All of my thoughts on positioning OER core curriculum in the K-12 market may be well and good, but what really matters is what actual customers think.
Toward that end, I am going to be interviewing some district sups and curriculum and instruction leaders over the next couple of months. If you or someone you work with might be interested in participating, let me know. (I’ll also be talking to state level curriculum folks as well as publishers.)
And if there’s a question you’d love to have asked, let me know that too.
Otherwise, stay tuned for reports on what I learn.
Many of us believe that technology, appropriately used, can greatly enhance learning. Schools have spent billions on equipping themselves with infrastructure including connectivity, devices, and staff expertise to realize the potential. And while most schools have not yet made the leap to one-to-one and the abandonment of print, they are unquestionably much closer to that than ever before.
When talking about open educational resources, many assume digital. OER is typically distributed in a digital form, and part of the viability of the “free” aspect of OER is the zero physical product costs. There is nothing that prevents OER from being printed though, and in fact, many of the larger scale implementations in K-12 have been with printed books.
So, in our ongoing discussion of how to best position K-12 OER core curriculum, the question is how to deal with the digital/blended vs. print question?
Generally, in marketing, there is a tension between defining the market as broadly as possible to maximize potential sales and narrowing it to target unique product features to a specific segment.
In the case of core curriculum for schools, a big and fairly unique market, I am of the opinion that you don’t want to exclude any potential district customers at the outset. And that means defining your product broadly, rather than more narrowly, in this case as a specifically blended or digital offering. Here are some facts to consider:
For K-12 schools, when core curriculum is purchased, it is still largely in a print form, though that almost always includes optional digital components. Slowly over time, the balance is shifting.
Much like supplemental materials, digital instructional resources are often evaluated and purchased differently than traditional core curriculum.
Districts still largely operate in siloed spaces. What comes in through the “ed tech” door will often be cast in an “ed tech” frame rather than “core curriculum.”
Digital programs are sometimes viewed as being less rigorous or of lower quality than print. This can especially be the case with core curriculum.
Right now, equity means print availability. Legal cases like Williams v. California have upheld that equal access to instructional materials must be provided for use at school and at home. (The always-clever commercial publisher lobby has used this to build the case that schools should buy two copies of textbooks per student, one for school and one for home. Perhaps the OER movement could make the case that it would be a better use of public funds to make instructional materials more affordable and accessible.)
Parents and communities sometimes feel a strong preference for print instructional materials.
Now, all this is not to say that I think print is superior to digital, but it is to say that to play in the K-12 core curriculum market, print is essential in my opinion.
Also, the suggestion here to avoid positioning strictly as digital is based on the premise that the product to be marketed is a core curriculum product (as with the other posts in this series). If you’re marketing a smaller, nichier type offering, positioning as an innovative digital product might make more sense. However, the dollars involved in creating core curriculum and the associated expectations dictate a broader approach.
The K-12 OER Collaborative curriculum is such a product, and it envisioned to be available in both print and digital forms. Often though, in the press and elsewhere, it has been referred to a blended or digital program. I wonder how many school leaders look at that and conclude it is not a good solution for their schools or worse, discount it as a serious replacement for core textbooks.
On the other hand, those who are looking for digital curriculum will be drawn to the Collaborative’s work, as well as similar offerings, in droves — there’s no particular need to market or sell specifically to them. (I wonder sometimes if our need to emphasize the digital nature of OER is in part an effort to convince doubters of the benefits of digital. That seems a tall task and beyond our scope to me.)
Because the term “OER” screams digital, is worth considering how to be explicit and unapologetic about the fact that this will be available in both print and digital formats.
Among of the most lauded benefits of OER are the 5 R’s — reuse, revise, remix, redistribute, and retain.
The ability of educators and students to continually update, improve, and iterate on their learning materials is the basis for rich learning. This model stands in marked contrast to the traditional publishing, whereupon textbooks are updated every seven years or so, and updates are made by publisher worker bees without a lot of learner input. In fact, once published, users are not permitted to share any enhancements they make to the materials. OER, on the other hand, empowers teachers and students to become more reflective and self directed with their learning and to share their improvements with others, elevating the whole enterprise.
