- Mar 2023
-
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
-
‘‘I think it lets us be more thoughtful and more deliberate about safety issues,’’ Altman says. ‘‘Part of our strategy is: Gradual change in the world is better than sudden change.’’
What are the long term effects of fast breaking changes and gradual changes for evolved entities?
-
OpenAI had a novel structure, which the organization called a ‘‘capped profit’’ model.
-
- Jan 2023
-
tedgioia.substack.com tedgioia.substack.com
-
creative fields like music and writing live and die based on creativity, not financial statements and branding deals.
-
- Dec 2022
-
-
One of the clear signs that the bottleneck to low-income adults working moreresults from their lack of opportunities is provided by looking at their hours of workover the business cycle. When the economy is strong and jobs are plentiful, low-incomeworkers are more likely to find work, find work with higher pay, and be able to securemore hours of work than when the economy is weak. In 2000, when the economy wasclose to genuine full employment, the unemployment rate averaged 4.0 percent and thepoverty rate was 11.3 percent; but in 2010, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, theunemployment rate averaged 9.6 percent and the poverty rate was almost 15.1 percent.What changed in those years was not poor families’ attitudes toward work but simplythe availability of jobs. Among the bottom one-fifth of nonelderly households, hoursworked per household were about 40 percent higher in the tight labor market of 2000than in recession- plagued 2010.Given the opportunity for work or additional work hours, low-income Americanswork more. A full-employment agenda that increases opportunities in the labor market,alongside stronger labor standards such as a higher minimum wage, reduces poverty.
How can we frame the science of poverty with respect to the model of statistical mechanics?
Unemployment numbers have very little to do with levels of poverty. They definitely don't seem to be correlated with poverty levels, in fact perhaps inversely so. Many would say that people are lazy and don't want to work when the general reality is that they do want to work (for a variety of reasons including identity and self-esteem), but the amount of work they can find and the pay they receive for it are the bigger problems.
-
- Nov 2022
-
threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
-
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1590111416014409728.html
I'm slowly getting the feeling that Musk is a system one thinker who relies on others to do his system two thinking.
-
- Oct 2022
-
glasp.notion.site glasp.notion.site
-
Business ModelWill I get charged at some point? How do you make money to run this product?TBD
"TBD 🚀🚀🚀" is such a bad indication for the future of a product
-
- Aug 2022
-
app.participate.com app.participate.com
-
In the end, universities live off of being exclusive.
-
-
hechingerreport.org hechingerreport.org
-
many of their parents are still paying back their student loans.
-
-
www.insidehighered.com www.insidehighered.com
-
Harris said this model is often better for the textbook authors OpenStax works with, whom Harris called "the long tail" behind the minority of financially successful academic authors -- those who wouldn't necessarily sell enough units to make a lot in royalties, but who are committed to their work nonetheless.
-
"We are fully committed to providing affordable, high-quality learning solutions for students," Joyner said. "We are excited to think openly and collaboratively with key partners like OpenStax to ensure that we, and our authors, are able to reach as many students as possible in new and highly accessible ways."
-
- Jul 2022
-
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s4xx_muNcs
Don't recommend unless you have 100 hours to follow up on everything here that goes beyond the surface.
Be aware that this is a gateway for what I'm sure is a relatively sophisticated sales funnel.
Motivational and a great start, but I wonder how many followed up on these techniques and methods, internalized them and used them every day? I've not read his book, but I suspect it's got the usual mnemonic methods that go back millennia. And yet, these things are still not commonplace. People just don't seem to want to put in the work.
As a result, they become a sales tool with a get rich quick (get smart quick) hook/scheme. Great for Kwik's pocketbook, but what about actual outcomes for the hundreds who attended or the 34.6k people who've watched this video so far?
These methods need to be instilled in youth as it's rare for adults to bother.
Acronyms for remembering things are alright, but not incredibly effective as most people will have issues remembering the acronym itself much less what the letters stand for.
There seems to be an over-fondness for acronyms for people selling systems like this. (See also Tiago Forte as another example.)
-
- Jun 2022
-
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
-
It was as if Silicon Valley had made a secret pact to subsidize the lifestyles of urban Millennials. As I pointed out three years ago, if you woke up on a Casper mattress, worked out with a Peloton, Ubered to a WeWork, ordered on DoorDash for lunch, took a Lyft home, and ordered dinner through Postmates only to realize your partner had already started on a Blue Apron meal, your household had, in one day, interacted with eight unprofitable companies that collectively lost about $15 billion in one year.
...but we'll make up for it in volume.
-
-
-
Free public projects private projects starting at $9/month per project
For many tools and apps payment for privacy is becoming the norm.
Examples: - Kumu.io - Github for private repos - ...
pros: - helps to encourage putting things into the commons
cons: - Normalizes the idea of payment for privacy which can be a toxic tool.
discuss...
-
- May 2022
-
www.latimes.com www.latimes.com
-
- Feb 2022
-
every.to every.to
-
Most writing is chasing clout, rather than insight
As the result of online business models and SEO, most writing becomes about chasing clout and audience eyeballs rather than providing thought provoking insight and razor sharp analysis. The audience reaction has weakened with the anger reaction machines like Twitter.
