The Education Business Blog

How should we design textbooks and education technology for a world where information is no longer scarce or hard to find? It is time to rethink how we build education products based on new paradigms of information management.

In Part 1 of this series we explored the broken paradigms about information that are driving most of batty. In Part 2 we explored strategies for adopting a new information paradigm to help us survive and thrive in the new climate.

Today we take a look at ten ideas for how we can build products that tap into the new zeitgeist. These are nuts and bolts tactics publishers can use to rethink product development.

In what follows I assume you have read the two prior installments. If you have not you may want to spend a couple of minutes on them first. In a nutshell we need to move from scanning and hoarding “scarce” information to treating it as an infinite resource that can be accessed as it is needed. Just-in-time instruction is no longer for adult learners only.

10 Ideas to Try

1. Start with a call to action. Traditional textbooks are set up backwards for today’s learners. Rather than tacking some practice problems on at the end of the chapter start with an activity that will motivate learners to seek out answers. This is how they work in the rest of their lives and we should mirror and model it in teaching. Projects, thought experiments, team challenges, and research activities are all examples of experiences that promote information seeking. These can be classroom discussions, paper-based activities, or on-line challenges (virtual worlds, games etc.).

2. Network your learners - Often we treat collaboration as cheating - but in a world of Facebook and Twitter we have no choice but to harness it. Encourage people working on the same problem to find each other through virtual study groups, student written FAQs, and peer-tutoring. Imagine a system that could help students working on the same problem all over the world find each other on any given evening. There is a precedent for this in on-line games where players can join a queue of people who are looking for others working on the same challenge. Another feature from the on-line game world that you might consider incorporating are guilds - formal associations of players who assist and help each other out. These strategies apply for teachers too!

3. Design instructional approaches that are open - Publishers have worked under the conceit that their materials were self-contained systems. You can’t build self-contained products anymore so don’t even try. Assume that teachers and learners are going to use your materials as a small part of a much larger set of resources.

4. Build for Dynamic Content - It is more important that you provide a framework for asking questions than the definitive set of facts. We can and should provide a core set of facts, but anticipate that new information will be available before the paper is dry on a new book and make a place for it in your on-line presence.

5. Build RSS into your products - Proactively deliver a steady stream of new content to users. For example, recent data on global warming shows that most of the projections were flat out wrong - they were far too conservative. Structure RSS streams for students, parents, and teachers. Will Richardson at Weblogg-Ed has some interesting ideas on this topic.

6. Adopt a software business model of continuous improvement. I’ve written elsewhere about the difference between book publishing and software development. This is clearly one area where you will want to build a business model (pricing, editorial resources) that assumes you will be improving a product long after it is “published.”

7. Encourage advanced on-line search techniques. This is one of the most important skills we can give students - and many of our teachers are not equipped to coach students in this area. There is an opportunity for publishers to provide the scaffolding for this skill. Tap into the advanced features of Google search or if you want a safe walled garden use NetTrekker. Hire a Librarian to show you how to do this.

8. Plant virtual easter eggs. Seed the web with relevant actionable content (web sites, wikis, and blogs) that good searches will find. Don’t rely completely on serendipity when kids are searching for content. Learn to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so your content floats to the top.

9. Build a two way street - Expect kids to find other relevant materials in their searches. Teacher materials should support incorporating outside information. Allow students and teachers to send you resources that they create or find as they work with your materials. Reward and recognize them for this - make it a competition and you will harness the power of user generated content.

10. Don’t be part of the problem. Filter what is included in everything you do to make sure it is relevant, important, and actionable. Strictly limit the outbound amount of content you generate - don’t overwhelm your audience with spammed content. Be a good information provider in a world of overwhelming information flow. Less is more.

Next Steps

Some of this may look a little weird - it runs against long established paradigms. But these ideas are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I challenge publishers to take one product suite and try all of these ideas with it. Don’t change your whole catalog, but when you do try it don’t use half-measures. Give it your all. And if you would like some help putting these ideas into your context give me a call.

