we have seen for delivering content and it is well priced.
Schoology is Facebook for schools. It is developing new functionality to deliver customized content and, to date, has spread virally. It is one of my picks for disrupting the market and being around next year. A major appeal is that Schoology is a freemium product, does not cost much to install, and has the potential of doing neutral targeted delivery of content, as opposed to the LMSs of the large publishers, which are biased to their own content.
Skoodat is more platform than LMS. It is a cloud-based platform on which you can put all your web-based applications, and they will interact with each other. The take of the panel was that this will most likely start as a B2B platform that will allow schools to easily download management, assessment, and content applications and link them to your legacy systems. This is the beginning of the next generation of cloud-based products. It is an early product that is ahead of the market and needs to be fleshed out.
4. Assessment – The Next Generation: Moving toward adaptive assessment to support teachers and customize instruction.
Until now, assessment was either end-of-year NCLB test or formative benchmark assessments that showed the progress being made toward mastery of the standards and end-of-year tests. Assessment has been judgmental of both teachers and students. There is a shift occurring in the assessment world due to the arrival of Common Core curriculum and its required adaptive assessments that emphasize growth. The new assessments are providing more support to teachers to help kids learn, and the assessments are being linked to the delivery of individualized content. The movement of assessment toward helping students and teachers master content is well under way.
We saw two interesting assessment products that are in development:
- Wireless Generation has a new product that shows a teacher the standards mastery levels of each student and the class by using colored lights. It delivers content to help teach the standards. The user interface is in the form of a honeycomb and is easy to use.
- Avant Assessment is traditionally a foreign language competency assessment. They are developing a new platform for students and teachers to collaborate so that students can master a standard. The assessment tools allow for a variety of ways to show knowledge beyond filling in the blank or extended response. The product is early stage but very collaborative and impressive to our educators.
About The BLEgroup
The BLEgroup is a group of 100 leading ed tech practitioners, composed of a mix of superintendents, CIOs, instructional technology specialists, and heads of instruction from a wide variety of state departments, large districts, intermediate units, virtual schools, and large and leading-edge technology districts.Eliot Levinson is CEO of the BLEgroup.
The BLEgroup provides services to both schools and the industry. At ISTE and TCEA, the BLEgroup provides 25 focus groups during which leading ed tech practitioners “kick the tires” on new products and answer questions which firms have about messaging, marketing, and implementation from a school perspective.
NEXT PANEL DISCUSSIONS WILL BE HELD AT ISTE ON JUNE 27 AND 28. If you are interested in learning more, contact Eliot Levinson, eliot@blegroup.com.
