Graham Glass, etc.

R.I.P. My dear cat Agatha

R.I.P. My dear cat Agatha, who was a loving, kind, and constant companion for the last 20 years. I will miss you my furry friend.

EDU 2.0 in 2011 - A Summary

2011 was a very good year for EDU 2.0, with lots of growth and plenty of improvements. We almost doubled in size, adding 220,000 new members, as well as tripling the number of servers we run and quadrupling our revenue. Some other interesting numbers are:

- 6,200,000 site visits
- 75,000,000 page views
- 2,100,000 files stored (770GB)

Our target is to pass 1,000,000 members in 2012, triple our revenue, and expand from traditional LMS into more social learning.

For fun, here are the main features we released during the year:

January

• Support for purchase orders
• Move 100% from Flash to Javascript
• White labeling
• Log in via school portal
• Support for blackberry
• Prevent simultaneous logins on single account
• Organize assignments listing by lesson
• Custom terminology

February

• Context-sensitive help
• Support for inserting HTML at the bottom of every page
• Added "parents" list for children

March

• Improvements to the class catalog
• Added "To-Do" box that indicates assignments due and need grading
• Added Classes/All class listing
• Proficiency import from CSV file
• Custom content boxes for classes
• Greatly improved layout for profiles

April

• Streamlined students listing
• Printable PDF certificates
• Pop-up analytics
• Added student activity timelines
• Search for students via their student ID
• Improved navigation with fly-out drill-down menus
• Support for customized metadata
• Support for search engine enable/disable
• Added more user fields
• Skype support
• Support for US common core standards
• Ability to hide sections from lessons
• Simplified class configuration
• Custom welcome pages

May

• Added initial set of reports under new "Reports" tab
• Ability to configure which fields are presented/required during sign up
• Added "click-to-edit" to gradebook
• Added new "long" listing to class catalog
• Ability to set default avatar
• Bulk class enrollment from file

June

• Added support for multiple currencies
• Released open API v1
• Allow choice of best/latest for quiz results
• Added SCORM SCO tracking
• Ability to activate/deactivate a class
• Upgraded media player
• Ability to activate/deactivate students in a class

July

• Ability to see a student's enrolled classes via their profile
• Ability to configure whether a student sees a table of contents in a lesson
• Ability to configure whether a student sees the proficiencies associated with a lesson
• Ability to disable/enable login instructions when creating an account
• Added "class status" report
• Ability to edit an assignment's associated lesson directly
• SCORM modules are imported offline to prevent browser timeouts
• Class completion support for self-paced classes

August

• Support for custom account fields

September

• New site design
• New home page design
• Improved color customization

October

• Ability to see last IP address of a user's login
• Lots of site improvements 
• New "site statistics" report
• Ability to copy a question bank from a quiz assignment
• Streamlined lesson listing
• Trash can v1
• Added dropbox assignments

November

• Added undo for deletion of assignments
• New school portal design
• Improvements to quiz and survey summaries
• Email sync improvements
• Added message context so you can see the class of the sender
• Drop-down login box
• Set school time zone
• Added more servers to our cloud

December

• Ability to set an icon for a shortcut
• Started to add automatic useful "to-do" items
• More class catalog improvements
• Added some early testimonials
• Improved the layout of assignments for teachers and students
• Ability to replace the default flavicon
• Added support for custom content boxes in the middle area of a class "news" page
• Upgraded mobile version to new look-and-feel
• Improved news feed configuration page
• Added group events option to news feed
• Added calendar and children icons to mobile home page
• Added more servers to our cloud
• Ability to hide/show custom content boxes on the class page
• Ability to hide/show welcome box on home page
• Ability to send school announcements to a certain type of account
• Added support for custom colorization of mobile interface
• Added support for multiple discount codes
• Improved navigation from groups to their associated class/team (when appropriate)

We have vastly more features planned for 2012, which should make it a lot of fun for us and our members!

Wedding

Here's a slideshow with some beautiful pictures from our wedding.

EDU 2.0 mobile improvements

We've recently made a lot of improvements to the EDU 2.0 mobile interface, and it's looking beautiful now! We're going to release native iPhone, iPad and Android applications in Q1 2012, as well as continuing to improvement the generic version that runs in any mobile browser.

Here's a screenshot of the new home page that you will see if you log into http://www.edu20.org from any mobile browser:

Disney and EDU 2.0

Here's a link to a nice blog entry from Disney about how they use EDU 2.0 for their Disney college program:

"EDU 2.0 is a communication resource like none other!  It gives our Disney College Program participants the ability to make the absolute most out of their program via a one-stop-shop communication and resource masterpiece!"

That quote definitely made my day!

EDU 2.0 passes 500,000 members!

EDU 2.0 just passed 500,000 members!

This is a significant milestone, and we're expecting to pass the 1,000,000 member milestone sometime in 2012.