Next in this series we look at how information overload is changing how we should be selling and marketing products.

In comments let us all know about products that are already employing these ideas, suggest other strategies that we could try, or just tell me where I’m wrong.

Information Overload Series

Part 1 - It’s all in your head - really
Part 2 - A cure for “a poverty of attention”
Part 3 - 10 Ways to Build Instructional Products For 21st Century Skills
Part 4 - 10 Ideas to For Marketing & Selling In An Age of Infinite Input
Summary - Closing Thoughts and Resources

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Posted In: Culture , Education Technology , K12 Publishing , Productivity

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“Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.” Tim Ferris

In Part 1 I talked about how our old paradigm of consuming information is at the root of our information overload problems. Today I present some practical ideas you can use to experiment with changing your paradigm.

I suggest starting with your personal experience with the new paradigm because until you have tried it and seen the results for yourself it will be difficult for you to think about how it applies to building products and services for your customers.

As I’ve written earlier I think the foundation survival skill in the age of infinite input is HOMING. This is the ability to search efficiently and have a nose for what is meaningful in what you find during that search.

What we need to do is couple homing with what Tim Ferris in his book The 4-Hour Workweek calls “a low information diet.”

“Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical. It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three.

The first step is to develop and maintain a low-information diet. Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.” p 83

Change your paradigm and you can change your behavior and go a long way towards solving the problem.

Now Go Try It

What does this look like? Here are some suggestions if you want to develop the habit of mind of seeking out information when it is actionable rather than endlessly scanning and hoarding.

Some of these ideas are going to look pretty weird because your paradigm has been constructed around the old paradigm. Try them for a week or two and see what the consequences are. Does anything happen where you can't get information you need? Do you have more time for your family or other interests? Does your stress level come down?

Learn to use the advanced search features of Google (or the search engine of your choice). Knowing how to make a haystack into a molehill is the best way to free yourself. It will build the confidence that you can find what you need exactly when you need it. Without this confidence you will never be comfortable dropping scanning and hoarding.

{Update} Build your network. Access to experts when you need them is another part of the puzzle. Call your friends, email old colleagues, attend industry events. Also, invest a little time in LinkedIn and Facebook and see which works best for you. I use LinkedIn for professional connections and Facebook for personal.

Stop reading the newspaper. Or just read one with an emphasis on sports, comics, and puzzles. This may seem extreme but most of the information in the paper is “ irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable” as Ferris noted. Don’t convert this to going to the New York Times website or CNN either - you want to stop the news habit altogether because you are going to be in the business of making your own news.

Cancel half your magazines - then all of them. Almost all magazines have on-line versions that are easier to access, have live links to deeper information if you are interested, and are easily found with a quick search when the topic will make a difference in your day.

Look at your files and toss 50% of them. Keep the financial stuff you need - everything else can go to recycling. The same goes for your hard drive. Then be ruthless about what you do file - only keep the stuff that isn’t time sensitive or easily found on-line. David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done” is an enormous help with this.

Learn how to use rules to automatically sort your email. Keep it simple, but do things to pull clutter from your inbox. This allows you to quickly focus on what is important. See one example of what you can do in the next idea.

Automatically file email newsletters in a separate folder. Most of these are just BACN (spam you want to receive). So either unsubscribe or create a mail rule that puts them all into a folder you can scan once a week or month. If you get more than a month behind - just toss it all. Odds are the information in them is available on the organization’s website and easily found if you need it. You would be amazed at how this simple change cleans up your inbox.

Check your email once or twice a day - and never first thing in the morning. As I’ve written elsewhere email overload is mostly a behavioral problem not a technical one. Very few people have jobs where they have to be available for consultation every minute of the day. We do it because it feels productive but it isn’t. Get a couple of critical tasks done before you allow yourself to be interrupted.

Only surf the web during work hours for directly relevant information. No cul-de-sacs of “oh this looks interesting” or mindless link chains. There is a place for curiously seeking out new sites, ideas and information, but it usually isn’t during work hours.

