What next for the LMS?

All of a sudden it’s LMS week* in mostly-US higher education. Nudged by the imminent Educause annual conference, there’s a whole pop-up festival of reflection on why we still have enterprise learning management systems—and why we have the ones we have.

Audrey Watters, D’Arcy Norman, Phil Hill, Michael Feldstein, Jared Stein and Jonathan Rees have all contributed to this thoughtful and detailed conversation; anyone who thinks universities just woke up one day trapped inside a giant LMS dome really should read each of these at least. And Mike Caulfield has nailed one of the key problems: LMS features that don’t deliver the function associated with the name—in this case, the wiki tools in an LMS that rhymes with Borg.

As Audrey Watters rightly points out in her look over the wall at what lies beyond the LMS, the natural mode of LMS development is incremental, calibrated to the traditional operations of education institutions. The bottom line is this: content goes in, grades come out, and the whole thing can be flushed and repopulated with new learners the next time it runs. The LMS is particularly efficient at delivering sequential learning, and so it’s learner-centred in the same way that IKEA is customer-centred.

But the LMS story isn’t centrally about user experience. It’s a story about corporations, their investors, and their attention to higher education as a market. This week, George Kroner and his colleagues at the Edutechnica blog revisited their 2013 analysis of four countries in the global LMS marketplace, to see how the market share of key players has shifted over the past 12 months.

This is the state of things as a bar chart:

LMS ‘global’ market share data, edutechnica.com

It’s a flattening visualisation that distorts the dollar value of the Australian market to an extraordinary degree, and it’s triggered a rerun of last year’s polite shoving between George Kroner and Allan Christie, General Manager of Blackboard’s ANZ operations, as to what counts as the Australian higher education market.

Put simply, it is generally accepted that there are 39 universities (38 public, 1 private) in Australia. (Allan Christie)

In short, I do not consider the list of the 39 universities to be a complete representation of higher education in Australia. (George Kroner)

The thing is, the entire Australian market is a hill of beans in comparison to the US. This is why we don’t belong on this misleading chart, but it’s also why our LMS market behaves the way it does, and so strongly favours the existing near-duopoly. In all but three of our generally agreed major institutions, one well known LMS has the advantage of incumbency, and the other well known LMS has the advantage of not being the incumbent, which is unpopular with its users in the same way that politicians are: generically. In a small system where everyone knows everyone, the influence of other institutions’ decisions is direct and intense. It tethers aspiration to conformism, and cautions against risk. Look at the neighbours, we say, they bought a Kia. Or the other one. Either way.

But this year, the disputed inclusion of Australia’s non-university providers is newly significant. The constitution of higher education in Australia is the subject of a substantial reform bill currently under Senate investigation (submissions to the Senate Standing Committee on Education and Employment have just closed, and you can check them out here.) If the Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill passes, it will change the relationship between the generally agreed 39, and the less well understood mix of others who can award degrees but until now have been excluded from Commonwealth funding.

No one’s sure exactly how Australia’s universities will adapt to all this, or how the non-university providers will be able to take advantage of their access to funding previously reserved for university places. But it’s likely that over the next few years LMS selection in the whole higher education sector will be sensitised to the attraction and retention of students who have grown up online, who are facing higher levels of education debt, and who will be vigorously encouraged by price signalling into comparison shopping. They will encounter a university system with more feedback mechanisms, more features, more special offers, and more personalised interventions of all kinds. Even if we’re not yet at the stage of installing lazy rivers, our online environments will become potentially distinctive campus amenities just like our libraries. Their quality, efficiency, and accessibility will become important in new ways, both to students looking to move quickly through degrees and sub-degree programs, and to university leaders looking for ways to expand and secure new markets, while keeping the overheads from teaching as low as possible.

Meanwhile many senior executive decision-makers setting the strategic direction for the use of these systems will still come from the generation whose own undergraduate experience (and perhaps whose academic careers) avoided online learning altogether. This is one reason, I think, why they have a view of LMS use that is far more utopian than most academics or students. It’s also the reason that universities underestimate by a very long way the proportion of academic staff workload that should now be reserved for LMS resource development, not just in exceptional circumstances like LMS change implementation, but all the time.

