Digital Utilities Sequel

It seems like ions ago that I was working with thirty higher education institutions in the Philadelphia region developing and setting up academic and administrative applications such as scoring assessment tests to billing promissory notes.  This was well before minicomputers, microcomputers, personal computer, and local area networking took center stage following Moore’s Law(1).

Because of costs, complexity, lack of resources, and risks -  higher education institutions in Philadelphia including University of Pennsylvania, Community College of Philadelphia, Temple University and Drexel University banded together and setup a non-profit called UNICOL to share an IBM 360 mainframe and all the resources to operate the environment.  Users of UNICOL signed up for accounts, and paid for CPU and Disk usage monthly much like I pay for water and gas used at my house on-demand today.

My first company(2) called Phaedra, became a user of UNICOL developing batch based services. In those early days of time sharing we did not call it on-demand, cloud or virtualization.  Phaedra was able to prosper selling IT services to organizations that had high volume, repetitive processes who desired automation.  Many organizations could not afford to buy mainframes or allocate the physical space,specialized cooling and raised floors to hide all the cabling.  Phaedra was able to offer affordable batch computer services– like scoring a final exam for class of 50 students for less than $25.  No one could beat that pricing – the test scoring service saved faculty hours of effort and reduced the probability of institutions developing their own test scoring application because it was so inexpensive and provided a nice value.

High education was ripe for re-engineering and computing back in the 70's.  Functions were scattered across departments. Many applications included paper based forms.  Segregation of duties and control required extra steps.  High volume during peak periods complicated staffing.  At the same time, custom software was very expensive to setup and sustain. Corporations, universities, government agencies, and hospitals employed hundreds of programmers each to develop and maintain custom software applications like payroll, billing, accounts receivable, registration, accounts payables and so many other functional areas.  Time sharing alternatives offering CPU time, disk space, and applications like Payroll popped up all over the region.  As computing power became more affordable, more and more organizations established on-premise IT shops, acquired hardware and enterprise software.  The pendulum swing justified localized investment rooted in differentiation and control.

Fast forward almost four decades.  Virtualization, Cloud computing – and web services is changing the way we acquire and utilize computing power - or at least supplement what we have.  Apple, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Yahoo, Google and so many other companies are integrating Cloud computing in their product lines and business models.  They are the new digital utilities.  Cloud computing examples can be found are all over the web.  Open any browser or smartphone and tap the power of applications from Maps to finding an open table for dinner or ball game. We are drawn to the services by convenience and utility.

Virtualizing on-premise servers in the Cloud has gained adoption across many industry sectors.  Companies like Amazon, offering an online retail marketplace worldwide - also provides Cloud based virtualized services for IT shops looking for alternatives to on-premise computing.  Microsoft, Dell, IBM, HP and others offer private Clouds or online environments segregated by virtual boundaries.

The big gap in Cloud computing is still the lack of shared services starting with identity management. There are so many credentials created by Cloud applications because there is little emphasis on a shared model.  Thus, services require the duplication of characteristics and ID proofing - while trying to maintain privacy and consumer control.  How many online ID's do you have?

Bridging applications in the Cloud is still a challenge.  You can find a large array of Cloud based applications like scheduling a meeting, sharing photos, hosting a conference call, publishing a market survey to collecting data using web forms - yet they are all independent lacking a shared security or data exchange model.  These online services represent a new breed of solutions following the utility model, offering consumer’s incremental value based pricing.

In summary, today's digital utilities offers automated services – packaged as transactions, economically justified by volume and sustained by adoption. Digital utilities are an alternative to the on-premise or self managed IT environments duplicating and embedding applications managed by local policies, rules and resources. The trend to outsource and leverage external IT resources will continue to power administrative and academic computing.These are not new concepts in my view. History repeats itself – as do the lessons learned.  I hope the sequel is better the second time around.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
[2] Phaedra, Inc.1976, Pennsylvania Corporation

CollegeTransfer.Net Will My Credits Transfer?

