Rock the ThirdWay!

ThirdWay@ASU won Pearson Product of the Year at this year's National Sales Meeting in San Diego a couple of weeks ago. It was the first year in the history of Pearson that something other than a textbook has ever received that honor. The prize is shared by a lot of people who have worked together for more than a year and a half to make this new experiment in Public/Private educational partnership successful, on both the ASU and Pearson teams.

The ASU team is led by Dr. Phil Regier, former Executive Dean of the WP Carey School of Business, now VP and Dean of ASU Online. His first officer is Assistant Vice President Kari Barlow, whose previous assignment at ASU was leading the Strategic Technology Alliance program for ASU's Technology Office. Under Phil's leadership, ASU Online has completely reinvented itself to become an emerging leader in online education. For example, in this year's US News and World Report ranking of online bachelor's degrees, ASU Online was rated #1, FIRST, THE BEST in Student Services and Technology out of nearly 1000 responding institutions. As a direct result of the ThirdWay partnership, ASUOnline is now growing faster, serving more students, and delivering online education at an extremely high level of quality.

On the Pearson side, Matt Leavy, Melanie Biel, Marijean Hamilton, Allison King and Kevin Molloy were backed up by a cast of hundreds of Pearson employees and partners who helped ASU completely reinvent their online offering. Working side by side with their ASU Online colleagues, the Pearson team has helped ASU in every aspect of the marketing, recruiting, advising, design and delivery of its online education.
To ensure the quality, reputation and integrity of the ASU Online brand, ASU faculty design and teach every online course, and are also responsible for establishing and enforcing all instructional and academic policies. But the Pearson team provides technology, content, expertise and support services for every aspect of the student lifecycle including:

• Pearson LearningStudio as the online learning platform for all courses; 
• Academic Enterprise Reporting to monitor and analyze trends in student performance; 
• Learning Outcome Manager for tracking the achievement of learning objectives and goals; 
• Enrollment services including engagement, retention and student support; 
• Prospect and lead generation services 
• Admissions support services to better connect with and keep students engaged during every stage of the enrollment process. 

The match between the Pearson ThirdWay offering and tthe ASU Technology Strategy is uncanny. In 2009, ASU was actively seeking a new model for accelerating its online offering. In the midst of a 10 year plan to expand the size and scope of the University while simultaneously raising its academic quality, ASU had already become the nation's largest residential university.
But President Michael Crow's vision for a New American University did not stop with residential education. Since 2005, he had pushed his institution to develop an online school of similar size and quality -- setting a goal of 100,000 distance learners inside of a decade. But after two failed bootstrapping attempts, President Crow knew that he would have to find expertise and investment from the private sector in order to compete online with giant for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix. Determined to maintain online the same educational standard of excellence found on ground at ASU, he nevertheless needed a new kind of partner if the New American University was to be a significant player in online education.
Since 2005 ASU has followed a technology strategy known as Strategic Technology Alliance. Quoting from the UTO's 2006 strategy document:

To meet rising student expectations and create a system of scalable academic excellence the University must turn from the direct provisioning of basic services to the aggressive application of information technologies to the core missions of learning and discovery.  
ASU will accomplish this turn through Strategic Technology Alliances – aligning the institution’s technology services strategy with the strategic technology directions of private sector partners who operate at scales 1000 times that of ASU’s. Strategic Technology Alliance will dramatically accelerate the institution’s technology platform development while simultaneously allowing the university to focus more of its talent and core resources on the application of this rapidly advancing platform to increasing student success, enhancing the learning environment and advancing ASU’s research agenda. 

In order to keep pace with accelerating technical change, and to extract as much value from the burgeoning power of all things digital, ASU sought to extract itself from the direct provisioning of technology services and instead identify private industry partners who, because of their scale and focus, were better positioned to harness accelerating capabilities at scale.
In a blog post from 2006, I outlined the strategy this way:

Vertically integrated enterprises (like Universities) can use a Core vs. Context analysis to focus resources to achieve leadership. Core activities are those which a firm must concentrate their own talent, management, and internal resources on, because they are central to the enterprise strategy. Context activities, by contrast, are those that might be reasonably provided to the firm in partnership with other firms for whom those activities are Core.... 
...if ASU can find a strategic ally who can assume responsibility for a major part of a Context service -- an ally for whom ASU's Context is Core, an ally that provides that service at a scale orders of magnitude beyond ASU's size, a partner subject to competitive pressures that force it to adapt more quickly than ASU is capable of adapting -- then I say we should seek those alliances. So I propose that, as part of its technology plan, ASU seek to establish a set of strategic alliances and work with those allies to build an integrated platform that provides those Context services going forward, a platform influenced by the technology visions of the allies as well as by ASU's goals. 
In each sector, we want to identify the broadest swath of activity that would be Core to an alliance partner, and identify a timeline for transitioning more of this activity -- over a period of months, or even years if need be -- from direct ASU management and ownership in favor of technology allies whose core business is to provide those services. I believe these alliances are the gateway to developing a technology platform that can more closely track the state of the art and allow ASU to focus its resources on the use of technology in its core businesses. 

