james & internet

Renai LeMay from Delimiter:

“I’m betting that Acer have given this school a massive fat discount to roll out Iconia Tabs instead of iPads. To put it bluntly, I think the choice of an Android tablet instead of an iPad for students at this point is a foolish one. I don’t yet regard Google’s Android platform as being a mature operating system for tablets, with it needing at least another year to become fully baked into this form factor.”

I’d say Renai’s prediction on this is absolutely spot-on. 

Education is all about the apps. And it’s an interesting area, because it’s not really about the breadth of app selection, but the depth of app selection that’s critical.

Breadth is important for the standard consumer. Does the Android tablet ecosystem have a Twitter app? Does it do Facebook? Does it have Angry Birds? Does it have an app for reading books? For playing music?

Depth of app selection is an entirely different notion. For example, you might have an app for teaching spelling in K-12 schools. The app for teaching spelling in Grade 1 (drag out letters, phonetic sounding, spell CAT & a cat leaps out etc) would be an entirely different experience for the one focused on Grade 4 (could involve typing, multiple word meanings, multi-syllabic words etc).

For education to work well, you not only need a good selection of apps as a whole, but you need good selection within the niches.

That’s where I think the iPad is years ahead of their competition. They’ve been filling out those app niches since launch. I don’t think the Android tablet ecosystem is even close.

“Using designs intended for a full screen on a 7-inch tablet is like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit. Not going to look good. But that’s what the Fire is trying to do. Accessing full (desktop) sites on the Fire was a prescription for failure in our testing. Users did much better when using mobile sites.

Using sites optimized for 3.5-inch mobile screens on the bigger 7-inch screen felt luxurious — somewhat like using a regular website on a 30-inch monitor.”

This is something I noticed when I saw the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab, but reading this study has reminded me again of this problem.

Most websites are designed with 2 sizes in mind — desktop, and mobile. When you’ve got a 7 inch screen, you’re trapped in a usability middle-ground. Desktop designs end up with tap targets that are far too small, and mobile designs looks sparse and unwieldy.

The question seems to be; will designers start to build websites optimised for all of these screen sizes? So far, we have:

• 3.5-inch screens (iPhone, iPod touch & many Android phones)
• 4 to 4.7-inch screens (More modern Android phones, some WP7 phones)
• 7-inch tablets (HTC Flyer, Kindle Fire, PlayBook, Galaxy Tab 7.7)
• 10-inch tablets (iPad, Galaxy Tab 10.1, HP TouchPad, Acer etc)

My sense is that designers & companies will target the 3.5-inch & 10-inch sizes for their market popularity, and the rest of the devices will work, but ultimately but either awkward-looking, hard to use, or both.

(Source: useit.com)

“It’s a chewer of battery power par excellence. Again, not a huge shock; this is a big screen phone and I spent a lot of time testing it yesterday, and then letting it sit on the charger once it started plaintively bleeping at me that power was low.”

Why in the name of everything holy would any phone manufacturer make a phone beep when its battery is dying?

Best case scenario: it beeps, you go ‘oh, hey, my phone is beeping annoyingly, I’d better plug it in to the charger’. It stops beeping. You are ambivalent about your phone.

Typical scenario: it beeps & you aren’t near a charger. It annoys you constantly until you are near a charger. You hate your phone.

Worst scenario: it beeps somewhere in your house, waking you up in the middle of the night. You can’t get back to sleep. You stumble out of bed, wander into your living room in the dark, trip over the shoes you kicked off hours ago, fall & impale yourself on a surround sound speaker stand. You actively hate your phone, & it has caused you physical pain.

Makers of consumer electronics — A phone is not a dying child. Never make an electronic device make noise when its battery is low. EVER EVER EVER

(Source: gizmodo.com.au)

OpenClass is a Learning Management System built by the Pearson Publishing group. It currently one of the newest offerings in the LMS space, and comes with a number of unique points of interest. Most notably:

• Super-tight Google Apps Education integration
• It’s free (more on this later)
• It has a new, social-focused course structure

Looking at Pearson themselves for a second, you may know they already have an LMS called Pearson LearningStudio. They claim in an interview at Inside Higher Ed that they serve different markets; LearningStudio is the ‘fully online programs at scale’ product, while OpenClass is the ‘campus market’ product.

What that exactly means, I don’t know. I must confess I’ve never used LearningStudio — I’m diving into OpenClass as brand-new to any of Pearson’s online offerings. Personally though, I’m not a huge fan of those types of product differentiations; they almost always end up as an arbitrary distinction, and usually just serve to confuse.

One interesting facet of the OpenClass launch has been Google’s involvement. Pearson’s initial press releases hammered on about how their relationship with Google was a ‘partnership’, and so many people were under the impression that this would finally be the moment Google jumped into the LMS space. Upon closer inspection this is not really true. To quote ZDnet:

As it turns out, sources close to Google made it very clear that there was no “partnership” between the two companies. As one source noted, that would be like saying the my company had partnered with Apple just because we announced an iPad App.

