Why education is expensive, and why technology will not be the solution.

This post is intended to open up a dialogue with the leadership at Adobe. I hope that people at Adobe read this post in the context of a larger discussion that is going on about the merits of outsourcing, a discussion that The Economist captures really well in its recent Special Report: Outsourcing and Offshoring.

Please do not mistake these concerns about outsourcing e-learning product development and support with any negative arguments partnering with colleagues from India. As I've written in other places, I very much believe that India is positioned for a source of strength in e-learning in the years to come.

Further, my experience has been that Adobe Connect is a fine synchronous collaboration / teaching platform, and that the people working in the Adobe Education Division are highly skilled and service oriented professionals.   

However, my years of experience with Connect has caused me to develop serious concerns about Adobe's strategy toward, and investments in, this platform. This concern is largely driven by my experience with the Connect product and support team, a team that has been outsourced to India.   

I would recommend that any of my higher ed colleagues who are looking to adopt a web / mobile synchronous learning platform include an evaluation of the parent company's product and support strategy. In other words, potential customers should ask Adobe leadership questions about the points that I raise below.

Adobe Connect is our platform for synchronous web based (and increasingly mobile) virtual teaching and collaboration.  We chose Connect because it most closely meets the following requirements:

• Works through a browser, with no software download requirement.  (Connect does have an add-in built on the Flash 11 player that needs to be installed for full meeting tools to be utilized.)
• Supports multiple webcam views, as we run classes with up to 30 participants.
• Integration with a landline phone bridge and VOIP for meeting recording and management, with full international toll-free calling support.
• Meeting room persistence, where uploaded content stays from one session to another.
• Dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android.
• Features such as breakout rooms, polling, whiteboards, and meeting recording.

At this point I have not found another synchronous collaboration platform that meets all these teaching and learning needs.  

We are confident that our students are receiving a premium synchronous learning and collaboration experience with Adobe Connect.

I am, however, actively looking (and would be happy to speak with you if your platform does meet these requirements), as a result of the challenges experienced with Adobe around this platform.

These challenges include:

Poor Communication Around System Downtime and Product Bugs:  Over the past two years we have experienced a number of occasions where our Adobe Connect service degraded (we are on a hosted instance), or that key features (such as video feeds) stopped working. In each case these problems were eventually resolved and corrected. The problem is that Adobe Connect team, based in India, has been less than proactive in communicating when technical problems are occurring. Nor has the Connect product team adequately communicated about server or application issues with Adobe's support professionals or U.S based sales force or solutions engineers.  In my experience, the Adobe Connect team is slow to report problems, and reticent to offer a full technical accounting of the root causes of the issues or steps taken to guard against future issues. This has not been a one-time event, but has occurred multiple times, most recently around the upgrade to Connect 9.

Inadequate Investment in Product Evolution:  The fact that Connect still most closely meets our synchronous e-learning and collaboration needs is testament to the amazing work performed by the original Macromedia Breeze team (which Adobe acquired and re-branded as Connect). I've been using this platform (first Breeze and now Connect) since 2004, and the platform change has been at best evolutionary. Connect is surely a much better platform than it was five years ago, but the full potential of this synchronous learning tool is nowhere near realized. Connect remains overly complicated for inexperienced users, with audio controls and troubleshooting still way too complicated and fragile. Adobe has not invested enough resources in simplifying the user experience, or in making meeting running and management more robust. Nor have basic features, such as the ability for meeting hosts to record and export meetings from within the meeting UI been implemented, and the meeting recording is only available in a less than useable flash (FLV) format.  The location of the product team in this instance, whether in the U.S. or India, is less of an issue than the level of corporate commitment for R&D for the platform.  I wonder, however, if a product team that is closer to both its customers (at least its US educational customers) and the company's leadership team would be better able to understand the market challenges and opportunities.

Lack of Ability to Collaborate with the Product Team: The lack of communication and collaboration with the Connect product team is I think the most significant cost for sourcing this platform to India. Adobe has not provided any channel (or at least one that I've been able to take advantage of) to enable direct feedback and dialogue with the Connect designers and engineers.   It is not clear to me that the Connect product team participates in edtech conferences or events. Nobody that I know from the Connect team is providing any leadership around learning innovation.

Adobe has enormous strengths to build on with Connect. Adobe has a dedicated, experienced, and highly skilled services and sales team. Adobe has a very strong core product with Connect in which it can innovate. Adobe has been a long-term trusted partner within higher education, with products that are widely used by faculty, staff and students. Adobe has considerable resources and a large number of talented engineers.

What Adobe needs to do, in my opinion, is signal a strong commitment to higher education via decision to invest significant resources in its synchronous learning platform.   

