The archive
of Farimah’s and Sue Hanson’s (of PR with
Panache) webinar sponsored by Agile Minds on March 14 is now available.
Sue started with the point that lead generation is much more
difficult when there is no brand awareness, and brand awareness starts with
your story. If you want to build a successful business, you have to have a
story; one that makes the audience feel something. A story doesn’t try to get
your audience to buy, it gets them to buy
in.
A story helps build brand awareness, or in other words it
achieves buy in, if the audience feels it is relevant (it’s about a problem
that they feel they need to solve) and if they can relate or identify with the people
who are solving the problem using your solution.
The place to start building your story is to talk to your
customers and find out what caused them to seek you out, and what results they
are receiving.
Farimah explained that a recognized brand makes lead
generation much more effective because it creates an element of trust, it keeps
your company on top of mind when they have a problem you can solve, it creates
leads by itself, and it makes other lead generation activities (such as email,
cold calling, and conferences) more successful. Without brand recognition, and without an investment in brand recognition, all other lead gen activities are more difficult.
When it comes to the specific lead gen activities
themselves, Farimah said that targeting is critical. Who owns the problem that
you solve? Who has to fix it, and who pays the consequences if it is not fixed?
Who makes the decision on what to buy to solve the problem? Who influences the
decision? Who can be an impediment to the buying decision? Know your audience,
and target your activities, messaging, and lists to reach that audience.
Many of Academic Business Advisor’s clients use conferences
as both lead gen and branding activities. Put yourself in the shoes of
conference attendees. If they glance at your booth as they walk by, is it
obvious what you do and what problem you solve? Too many booths show happy or
struggling kids or teachers, but fail to communicate what the companies do.
All successful lead gen activities make a compelling offer.
Often good information (such as a webinar or free ebook on a relevant topic) is
more valuable to potential prospects than an offer of some limited time free
use of your product or service.
Farimah and Sue stressed that whatever activity you perform,
your followup activities should be pre-planned. If you offer a webinar or go to
a conference, have your followup emails queued and ready to go, along with some
call to action.
Sue’s PR with Panache can help you generate a buzz that translates
into business. Farimah (and my) Academic Business Advisors helps education companies develop
and execute winning strategies to grow their education businesses. If either of
these sounds like something you could use, please contact us at info@academicbiz.com.
This post is was written by Cathy Toohey of The Toohey Group who had some reflections
on the 2013 Florida
Education Technology Conference or FETC. Cathy is an independent
educational marketing consultant. For the past 25 years Cathy has worked on a
wide-range of products and programs from early childhood to professional
development.
FETC was very well attended and enthusiasm was extremely high.
As a marketing consultant my overall take-away word from the
exhibit hall was MANAGEMENT.
Eight thousand people showed up for the Texas Computer
Education Association Fusion 2013 Conference in Austin this last week. I’m the
last one here, because good old American Airlines canceled my original flight
for Friday and then my newly booked flight for Saturday. But this gives me a good chance to compose a
recap.
First of all, the fun stuff. Alan Stern and I found a great
wine bar, Cru, on 2nd
Street. If you’re in Austin, they have very economical flights of wine
tastings, and great appetizers to go with them. We then headed over to Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar on 6th
Street for a great show. And tonight, I’m going to Antone’s on 5th Street for a
Carnaval of Brazilian music.
Getting back to Education, Charles Blaschke, of Education Turnkey Systems, probably knows more
about education funding than any person in the US. At the SIIA member
breakfast, he noted that districts have slammed on the brakes for all
purchases, and that there is $2 billion of uncommitted Title I funds, because
of fear of sequestration. Districts can allocate up to 25% of their Title I
funds for the following year, and since they have no confidence that there will
be federal funding next year that is comparable to what they have this year,
they are holding on to as much as they can. This has made for a terrible
November through February time period for education publishers, a spending
desert that will continue at least until districts get a better sense of what
they will receive next year. Even then, if federal education levels are cut (a
good possibility), the education technology publishing community can expect a
terrible next 12 months.
But you couldn’t tell that by the looking at the number and
size of the booths on the exhibition floor. There seemed to be a lot of
relatively new companies with a lot of money to spend on conference booths.
