Frank has a great post over on Geekwire that does a great job of explaining why Dumbo Drops of tech don’t work in schools.
The question he didn’t completely address is why do people keep making this mistake?
One explanation is that a massive initiative that “attacks” a “problem” is far sexier than a thoughtful program to incrementally improve classroom practice. Don’t forget that many Superintendents are politicians. These things get headlines.
Education publishers have taken a lot of fire in the last few years – many believe that we are too big, too powerful, and that things would be better if teachers just wrote their own materials or used free stuff.
So why do we continue to exist? Are publishers a necessary evil soon to be eliminated by a tsunami of free OER content, or is there an ongoing beneficial role in public education that publishers can fill?
This post is one publisher’s take on what justifies our place in education. This isn’t intended as a direct refutation of critiques of publishers, any industry as large as ours (over $10 billion) has plenty of opportunities to improve what we do. Rather, I focus on some of the lesser appreciated positive contributions we make. It also isn’t a takedown of OER materials, which have earned a permanent place at the table.
Last Tuesday the Secretary of Education said
“I think we should be moving from print to digital absolutely as fast as we can over the next couple of years. Textbooks should be obsolete.”
He was clear that he sees the digital transformation in schools as a “critical game changer” for the American education system.
He gave three reasons for the advocating a rapid shift:
Quick – what percentage of your iTunes library is produced by amateurs? For that matter how many books on your eReader of choice are self-published works?
If you are like most people the answer to both questions is “slim to none.”
The point is that quality matters in any medium. Moving from analog to digital doesn’t reduce expectations of quality – in many cases it increases it.
My last post, Apple’s iPad Textbooks Cost 5x More Than Print, touched a live wire.
The majority of comments were positive. The general tone was support for iPads in the classroom (a position I share) but an appreciation for the realistic view of what it will cost to implement the vision today.
Oops – I Underestimated
The role of textbooks in a rapidly digitizing world is an open question. The publishing industry needs to develop a new paradigm for commercially produced instructional materials or it faces extinction.
These and many more questions haunt the dreams of educational publishing professionals.
Now, thanks to the folks at Nature (a division of MacMillan) and their new eTextbook Principles of Biology, I glimpse a promising path forward. As is so often the case with paradigm shifts once it “clicks” in your head it is so simple that you wonder that you didn’t get it earlier.
What is the best way to break into education publishing? If you are young and starting out what launching pads set you up well for a career in the world of instructional materials and software?
I’m bullish in the industry and think we are in one of the most creative and fascinating eras as traditional print publishing blends with digital production and distribution. There is going to be a huge amount of disruption but there will be an enormous amount of opportunity in the midst of all the changes.
In the first part of this series I focused on the best ways to prepare and organize your search. Today I turn the focus on what kinds of jobs industry entrants should consider.
Education spending patterns have been abnormal for several years. Publishing used to follow very predictable patterns – no more.
Between the Great Recession and ARRA Stimulus funds we have been living in an era of seesaw budgets for three years. Since education spending lags the general economy by up to 3 years this will continue until at least 2014.
I can remember entire decades where budget flows were so steady that you could predict the entire year within +/- 10% after the first three months. In 2008, 2009, and 2010 the first half of each year told you very little about the second half.
When textbooks go fully digital what will schools buy? Will they buy individual lessons, units of 2-3 weeks length, or full curriculum that span a year the way they do today? This is the $5 billion question facing our industry.
Mike Shatzkin has an excellent post on this topic over at The Shatzkin Files. His framing is concise and revealing for those of us mapping out strategy for the analog to digital transition in instructional materials.
He was on a working group preparing for a talk about copyright across different publishing markets:
The Education Business Blog