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00:00:01
That this group must somehow form a cohort
206 Plays2 years ago
Phil, Morgan, and Neil look at the rapid rise of commercial video platforms into the EdTech toolset, the promise but slow adoption of education-specific tools to address pedagogy, and how realtime application of Gartner frameworks might apply.
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts
00:00:01
Speaker
you
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome back. This is Phil Hill with Neil Mosley and Glenda Morgan with online education across the Atlantic. And looking forward to our discussion today. And hopefully, Neil, you're fully back into the new year, not just post-holiday rush, but things are feeling normal at this point. Or are you still in holiday mode right now?
00:00:35
Speaker
You know what Phil, things are feeling normal in that everything is kind of back running. My kids are back in school. My kids are being sick and ill and off school. So it really feels real. I'd like to just give a shout out to all the parents with young children right now, because it's been an interesting few weeks of returning to school and kids getting ill and dealing with all that. So it definitely feels,
00:01:02
Speaker
Real and very much post Christmas and New Year's for me Phil so yeah, yeah back into it and Yeah, it's good to be back into the podcast.
International Student Policies and Opportunities
00:01:12
Speaker
I mean like last week. We were I think trying to Salvage some good news out of what we seem like a pretty depressing picture
00:01:21
Speaker
for higher education. But I feel like there's been some interesting news that probably chimes with some of the themes that we talked about last week. So I don't know what you guys have been following, but I was interested in Canada announcing some restrictions on international students. I think that led to a little bit of rejoicing over here, to be honest, in the UK.
00:01:49
Speaker
We can have those students. Yeah, yeah. We're not the only one in the firing line of making weird decisions to limit international students.
00:02:00
Speaker
Yeah absolutely absolutely. So that in a way bad news for Canada but good news for the UK maybe is the story there.
Company Changes and Strategic Shifts
00:02:08
Speaker
I guess another thing that we kind of touched on last week which I'd be interested to know what you guys thought about was sort of pending news around 2U and I know nothing's been announced but it seems clear that there's been some layoffs just from the kind of the noise around there and I just wondered what
00:02:27
Speaker
what you had to say about that or what you thought or what you'd heard. For me, there was a lot of noise online that we referred to last week, I have to say. Not a whole lot came out of it other than layoffs that I've seen. But part of the thing to keep in mind, or I need to keep in mind, there are people who want the company dead.
00:02:52
Speaker
And so I think we're also into the stage where people are trying to throw out rumors as well. So it may be there's still some huge news that comes out of it in the next week or so, but nothing huge that I've seen so far. I am expecting something in the first half of the year that will be momentous. Here's how we're handling the debt. We're splitting up the company. We're going bankrupt. We're pulling, you know, the rabbit out of the hat, something big, but
00:03:20
Speaker
Nothing exciting that I've heard. I haven't heard anything specific about 2U, but I did read an interesting write-up which was actually nominally about the Pearson earnings call that went into some detail about Merrillville University and how it had transitioned to 2U, but it sounded like that was just a very minor thing because I talked about them trying to transition to running their own programs and that sort of thing.
00:03:50
Speaker
So that was an interesting article I read. Well, I've done some of the interviews for my stories on what's happening to 2U. I had heard that independently, sources that cannot be mentioned. Essentially, 2U edX deal is there. They did take over some of the Maryville work, but it is very explicitly a transition to them taking it in-house. It is not a long-term
00:04:16
Speaker
contract. So I had heard very similar thing from a different set of sources.
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, which makes some of the layoffs make sense. No, I think it's one of those things, isn't it, where you were saying, Phil, about whether I've got going in the new year or on that. It feels like in terms of the OPM space and the online education company space, there's a sense of what's to come in the year ahead still isn't there with some of these announcements or the kind of place that companies find themselves in, which is going to be kind of interesting.
00:04:48
Speaker
I kind of noticed again in the news over here that there's more kind of bad news in terms of deficit. University of York over here announced a deficit. It was interesting looking at their report because they flagged a slight decline in their online student numbers. And maybe that's an interesting segue into, I know that you guys put out a piece around enrollment trends in the US.
