At the International Society for Technology in Education conference in Denver this week — attended by more than 15,000 K-12 teachers, school officials, vendors, and reporters — the biggest news was Amazon’s release of Inspire. This platform looks like the Amazon consumer shopping site, but it is targeted at helping teachers find, organize, and share freely available course materials. While the system could easily be adopted for higher-education usage, the default content organization is built on K-12 grade levels. There is an area, however, where Amazon has already come to dominate the educational technology market for colleges and universities.
In the past five years or so, more and more software that colleges use for online teaching and classroom management has moved to “the cloud,” meaning it is run from some far-off data center via the web rather than from servers controlled by a college. And these days most of those cloud systems are hosted by Amazon, through its Amazon Web Services, or AWS.
How did this sea change occur, and what are the implications for faculty and staff?
Cloud-based learning platforms are not new, but as recently as 10 years ago they were the exception. The norm for a learning-management system in higher education was for the institution to run the application in its own data center. In fact, colleges initially pushed back against the cloud trend, insisting that academic data never leave the campus for privacy reasons (Ferpa in particular) and for the concern about big tech companies using personal data in ways the colleges could not control.
The big change occurred around 2011 with the release of Canvas, an upstart challenger to Blackboard’s course-management system released by a company called Instructure. This LMS was designed natively for the cloud and built on top of Amazon’s cloud service. Initially this approach was viewed with some trepidation by the higher-education community. You mean my data is not even at the vendor’s site, and I share computing resources with potentially hundreds or thousands of other schools? We’re all running the same application without true versions to control? With the rise in popularity of Canvas, these concerns started to fade away. But colleges gradually accepted the change as they saw that using the cloud meant fewer crashes and the ability to temporarily add more processing power during peak periods, such as the start of the term or during finals.
Meanwhile, new niche learning platforms such as those for competency-based programs and adaptive-learning products were also designed natively for the cloud.
Established providers such as Blackboard and D2L (formerly Desire2Learn) eventually shifted with the market. D2L recently announced its move to the cloud and, for an increasing portion of its platform, AWS. Blackboard in the past week announced a new partnership with IBM to manage its existing data centers and to expand the cloud option using AWS. In fact, as part of this new partnership, Blackboard is moving away from its own data-center technology and adopting AWS as the default. I expect cloud-based options on AWS for both of these vendors to become the norm for all of their customers in the coming years.
Open-source platforms like Moodle are increasingly adopting AWS. And the newest LMS competitor — Schoology — is based on Amazon’s cloud service. Among the MOOC providers, Coursera also runs on AWS and is featured in an Amazon case study. Udacity runs on Google App Engine but does a segment of its homework and grading on AWS. The nonprofit MOOC provider edX has a partner company that runs the platform on AWS.
Thus we find higher education in an interesting situation, where we will soon have a majority of institutions running their learning platforms on AWS, and the vast majority of new adoptions based on AWS, without Amazon actually selling to the colleges. We’re not just talking about most colleges moving to the cloud — they’re actually moving to the same service.
What are the implications of this huge change?
What Are the Trade-Offs?
Different vendors mean different things when describing their offerings as being “in the cloud.” A good example of cloud software from the end user’s perspective is Gmail. Gmail users are not aware of which version number of the software they are using, what new updates are coming, or when those updates will come. They sign up for an account when they need one, they don’t have to wait for it to be set up for them, and they don’t worry or even think much about how it works behind the scenes, any more than they think about the technology behind the dial tone on their telephones. While this change has been enthusiastically embraced by consumers, it involves more complex trade-offs for higher-education institutions, which go well beyond those required in moving from self-hosted software to managed hosting.
Cloud computing represents both relief from worries and a loss of control. IT departments no longer have to worry about whether they have applied the latest security updates or whether they have enough disk space or bandwidth. On the other hand, a faraway company now controls when new features appear in the application. As a result, campus IT staffs have much less control over customizing learning software to the individual needs of a college. Database designs vary in cloud models, but in general, understanding exactly how and how well their data privacy is protected requires more sophistication from the customers. And university purchasing processes often need to be adjusted to accommodate the different business relationship that the cloud model requires.
And what of the question of how institutions spend their money? With this recent move, colleges are shifting dollars from internal IT staff salaries to subscription costs for outside vendors (and indirectly to Amazon). In general, I have seen that the move to AWS and the cloud for learning platforms has kept the total spending equal or even lower in most cases, and there is no discernible reduction in IT staffing. According to Educause Core Data Services, IT staffing has held steady at ratios of 7.7 to 7.8 employees per 1,000 full-time-equivalent students for the past five years. Where there is an increase, however, is in the share of campuses boasting a “faculty teaching/excellence center that provides expertise on IT,” from 66 percent in 2010 to 75 percent in 2014. It appears that colleges are increasing their spending on support services at the same time as they are making the move to the learning platform cloud.
While I have not seen immediate problems with the massive shift to one cloud service, there are always implications with one company coming to dominate a market. And there are clear signs that this emerging dominance by AWS is not coincidental, as Amazon has an “AWS Learning Management System Test Drive” whose purpose is to “provide customers with ability to easily explore the benefits of using LMS solutions on AWS.”
Do higher-education institutions realize how much of their future learning-platform use relies on one set of cloud services? What would happen if Amazon were acquired (not likely, but worth considering) or if it simply changed the terms of data privacy and usage? What if Amazon becomes too successful in cloud services and raises its prices? The cloud service is and has been rock solid, but one change could have effects throughout the educational-technology market.
In the end, it is probably worth noting that the rapid change in five years partially undermines the narrative that higher-education institutions are resistant to change and cannot adopt new approaches when the benefits warrant a change. Yes, higher education can be slow to adopt many innovations, but the move to AWS for learning platforms has been little noticed. There have been some clear benefits to the overall educational-technology market in terms of system reliability and innovation, but the success of one vendor should trigger some deeper discussions among campus leadership about how to understand and work with technology partners.
Phil Hill is a partner at MindWires Consulting, co-publisher of the e-Literate blog, and co-producer of e-Literate TV.