Educator traffic in the exhibition hall seemed to be down. Many vendors
reported a fairly healthy number of visitors on Wednesday, but significant dips
on Thursday and virtually no visitors on Friday. Still, with TCEA as the de
facto winter education technology conference of the winter, it’s an essential
place for education publishers to be seen.
Peter Sheahan of Change
Labs in Australia was the opening keynote speaker at the conference. He
related the changes in the US Education sector to other sectors that have
experience seismic changes. One key underlying factor is that in none of these
transformations were people before the change able to predict or explain what
would happen during the change. Thus, if you encounter someone who says with
any certainty, “this is what you need to do” the only thing you can be certain
of is that that person is wrong.
Because there is no algorithm that you can apply to improve
the education system in the US, the best strategy is to make sure you surround
yourself with people who are knowledgeable, professional, and flexible.
In schools, this means that change has little to do with the
technology, and everything to do with the teacher. It’s not going to work from
top down, but has to be achieved through two way communications. Allow teachers
some measure of control, and help them make some simple first steps to change,
and you can start driving improvements.
For education technology companies, maybe that means working
with Farimah and me at Academic Business Advisors.
Seth Mattison of BridgeWorks
was the closing keynote speaker. As if the huge changes facing education aren’t
enough, we also have to deal with three generations of educators who just don’t
get it. Of course, which three don’t get it, and which one does, depends on
which generation you’re in:
Traditionals:
born before 1947, look at the other generations as lacking loyalty, too
consumer oriented, and not willing to stick with a plan long enough for it to
work.
Boomers:
born 1947 – 1962,see the other generations as pessimistic, not willing to try
out new things and take chances in order to make things better.
Gen X:
born 1963 – 1980 just don’t trust the other generations, and they just want to
be told what they have to do, when they have to do it by, and then be left
alone to do it their way.
Millennials:
born 1981 – 2000 don’t see the value of face to face communications and demand want a say in what is going to be done; they don’t want to be told what to do,
they want to help shape both what is going to be done and how it’s going to be
accomplished.
There are a few people, irrespective of birth year, who do
not feel entirely comfortable with any one of the generations, but can often be
used to help fuse the four generations into a functioning team. Mattison’s
advice was to find these people, and have them help push your teams to
evolutionary, not revolutionary change.
Of course, no tech conference would be worth its weight
without a few website and app tips. Here are a few I gleaned from the conference:
Endless
Alphabet is a very cute early reading app that teaches kids the alphabet
and vocabulary.
Thinglink.com
allows you or students to post a picture and then annotate sections of the
picture with explanations, sound, animation, or video. For example, if you were
teaching Spanish, students could post a picture and label parts of the picture
with the word in Spanish.
CopyPasteCharacter.com
offers all the special font characters so you can copy and paste them into
documents, presentations, chats, or web pages.
EZBib is a
free bibliography maker. If you scan in the bar code of a book, it will
automatically give you back the information for an MLA citation.
All in all, a worthwhile four days, but I can’t wait to get
back to my own bed.
This post is written by Farimah Schuerman, Managing Partner of Academic Business Advisors.
Are you a senior manager of a company that develops and
sells instructional solutions, especially for
math and reading? If so, you've
felt the pain of the recession and may wonder how you can best survive the
"new normal." One way to ensure your company's survival is to see the
current situation from your customer's view. What's causing them to more
carefully consider every purchase may run deeper than you think.
The rush to meet the guidelines for the Common Core
standards and the anxiety around meeting the objectives of the related
assessments is masking a much deeper and more daunting challenge school
districts’ leadership team: Change Management.
While leaders of commercial enterprises have understood and embraced practices
that guide a corporation through change when outside forces require it, this has
never been a part of the education culture.
Now, school personnel at all levels are being bombarded with change. If
you understand the forces behind the change and can help administrators cope
and adapt, you could find your business thriving, even during a down economy.
Three Forces Driving Change: What’s
the Impact on School Administrators?
