Key Trends:
- Individualization. More districts are announcing at least the intent to individualize every student's education.
- Embrace of web-delivered curriculum. Buyers at districts are projecting an increase in purchasing of web-delivered instructional materials. More importantly, more teachers using the web means that more will be expected from materials delivered on the web:
- Anytime/anywhere learning
- Tie-in to data and data analysis tools
- Customization
- Modularization of curricula. The fact of the matter is that any basal curriculum (except maybe the most strictly prescribed curricula) will be only partially used by classroom teachers. From both a cost-effectiveness and a usefulness standpoint, delivering modular curriculum resources makes perfect sense.
- Community. Call it what you will -- web 2.0, user generated value, community-based content, etc -- the fact is that organized correctly, and made usable by the majority, mechanisms for collecting, packaging and redistributing value generated by a group of users with common goals has changed everything from bookbuying to selling second-hand items to selecting rental movies to downloading music. It should (and eventually will) change education too.
- NCLB. Love it or hate it, it's not going away. The reauthorization should fix some of the major problems with it, but the idea of measuring school performance based on improvements in student performance will only be strengthened in the coming years, regardless of who occupies the White House or Congress.
- Consolidation of the major publishers. This is not inertia in and of itself, but a sign that the major publishers see this business as a commodity. They are betting that control of distribution and political processes will preserve revenues and profits in a sort of zero-sum status quo. Innovation (either in product or economic models) is not a factor of competition in their minds.
- The existing adoption process, especially in Texas and California. The major states where there remains line-item adoption funding continue to drive the rest of the instructional materials industry. When Texas can guarantee that $180 million will be spent this year on K-5 math curricula, it drives the major publishers efforts to build products that meet the standards needs of the state. With an arcane adoption process and a logistically nightmarish sales and marketing effort associated with the adoption, small, innovation-driven players are virtually excluded from participation. This creates a barrier to new products and new forms of products gaining the foothold they need to be viable solutions to curriculum needs.
- NCLB. Having the fiasco of Reading First behind it, the US Department of Education is still fishing around for the best way to have an impact. We'll see if their math initiatives encourage innovative solutions to enter the market, or if the criteria for inclusion end up excluding things without a sufficient "scientific research base".
- More web-delivered materials will be purchased. This will be especially true if tools emerge that allow teachers to seamlessly integrate a variety of web-based content to solve real world classroom problems.
- Economic models will emerge that will allow "just in time", or pay-for-consumption models of curriculum delivery.
- The quest for individualization will enable some powerful, open-access tools to be developed and utilized that facilitate an acceleration of the value of web-delivered curricula.
- Teachers will have a greater influence on purchasing. In a world of effective mix-and-match, modular, customizable, data-enhanced content, not only will teachers be in the best position to decide what is best for their students, school and district administrators will be able to monitor usage and recognize value.
- The overall market for content resources will not disappear ever. But it will grow smaller overall as schools are able to buy just what they need. User-generated content will not replace professionally developed content, and will never amount to more than 10% of what teachers consume in the classroom.
wjk
2 comments:
I find it interesting that there is a trend towards the individualization of learning for all students, yet the current version of NCLB law does not allow progress to be measured on the growth of individual students.
Good point, Barclay. Individual instruction would seem to call for an IEP-style plan for every student, not just special needs students. However, I think there is a legitimate concern in calling relative progress for every student a sufficient goal and not keeping objective benchmarks in place that a significant portion of students should be expected to reach. My sense is that is the reason behind the inflexibility in the way AYP is measured.
Post a Comment