Oct
27
Fair Dealing in Carniola
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
OK, its a test. What links Mrs Donald Trump with historian and English Royal Society member Valvasor (mid-seventeenth century) and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations (IFRRO)? Give up? The connection is Slovenia. Melania Knauss-Trump was born there, Valvasor wrote the history of the Duchy of Carniola (then a Habsburg property long before the creation and dissolution of Yugoslavia), and wrote the first treatise on vampires. And IFRRO met here this week in the capital, Ljubljana, which is probably why I know these things (at least, temporarily!).
And in a month of travel it was a relief to reach a small town, in a country of 2 million people, where you can see a third of the territory from the castle roof. Yet IFRRO has been concerned with lofty and global matters, and I and others have been trying to help by stimulating the argument in the vital sector of education. I will put my slides for the keynote at the business models forum in the download section of this website (and they will also be at www.ifrro.org) and will not rehearse them now, but I have been very interested by the arguments around a conference room of some 230 delegates from 130 countries. Faced with the ever-increasing extension of fair use and fair dealings claims (the Canadian government is the latest to push for extensions of educational concessions), it seems that education is becoming the battleground for networked rights. I continue to believe that the word “copyright”, and the perpetual discussion of ex-print formats (books, articles, newspapers, magazines etc) tempts legislators and administrators to try to regulate digital networks as if they were simply extensions of the non-digital world. I think we need a new language, the removal of the copyright exceptions, blanket (and often metered) licenses and the ability to wrap content into software-governed packages and still protect it, and the new content it morphs into, on the network. If Google can measure the value of every click we make, then we should be able to measure usage. Lets dump copyright and start over with a new approach to network licensing which rewards authors and risk-taking entrepreneurial investors (even publishers where they can cope with that description) for making education work in the individualized learning context online which I have described before.
This educational push – creating a world of collaborative learning – will be the most important thing that our society accomplishes in our lifetimes, so making sure it works economically is totally worthwhile. And after a panel debate on some of the legal issues I then had the pleasure of hearing a following speaker take some of my themes and arguments, exemplify them brilliantly, and then drive the discussion forward in a wholly compelling and committed manner. Melissa Sabella, who runs Pearson’s custom publishing business in EMEA from London, justified every word of my recent blog on that company. Standing on a corporate platform that is now 29% digital (some $2.5 billion in network-derived digital educational revenues), she was able to be ruthlessly authoritative about the necessity to protect the educational economy at this point of rapid change. While Pearson has major digital businesses like MyLab (revenues of some $8 million this year) it is the startling shift to eBook here in the last year which has made the critical change: some 25% of Pearson’s textbook business is now digital, and the big and recent push has been from the onset of a mobile networked marketplace.
Two factors underlie all of this, and Melissa met them square on. One is that in order for custom and individualized learning to work, you have to have frictionless purchase. The other is that networked learners are living in a world where, increasingly, the content knows them. The ability to allow content to track the learner, building associations and next steps, recognizing the need and providing the assessment, the diagnostic and the learning object to rehearse or re-inforce the learning provides the values that people will pay for in the future.
Of course, the first question from the sceptics is always “when”. I floundered around, pointing out that the developed world was taking its time ( and in economic down turn would take longer), partly because it was such a book-based culture, while the developing world could reach more easily, or leap-frog, to these conclusions. Melissa was more direct, citing her own experience of the 75,000 students in the Nigerian equivalent of the Open University (or its South African equivalent, which predates the UK distance learning landmark and which I recall visiting when I was publishing textbooks in Africa in the 1970s). But now the courseware must be customized, and, again in South Africa, the 40,000 students in the CTI scheme wanted learning that fitted their smartphones (a third of students have them). Africa. We are used to Asia Pacific being held up as a beacon of change. But this was Africa, and it was good stuff to hear.
It has eventually stopped raining in Slovenia and I have been able to walk around the town of Ljubljana. Before I go I hope to see more, but the watery sunshine of a late October day following heavy rain did surely betoken something, I hope? Maybe, at last, the men and women who control the author/publisher side of reproduction rights can persuade governments, globally, that the huge promise of networked education through individualized learning has to be paid for somehow, and since it is the powerful economic need in our society to create a workforce which can respond to the challenges of the networked world, then it had better be the state, and sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, I have put “fair dealing” on my watch list, along with that other horror, “blended learning”!
