"Investors are hungry" for education technology

The Financial Post says investors are hungry for edtech investments.  The evidence for this is an increase in U.S. education technology investments from $52 million in 2005 to $930 million in 2011.  The global "education market" is estimated to be about $2 trillion.

A spillover investor interest in Canada was identified by the Post as well.  Desire2Learn (D2L) raised $80 million from venture capital investments in September, the largest amount ever raised as a software investment in Canada, according to the Post.   The next step for D2L is to "start scooping up smaller startups with innovative technologies."

D2L is a learning management system (LMS), the software used to manage the assignments, marks and other information about students.  It is particularly used in online learning programs, but can be used to manage classroom information as well. 

The company that produces D2L is located in Waterloo, Ontario.  Its major proprietary competitor is Blackboard, which took over the other main Canadian-created LMS, WebCT.  Moodle is the main open source LMS, free to use, but with high time demands for maintenance and upgrades.

The link between privatization and education technology is made explicit in the Post article.  Teach for America (TFA)  is a program that puts university grads without teaching qualifications into U.S. public schools as teachers.  The Post reports that TFA "has trained an education corps of almost 28,000 young teachers interested in education reform. Many of them, disillusioned with traditional classroom teaching, have started private companies or not-for-profits to change the system from the outside."

The Post does have some strategic advice for edtech businesses that might be directed to the promoters of the BC Education Plan as well :

"Smart entrepreneurs dole out their technological solutions in easily digestible chunks that don’t force busy teachers to re-imagine their classrooms from the ground up. After all, teachers still have many other low-tech realities to consider: paper report cards, chalkboards and overhead[s]. The everyday reality of a ringing bell and a packed curriculum makes implementation of sweeping digital reform all the more difficult."

Find the Financial Post article from September 10, 2012 at http://natpo.st/SdZngW

Please, not another $100 million failed system

 

BCeSIS is the troubled student information system that the Ministry has spent $100 million on in the last decade.  This article is a description of the plan by the Ministry to replace it with a new system for the next decade.

The Ministry knew by the fall of 2010 that BCeSIS had to be replaced.  There had been a disastrous opening of school where the system simply failed to deliver at a crucial time in the school year.  In addition, the Pearson corporation bought out the company that developed the software for BCeSIS, the AAL company.  Pearson is expanding its reach into all aspects of education by buying companies and closing down their products.  In effect, they are buying a customer base for their existing products.  This is what Pearson did, when it told the ministry that the company would stop supporting BCeSIS software as of 2013.

To get an idea of how to move beyond these problems, the Ministry hired Gartner, a technology consulting corporation, to look at BCeSIS, consult with users about future directions and make recommendations.

The consultants interviewed technology coordinators and people who had played a role in BCeSIS.  They also developed a questionnaire and ask superintendents to identify who should be surveyed.  In at least some cases, only administrators and technology staff were identified for the survey.

The consultants interviewed me as well.

The report Gartner produced recommended that the province develop another centralized system and that the province should buy off-the-shelf software that could meet the system needs. You can find their report at http://www.bcedplan.ca/actions/technology/gartner-report-highlights.php

The report said that everyone they interviewed, except the BCTF, essentially wanted what BCeSIS was supposed to be—an “enterprise” system where all the data for the system goes into a central database.  It noted that I had disagreed with this—I had said that it should be a decentralized system where data was held locally and only data that needed to be reported provincially should be drawn from the locally held database and sent to a central database.

The ministry then had another consultant contact people who had been contacted before to see if they agreed with the Gartner recommendations. 

In a recent meeting, the ministry offered to brief the BCTF on the developments in proceeding with the replacement system.

I had a phone discussion on October 22 with Renate Butterfield, an Associate Deputy Minister and this is some of the information from that meeting:

*It will be an “enterprise-wide” system—meaning a single point database and access.

*It will be based on a 10-year service contract—the ministry or districts won’t own it. Rather, a company will provide the service.

*It will not be just “off-the-shelf”—in other words, there will be programming to meet the needs identified.  This is essential if it is to meet the changing needs of the BC Education Plan.

*Lots of companies have expressed interest through the processes of requests for information and qualifications to carry out a project of this size.

