Articles Tagged with textbook

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From a Publisher’s perspective Apple’s iPad textbook initiative is a decent 1.0 release with promise. I’ve had a few weeks to play with iBooks Author and iBooks2 and discuss them with colleagues. I’ll write about the many positives in future posts.

But there is a worm in this apple. All the sweet promises Apple is making are going to slam headfirst into the funding issue. It will cost a school 552% more to implement iPad textbooks than it does to deploy books. That ain’t happening in THIS economy. The press reports I’ve seen have completely missed this because Apple “hand waved” their way around it.

Update – A follow on post discussion of reader responses is here.

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Education publishers and Learning Management Systems have a long and somewhat checkered history. Open source publishing, XML, and content digitization are changing the LMS landscape rapidly. In today’s guest post Louise Dube outlines the issues facing companies creating instructional materials.

By Louise Dube

What to do? Educator Buying Trends, a recently survey by MDR reveals that Moodle has the largest installed base of Learning Management systems (LMS) in K-12. Equally interesting is that Moodle’s strongest presence is in large districts. These districts have the IT infrastructure to support the development and customization of an open source platform.

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broken_glassToday’s walkabout focuses on a fundamental shift in the instructional materials industry away from the scale economics of the big textbook publishers to the value of niche focused expertise. I believe this is the future of our business.

In a world where Home Depot crushes the local hardware store only themselves to be crushed by Lowes this probably sounds foolish. Why shouldn’t Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt do the same in education? In their business model everything becomes a commodity and low prices rule. Indeed – that is precisely what has happened over the past couple of decades in education.

But there are fundamental and intersecting trends that are leading us away from this model and in a fresh new direction.

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The worlds of textbook publishers and education technology companies are colliding. The market is driving this convergence – schools have had technology around long enough that they have figured out how it can integrate in with existing practices. Yet the list of successful educational products that blend print and technology is few and far between.

I moved into the publishing world 4 years ago from ed tech. From my perspective on both sides of this fence the problem has more to do with the vendors clashing paradigms than with customer demand.

The paradigms are radically different along several key vectors and reconciling these will be the central challenge as Riverdeep and Houghton merge and as Pearson absorbs Harcourt (announced today).

Follow me to the flip for a more detailed look at this problem.

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