The result of this failure over many years to recognise the time needed to use an LMS well means that we end up with the situation Audrey Watters describes:

The learning management system has shaped a generation’s view of education technology, and I’d contend, shaped it for the worst. It has shaped what many people think ed-tech looks like, how it works, whose needs it suits, what it can do, and why it would do so. The learning management system reflects the technological desires of administrators — it’s right there in the phrase. “Management.” It does not reflect the needs of teachers and learners.

This is right, but it’s not the consequence of essentially bad design. The LMS is specifically good at what universities need it to do. Universities have learning management systems for the same reason they have student information systems: because their core institutional business isn’t learning itself, but the governance of the processes that assure that learning has happened in agreed ways. Universities exist to award degrees, to the right people at the right time, and to do this responsibly they have to invest in the most robust administrative processes: enrolment management at one end, and lock tight records management at the other. Actual student learning is something they outsource to their academic faculty, who still achieve this with minimal management oversight except through feedback surveys.

But as we move towards a more competitive system, with tighter budgets and higher expectations for quality, we should probably notice that the LMS is also a performance monitoring system for teaching. Minimally this is being introduced through the development of institutional threshold standards for online learning practice, while the attention of analytics tools is technically towards the evidence of student engagement with learning. As more routine teaching shifts online, there is nothing whatsoever to inhibit the development of LMS analytics for staff performance evaluation—including of casual and sessional staff.

This is why even academics who find the LMS a pretty hopeless teaching environment need to keep an eye on its strategic development, and especially to pay close attention when institutions engage in the process of selecting a new LMS. Because behind all the blither about the transformation of the student learning experience, an enterprise level management system is exactly what it says on the tin.

 

* LMS week: it’s like Shark Week, only longer.

 

Scare tactics

OK, so clearly there’s a move on in the world of elearning conferences and events to shake academics out of our usual torpor.  As everyone knows, we don’t have much to do, and what we do pull off shows not a skerrick of imagination or even rudimentary competence.

So let’s get the email about Blended Learning 2012 out of the way first.  The event seems like a reasonable affair, but it’s clear that the pricing structure doesn’t anticipate someone like me getting along.  Seriously, $2,499 for a two-day event?  Digging a little further it turns out that the target audience is a bit more elevated.  “This event,” purrs the website, “has been specifically researched and designed for … ”

Vice Chancellors, Deputy Vice Chancellors, Directors of Learning and Teaching, Heads of Schools, Directors of IT, Heads of M-Learning, Heads of E-Learning, LMS Implementation Managers, Heads of Flexible Learning and Heads of Blended Learning

$2,499 is obviously everyone’s idea of a reasonable two-day expense at that level. Interestingly, this sum would go most of the way towards buying an entire semester of teaching at adjunct rates for a tutorial’s worth of students.  In fact, set against this, two days of executive conference attendance would want to provide some pretty staggering insights into elearning to get a similar return on investment.

But the real problem is that despite the fact that I’m not any of the above, the email was personally addressed to me and the subject line was this:

Kate, are you designing your course to appeal to the modern student?

Well, gosh, no.  Was I supposed to?  But since you asked, I design all my courses by looking at nineteenth century photographs of pinched and miserable schoolchildren with chalk and slate tablets, and I go from there.

The thing is, if you’re inviting me to something that costs $2,499, you really don’t want to know about courses I design or the students I design them for. You want to know about budgets I control, and that’s why you’re selling the vendor tickets to this networking event at an even more impressive $3,399, so they can hang out with the VP-IT and the CIO.

But if you persist in directing this email to the trenches, then you do need to understand how many of our research projects started with internal seed funding not much more than this, and how many institutional teaching awards offer prizes less than this.

Which brings me to the other resistable offer in this week’s email. This one came in an email from Campus Review, the weekly higher education magazine* that describes itself as  Australia’s:

only dedicated higher education magazine written for the sector by an independent voice. Written with editorial integrity by respected journalists, and strongly focused on issues relevant to the sector including teaching and learning, technology, management, finance, recruitment, conferences and industry events, Campus Review is in touch with its readers.

It’s a bit of a performance to remember the password to CR, but I’ve always appreciated it as a source of credible, sensible coverage of Australia’s higher education news.

So I was genuinely surprised to discover that CR were emailing to check whether I’m “ready for the demands of the Facebook generation”, and on the presumption that I’m not, to invite me to a Blackboard webinar that will help me catch up to the realities of modern life.  (Just a note to marketing: I live with the Facebook generation.  They’re currently 10-12 years old, and they’re Directioners.  If you don’t know what I mean by this, do look it up.)