Severely limit your use of RSS. RSS is really automated scanning - and automating an inefficient process just makes it more inefficient. I suggest restricting your feeds to 10 or fewer - try for 5-7. Focus your blog reading on analysis and insight not on news.

I’m sure you can come up with ideas of your own as well - try them. Also be sure to visit Ferris’ site for more ideas and testimonials from people who have tried this.

I leave you with this quote which was cited in Ferris’ book:

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” Herbert Simon Nobel Laureate in Economics

Next in the series - what does information overload mean for instructional materials?

Information Overload Series

Part 1 - It’s all in your head - really
Part 2 - A cure for “a poverty of attention”
Part 3 - 10 Ways to Build Instructional Products For 21st Century Skills
Part 4 - 10 Ideas to For Marketing & Selling In An Age of Infinite Input
Summary - Closing Thoughts and Resources

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Posted In: Productivity

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Are you drowning in information? You are not alone, almost all of us are. But the information is not to blame - we are.

Information overload is a meta societal problem that affects our whole industry. From the personal (we are overwhelmed) to the products we build (we need to teach kids how to avoid it) to marketing (cutting through the noise) it is driving change across our businesses.

Most of us have had the experience of going to a web site to find something and 45 minutes later found ourselves off in some far corner of the internet on a completely unrelated topic. Or maybe you have been unable to empty your email inbox for the last year - or two. You didn’t take your Blackberry on your last vacation did you? You did take a vacation - right?

There is a solution, but it involves stepping outside your comfort zone. This is important to education because the old habits of mind about consuming information that we are passing along to today’s children are hurting their ability to think and act in new and more productive ways. We need to model the change for them.

This is the first in a series of posts that address how we can learn to live with information overload, what it means for instructional products, and how it affects our ability to sell and market effectively.

Our Broken Paradigm

For those of us who came of age before the internet our paradigm of information consumption is built on two assumptions that are no longer true.

1. Information is scarce - This manifested itself in SCANNING - a need to constantly scan the media landscape to find the stuff you needed to know. If you missed information when it passed by it was gone. We learned to read the paper every day, read 3-4 magazines, and watch the news on TV. The more sources of information you had the more likely you were to be well informed.

2. Information is hard to find. This flows from the first assumption and led to HOARDING. If you wanted to have easy access to information you better catch it as it passes by: tear it from the magazine, throw it in a file, put it on a 3x5 card. Finding it later involved a couple of hours of going down to the library, locating it, and copying it or making notes from the source material. Usually it was just too much trouble.

Scanning and hoarding information made sense right up until the mid to late 90’s. Adult learners want just-in-time information. We scanned and hoarded so that information would be on hand when we needed it. I took pride in being an information omnivore.

The Game Has Changed

But with the vast resources of the web at our disposal both assumptions no longer hold and the behaviors have gone from effective survival techniques to threatening our very sanity. Scanning and hoarding in an age of infinite input will make your head and your hard drive explode.

If we can let all that go we can set ourselves free from the brutal info-treadmill most of us find ourselves on. Information may seem like it is free these days, but the real cost is the time it takes to process and manage it.

Think about that in the context of the resources at our fingertips today. Don’t bother scanning, and don’t gather and hold information close to you. Stop it - just stop it!

In 30 seconds with a good search strategy you can find what you need right when you need it. We need to learn how to ignore what we once thought was important and we need to embrace the idea that we can easily and quickly find whatever information we need whenever we need it. This is a complete paradigm shift.

Next in the series I explore some hands on practical things you can do to start working smarter not harder.

Information Overload Series

Part 1 - It’s all in your head - really
Part 2 - A cure for “a poverty of attention”
Part 3 - 10 Ways to Build Instructional Products For 21st Century Skills
Part 4 - 10 Ideas to For Marketing & Selling In An Age of Infinite Input
Summary - Closing Thoughts and Resources

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Welcome Technology & Learning readers. My article Getting It Wrong - Slaying Myths About Video Games covers 5 misconceptions many teachers about video games and was published in two parts in September and October.

If you are interested in learning more in on the topic of games in the classroom here are two resources to help you.

