Digital Content Chronicle

Premium Content: Vander Ark Revisited

SETDA’s report, “Out of Print: Reimagining the K-12 Textbook in a Digital Age,” put a solid stake in the ground for moving from print to digital.  The report offered a rationale for the shift, four case studies of states that are well down the path toward making the shift, as well as thumbnail sketches of other states making policy moves. It also provided insights for the necessary conditions for making the shift, and offered specific recommendations to address K-12 instructional materials needs. Throughout, the report presented indications of drivers of the change, including the economy, the desire for flexibility in funding at the district and school level, concomitant changes in assessment and professional learning, and, of course, the changing nature of students and how they interact with technology and the world in general.  We did not, however, take a detailed look at drivers.  In a recent post on Getting Smart, Tom Vander Ark did.  Most who read Digital Content Chronicle probably saw Tom’s post, but even if you did, it is worth another look.

Tom knocks down the straw man of the death of premium content and traditional textbook publishers, provides a list of twelve trends shaping the development of digital content and even adds examples of products or services for each.  He lays out a strong case for a continuation of a need for premium content, but only in a different looking system in which the content is “smart” and the need for content related services grows.  He lists specific growth areas such as professional development, and argues that it may take a decade for the market to shift from 7-year adoption cycles to subscription bundles for content and related services. 

I wonder if publically traded companies like the major textbook companies will be able to withstand a decade-long transition where revenue is dwindling in the old model. Can they wait for the new model to kick in? Tom does note how those publishers are sticking their toes in the water, but no one seems to be jumping in. Others are diving in head first. Grants from a variety of philanthropic organizations and entities like NSF are providing funding and new energy to the field. 

Some of us have been calling for an active effort to create new business models for years, and that is one of one of the core recommendations of “Out of Print.” The accelerator will be new business models that are developed collaboratively with states and other major purchasers to encourage rapid 'buy-in.' Vander Ark’s post is chock full of examples and rationale both for why and how the shift will continue with some things old, some things borrowed, and a lot of things new.  Check it out; it is worth a bookmark for future reference to see how things are progressing. 

The OER Spirit in the Cathedral and the Bazaar

My work with digital content in general and OER in particular is often at the policy level. I am not as fortunate as colleagues in the field such as Karen Fasimpaur who get to work with teachers, often directly in the classroom. Nonetheless, I do talk with teachers from time to time and they have questions similar to those that policymakers ask such as, “How do you find good quality OER?” After I mumble something like, “Go to the Creative Commons site and click on Explore and go to ISKME and their OER Commons site,” I try to tell them that the best quality comes from the users. That is, while OER is content, it also is open. Thus, users should contribute content, but they also should also use it and modify it to meet their needs and their students’ needs.

This notion was reinforced in an excellent blog post by Ian Quillen in Mind/Shift. Ian quotes Bill Fitzgerald, the founder of FunnyMonkey, during a presentation at Educon 2.5: “People often hear the content piece rather than the open piece,” said Fitzgerald. “And it shifts [an understanding] about what open content is.” Quillen’s post goes on to delineate a framework of nine tips Fitzgerald offers based on “The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary,” which is characterized as “an evolving book” by Eric Raymond the author of the book. Fitzgerald’s tips are not only are practical, they also embrace the spirit of open. The tips are simple and common sense, yet valuable: “Good content comes from personal passion,” “Licensing is important,” “Hands off the lessons you’ve tired of.”

The next time a teacher asks about open educational resources and what they mean, refer them to these nine tips. They should get the essence of the OER spirit.

Pubs - Don't Forget OER!

We in the ed tech world are fortunate to have a wide range of coverage of our segment of the industry, from traditional trade publications like T.H.E. Journal, eSchool News and Tech and Learning, to a variety of blogs as well as entities like EdSurge that have a focus on the business and especially start-up side. (It seems weird to have traditional publications in a field that I have always considered young, but I remind myself –truth in reporting – I worked for T.H.E. Journal for 16 years.) We still are a small market segment, and I consider some of the editors, publishers and writers for these “publications,” to be colleagues and some of them are friends. So call this a friendly plea to think a bit differently, and help our readers do the same, especially when covering “traditional” topics. I will pick on eSchool News as an example, but it can be true of any of the ‘traditional’ trade publications. My plea concerns OER. In otherwise interesting articles, eSchool News missed great opportunities to bring the notion of open educational resources to its readers.

For example, the article “Tips for understanding copyright rules” was a good refresher on Copyright 101, and provided some fair use guidelines for different types of works, as well as the four factors of fair use doctrine (say that four times fast). Toward the end of the article, I kept looking for the section on Open Educational Resources and how they are different from the traditionally licensed textbooks used in schools. Alas, that section was not there – but it could have been.

Next I read another article in eSN, “Publishers answering the call for digital textbooks.” The author spotlighted five entities providing “digital textbooks”: Apple iBooks, CK-12 Foundation, Kno, Discovery Education and McGraw-Hill. Each has interesting and attractive features and capabilities, all of which are likely to help keep students engaged. What was not explored in the description of these products was how they were licensed and how that licensing may effect how the content could be used by the teachers and students. To more and more teachers, materials licensed with a Creative Commons license that allows remix and redistribution options are becoming appealing. This added flexibility allows teachers to provide instructional materials more individually suited for each student.

So I send my plea for writers and editors in the education market and especially in the educational technology space to provide an additional angle for your increasing coverage of digital content: Don’t forget the positive role that OER can play as the instructional materials market evolves to a more flexible, user-friendly space.

Two Superintendents Who Get It

A news story out of central Florida caught my eye recently with the headline: “Schools Moving Toward Digital Textbooks.” Many of these stories in local papers talk about a district’s purchase of devices and “how excited and engaged students are in their learning.” As a former editor, I always asked my writers to NOT give our readers those kinds of quotes. Of course the students are excited; they just got a cool device. Of course they are engaged; they are working with a device that offers all kinds of different approaches to interact beyond reading a flat textbook. These approaches are similar to those they use outside of school – the ones they choose to use when they have a choice. This article has some of that, but it also has a couple of tidbits.

The first is a reference to Mooresville, NC schools. This oft-cited school has a truly forward leaning superintendent, Mark Edwards, who actually tracks the data in his schools and is interested in the impact the innovations he has implemented have on student achievement. He is quoted as saying, “We’re currently 100th in the state in funding and second in the state in overall academic achievement.” That is the kind of information that school board members, legislators and other policy makers want to hear. The policy makers are OK with excitement and engagement, but they usually are not willing to plunk down hundreds of thousands of dollars on changes that have little or no evidence of impact on student learning.

The other tidbit is something I have been waiting to hear educators say, and it comes from another superintendent, Dr. Casey Wardynski of Huntsville City Schools in Alabama. The quote is worth including it in its entirety. “A lot of people when they think about digital education or digital conversion, they are thinking e-books and Kindles. That’s the weakest form. The strongest form looks almost like a game a child will play. So in the middle school curriculum, by the time a child solves the problem, they’ve already got 12 windows open, they’ve got a Cartesian coordinate, they have video running of the lesson, they can pull up a textbook or a piece of the lesson. They can also bring up 300 other textbooks.”

I would bet that if you asked Wardynski, he could tell you how student achievement has been impacted in Huntsville schools or he can tell you of the plan they have to track it. I wonder how many other superintendents there are out there who can cite that kind of data that Edwards does or who has the kind of sophisticated understanding of the technology that Wardynski does.