We need better business models that aren't built on hype.
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
-
-
Founded in partnership with a team of entrepreneurial journalists who believe in a better model to create excellent content while narrowing the synapse between elite creators and their audiences.
http://puck.news/who-is-puck/
Another platform play of journalists banding together to find a niche space of readers.
-
-
therebooting.substack.com therebooting.substack.com
-
Aligning editorial mission and business model is critical.
One of the most complex questions in journalism in the past decade or more is how can one best align editorial mission with the business model? This is particularly difficult because the traditional business model(s) have been shifting in the move to online.
-
Axios Pro is bundling newsletters together in a high-priced subscription product ($2,500 for the bundle; $599 each) aimed squarely at deep-pocketed investors.
Old business advice: find the rich and charge them a pretty penny for something they either think they need or fear they can't live without.
-
- Nov 2021
-
careframework.org careframework.org
-
also into business models that can better serve the interests of both students and educators.
We are at a point in time where we need to reflect on our business practices. The question should be who are we serving and how do we show we are serving them.
-
- Sep 2021
-
commonplace.knowledgefutures.org commonplace.knowledgefutures.org
- Aug 2021
-
www.edsurge.com www.edsurge.com
-
“The real economics of college have shifted so much during the last 70 years, and we have not made adjustments to all those changes. Students are in an equation that has not adapted to the circumstances.”
-
- May 2021
-
harpers.org harpers.org
-
In a way, the essential premise of the collab-house business model is not far from that of pornographic entertainment. (Where else do talent and crew and cadres of management congregate in furnished mansions to produce intimate content?) Interestingly, but maybe not surprisingly, many TikTok influencers, including some here at the Clubhouse, have made the crossover from social media to pornography, using apps such as OnlyFans to post nude pics for their legions of subscribers.
-
Later in my visit, Chase Zwernemann, the twenty-one-year-old VP of talent management, will tell me that “we really see ourselves like influencing professors.” And if this weren’t enough, under the Clubhouse aegis is a trio of TikTok houses, each of which corresponds, apparently, to a different level of academe. There’s Clubhouse BH—the grad school—which is meant for “our more seasoned influencers.” (If this phrase conjures for you images of geriatrics taking selfies in suggestive postures, please know that by “seasoned influencers” they simply mean people who have been in the business a while and have thus reached the ripe old age of twenty-two or twenty-three.) Beneath that is Clubhouse FTB, which apparently serves as the undergraduate program. And finally, there’s Not a Content House, the high school of the Clubhouse venture, one meant to appeal to an even younger demographic.
He uses academe, but I might liken it to a studio system of sorts.
-
-
www.microsoft.com www.microsoft.com
-
Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Microsoft 365 Business Premium plans will include all the features above for up to 300 attendees
-
-
www.timeshighereducation.com www.timeshighereducation.com
-
In viewing academia as a business, you should always give customers what they want, and this applies on two levels. First, always consider the demand for the research product. This is much easier said than done. Anyone can acknowledge that the customers are always right, but truly listening to them and extracting what they need is difficult, especially if you have your own personal desires with respect to the product (in this case, the research). Talk to the funding customer constantly. Second, most students are, in effect, employees, and the adviser is a boss who doubles as a customer. In some respects, your adviser will provide your pay cheque, or at least govern it. Thus, do what the customer requires. In addition, always consider your audience when writing and presenting. In the case of a thesis, the audience is your adviser and committee. Again, talk to the customers constantly.
-
Anyone who treats research as a business tends not to be well received in academia, but they likely have the funding necessary to drive advances, and they may eventually be wealthy.
There can be clear benefits to treating academia like a business.
-
-
www.economist.com www.economist.com
-
-
Substack insists that advances are determined by “business decisions, not editorial ones”. Yet it offers writers mentoring and legal advice, and will soon provide editing services.
Some evidence of Substack acting along the lines of agent, production company, and studio. Then taking a slice of the overall pie.
By having the breadth of the space they're able to see who to invest in over time, much the same way that Amazon can put smaller companies out of business by knocking off big sales items.
-
Record labels are another endangered middleman. They have historically taken care of turning a song into a hit, in return for an ongoing share of revenues. But more and more artists are going it alone. More than 60,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify every day, most by bedroom-based rockstars who can use new online services to handle the logistics themselves. UnitedMasters, a music-distribution platform which bills itself as “a record label in your pocket”, recently raised $50m in a venture-capital round led by Apple. Tools like Splice make recording easier. Companies like Fanjoy take care of merchandise.And financing is getting simpler. One startup, HIFI, helps artists manage their royalties, paying them regularly and fronting them small sums to make up shortfalls. Another, Karat, extends credit to creators based on their follower count. Helped by such services independent artists took home 5.1% of global recorded music revenues last year, up from 1.7% in 2015, calculates MIDiA Research, a consultancy. In the same period the share of the three largest record labels fell from 71.1% to 65.5%.
