Articles Tagged with textbooks

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NFImageImportLast week the New York Times published a piece titled $200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math by Ashlee Vance.

Today we take up the challenge posed in the title and demonstrate that Open Source Textbooks are twice as expensive as books in the K12 market.

Let me state right up front that I’m all for using economic and technology forces to drive costs down while improving services. I agree that Open Source instructional materials have a place and will play a role in coming years in doing exactly this. But they are not the panacea painted by their advocates in the article.

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NFImageImportCommon Core Standards (CCS) will have a profound impact on the instructional materials market. The big players like Pearson and McGraw-Hill are on-board as endorsing partners, but smaller supplemental publishers have as much (if not more) to gain if the initiative is successful.

Common standards will reduce structural barriers to entry, reduce costs (and hopefully prices), and make it easier for new players to enter the textbook market. They also make it easier for open source publishing and have the potential to stall the market during implementation.

In this post I am not going to wade into the politics of whether Common Core Standards are good or evil. My goal is to look at this from the potential economic impact on the companies that serve the education market.

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NFImageImportliteracy n. The condition or quality of being literate, especially the ability to read and write.

Surpise! It turns out that the generation in school today is writing more and reading more. Several recent reports provide evidence to support this startling claim. The internet – a time pig that has consumed us with new ways of doing things – has wings.

This trend is global – according to the CIA literacy rates went from 50-60% in the 1970’s to over 80% by 2005. Teens are leading the way. TV is for geezers.

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384574407_2b4b7295ea_oHow can technology and innovation reshape education? Union Square Ventures put on Hacking Education – a conference that brought educators and entrepreneurs together to hash this out. Unfortunately they didn’t have any practitioners from the education technology and publishing industries there. After reviewing the well written summary of the discussion I put together the following extended comment to add the perspective of someone who was there, did that, and got the t-shirts.

As someone who has spent the last 18 years in the Education Technology and Instructional Materials businesses I feel the commentary misses the mark from a business perspective. This isn’t a critique of what was was covered – many of the participants are people I admire and cite frequently – Danah Boyd, Fred Wilson, Katie Salen, Steven Johnson , NT Etuk etc. It is meant to talk specifically about the business challenges of translating these great ideas into practice.

It might be tempting to dismiss folks who have been in the trenches as old school – people who “don’t get it” – but some of us are not clinging to old paradigms but working hard to create new ones. Experience may blind us to new possibilities – but it may also guide you around some of the land mines many of us have already stepped on.

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6a00d8341d03da53ef00e54f50f27c8833-640wiIf you don’t think story-line matters in instructional materials just look at the pie fight over evolution in Texas. At its root this is a battle over which story we use to make sense of how we got here. Advocates on both sides will be unhappy with this characterization – for them the fight is over the truth. My goal in this piece is not to take sides in this argument (I do have one) but to talk about the power of story-line in instruction.

“And The Moral of the Story Is…”

Theories, metaphors, legends, myths, etc. are all attempts to impose order on our perception of the world. These stories give us a shared shorthand to help us make decisions about how to think and act. Without the moment of “oh this is like the time when x did y in the story about z” we’d forever be stuck deciding what to do next – stories help us be efficient. It is so wired that our brains even make up stories when we are sleeping – dreams may not make literal sense to our left brain but our pattern seeking right brain has the steering wheel during those hours.

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1170296_untitledOne of the fundamental shifts No Child Left Behind (NCLB) caused in Special Education was accountability for teaching reading, math, science, and social studies.

Traditionally many Special Ed classrooms focused on life skills – the functional skills students with intellectual disabilities need to live as independently as they can. Academics were not the focus. Because students in SPED are now tested and factored into schools’ AYP calculations this has changed.

MAINSTREAM MATERIALS MISS THE MARK

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865433_money_mattersWhat impact will the economic stimulus have on educational materials and technology? A front page New York Times article yesterday left no doubt that education will be a significant part of the legislation. The Times reports that the total education allocation could be as much as $75-$95* billion a year over current allocations for the next two years. In sector that accounts for about $530 billion in total expenditures, 92% of which has traditionally come from state and local taxes, this represents a seismic shift in the Federal Government’s influence on the market.

The questions executives in the industry have to wrestle with are how much of the total will be spent on instructional materials, when will funds flow, and what products will schools buy? The answers to these questions will drive investments, hiring, and M&A for the next couple of years.

I’ve talked to a few folks around the industry to see what people are thinking and the notes below represent a collective set of insights. It is still early days, the legislation probably won’t be in a final format until mid to late February, but many companies are making decisions now about their ’09 plans.

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Michele-KingGuest blogger Michele King provides a practitioner’s perspective to Randy Wilhelm’s post Web Content is a Source for Differentiated Instruction. Michele is an administrator at a large urban school district and a former 1st Grade bilingual teacher.

By Michele King

As the Instructional Support Coordinator for a large urban district, I am responsible for transitioning our district away from print-based instructional resources to a database driven solution accessed by teachers over the Internet. I read Mr. Wilhelm’s post with great interest and my experience working with teachers closely aligns with the “Schools and Generation Net” survey results.

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870607_braeburn_1Products designed for the classroom must meet the needs of teachers first. If students are the primary users of your instructional materials this may sound a little backwards – but it isn’t. Teachers can make or break your product before a student ever sees it.

Designing for teacher ease-of-use should be a core competency at any education publisher.

Today we tackle issue #4 in the series on selling and marketing to educators.

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In times of disruptive change the cutting edge is the safest place to be.

To many people this seems counterintuitive. If there is rapid change the inclination of most people is to circle the wagons around the familiar. But, when the market is moving, breaking camp and moving forward is actually a lower risk approach. If you are taking risks in your job and trying to invent the future you are actually in a safer position than those who cling to the status quo.

Education Market Forces

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