John Rice's Education Games Research is essential reading on the subject. John is a Technology Director for a School District here in Texas and has published research in this arena. He writes from a practitioner's perspective but also with a good eye for research validation.

Richard Carey has put together an excellent resource over at Squidoo which provides automatically updated links and resources on the topic of Serious Games, Simulations & Learning. You can find books, blogs, and other items of interest at the site.

I also write regulary here on this topic and you can find all the relevant articles by clicking on the Serious Games link in the sidebar.

On a less serious note you can also read John August's Seven Things I Learned from World of Warcraft.

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Posted In: Education Technology , Serious Games

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Do video games belong in the classroom?

Part 2 of the article I wrote for Technology & Learning Magazine is up on their website now.

The myths covered this month are:

Myth #3—Learning elements leach all the fun out of games
Myth #4—Teachers don't need to be involved in the game; kids can do it on their own
Myth #5—There isn't any scientifically based research to support the use of video games for learning

The lede:

"Do video games and simulations really belong in the classroom? A growing body of evidence—from education conference sessions to ramped-up gaming research and university pilot programs—all point to the affirmative. However, sensationalized press accounts, a personal lack of familiarity with games, and other factors still contribute to a broad skepticism of their value by educators, parents, and the public. Last month, we addressed the first two of five commonly held myths about video games. Here, we examine the remaining three."

Part 1 from last month is here. The myths debunked were:

Myth #1—Games are all about twitch speed, not higher order thinking skills
Myth #2—Games are just about violence and sex

Enjoy - then come back here and add your thoughts or tell me what I got wrong in comments!

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Posted In: Education Technology , Serious Games

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Sundance/Newbridge deserves kudos for their catalog cover contest. It embodies some of the elements of the Web 2.0 aesthetic in a traditional marketing vehicle and shows that you don't have to reinvent the world to harness the power of user generated content.

I found this because the Austin American Statesman reported the winner in this morning's paper (sorry no link on their site). If you think that won't do much for them from a marketing standpoint you would be correct. Yes, it was very cool to see local 6th Grade Nicolette T. win for her work Metamorphosis and I hope local educators will think warmly of Sundance this fall.

But, the real impact is that over 400 other kids submitted entries and their schools were all paying attention to this. Those kids had fun (we assume), enaged their creative faculties, and got their competitive juices going. Sundance got some great ideas from their most important constituency, the kids who learn from their materials. Everyone gets to look at a cool cover for the next 6 months. It was a win all around.

Too often we sit in meetings where an important topic is hotly debated (cover design anyone....). Usually the simplest and best answer to all the hot air is actually a question "Have we asked our customers about this?"

For a related article please visit Web 2.0 Tradeshow Booth at NECC.

Anyway, big GRATZ to Nicolette. Texas rules!

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Posted In: K12 Publishing , Marketing Management

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In response to Education Publishing - A Wave of Change Sweeps Over The Industry Randy Wilhelm – Co-Founder & CEO of Thinkronize (publishers of netTrekker) posted a comment worthy of guest blogger status. Randy is a friend and colleague from industry associations and he speaks passionately about what students and teachers need in the 21st Century.

I particularly agree with Randy’s comments about Librarians – in an ocean of information it helps to have a navigator!

By Randy Wilhelm

It has been said that if Rip Van Winkle awoke in the 21st century after his hundred-year-slumber, he would still recognize the classroom. While other industries have made the transition to digital content, the movement in education has been slow going. Until there is a massive investment in technology infrastructure, and a major training effort of our teachers, the bulk of classroom instruction will be tied to print-based materials.

Every year the textbook publishing industry receives a windfall in the high-stakes sum of $8 billion from our nation’s K-12 schools. However, new print editions of our children’s’ textbooks are only distributed every five to seven years, so although their math books might be relevant, their social studies and science texts are vintage the day they come off the press.

That said, I have witnessed hopeful signs of transition. In my role as CEO of an Internet education company, I have seen a meaningful upswing in schools investing in digitally delivered content and products and have been pleased to see that teachers and students are increasingly embracing the Internet.