Driving Force #1: Common
Core Standards Are Forcing New Processes
The shift to Common Core has required districts to take a
long, hard look at which processes they can keep doing as before, and which
must change. Teaching is shifting from
knowledge-based, to learning-based approaches. It’s not what the teacher knows,
it’s what the students learn; students need to grasp concepts, not commit facts
to short term memory, and to demonstrate that they can apply what they have
learned to new problems. Good teachers
have used this approach for years with success, but many others have not. Successful
companies are already reacting to this catalyst and providing leadership, producing
instructional materials, particularly in reading and math, that use the latest
cognitive research to help teachers help each student learn.
This leads me to the second pressure point: meaningful
professional development (PD) and related evaluation. Teachers need to be prepared not only to
align instruction to the Common Core Curriculum, but how to extract the best
learning. This involves disrupting
traditional classroom strategies based on the new realities: the use of new
technologies, mainstreaming students with special needs, and problem based
learning, just to name a few. We hear the terms "personalized
learning" and "individualized instruction" which expand on the
concept of differentiated instruction. I wonder how many teachers are equipped
to teach this way, especially as class sizes grow larger than we've experienced
before. The best PD providers are building both product-specific and generalized
tools for helping teachers successfully make these changes and for
administrators to better manage them.
Driving Force #3: Doing
More with Less
A third pressure is the combination of diminished or flat
school funding while expenses, particularly those around staff benefits, are on
the rise.
In this time of greater accountability, teachers,
administrators, and materials are being measured, evaluated, and judged, even
when outcomes can’t be specifically tied to specific actions. Diminished
funding also comes at a time when there is momentum to acquire and support costly
technology solutions which promise to improve learning. A firehose of new
technology applications have the potential to provide more reliable collection
and analysis of student data. But, administrators feel forced to make stressful
decisions and often feel the frustration that there may be no "good"
decision, just the best one they can make under bad circumstances and with
incomplete information or unbiased guidance. Successful companies are finding
ways of tying their solutions to both fiscal austerity and high achievement.
Strong Company Leaders to the Rescue
So what's the point of painting this negative picture? It's not to depress you, but to remind you
that in order to be successful in this environment, everyone who works for your
company must understand these forces and be empathetic. Company leaders,
starting with the CEO and every employee must understand the buyer's
perspective when trying to get excellent products, with game-changing
possibilities, into the hands of students who need them. So, here are some guiding questions I suggest
you consider as a leader of an organization that serves the school market:
How does your product (or service) make the
buyer's life better?
Can you articulate how your product solves a
pressing problem?
Does the problem your product or service
addresses keep school leaders up at night?
What else is required, or has to change for educators
to implement your product successfully and do you understand how the
implementation will be managed?
Does your product or service replace a product
that is established and gets the job done - not as well as yours, but works?
How much teacher training will be required to
effectively utilize your product or service and when do you expect this
training to be provided?
When your product is implemented, will instructional
time have to be managed differently?
Will using your product require that students are
identified in a new or different way?
Four Steps You Can Take Today on the Pathway to Success
1. Help Potential
Customers Secure Funds
How will educators pay for your product? While this is a basic question, the answer is
not always straightforward. If grants
are necessary, how will they be secured?
How can you help? Does the use of
your product save some other expense?
Credit recovery products have used this approach, retaining students
brings income to the district that can cover the expense. What strategies like
this could you use to reduce perceived costs?
2. Train and Support Your
Sales Team
It is critical that your sales team can display empathy for school
administrators who are under fire. Some
ways they do this are by confirming timing and by offering alternatives for
scheduling, and by being sensitive to the timing of other initiatives that are
going on in the district. They need to develop a deep understanding of the
district’s priorities. Administrators
are pulled into committees, community meetings, staff trainings and are
thrashed around by external forces can affect the salesperson's ability to drive
deals forward on your company's schedule.
3. Think Through the Entire
Process from Sale to Implementation
Understanding the principals of change management will help
your company guide and support your customers through the challenges they
face. When you are proposing a product
adoption, think about how it will affect the district or school and take the
time to plan the change with the administrators. Look at calendaring with them. Offer support for how data might flow if the
product has instructional impact. Think
about how teachers will need to do things differently, and figure out how best
to stage those changes so they are as easy as possible. Assign support staff to
monitor these changes; don't encumber the sales team with that task, that's not
their role, or their expertise. Supporting implementations will distract them
from their principal function: driving new sales. Take time to help your entire
staff understand the current dynamics of change so that each one can be
empathetic and supportive during any interaction with customers or prospects.
