Blurts

Meanwhile, Evernote has confirmed to TechCrunch that in the past month the company has lost many senior executives, including its CTO Anirban Kundu, CFO Vincent Toolan, CPO Erik Wrobel and head of HR Michelle Wagner.

Evernote has been my web clipper for several years. It fills the gap between my online reading and writing. I use it from multiple devices and it works very well. 

However, it costs far too much for the way I use it. It is a subscription service for $70 a year. This is just too much for me to pay for an activity I could probably do in a dozen different ways if I made the effort to switch. 

Evernote has had poor guidance. Perhaps it was run by engineers who delighted in what they could make the service do without bothering to understand what most users wanted it to do. Perhaps the decision makers set the price on the capabilities of the service without bothering to understand that few individuals use most of the features. Feature bloat has been the ruin of many software products. Perhaps the decision makers just didn’t care. 

I am guessing they care now. They have been forced to reduce the price of Evernote and many of the big money executives are gone. 

This happens over and over again. There used to be multiple levels of web design and imaging manipulation software from several companies and these companies have dropped the less expensive and less capable product from their offerings. The problem was that most folks could do everything they wanted to do with the less expensive product. 

I must be missing something in the repeated failure of this approach. I see the problem as the difficulty companies have in creating an additional useful product and pricing the value of an existing product in line with the benefit delivered. 

Forty dollars is closer to the actual value I would put on Evernote. I would price the annual fee at $25, but I suppose the company will try $40 until too many folks move on. 

The WordPress platform I have known and loved is moving to a new approach. Instead of entering text within the familiar window that resembles a word processor, you now assemble posts using blocks. This seems to be the way online tools are going. I doubt it will modify my behavior as a blogger, but I bet it will expand the use of WordPress as a way to create sites. I have not used SquareSpace, but I imagine the new WordPress will function more like SquareSpace.

What you see here is the paragraph block. It offers the options for modifying the text content within paragraphs. 

I recently came across a post from a past student, now faculty member, complaining about the lack of accommodations for vision impaired students in online content. He stated that this was a personal issue as he was losing his sight. I must say that this was the first I knew of his vision issues.

Since I create online content intended for student use, this did cause me to consider this situation. I admit that I do not take the time to add “alt text” to images I include and recognize this as an expectation for vision-impaired students. This got me thinking about why. I am aware of this issue and recognize that it is easy enough to do when working with higher level web design tools such as Dreamweaver. Adding an image presents you with options for that image – use as a link, etc. and includes a textbox for an alt text.

This led me to wonder about tools such as WordPress (the tool used for this blog). I recognize I could use the html view and enter an alt text tag manually, but I doubted that most users who know how or be willing to do so. I assumed that there would be another option and I was right (see below). The section for setting attributes of the image appears on the right-hand side.

Since many folks now use the “page” option from blog software to create web sites rather than to blogs, I first assumed this was an issue. I figured out that I was probably not using the software as intended. My typical behavior was to upload an image at the time I was creating a blog post and then immediately using the “Insert into post button”. This strategy allows some attributes of an image to be set after it appears in the blog post (image size, justification). It does not allow an alt text description. The proper approach, I assume, is to upload the image, select that image within the library, set the desired attributes, and then insert into post.

A couple of years ago, I converted a wiki textbook I had created into a page-based WordPress site. I know that none of the images in this work are tagged. I am guessing there is not an easy way to update the images to include alt text descriptions.

As I am preparing my Fall online course, I happen to come across this article on the cost of online education.

The three main reasons for higher online tuition were, in order, “Added costs of online instruction and support services,” the “Added cost of online course and program development,” and “Added costs of online program marketing.”

Of course, the cost of education and tuition are two very different things. The article I referenced focuses on the higher cost of tuition. Students taking online courses save huge amounts of money in transportation and living expenses which many seem unable to differentiate when it comes to the understanding of the “rising cost of college”.

I would add a few other factors that should, but not always are included. I am not a fan of the large capacity online course. They remind me of the old days of correspondence study based on a read a chapter in this book and send in your answers to these questions covering that chapter. Even having taught many online courses I find the experience frustrating and far from as effective as face to face courses. Interaction online is strained and much of the interaction in higher level courses on campus do not occur during formal class meetings. Theoretically, these experiences can be approximated online, but I fear this seldom happens with the fault going to all parties. For these reasons, I believe present online approaches offer a better learner experience with smaller class sizes.