AcademyOne has been developing WMCT (beta Will My Credits Transfer) as a new online service for prospective transfer students on CollegeTransfer.Net.  

This new service enables a student to enter prior, current or future course work or assessments and then generate course level mappings at targeted institutions.  Institutions are sorted by the number of potential course credits that will transfer and articulate, reducing the number required to complete - thus lowering the cost and time of completion. 

To start, visit your target transfer profile institution. There are over 1,200 institutions that have a transfer profile published on CollegeTransfer.Net.  Once you find a transfer profile, select "Will my Credits Transfer?" on the left menu.  You can import courses from your Favorites or enter new courses in by selecting the college or university and picking the courses from their catalog.  

CollegeTransfer.Net posts new National College Transfer Services Map

The National CollegeTransfer Services Network Map

Well, it took two years to compile the State Transfer Profiles and we finally finished! Lot's of late nights and blurry eyes trying to figure out how to present 1,000 College and Univeristy transfer profiles across the US in a consistent and intuitive interface. We hope what we created will be useful to students considering transfer, especially those contemplating moving across State boundaries.

You can access the State resources focused on education, college transfer, finding financial aid, finding jobs and linking to the Colleges and Universities in the State by Clicking on the States.

Find a College or University by map location by hovering over the map markers. The region around the State will magnify when you click on the map. Hover over a black marker dot and review the college or university it represents. Click on the map marker to open the College or University Transfer Profile. Click the Zoom Out link below to restore the US Map to full view. If you want to just jump to the State Resources for Education and College Transfer, find your State in the list below.

Click here to access the US Map of States and the Transfer Profiles published on CollegeTransfer.Net by AcademyOne.

Beyond 100,000 Educational Websites

Yesterday, I did a rough estimate.  In 2010 there has to be at least 10,000 main educational websites and another 100,000 sub-sites in the United States aiming to serve educational aspirations.  I am not going into my logic here how I calculated the number.  It really does not matter.  Let's just agree there are a huge number of websites attempting to serve educational related objectives across sectors including industry, military, agriculture, labor and education.  Over fifty years ago, I recall we use to go into gasoline venues and get FREE maps.  My dad collected hundreds of them as we traveled all over the United States.  Today, are the educational related websites scattered throughout the internet like the maps distributed by Texaco, Exxon, Shell, Hess an Mobil?  Are we really achieving the goals of helping people navigate and get to their destinations?

We have billions and billions invested in this web infrastructure keeping many employed. These web destinations attempt to serve consumers with educational content and applications that are designed to help them decide on formal education opportunities. Whether it is information used to further one’s aspirations, such as landing a job or gaining exposure to areas of interest or assessing one’s competencies, we have so much available online to help individuals expand their knowledge, acquire skills and challenge their minds all through a browser. It's mind boggling.

All these websites I mention are used across 50,000 high schools and thousands of companies by millions and millions of people every day, and they are ignored by millions and millions who are the primary target audience as our nation globally competes across world markets hungry for innovation and educated human resources able to excel in the knowledge universe.  These thousands of websites reflect our virtual online abundance – like the corn fields in the mid-west that farmers harvest to feed the world. In other words, they reflect our society’s priority on formal education attainment and credentials.

From public policy architects to higher education leaders, the industry reflects the ivy tower orientation that dictates people must come to it and not the other way around. This is not intended as a criticism, but a declaration that our efforts are evolving on the web to serve consumers with more agile forms than the legacy of education mediums which are limited by physical presence and delivery because not everyone fits into a single learning style or can follow traditional forms of discovery. Brand is becoming less important as more emphasis is placed on how we serve the consumer’s needs and help them achieve their aspirations.


Like many, I feel fortunate we have so many resources devoted to informing consumers of their options and reflecting the diversity of choices available. Yet, there are many who are underserved, poorly served or not served at all by this infrastructure and investment. Institutions generally make the assumption that learning is centered on the institutional practices formally developed around seat time and not learning outcomes directly. We have used courses as a surrogate. Learning units framed by time and grades are not easily comparable because they abstract the outcomes published in various forms ranging from syllabi to meeting objectives. We have developed general education requirements and major specific requirements segmented by how institutions organize specialties.