The same sort of dis-aggregation and disintermediation that has hit the publishing business is also taking place to newspapers, magazines, and music.
The question is how to best put the pieces of the pie together in the best way possible. There's probably room for talented producers to put these together to better leverage the artists' work.
-
- Mar 2021
-
pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
-
Paywall success stories are a mix of specialized news, often catering to the ultrawealthy (WSJ), superstar news orgs focused on specific national and international news (NYT) or news with billionaire backstops (WP). The civic function of news is not met by any of these models. But reader-supported, open access news, like Canadaland and The Halifax Examiner are filling in the gaps. The co-op model is a most welcome adjunct to these success stories.
List of business models for news.
-
- Feb 2021
-
github.com github.com
-
In Trailblazer, models are completely empty. They solely contain associations and finders. No business logic is allowed in models.
-
-
cdixon.org cdixon.org
-
A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to call “come for the tool, stay for the network.” The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.
This is an interesting and useful strategy. I've heard the idea several times before.
I'm curious if this is the oldest version of it? I have to imagine that there are earlier versions of it dating back to 2011 or 2012 if not earlier.
-
-
www.coursera.org www.coursera.org
-
the idea of decentralized business models. These are business models distributed across a blockchain network not centralized in a traditional corporation. They can be fully autonomous too, meaning no humans involved. There's big potential for true peer-to-peer models like ride-sharing without Uber as a middleman taking fees. Owners of driverless cars will someday be able to put their autonomous vehicles to work. So even the big disruptors can be disrupted by this new technology.
Decentralized Business Models
-
-
subpixel.space subpixel.space
-
But the inverse trajectory, from which this essay takes its name, is now equally viable: “come for the network, pay for the tool.” Just as built-in social networks are a moat for information products, customized tooling is a moat for social networks.1 This entrenchment effect provides a realistic business case for bespoke social networks. Running a bespoke social network means you’re basically in the same business as Slack, but for a focused community and with tailored features. This is a great business to be in for the same reasons Slack is: low customer acquisition costs and long lifetime value. The more tools, content, and social space are tied together, the more they take on the qualities of being infrastructure for one’s life.
An interesting value proposition and way of looking at the space that isn't advertising specific.
-
Most business writing lacks a meaningful engagement with the question of whether the strategies, tactics, and trends on offer are good, in a larger and longer term sense. It is negligent not to address these questions.
Very few businesses consider the long term effects of their work...
-
A new business type here is the paid community: a direct subscription to join in. Today, most paid communities live on the outskirts of existing social platforms. But as they become normalized, paid communities are becoming a viable business model for smaller-scale social networks aiming to be both profitable and socially sustainable.
paid communities
-
-
michael-lewis.com michael-lewis.com
-
A broad overview of the original web and where we are today. Includes an outline of three business models that don't include advertising including:
- Passion projects
- Donation-based sites
- Subscription-based sites
-
-
-
I wonder how much this mini-article about Twitter subscription services may have been in response to Galloway's article last week?
Or will they, as he suggests they do so often, make a head fake to something they might do and then just do nothing (again)?
-
-
nymag.com nymag.com
-
Neither Snap nor Pinterest is free of issues, but to date, nobody has rallied a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol using tastefully curated photos of bathroom remodelings.
-
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>jeremycherfas </span> in The Capitalist Case for Overhauling Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>02/08/2021 14:14:45</time>)</cite></small>
-
- Nov 2020
-
mailchi.mp mailchi.mp
-
A better definition I've been using since then, thanks to Jason Hwang, is "fixed output." A company that delivers the same thing to all customers is going to be organized differently than one that does things made-to-order.
Fixed output companies
A company that delivers the same thing to all customers. These companies are going to be organized differently than ones that do things bespoke for their customers.
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
- Oct 2020
-
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
-
Like many other stores, Vroman’s is hosting online events to promote new books, which can attract attendees from all over the country but generally bring in almost no money.
Maybe they need a book paywall for admission into those events? Buy a book to get the zoom code to get into the event?
David Dylan Thomas essentially did this for his recent book launch.
-
-
kfitz.info kfitz.info
-
That is to say: if the problem has not been the centralized, corporatized control of the individual voice, the individual’s data, but rather a deeper failure of sociality that precedes that control, then merely reclaiming ownership of our voices and our data isn’t enough. If the goal is creating more authentic, more productive forms of online sociality, we need to rethink our platforms, the ways they function, and our relationships to them from the ground up. It’s not just a matter of functionality, or privacy controls, or even of business models. It’s a matter of governance.
-
-
www.hollywoodreporter.com www.hollywoodreporter.com
-
Twenty Stories Bookmobile, which left L.A. traffic for Providence, Rhode Island, in 2018
This makes me think that a mobile bookstore a la the traditional LA roach coach with a well painted/decorated exterior could be a cool thing.
I'm reminded of a used bookstore pop-up I saw recently at the Santa Anita Mall prior to the holidays. Booksellers were traditionally itinerant mongers anyway. Perhaps this could be a more solid model, especially for the lunchtime business crowds.