00:05:14
Speaker
this week that we might want to kind of touch on a little bit and what we were kind of seeing there in terms of trends or anything new that came out of that. Yeah. The post, there have been two on one premium, one free, but it's the official data from the Department of Education, the IPEDS data. And they have two different data sets that give distance education numbers. One is 12 month unduplicated headcounts, which quite frankly is more appropriate for online education as a metric.
00:05:43
Speaker
But the one they've been doing since fall 2012 is the fall enrollment data. And it's built on an assumption of old-style education. Students show up in September, and then you take your classes through May, and then you count them by a census method in October. So that's the data that came out. The real big benefit of this data is twofold. One, it's been consistent so you could see historical trends.
Trends in Online Education Enrollments
00:06:10
Speaker
So a decade now, more than a decade of distance education data has been available. The other benefit is it's from the government, it's freely available. So you see it down to the institution level, you can get data. It's not just up to whoever releases the report on what they show, all the data's there. So that's where we put out and it really got into fall 2022.
00:06:38
Speaker
which, you know, more than a year out of date, if you will. But I think what's significant is that really start showing the new normal. You know, we're past the height of the pandemic and the online enrollments that were caused by school shutting down and forcing everybody to go remote.
00:06:58
Speaker
fall 2022 for the most part, schools were open again. And so you start to get insight. And the headline number is the fact that this was not just a projection of previous linear growth of online education.
00:07:14
Speaker
it jumps significantly, nearly doubling if you look at it in terms of the percentage of students taking an online class compared to at least one online class. So that's fully online or just a mix versus students who take no online classes. And it happens at the same time that overall enrollments are going down. So online students are going up, but total enrollment's going down. So the picture is even more dramatic, if you will.
00:07:45
Speaker
So, yeah, it was interesting data, but like I said, the real importance of it, I think, is we can now say, hey, let's start looking at this and say, what does this tell us that's going to be happening in the future? And it definitely seemed to get interest, but I was interviewed by the Heckinger report based on that piece.
00:08:02
Speaker
the author of it and hopefully this ends up in the article that really hit her and she said it very pithy so a good reporter she goes what really hits me and at a time of declining enrollments the number of students taking at least one online class jumped by a million and a half just from 2019 to 2022 and to her that was stunning so i think some of this news i think is helping people see the the new trends and just how significant
00:08:32
Speaker
And to separate it from some of the noise of all enrollments going down, including online. In aggregate, it's going up. It's just changing in nature. And what do people put that down to, Phil? Because there's various different narratives, isn't there, around online education?
00:08:49
Speaker
narrative of it just pure and simply being the future but then there's also kind of wider changes that might cause people to want to study in that way like having to balance greater kind of commitments around work and things like that and not necessarily being able to
00:09:05
Speaker
afford a campus-based luxury experience? Well, the biggest thing I chalk it up to is the inexplicable habit that not everybody looks at data and thinks about it multiple times a week and tries to think about it. I don't get those people, but they are the vast majority. Some of the thing comes from
00:09:28
Speaker
The recent narratives are that online education is going down because we're coming out of the pandemic. So I think there's a conflation of we don't have remote online teaching anymore forced online. Therefore, the numbers naturally came down as a lot of schools started moving back to face to face.
00:09:49
Speaker
And that headline, I think it's still sticking in people's heads.
HyFlex Learning: Debates and Challenges
00:09:53
Speaker
Then you combine it with what we've talked about quite a bit, the OPM case and how the online market seems to be cratering. I think you have those two stories that lead into where there might be people assuming.
00:10:07
Speaker
that online education hit its peak and is going away without viewing the pandemic as the aberration and we're back to a new normal and oh, look, it's higher than it was before. So to me, that's probably what it hits. I'm not sure what you're hearing, Morgan. Yeah, you know, as you were talking, I was also just thinking about the whole HyFlex issue. Any opportunity to talk about HyFlex, Morgan? I feel like this is yours.