ThirdWay is a textbook example of this Core v Context approach. Under ThirdWay, ASU focuses on the Core issues of student success, academic rigor and quality. These are clearly Core for the institution. Pearson focuses on providing the widest possible range of support services, which provide the Context for ASU's Core. These services can be Core for Pearson because we provide them to a wide variety of institutions across the country, at a scale much greater than ASU alone. 
Pearson is invested in the success of the overall venture. Unlike product models, where the institution purchases specific services and technologies and then bears responsibility for making them work in the field, ThirdWay makes Pearson a true partner. ASU and Pearson pursue ASUOnline's goals together, and Pearson only makes money if the venture meets the growth and success goals the enterprise sets for itself. 
It's a great theory -- if I do say so myself-- but it's especially gratifying to see it play out successfully for ASU and Pearson. ThirdWay promises to be an important offering for us this year, and I expect I will be writing about it some more in the weeks to come. So I wanted to say a public thank you to Matt, Melanie, Marijean, Allison, Kevin, Kari, and the extraordinary team that has proved this model out and shown us all how a new kind of Public/Private partnership can make the impossible possible... 
Rock the Third Way!

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It Does My Heart Good...

to see Phil Hill at e-Literate speculate on ....

What If OpenClass Succeeds in Disrupting LMS Market? ...

According to Phil people are asking:

will Pearson’s OpenClass LMS offering and associated corporate strategy lead to more competition or less competition in the LMS space for higher ed, or how will the competitive landscape change?

At this point, a couple weeks into the OpenClass beta, I'm really excited that the question is being debated. It means the word is getting out about #OpenClass and people are interested in our new model, and the impact that it may have on the market. A good beginning.

Phil and Michael have an interesting perspective on OpenClass. First, I think they have it right when they say we intend the OC as a disruptive product. We are adamant about making a quality product, but we are also conscious of avoiding feature bloat. We think connection to third party tools and technologies will be crucial to creating the richest possible landscape. This will be an important way that OpenClass will expand its capabilities, to facilitate choice.

e-Literate is also spot on when it says that if the OC platform is successful, it will redefine the LMS category and change the game. OpenClass is intended as a platform strategy -- specifically a co-creation platform. As I understand the term, co-creation platforms allow diverse creators to share a common development and deployment infrastructure at Internet scale to deliver products to a market in an integrated way. Done well, a co-ceation platform can be a tremendous spur to innovation - think eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon.

e-Literate goes on to say that:

If OpenClass is successful ... it will move the learning platform more towards a consumer decision and less of an institutional decision.

I think this would be a good outcome, as long as we can help CIOs prevent data Balkanization. If students and faculty are choosing not just the OC platform, but individual learning technologies and new kinds of content, then OC will be a positive force in education.

I hope we are able to grow the OC into a space that provides an opportunity for innovators to reach faculty and students more quickly, more richly, and that all that activity leads to greater student success. If we can make that happen, the rest will take care of itself.

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Published v. Open content: Clash of the Titans or natural coexistence?

(Deleted this post accidentally...reposting)
I think some folks think that there is a kind of educational cage match between Open and published content: Two will go in, but only One can come out. And we end up with either an exclusively open source or an exclusively published content world thereafter.

I don't see it that way. Seems to me that the world we have lived in for a while is one where open and published content co-exist quite naturally.

Pearson sells educational technology and content. To do that, our content must always add value above and beyond the value provided by OpenSource resources that are available to all of us for free. We are up to that challenge, now and into the future. Professors everywhere are combining their own content with others content, both open and published, to create learning opportunities for students. Pearson welcomes innovation from everywhere, OpenSource and published, that will contribute to student success and accelerate the improvements technology can bring to education.

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A Good Week for #OpenClass

It's hard to believe that Educasue was only just last week. I have to say this past week was a good one for OpenClass.

The response from schools around the world, from the community, and from the press has been terrific, beyond our expectations. Googling OpenClass brings back links to ongoing coverage from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, US News, TMC Net, ZDNet and many others. We were covered in the financial press too, by Forbes, the Mötley Fool, MarketWatch, and NPR's Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal. The blogging and twitter communities are following us extensively. We were the buzz of the show at Educause.

So all in all, a good start.

More than 1000 Google Apps institutions have already activated the OC for their domains through the GoogleApps Marketplace. Several campuses are considering wider adoptions and I'm confident we will soon be able to announce the first campus to adopt OpenClass as their institutional choice.

The challenge now is to maintain momentum and build the trust of the community through effective and open communication. We have a great core of leaders who have gotten us this far and we hope they will help us as we expand and round out the core feature set, build out the exchange, integrate a broad array of technology and content partners and grow.