4. Plan for the Future
Finally, senior management needs to be prepared that sales
are slower under these circumstances, and you need to be cognizant of the cash
flow implications of this slowed decision-making process. Unless you have a "must-have"
product, you will need to tighten your belts and hunker down. Keep these points
in mind!
You can listen to a 15 minute discussion on these issues with Glen McCandless of Selling to Schools, Mitch Weisburgh, and me on Blog Talk Radio.
This process of re-imagining products and services requires
a radical change in underlying beliefs; it’s what in 1962 Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm
shift. While business leaders can attempt this process internally, it
is often best facilitated by outsiders, because it involves a significant shift
in perception.
Sue Hanson of PR with Panache and Mitch Weisburgh of Academic Business Advisors discuss why effective marketing, especially in education, starts with a good story. They describe the elements of a good story, and then how to use the story in sales, face to face marketing, press, blogs, websites, and social media marketing.
PR with Panache helps education technology firms with publicity and press. Academic Business Advisors helps ed tech companies define and execute sales and marketing plans and the two companies often work together to help companies grow rapidly.
It’s September, and thus another year for BMO’s Back to School
Conference in New York City, which was held on September 13. If you are
interested in the preK-12 or higher education markets, BMO also publishes their
Education
and Training Equity Research, which is known in the Education Investment
community as the bible.
Before recapping my impressions from this year’s conference, a few announcements.
My wife and I spent just over two weeks in Spain, primarily
bicycling and visiting wineries in La Rioja and Ribera del Duero. We visited about
20 wineries, tasted over 70 wines, and averaged about 30 miles a day on our
folding bikes. For those interested, here is the commentary and pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mweisburgh/sets/72157631482124178/
On Thursday, September 20 at 1:00 Eastern time, Sue Hanson and I are giving a
webinar: Storytelling Isn't Just for Bedtime: The Social Side of PR &
Marketing. Here is the registration page: http://www.hostinguc.com/agile/091812/email.html
Finally, if you are going to Ednet, Sept 30 to October
2, Farimah and I would love to meet you.
English: Looking southeast at Special education PS 721 in Gravesend, Brooklyn on a sunny late afternoon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
BMO Back to School Recap
Don’t just think China and India when looking for large
markets overseas. Brazil already has over $2 billion in private postsecondary
education revenues with double digit growth and over 1 million students
participating in undergraduate distance education a year. Currently fewer than
15% of young people in Brazil take any postsecondary courses, and the
government is increasing student aid.
But, back to China, there are about 200,000 students a year,
whose parents are able to pay full tuition, that are trying to get into the US
for high school education, primarily to learn English fluently. In fact, 85% of
Chinese families that are earning over $1M a year want to send their children
to the US or the UK for at least some secondary education.
Australian and Canadian schools are aggressively attracting
international students. Students from non-English speaking countries pursuing
postsecondary studies in English speaking countries is expected to grow by over
50% over the next five years. To the extent that schools (and national policies) can figure out how to
make this type of education more affordable, like through hybrid programs or
allowing work-study, the floodgates can open even faster. Students generally
choose the country first, then the city, and then the school. While the US is
attractive to the students, our policies often make it more difficult and
expensive.
The for-profit postsecondary schools have been under attack,
and are significantly more expensive than community colleges, but they feel
that their advantages over community colleges are as follows:
Many students leave community colleges because
they are crowded out of the courses they need in order to graduate
They can offer subsidiaries services, like
childcare
They can equip their labs better and provide
more hands-on training for occupations
They are better at marketing
They are perceived to be better at placement
They concentrate on the courses that are
occupational, and can offer degrees in less time
One of the largest players in private and charter K12 is
education is K12. They believe that only they
and Pearson are large enough to change education on a national level. Their view
is that there are entrenched interests that are preventing parents and children
from exercising their choice for education, and that the biggest barriers that
they face are political, not demand. Their educational challenge is to help the
more than 50% of children who come into their schools and are behind grade
level.