In a conversation on Twitter yesterday (see below), Bill Fitzgerald said “OER still suffers from an overemphasis on delivery and ancillaries, and insufficient attention to streamlining reuse.”
This brought to mind many things for me, among them some action research that has reported that many educational policymakers and decision makers see reuse, and particularly revision and remix, to be a negative.
This isn’t particularly surprising. Traditional education has a rigid command and control structure. Curriculum is developed by big brains in an ivory tower. It is approved by state legislators, departments of education, and district committees. It is then brought to teachers to deliver to students, with neither group having much input on the process.
Now, in fairness, this process varies a fair amount from state to state and district to district. But, by and large, and especially in the era of pacing and “fidelity to the textbook,” there isn’t a lot of teacher or student participation in a great deal of classroom curricula.
This is where I personally have to step back from my own views on openlearning, which is diametrically opposed to this, and focus for now on open educational resources and how we can best position them to be adopted as core curriculum in a large number of classrooms. (This is the goal of the K-12 OER Collaborative, among others.)
If district decision makers don’t feel positively about their teachers remixing instructional materials, then it doesn’t make sense to me to position that as a benefit (or even mention it). Now some argue that it is our job to “educate” these decision makers about the benefits of the remixing, of how it can elevate the professionalism of their teachers and advance the learning of their students.
And while I love to evangelize these benefits, it is just too heavy (and unnecessary) of a lift if you’re trying to sell a district an open licensed core curriculum. There are so many other objections to be addressed, so many other hurdles to jump over, that it just isn’t worth it. In my opinion, it is also likely to be unsuccessful in most cases.
So let’s leave the 5 r’s for the choir and focus on showing how OER meets already-identified needs of K-12 districts.
[Note: A silver lining to all this is that many teachers do see remix as a benefit. In addition, the best teachers revise and remix even proprietary instructional materials every day (though they may not call it that). Add a resource here. Take out a section there. Make an assignment from a bit of this and a bit of that. Teachers will keep doing that no matter what decision makers favor, and OER gives them a better and easier way to do that. And students will benefit. They can even join in on the remix fun.]
The K-12 OER Collaborative has taken a great step forward as Karl Nelson has agreed to join the organization full-time as of later this month.
Karl has been the Director of Digital Learning for Washington state’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for five years and prior to that worked with Puget Sound ESD. He is a creative thinker about digital learning and a skilled manager. Karl has been instrumental in getting the Collaborative up and running in its early days as the Washington state Collaborative member.
Hiring Karl full-time is a great coup for the Collaborative and will undoubtedly help move their efforts forward.
For those unfamiliar, the K-12 OER Collaborative is a state-led initiative involving 12 states and other organizations working to develop core, free, openly-licensed K-12 math and ELA curriculum aligned with state college ready standards. This is a ground-breaking initiative and is particularly important for its ambitious scope.
[Note: Some of my OER time this year, with support from the Hewlett Foundation, is being spent on thinking through implementation and business model strategies for core OER curriculum in the K-12 space with the K-12 OER Collaborative being a prime example. My “Positioning ‘open'” posts are part of the thinking going into this. Stay tuned for more.]
I am often frustrated with the characterization of all MOOCs as amazing, or more often, terrible. In my opinion, that’s kind of like saying all books are amazing or terrible — there is too much variation to make that kind of blanket generalization.
I’ve been fortunate to participate in several MOOCs that are both truly open and engagingly participative. One of those is CLMOOC, which is returning for its third year this summer starting on June 18.
Whether you are intrigued by MOOCs or don’t really get what they’re about, whether you’re a Connected Learning or maker ed expert or these are new concepts to you, whether you have a lot of time and energy to devote to learning this summer or you don’t, CLMOOC is a valuable and fun collaboration to check out. You can sign up for more info here, join our G+ community, and/or follow us on Twitter.
And this year, we are again expanding the CLMOOC Make Bank so join us there too! Lots of great ideas you can borrow or steal and maybe even add some of your own!