*The request for proposals will be based on a description of the functional requirements aimed at meeting the administrative needs, the teacher needs and student and parent needs.  Each would have access to only a pre-determined level according to role.

*The request for proposals will be issued at the end of November.

*The functional requirements will be an important part of the request.

*The ministry brought together 44 people over the last summer to create the functional requirements document.  They say that some of those were teachers, but the BCTF was not asked to identify participants, as far as I know. 

*The 56 page list of functional requirements was posted on the ministry web site this week.  It can be found on the BC Education Plan web site at www.bcedplan.ca/actions/technology.php.

*The ministry is looking for feedback which must be posted by November 16.  A web-based survey is on the ministry website at http://www.bcedplan.ca/actions/technology/sis-feedback.php

*The “Application Design Requirements” are

            1)         It will be a single student record/data model

            2)         It will be built on an information sharing/security model

3)         It will include analytics and a data warehouse (analytics tools have been developed by the ministry, including a dashboard provided to districts)

4)         It will include data retention for 55 years

5)         It will be usable on mobile platforms

6)         It should support attaching digital files to student records

*The ministry estimates that the cost of this system will be $10 each per student for the board and the ministry.  That, of course, is only the cost of operating the system, not the hardware, training and support locally required to actually run the student information system.

One of the dangers of consultation on technology issues is that people comfortable with the technology are more likely to respond to consultation.  Since the day to day work of all teachers will be affected by the nature of the student information system, all teachers should spend some time looking at the functional needs.

Again, the functional needs can be found here [www.bcedplan.ca/actions/technology.php.]

 

The Internet is in the ground

We got a good lesson in the realities of the Internet at the BCTF today.  Our access to the world--and the world to us--was cut off when a crew working outside our office cut through the cable that connects us to the Internet.  Our telephones were down as well because we have voice over the Internet.

It reminded me of a book I read just last week called Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum.

Blum said the image we have of the Internet is that it is in the air--circulating around us, making connections globally.  Talk of the "cloud" as a place where you can save files outside of your own hard drive accentuates that ethereal sense of the Internet.

The reality, though, is the Internet is actually tubes that carry the data around the world.  It is almost all under the ground or under the oceans, with mostly fiber optic cable carrying the information.

Blum's story is a good read.  He is a journalist, not a techie, and brings journalistic skills to the book.

He travelled around the world, looking at the physical elements--the tubes that carry the data and the hubs that link the various networks to make it the internet.  He watched as a cable emerged from under the ocean with a new connection between Africa and North America.  He went down a manhole in New York where some workers were installing another cable.

He visited the massive server farms of Google and Facebook in eastern Oregon--again the physical places that store data in concrete, physical buildings.  The "cloud" is thousands of servers that are so physical that they require vast air conditioning to cool off the heat generated.

The real irony of our situation of losing the connection to the Internet was that the crew that cut through our cable right outside the office in Vancouver was putting in an additional tube to carry more cables to add to the Internet.

The Internet is really in the ground, not in the cloud.

Print your gun on a 3D printer

Cory Doctorow warns of a scary future--the new 3D printing technology will allow people to create their own guns...and many other handy tools and objects.

Doctorow spoke at the Centre for Digital Media on October 22 to a crowd made up of students from the Centre and members of the BC Civil Liberties Association.  His lecture was entitled "An appliance is a computer with spyware on it out of the box."

Wikipedia says "3D printing is a process of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital model. 3D printing is achieved using additive processes, where an object is created by laying down successive layers of material.  3D printing is considered distinct from traditional machining techniques (subtractive processes) which mostly rely on the removal of material by drilling, cutting etc."

Doctorow chose to talk about a potentially frightening use of this new technology as away of raising issues around efforts to control technology.  He built up to 3D technology by giving a history of the failed attempts to control technology with other technology.

His story started with the days a quarter century ago when people shared software by "sneaker net."  That involved downloading software to a floppy disk in your computer and wearing your sneakers as you walked to a friend's computer and copied the software onto their computer.  He then described how tech companies tried to control this by putting blocks onto the disks.  And then other computer users found ways to break the locks. 