Education companies are viewing technology and the adoption
of the common core as breaking down the barriers that have created a fragmented
(and diverse) education marketplace in both elementary and secondary education.
They feel this should enable large growth for a number of companies.
However, in a panel on investors, the mood was less
sanguine. Their view is that the US is the biggest education market, but also
the single most regulated, the one showing the lowest return on investment, and
one with significant risk as state and federal policies change, so they are concentrating
much more outside the US.
While there has been a lot of press about Massively Open
Online Courses (MOOCs) and companies like UDEMY and Coursera, a panel of
postsecondary companies pointed out that you can rarely actually have a
completely online program. For example, if you are taking a course in
midwifery, you have to deliver an actual baby and apprentice in a facility that
delivers children. And it was pointed out
that the top 20 postsecondary institutions of 20 years ago and the top ones
today would essentially be the same.
and Judah Karkowsky, VP of Business Development at Wireless Generation. ClassLink is known for LaunchPad, a Codie Award winner that provides students, parents, and teachers access to applications from any device at any time. Wireless Generation is known for their mClass products, which began with streamlining qualitative students assessment by teachers and has expanded
The general consensus is that, sometime before the end of five years, mobile learning is going to be larger than print, desktop, or laptop; it’s where the growth is, while usage in the other areas is likely to shrink. If you are not starting with mobile development now, you will be left behind in three years.
Stan, Judah, and attendees talked about the following issues regarding mLearning.
Authentication
Teachers, parents, and students don’t want to have to log in for every application. The OAuth protocol allows users to login in and authenticate from other applications. Have you ever been offered to login using your Google, Facebook, or Twitter accounts? That’s OAuth. Automatic login using LDAP can be used for single sign on inside the school.
Education privacy, or FERPA, is pretty strict, and there are potential pitfalls to storing student data in the cloud. On the other hand, if you have the school district store sensitive data (like student names) on their equipment and disassociate that data from applications specific data in the cloud, you make it that much more difficult for a person to follow the footprints and obtain information that might hurt a student. Wireless Generation has very strict policies, for example any person only has the rights to the information to the students that he or she is directly involved with; a teacher can’t even access a former student’s information the following year. A large cloud storage platform, like Amazon, has many safeguards built in, but the data will only be as secure as your applications data architecture.
ClassLink is a district wide solution for authentication and privacy, so application and content developers might want to consider ClassLink compatibility and talk to either Stan or to Berj Akian.
Platform
The consensus seemed to be that for distributed applications, REST, or Representational state transfer, is fast, universal, and scalable.
When developing for specific devices, programming in the native platform gives you greater access to features and somewhat faster response time than programming in a more generic platform. For example, if you are creating a system for iPads, and you want to access the device’s camera, you need to program in iOS.
However, developing in a platform like Sencha Touch allows you to develop once, and then have your application run on a wide variety of platforms. If you don’t need access to hardware features, this may be the best option, and Sencha has a lot of data collection capabilities built in.
The iOS 4.3.x home screen, as shown on an iPhone 3GS. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Apple Approval
If you want your application to be available through Apple's App store, it needs to be approved by Apple. The approval process generally takes about two weeks, but it is highly unlikely that you will be approved the first time you apply. For example, one of the developers was rejected because the name of his application had a capital letter in the middle, and that is against Apple standards. Another was not able to send data between two of his own applications. He needed to have the first application store the data on the cloud, and then have the second app access it there rather than on the device.
The main disadvantage to not being on iTunes is that it’s more difficult for potential users to find you, and secondarily that there are some features of iOS that are not accessible through the browser and are only accessible in native applications.
Furthermore, Apple has no provision for a sandlot or beta rollout. If you roll out or post your new release on the App store for a limited number of people, you are technically in violation of Apple’s contract, and you could lose your ability to create any applications to be accessed from the App store.
Don’t let your developers create the user interface.
There are three aspects to any app: the interface, the functionality, and the data. Create functional specs for the functionality and the data, and then go to professional designers to create the User Interface. They’ll often come up with ideas you’d never thought of. In fact, it may be worth the cost to have three groups of designers develop different interfaces, go through a few iterations, and then pick the best one. UI design is not generally that expensive, but is critical to the usability of your application.
