I had a great meeting with Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of the OCW Consortium. The OCW Consortium represents over 250 colleges and universities that contribute free and open courses (lecture notes, videos, tests, quizzes etc.). She had a number of helpful thoughts for NIXTY that build upon what Mike Caulfield outlined and take things to a new level.

Overall, she was quite positive about NIXTY. She readily saw the big picture of what we are trying to accomplish and thought the system was intuitive and easy-to-use. She indicated that it was great that we are going to launch with close to 100 open courses and thought we had a solid strategy in place. She also had a number of suggestions that would make the service better. These include:

-    Deliberately create a tutor community. OCWs are great, but having people guide you through the courses can really unlock them and make them more accessible.

-    Create a dashboard/metrics for OCW reuse and user type/demographics

-    Begin our OCW build out with the most popular courses and be deliberate about diversifying course content and institution.

-    Click for credit – provide a list of colleges (e.g., Western Governor’s University) that can provide credit for knowledge gained using OCW. For example, you finish English 101 OCW. At the end, there is a list of colleges that provide assessments corresponding to their requirements for English 101. If requirements are passed, then the individual can get credit for their knowledge.

-    Support Developing World OCW – create an easy way for academic institutions in the developing world to publish their content.

We look very forward to becoming a member of OCW Consortium. Courses created/published in NIXTY will have the option of being categorized as OCW. We are delighted to be a contributing member of this growing community.

Had a great meeting in Cambridge with Dr. Iiyoshi the other day. He is the editor/author of Opening Up Education, which is available for free here. We talked about his work at the Carnegie Foundation and his heart for helping educators become better teachers. I shared the NIXTY vision with him and he immediately understood what we are doing and then offered insight and advice as to how we can make it even better. At Carnegie, Dr. Iiyoshi spearheaded a program called the Knowledge Media Lab. One of the goals of the Knowledge Media Lab was to advance teaching scholarship (a.k.a. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) and promote educational knowledge building and sharing with Web 2.0 technologies. They did this by helping create digital representations of exemplary teaching practices and educational improvement efforts by and for educators, celebrating great teachers (they even had an online Educator Hall of Fame called the Gallery of Teaching and Learning, and providing various online tools and resources to help educators excel in their teaching and student learning. At MIT, he is now helping build similar tools and resources such as the Gallery of Educational Innovation. In our discussion about NIXTY, it quickly became apparent that the NIXTY platform could be used to reach some of these same goals.

We do not want NIXTY to simply be a place to find great content. Rather, we want NIXTY to be the premier place to find great content AND great teaching. We drilled down a bit more and started to find ways we could practically reach this goal of excellence in teaching. Initial thoughts include pointing to stellar teachers as examples. This would include examples of open courses that expert teachers develop. Reviewing these work examples will help other educators learn how to better communicate in residential, blended, and online environments. We also discussed ways of including tips in the process of building out a course. For example, if an instructor uploads a set of slides, then an information box could pop out and query them as to a best practice in PowerPoint presentations. These types of tips could be strategically placed throughout the course development process. The goal here is to better the process and method of course development. Another way would be to promote student teaching. The hard division between learners and educators is weakening and NIXTY will help this along by providing a real peer2peer platform. We could start by focusing on teaching assistants and graduate students.

Overall, it was a very enlightening discussion. MIT is fortunate to have Dr. Iiyoshi on board. I count myself as blessed and fortunate to be able to work with him in our future efforts.

Just had a great meeting with Mike Caulfield. He helped me better understand the OCW World and highlighted ways that NIXTY could help address some of the challenges that OCW faces. Before jumping into some of the steps that we can take, let me first sketch out the NIXTY system, so you can see these steps in context.

NIXTY is a global learning platform that provides free and premium ePortfolios, courses, CEs and learning management systems. Institutions can launch a private LMS/CMS just like they would from another commercial or open source LMS/CMS provider. Additionally, there is a public/open side where anyone can launch a course.

Now, back to the main point, NIXTY can take the following steps to better align with the OCW world.

1. Integrate the OCW banner into course development - when a person launches a course on NIXTY, we can make it very easy for them to make it a OCW.

2. Provide metrics on OCW reuse - if a person creates an OCW on NIXTY, then we can make it very easy for people to reuse that content in other courses. Additionally, we track course content at the micro-level, so if people port content out of a OCW course and reuse it in another course, then we can provide them with an overall dashboard to track macro and micro OCW course content.

3. Help faculty convert course content published in their institution’s LMS to OCW content and publish it on the public side of NIXTY so that it is easily accessible. For example, I’m a professor at X University. I build my course out in my institution’s private NIXTY LMS. When it is done I see a button that says “publish as OCW and make available on Web”. If I press that button, then my course content falls under the OCW banner and gets published on the open/public side of NIXTY. As an aside, we are not yet common cartridge compliant, but will be in the near future (we have the common catridge engine built, but it is not yet integrated with NIXTY).

4. Make NIXTY courses publicly accessible to the OCW Consortium search tool, so that content can readily be found/integrated/exported.

These are a few steps that we can take. If you have additional recommendations, then please let me know. You can email me: glen at nixty.com.