The painful irony of this communication is hard to overstate.  I don’t mean to single out any one LMS, but Blackboard really aren’t renowned among either educators or students for the engaging nature of their social tools.  It does seem as though they’re now having to tackle the increasing tolerance of their client institutions for platform solutions that include compensatory social tools alongside the campus LMS.  Or, as Blackboard would like us to see it:

As institutions grow they develop a complex ecosystem of diverse platforms, this becomes a roadblock to delivering a customised student experience and institutional agility. Student’s [sic] expectations are high, they assume you will deliver 24/7 service, Facebook-type eLearning interfaces, and course materials to their mobile devices. Benchmarking for this is now too long a process, seeking out proven practices and implementing them without delay is the only way to keep agile and ready for change.

This is a genuinely subtle proposition, presented as a planning emergency. I’m sure TEQSA would be interested to read that Blackboard have now decided that Australian higher education can no longer afford the time it takes to benchmark.

The short version of the invite is this: because the terrible design of social tools native to the typical LMS has encouraged faculty and  institutions towards a more open-minded ecosystemic approach, we now need to know more about all of Blackboard’s other tools that will deliver us from the messy solutions we devised to deliver us from the campus LMS in the first place.

This is complicated enough.  But what I’m really trying to figure out is why this opportunity was presented to me as such an antagonising email from Campus Review.  I understand that they have many commercial sponsors, as well as all their academic subscribers, but I also can’t help noticing that one of their current lead articles is a feature on academic conflict of interest in relation to commercial partnerships, to which I say: right backatcha.

A little while ago, I suggested that a company that had acquired a controlling stake in the critical infrastructure of the small Australian higher education sector would operate discreetly.  I’m now less sure that this is the case, and I’m genuinely uncomfortable at the revelation that the CR subscriber list has proved to be such an obvious commercial asset to the national Blackboard getting-to-know-you strategy.  Or have I missed something?

I’d really welcome a clarification from anyone at all on this, but in the meantime here’s my plea to anyone else who’s planning to send me a faux personalised email alerting me to the “Facebook-type” tendencies of “the modern student”: please stop telling me how to do my job, and please stop these disingenuous attempts at telling me that I don’t understand how the modern world works.  I do, really I do.  It is my absolute privilege to meet and work with “the modern student” every single day, and if you ever want to bring your vendors along to find out how we’re all getting along together (and how we’re already using Facebook-type free public tools to do it), they’re welcome to pay us handsomely for the opportunity, and we’ll put it towards something worth promoting.

* UPDATE: Yesterday I described CR as a weekly newsletter, and created the wrong impression for non-Australian readers that it normally comes out as an email, and the Blackboard advertisement was just included in that.  So I’ve clarified that CR is a weekly web-based higher ed magazine in Australia, and the email that I received from CR was on the single topic of the Blackboard webinar, headed “Are You Ready For The Demands of the Facebook Generation?”  I opened it because I was genuinely interested to know CR’s views in the context of this question. My objection to the tone of the webinar promotion is aimed at Blackboard; my confusion about CR’s reponsibility for the email and its header is that I think it’s at odds with their statement on independence.  Surely Blackboard can send their own emails?

Learning from failure

The problem with edtech evangelism is that it assumes the most valuable lessons are learned from other people’s success. This is why our lives fill up with stories of exciting tools that have transformed this that or the other thing. Exhausting, really.

Given the importance of failure to innovation, it’s interestingly rare to find blogs, lists, journals, or conferences focused on failure, in any field. The Ten Most Awful Mistakes in Online Course Design.  Ten Tools I’ll Never Try Again.  Seriously, I’d find those useful. But we don’t do it this way.  We don’t fly keynote speakers around the world to tell us what they did wrong, from the cartwheeling Prezi that nauseated the audience to the webinars doomed by lag, and the drop box assignments that were impossible to return—or the MOOC in which experienced and highly engaged learners left class early and set up an alternate public discussion of the misalignment of course purpose to course environment, for all to see.

But perhaps we should promote these experiences, because failure is how most of us learn. The only way to test whether or not a new tool does what it promises to do, for example, is to try it in a populated course. This doesn’t always produce splendid results, as Curt Bonk and his Blackboard partners are currently finding out.  Lisa M. Lane’s original blog on her decision to quit their experiment is worth reading, but it’s the appreciative discussion in the comments between the MOOC’s course leaders and the unconvinced that’s really gripping.