-
-
-
That’s why it’s so important to us that we help you drive sustainable revenue and businesses.
Compared to Facebook which just uses your content to drive you out of business like it did for Funny or Die. Reference: http://splitsider.com/2018/02/how-facebook-is-killing-comedy/
-
-
www.americanpressinstitute.org www.americanpressinstitute.org
-
A common complaint we heard from publishers at all levels is that it’s difficult to build partnerships with social media platforms. They seem to be holding all the cards. Even large publishers often feel in the dark during meetings with large platform companies.
I'm more curious why all the large media companies/publishers don't pool their resources to build a competing social platform that they own and control so the end value comes to them instead of VC-backed social silos?
-
- May 2020
-
themargins.substack.com themargins.substack.com
-
Third-party delivery platforms, as they’ve been built, just seem like the wrong model, but instead of testing, failing, and evolving, they’ve been subsidized into market dominance.
-
- Apr 2020
-
marker.medium.com marker.medium.com
-
When Casper filed its S-1 in January, analysts, investors, and business nerds descended on the document like vultures. Not only was it a precarious moment to take a startup public, it was the first time anyone could actually access the raw numbers under the hood of a DTC. “The economics work better if Casper sent you a mattress for free, stuffed with $300,” jabbed NYU Stern marketing professor and tech doomsayer Scott Galloway. “This appears to be Casper’s business,” tweeted number-crunching Atlantic columnist Derek Thompson. “Buy mattress at $400. Sell at $1,000. Refund/return 20% of them. Keep $400, on avg. Then spend $290 of that on ads/marketing and $270 on admin (finance, HR, IT). Lose $160. Repeat.”
Summary of Casper's business model
-
- Feb 2019
-
stratechery.com stratechery.com
-
What happened is that Spotify dragged the record labels into a completely new business model that relied on Internet assumptions, instead of fighting them: if duplicating and distributing digital media is free (on a marginal basis), don’t try to make it scarce, but instead make it abundant and charge for the convenience of accessing just about all of it.
-
- Jan 2019
- Nov 2017
-
www.educause.edu www.educause.edu
-
the experimentation and possibility of the MOOC movement had become co-opted and rebranded by venture capitalists as a fully formed, disruptive solution to the broken model of higher education.11
-
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which have become the poster child of innovation in higher education over the last two to three years
-
social engagement, public knowledge, and the mission of promoting enlightenment and critical inquiry in society
-
recent promise of Web 2.0
A bit surprised by this “recent”. By that time, much of what has been lumped under the “Web 2.0” umbrella had already shifted a few times. In fact, the “Web 3.0” hype cycle was probably in the “Trough of Disillusionment” if not the Gartner-called “Slope of Enlightenment”.
-
institutional demands for enterprise services such as e-mail, student information systems, and the branded website become mission-critical
In context, these other dimensions of “online presence” in Higher Education take a special meaning. Reminds me of WPcampus. One might have thought that it was about using WordPress to enhance learning. While there are some presentations on leveraging WP as a kind of “Learning Management System”, much of it is about Higher Education as a sector for webwork (-development, -design, etc.).
Tags
- Public Intellectuals
- Corporate Identity
- Business Models for Higher Education
- ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
- Citizen Engagement
- #LearnerData
- #WordPress
- University Websites
- Critical Thinking
- LMS (Learning Management System)
- #EdTech
- SIS (Student Information System)
- #WPcampus
- MOOC Hype Cycle
- Web 2.0
- Open Knowledge
Annotators
URL
-
-
halfanhour.blogspot.com halfanhour.blogspot.com
-
access to one-on-one (and possible small circle) consultations for a fee
-
We (had we ever been given the opportunity) would have created the business proposition very differently.
-
access to the top researchers in the field
-
I think that universities (especially the 'elite' universities) have lost the plot when it comes to their value proposition (or, at least, what they tell the world their value proposition is).
In some ways, the strongest indictment of the MOOC hype.
-
-
www.ht2labs.com www.ht2labs.com
-
Often our solutions must co-exist with existing systems. That’s why we also invest time and money in emerging standards, like xAPI or Open Badges, to help connect our platforms together into a single ecosystem for personal, social and data-driven learning.
-
-
www.edcast.com www.edcast.com
-
Interesting list of clients.
-
-
en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
-
Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. is now an independent public company and the parent of Barnes & Noble College, trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol, "BNED".
-
-
www.bnedloudcloud.com www.bnedloudcloud.com
-
a strategic partner and collaborator to the 770 stores on campuses nationwide
-
ABOUT BARNES & NOBLE EDUCATION
-
-
www.lynn.edu www.lynn.edu
-
Enhanced learning experience Graduate students now receive upgraded iPads, and all students access course materials with Canvas, a new learning management software. The School of Aeronautics is now the College of Aeronautics; and the College of Business and Management is hosting a business symposium Nov. 15.
This from a university which had dropped Blackboard for iTunes U.
-
-
unizin.org unizin.org
-
A bit of context.