For example, in many classrooms nationwide, students are now learning with engaging digital content delivered via white boards, or podcasts, creating presentations using multimedia materials and collaborating on these projects using blogs – all signs of progress towards where our classrooms need to be to meet today’s 21st-century learning environment.

My company is witnessing this progress as well. Specifically, from school year 2006 to school year 2007, subscriptions to our K-12 product netTrekker d.i., [http://school.nettrekker.com/frontdoor/] -- delivering safe, relevant digital content to every desktop-- saw an 84% increase. We recently hit the 10 millionth student mark and netTrekker d.i. is now used in 19,000 schools – an increase of 2,000 from last year -- in all 50 states including adoptions by key districts and states nationwide.

So who gets the credit for these promising signs of change? Teachers and students are playing a grand role in the digital transition. Many teachers see their jobs as preparing students for the technology-driven world they'll face as adults and understand that technology offers new solutions for differentiated instruction. And our digitally-native students are raising the bar by demanding that they are taught in the same way that they receive the bulk of their daily information and entertainment – electronically!

And, remember your old school librarian – glasses on a chain around her neck and the Dewey Decimal system on her mind? Well, meet today’s librarian – now also called “media specialist” – whose responsibilities include integrating digital media into both the library and classroom. No longer does she see herself only as the facilitator of information from books and traditional print media – she is now a conduit to all forms of information, print or digital – in whatever format her students need. This is an exciting transformation and one I’ve seen many librarians/media specialists nationwide embrace willingly.


An upcoming independent research study from Interactive Educational Systems Design (IESD) will query both principals and library/media specialists looking at educational issues relating to students, teachers and the Internet. The study will hone in on issues such as Internet safety, information literacy and the professional development and tech-savvy of our teachers. Perhaps the results of this research will be more telling - and promising - in terms of changes in trends and attitudes.

In the end, the future of our children depends on the progress of our educational system. We’re at a pivotal crossroads. The transition from textbooks to digital content –embracing the Internet for its contextually relevant, safe educational content – is vital if our children are to be well equipped for the global challenges of the 21st century.

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Posted In: Education Technology , K12 Publishing

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E-Mail Marketing to Educators: What`s Working was put on Heller QED on October 12th. I had the honor of speaking about eMail marketing in a web 2.0 world.

My core message was that eMail 2.0 is activity driven, not demographics driven.

A person does something, and the company responds in a personal, authentic, and timely manner with a communication. It has the same give and take as a conversation. The focus is engaging people early in the decision making cycle with useful information, not at the end with a last ditch special offer.

As a follow up to the call I've assembed the following list of resources for attendees. I've also included my presentation for those who were unable to make the call.

Presentation

My presentation (PDF) Download file from today with speaker's notes included.

Articles

A couple of really good articles that lay out the case for the conversation economy.

The Conversation Economy - Business Week

Internet Marketing Mind Map - very cool

Books

These are all books that will build background knowledge and understanding of the larger trends that are at work today in the marketplace.

Wikinomics

The Long Tail

The Wisdom of Crowds

Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing The Way Businesses Talk With Customers

Small is the New Big

Business Blogs

All of these blogs touch regularly on issues related to marketing in a web 2.0 world.

Logic + Emotion

Seth Godin

The Long Tail

Bokardo Social Web Design

Copyblogger

Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog

Influential Marketing Blog

Education Business Blog

Educator Blogs

These blogs won't teach you about email or marketing - but they will show you the kinds of conversations educators are having in general. These are some of the best but there are thousands out there to sample from.

eLearnspace

Weblogg-Ed

Not So Distant Future

Classroom 2.0

Metrics Tools

These are all tools that will help you measure traffic and activity on web sites. Some are free, some are not.

Quantcast

Comscore

Hitwise

Compete.com

Google Analytics

Service Providers and Autoresponders

These are companies and products that can help you set up your response trees, manage the process, and track performance metrics.