It may be possible to make these sorts of investments with its existing product and support team in India, as I am sure they are also dedicated professionals. That sort of investment, however, would need to be accompanied by a commitment to greater openness, platform upgrades, and tighter collaboration with customers.   

I question the feasibility of accomplishing these goals when the product team is 8,000 miles away from the majority of its education customers. 

Adobe, and other edtech firms, should be asking themselves if the savings realized by moving product and support positions outside of its main customer base are worth the costs in communication with customers, innovation, and agility. 

Is anyone in Adobe's leadership interested in examining these challenges, and perhaps working with our community to address opportunities to improve both the platform and the support model?

Part 10 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series

Education is political — inherently so and despite the protestations from some quarters when what happens in our schools, in our textbooks, in our brains “;becomes politicized.” Education is political not simply because of the governmental role — federal, state, local — in school funding and policies. It is political because of the polis — the connections between education and community. Education is political because learning is at once personal (and, of course, “;the personal is political”) and social; it is both private and public.

But I’ll leave a round-up of all that happened in 2012 with regards to the “;politics of education” — the U.S. Presidential Elections, the Chicago Teachers Union strike, the Dream Act — for someone else to write. I’m interested here in the “;politics of ed-tech.”

Of course, if education is political, then ed-tech must be as well. As such, “;the politics of ed-tech” isn’t really a trend; it’s a truism. (And wait, “;what is ed-tech?”) So why frame this as the penultimate trend in my year-in-review series? I think it’s because, much like the first trend I examined — the business of ed-tech — we witnessed in 2012 the (education) technology sector discovering, seizing, wielding its power and influence.

The year began with the Internet’s protests against SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect IP Act). The proposed legislation would give U.S. law enforcement more authority to crack down on online copyright infringement, allowing them to ban search engines from linking to “;infringing” websites and require Internet service providers to block access to these sites as well. The technology industry was very vocal in its opposition to SOPA and PIPA (except GoDaddy. I hope you all changed domain registrars!), arguing the laws would “;break the Internet” — in technology and in spirit. Internet co-founder Vint Cerf penned a letter to the author of SOPA, Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas), stating that "Requiring search engines to delete a domain name begins a worldwide arms race of unprecedented ‘censorship’ of the Web.” On January 18, the English Wikipedia, Reddit, Wired, and thousands of other websites coordinated a protest, “;going dark” to express their opposition to the bills. Access to pro-SOPA websites was difficult as Anonymous called for DDOS attacks against them. Rep. Smith put work on the legislation on hold 2 days later.

The Internet had won.

The (Ed-)Tech Lobby

The Internet — whatever we mean by that — isn’t a new political force, by any means. But in 2012, at both the grassroots and the corporate levels, the Internet flexed its political muscles. Major Internet/technology companies increased their lobbyist presence in Washington DC. According to Opensecrets.org, Google had over $ 14.3 million in lobbying expenditures this year (it was the fifth highest spender). Microsoft spent $ 5.6 million. Facebook spent $ 2.5 million, almost twice what it had in 2011. Apple spent $ 1.4 million. Compare that to $ 790,000 spent by Pearson Education, the $ 540,000 spent by the Apollo Group (parent company to the University of Phoenix), the $ 5 million spent by Ford, or the $ 9.8 million spent by Exxon.

What, if anything education-related, did these tech companies get for their efforts? For starters, an updated COPPA, just released today. The updated version of privacy law reflects changing technologies, adding geolocation data and photos to the types of “;personal information” that sites cannot capture from those under 13 without parents’ consent. The new rules also state that platforms like Google Play and the Apple App Store are exempt from liability if they sell apps that violate COPPA. Facebook had protested some of the proposed changed that would have required the “;Like” button (and similar social media plug-ins) to comply with COPPA. That language didn’t make it to the final version, which will allow sites to collect data without parental consent

”for the sole purpose of supporting the website or online service’s internal operations, such as contextual advertising, frequency capping, legal compliance, site analysis, and network communications. Without parental consent, such information may never be used or disclosed to contact a specific individual, including through behavioral advertising, to amass a profile on a specific individual, or for any other purpose.”

Allowing contextual advertising has led several blogs to speculate if this means kids under 13 can join Facebook (I don’t think it does, but I’m neither a lobbyist nor a lawyer so I could be wrong.)

Lobbying doesn’t just happen at the federal level, of course. Salon recently reported on the lobbying efforts of the University of Phoenix to defeat proposed legislation in Arizona that would have allowed some community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees.

And it’s at the state level where the efforts of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) are focused. As I wrote in October (as part of yet-another series I penned this year — this one on “;What Educators Should Know About Tech”), ALEC is

a powerful non-profit organization whose membership is comprised of corporations and conservative politicians. This isn’t merely a lobbying group, as corporate members craft legislation introduced at the state level that promotes free-market and conservative ideals — all behind closed doors.