So if you think that OpenClass is Google’s leap into the Educational space to blow up & remake the whole LMS universe, it’s not.

Install & First Impressions

Installing OpenClass on an existing Google Apps stack is very simple. You find it in the Google Apps Marketplace, then hit ‘Add it now’.

(By the way, Google Apps Marketplace is one of the best admin features of the whole Google Apps stack. Integrating a new system with your existing Google Apps is literally a single click. Then you’ve got single-sign on happening for your profile across systems. Suddenly, cats and dogs are living together. It’s freaking crazy.)

Here’s what it looks like once you’re into the Dashboard:

Almost immediately you can see the Google Apps integration; Gmail, Docs, Calendar & Chat are prominently displayed on the top bar. In that respect, the OpenClass Dashboard could definitely be a nifty, no-effort portal to your entire suite of services. These are more than mere links too; the icons display notifications for unread email, upcoming events, docs & chat.

I can see this being a major advantage if your staff & students are already using the Google App services. If you’re not though, it could be a bit clunky. I tried switching off Google Talk to see if it would remove the icon, and that didn’t work. So OpenClass kind of assumes you enable all those services, which (especially with Google Talk) could be a mistaken assumption. So that’s something to consider.

I like the idea of having the activity feed front-and-centre too. Actually, OpenClass takes a lot of design & user interaction cues from Facebook, and this influence is felt all over the place. If Facebook is the social network, and Yammer is the corporate social network, then OpenClass could definitely be seen as the course-based social network. Here’s the Course Home:

It’s definitely cleaner than almost all LMS systems I’ve seen in the past. There’s no Moodle-esque myriad of tiny icons to click, and no Blackboard-esque ‘Action bar’ dropdowns next to every heading or menu item. There’s no ‘Switch to Student view’-type button either. You are what you are.

Missing Bits

Make no mistake though, this is a very immature product in comparison to other established (weather-beaten?) LMS platforms. A few things off the top of my head:

• No analytics (they’re coming soon via 3rd party tools)
• No API (again, coming soon)
• No integration with a Student Information System. If you want to do that right now, it’d have to be at the Google Apps end, and it certainly wouldn’t pass student data (like grades) back & forward
• No rubrics
• No conditional releases
• The file upload tool is pretty crappy

A lot of these things are features that come with time & experience in the educational space, so I can’t beat them up too badly about it. This is a pretty solid v1.0 featureset, but it won’t be a system that you can swap to from a traditional LMS without dropping a ton of tools.

Two more quick impressions about the system as a whole:

• It uses URL redirects A LOT. I don’t know if that’s a by-product of a Google Apps system or what, but it makes OpenClass feel kind of janky to use. I’ve also encountered blank pages during these redirects, which just flat-out won’t load. That’s definitely not something you want students to experience. Sometimes it also gets your session confused and makes you log back in too, which is annoying.
• It’s disappointingly slow to load. It looks like it’s using the HTML5 Canvas element to generate a lot of the visual elements, which I like in principle (no Flash, no Java = win!) but it chugs. I think there’s definitely a lot for them to tighten up performance-wise. No idea whether this is a front-end issue, or whether they need to throw some more servers in the mix.

Cost & Future

This brings us to the price — it’s a free, software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. That means no hosting costs, no licensing costs. So how are Pearson making money on this exactly?

I’m going to link to this Inside Higher Ed interview one more time though, because I think it’s telling where Pearson plans to go with this product in the market (emphasis below is mine).

QUESTION 6: Where is OpenClass’ service level agreement?

ANSWER: We will provide a level of service consistent with the high level of service that we provide on all of our other SaaS applications. If additional service levels (whether guarantees or help desk or technical services) beyond what is offered with OpenClass are required by an institution those will be made available on a commercial basis.

QUESTION 7: Do we have back-end access to our institutional OpenClass system and data?

ANSWER: Yes, institutions will have access to a rich data set within OpenClass at no cost. They will also be able to access for fee services from Pearson for expert analytics consulting and data analysis tools.

It’s the good old Gillette model — sure, you get the razor for free, but those blades’ll cost ya.

Overall, I think as long as Pearson is committed to the platform long-term it will definitely improve. I like their user experience; it is definitely a new take on the overall LMS experience. I saw an article today on The Australian on how Monash Uni is signing up as a ‘design program partner’ to develop OpenClass. I’m very interested to see how that turns out.

So OpenClass could definitely be compelling if you’re using Google Apps for Education already, because that gives you a pretty amazing set of tools (email, calendaring, documents & more) and a hosted LMS for the princely sum of $0.

It will be one I keep an eye on, that’s for sure.