Could this awkward experience have been predicted?  Should either Blackboard or Bonk have given some thought to the possibility that an all night party with an open bar might attract a bigger crowd than would comfortably fit the venue?  Was the suck-it-and-see communication strategy really the way to go, given the sensitivity and confusion around openness (and Blackboard’s investment in open) right at the moment? Were expectations driven too high by the opportunity to interact directly with such a well-known eLearning pioneer?

It seems that for some, the problems were embedded in the environment itself—the unchanging assumptions behind the design of online forum tools (“very 1999”, as Lisa Lane puts it). This is the tiny, familiar failure that’s difficult to avoid. Most LMS discussion tools pass the test of course planning simply by being there.  Blog? Wiki? Forum? Yup, we’re good.  It’s only when you try to use them with 50, 100, 1000 students or more, that you start to see how awful they are.

And this isn’t a trivial limitation.  Just as in the face to face classroom, presence is the hinge on which the online gate swings: it’s the simple, human claim that learners make on one another’s time, that enables us all to feel that we’re exchanging ideas with people, not just testing ourselves against prescribed content. If this is important with a small class, imagine how much more vital it is once enrolment cranks up to the thousands. Without it, really, what differentiates a massive online class from a difficult day at the mall?

The comments on Lisa Lane’s blog will ring bell after bell with anyone who has tried to use the communication tools of a standard LMS to engage students in discussion. Somehow, the leading vendors have managed to miss the fact that users want to tailor their online presence, just as they choose how to present their physical appearance. The capacity to craft a personality that works for you is really critical to anyone’s sense of composure in a community of strangers. Users expect to control how their name appears, to use a thumbnail of their choice as their visual avatar, to share images, videos, feeds and links, and to be given some kind of personal site in which they customise, organise and publish what’s meaningful to them, in order to show not only what they think, but to share information about the public online networks through which they move.

This dominos into the second critical issue. Anyone trying to engage with an online class needs to keep up with a snowballing volume of input from others.  Messages need to bundle intuitively, to thread and scroll and quote properly. Users expect to be able to flag, sort and prioritise, to use powerful search tools, and to send quick notes of appreciation with likes, favourites and reposts. Some will save and print, because that’s the way they like to work; and others will need it all to be readable on a mobile screen half the size of a postcard. Everyone will need to skim for new messages, and some will want push notification.  The singular, standout value of learning through online discussion is that it’s a self-transcribing conversation that fosters review and reflection—but none of this works if you can’t find what you’re looking for.

When we undertook an institutional RFP for a new LMS last year, we expected that big companies whose R&D focus must be on the ways in which people use technology and networks to communicate, learn and manage their lives would develop social learning tools that would synchronise with these trends. Any campus LMS has to sit open on a student laptop where the next tab is Facebook (or Tumblr, Twitter and so on).  Students multitask their online learning against a background of rapid, pervasive interaction with friends they genuinely care about; if we’re going to ask them to concentrate instead on staying in the class space, couldn’t LMS designers at least help us out with a social design that’s halfway engaging?

They could—of course they could—so the fact that they don’t is revealing.  My guess is that LMS designers who don’t develop their social tools have made a rational calculation that it’s better for them if we handle this bit. The institutional shift to learning platforms, described so well by Phil Hill in a recent post for e-Literate has really been driven by desperate teachers looking for ways to compensate for awful LMS design. So platforming is a strategy of accommodation that works reasonably well for institutions and exceptionally well for LMS vendors; it’s the admission that L is rapidly uncoupling from M. The inclusion of a few engaging social options like WordPress or Google Apps doesn’t expose the big vendors to much risk providing everything’s bolted to the platform: in fact, it perpetuates dependency on whoever provides the core tools for managing the platform itself.

But as more institutions embrace the platform model, there’s going to be much more churn in social features, tools and options, because this is a wide open space for edupreneurs. Academics will come under increasing pressure to try new things, pushed by articulate, informed student demand. Negative feedback won’t wait for teacher evaluations—it’ll be on Facebook.  This is why it’s so helpful that Lisa Lane, Curtis Bonk and their colleagues are modelling their failure-to-communicate debate in the open, in the truer sense.