Internal development vs outsourcing
Outsourcing has become more expensive over the last three years. It can reduce your overhead, but it can also be disastrous. Make sure that you plan so you can re-source development if it goes awry.
Conclusions
Both speakers stressed the importance of UI testing, multiple rounds before product release. In the near term, expect greater mLearning adoption in grades 6-12 than in elementary. If you have existing web products, chop them down to what people really use and what is really important about them before developing mobile applications.
Post Conclusions
After this article was posted, I received an email from my sister, Betsy Silver, who is the Director of Public Sector Business Development at RDA Software. She pointed that if you do your due diligence correctly, the team that you hire will have done this type of development many times for other clients, so they can get the work done faster and better since they are familiar with both the pitfalls and the best practices. If speed to market and quality of development are more important than cost, outsourcing can be a win. She also noted that RDA does this tpe of hybrid cloud/on-premise work for mobile devices as well as cloud applications.
Massachusetts is currently the number one state in student achievement in the US. But, if it were a country, it would be just 17th in the world. What does that say about the other 49 states?
Dunn noted that there has been a lot of noise about education reform, and there is a lot of stupid money coming into education, but these are not getting to the root of the problem. Our goals should be to help teachers teach and students learn, not to reduce costs or make backpacks lighter. Dunn went on to comment that inadequate professional development around education technology has been the biggest impediment to change, and that our focus is often distracted.
In the second day’s keynote, Idaho Superintendent Tom Luna described how Idaho is transforming education with the recent passage of the Students Come First laws. He observed that it’s not just one thing, reform has to be comprehensive involving compensation and tenure, managing technology, changing teaching paradigms, giving parents greater voice and choice, and putting the children first.
The first hurdle was pushing the reforms through the legislature. When the education and political leadership looked at all the changes they felt needed to be done, they concluded that they would face just as much opposition if they tried to do part of the reforms or all of them, so they did not compromise on the breadth of the reforms they pushed through the legislature. In fact, they faced so much opposition that they received personal threats along with having their tires slashed. There was so much pressure that any time the legislators went home for the weekend, Luna knew that he would need to recount votes and re-innoculate the swing legislators.
The legislation passed. Tenure has been replaced with a different due-process system for new teachers. Teacher compensation has been raised, and is dependent on a combination of student test scores, parent evaluations, and school administration evaluations. Parents have more choices, students can opt to take individual courses from different schools or providers. All students need to take at least two online HS courses to graduate. And technology and PD are built into school financing so they can’t be singled out for reductions when budgets get tight.
Luna says it’s now up to them to implement. We can’t hide behind excuses that other countries don’t have our diversity or poverty. They may not have our exact problems, but all the countries ahead of us have their own hurdles to overcome, and they have made a commitment to educate all their children. Luna’s goal is not just for Idaho to become first in the US, it’s for Idaho’s students to become global leaders in student achievement and employability.
Since teachers are the number one factor in schools driving student performance, the ability to develop and keep good teachers is going to be critical to Idaho’s success. One small indication of success is that since passage of Students Come First, the number of teachers who have left Idaho to teach in other states has decreased by half.
With a general election coming up this November, Luna is hopeful that interim results will convince voters to stay the course.
In a panel of effectively communicating the power of education technology, Matt Cohen, Tom Whitby, and Frank Catalano pointed out that because there is so little education reporting in the general press, bad reporting gets magnified and distorts what is actually happening. Reporters don’t go into schools and they don’t talk to teachers; they talk with vendors, government officials, and politicians. As a result, persistent myths that get passed on as facts damage efforts to improve schools.
In addition to poor reporting, the trio noted three obstacles to improving teacher and student effectiveness. First, there have been so many different education reforms, many teachers feel that if they just ignore any attempt to change the way they teach, it will eventually go away. Second, if you take bad practice in the classroom and make it digital, it’s still bad practice. Effective change is effectuated through superior leadership that can overcome these and other obstacles. Third, the only tech professional development that most teachers get is one to two days at the beginning of the school year; that’s not enough to modify behavior or impart competence. Technology has to be made part of every teacher’s workday for it to hold up to its promise.