Doctorow followed this with a range of further examples of technology limits broken by other technologies.

The other approach to control is through laws.  The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was created as a control system, effectively working for corporate interests.  The Canadian Conservative government when it passed the new Copyright Act this last summer went even further than required by international agreements.  The new law makes it illegal to break a digital lock to use software, even if you own the content that is behind the lock--a law adopted at the behest of the technology and movie corporations.

Doctorow expanded on his point of corporate control by describing McDonalds and Walmart as technology companies--their domination is created by the technology of their supply chains.  He also lamented our government joining the TPP--the Trans-Pacific Economic Partnership.  The treaty will likely give even more power to corporations on technology issues--and Canada has signed on to accept whatever is negotiated by the other countries involved, without being able to influence the outcomes.

Back to printing our own gun.  The dangers in this will likely lead for calls for controls both in laws and in technology.  Doctorow described the ways that tech companies imbed controls within the technology that hide the control code so that the owner of the machine is supposed not to be able to find it.  But every time a new approach is created, other techies have found ways of finding it and getting around it.

One of the attempts at controls is to include spyware when the computer is built and its presence is hidden so the user is unaware of its existence.  This allows the behavior of the computer user to be monitored.

Ah, hidden spyware--an explanation for this being an issue of interest to the BC Civil Liberties Association. 

Doctorow illustrated the problem with a story about a school (in Texas, I believe) that provided an Apple laptop to every student with spyware built in that allowed the principal to watch the students, including when they took the computers home and had them on in the room where they were changing clothes.  It was discovered when a student was called in to the office to be challenged on some behavior that the principal could not have known about otherwise.

So how are we going to control the 3D created guns?  Doctorow said he didn't know.  But he was sure that both the legal and technology approaches used in the past would not accomplish the task and attempts to use these approaches will have many negative implications.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author and has been active in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the UK Open Rights Group.

 

Privatization, venture capital and public education

In days past, most of the private sector direct engagement and investment in public education was probably in the area of publishing textbooks.  However, this has changed as technology has increasingly become a factor in education.

The array of technology expands almost daily--marks programs, student information systems, bar-code uses, etextbooks, online programs and schools, learning resources, and on and on.

The business of education technology seems to have three key actors--startup companies trying to find a niche for ideas and products, venture capital to finance the development, and large, mature companies that buy out the successful startup. 

"Who are some of the prominent investors in education technology?"

An answer to that question is provided in Audrey Watters'  hackededucation blog.   She lists dozens of venture capital businesses that are making investments.  Although the Gates Foundation is not itself a venture capital business, it provides funding for a number of them.

What is the importance of this? 

Venture capital is interested in making money fast, even if there is high risk.  Its primary purpose definitely is not to create products that best fit the needs of the education system as determined by educators.

If, as Ursula Franklin reminds us, "every tool shapes the task," then it is important to develop tools that fit with the social and philosophical aims of education.  Leaving decisions about our tools in education to "the market" may well produce results that are not the best for education or society.

How do the education technology entrepreneurs make their money?  If they can establish a market for their products, they can go to an IPO, the offering of stocks for sale in the public markets.  This is the way that Google and Facebook went "public."  The Facebook example shows the limitations of this approach.  When even the biggest guys can end up with stocks that quickly drop in value, how can one expect a little-known company in a niche market to find success with this approach?

Even Blackboard, didn't stay public.  Watters reports that "Blackboard, for example, went public in 2004, but went private again in 2011 when the company was purchased by an equity firm."  This even after it had swallowed up WebCT and Elluminate, among others.

Some venture capital comes from subsidiaries of big companies...like Pearson.  Their position "gives enormous power and influence to Pearson-backed Learn Capital and to charter-school focused NewSchools Venture Fund in particular in establishing who gets out of the gate with strong, initial seed funding," according to Watters.

The other option is acquisition--selling to one of the big, established companies in the education market.  The acquired company and its product often disappear, as WebCT did when Blackboard stopped supporting it and moved users to its platform and the software for BCeSIS did when Pearson acquired AAL.

Pearson consolidates its leading position by two means--providing venture capital for products it thinks will succeed and buying up the ones that it hasn't financed itself.