Because there’s a whole world of learning through failure up ahead, and we’re going to appreciate these pointers from our peers that show us both how to give feedback constructively, and how to respond to it openly.

Update:

Michael Feldstein’s fresh post that touches on the distinction between edupreneurs and teacherpreneurs (besides a number of other excellent points) really helped me think through some ways forward.  As ever, Instructure  come off well — but will they be able to sustain their personal approach as they grow? Time will tell.

Related articles

• Bonk / Bb MOOC week 1: Motivation & Encouragement (?) (jjulius.org)
• Selecting meaningful #socialmedia tools for a #MOOC or #PLN (downes.ca)
• 4 Reasons Why the Bonk MOOC is So Interesting (downes.ca)

The hardest part

OK, so here’s a quick follow-up on yesterday’s post about Blackboard’s complex rebranding of itself as an open source visionary. Phil Hill thinks this isn’t the key point, and I feel that he’s right.

As I mentioned yesterday, Ray Henderson has issued a significant challenge to higher education, in the form of an offer “to solve the hardest problems in education, comprehensively.”

Educators are really familiar with being the experience of being told that we have a problem that someone is either keen to point out, or worse, keen to fix.  This is the daily grind of personal performance evaluation; something we loosely call “feedback” is the grist that we take to the mill of change every single day.

The Blackboard vision of the “end to end” management of the “educational experience” that should “build on everyone’s best” is shown here in their key promotional video.  If you’re wondering what all these changes mean, this is three minutes of your life worth giving up to watch it again.  It’s a vision of college life that won’t ring true for everyone, but it shows how broad the expectation is that students in the near future (these are not students with pointy ears or flying skateboards) will have all of their financial, communication and learning needs seamlessly supplied through one integrated suite of college-life tools.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the wire, institutions and their employees will glide through a world of handsomely visualised data all effortlessly transmitted from wherever it is anything is hosted.

Everything will just get much easier for everyone, in this world in which all of higher education’s hardest problems are solved.

Except that on this basis, it looks as though higher education’s hardest problems relate to how students find their way around campus, pay fees on time, shop at campus services, and can more easily buy tickets to the game, all while remembering to do their homework. Faculty are now sitting in much more comfortable chairs because they’re working wirelessly everywhere, merrily keeping tabs on everyone’s personal educational growth, while lecture halls are packed with animated and highly engaged students with the world’s premier educational content at their fingertips.

So, OK, I think educators who are invested in this potentially significant culture shift need to be leading a different conversation, about higher education’s harder problems.  Here are four that pop out for this ordinary educator.

1. Adjunctification (or casualisation, depending on where you sit globally): where are we at with this? What’s the business services IT wraparound that will make this standout feature of global higher education less corrosive for individuals, and while we’re at it, less compromising for the integrity of higher education marketing?  Do we even have a plan for ensuring that as learning becomes more complex and diffuses across more opportunities and locations, the majority of actual teaching which is currently resting with the precariously employed doesn’t become an ever more onerous personal IT cost that they bear?

2. The higher education toxic debt swamp: why exactly should students take on the personal cost of a college education, and what happens when they can’t pay it back?

3. What are we really doing in terms of social justice and global regional equity, in terms of widening participation while maintaining the meaningful status of a completed higher education program as a significant professional achievement?

4. Open needs also to be local, so how are we ensuring that the world’s educational content isn’t supplied by a small number of big institutions, most of them located in the metropolitan centres of the northern hemisphere, so that all educational institutions remain effectively engaged in conversation about what matters to their regional communities?

These are hard, interesting problems.  Higher education institutions, in mostly effective partnership with our students, think about these problems every day.  If the mission of our former LMS providers really is to help us solve them, then we need to be a whole lot clearer in explaining our priorities.

Hint: for most of us, it’s not about the ball game.

One professor at a time

I’m still worried about the missed potential for edtech entrepreneurs large and small to engage in more substantial dialogue with educators at an earlier stage in their thinking.  At the moment, the pattern of bringing a mostly non-negotiable product to the RFP table involves both parties in an awkward clash of expectations that Joshua Kim has aptly described as a “bake-off”, and that certainly has reminded me of MasterChef more than once.

So the award for persistence in communicating with educators goes to the Instructure team who have been pursuing me from Sweden to Australia over the last month for a chat and a walkthrough of Canvas.