Bob Resnick of Education Market Research showed the growth of K12 education purchases has been increasing by 4.2% per year since 2004, to $18.3 Billion, despite education cutbacks. Comparing 2010 to 2009, digital products were up 17.9%, while the total market increased by about 4%. His data shows that student enrollment is likely to increase at the same time per pupil expenditures are increasing. The fastest growing segments (2010 over 2009 sales) are
Reading and Math interventions (50% increase in sales)
While sales of some traditional materials are decreasing:
Library books and services (17% decrease in sales)
Teacher resource materiuals (13% decrease in sales)
Guided leveled readers (10% decrease in sales
Resnick’s survey indicates the growth of interactive white boards, with an installed base in 2010 of 1.5 million units, or an average of 20 IWBs per school. Most teachers say that that they primarily use IWB resources that come “from their own imagination and ingenuity.” Resnick commented that the next wave of content development will be for IWB use and for 1 to 1 classrooms.
Resnick’s data points out the shift from print to digital occurring at all levels of education. Cengage’s Dunn, Idaho’s Luna, and panelists Whitby, Cohen, and Catalano demonstrated the complexity of education issues and the need to focus on student learning as the end result. Luna’s statewide initiative in education reform shows how difficult it can be to effectuate systemic change, and is an interesting experiment in top-down education reform. (Of course, that’s easy for me to say, I’m in NY, and it’s not my salary being affected.) Maybe, ten years from now, we will no longer start education conferences by pronouncing that the US education system is a national disgrace.
Sloan’s Blended Learning Conference was held April 23-4, 2012 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is primarily a postsecondary conference, although there were a few sessions on K12 blended learning implementation. K12 often follows where higher education leads, so if you are primarily interested in K12 education, this might be a glimpse into your future as well.
Blended learning is expanding, in types as well as numbers. The face to face component might occur incidentally once or twice, or might meet as often as twice a week. The drivers for expansion are both monetary and pedagogical, although, as you’ll see below, there are certainly obstacles and wrong turns in its implementation. We think it’s important to note that this conference dealt with Higher Ed as it functions today, and did not provide a glimpse of future changes we might see there. Perhaps that will be more apparent at the Innovations Conference Sloan runs in the summer.
Cost drivers for blended learning
To the extent that money drives educational decisions, blended learning may be the most viable solution to two problems.
There seems to be a growing national shortage of classroom space, and no money to build more. Institutions are thus pressuring instructors to reduce seat time requirements for their course. In fact, the original definition of blended learning stated that 30 to 70% of class time be replaced by online activities.
There are only two ways to substantially adapt to the huge cuts in state spending for higher education: raise tuition (the prime reason tuition rates have increased dramatically over the last 10 years), or increase efficiencies (larger classes, more classes per instructor, use of more adjunct faculty). Blended learning is looked on as a way to allow an instructor to teach larger classes and also potentially reach a larger audience, since there is a lower requirement to be in the same classroom. Changes in financial aid have also made it possible to spend less “seat” time to accomplish learning.
Improved pedagogy for blended learning
While these economic factors are probably driving the institutions to expand blended learning, there is a potential for more effective teaching as well. In fact, many students seem to prefer blended to online or face to face classes, and some studies indicate greater effectiveness of blended over either of the other two methods. After all, how engaged is a student in the back row of a 400 person class listening to a lecture?
Some of the enhancements that are now available include:
Heterogeneous groups: Greater diversity often results in greater learning. One example is small groups consisting of students from different campuses who are taking the same course and who then work together in project or problem based learning. Students can form, or be placed in, asynchronous study groups as well, jointly taking notes on readings and lectures or commenting on each other’s’ summaries. (A session on long-term group project management proved most informative and is described later.)
Peer review: giving students the ability to see and then review (using some rubric) the works of other students increases their awareness of good work while also potentially reducing the workload of the instructor. Peer evaluation, which is related, also emulates the real-world work environment and has proven valuable.