00:10:36
Speaker
Well, partly, you know, we're waiting on a big cage match between somebody that Phil and I work with quite a bit called Kevin Kelly, who has done a lot of work on HyFlex. He's got a book coming out soon, which you should all buy. But he is pro HyFlex, and I am intrinsically anti HyFlex. And maybe again, it's my personality, but I just worry that people are doing it badly. But, you know, there is something there in the sense that there is a need for
00:11:05
Speaker
flexibility as well. You know I'm just thinking about a conversation I had with a community college outside of Washington DC where they just said they sort of really needed to do that sort of thing because not everybody wanted to sit on the belt line for hours and hours and hours a week and that gave some sort of flexibility there so I think there's that but I think for the most part it does it is done badly you know in the sense of it's like the worst of all possible worlds it's not
00:11:32
Speaker
in person, but it's not online. And you sort of fall between the stools there. But, you know, I think there's definitely that desire for flexibility that that speaks to. And I think that feeds into the growth of online generally, because people are busy people as well and need that ability to mix their schedules around.
00:11:56
Speaker
Well, I think you might have described a future episode. We'll get Kevin on online and we'll do a debate. I don't want to speak for him holistically. He definitely agrees that it's done poorly. I think there's a difference in perspective of, does that mean that we shouldn't be trying it versus, hey, schools need to support things? But that might actually be a very interesting debate to have. Yeah, no, definitely. I think I would be in favor of that because he has sort of thought carefully about it.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, interesting, interesting. I have to say I looked on slightly envious at your ability to be able to look at the data and actually get to a stage where you can kind of ascertain the trend post-pandemic, because we in the UK usually have student data coming out at the end of January, but because of some changes that are taking place, that's now going to push back to April.
00:12:51
Speaker
you know, on the subject of people looking at data. Sorry, I'm now having to wait a few more months before I can kind of access. Well, here in the US, we have data that comes out, you know, regularly, except we don't have financial aid systems that come out in time to actually work. So, you know, maybe they should have delayed the data and put out the FAFSA in a more
00:13:13
Speaker
Timely fashion if i can help you guys are being too kind to the ipads folks the data is supposed to come out in november and december and so i've been one of the people you like it the holidays grandsons opening up the gifts that i'm thinking that should be me opening up the ipads data before now so it actually was late here although i guess i should complain that it was essentially a month month and a half late
00:13:37
Speaker
And I'm going to jump into this opportunity to do some dirty washing of Phil Hill and Associates on the podcast. Go for it. That's why we're doing it.
00:13:46
Speaker
Phil may have a borderline problem with data. You know, sometimes I'm like idly wondering, yeah, it'd be interesting to look at X versus Y, you know, some really obscure piece of data. And like within minutes, it's in my inbox. Phil has gone and analyzed it and charted it and it's got things like that, which I'm very happy about. But he certainly is a data enthusiast.
00:14:11
Speaker
Maybe there's a group for that, you know, a kind of a spin on AA analysts anonymous, maybe. Yeah. Well, I do have to admit, I don't think it's the first date I send you when you send me a random question. I think it's like the fourth or fifth. So it's even worse. Yeah, where you're I'm adding to it and you're thinking about a restraining order. I think that's where the real problem comes in.
00:14:37
Speaker
Anyway, the problems of data and analysts aside, I thought it might be a good time to segue into what we were planning on talking about, which I think, Morgan, you brought up at the end of, or during last episode, where we said that we'd spend a little time talking about education video conferencing, virtual classrooms.
Dominance of Zoom and Teams
00:14:59
Speaker
I'm not really sure what the vernacular is in the US around this kind of thing, but in the UK, probably,
00:15:04
Speaker
probably virtual classrooms is a kind of the kind of common term that we use for I suppose the sort of tools like zoom and I hear you know colleges and university staff faculty tend to call it video conferencing yeah but I think students tend to call it class quite often it became very associated in their mind so it's virtual class or class for students
00:15:28
Speaker
But you also hear video conferencing, which is more the legacy term and previous generations of usage. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it seems like there's not necessarily one catch-all term. So but that's the kind of broad realm that we kind of we said we'd discuss. And I think.
00:15:45
Speaker
just thinking about what we've talked about already in terms of the iPad's data. I think there's a similarity here in my mind that certainly with the kind of pandemic and there's kind of Zoom University that got talked about so much.
00:16:01
Speaker
you know I think it really brought a lot of these tools into focus and you know new products came on the market and maybe we'll talk about some of those things but in a similar way you were kind of saying you know the IPES data you know gives you a better sense of
00:16:19
Speaker
where we are post pandemic. I just wondered where you feel some of these technologies and this kind of space is after that period of really increased usage, increased focus, new products.