The debate rages on about this. Meanwhile so many people check in and check out educational opportunties.  Often, they become to realize difficulties they did not expect.  Many do not like the formal educational framework offered, the structure and rituals imposed to achieve formal credentials based upon lecture formats and artificial environments that have difficulty engaging people over a long period of commitment and cost. Or they are not connected at all to educational attainment initially sought, seeking to rebel against the values society places on the importance of formal education and those that control it – the ones who have passed through the front doors of achievement and want to reinforce its relevance because of their past investment.

Still, many just don’t want to follow the masses or are not ready to change or venture beyond their comfort zones. They want independence and control of what they do, learn, play and on what they work. As I ponder this entire web infrastructure, I am left questioning how we could do more to reach people who just don’t see the value or can’t get past their confusion because they checked out so long ago or just do not want to fit into what the Academy offers or don’t know how to find what may be a better fit given the volume of choices and the complexity of sifting through the surface attributes that attempt to distinguish perspectives.

How do we help consumers get re-engaged? Can social networks and media bring them back into formal educational programs and help overcome their reluctance? Do we need to? Or, can we tailor our educational delivery system to fit a more agile framework of teaching and learning? Can we step outside of the formal structures of traditional education delivery? Can we leverage the power of the web to serve consumers and their personal needs rather than the conveniences of how the Academy tries to deliver within a framework designed around economies of scale and the scarcity of knowledge assumed?

Self-paced learning, gaming and the evolution of powerful composite tools with flexible formats will continue to evolve as alternatives to formal education delivery and credentials. How we value the meaning and respect what one can demonstrate without formal bridges across institutions, is another challenging area to think about. People have different learning styles, and a variety of learning formats are available today. We don’t learn everything in the classroom, just like we don’t all consume the news from a newspaper, radio or TV show. Nor, do we only learn things at work. We learn by interacting, like reading instructions on how to construct a toy or by listening to a neighbor’s guidance on how to plant a tree.

Institutions often focus on the convenience of knowledge delivery through small classes, assessing and grading comprehension. Even though most are not-for-profit, the basis of delivery is still governed by economies of scale and breakeven conclusions. Assessing and comparing where someone is in an artificial group called a class is random. Assessing and comparing where someone is across a community and where they would like to be, is where I think we need to go next. These are questions that could be answered through the rich content and resources we have spread across these thousands of websites – bringing what is relevant to a person in a just-in-time format and metered to fit their needs. Does this mean we oversimplify?

Like the games we play on the Xbox and Wii, I feel the various levels have to be inviting and increasingly challenging to the player. We could all post our scores to see how well we are doing against the “world” of players, a form of a credential. Can we compare the achievement of learning from a game like we can with a formal course of instruction? There are a lot of things to ponder as we continue to expand the knowledge universe and economy by being focused on what we can do, not just from what we know. Games can achieve both, by bringing content into context and challenging us to do something with the information we are provided – like adjusting our golf swing when we know the wind speed and direction. How we build the next generation learning tools will be more about continuing the evolution of innovation that focuses on the learner, not about the content or how we currently want to delivery it in units isolated. We want to see how things fit into our world, and what can help us succeed. These are just some thoughts as I am left pondering the venture beyond the fixed views we often find ourselves debating when we consider incremental initiatives that may impact a sector of the market because they are underserved or underrepresented or underperforming according to traditional methods.

Cloudy EDUCAUSE

Weather at EDUCAUSE.  This year's EDUCAUSE conference held in Anaheim, California was overshadowed by clouds everywhere overhead. I was waiting for rain all five days on my west coast trip. Finally, on friday there was a bit of drizzle before I left to return home.  The wind was picking up coming from the north influenced by pending colder air as the comfortable summer slowly ends and fall begins.