-
Instructors can supplement traditional course materials with low-cost alternatives such as Open Educational Resources and faculty-generated content.
-
-
www.indianaeconomicdigest.net www.indianaeconomicdigest.net
-
“We’re between the now and the not yet of moving to digital textbooks. But the model has not been discerned,”
-
-
en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
-
Kroton has more than 1.9 million students
-
-
mfeldstein.com mfeldstein.com
-
Moodle Pty—more widely known within the Moodle community as Moodle HQ—does most of the development of the core Moodle code and maintains tight control over which code submitted by third parties gets accepted into the code base
-
-
opencontent.org opencontent.org
-
Publishers can compete with free textbooks by making their more-restrictive-than-all-right-reserved offerings 70% more affordable.
Sounds a bit like what Clay Shirky was trying to say about the Napster moment coming to Higher Education, five years ago. Skimmed the critique of Shirky’s piece and was mostly nodding in agreement with it. But there might be a discussion about industries having learnt from the Napster moment. After all, the recording industry has been able to withstand this pressure for close to twenty years. Also sounds like this could be a corollary to Chris Anderson’s (in)famous promotion of the “free” (as in profit) model for businesses, almost ten years ago. In other words, we might live another reshaping of “free” in the next 9-10 years.
-
- Apr 2017
-
creativecommons.org creativecommons.org
- Oct 2016
-
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com
-
With figures like those, it's clear that the education system isn't going away anytime soon.
How so?
-
Capterra notes that an average school spends an average of $30,000 to $50,000 per year just on paper, but reusable tech would completely eliminate that cost.
-
- Sep 2016
-
www.educationdive.com www.educationdive.com
-
As many universities are being queried by the federal government on how they spend their endowment money, and enrollment decreases among all institutions nationally, traditional campuses will need to look at these partnerships as a sign of where education is likely going in the future, and what the federal government may be willing to finance with its student loan programs going ahead.
To me, the most interesting about this program is that it sounds like it’s targeting post-secondary institutions. There are multiple programs to “teach kids to code”. Compulsory education (primary and secondary) can provide a great context for these, in part because the type of learning involved is so broad and pedagogical skills are so recognized. In post-secondary contexts, however, there’s a strong tendency to limit coding to very specific contexts, including Computer Science or individual programs. We probably take for granted that people who need broad coding skills can develop them outside of their college and university programs. In a way, this isn’t that surprising if we’re to compare coding to very basic skills, like typing. Though there are probably many universities and colleges where students can get trained in typing, it’s very separate from the curriculum. It might be “college prep”, but it’s not really a college prerequisite. And there isn’t that much support in post-secondary education. Of course, there are many programs, in any discipline, giving a lot of weight to coding skills. For instance, learners in Digital Humanities probably hone in their ability to code, at some point in their career. And it’s probably hard for most digital arts programs to avoid at least some training in programming languages. It’s just that these “general” programs in coding tend to focus almost exclusively on so-called “K–12 Education”. That this program focuses on diversity is also interesting. Not surprising, as many such initiatives have to do with inequalities, real or perceived. But it might be where something so general can have an impact in Higher Education. It’s also interesting to notice that there isn’t much in terms of branding or otherwise which explicitly connects this initiative with colleges and universities. Pictures on the site show (diverse) adults, presumably registered students at universities and colleges where “education partners” are to be found. But it sounds like the idea of a “school” is purposefully left quite broad or even ambiguous. Of course, these programs might also benefit adult learners who aren’t registered at a formal institution of higher learning. Which would make it closer to “para-educational” programs. In fact, there might something of a lesson for the future of universities and colleges.
-
As many universities are being queried by the federal government on how they spend their endowment money, and enrollment decreases among all institutions nationally, traditional campuses will need to look at these partnerships as a sign of where education is likely going in the future, and what the federal government may be willing to finance with its student loan programs going ahead.
To me, the most interesting about this program is that it sounds like it’s targeting post-secondary institutions. There are multiple programs to “teach kids to code”. Compulsory education (primary and secondary) can provide a great context for these, in part because the type of learning involved is so broad and pedagogical skills are so recognized. In post-secondary contexts, however, there’s a strong tendency to limit coding to very specific contexts, including Computer Science or individual programs. We probably take for granted that people who need broad coding skills can develop them outside of their college and university programs. In a way, this isn’t that surprising if we’re to compare coding to very basic skills, like typing. Though there are probably many universities and colleges where students can get trained in typing, it’s very separate from the curriculum. It might be “college prep”, but it’s not really a college prerequisite. And there isn’t that much support in post-secondary education. Of course, there are many programs, in any discipline, giving a lot of weight to coding skills. For instance, learners in Digital Humanities probably hone in their ability to code, at some point in their career. And it’s probably hard for most digital arts programs to avoid at least some training in programming languages. It’s just that these “general” programs in coding tend to focus almost exclusively on so-called “K–12 Education”. That this program focuses on diversity is also interesting. Not surprising, as many such initiatives have to do with inequalities, real or perceived. But it might be where something so general can have an impact in Higher Education. It’s also interesting to notice that there isn’t much in terms of branding or otherwise which explicitly connects this initiative with colleges and universities. Pictures on the site show (diverse) adults, presumably registered students at universities and colleges where “education partners” are to be found. But it sounds like the idea of a “school” is purposefully left quite broad or even ambiguous. Of course, these programs might also benefit adult learners who aren’t registered at a formal institution of higher learning. Which would make it closer to “para-educational” programs. In fact, there might something of a lesson for the future of universities and colleges.
