Jul

20

What you need is a Platform

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

For some years, strategy consultants, this writer amongst them, have talked about “migration” to the Platform. My erstwhile colleagues at Outsell have been strong on the point, but we have all of us been short of exemplars in the education sector. It has therefore been hard for industry participants to see exactly what we mean or how it might be applied. Here then is a chance to explain what I at least mean, as demonstrated by English360 (www.english360.com), a platform developed for English Language Teaching (ELT). And, with major non-educational interests (like Bertelsman this week, and News Corp when their minds are not elsewhere) thinking of education as a banker zone and seeking strategic investments this is a very pertinent area to look at, even though few current text book players seem to have got it right yet.

First of all, some preliminaries:

What is a Platform?

In most digital content marketplaces there is a need for an interface between users and technology, to allow users to manipulate content and present it to themselves, their colleagues or their learners. This may be very lite, or it could be serious industrial strength technology. Its aim is to:

Sorry to repeat what so many know already. And to do so in a context where, when we have been talking workflow/process, we have seen such a spate of examples already: GlobalSpec in engineering, AscendWorldwide in aircraft leasing; DataExlorers in equity leasing to name but three. And elsewhere, open APIs invite users to work on the vendors’ platform as a matter of course. Yet this has been rare in education, where looking at the tools needed to empower teachers has usually not survived the scorn of publishers saying that teachers will never do anything for themselves until last thing Sunday night before the Monday class.

Then again we hear that teachers have quite enough technology that they are not using – VLEs, LMS – so why add more? Well, one of the reasons why that technology is not working, in the UK at least, is that the level of digital literacy amongst teachers is often lower than their pupils, and the technologies installed in every school and classroom in the UK are high level and require a thin platform to give an intuitive interface to teaching tasks like lesson preparation, individualized learner guidance and diagnostic assessment. This is not altered by the fact that a institution has Moodle or that its VLE is stuffed to the brim with unused content or lesson plans created by teachers in previous years (but not updated).

English 360 is a cogent demonstration of this interfacing platform role. I even forgive them for talking about blended learning, since I see how desperately they are trying to de-ice these concepts from the prejudicial beliefs of publishers and teachers alike. They are providing the authoring tools required to get even less-motivated teachers into flexible course design. Through Cambridge University Press initially, and now through a widening range of published materials, they are adding digital learning objects to allow for the construction of contextualised and personalised learning, and they include all the collaborative tools needed to enable learners to learn together, which remains one of the most successful learning strategies, and one which the internet enhances considerably. And in terms of personalised learning they add the tags that reflect the diagnostic readings made by the platform, and which enable users to follow remedial pathways designed to correct their mistakes and support their weaknesses.

When I was a publisher responsible for an ELT list (now lost in the mists of time, fortunately!), there was ELT and ESP – English for special purposes like the oil industry. And the problem of both was that teachers came from all backgrounds (and sometimes none) and learners were equally fragmented by time, place and purpose. Now everything can be treated as ESP, since platform publishing allows special vocabularies or learning content to be available in the same context as basic language learning. It seems to me that English 360 drives beyond the only comparable play in this sector (Macmillan’s Campus English) and not only do I think that publisher’s should invest content in it, but I think they should licence it and use it as a white label environment for branding their approach to digital ELT. Then they can drive it towards mobile platforms, the future focus of many ELT markets, and even (just imagine, collaborative publishers!) share content to create learning solutions.

Of course, outside of ELT some publishers are already getting platform savvy in education. Pearson always has been, and it is interesting to see how MyLab has developed as an all markets vehicle. A dramatic late convert now rushing into the front line is McGraw-Hill: on 18 July they announced the launch of McGraw-Hill Campus (www.mhcampus.com) in higher education, allowing all of their disaggregated content to be used in any LMS – “a universal solution for any institutions LMS”. And McGraw has Connect as a learning platform and Create as a publishing tool already established in these markets. But still there is little progress in K-12, and many seem to see Textbooks on a Kindle as a revolution. Of course it is in one sense – it revolutionizes publisher textbook margins downwards and further complicates the rental market. But it is facsimile, not change. Until we believe that Blended is over and Textbook is dead, it is really hard to reinvent. Which is why English 360 is so welcome.

Jul

8

How big is the eBook?

Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Lets start with a complaint. I seem to be the only citizen of the UK who has not received a letter from the Police saying that my phone might have been hacked by Murdoch’s News International newspapers. This is at once humiliating and ungrateful. Only recently I sent Rupert a birthday card (https://www.davidworlock.com/2011/03/birthday-greetings-rm/) I wonder if compensation will be offered to the bruised egos of those of us whose voicemail did not assuage the ferocious appetites of the newshounds at the now defunct News of the Screws. But I know that if I had the Tycoon’s dollar in my grasp I should be forced to pay it over to the benefit of the 200 wholly innocent computer operators, secretaries and cleaners who have lost their jobs in this debacle, and will be unemployed until Rupert gets the Sunday Sun launched later in the year.

So that is the topic that I do not choose to talk about. And I would have liked to talk about Facebook: everything in the social network devolves to video is a theory I have held for a long time. The Skype-Facebook alliance brings Microsoft back into play, but Google+, the social network, while it has few takers, has group video. The manifest destiny of social networks is video chat, and that is a subject for another day. Meanwhile, Facebook has seen its first net user declines. Watch this space.

Still with me? The most important issue of the week was definitely getting a copy of a new report on Market Sizing and forecasts for eBooks. I was delighted to see that this came from my erstwhile friends and colleagues at Outsell, not least because they have filled a real gap and we are all going to be grateful to them. As they would expect, I could argue with the forecasts, but so could most of us: the important thing is to have a forecast, based on historical data, which can be the focus of debate going forward. Outsell have decided to divide the market to be measured into three – consumer, educational and professional. This was very wise. They have also made the very first attempt that I have seen to get global estimates – Europe, Asia-Pacific and the USA will all be markedly different in their development in this area. It is comforting, after so many attempts at global trend analysis (thinly disguised US forecasting globally extrapolated) to see genuine attempts to understand players like Kodansha and fit them into the grid. The future is manga as well as Stephanie Meyer. So, inspired by these efforts, let me add a couple of thoughts on top:

The report notes that many publishers feel happy with eBooks. They should be deeply disturbed, in my view. The eBook is a transitory phase, and anyone complacent enough to believe that it “solves” any of the underlying issues of movement to a networked, digital marketplace needs a strong cup of tea and a good talking to, as my mother would have said. It is already clear that the only thing that these three markets examined by Outsell have in common is that they all define the word “book” in “eBook” very differently. “Book” is the packaging word of the print world: calling something an “eBook” does not mean that publishers can regard it as a format environment in the same way. In current attitudes to ebooks, especially in those devoted to ePub3 who point to the newly announced standard as a breakthrough in multimedia publishing, there remains the hope that eBooks can become an extension of businesses which are primarily print-based and wish to see change at their own pace. The problem is that neither customers or self-publishers, or custom course content producers or anyone else, is going to wait for them.

In the meanwhile, we all need to know where we are on the change graph, and then we can begin to adjust our own strategies as we guage how fast the water is running. Outsell have done us all a real service in getting all the data together: now we need to acquire it and begin the internal argument from here.

Worldwide e-Books: Market Size and Forecast Report, 2009-2013 (June 30, 2011) (www.outsellinc.com)

« go back — keep looking »