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah, well, so what I've seen is, I mean, obviously, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, primarily those, a little bit of WebEx where people who are too stubborn to leave that tool got heavy usage and became the default quite often.
00:16:50
Speaker
But and what happened is people got used to it, faculty in particular. It's just like, oh, I can use this. So now you don't have the same emergency remote teaching where I'm forced to hold my class online. But it's now a tool and everybody's basket that they can use and it's being used. So it's not being used as heavily, but it's like a new tool that's fully accepted. But then the problem or one of the problems is
00:17:19
Speaker
all of the companies from their stock price to the money they invested and their expectations. It seems like there was this view from the ed tech community of, Oh, it's all going to go up. There's never going to be a COVID pullback. And so things are just on a straight line trajectory growing. So it was a very divergent from a reality that I have, that I think we saw there. So as a snapshot, that's what I would describe it as Morgan.
00:17:48
Speaker
Yeah. You know, and, and I think I would agree with that. Um, you know, I was, I was a bit down on them at the beginning cause I sort of thought, huh, you know, one, they're trying to solve with technology. What is essentially a pedagogy problem or a teaching problem, you know, uh, by adding additional features. You know, I also wondered about the extent to which just zoom and teams would add features in. If you don't mind, I think you're now bringing out a bit of complexity that our listeners need to make sure we understand.
00:18:17
Speaker
Yeah, let me back up a bit. I sort of, sort of three, three core buckets of products and, and, and it'll be interesting to see if you agree or push back. One is sort of add-ons to, to assume or teams or something like that. So I would put class.
00:18:32
Speaker
in that, because it's built on that. Custom-built products, like an Engagely or all those sort of things. And then you've got your basic systems, your Zoom and your Teams. For a while there, there were some products that were starting to build analytics around collaboration, which I used to have as a fourth bucket in my head.
00:18:55
Speaker
in many ways, I don't see those around anymore. So I think you've got those sort of those three basic buckets and how they work. So you've got your basic Zoom and Teams, you've got add-ons, and then you've got custom products like an Engagely. Yeah, and I think, you know, to add to that, there's
00:19:16
Speaker
In space proximity, there's Minerva forums, one big blue button, Blackboard Collaborate. There's a whole bunch, isn't there, that have kind of sprung up and even just thinking about other areas that I've kind of been involved in this specific.
00:19:31
Speaker
Conferencing tools that kind of sprung up around the pandemic around music education as well So it's been really interesting to see I mean in a way when we talked about the LMS before we kind of slightly lamented the fact that there wasn't necessarily kind of new new entrance
00:19:48
Speaker
But I just wonder really like just thinking about the kind of question of where things stand post-pandemic. I wonder how much kind of length that they have to go. Some of those kind of more specific education focused tools because I don't know what the picture is in the US but I think
00:20:07
Speaker
With a few exceptions, I feel like the majority of the usage is focused around Teams and Zoom, and they still have a really big share of that space. Although I have to confess, I find some of the education-focused ones quite compelling in terms of product. But is that generally reflective of the picture in the US? Are those two the big,
00:20:35
Speaker
even with the existence of more education-focused products? Oh, yeah. And I think we should point out that, I mean, prior to the pandemic and prior to the mid-2010s, you had Blackboard Collaborate, which came from Illuminate and WIMBA, acquisition of them years before that. You had Big Blue Button. You already had education-specific conferencing tools.
00:21:02
Speaker
but they really were old style. Like the big, I remember one of the biggest applause lines I ever heard in a blackboard world is when they announced that you no longer had to do a Java download and installation to make their video conferencing tool work. That was about the loudest I've ever heard the audience cheer for. So you had these cumbersome old school systems.
00:21:27
Speaker
There were lightly used or used by power users. If you jump into the pandemic, what happened was, you're right, Teams and Zoom became the default period. It just completely changed the environment.
00:21:41
Speaker
I think that was happening already, but the pandemic, you know, the first month of the pandemic, it was just like the default is Zoom and Teams. Then Class ended up buying Collaborate from Blackboard, which was acquired by Anthology. So Collaborate is now owned by Class, and I think they're trying to migrate into a common platform. By the way, they also announced that they sit on top of Teams now.