What do I mean by this metaphor? Visiting the exhibit hall and conference sessions, I was overwhelmed by the volume and intensity of everyone talking about cloud computing and the pending storms that lay ahead as the vendor community tries to disrupt the monolpoly on-premise infrastructure opening the flood gates for new IT spending.

It was so prevalent everywhere I turned. The vendors and booths were all about collaboration, sharing, outsourcing, lowering costs and reducing complexity. There were also many expressing methods to improve services and methods of delivery following the cloud - such as offering new mobile apps.

Mobility was a hot topic with many offering new services delivered in the palm of one's hand retrofitting processes and methods that still retain the legacy of institutional meaning transformed. These are primative applications canabilizing business models as vendors attempt to shift away from expensive legacy and on premise computing business models.

We are seeing extremes. On one hand, we see further fragmentation of computing power across devices and on the other we see the consolidation of large scale computing resources to serve aggregation and information management - and an attempt at centralized decision making driven by calls by policy to simplify, standardize and align sectors of the industry to improve outcomes from the public investment in education.

In the US, we spend 7% of the GDP which is $1.4 trillion I think.  That is a lot of dough - especially in tough times when people across the world are skeptics and lack confidence in their future given present circumstances.  And, as a proportion of priority, it is far more than most countries around the world.

The conversation and choices about on premise computing versus moving to the cloud was segregated by those seeking to reduce complexity and costs and those discussing new killer applications that would enable collaboration, sharing and improved services with loosely coupled technologies.

Conversations were all over the place with obviously different levels of understandings of the movement and meaning hidden in the clouds and the pending storms facing the education ecosystem outside our control.

Vendors, implementers, users, techies and subject matter experts were talking about moving to the cloud and what it meant to them and how they projected the impact on their products and services. Some are trying to reinvent themselves.  There is some self serving motives implied by all this since the vendor community would benefit from the increased costs to move to cloud computing.

Along with these discussions and to a lesser degree, SOA (service oriented architectures) and web services materialized. This usually instigated privacy and security issues underlined by unknowns and fears.  Who would want to invite hackers to open services - adding more efforts to lock down the IT infrastructure?

The pending political winds as this year's election is around the corner also weaved into the conversations. It is one of the unknowns and no one was predicting the outcome.

I did not hear much discussion on SOA Governance which did not surprise me. But, many discussions were had around private clouds which does address conclusions taken.

We have obviously entered a new stage of computing much like the previous stages where things get very stormy and disruptive. From my view, the precipitation predicted is more like farmers praying for rain during a long draught. It is not a scientific process. There is a bit of ritual.

We have to remember the economic disaster and the impact on the huge IT investments already in place. The storm is still materializing some say and their perspectives differ by distance. The complexity and accuracy of predicting rainfall is like the weekly weather forecast changing every time you tune in with more information.

On premise computing I believe is in the trillions. Much like the large acres of land seeded to bear crops with the expectation of rain, farmers must wait for things outside their control. They bunker down - sheltering from the political and economic winds outside their control. The billions spent each year fertilizing and watering the on premise systems designed around institutional interests reveals the gaps and flaws in consumer facing outcomes because we don't have a one size fits all system that is easy to comprehend.  Our systems are evolving.

Many systems are failing or will fail without sustainable business models. Without a means to support the land covered by what we seed, we can't harvest what we sow. This is a fatal mistake farmers living on the edge of break even fall victim to, just like many colleges and universities are economically surviving borrowing from the future or pushing to make their enrollment quotas leveraging the federal and state support they get.

What does this mean for the long term? Just as farming consolidated as food production moved from local control to high production, does it mean we will see massive consolidation in education?

Another stream of thought trickles down. Many confuse architectures that have long been accepted on the basis they buffer change and handle scalability with fixed investment. The shift to leverage scalability over control and expansiveness over fixed resources across the education ecosystem is also mixed with potential hail damaging crops further. The hail being the vulnerabilities and risks we do not see coming.