In the next couple of weeks we will be opening a common instance of OpenClass we are calling OpenClassU. I'm hoping to move the design discussions to a set of classes there, where we can use the tool we are building out together to share ideas and learn from one another.

Would you have interest in an invitation to an OpenClassU?

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Josh Kim's 4 Injunctions

Our friend Josh Kim posted some more challenges for the OC team. We appreciate Josh’s commitment to more open conversations across the community and for his feedback on our willingness to have a public dialog about OpenClass. We hope that this approach encourages others across the community to participate in the future.
Like all good friends, Josh tells us straight, and in his most recent OpenClass post he gave us four injunctions:

1. Utilize OpenClass as an Extranet Platform
2. Aggregate the Discussion
3. Publish all costs
4. Publish all adoptions

Regarding Josh’s latest ideas, we’re happy to say that all of these are in our interest and we plan to do each of these, and most will be substantially in place In the next 3-4 months.

1. Team OC wants nothing more than for everyone to have the opportunity to get their hands on OpenClass. To begin to meet the demand for OpenClass access outside the Google institutions, we will begin sending invitations to those who have registered their interest with us at joinOpenClass.com over the next several weeks.If you are not using Google Apps for Education and would like to get a first-hand look into the product please email info@JoinOpenClass.com We are following a careful growth path, working toward general availability in the first half of next year.
2. Our goal is to provide as much detail around OpenClass as possible to the community. As details around the OpenClass offering crystallize, we will continue to grow our website, broaden and deepen the available information and create a central place for everyone to find information on OpenClass and discuss how it should improve. As a start, this week we added visual walkthroughs of some of the key features within OpenClass on the www.joinopenclass.com website.
3. As Pearson better understands the integration and support models that the community will be receptive to, we will publish how we plan to provide those services commercially. Pearson will offer helpdesk, integration and other commercial services to help meet the needs of institutions that would choose Pearson to provide those services. Remember though that Pearson is committed to provide to OpenClass institution at no cost in a self-service way.
4. TeamOC is eager to share the stories from institutions and other partners as they experience and engage with OpenClass. As we progress we will be encouraging OpenClass users to share their experiences with one another. Look for these in the upcoming weeks on www.joinopenclass.com

We are working hard to meet the demand for information over the next several months as the OpenClass community grows. We are committed to transparency and really appreciate everyone's interest and advice.

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Michael's Followup

Michael Feldstein followed up his first thoughtful post on OpenClass with another. Here's some of what he had to say in his second piece:

I think Pearson is trying to create a platform in the way that Google and Facebook are platforms...I think there is a lot that is compelling about the idea of such a platform, and that it could deliver improvements to the learning experience that would be difficult to achieve without the kind of scale ... that Pearson is trying to create. In essence, the message is that Pearson will get the LMS (and its price tag) out of the way so that, in Adrian’s words, teachers can focus on “climbing the value chain.”

You can read the rest of the post here.
Michael also had some welcome advice for us:

Pearson will need to raise its game if it wants to foster the kind of trust necessary to build the new customer relationships that it appears to be shooting for.

Michael is right. This is a new game for us. We've been playing for a little more than a week, and we already see lots we have to learn, and fast. But we are determined to build on the interest in the OC model and the trust that faculty already place in Pearson when they choose our materials for the students in their courses. The OC team is determined to be of service to this community through the agency of our company, and gain trust one person at a time.

PS - We have posted a slideshow tour of #OpenClass at joinOpenClass.com

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Nixty asks...

Q: @Nixty, a competitor to OpenClass, asks:

What happens when readily available free courses/texts help students learn better than Pearson’s closed expensive courses/texts?
What happens when we have clear research support that shows how students taking the open and free course learn more than students taking Pearson’s closed and expensive course?
Pearson’s stated aim is to make the LMS a commodity so they can sell more of their closed content and course tools. What happens when Pearson isn’t selling enough of their closed content and course tools?

Answer: Is this a trick question? Doesn't this boil down to the more general question --- What happens when a free product is better than one you pay for? There's only one conclusion I can come to - free wins that round. And 'for pay' has to come up with something worth paying for, which is the essence of competition, the arms race that drives economics to produce improvement. I believe Pearson has proven it is up to that challenge for the long haul.
Q: Later in the same post @nixty also asked:

[Pearson's] business model assumes (and this is a fundamentally flawed assumption) that they will be able to sell closed content and tools to support OpenClass. What happens when their assumption proves to be wrong?

Answer: Again, do I have to be careful of a trap? I can only see one answer. Pearson content will always have to continue to be worth money if we expect people to pay for it. Which is why we work so hard to ensure we find new and better ways of ensuring student success. The competition between pay and free will lead both modalities to innovations we haven't yet imagined.
Let the games begin!! And may the best product win!


PS - Nixty has the wrong idea about Pearson's stated aim for OpenClass. OpenClass is open...to all forms of content, both Open and published. We are so committed to open, it's in the name.

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