00:22:11
Speaker
I don't know if you had seen that news. So there's still a plugin, but they're a plugin for both Zoom and for Teams.
00:22:18
Speaker
And then those two products, Engagely and Class, came out during the pandemic. And as Morgan was saying, it really was pedagogical in nature. They were education specific. They had little things like tools on engagement or on just making it easy for teachers to do what they had been doing face to face, but do it online.
00:22:42
Speaker
But to ask the question today in early 2024, that did not change the nature. It is Zoom and Teams are the default.
00:22:53
Speaker
There seems to be geographic regions, like Teams seems to be much stronger if you're a King Charles adherent. But those two are the default despite the introduction of these other systems. So that sort of indirectly also goes, I agree Morgan with your categorization as well. There's a difference between a plug-in and a fully customized system. But that's how I see it.
00:23:22
Speaker
And I think there were always sort of niche users in a way, like high end users. So, you know, if you think about the origin of the Minerva forums, you know, really sophisticated tool for managing online discussions and to you had a tool as well, right, that they used.
00:23:40
Speaker
Well, they were sitting on top of Adobe, I believe. They basically wrapped around that. So they essentially embedded that into their learning platform with lots of customizations around that so that the look and feel was pure to you. But they didn't write their own, if you will, core video conferencing tool.
00:24:04
Speaker
But yeah, you know, it was that sort of high end kind of feel around things like who's engaging, who's not engaging, you know, with the color coded and being able to organize the users in different ways. But, you know, as the pandemic introduced everybody to more synchronous tools you needed, you got this like more people wanted into the system.
00:24:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting that those kind of trends are reflected over here because my impression kind of before the pandemic is that, similar to maybe what you guys were saying, that there was always a virtual classroom or a video conferencing tool around, but it was the one thing I always felt in the kind of
00:24:44
Speaker
edtech suite of universities that was kind of gathering the most dust shall we say and then pandemic hit teams zoom and we had a probably a i don't know if this is a uk only or this happened in the u.s as well but i think we had a bit of a move towards zoom for institutions that were probably less familiar with that and i think on the whole institutions over here were less familiar with zoom and
00:25:11
Speaker
than teams. But a lot of security issues then threw up, which I think just led people to teams. And that was already part of the infrastructure within institutions. And so I think it's interesting to kind of observe similar things that have happened. But I just wonder what this says about general approaches to the way ed tech is
00:25:35
Speaker
I want to jump in here and not derail the conversation, but obviously Neil has lived a charmed life if he thinks that video conferencing tools were the least used, because obviously he's never seen an interactive whiteboard or a video wall.
00:25:51
Speaker
Because those are the top of my list of dumb things people buy that then gather dust or don't get used. I mean, I can't tell you how many campuses I've been at, where they've spent more than a million dollars on a video wall that, at its best, is being used by students for gaming. You know, like, it's one of those things that just don't get used and people insist on buying, but okay.
00:26:15
Speaker
Back to you. No, no, no. If you're going to interrupt, I've got to interrupt, too. Let's not equate Zoom and Teams by any stretch of the imagination. This will be opinionated. But no, Zoom is the thing that changed the game. Zoom suddenly made video conference. Oh, anybody can do it. Well, not my grandparents. They're dead. It was not that effective.
00:26:38
Speaker
My parents and my in-laws could use this. We could do video calls during the pandemic, during lockdown. It was so easy and so reliable, even with the massive ramp up at scale. Zoom is the tool that changed the whole game. Microsoft is everywhere.
00:26:57
Speaker
And Microsoft made Teams sort of good enough that you could still use it. But it was built around the security model. It's like Teams is great if you can get into the conference and start using it. Whereas Zoom was great because anybody could do it. So they're very different in approach. And anytime I see a meeting invitation in its teams, I'm like, oh, geez, I know I'm not going to be able to get in. It's going to
00:27:23
Speaker
It's an external group inviting me. Somebody forgot to set it up. It's completely different where Zoom just works. Now, having said that, I think a difference in the US and the UK, we definitely saw the security issues, Zoom bombing, people getting involved in classes they shouldn't. And a lot of schools wanted people to shift to Teams. So I worked with one university where they had a Microsoft account and then they made
00:27:53
Speaker
teams available to everybody. But in reality, not just classes, but most of the project meetings kept happening on Zoom. So you ended up with this parallel team and Zoom usage where users wanted to use Zoom. The schools wanted to push a lot of people to Teams. And in the US, I don't know the exact market share, but I think here much more Zoom has remained the default.