Skylist

Intellicontact

Aweber

Send Studio

Eloqua

You can also build a lot of this directly into your website if you choose to.

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Posted In: Data Driven Selling , Marketing Management

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Teaching metaphors, the role of school in society, bad (i.e. wrong) press for video games, glitz vs. content, banned books, racism in games, phishing games, and monkeys at the keyboard. All featured on this weeks roundup!

Teachings of a Zen Gardener over at PickTheBrain is a beautiful analogy for what teachers do.

The always excellent Will Richardson posted “School as Node” over at Weblogg-Ed. The original post he references talked about revolution but Will argues that we need to engage in a conscious act of evolution. This is a nice follow on to the articles just published here by Paul Schumann.

Unconscionable. Really. Newspaper Seriously Errs Reporting Videogame Study at Educational Games Research. We deserve a better press than this - oh wait we have the web now.

Logic+Emotion published When Presentation Eclipses Story. Textbook publishers are on the horns of a dilemma here - pretty covers and whizzy free-with-order stuff sells books - but at the heart of it we should remember that it is about kids understanding the content. Its also a good reminder for anyone doing a presentation.

Sad but true. Starting to notice - the only people school firewalls keep away from resources are the teachers - students know of every proxy on the planet - from the Classroom 2.0 blog. Related to my entry Disfunction Junction

Love this list - Banned Books: Have you read one? from Clarksville, TN Online. I'm a piker - I've only read 18 of them. But this gives me some ideas..

On the edugaming front at the The Forge · Straight From Central Casting is a disturbing reflection on the role of racism when creating "the bad guys" in game design. Think this doesn't matter for the real world? Head over to DailyKos to read a hilarious send up of anti-muslim stereotyping.

Play this game! Over at PC World Phishing Game Warns Users highlights a great educational game that everyone should play. I consider myself fairly savvy and I only got about 75% right the first time through.

Hat tip to Paul Schumann - this is a really cool video of a crowd game using technology. Look at the intensity - we want that in our classrooms!

Must see video - Chimp vs. Pacman.

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Posted In: Education Technology , K12 Publishing , Marketing Management , Serious Games

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[Ed] This entry concludes are guest blogging by Paul Schumann on technology substitution in the K12 market.

Click here to read the introduction to this series.

Click here to read Part 1 – Methodology and Reference Library Case Study

Click here to ready Part 2 - The Data for Supplemental Publishing, Basal Textbooks, Student Devices, Delivery Platforms, & Electronic Media

Technological Substitution in Publishing: Conclusion and Recommendations

Paul Schumann, Glocal Vantage, Inc.

Without a comprehensive study of the usage of educational materials in the K-12 classroom, it is going to be impossible to detect and understand the changes in education that are already underway. Three major substitutions have already begun that we can’t detect with traditional market reports based on sales:

1. New theories of learning: See for example the connectivism movement of George Siemens at the University of Manitoba and the recent book Presence by Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski and Flowers in which learning is based on the future rather than the past.

2. Utilization of social technologies: See for example Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson and the Learning Technologies Center

3. Collaborative User Generate Content: See for example Wikipedia , Wikibooks, the Open Content Network and the generalized interface for instructional modules (SCORM)

Open Source Content

"Open" content is developed through a collaboration of volunteers who care enough about the subject that they devote their minds and resources to create something of value. A current example of open content creation is Wikipedia.

From "About Wikipedia":

"Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia, written collaboratively by people from all around the world. The site is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit articles simply by clicking on the edit this page link.

There are 13,000 active contributors working on over 1,800,000 articles in more than 100 languages. As of today, there are 793,168 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the amount of knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. Visitors do not need any special qualifications to contribute, and people of all ages help to write Wikipedia articles.

All the text in Wikipedia, and most images and other content, is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the GFDL license ensures the content will remain freely distributable and reproducible."

It appears that in the future, many reference works will be both free and open. This trend will accelerate the decline of the printed reference industry, and may mean the same for the proprietary electronic reference industry unless that industry can determine how to participate in the free and collaborative information trend.