-
-
www.educationdive.com www.educationdive.com
-
Interactive whiteboards were all the rage in ed tech purchases several years ago, costing schools millions of dollars but gaining little in the classroom.
-
-
www.educationdive.com www.educationdive.com
-
We commonly look at Ivy League institutions as the standard of higher education in America, but the truth is that the majority of the nation's workforce, innovation identity and manufacturing futures are tied to those institutions which graduate outside of the realm of high achievers from wealthy families.
-
-
hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
-
frame the purposes and value of education in purely economic terms
Sign of the times? One part is about economics as the discipline of decision-making. Economists often claim that their work is about any risk/benefit analysis and isn’t purely about money. But the whole thing is still about “resources” or “exchange value”, in one way or another. So, it could be undue influence from this way of thinking. A second part is that, as this piece made clear at the onset, “education is big business”. In some ways, “education” is mostly a term for a sector or market. Schooling, Higher Education, Teaching, and Learning are all related. Corporate training may not belong to the same sector even though many of the aforementioned EdTech players bet big on this. So there’s a logic to focus on the money involved in “education”. Has little to do with learning experiences, but it’s an entrenched system.
Finally, there’s something about efficiency, regardless of effectiveness. It’s somewhat related to economics, but it’s often at a much shallower level. The kind of “your tax dollars at work” thinking which is so common in the United States. “It’s the economy, silly!”
-
-
www.chronicle.com www.chronicle.com
-
often private companies whose technologies power the systems universities use for predictive analytics and adaptive courseware
-
-
tressiemc.com tressiemc.com
-
mis-read or failed to read the labor market for different degree types.
Sounds fairly damning for a business based on helping diverse students with the labour market…
-
The aggressive recruiting did not extend to aggressive retainment and debt management.
-
If an organization works — and extracting billions of dollars in federal student aid money suggests ITT worked for a long time — then who it most frequently and efficiently works best for is one way to understand the organization.
-
-
campustechnology.com campustechnology.com
-
The news on the self-paced e-learning industry is so bad, Ambient Insight will no longer publish commercial syndicated reports on the industry
-
-
www.educationdive.com www.educationdive.com
-
E-learning systems revenues in the United States and China are expected to drop by more than $6 billion annually, according to a new study.
-
-
www.edsurge.com www.edsurge.com
-
University staff who are buying data-driven technology
-
-
www.fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com
-
"At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment,"
-
- Jul 2016
-
www.thewpcrowd.com www.thewpcrowd.com
-
there’s only a fine line between “WordPress in Higher Education” and “WordPress in the Enterprise”.
-
-
www.noshelfrequired.com www.noshelfrequired.com
-
market for
-
institutions that are preparing tomorrow’s leaders
-
-
www.nacubo.org www.nacubo.org
-
Montreal: Melding of Old and New
-
-
-
education vertical
-
-
hackeducation.com hackeducation.com
-
I could have easily chosen a different prepositional phrase. "Convivial Tools in an Age of Big Data.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of DRM.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of Venture-Funded Education Technology Startups.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of Doxxing and Trolls."
The Others.
-
education technology has become about control, surveillance, and data extraction
-
-
medium.com medium.com
-
efforts to expand worldwide
At the risk of sounding cynical (which is a very real thing with annotations), reaching a global market can be very imperialistic a move, regardless of who makes it.
-
ironically while continuing to employ adjunct faculty
Much hiding in this passing comment. As adjuncts, our contributions to the system are perceived through the exploitation lens.
-
afford a university education
-
-
hackeducation.com hackeducation.com
-
The military’s contributions to education technology are often overlooked
Though that may not really be the core argument of the piece, it’s more than a passing point. Watters’s raising awareness of this other type of “military-industrial complex” could have a deep impact on many a discussion, including the whole hype about VR (and AR). It’s not just Carnegie-Mellon and Paris’s Polytechnique («l’X») which have strong ties to the military. Or (D)ARPANET. Reminds me of IU’s Dorson getting money for the Folklore Institute during the Cold War by arguing that the Soviets were funding folklore. Even the head of the NEH in 2000 talked about Sputnik and used the language of “beating Europe at culture” when discussing plans for the agency. Not that it means the funding or “innovation” would come directly from the military but it’s all part of the Cold War-era “ideology”. In education, it’s about competing with India or Finland. In other words, the military is part of a much larger plan for “world domination”.
-
-
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
-
For-profits typically take those funds and spend way more on advertising and profit distribution than on teaching.