00:28:23
Speaker
despite the attempt for people to say, let's move to teams for security reasons. Whereas in Canada and the UK in particular, I think there truly was a shift over to teams. So I think that maybe it's the US, the US diverged from other English speaking areas. So that's what I saw, but we need to be careful not to say they're the same thing, in my opinion.
00:28:49
Speaker
But obviously there's a feature request. If anybody from Zoom is listening, a feature request, please make it possible for us to speak with our dead relatives and friends. Then you'll have a real winner.
00:29:01
Speaker
That's an AI feature we haven't covered before, I think. But maybe that's one for another episode. Yeah, you make a good point, Phil. You make a good point. And I think, I guess, you guys probably similar to me spend a decent amount of your time on either Zoom or Teams. And I similarly have a preference for Zoom. But I think that was probably another thing that kind of came
00:29:25
Speaker
through in the pandemic that kind of slight zoom versus teams even though I acknowledge your point about them being different there was definitely that that side of things but I just you know I'm kind of interested in what you know what's happened around video conferencing what that says about the way in which universities develop
00:29:43
Speaker
their edtech stacks because this might be a bit unfair to characterize.
EdTech Evolution Post-Pandemic
00:29:48
Speaker
You've got Teams, the safe option, Zoom, the one that's probably more user-friendly. You've got then other products that we've mentioned like Engagely, like InSpace Proximity, like class technologies that are kind of, you know, their pitches were designed for education, but arguably maybe those are trying to difficult, they're finding it difficult maybe to get traction.
00:30:09
Speaker
within higher education, perhaps, we might say. I just wondered what you think all of that stuff put together says about the way in which universities go about developing the ed tech that they use primarily.
00:30:23
Speaker
Before Phil comes with a serious answer, I've got a semi-serious answer, but one of the most useful things I ever came across was a blog post that somebody at Gartner managed to get past the Gartner guards on April Fool's Day some years ago, where they did the real magic quadrant.
00:30:42
Speaker
So you know Magic Quadrant, it's execution and vision. This was execution and vision. And then they just labeled the different quadrants. So one was labeled, don't buy this bottom left hand corner, top right hand corner was buy this bottom right hand corner was what you wanted to buy. And top left hand corner was what your boss wants you to buy. And that was that speaks to a fundamental truth. You know, you've got what your boss wants you to buy and what you want to buy. And you're caught in that tension. And then I think that's where
00:31:11
Speaker
some of the, you know, the safe versus, versus usable kinds of things. I know certainly instances in the UK in which the, the procurement of zoom was led by faculty really wanting it because he didn't want to use teams. Like that definitely happened in the UK. But you guys are more compliant. So the end result was less a sticking with zoom.
00:31:35
Speaker
I think you sort of grind them down in the end maybe, Steve. I don't know. Persistence. All right, so going back to your question, what does it say about edtech is it forced edtech to get over itself. I mean, the previous generation of tools were awful. They were hard to use. They didn't have the hard to use or the secure locked up and might not have been video walls, but they weren't getting used for a reason.
00:32:00
Speaker
And so March 2020, we got rid of that assumption. And so it was a positive in my mind that EdTech World, and I'm talking about institutions, faculty, administrators, accepted these third-party non-education tools as a core part of their usage.