Oct
20
Learning, management and leadership
Filed Under Blog, Cengage, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
There is nothing more certain in the information industry than that, once past a certain point, the big only get bigger. Thus I see no logical end to the steady growth of Pearson, over the past decade, as the leading force in education systems and services. Indeed. I predict another decade of such growth, driving national education champions to despair and frustrating would-be competitors who lack the global outreach. They now have the size to balance slower running developed world markets against fast-flowing BRICs educational economies. While their competitors want to play them on a pitch named Textbooks or Blended Learning, they have the scope to introduce just the right amount of technology, curriculum control and assessment into the mix to satisfy a Brazilian state, an American city school board or a consortium of vocational training panels. Their custom business will build over time. And so will their approach to individualized learning.
In short, over the next decade they will become recognized for what they now are: the behemoth of education with every growth option at their disposal. As a company that early recognized that the enterprise systems of schools were one of the keys to digital education they can be systems and solution suppliers of turnkey environments with the content in place. They can get to grips with the assessment engines of the world, using their experience of owning the major US solution supplier as well as a major UK examination board to drive national systems globally. While we have been saying for 20 years that education is different because of national and cultural distinctions, they have got on with identifying the things that education has in common – from sorting out timetabling, communicating with parents, marking exams and providing administrators with performance reporting – and have made a business of this alongside schoolbook supply. Does any other player in their competitive sector have a strategic alliance with Oracle?
Pearson has always been able to change. A nineteenth century builders merchant from Yorkshire, UK, became, in the hands of Weedon Pearson, a successful oil wildcatter in Venezuela and finally the collector of great tradeable brands in mid-twentieth century Britain. Some of those brands remain in terms of Penguin and the Financial Times, but as we saw with IDC, having a few brands around to toss into the investment fire is a great way of fueling the next stages of growth, just as the last realization from the last sale is now lighting acquisition fires in China, Brazil and India. So we should be asking what next at this point. And we should be interested in the parts of the education scene where Pearson currently has little scale or penetration.
I once had the enjoyable consultancy task of introducing a major hardware player to “the largest educational publisher in the world”. Dreams of strategic alliance were in the air. My hardware client was frankly disappointed: “we get more revenue from printer cartridges sold to education than they do from textbooks”. Now the roles are reversed. My hardware friends are buying search software to stay alive and Pearson are powering on, following a strategy which will undoubtedly see them emerge as a major owner of schools and universities in a number of countries, the owner of distance learning institutions with global outreach (including degree awarding and exam setting bodies in countries like the UK), a partner of governments in delivering national solutions and a leadership role in the flight from content into an individualized learning environment. And they are the only player in the sector big enough to do the whole education value chain.
They have invested and played around experimentally in some sectors for years, however, without coming up with a real strategy. Learning management is one. Working with Blackboard was one phase, buying Fronter was another. Yet their latest announcement, last week, that they will now enter a partnership with Google to develop OpenClass as a free generic LMS available globally on the Web is something else again. Here is a well-tenanted marketplace, with Blackboard and open source Moodle occupying some 80 per cent between them. Pearson seemingly have no real axe to grind here – except pure disruption (and they have teamed up with the arch-disruptor to do that). At the moment huge amounts of Pearson content must sit on Moodle or Blackboard installations. But I suspect that Pearson think this is a temporary world, that the future of learning management may have mobile and Cloud attached to them, and that they need to be somewhere fairly unique, where even larger competitors like Cengage could not follow. OpenClass could be a place like that.
Finally, as Pearson puts further distance between itself and its rivals, it is interesting to see how it now feels that it is important to build viewpoints and concensus in education as well as develop systems and solutions. The work of the Pearson Foundation was highlighted recently in Media Taylor (www.mediataylor.com) I am not sure that I take such a sinister view as this blogger, but, especially in countries like India, it will be important to prepare the ground and widen the options. Major players like Pearson have an interest in this – but also a duty of care. Since there are such plentiful national educational interests that Pearson will not face competition issues in most of its markets for some years. In the meanwhile informing and educating educational buyers could be a critical part of that.
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