While ALEC has been in existence for decades now, it’s only recently found itself in the spotlight, in no small part because of the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin and the invocation of the ALEC-sponsored Stand Your Ground Law as a defense by his shooter George Zimmerman. Other legislation that the organization has promoted include the spate of voter ID laws that some argue prevent voter fraud and others say are an organized campaign of voter disenfranchisement.

ALEC currently runs 9 initiatives to impact legislation at the state level, including one specifically devoted to education reform. “;The mission of ALEC’s Education Task Force,” according to its website, “;is to promote excellence in the nation’s educational system, to advance reforms through parental choice, to support efficiency, accountability, and transparency in all educational institutions, and to ensure America’s youth are given the opportunity to succeed.”

ALEC’s legislative efforts in education include legalizing and expanding charter schools and vouchers, passing parent trigger laws, eliminating caps on virtual school enrollment, penalizing students who take longer than 4 years to graduate college, breaking teacher unions, weakening teacher certification requirements, and eliminating tenure. In short: dismantling and privatizing the U.S. public school system.

The list of education and tech-related ALEC members includes AOL, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, AT&T, Comcast, the Entertainment Software Association, the Foundation for the Excellence in Education, the Innosight Institute, iNACOL, K12 Inc, Kaplan Higher Education, Microsoft, News Corp, Reed Elsevier, Scantron, Verizon, the Walton Family Foundation, Wireless Generation, and Yahoo.

Politicians, Policies, and Pundits

2012 was an election year, but education wasn’t much of an issue in the Presidential Presidential campaign (compare Republican and Democrat Party platforms to gauge why). Education technology, even less so. Similarly, education was important in a number of state-level races (see Education Week’s Voters’ Guide for edu-related campaign results), but ed-tech was a question at stake in just one — in Idaho where voters rejected 3 measures dubbed the “;Luna Laws" (so-called for their connection to State Superintendent of Schools Tom Luna).

Voters rejected a proposition that would have required students take 2 online classes to graduate and mandated they all lease laptops. They also rejected a law that would have linked teachers’ pay to standardized test scores and one that would have curbed teachers’ collective bargaining rights.

This trio of “;Luna Laws” should make it clear why it’s hard to extract the politics of ed-tech from the politics of education and/or the politics of tech. Online classes. Mandatory laptops. Performance pay. Standardized testing. Anti-union measures. It’s all part of the education reform agenda, and as such it’s near impossible to just talk about the ed-tech and not situate it in politics/policies/practices.

Five more points of interest:

New Jersey: Until December 14, and the horrific shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut I would have said New Jersey was the site of the most devastating stories of the year: Hurricane Sandy. In the wake of the storm, I think folks saw a different side of Chris Christie. I think they saw the massive vulnerabilities we face in light of climate change. And John Merrow, in a PBS NewsHour segment, highlights why in light of all this “;schools matter” — as teachers and principals help maintain the safety of their students.

Hurricane Sandy wasn’t an “;ed-tech” story per se, although there were elements — thanks to social media — of its being a “;community tech” story, particularly with real-time, crowdsourced news via mobile devices and via Twitter.

Bonus points for New Jersey for Newark mayor Cory Booker, avid tweeter, friend of Mark Zuckerberg, teen media startup founder, and part-time superhero. Also not an ed-tech story. Still somehow relevant.

Lousiana: Louisiana’s story isn’t particularly “;ed-tech-y” either, unless you link, as some folks do, charter schools to ed-tech. (There’s a sense — in some quarters at least — that charter schools, less encumbered by district bureaucracy, are more apt to adopt new computer technologies, more willing to experiment with “;blended learning” (that is, a blend of face-to-face and computer-mediated instruction), more interested in data and learning analytics.) Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has had to rebuild much of its infrastructure, including its school system — and charter schools have proliferated. (About 80$ of New Orleans schools are charters.) New Orleans is also the site of a thriving ed-tech startup community, with the 4.0 Schools lab helping to support some of that innovation. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal also expanded a voucher program this year that allowed public funding to be used for almost any sort of “;school.” This has since been found to be unconstitutional. Phew, because if you see the list of the “;14 Wacky “;Facts” Kids Will Learn in Louisiana’s Voucher Schools,” it’s pretty clear that this was the anti-STEM initiative of the year.