Instructure are the other company emphasising disruption to the standard LMS at the moment.  Anyone who has dealt with them seems to agree that this hard yards approach to consultation is their signature: they’ve been wearing out their shoes walking the hallways of higher education trying to figure out what educators actually want. To this, I can add that they’re really open to criticism of their product from someone with no technical background, and when they don’t have an answer to a question, they say: “We don’t know.”  This is actually a very good way to talk to people who teach, and it’s quite a bit less frustrating than the approach that’s been taken by several big edtech market announcements recently, where a curiously warped vision of education driven by content, analytics and automated workflow has been sculpted in haste by marketing communications.

The problem facing edtech marketing is that this vision might sell in the university boardroom or the engine room of strategic planning and quality assurance, but it’s one that most individual educators end up pinning to their mental dartboard.  So it’s just as hard for major corporates as it is for bootstrappers to figure out, I think, whether their intended audience sits at the institutional level, with the CIO, the CFO, and CEO and the hand that signs the paper, or whether their appeal should be pitched at users–teachers and their students.  What seems to happen is an awkward amalgam of the two, and this is never more offputting than in the corporate video spruiking the vision of the imaginary college experience.  We’ve all seen them.

So this brings me to Adrian Sannier’s response to Joshua Kim’s invitation to Pearson to do better at communicating with both their potential customers and those who are more sceptical about whether or not OpenClass is really aiming to change anything.

I’ve been genuinely impressed by Sannier’s willingness to front up to the criticism that OpenClass has been premature in its marketing announcements.  The OpenClass webpage has come in for sustained criticism from the education community, which is hard on Sannier as he is the only substantial piece of content on it.  And the unfortunate “see you at EDUCAUSE” answer to most questions hasn’t really worked for those of us not within a hemisphere of the northern American trade fairs, although I agree with Phil Hill that EDUCAUSE itself probably prompted the jumpy timing of the premiere.

Still, when I’m not seeing Sannier herding cats in a cowboy hat, I’m uncomfortably reminded of Quade Cooper; it’s the flipside of both corporate and sporting celebrity that there are times when the camera holds its tight close-up for what must feel like a very long time.

So, to be clear, I think his approach to taking these questions wherever they pop up is helpful, and I just want to follow up on one comment that has caught my eye.  In response to a question about the positioning of OpenClass in relation to other Pearson products, Sannier writes:

Pearson LearningStudio and OpenClass serve different markets. Pearson LearningStudio is the de-factor standard for fully online programs at scale, allowing programs a great deal of control over the academic experience. By contrast, OpenClass is designed for the campus market, where curriculum decisions are made one professor at a time. We understand the needs of these markets are quite distinct and have made OpenClass with that in mind.

We recognize that there is more than one set of institutional requirements around the world for a LMS. OpenClass complements Pearson’s other platform offerings very effectively.

This fleeting attention to the “one professor at a time” model of what actually happens in the classroom is rather lost in the subsequent strong focus on institutional buy-in that infuses the rest of Sannier’s answers, but the flicker of recognition is nevertheless there.

What this brings into the conversation is the most important shift in educational technology, that pre-dates the current potential for modes of managed promiscuity at the institutional level.  Individual educators have been quietly sneaking over the back fence like teenagers for some time, searching for the tools and applications in social media that will enable them to compensate for the limitations of big LMS solutions focused on analytics, workflow and content management (and frankly, we could sum all this up as educational CRM).

Most of us have found our tools through word of mouth—I know I came to Ning and Voicethread via Jane Hart’s excellent annual list of Top 100 Tools recommended by other educators; I started using Flickr memory maps as a learning tool after a bit of searching for something else entirely.  Diigo for Education is a list that provides me with a daily hint to think of something new that might work.  But sometimes the ideas come over coffee with colleagues: what really works for me is when someone who has tried something can tell me what I should avoid.

Educators are naturally good at this kind of crowdsourcing for social learning, and this seems to be the wave that OpenClass is trying to catch.  This is precisely why they’ve garnered so much attention without showing so much as a screenshot: the desire for change is really there.  So even if it’s not clear that OpenClass have the answer, or that anyone actually wants the future of education managed by big publishing, the passionate level of frustration with OpenClass should be giving other edtech entrepreneurs claiming to be disruptive something to think about in terms of their audience: the keenest advocates for disruption are also those who really don’t respond well to a conventional sales pitch.