The Education Business Blog

Textbooks and Education Technology are changing in disruptive and dramatic ways. Technology substitution is driving a great deal of this change. The recent sale of Harcourt’s various divisions to Pearson and Houghton/Riverdeep is only the tip of the iceberg. Education Publishers of print and technology products, large and small, are all wrestling with these changes.

The changes are affecting every aspect of our business including how products are created, priced, sold, packaged, promoted, and even what the basic definition of a product is. I believe these changes are only beginning and that they will accelerate in the next several years. Anecdotal evidence includes attendance at shows like the recent IRA (empty) and NECC (swamped). Sales of electronic whiteboards (Promethean, Smart, RM) are skyrocketing. Pearson swept the California Social Studies adoption with a hybrid technology and print product.

We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

A Quantitative View

There is a more quantitative way to study this change. Over the next few days we will be publishing a study done by Paul Schumann a futurist and business analyst who has studied the sources and rate of change across many industries at IBM and as an independent consultant at Glocal Vantage. He has taken a detailed look at the Education Market and his findings have profound implications for where our industry is headed. Paul has published another version of this study on his blog Innovation Travelogue.

Paul’s analysis is a quantitative tour through what we can expect in the coming years. The punch line is that we are at the beginning of the product substitution shown in the chart below. Don’t discount the dramatic nature of this prediction. When disruptive technologies hit an industry the change often sneaks up on the unprepared and is largely over before there is time to react. Consider the tale of print encyclopedia’s which saw the value of their products plummet from over $2,000 to under $5 in a 3 year period in the 1990’s when CD-ROM based products were bundled with other software.

Here is a small sample from the report:

“One of the interesting, and most insidious aspects of this type of substitution, when the substitution is taking place in a growing market, is that a large percentage of the substitution has taken place before the old technology sees two successive years of decreased revenue. This is the case [in Reference Libraries]. Fifty percent of the total time to 90% substitution has elapsed before the print media have experienced two years decline”

Think about that.

Other Articles in this Series

Introduction
Part 1 – Reference Libraries and Open Source

Part 2 – Supplemental materials, Basal textbooks, Student Devices (Laptops, handhelds), Delivery Platforms (CD-ROM, Internet), and Electronic Media.

Part 3 – Conclusions & Recommendations

Below the fold a bio of Paul Schumman

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Breaking down artificial boundaries in the world of Education emerged as a theme today at EdNet in Chicago. This applies to the curriculum, but it also applies to how schools are managed – it may be a new overarching meme for education.

Chuck House from Media X at Standford kicked things off with a keynote that touched on a lot of interesting ideas. One of them was that the big challenges our society faces (e.g. global warming, terrorism) cross many disciplines. Addressing them demands the ability to weave disparate ideas together. We need to proactively teach that skill. In addition, how we access knowledge via the web is going to force schools to start breaking down the artificial barriers we have set up between subject areas.

This thread was picked up early in the afternoon by panelist Jackson Grayson from the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC). One of his central points was that most schools don’t do process management very well – they manage inputs and outcomes well but they don’t focus on what happens in the middle, which all about process. Moreover – when they do focus on process they do it in silos – they look at finance or curriculum but don’t look at where those things intersect. Echoing Chuck’s presentation Jackson noted that the big issues schools face require a systemic approach that crosses boundaries.