Virginia: Virginia made the “;Politics of Ed-Tech” news this year with the decision at UVA to fire president Teresa Sullivan. In June, the political appointees who make up the university’s Board of Visitors (none of whom were educators) ousted Sullivan (long-time educator, sociologist, administrator), in part because they felt she was slow to hop on the MOOC bandwagon. Massive outcry from alumni, professors, students, academia followed. Sullivan was reinstated. And a few weeks later, the university announced it was joining Coursera (it had already been in discussions to do so when Sullivan was fird.) Ell Oh Ell,.

Minnesota: Insisting "this has been a longtime requirement in Minnesota (at least 20 years)” the state informed Coursera this summer its residents were not allowed to take MOOCs, prompting the startup to clarify its Terms of Service:

Notice for Minnesota Users:

Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.

After much pointing and laughing from the Internet (and suggestions that entrepreneurial-minded folks set up coffeeshops just across the state line where Minnesota folks could legally MOOC), the state said it would revisit the law. “;Obviously, our office encourages lifelong learning,” said the Office of Higher Educaiton. I mean, obviously.

Florida: See also: Jeb Bush.

(Note all the names here that come up as possible contenders for the White House in 2016.)

Plenty of ed-tech is clearly tied to education policies. You can see it in the Race for the Top competition and its requirements that states and districts comply with the administration’s demands for more testing, more data-driven decision-making, more tech. And you can see it in the Common Core State Standards — the new curriculum and the associate development of new, computer-based assessments. (It’s worth noting here too that one of the creators of the CCSS, David Coleman, was named the head of the College Board this year. You know, the highly profitable “;non-profit” that handles the SAT and AP exams.)

All this — the testing, the RTTT, the Common Core — necessitates new procurements, new technology, new apps, new (digital) textbooks, new hardware, new tests, kaching, kaching, kaching — link the business of ed-tech to the politics of ed-tech.

Workers versus Machines?

Will computers replace teachers? Can computers replace teachers? Should computers replace teachers? Folks keep asking these questions — and not just as link-bait-y blog headlines either. I think that people are genuinely concerned. Are their jobs in jeopardy? Are their relationships in jeopardy? Will education be cheaper? Better? Faster? Do we just need a handful of "superstar professors," some webcams, and an Internet connection and we can ditch everyone else?

Oh no no no, we have no plans to replace teachers, most ed-tech companies say reassuringly. But sometimes it feels like they doth protest too much. (Khan Academy, I’m looking at you here.) But then there are the folks who make that agenda overt: “;Why the Chicago Teachers’ Strike Will Help Education Entrepreneurs,” read a headline in Inc Magazine. “;If there’s a bright side to the Chicago teacher’s strike as it continues to victimize (for no good reason) hundreds of thousands of kids and parents, it’s that it will provide an opportunity for many Chicago-based entrepreneurs and education start-ups.” Or take former DC mayor Adrian Fenty who told the crowd at the Education Innovation Summit at the ASU campus in April, “;if we fire more teachers, we can use that money for more technology.”

Some trade-off.

Education Politics and Internet Culture

But remember: the Internet stopped SOPA. Not just the big tech co’s. The Internet. Us. I think about that a lot in relation to the politics of ed-tech: whither the Internet?

What role might the Internet play in demanding better education? More access? More opportunities? Will the Internet be interested in protecting user (learner) data? What does Internet culture have to say for and about education politics? There are some profoundly anti-teacher and anti-school narratives being told (particularly in the tech industry, I think): how do these shape our tech, our ed-tech? Are these narratives being spread or being countered by the Web? What stories do we tell about learning and learning online? I mean, we the Internet, not just the corporate voices.

And how do "the politics of ed-tech" run through of the trends I’ve looked at in this series: data, platforms, DARPA and the Maker Movement, MOOCs, open textbook initiatives, startups, investment, and so on.

Sure, there weren’t a lot of great education-related memes this year, I lamented at one point, in a year rich with political meme-ry. A couple of Sesame Street-related GIFs popped up after a presidential debate, but not much more. But I'd wager education had its fair share of viral TED videos, a viral Clay Shirky blog post for good measure. PBS autotuned Mr. Rogers. And somewhere along the way, a Web of teachers and techies and movie critics convinced the world not to go see the pro-“parent-trigger” education reform movie Won’t Back Down, which can now boast the worst box office opening in history. So we have the Internet to thank for that.

One final note: in April, education historian Diane Ravitch started a blog. I know, right? A blog? In 2012. Heh. But also, wow. Ravitch posts incessantly — on average 10 post a day. Commenters flock to it. While Ravitch is not much of a fan of education technology, she has certainly embraced Web 2.0 tools — the blog, the Twitterz — as a platform for her message. She noted just this week that her site has already seen 2 million pageviews since its launch, invoking just the sort of metrics that the tech industry loves to hype. And really, her blog's become quite the year’s big political ed-tech thing.