Here are a couple of graphs related to our growth (they don't include November):

Members:

Revenue:

EDU 2.0 Growth Continues

Here's the latest EDU 2.0 growth curve, which includes June's membership numbers. At this rate, we'll pass 400,000 members in a few weeks time. And since growth has accelerated every single year in the Fall, it will pass 1/2 million members quite quickly. And last of all, the upcoming gorgeous new user interface and major new features should really help with adoption!

Amazon EC2 issues

Amazon EC2 is having issues right now, which is affecting a large number of sites including EDU 2.0. Amazon is usually pretty good and fixing things quickly, so hopefully EDU 2.0 will be available again soon.

The Amazon status page is at http://status.aws.amazon.com/ and news commentary on the outage is here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/04/amazon-web-services-experiencing-one-of-the-worst-ever-regional-disruptions.php

EDU 2.0 growth curve - WOW!

Check out the EDU 2.0 growth curve, which now includes March signups! At this rate, we should pass 500K members quite soon.

New EDU 2.0 Home Pages

We're going to refresh our home page design significantly in about 3-6 months, but in the meantime we've decided to improve the color schemes and layout a little. The main ideas were:

1. Make the EDU 2.0 for School site more appealing to higher education by moving away from the current "colorful" version.

2. Make the EDU 2.0 for Business site more professional by moving to a darker monochromatic appearance.

Here are the two leading candidates:

EDU 2.0 for School (http://www.edu20.org):

EDU 2.0 for Business (http://www.edu20.com):

Any feedback is much appreciated!

Nice blog post re: EDU 2.0

This post is one of the best overviews of EDU 2.0 so far.....

 

EDU 2.0 2010 Statistics

For fun, I compiled a few EDU 2.0 2010 statistics:

• 3,000 new schools
• 170,000 new users
• 1,000,000 files in storage (200GB)
• 3,500,000 site visits
• 45,000,000 page views

It will be interesting to see how these numbers increase during 2011!

EDU 2.0 in 2010 - a reflection

As the year draws to a close I thought it would be fun to outline the progress we made on the EDU 2.0 site during 2010. The feature list is not complete - I left out a myriad of minor improvements that we typically roll out each week.

Compiling this list was an eye-opener to me - I had forgotten how much the site had changed in just a single year! We plan on making even more improvements in 2011 (I posted our initial 2011 roadmap a few days ago).

Jan

• Customizable home pages (blocks)
• Curricula & proficiencies
• iPhone support
• SSL login
• Passes 125,000 members

Feb

• Bronze premium plan introduced
• Foreign domain support
• Lots of performance tuning
• SMS integration
• SCORM support

Mar

• New quiz design
• Many district improvements
• Support for class templates
• Blackboard import (alpha)
• Support for certificates
• Ability to merge schools
• Passes 145,000 members

Apr

• New web site design (major upgrade)
• Display of online users
• LDAP

May

• New home page layouts w/ right-hand column
• Ability to see schools on a map
• Improved class catalog
• Login widget
• Improvements for translators
• Support for Swedish
• Passes 160,000 members

Jun

• Home page updates pt 1 w/ right-hand bar
• Added context-sensitive help
• Improved email invitations
• Communications monitoring

Jul

• News/Activity feeds
• Support for yearly plans
• Ecommerce option for charging for classes
• Passes 170,000 members

Aug

• Updated/unified search
• Added premium support forum
• Lesson flyout navigation
• Pop-up user information
• Custom shortcuts in left-bar
• Ability to launch SCORM in its own window
• Ability to transfer students between schools
• Doubled server capacity
• Passes 220,000 members

Sep

• Improved University support
• Color customization
• PDF receipts
• Class sign-off
• Updated groups
• Analytics
• Passes 250,000 members

Oct

• Pagination of people
• Calendar performance improvements
• Multi-currency support
• SCORM left-menu navigation
• Simpler class configuration

Nov

• Prerequisite and completion certificates
• Support paypal and purchase orders as payment method
• Better support for IE8
• Parent improvements
• Added group catalog
• Support for resending invitations
• Passes 275,000 members

Dec

• Pretty URLs
• Updated Help content
• Bulk class enroll
• Customization login instructions
• Upgraded Amazon infrastructure
• Passes 290,000 members

Code stats update: EDU 2.0 vs. Moodle

About 3 months ago I did a comparison of EDU 2.0 lines of code vs. Moodle. Since then, we've added a ton of new functionality, including:

- major upgrades to groups
- improvements to e-commerce support
- support for prerequisite certificates and auto-awarding of certificates
- improvements to the class catalog
- improvements to calendars
- analytics for tracking lesson progress, assignment progress, etc.
- migration of our database to Amazon RDS
- significant upgrades to our online help

Here are the updated figures for our code base:
- 47,000 -> 49,000 lines of code (+4%)
- 858 -> 880 classes (+2%)
- 6192 -> 6410 methods (+3%)
- 7 -> 7 methods per class (same)
- 5 -> 5 lines per method (same)

So overall, the codebase went up by about 4%, which is tiny relative to the amount of functionality. This is mostly due to the modularization of the code base and the continuous refactoring that we apply to the existing code.

