I’ve just attended a two day seminar organised by European Schoolnet about ‘Educational Publishing Futures’. There was a healthy mix of content publishers, technology providers, Open Education Resources advocates and education ministries. Although much of it I’ve talked about in the blog before, I thought I’d share some data and conclusions.
The first two speakers – Marc Durando of European Schoolnet and Graham Taylor of the UK Educational Publishers Council – summed up my feelings of the grass-roots need: “We need to support teachers in their working practice” but “teachers look for structure in planning their courses”. Providing a ‘repository’ of teaching resources, free or paid-for, and saying “you choose” to the teacher does not solve their problems. There is plenty of content out there on the great repository in the sky (Google, not heaven), but teachers have no time to evaluate and integrate it.
i.e. The traditional publisher’s role of editing, curating and packaging content is still valuable.
The most interesting fact for me was England is still FAR ahead of Europe in actual usage on online educational content in upper primary school. Nearly 40% of English teachers use an online resource at least once a week, compared with less than 5% in France, Germany and Spain. I believe that will open up as whiteboard and tablet penetration increase – we’re already at 100% in English state schools.
Rob Abel from IMS then talked about how the US market is developing with two key thrusts of current policy: the Common Core standards which should make numeracy and literacy teaching more standard across the States, and a rethinking of the assessment regime towards more formative assessment. Again, this creates real market opportunity for learning-and-testing-integrated content.
On the standards side there was a bit of a divide between the whiteboard and learning platform sellers (who want common whiteboard and LMS formats) and publishers (who see no need).
I’m a deep sceptic about the need for education-only content standards. HTML, Flash and MS Office are pretty proven standards already, and even if there is a need to feed test scores back into the school management information this could be done via a much simpler standard than SCORM or Common Cartridge. The insistence on such clunky, out-dated standards inhibits publisher innovation (as Nick Kind from Macmillan pointed out) but also adds extra cost to the schools paying for the development.
Ultimately I think commercial reality will win out. If customers don’t demand certain formats, and it costs more for the publishers to implement, it’s simply not going to happen.
The bigger point in the standards debate was that it’s dangerous for publishers to get obsessed about compatibility with one technology platform (be in whiteboards or iPads) where the sensible approach is to develop web-standard content that can be viewed on a range of devices – and is more in keeping with a trend of seamless learning at home and in the classroom on multiple devices. But if course if that device is an Apple one, that means no Flash!
Finally we heard from the team at Klascement, who run a really exemplary content moderation and search system for Flemish teachers. Klascement’s 36,000 visitors per week is more than twice what Smart Exchange gets globally for their service (although only half what Glow gets in Scotland for a similar population size – albeit not quite comparable)
They are experimenting with marketing services for publishers to offset falling state funding (sponsored listings, banners, email marketing and whole sponsored sections). I love their willingness to engage in the thorny issue of direct funding by schools and teachers, but I don’t think they’re going as far as Teachable in actually providing a platform for publishers to sell their content alongside the free material.
Klascement’s best new idea was to use their internal ‘credits’ system to allow helpful contributors and reviewers to earn real-world benefits (such as health club membership etc). We believe contributors are essential to getting these systems working: so valuable we go the full hog and pay them royalties!
I’d be interested to hear from anyone else at the event who took home a different view of Educational Publishing Futures.
