From Freek Bijl (Netherlands)

From Macleans Magazine:

“In his teachings, the Greek philosopher Epictetus proclaimed: “Only the educated are free.” Unfortunately, an education isn’t. On average, undergraduate tuition fees across Canada increased by 3.6 per cent this year, the same percentage jump as last year. Ontario had the highest increase at five per cent, the maximum allowed by the provincial government, while British Columbia had the lowest increase at two per cent. Despite a 4.2 per cent increase, students at Quebec universities still pay among the lowest tuition in the country—as long as they are residents of the province. Meanwhile, Manitoba and Saskatchewan ended tuition freezes with increases of 4.3 per cent and 3.4 per cent respectively.

Tuition fees in New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador remained unchanged, while in Nova Scotia, fees actually decreased by 3.1 per cent. Thanks to the implementation of the Nova Scotia University Student Bursary Trust in March 2008, fees for residents of the province will remain frozen until 2011. International students, who generally pay considerably higher tuition than Canadian students, saw their fees rise 7.1 per cent for an average fee of $15,674.

When it comes to compulsory fees, undergraduate students across the country are paying 6.8 per cent more on average this year, with Alberta students facing an enormous 31.1 per cent increase.

—Sally Brown

All fees in the accompanying chart are for undergraduate arts and science programs as of September 2009. The names of several universities appear twice:

Quebec institutions where out-of-province fees apply, and universities where there are different fees for arts programs and science programs.

Compulsory ancillary fees can vary according to program, or in the case of UBC and UNB, by campus location: students at UBC Okanagan campus pay $125 less than students at the main Vancouver campus; students at UNB Saint John pay $61 more than those at UNB Fredericton. UOIT’s fees include the cost of a laptop. Ancillary fees include student health plan fees. If students are covered by another insurance plan, they can opt out of most health plans, which range in cost from $52 to $386.

*Tuition at Nova Scotia universities is reduced for residents of the province.
Out-of-province students must pay $1,022 more than the tuition fees listed here.”

This is a fascinating story. From IHE:

“The document, “Putting the Customer First in College,” calls on the U.S. Education Department to create an Office of Consumer Protection in Higher Education that would (1) pressure colleges to produce significantly better data on how well they serve students, (2) develop a system for making that data available for students to use in choosing a college, and (3) direct students unhappy with their colleges’ educational practices to federal, state, or accrediting officials who can help them resolve their complaints. “In most sectors of our economy, customer focus is paramount, as it should be in education, too,” the author, Louis Soares, writes in the paper. “Customer focus could yield a more student-centric system through the development and dissemination of user-friendly ‘truth-in-education’ information that helps students make ‘best-fit’ choices regarding which education provider to select based on customer preferences such as: academic quality, price, convenience, learning style, beginning education level and the anticipated return on their investment in education.”

Read more at Inside Higher Ed

Link to the White Paper on Higher Education from The Center for American Progress

Three U.S. investment research firms provide reports on the education industry for interested readers. The reports cover K12, corporate and higher education. The commentary often goes beyond investment-related advice, and addresses policy issues and, of course, business strategy.

1. Education Signals from the investment firm Signal Hill.

The firm, Signal Hill produces Education Signals. Note: Trace Urdan, a member of the Higher Education Management Group, is an analyst at Signal Hill, and is considered one of the most respected people in the field.

See this industry update from Signal Hill from earlier in 2009.

Registration for the reports are available here.

2. RW Baird publishes Class Notes.

You can find the most recent (November) issue here.

3. First Analysis is a Chicago-based investment firm.

Michelle Moreno CFA, a member of the Higher Education Management Group, is a Senior Vice-President with First Analysis.

Corey Greendale provides public equity coverage.

From ZD Net

Anyone seeking a case study of how a proprietary software company can “embrace and extend” itself into the open source world should stop thinking Microsoft and start thinking Blackboard.

Blackboard has a long-running feud with open source, ably chronicled by our own Christopher Dawson. Open source Learning Management Systems (LMSs) like Moodle, Sakai and OLAT have been seeking its market share for five years now.

Part of the solution was to open source tools for use with its proprietary suite. Blackboard may have been overly-aggressive in pushing this as a true open source solution but it wasn’t finished yet.

Phase Two involves signing alliances with educators and lining up scaled resources from within the open source ecosystem.

Today’s news brings an example.

Read More

News: Online Education’s Great Unknowns – Inside Higher Ed

The Campus Computing Project and Eduventures conducted a study earlier this year that asked many of the most pressing questions about online learning. Eduventures was kind of enough to forward me an advance copy (of their version), but I understand the report will be made available very soon. The article in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed smartly focusses on one of the most interesting insights from the report: the lack of knowledge within our colleges and universities as to the financial impact – current and future – of online programming. This is something I’ve made a point of touching on in a number of conference presentations during the last 3-4 years. The lack of understanding of the financial impact of online learning is particularly odd given that many schools invest in online learning for financial reasons.

