Bear with me as I clarify an important financial point regarding my commentary on University of Arizona Global Campus’s likely finances. Last week The Chronicle of Higher Education published an opinion essay I wrote, arguing against the recent Instant Global Campus movement, where I included a similar statement. Unfortunately I missed a change in the editing process that assigned this description directly to Ashford itself.

Either way, it is doubtful that these global-campus deals will pay off in the way they are being touted in press releases. Arizona has said that they expect to bring in $25 million annually from the deal, but Ashford hasn’t been that profitable since 2013, when there was significantly less competition in the online space.

Link to original post

Recently Phil Hill and I had an opportunity to give a talk together. One of the core topics we raised was empathy, which Oxford Languages defines as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” We discussed demonstrating empathy for a wide range of higher education stakeholders, from students to campus leaders. Soon after this talk, Wiley released a useful and informative infographic, “Emergency Remote Learning Satisfaction for Students and Instructors.” On their own, the results showed that students rated remote learning less favorably than faculty did, showing an initial level of disconnect.

Link to original post

The news today, from Kate Lee Carey at CooleyEd, is that AB 1341, which was re-submitted in mostly similar form as AB70, was signed into law by the governor yesterday [emphasis added].

As a refresher, this bill amends the Act by limiting, in certain circumstances, the authority of the [Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education] BPPE to accept an institution’s nonprofit status when determining whether to verify an exemption from BPPE oversight … AB70 adds new definitions to the Act for both “nonprofit corporation” and “public institution of higher education” and requires that the [Attorney General] AG make the determination of nonprofit status for any institution that operated for-profit on or after January 1, 2010, based on specific criteria.

Link to original post

This summer I shared an update on the higher ed LMS market in North America (US and Canada), and earlier this week I shared a view of market acceleration in North American K-12 and higher ed regions. How has the market been changing outside of this region? So what do the data show us in terms of recent migration trends?

Link to original post

We’ve all known that 2020 is a year like no other (and let’s hope that includes future year comparisons), and we know that LMS usage is increasing across the board as schools rely largely on remote and hybrid education. But there has been an open question whether the LMS market would decrease or increase in selection activity (adopting a new LMS or switching vendors). Most indications thus far support the argument that the LMS market is accelerating in 2020.

Link to original post

If they gave out a Pulitzer Prize for EdTech media, I’d nominate Jeff Young at EdSurge for his podcast series Pandemic Campus Diaries. But more on that later.

It’s getting harder to avoid Scott Galloway lately. CNN, WSJ, Yahoo Finance, New York Magazine, Vox Media, you name it. The NYU professor does know how to market himself. Last Thursday he was a keynote speaker at the kickoff and pre-show for ASU/GSV, which is virtual this year. Never one to leave a data chart up long enough to be read and placed in context, it was a whirlwind presentation.

Link to original post

After months of speculation, we have the first large-scale estimation of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on US higher education enrollment thanks to the National Student Clearinghouse’s First Look Report on Fall 2020. The headlines:

With 22 percent of colleges reporting as of September 10, undergraduate enrollments are running 2.5 percent below last year’s level.International undergraduate enrollments are down 11 percent, along with American Indian and Native Alaskan students (-8%), White students and Black students (-6% each), and community college students overall (-8%).

Link to original post

Over the past two weeks we have seen what I believe is one of the two biggest EdTech failures leading to large-scale outages at schools this year (the other being the Fairfax County Public School system in April). The nation’s fourth-largest K-12 district, Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida with more than 270,000 students, has seen a series of technical problems disrupting students from taking class. Yesterday the school board had enough and canceled the $15.3 million no-bid contract that the district had signed with K12, Inc to provide a suite of learning platforms, effective immediately, leading teachers to scramble and migrate back to Zoom and Microsoft Teams usage.

Link to original post

At the end of March I shared a view of four phases for higher education’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of remote and online learning. Phase 1 was the spring rapid move to remote teaching, Phase 2 was the summer move to try and add back in the basics of online education, Phase 3 was the chaotic fall, and Phase 4 is the transition to a new normal, hopefully starting in early 2021.

Phase 3 is indeed turning out to be an “extended transition during continued turmoil”.

Link to original post

It has now been a dozen years of sharing the LMS Market share graphic, commonly known as the squid diagram. With the release of our Mid-Year 2020 report this week to subscribers along with our partners at LISTedTECH, it’s time for us to look at updates on the institutional LMS market for North America (US and Canada) higher education. Note that our coverage for the market analysis includes Europe, Latin America, Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and surrounding island countries) as well as new coverage of the Middle East.

This is the first report since the completion of the sale of Instructure and since the beginning of the pandemic.

Link to original post