Flat World Education and Brandman University will provide teaching material and learning managment for an integrated business degree

Flat World Education (an online textbook publisher) and Brandman University (an online university) have received $9.5 million in venture funding to develop an online, bachelor of business administration degree. The teaching material will not only be "digital first" -- not adapted from a print textbook -- it will be "mobile first."

There are few details, but it sounds like they are building a learning management system for self-paced ("competency-based") courses that is integrated with their own teaching material. That might lead to a pitch that says something like:

Don't adopt online textbooks from traditional publishers and teach using a general purpose LMS like Blackboard, get the whole thing, delivered on a mobile device, from us. Faculty can act as mentors when students get stuck, and we will do the data mining ("adaptive technology and analytics") necessary to support them in spotting problems.

That does not sound much like a Harvard Education, but neither does the experience at many other online and face-face universities.

I'd say this is a longshot, but it is way to early to tell, and it is always nice to see a fresh angle. If they are right, this might be the business degree that rules them all (or at least quite a few of them).

Worries about OpenClass -- a new learning management system from Google and Pearson

Google and Pearson, a large textbook and etext publisher, are joining forces to offer a free learning management system (LMS) called OpenClass. OpenClass will be competition for Blackboard since it will be free, and, given the skills and resources of Google and Pearson, well done. It will also compete with Moodle, which is open source, but requires a significant staff committment to run.

That is the good news for OpenClass. The bad news for OpenClass is that the LMS market is not competitve -- it is dominated by Blackboard, Moodle and a few less popular LMSs.

Even if OpenClass is better than Blackboard and Moodle -- "open and not clunky" as they claim on their Web site -- it will take time to become a major player because we are locked into current LMSs by the material we have created, the training our students and staff have accumulated, and the systems we have built around them.

Do you use an LMS on your campus? If so, how many students and faculty know how to use it? Do students expect it to be used in a class? Have faculty invested in material that is now loaded into the LMS? Do they use it to automate testing and grading? Is it integrated with student records applications and the textbooks faculty adopt?

Don't get me wrong -- this is not a defense of the current LMSs. My campus uses Blackboard, but it is way too "clunky and closed" for me to use. I am just saying that it will be hard to displace even if OpenClass is superior.

Don't get me wrong on that either. I am not enthusiastic about OpenClass. For a start, I worry that it will favor Google Apps and Pearson teaching material. More important, I worry about the pedagogical impact of any LMS. If OpenClass were to become dominant, would it push us to teach within the confines of the OpenClass LMS -- a Procrustean fit?

On my campus today, on-line education is synonymous with Blackboard. We are in the very early stages of networked education and educational technology. It is too early for such standardization.

Don't get me wrong one last time. I believe the folks working on OpenClass at Google and Pearson are smart and mean well. I just wished they worked for a small startup that did not have such deep pockets.

For more discussion see:
Google Plus discussion
Chronicle of Higher Education discussion
Pearson announcement