In contrast, Moodle 1.x is over 1,500,000 lines of PHP. I'm not sure what Moodle 2.0 weighs in at.

 

Great EDU 2.0 Review

Check out this great quote from a very complimentary review of EDU 2.0:

"I was in my quest to find online education tools when I stumbled upon Edu 2.0. After playing with it for a while, I think it’s safe to say that Edu 2.0 is by far the most complete online educational tool that I’ve come across."

Nice!!

EDU 2.0: Revenue Growth

We added premium plans to EDU 2.0 for School about 9 months ago, and launched EDU 2.0 for Business (which has no free plan except for the 30-day free trial) about a year ago. Here are plots of the revenue growth for both companies (actual numbers are intentionally omitted):

EDU 2.0 for School:

EDU 2.0 for Business:

Overall, I'm very happy with the growth curves for both companies. It's too early to make any kind of accurate extrapolations, but our goal for 2011 is to increase the revenues for each company by at least 4x. At this point, this seems very doable, especially since we haven't done any marketing yet and the growth to-date has been 100% word of mouth.

Prezi: EDU 2.0 vs. Moodle 2.0

Here's a Prezi that one of the EDU 2.0 teachers made that compares EDU 2.0 vs Moodle 2.0. For a full-size version, click here.

Edu20 vs. Moodle on Prezi

EDU 2.0 in the News

EDU 2.0 just passed 275,000 members and is starting to get some really good press!

Here are a few items that I noticed this week:

1. From the person who runs the EFL CLASSROOM 2.0 site: 

"EDU 2.0 is the place I'm now recommending teacher's start their own classroom LMS (learning management system). I've waited awhile on this call - for a lot of new sites to consolidate and be built. IMO - EDU 2.0 wins for both SIMPLICITY OF USE, FUNCTIONALITY AND POSSIBILITY. Available free to all members and just follow the instructions after registration to gain admin access there. On EDU 2.0, teachers can freely and easily sign up students and create their own course environment. Unlike other LMSs, it is totally online, no downloading and servers necessary. Easy to add or change applications (of which it has a large slate - chat , video, photos, blogs, attendance, gradebooks, to mention a few). Go see yourself!"

2. EDU 2.0 is the #1 entry in this list of great social media tools for teachers.

3. This edtech blog explains why students love EDU 2.0 and why it was chosen over Moodle and Blackboard.

4. EDU 2.0 is the #1 entry in this list of 12 tools for blended learning.

5. The author of iLearn technology describes why she chose EDU 2.0 for her virtual classes.

Rails no-brainer?

I've been using Rails for about 4 years and have often wondered why it doesn't implement the following concept; a Rails controller could define a method like:

def mymethod(a, b)
end

and if you invoked the method with mymethod&a=14&b=hi that Rails would automatically set the variable "a'" to "14" and "b" to "hi".

Right now, you have to write methods like:

def mymethods
  a = params[:a]
  b = params[:b]
  ...
end 

Does anyone have any insight into why Rails doesn't support this?

An alternative theory for "subconsciousness", Part 2

When people talk about consciousness versus unconsciousness, there's usually the assumption that there's a "conscious" part of the brain that is thinking and experiencing the world, and other "subconscious" parts of the brain that are in the dark and just doing stuff without actually experiencing the world on their own.

But the disconnect/reconnect thought experiment made me consider an alternative explanation.

Perhaps a brain can be thought of as comprised of a set of regions, where each region is independently conscious? When two regions merge (i.e. integrate their information flows), they form a single unified consciousness, and when a region splits it forms into two separate consciousnesses. 

For example, imagine that you're concentrating very hard on a tough intellectual problem. A significant portion of your brain would orient around solving the problem and isolate itself from other areas such as the audio region and somatic region in order to work undisturbed. According to my theory, these regions are still conscious, even thought they're much "dumber" than the unified consciousness they were part of. The audio center would still experience sounds, although it would not be able to identify them in any high-level way. Similarly, the somatic regions would still experience a movement of your leg but would not be able to articulate this in any way.

From the "dominant" brain region's perspective, the audio and somatic regions are now effectively invisible since information is no longer flowing between them. But each region is in fact still conscious in its own right. If something in the audio region was jolting enough, the signals from the audio region would probably trigger reintegration with the "dominant" brain region, which would consider the audio region as being previously in its "subconscious". But the audio region was actually conscious the entire time!

In everyday life, I imagine that the regions of a brain are continuously splitting and merging, sometimes within milliseconds. I visualize a brain as a shimmering, continuously reorganizing set of regions, and consciousness as something that merges and splits according to the topology of the regions.

And somewhere in this theory potentially lurks some more clues to the Hard Problem...