We will be meeting with several experts, teachers, professors, homeschool parents, instructional designers and bloggers in the coming months. Our tour starts on 1/4/10 with a trip to the Berkshires to meet with Michael Feldstein. I got to know Michael a bit better through working with him on a special edition of On the Horizon that addressed the future of online learning and learning management systems. He is a prolific blogger and expert in the eLearning space. On 1/5/10 I have the great priviledge of meeting with Dr. Toru Iiyoshi, Senior Strategist in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr Iiyoshi is the co-editor/author of the groundbreaking book Opening Up Education. In true form, the entire book is available for free at the previous link. Finally, the first leg of the tour ends with a trip up to Keene, NH to meet with Mike Caulfield. Mike is Director of Community Outreach for the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

I’m looking very forward to meeting these individuals. I’ll keep you posted as we meet with other experts in the eLearning space.

I also want to thank Michael Horn for his continued support of NIXTY and for connecting us with Bob Moesta of ReWired Inc. and Stacey Childress of Harvard. It is great to be able to consult with people who are kindred spirits.

We launched a NIXTY fan page on Facebook a few weeks ago. We are all surprised by the amount of people that have “fanned” NIXTY. NIXTY fans will get access to the site and other goodies much earlier than the general public. Jump in and add us as a fan! We’d love to have you as part of our initial team.

Had a great presentation out at William and Mary the other day. Talked about NIXTY, social media strategy, and search engine optimization with their MBA graduates. Very creative group of students and faculty. Looking forward to working with them in the future!

We are getting closer to launch! What you see below are several screenshots of our soon to be released ePortfolios. In the very near future we will be posting screenshots of our courses and learning management system. We’d love to hear your thoughts/feedback on the ePortfolio designs! You can click on them to see an enlarged view. Thanks!

5 Reasons to Create an ePortfolio

1. Define your space on the Web
2. Post your CV or Resume
3. Display your work
3. Help get a job or into college/graduate school
4. Network with other educators, mentors, and students
5. Attract students for courses you are teaching on NIXTY

Sarah Lacy has a nice post up on techcrunch about the need for startup to swing for the fences and try to change the world. I once heard a person say that your mission statement captures where you are now, your vision statement captures where you want to end up, and your strategic plan shows you how to get from your mission to your vision.

Our vision, even though our engineers cringe whenever I use this terminology, is to be the educational operating system for the Web. Fred Wilson alluded to this in a post a few months ago, where he conceptualized the Internet as one big operating system with default services. You want to search, you use Google. You want to buy something, you use Amazon. These services act like programs (think word or powerpoint) for the Web. We want to be that default system for education.

We realize that this is a preposterous goal. Jim Collins has underlied the importance of Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Well, this is our BHAG. Chuckle, laugh, criticise, but join us! Sign up for our beta. We need your help reaching this goal!

Beta testing will begin in late December. In the near future, we’ll post some screenshots of the ePortfolios, courses, and learning management systems that we have been working on.

The LMS/CMS landscape has just significantly shifted.  Angel was a great company and it is a real shame that they’ve been acquired. They were great innovators and now they are being folded into Bb. Bb is suggesting that they’ll learn from ANGEL by providing better customer service and integrating ANGEL’s innovative features. Remember the WebCT merger? I don’t think it’ll play out as the PR folks are spinning it.

I’ve got to wonder about how the ANGEL executives feel about this outcome. They’ve spent the last 9 years building a great company with strong revenues, only to have to sell it to Bb for considerably less than it is actually worth. Rumors suggest ANGEL had to sell b/c their chief stakeholder, Indiana University, needed some capital. I’m not sure if this is true or not, but their press releases seem to more than hint that the increased capital was a significant factor in the sale.

The sales team has to also be incredibly frustrated by this situation. They’ve spent the last 9 years attracting clients from Bb. Angel, by far, had the best rates of winning Bb clients over. Now these sales executives are stuck. They’ve won clients over, trained them, celebrated them, and now…ironically…they have to turn them right back over to Bb. How’s that for insane? ANGEL clients are rightly furious about this situation. Many of them chose ANGEL, so they didn’t have to choose Bb.

All of that said, Bb suing Desire2Learn for patent infringement, and now acquiring ANGEL, has resulted in a significant shifting in the LMS market. There are now several smaller companies competing for the title of “not Bb.” Who knows how this will all shake out. Many are commenting that it’ll drive traffic to these smaller commerical companies and that it will also be a boon for Moodle and Sakai. I’m sure all of these parties will benefit from the acquisition.

How does NIXTY fit into all of this? Well, for one, we are going to be incredibly more affordable than any of the other commerical providers out there. Pricing is hard to come by, but right now we are imagining we will be approximately 20% of the cost of the smaller vendors and likely 10% of the cost of Bb. People are amazed to hear that we will be able to offer a robust LMS at that low cost. They often think we are exaggerating. The dirty secret in the LMS industry is that overhead costs are actually quite low if you are smart about running your company. The easy majority of the costs are spent on sales and marketing. If you can get market adoption with very little sales costs, then you can charge really low prices and still generate considerable revenue.

How do you get the word out about your LMS without spending a ton of money on advertising, sales, marketing, conferences, PR etc. Easy, you build an awesome product that solves client problems and you connect it to an open platform that provides free tools that are needed by learners, educators, and institutions. You also have to be creative about finding ways to foster collaboration so that real network effects occur.

We’d love for you to be part of that process. Sign up for our beta and help us fulfill our mission of Empowering Education for Everyone!