Not only is this trend well underway for the reference publishing industry, it has started in the textbook industry as well. A recent conference "Reconsidering the Textbook: and an article on that conference "The Future of a Dinosaur" are good places to begin an understanding of this trend. The same type of trend is also apparent for scientific and technical journals.

Technology Standards

An enabling technology for open content development is SCORM, described in an article by Robert Brumfied in “Gathering SCORM Could Transform eLearning: Emerging Standard Enables Accessibility, Interoperability of Digital Content”:

"The Sharable Content Object Reference Model--or SCORM--is a collection of standards and specifications adapted from multiple sources to allow for the interoperability, accessibility, and reusability of digital learning materials: everything from a video clip illustrating how cells divide to a PowerPoint explication of a sonnet.

The SCORM specifications are becoming increasingly important for ensuring that digital content can be integrated into any learning management system (LMS) software, regardless of its manufacturer. What's more, SCORM is opening the door for the creation of "digital repositories," or collections of sharable, reusable online content that educators can search through to find items they can incorporate into their own instruction."

Recommendation

This meta research study only scratches the surface of the transformation underway. In order to save the great wealth represented by the industry and the many lives and careers affected by the transformation, a large scale study should be implemented quickly where the appropriate longitudinal data can be collected and analyzed, and strategies developed to chart a roadmap for navigating the transformation.

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

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[Ed] Today’s installment shows the data on Supplemental Products, Basal Textbooks, Student Devices, Delivery Platforms, and Electronic Media.

Click here to read the introduction to this series.
Click here to read Part 1 – Methodology and Reference Library Case Study
Click here to read the next and final installment - Conclusion and Recommendations

Technological Substitution in Publishing: Part 2 - Supplemental Products, Basal Textbooks, Student Devices, Delivery Platforms, and Electronic Media

Paul Schumann, Glocal Vantage, Inc.

Supplemental Products

The educational supplemental products market is fragmented and complex. However, at a very high level it is possible to discern substitutions that are occurring. Print based supplemental products are in a steady decline. Electronic media based supplemental products are steadily increasing and will reach 90% of the market in 2020.


Data: Association of American Publishers, 2004

Basal Products

It would appear that the electronic substitution for print in basal education products has begun. While the data indicates that the substitution is in the early stages, it does seem to indicate that it has begun. The data source for this is suspect as it is the results of two surveys without guarantee that the two survey populations were representative samples. Research in the field of substitution analysis generally agrees that if the substitution reaches 5%, the substitution models are accurate.

Data: Association of American Publishers, 2004

Student Devices

Student devices have changed from desk top to lap-top over the years, and are now changing again to other types of devices. This substitution is summarized in graph below.


Data: America’s Digital Schools, The Greaves Group & The Hayes Connectio, 2006

While the number of data points is small, the data fits the Fisher-Pry model well, and supports common knowledge. Desktops are in decline and laptops have reached their maximum penetration of the market. Other types of student devices are rapidly gaining share of the market. While there is data presented in America’s Digital Schools on a number of other student devices, with the limited number of data points, it was impossible to segment the other device category. However, thin client, handheld, cell phones and portable gaming devices seem to be on the decline. While, tablet PCs and student appliances are gaining market share.

Update 10/11/07 - Tom Greaves pointed out that in the student devices market we should include the $200 "laptops" that are just now coming to market from a variety of sources. Depending on whether you place them in the "Device" Category or the "Laptop" category the statements above would change.

Delivery Platforms

In “A Study of the Grade K-6 Supplementary Instructional Materials Market”, the authors use instructional time used as a measure of the penetration of various materials and technologies. This is a much better surrogate measure of the penetration of new technologies and concepts into the market as it doesn’t depend upon the cost of the technology or material. (This approach should be the basis for a thorough study of the substitutions ongoing in the education arena.) However, the data is limited. What is does show is that CDROM and the Internet are gaining share of instructional time at the expense of other media, as shown in the graph below.


Data: Study of the Grade K-6 Supplementary Instructional Materials Market, Hagen Marketing Research Inc., Lois Esk