Any rain or moisture would help I guess when there is a draught. Yet, given the drastic economic and market shifts brought on by our past global circumstances and disruptive innovations unfolding at a greater rate, I think we will have cloudy weather over head keeping the sun out while debates and challenges unfold about priorities. The sun won't shine for a while until the atmosphere overhead breaks up. This is why it is cool to fly over the clouds missing the disruptive air movements.  It gives us the ability to see things we could not see on the ground.

Cloud computing and virtualization is growing in popularity driven by the promise of lower costs and greater good. But, the greater opportunity is the opportunity to redesign systems to address the driving movement consumers need to succeed as innovations of delivery continue to evolve. 

My long term prediciton or forecast of moving to a consumer centric education system is still supported by what I see.  We need to build tools and systems that cater to people's needs, which begins with how we create and use data systems designed to mask the complexity and deliver the right information at the right time to consumers as they navigate their place in the continum of life long learning.  Like online or virtual games, we have to have levels and a means to track progress that is easy to follow.

Our tools, methods of delivery, information management overall, decision making and our ability to empower learners is constrained by how the education industry has generally designed offerings and delivery oriented toward institutional conveniences.  Learners learn with varying learning styles.  Concepts like TERM and SEMESTER are artificial ways of packing learning overtime wit.  We have COURSES packing content into chunks.  We have GRADES which reflect assessment.

Rain nurtures. Like data, it helps fuel growth, confidence and attitudes. Every rain drop is also unique.  And, in order for us to foster a greater return on the IT investment, we need to realize data is a commodity and our systems should be designed around data standards, enabling the collaboration and sharing consumers seek as they transition geography, artificial borders and varying practices.

Web Portals and Storing Account Profiles

Web portals offer a personal means to store account profiles and account information, allowing the user to return and recall important steps and content bookmarked.  As I previously wrote, web portals are like food buffets - presenting a ton of choices.  When we have unlimited or near unlimited content, we tend to want to consume more than we need.  We take an extra plate so to speak.  One plate can serve many dishes, even offer a seamless experience across the board without having to return to the table. The proprietary perspective of capturing constituent information and using it to cater to the expectations presents another challenge because it means learners have to repeat their information in account profiles all over the place. This is a call for action to support single sign-on and authentication through federation, rather than offering learners standalone account profiles.

Web portals attempt to offer some value in helping constituents bridge the varied applications and step through the complex questions based upon self reported data. However, the assumption that constituents or target audiences can consume the content without assistance is a mistake, especially for constituents who are visiting for the first time. When a patron visits a restaurant and is considering the menu, they are often asked by the hostess or server “Is this the first time you are experiencing our venue?”

This extra step is often missing on web portals because they treat visitors all the same or attempt to put people into categories all the same, leading most down unfamilar paths - increasing the lost feeling. In addition, the sharing of information between applications is so problematic that it is often just skipped, losing any ability to overcome the initial challenges of first time visitors.

Spanning Silos

The design of web portals generally follows a logical perspective spanning silos or sources of content. It often begins with the assumption that the visual content will help learners navigate personal circumstances, choices and opportunities before them as they consider enrolling or following their aspirations.  Is it function over form?

This is not to say the content is not valuable and important.  We all believe the buffet of choices presents what the silos wish to reveal.  All too often, the content is taken out of context or assumed complete because there is just so much information on the web.  It means, web portals are not the end-all either.  They are one means to deliver information.  And, they may not be the most effective way to present content and information to all types of learners - because we all see things differently.  Which is why we often cater to different audiences with different sites or pages.

Web portals are often designed to guide visitors through menus and hyperlinks to other content from the authors perspective breaking content up into byte size related chunks.  Portal visitors, or for that matter the hard to reach prospective learner or students will often struggle to discern differences across content because it all looks good on the surface with graphics and pictures.  The content volume and choices will confuse some because it is appears legitimate and complete - and they follow the immediate paths or instant gratification of choices given.

Imagine throwing a menu with a thousand courses at a patron and asking them what they want after only a few minutes of study. We are forced into selection and often regret our choices.  We compare to others.  And, then discover our likes and dislikes by accident more than thoughtful analysis.