Articles Tagged with education

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In January 2001 as the dot com boom burst online education site wwwrrr.com went out of business overnight, literally. Coverage tended to focus on the employees – who ultimately filed a class action lawsuit for back pay and 401k contributions.

Lost in that ugly coverage was the blunt reality for teachers and schools that the new era of on-line content had a very dark side. Teachers who were relying on wwwrrr’s materials on January 9th were left with absolutely nothing on January 10th. They had no warning.

When schools buy a textbook they own the thing. If the vendor stops offering the book the school still has the thing. With cloud-based solutions schools are buying a license to a service. If the vendor stops offering the service it evaporates. Teachers rightly want some assurance that if they integrate a useful solution into their lesson plans that they can use it for several years.

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The Common Core Standards are causing a lot of angst across the world of education.  Fortunately Brandt Redd is here to help.

Over at Of That he lays it all out in a lucid and well linked overview “The Common Core State Standards – For My Concerned Friends.”   He cuts through the BS clearly and cleanly and describes how CCSS fits in the overall scheme of the Gates Foundation’s vision for personalized education.

Last week’s announcement by the Republican National Committee (RNC) that they are opposed to CCSS has added to the uncertainty hanging over the direction of the market in the next 3-4 years.  If CCSS becomes more than minor skirmish in the political wars we’ll have a period of extended uncertainty about how materials should be crafted.  The angry maw of lens hungry politicians could make a six course meal of various conspiracy theories.

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Gas Shut Off SignWe’ve all heard the voices of DOOM about the looming budget cuts from the sequester. I call BS, at least as it affects K12 education.

Laziness often drives how we talk about education funding. Because it is easy to track federal spending we focus our energy there. But this willfully ignores the plain fact that 90% of funding for education comes from state and local government, the Feds only account for 10%.

Do the math. A 10% sequester driven cut in Federal spending means a 1% cut to total education spending.

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PCI LogoPCI Education was sold to PRO-ED, Inc. in mid-December 2012. Since then I’ve fielded a lot questions about the sale. This post is an attempt, from my perspective as PCI’s former CEO, to answer the big questions in one place.*

What Is The Rationale For The Deal?

There are several good reasons for combining the operations.

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Foot on nailsLast December I penned (keyed?) a relatively optimistic piece about education spending, with the conclusion that the textbook adoption market was in a crash but supplemental materials were in a short-term stall. I had it right on the first point and wrong on the second – we have seen a full blown market crash across the board this year. There are still sound reasons for long term optimism, but the near term remains grim.

After the election I decided to read Nate Silver’s book “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t”. I was hoping to find insights on why I’d gotten it wrong, and so far I’ve not been disappointed.

Early on he outlines the distinction between risk and uncertainty in a way that is highly relevant to how we understand where we are in education publishing.

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hope streetThese are grim days for the world of education. Funding cuts past, present, and future loom over schools and districts. Class sizes are swelling, essential services are being trimmed, and any spending decision that can be delayed is sitting in limbo.

The companies that serve schools are feeling the pinch even deeper – while school budgets are down roughly 10%-15% scuttlebutt around the industry has most education companies down 20%-40% from 2011. Data systems, some technology niches, and companies with strong international presence are doing better, but those are the exceptions not the rule.

Relatively speaking schools have bad colds, we have pneumonia.

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here_doormatiPads in the classroom are all the rage in the education publishing market – somedays the oxygen for discussing anything but learning tablets has been sucked out of the room.

As we move beyond the giggling crush stage there are a couple of points to consider that might give publishers a more grounded perspective on where we really are in the adoption cycle.

Falling Off The Learning Cliff

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088My guess is that if you are in the office today you aren’t all that busy. So take 7 minutes and watch this great little video, particularly if you are skeptic about video games and learning.

Video – Tangential Learning

His central point, that a well designed game experience tees up personally directed learning actually extends far beyond games.

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4567uetudthjgfjhgIn “Four years into the ebook revolution: things we know and things we don’t know” Mike Shatzkin does a great job of summarizing the state of the trade publishing business. Education Publishers take note – this is your future.

In “Predicting Player Behavior and How Zynga Profits From Data Analysis” John Rice picks apart the Wall St. Journal’s article (paywall) with an eye to education. Talk about data driven business models is all the rage in EdTech – this is what it really looks like. Money quote:

“We feel that a purely data-driven approach has significant promise for creating accurate predictive models of player behavior in games without the difficulties associated with earlier modeling techniques.”

Stephen Coller at the Gates Foundation has a new blog Forking Education about their open source work on the Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI), the Learning Resources Metadata Initiative (LRMI), and Learning Maps among other things. I’m not sure if the title is meant to evoke poking a fork to stir things up or if it is a bad pun.

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Distilling the range of policy positions on our current economic malaise is a huge challenge, but fortunately Rortybomb is up to the task. I recommend his post – A Topological Mapping of Explanations and Policy Solutions to Our Weak Economy.

Not only does he provide spiffy venn diagrams that distill people’s positions he also provides extremely useful links to articles that lay out those positions.

As a business leader I recommend this post for those wanting to dig deeper on what the road ahead might look like for our organizations.

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