Don’t know what the stats are for “non-profit universities and colleges” but it does feel like an increasing portion of their budgets go to marketing, advertising, PR, and strategic positioning (at least in the United States and Canada).
-
The phrase “diploma mills” came into popular usage during the era.
-
A similar conclusion was reached by the medical (pdf) and legal professions of the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
Somewhat surprising, in the current context.
-
This model might make sense if our goal was to produce cars, clothing, and some other commodity more efficiently. But a university education doesn’t fit into this paradigm. It isn’t just a commodity.
In education as in health, things get really complex when people have an incentive for people not to improve.
-
The idea is that higher education is like any other industry.
-
-
www.seattletimes.com www.seattletimes.com
-
“In five to 10 years, most students will buy their postsecondary education differently from the way they buy it now,”
-
-
medium.com medium.com
-
improving teaching, not amplifying learning.
Though it’s not exactly the same thing, you could call this “instrumental” or “pragmatic”. Of course, you could have something very practical to amplify learning, and #EdTech is predicated on that idea. But when you do, you make learning so goal-oriented that it shifts its meaning. Very hard to have a “solution” for open-ended learning, though it’s very easy to have tools which can enhance open approaches to learning. Teachers have a tough time and it doesn’t feel so strange to make teachers’ lives easier. Teachers typically don’t make big purchasing decisions but there’s a level of influence from teachers when a “solution” imposes itself. At least, based on the insistence of #BigEdTech on trying to influence teachers (who then pressure administrators to make purchases), one might think that teachers have a say in the matter. If something makes a teaching-related task easier, administrators are likely to perceive the value. Comes down to figures, dollars, expense, expenditures, supplies, HR, budgets… Pedagogy may not even come into play.
-
-
www.alfiekohn.org www.alfiekohn.org
-
districts are pouring money into computers and software programs—money that’s badly needed for, say, hiring teachers
-
despite the fact that it’s remarkably expensive
-
spend oodles of money
-
-
www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
-
the largest consumer of college graduates
-
there is widespread agreement among college officials and policymakers that the current accreditation system is broken
-
-
www.insidehighered.com www.insidehighered.com
-
Funding for humanities labs
-
our faculty are evaluated on not just research, teaching and service but also collaboration
Valuing the teaching profession.
-
- Jun 2016
-
www.educationdive.com www.educationdive.com
-
failure to find revenue and support from unconventional sources
-
-
www.socrative.com www.socrative.com
-
However, you may be required to pay fees to use certain features or content made available through the Site and Services.
Wish they said more. No-cost solutions are neat for one-offs, but pedagogues should be wary of building their practice on services which may start requiring payment.
-
-
www.eschoolnews.com www.eschoolnews.com
-
timely
Time-sensitive, mission-critical, just-in-time, realtime, 24/7…
-
-
listedtech.com listedtech.com
-
Am I asking too many questions?
No.
-
-
opencontent.org opencontent.org
-
many more people understand cost than understand pedagogy
While this may be true, it sure is sad. Especially as the emphasis on cost is likely to have negative impacts in the long run.
-
- May 2016
-
adamcroom.com adamcroom.com
-
To me, this is what OER for the web should start to reflect.
You mean it’s not just about the price of textbooks??
-
- Jan 2016
-
www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
-
Job functionOther,Marketing
But, but… Eric said it wasn’t marketing!
-
-
www.huffingtonpost.com www.huffingtonpost.com
-
In 2014, U.S. based education technology (EdTech) companies raised $1.2 billion in funding across 357 venture rounds.
-
-
pressblog.uchicago.edu pressblog.uchicago.edu
-
one wonders about the relationships between scholarship, technology, and the academic institution that engendered that turn from printing materials to printing ideas.
One sure does.
-
- Dec 2015
-
larrycuban.wordpress.com larrycuban.wordpress.com
-
numbers have to be interpreted by those who do the daily work of classroom teaching
-
-
bits.blogs.nytimes.com bits.blogs.nytimes.com
-
nearly $8 billion prekindergarten through 12th-grade education technology software market
-
-
www.knewton.com www.knewton.com
-
purchasable à la carte
How many units of learning per dollar?
-
no research
In direct opposition with the model for most universities, these days. So that may be the fork in the road. But there are more than two paths.
-
Universities bundle services like mad
Who came up with such a scheme? A mad scientist? We’re far from Bologna.
-
perfect storm of bundling
-
only unbundling health clubs suffer
There might be something about the connection between learning and “health & wellness”.
-
Unbundling has played out in almost every media industry.
And the shift away from “access to content” is still going on, a decade and a half after Napster. If education is a “content industry” and “content industries” are being disrupted, then education will be disrupted… by becoming even more “industrial”.
-
consumer choice will inevitably force them to unbundle.
The battle is raging on, but the issue is predetermined.
-
-
edumorphology.com edumorphology.com
-
Yes, my intention was to show the most easily replaced in dark and move it to the least easily replaced.
One linear model, represented in something of a spiral… Agreed that the transformative experience is tough to “disrupt”, but the whole “content delivery” emphasis shows that the disruption isn’t so quick.