The report from Eduventures is a gem; it reflects a deep understanding of key issues in online higher education.

Posted using ShareThis

Are Google and Blackboard an Item?

Didn’t we hear something like this a year ago?

Posted using ShareThis

Frederick M. Hess wrote an interesting piece for Inside Higher Ed in which he questioned the logic and fairness of the U.S. government’s initiative to “provide $500 million to develop free, and ‘freely available,’ online college courses.” He suggests that the initiative is short-sighted and serves to undercut existing commercial providers:

“It’s one thing to encourage providers to develop ”open source” wares and to promote measures that encourage publishers, colleges and universities to reduce costs and save students money. But it’s another thing entirely for the federal government to use taxpayer dollars to provide services that will undercut those offered by self-sustaining private enterprises.” . . . “More than half a dozen major textbook publishers, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Cengage, W.W. Norton & Co., and John Wiley & Sons, as well as hundreds of smaller providers, develop and distribute online educational content.”

Questions about the sustainability of the initiative and the role of government in higher education are obviously important; Dr. Hess provides a valuable service by addressing these issues. But, as they say, “context is everything”. If we take a closer look at the specific state of content development in online higher education, we can see that the government initiative may ultimately serve the interests of the commercial sector.

Digital Content Development in Online Higher Education

At its core, the government initiative involves sponsoring the development of digital content that will be used for free by colleges and universities. The more educational institutions that use the content, the more successful the initiative will have been deemed to be. This approach to content development is very different from how the vast majority of our traditional colleges and universities produce and finance digital content for online education.

Traditional colleges and universities build online course content according to the organizational and financial logic of what Tony Bates once called the “cottage model”. The cottage model of content development is derived from classroom higher education. It has two essential features. One, individual instructors assume primary responsibility for the design and development of course content. While virtually every educational institution in North America now includes a service department charged with assisting instructors with course development, in all but exceptional cases, these departments have not disrupted the traditional breakdown of roles and responsibilities for course design and development.  As any number of instructional designers will tell you (behind closed doors), they have relatively little control over the final product. These are service units, fundamentally; designed to respond to decisions that reside in the hands of faculty. Success is measured as much by the level of satisfaction of faculty, as by the quality of the course.

Two, the content created through the cottage model is typically used for only a single course at a single university. It is not shared or sold to other educational institutions that offer similar courses. The effect of this practice is to severely limit the financial investment that can be made in the development of course content. Without economies from scale (i.e. volume), investment must be restricted to the revenue generated by a single course. (In some universities, there can be two versions of a single course because more than one instructor teaches it.) While this approach has little impact on the quality of classroom education, it places great restrictions on what is possible for digital education. Educational media, like other forms of media, is highly dependent on the level of investment and the skills brought to its’ development. Without the involvement of a team of specialists and a significant financial investment, higher education will not be able to explore and ultimately exploit the tremendous potential of digital media for educational purposes. Today’s text-based courses, using simple graphics and group discussions, can be effective if well designed. But they are just one piece of a broader set of opportunities that digital educational media offers. As of 2009, simulations, games, dramatizations, and other possibilities remain rare in higher education.

It likely won’t surprise anyone to learn that it is the larger online proprietary schools that were first to recognize that the cottage model is inappropriate. Many of these schools – such as the U of Phoenix, ITT Technical Institute, The Art Institute – have put in place large and sophisticated teams to develop course content. Some have chosen to outsource parts of course development to companies like Learning Mate Solutions and Tata Interactive, both of India. Others have turned to the most familiar source of instructional media in higher education: textbook publishers, who continue to migrate, albeit slowly and awkwardly, to digital. (Pearson Education, for example, is working with Walden University, part of Laureate Education Inc.) (It’s interesting to note that the textbook industry is founded on the premise that a great deal of higher education curriculum is common, something traditional colleges and universities have yet to come to terms with.)

Frederick Hess may be correct, then, when he argues that the Obama initiative is anti-competitive, and that there are companies already providing these services to our schools. However, the vast majority of our colleges and universities do not take advantage of this model. It is this aspect of the online higher education market that changes the broader significance of the government initiative.

The government initiative actually mimics the production model of the private sector. And, as such, it serves as a very large and well-publicized demonstration of a different approach to content development – one that opens the door to course development being done outside of university walls. Consequently, the initiative may actually serve to encourage traditional colleges and universities to adopt this new industrial approach (new to higher ed) for online learning. Once traditional schools recognize the advantages of the new model, more will be open to working with private companies to acquire content. Ultimately, the government initiative may increase the total size of the commercial market for digital content providers. It is the private sector – those that Dr. Hess sees as victims of the initiative – that will benefit from the government’s intervention.

So, the government’s initiative may be, technically speaking, anti-competitive, and unfair to the companies that operate in this market. But in the longer term we may find that is these same vendors that are reaping the rewards.

If I were in the business of building and selling educational media, I wouldn’t complain too loudly.

The E-Learning Debate at Oxford Union