Gamification: converting reading, research, or assessment assignments into game-like activities can increase student engagement. For example, a research project can be made into a treasure hunt, or quizzes can be converted into games. This design change really enhances elements of interactivity beyond what’s accomplished in traditional instruction.
Flexibility and time shifting: In addition to making class lectures available online, tests can be scheduled not at a particular moment, but at the point the individual students feels competent.
Assessment: Some schools are experimenting with letting students retake tests until they are satisfied with the results, converting assessments of learning into assessment as learning. Testing can also emulate real world work scenarios by allowing resources to be used in test taking environments, testing not only what the student knows, but how well they can solve problems using the right tools.
The general practice for creating blended courses is for the individual instructors to determine how to incorporate online resources and tools into their classes: which resources to use and how much seat time to reduce. Schools support the instructors through training, use of graduate students for design and development, and school guidelines for look and feel. Experienced companies such as Erudient (Erudient is a client of ours) are available to assist with design, development, support, and resource selection.
Hurdles and some solutions for blended learning
The end goal of education is still to increase student knowledge, skill, and expertise. Some clumsy attempts at blended learning are to put PowerPoint slides online along with some narration, reduce face to face by one class a week, and call the course “blended”. This conference was to dispense with those types of efforts, and many sessions at the conference dealt with some of the problems in implementation blended classes and the ways that the speaker used in overcoming them.
One problem is students who sign up for hybrid or online classes, and then are not prepared for the differences between instructor directed classes and the self-motivation and organization required online. One suggestion was to have successful students make videos of how they successfully completed the course to be shown at the beginning of courses. Other instructors pointed out the importance of early warning systems to monitor when students start falling behind and then immediate engagement with those students.
For group work, many pointed out that you can’t just assign remote students into a group and then expect them to productively accomplish something. Students need time to form, which can be provided by icebreaking or get-acquainted activities. One school requires groups to record their online interactions so that, if there are disagreements among group members about certain participants not contributing, the school can monitor what actually happened.
Similarly, some faculty are used to traditional settings and haven’t managed the nuanced differences such as building the community of learners, structuring activities and projects in a way to help students manage the time to complete long term projects. One particular session covered techniques to help students by building team activities including peer evaluations and assigning a grade to completing a task. Milestones ensured that students move through the activity without creating bottlenecks or problems for one another. Peer evaluation on the various iterations of the project ensure that by the time the end is reached, the final output is already in good shape. While this technique is used in writing all the time, a group activity in a blended scenario requires real project management planning and skills.
One interesting use of blended learning in K12 is the WCATY (Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth) Academy, which is a middle school. This group serves about a third of the districts in the state, with about 1300 students a year. Their goal is to make students responsible for their own learning and understand their own learning processed by digging deeply into one topic. For example, a course on the French Revolution is called “Off with their Heads” and starts with a virtual tour of the Versailles palace. A course on meeting up with aliens actually teaches communications techniques. WCATY teachers focus on learning, and assessing learning, through storytelling, with a combination of virtual and face to face activities for students.
Another session was presented on blended learning in a studio course, and the research showed clearly that while the activity was accomplished by individual students, group evaluations and expert feedback were critical to the final result and greatly enhanced the learning of both the students evaluated and the students evaluating. To learn more and to see the research, including some of the best use of graphics in a research paper, contact Mahmoud Reza Saghafi at saghafi@student.qut.edu.au, (Queensland University of Technology.)
One of the financial goals for institutions to implement blended learning is to increase class size, which can cause a cascade of issues. Aisha Jackson, Amanda McAndrew, Jackie Moriyama, and Viktoriya Oliynyk of the University of Colorado at Boulder maintain a website of mostly free tools to help with these large classes, and which can also help with face to face large classes: http://bit.ly/largecourseinfo
In conclusion
Blended Learning can be a magic button; reducing the costs of education while also enhancing learning. There are many resistors and still some hurdles to overcome to successful implementation, but, as one participant pointed out, if the lecture format for classes were introduced as a new technology today, it would like be universally panned.
This conference would not have been possible without the energy and organization of Tanya Joosten and the folks at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We would like to put a plug in for Dr. Joosten’s book Social Media for Educators as a big thank you for your successful efforts.