00:32:22
Speaker
and acknowledge these are better for what we need. And we just got over the scalability issues. And there's a new set of tools that's much more useful. The second thing is that I think on a positive vein,
00:32:39
Speaker
With online education, we were getting stuck too much in this mind that asynchronous is a way to do it. Thoughtfully designed online education is asynchronous, and not just sort of asynchronous, fully asynchronous. And we looked down our noses at anything that had a synchronous element. Part of what we learned during the pandemic is
00:33:02
Speaker
The big weakness of online education, the Achilles Hill in my mind, is engagement, faculty to student, student to student, knowing people, how, you know, feeling like you belong, all these types of things, the ability to ask questions easily. And there was a realization, oh my goodness, all I have to do is I don't need to lecture on Zoom, but if I simply have office hours on Zoom,
00:33:27
Speaker
That opens up a whole new world. Students feel like they belong. And it helps with time management as well. So I think it injected the need or the opportunity to use synchronous elements within an asynchronous course to make it more engaging.
00:33:47
Speaker
So what does it say about edtech? Uh, yeah, it took a pandemic, but edtech accepted general tools that were better than what we had been producing and truly use them. And I also think it's positive that we're getting past the asynchronous only mentality and that we're trying to figure out what's appropriate. How do we mix different modalities together within a course to help out with the design? So there I've taken the positive lens on this for the record.
00:34:17
Speaker
Yeah it was interesting the point you made around, I guess the way I always describe it is that kind of orthodoxy around online education in terms of how it's done and it was I guess probably a trap I fell into as well that you had on one side
00:34:33
Speaker
You know people finding their way who didn't really have necessarily the kind of knowledge base of the experience To you know to teach online and then you had people who'd worked in online preaching from the rooftops about the way it should be done and the fact that is You know, this isn't online and I think probably that slightly went over the top in terms of slightly Well, yeah slightly. I'm again. That's british understatement for you again Sorry
00:35:02
Speaker
We're understanding at Shiver as episodes go on. But yeah, I think that's an interesting one. But just going back to some of the products in the space.
00:35:15
Speaker
I guess in a way I've tacitly characterised some of the newer education-focused products as struggling. Do you see that? Do you see that they're struggling to gain traction? Is that a fair characterisation? What advice would you give to those companies if that is the
00:35:33
Speaker
if that is the kind of correct characterization. I'll jump in, but I suspect Morgan and I differ, so I want to state something that may get her reaction to it. I lament the fact that these companies are in trouble. I think that the tools that class, Engagely, InSpace, those three in particular, but there are others as well.
00:35:51
Speaker
I think they have some outstanding educational features that if used more often would encourage a nudge faculty to rethink how they design a course and truly make it more engaging. So I lament the fact that they're not catching on.
00:36:10
Speaker
And I think the nature of it not catching on is twofold. One is EdTech not truly being enough about pedagogy. But number two, the whole investment assumptions behind it, that these will grow to infinity. So I lament that they're not getting used much. But Morgan, it sounded like you might have had a, you at least started out with a more negative view on them.
00:36:33
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I thought they were interesting and good and were able to sort of nudge people towards some better things. I did wonder about a couple of things. One was, you know, trying to build into a pedagogy the way that, build into a technology is something that really needs to be thought about beforehand, so more of a design issue. I also
00:36:57
Speaker
just want to throw something out there in the sense that I know of one situation where folks were using one of these higher end tools with more engagement built in. It was a small class. It was a small master's degree class. And one of the students came in drunk and took off all his clothes in the course of the class. And the professor didn't notice.
00:37:25
Speaker
So, so even a small class using one of these higher end things, obviously, maybe they need to build in a nakedness awareness, the button or something. I think that's called an edge case, isn't it? I'm mistress of the edge case.
00:37:43
Speaker
But, you know, so the other thing I think going on here, you know, something that I wondered about in the sense that pass in particular was heavily focused on K-12 and higher ed has this fussiness where they don't want to buy something that is bought by K-12, you know, it's sort of like the Groucho Marx kind of thing. They don't want to be part of any.
00:38:02
Speaker
any club that would accept them. So, you know, I think that's sort of going on there. And then, you know, it's also another tool. You know, you've got Zoom, which you maybe use for a meeting, and then you've got to go to this other system to use for a class, and it's both cost and hassle.
00:38:21
Speaker
I was talking to somebody, a friend from one of the LMS vendors, VLE vendors, and we were talking about, I'm glad that I am not having to deal with what class and engagement you're going through right now, listening to their investors who are saying, hey, I thought this would be taking over the world by now. We gave you tons of money.
