Posts By: Harold Jarche

Open Source Learning Business Model

Posted — filed under OpenSource.

From Scott Leslie; Dokeos is a private Belgian company using the open source Claroline LMS. This company offers training, services and hosting, based on an open source system. I will be interested to see if this business and its model survive. I think that open source in a commercial education venture is not only viable, but that it’s a stronger model. With open source, the vendor can’t hide the system’s weaknesses, but will work with clients to improve the system.

I had previously written about one of my projects last year and discussed this kind of business model.

Oct 2003: I was evaluating LCMS’s for a client and it had been a few years since I’d done this. I saw how much the market had changed. I had conducted some evaluations in 1999 and 2000 for Industry Canada, while I was at Mount Allison University’s Centre for Learning Technologies. The Centre no longer exists, but one of our reports is still available on theTeleEducationNewBrunswick site. We also helped the Centre for Curriculum and Technology Transfer develop the "landonline" LMS evaluation site, which has since become Edutools.

Three years ago there were many choices, or so it seemed. Now the commercial vendors are fewer, and there are even less in the academic market. There are a lot of Open Source systems available, but my clients were uneasy about these, and I understand why. It’s hard to sell your board of directors on technology that has been "cooked-up" by a worldwide network of part-timers. They wanted some kind of insurance.

I believe the next great business model for an elearning entrepreneur is to provide high quality installation and support services for a select group of open source learning systems. Your customers will soon realize that you are not trying to sell them the next upgrade to get more cash, because the software is free. You will be selling your knowledge, experience, and customer service. Many IT departments would be more apt to use open source if they knew that it was strongly supported. Also, there is a lot less conflict of interest when you remove the vendor from the ongoing support.

Having lived through the dot com era, I believe that the marketplace is ready for this new business model.

The Internet and Real-Time Evaluation

Posted — filed under Learning, Technology.

Liz Lawley in Many2Many discusses the merits of blogging conference presentations, and describes the different types of presentations, from good speakers & good content to the reverse. The privacy of IRC or other media encourages criticism, and some critical thinking, as well as plain old heckling. I see this as a pretty good method to evaluate conference presenters, either as formative evaluation for improvement or summative evaluation, to ensure that they don’t get invited back if they can’t cut it. Blogging and chat seem to be better evaluation tools than "smiley" sheets that few attendees complete …

This reminds me of Conor Vibert’s competitive intelligence class at Acadia University, where he has students giving presentations on a business, while others are going online to question their claims, and other students are using chat to discuss the points without interrupting the speakers. It’s exciting to watch Conor’s classes in action at the Acadia Real Time Case Competition.

Open Source is a Credible Option for the Big Guys

Posted — filed under OpenSource.

Even CIO magazine, read by most IT professionals, is coming out in favour of open source, with its recent article on The Myths of Open Source. This is a balanced article, clearly showing that open source does not mean free. Six myths are debunked, such as the idea that there is a lack of support, or that open source is not ready for mission-critical applications. In the end, open source is about standards, like HTML, which are necessary for any kind of collaboration. If you need to collaborate, you probably need open source.

Leadership for the Information Revolution

Posted — filed under Democracy, OpenSource, Work.

Peter Levesque, in Democracy & Socioactive Software and Technology discusses the effect of the Internet in connecting an unprecedented number of people, who in turn have created a variety of community-based initiatives, such as open source, open content and more flexible copyright rules, like the Creative Commons.

He continues on the Cluetrain thread that markets are conversations, and these conversation must be genuine. This should mean that corporations have to "get real" in order to connect with their markets, as many communities do. But Levesque goes on to say that communities have not been as successful as corporations in producing certain kinds of societal benefits.

Levesque calls for new leadership for the information revolution. "I suggest that the leaders will be found among the aggressively intelligent citizenry, liberated from many tasks and obligations by technology freely shared; using data, information and knowledge acquired from open source databases, produced from the multiples of billions of dollars of public money invested through research councils, universities, social agencies, and public institutions."

I would suggest that business models that will allow the leadership to prosper will be essential. These potential leaders, from the "aggressively intelligent citizenry", need to be free from corporate non-disclosures or government gag orders, and the most effective business model could be the free agent working within a peer network. As tenure was essential for academic freedom, so an unfettered business model may be necessary for future leaders. If all individuals had the rights of today’s corporations, what kind of societal benefits would ensue?

Thanks to Stephen’s OLDaily for pointing to this.

Edinburgh Scenarios on eLearning in 2014

Posted — filed under Learning, Work.

I’m posting this information on the Edinburgh scenarios, because I believe it is important, and because I cannot find any more information on the results of the scenario building that took place in Edinburgh last month. Does anyone have any more information? I would like to keep the conversation going. The eLearninternational 2004 World Summit… Read more »

RSS & e-Bay

Posted — filed under Work.

A follow-up on e-Bay and how the customer community is making the process of buying & selling online easier. How do you compete with a business model where customers help each other to use a web service? In this case, it’s an RSS feed to keep track of items for sale in your news aggregator. I don’t use e-Bay but I sure like their business model. From Seb.

Knowledge Work

Posted — filed under Work.

Lilia has written an excellent paper on knowledge work and weblogs. The main uses she cites for blogging (personal knowledge repositories, learning journals, or networking instruments) are the same reasons that I blog. I find that writing about things that I find interesting or useful online helps me to create my own knowledge repository. With Drupal as a CMS, my repository is also searchable, so I can search my own blog to find something that I posted about open source a few months back. This is the main reason that I amalgamated my other blogs; so I could find stuff. The discipline of writing every day is a form of a learning journal, and is similar to what Stephen Covey calls "sharpening the saw". The more you write, the more skilled you become; I hope 😉

Another point in Lilia’s paper is that knowledge work is "discretionary behavior", in that knowledge workers have to be motivated to do knowledge work. Many companies are tryng to find ways to motivate their knowledge workers. This makes me wonder about Peter Drucker’s comment that the corporation as we know it won’t be around in the next 25 years (Managing in the Next Society, 2002). Perhaps the actual structure of work, especially the Corporation itself, is an obstacle to knowledge work. Instead of tweaking the mechanisms of the corporation, through job redesign or cultural initiatives, we should be re-examining the basic structure of the corporation. It is an industrial age creation, designed to maximize physical capital and may not be optimal for maximizing "knowledge capital".

The network, with its dynamic conversations, is where a lot of knowledge work gets done, and we should be looking at new laws to recognise networks in a similar way that we recognise corporations as legal entities. Is anything like this happening?

Conversations on e-Bay

Posted — filed under Work.

One of the first things that Meg Whitman remarked about e-Bay was that ‘It looks like the experience people have with each other helps define your brand.’. The Monitor has an in-depth article on the current CEO of e-Bay, showing how peer-to-peer relationships and a small service fee are some of the keys to the success of this multi-billion dollar company. One more example that there are others on the Cluetrain, who are successful.

Vacuum Cleaner Salesmen

Posted — filed under Work.

If you want to spend a few minutes enjoying a humourous story, then read Cam’s telling of a visit by the Vacuum Cleaner Salesman. Cameron lives in Sackville, and provides technical support for my website. After reading this story, what I really appreciate about Cam is that he didn’t give this guy my name. Cam’s site also uses the Drupal CMS.

More on Conversations

Posted — filed under Learning, Technology.

My previous blog on Blogs, Markets & Conversations, is nothing new. A detailed discussion from 1997 is provided by Juanita Brown, which was pointed out by Martin Dugage, who also hopes to see the end of corporate jargon as a feeble attempt at conversation with markets.