XplanaZine

Microsoft announced this past week that they will roll out a new subscription service for Outlook. For me, it was hard to read this announcement and not be reminded of all the hype about subscription services to software during the last part of the dotcom craze. Back then everyone was talking about a near future in which there was very little software actually loaded on our computers. Computers would have a lightweight operating system and be used to backup online content. All of the rest would be done online.

Well, several years have passed since then and, at last check, the aisles at Best Buy are still full of packaged software and we continue to stuff our hard drives with new programs. But the announcement by Microsoft does remind us that subscription services for software does continue to grow. And, while it may be many years before we realize the dream of an entirely subscription-based and online software world, we have discovered that hosted software makes sense for specific types of applications or services.

Two of the first applications to take off as subscription services were e-mail and blogging. Both are text-based, focus on communication, and address the needs of a mobile culture. They afford us the comfort of staying in touch from anywhere or from any computer. In addition, over time the online interfaces for these applications, such as Gmail and Typepad, have evolved into standards of simplicity and usability.

Another set of applications to find popularity early on as subscription services were education tools. In this case, the motivating factor started out as a need to create interactions and post them online. Such work could be done with client-side software but few teachers had the technological sophistication or time to manage the process. This created a market for Web-based services that handled creating and posting learning objects in a turnkey, easy fashion. Companies like Quia let educators create many types of activities in a familiar way, and then post them to the Web without having to know much about the Web.

E-mail, blogging, and creating learning activities all make sense as online services. They are about creating information that is meant to be shared with a community over the Web. They are more about distribution than they are about local creation and storage.

Education, also, is well suited as a market for subscription services for a number of reasons. First, as we just mentioned, education is all about creating information that needs to be distributed to a larger community. In addition, users in education have widely disparate skill sets and benefit from shared, Web-based technology that can address both ends of the skills spectrum. Finally, subscription services for education make sense because standards have evolved that make the creation of such applications possible.

So far, we’re still in the beginning phases of these services for education. As technology and content standards continue to develop, however, we will see some exciting evolutions. First, we will see more convenient options for individual subscribers. To date, most of the attention has been on large, institutional subscriptions that mandate the use of a single application by all users of a school or university. This makes sense for student information management but not necessarily for teaching. As standards evolve, and as technology develops to address student information needs, we will see a rise in individual subscriptions to learning platforms and learning tools that let teachers explore the best options for their needs.

Another thing we will see in the not-too-distant future is a greater flexibility in the platforms to which we subscribe. In the first phase of educational technology, most of the focus was placed on building systems and tools that were easy to use. We deliberately sacrificed power and individual flexibility for ease of use and a lowest-common-denominator pedagogical model. This was successful and necessary as it brought more users on board and gained important buy-in for technology in education. In the future, however, applications will provide more flexibility and allow users new options for controlling their teaching and learning environment. Rather than be stuck with a single pedagogical option, teachers will be able to mold the online learning environment to match their personal style.

Finally, in addition to technology, we will also have a myriad of content services to which we can subscribe. Publishers will certainly offer their content in granular form via subscription services, but so will various learning object repositories and discipline-specific content libraries. We will be able to subscribe to the content types that make the most sense and port those tot he applications we find the most productive for our teaching and learning.

In the future, we will be able to:

1. Subscribe to the learning system that makes the most sense for us as individual teachers;
2. Subscribe to content and have it delivered directly to our technologies of choice in the appropriate format for each technology;
3. Receive live updates and suggested content learning packages from our providers.

As an example, I will subscribe to an LMS platform that focuses on collaboration and communication (blog and wiki-based). I will also have subscriptions to various content providers and/or LORs. I will build collections of content from these sources (lessons or units constructed the same way I create collections in iTunes) and they will be imported into my learning system with the simple click of a button. The price I pay for all of this will be approximately $100 per year. it will be less if I use open source technology and/or content. Finally, all of my course work, as teacher or student, will be exported regularly to my ePortfolio of choice, also available by subscription.