00:38:42
Speaker
Even though, and I still maintain, there are some great, there are some great designs in those tools. And the way that this colleague responded was interesting. He goes, he goes, yeah, I'm glad I work for a technology that's required LMS. And I'm glad I don't work for a technology that might be beautiful, but it's completely optional. You know, it's add an add on to something I'm already paying for.
00:39:09
Speaker
And I think that's part of the issue is the world, the colleges and universities already accepted, hey, we all have to have team or Zoom, or occasionally WebEx. And now you're saying we need yet another layer? We can handle this one change, not two changes. And I think that was part of it as far as I've seen. And I don't know that we can write them off. I'm just saying it's got to be difficult for them, especially compared to expectations.
00:39:39
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, you guys make some interesting points. I think the K-12 point is an interesting one because I guess there's a, it feels like there's more online schools in that space in the UK, but it doesn't feel like that's necessarily a big market. But I think one of the things in terms of
00:39:54
Speaker
The features of some of these products that feels like it's more K-12 focus, but feels like it's a bit more of a jarring fit for higher education is more of the features around the students zoning out or something like that. It feels like that culturally is more on that kind of surveillance, uncomfortable area for higher education, I think.
00:40:23
Speaker
So the ability to show like red, green, yellow in terms of this student hasn't spoken up in a long time, or are you even talking about like the video, you know, they're not paying attention.
00:40:36
Speaker
Yeah, all of those features that are essentially around gauging students attentiveness and engagement, it feels like my hunch is that that is a feature that's more readily accepted in K-12 than it is in higher education. But I'm the same as you, Phil, to be honest. I think some of these products have some really good
00:41:00
Speaker
features and they sort of take video conferencing on a bit further in terms of education and it's a shame that we are where we are but like you say you know a lot of the kind of pandemic hype around edtech has kind of played a role in that. I mean there have been, it seems like there have been instances in which universities have
00:41:21
Speaker
gone in on the products I think. Was it Southern New Hampshire who use InSpace? Yes. And Coventry here in the UK use Engagely. So, you know, I'm interested in terms of the potential, you know, in the context of
00:41:38
Speaker
online education growing, whether universities will go out on a bit more of a limb to adopt some of these technologies, to sort of slightly differentiate their experience. But in the UK, for sure, I think there's also been a bit of a move towards consolidation.
Future of Education-Specific Tools
00:41:59
Speaker
So there's an organization in the UK called Usizer who does surveys on stuff around ed tech in institutions.
00:42:08
Speaker
One of the messages I think on one of their more recent ones was just, we need to bring all of this array of tools. We need to cut that down and bring them into the center to manage. Yeah, I think that's true.
00:42:25
Speaker
All right, so I'll take Morgan's role and enter Jack Gartner wisdom into our podcast. But I hope, I think the best case is that we're dealing with a very compressed hype cycle around these tools that very rapidly, even before the pandemic, but that particularly in 2021.
00:42:44
Speaker
the hype around video conferencing just got out of control. Now we're down into financial reality in particular, and we're in the trial of disillusionment, including should these even exist? And is anybody using them? There's real problems.
00:43:02
Speaker
The best case is, is that we'll now get back into the plateau of productivity, not as high as the hype, but we'll now start integrating some of the education-specific tools. And if it's, you know, class-engagedly in InSpace or some of the discipline-specific ones, I hope we keep some of those really good designs and slowly integrate them and change the whole field moving forward.
00:43:29
Speaker
So I think best case argument is we're just living through this hype cycle within a couple of years in this case. Yeah, and I guess in a way those product developments aren't going to probably be lost to time, but maybe they'll be adopted into some of the more main players.
00:43:48
Speaker
But yeah, that's great. I think that's been a really interesting discussion. Thank you, guys. And yeah, it'd be interesting to see whether some of those ones that we've kind of lamented where their current position is, how they kind of end up as the year goes on. But yeah. We might even have a follow-up podcast in a year to see, did we see slow but steady realistic adoption?
00:44:13
Speaker
Yeah, we could have a where are they now virtual classrooms. Okay, well, yeah, this has been great. And I know a lot of schools are asking or thinking about these subjects. And yeah, it's an interesting field that I hope changes over time. But it's great seeing you all and we look forward to our discussion next week as well.