-
-
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com
-
customers become less willing to pay
There are a few key cases, here. a) Public Education (much of the planet) b) Parent-Funded Higher Education (US-centric model) c) Corporate Training (emphasis for most learning platforms, these days) d) For-Profit Universities (Apollo Group and such) e) xMOOCs (learning as a startup idea, with freemium models) f) Ad-Supported Apps & Games (Hey! Some of them are “educational”!)
-
In every industry, the early successful products and services often have an interdependent architecture—meaning that they tend to be proprietary and bundled.
The idea that there’s a “Great Unbundling of (Higher) Education” needs not be restricted to the business side of things, but it’s partly driven by those who perceive education as an “industry”. Producing… graduates?
-
-
mfeldstein.com mfeldstein.com
-
More consolidation in the LMS market?
-
-
mfeldstein.com mfeldstein.com
-
course design is more important than the LMS
In all the platform news, we can talk about “learning management” in view of instructional and course design. But maybe it even goes further than design into a variety of practices which aren´t through-designed.
-
-
mfeldstein.com mfeldstein.com
-
It is possible to achieve a more humane and personal education at scale
Important claim, probably coming from the need for reports which answer the “But does it scale?” question.
-
-
robinderosa.net robinderosa.net
-
The goal of education is for the educator to become less and less needed for learners to learn.
The reverse of the typical “goal displacement”. Instead of focusing on ensuring our continued employment as “instructors”, we want to make sure learning happens. Deep down, we know we’ll find ways to work, no matter what happens. The comparison with health can be interesting. If doctors had an incentive to keep people sick, society wouldn’t benefit much. Allegedly, Chinese healthcare provides incentives for doctors to help people stay healthy. Sounds like it’d make sense, somehow. Yet education and health are both treated like industries. We produce graduates, future employees, etc. Doctors produce people who fit a pattern of what it means to be healthy in a given social context. There’s even a factory-chain metaphor used when some people apply “lean management” to hospitals or colleges. Not that the problem is with the management philosophy itself. But focusing so much on resource allocation blinds us from a deep reality: as we are getting healthier and more “learned”, roles are shifting.
-
- Nov 2015
-
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
-
Only four years old, Twitch already has 100 million viewers who consume 20 billion minutes of gaming every month. According to one 2014 study, Twitch is the fourth-most-visited site on the Internet during peak traffic periods, after Netflix, Google and Apple and above Facebook and Amazon. (Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for about $1 billion, all of it cash.) And there is money in it for the gamers themselves, called ‘‘streamers’’: Fans can subscribe to channels for extra access, or they can send donations of any amount. Streamers with modest followings can make respectable incomes — hundreds or thousands of dollars a month — and the very top streamers are getting rich.
(This is entirely peripheral to the subject of the article. I am making note of it because I have barely heard of Twitch until recently.)
-
-
-
PC gaming has enthusiastically embraced crowdfunding. On Kickstarter, video games (most of of which PC games) is the highest-funded category
-
Another form of video game remixing happens on broadcasting sites like Twitch, where you can watch live videos of people playing games (while they chat with the audience — the end result is an interesting mix between video games and talk radio).
-
Remixing books is popular on services like Wattpad where users write fanfiction inspired by books, celebrities, movies, etc. From a legal perspective, some fanfiction could be seen as copyright or trademark infringement. From a business perspective, the book industry would be smart to learn from the PC gaming business. Instead of fighting over pieces of a shrinking pie, try to grow the pie by getting more people to read and write books.
-
In the gaming world, “mods” are user created versions of games or elements of games. Steam has about 4500 games but about 400 million pieces of user-generated content. Dota itself was originally a user-created mod of another game, Warcraft 3.Contrast this to the music industry, which relies on litigation to aggressively stifle remixing and experimentation.
-
PC games are so popular they can also make money from live events. Live gaming competitions have become huge: over 32M people watched the League of Legends championship this year, almost double the number of people who watched the NBA finals.
-
The types of games on Steam vary widely, as do the business models. The most popular game, Dota 2, is free. It makes money selling in-app items, mostly “cosmetic items” that alter the appearance of characters.
-
-
www.edsurge.com www.edsurge.com
-
Non-Traditional Students: The New Majority
Education, she sure is changing.
-
- Apr 2015
-
-
2. Is it reasonable to compare the costs of xMOOCs to the costs of online credit courses? Are they competing for the same funds, or are they categorically different in their funding source and goals? If so, how?
MOOCs is a community service for which, I expect, every university has a budget. It is the universities' moral obligation to serve the interested groups\communities\society with MOOCs. It is mutually beneficial - the universities get their brand, research and teaching practices distributed, while the public shares with them personal data and comments, and opinions (which are extremely costly, compare this with the cost of those massive public opinion surveys conducted prior to the election campaigns, or market research) ... Hopefully the universities and academia can add ethical rigor to the way the big massives of private data is used.
-
it is difficult to see how publicly funded higher education institutions can develop sustainable business models for MOOCs;
-