Contributors
jonathan woahn
david blake
digital rights management and edu
What lessons edu needs to learn from the mistakes of big media:
There was a blog post a few days ago, “The 10 Stupidest Tech Company Blunders”. Sixth stupidest ever, the music industry fighting Napster instead of using Napster to change and innovate their own model.
“Today, of course, music-subscription businesses and streaming services such as Pandora dominate digital music. Had the record companies partnered with Napster, MP3.com, or any of the other file sharing networks instead of suing them, they might control digital music sales today--without nearly as many problems with piracy.”
Edu and music are not exactly the same. Institutional edu doesn’t seemed embittered by open education reform, such as MIT’s open courseware. There is however, a disdain and stigma for online education and the textbook industry’s growing threat of the ebook. There is tension between the traditions of the past and technologies' potential innovations of the future. And in those tensions, there are some lessons to be learned from the mistakes of big media.
(1) Napster vs. Labels. Napster changed the world. It was a seed of innovation that had just began to sprout in a big way. And instead of adapting, adopting, partnering, mimicking, or in any way trying to learn from, embrace, or grow the innovation, the big labels felt threatened and just tried to crush the sapling that was Napster under its big boots. Largely it worked, killing what Napster might have become, but shoots spread and rose up in the hundreds, just delaying the march of progress and leaving the big labels outdated and now outmanned and out positioned to win the fight in the long run.
I see this in the world of edu—one recent case is the WA teacher unions fighting the Charter movement. Edu needs to adapt and adopt not fight and delay.
(2) Hollywood, Blockbuster, Netflix, and Red Box. In high school, every video I rented was from Hollywood Video. In college is was Blockbuster online. Two years ago it was RedBox and these days it is streaming from NetFlix on demand. There is an interesting story behind the evolution of the movie rental evolution that applies to edu. Hollywood Video is every university who still doesn’t offer online courses. Blockbuster is arguably those who do offer online courses as a bolted-on extension of their otherwise unchanged business model. In this analogy, I think edu is about where the movie rental business was while I was in college, so it is too early to say who the Netflix and the RedBox are here, but I will venture with this. RedBox is the online universities of today, Phoenix, Kaplan, DeVry. They are the 50% solution. I believe that RedBox is a 10-yr business model and then it will be forever gone. Streaming will mark its death. The online colleges bring great convenience, steals serious market share; they are the 50% solution. They brought convenience and arguably cost savings to the old business model. The NetFlix, and by NetFlix I really infer the NetFlix on demand (streaming is the future and they are the ones positioned for that market), is the real innovation. It is a change in distribution, technology, and business model. It is the disruptor. Whoever this is in the edu market, I think it’s too early to say.
(3) BluRay vs. HD DVD. Akin to the Napster lesson. With Napster, it was a fight against innovation. With BluRay and HD DVD they fought for the rights to the future of innovation, not against it. The problem was, they spent more time and more money fighting each other, that they lost the market entirely. BluRay finally pulled ahead, but so late in the game, they have won little share over DVDs and the market is soon to go the way of streaming. Billions of dollars lost and half a decade wasted. If BluRay and HD DVD had partnered at the very beginning, the market would have gone high def years ago and money would have been plentiful on both sides of the fence. I see this being akin to the fight between the traditional and the for-profits. They both want to educate students, they just both want to do it in their format. If they fight each other long enough, they will waste time, energy and efforts that could be spent innovating and blazing ahead.
(4) Digital Rights Management. I watched a interesting documentary on DRM in the music and film industry:
It was interesting to learn about how Disney ripped off works in the public domain and made them relevant to our day and age. “His work was a remix of the stuff that came before. He was a mashup artist”. For example, from the video (which is queued to the this portion of the movie) is about how Steamboat Willie was a direct ripoff of Steamboat Bill. But then towards the end of the 20th century, Disney had all of the public domain and copyright laws rewritten to protect their work for ~100 years rather than the previous 14 years as it was when Disney got his start.
The simple point I want to make here, is that education is built upon the works of those who have gone before. I am an economist and I believe in giving people incentives to produce works. I believe in copyright laws. But, it is important that the author/creator is protected and given incentives—not the marketplace or distribution channel.
A case from recent history that exposes what is wrong with music rights today is the Boston University student being sued for file sharing; he has been ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading 30. That is because so many layers of labels and producers have rights to those songs. Protect the artist, but the way that iTunes and most recently, the Kindle, lock up their owners information is bad for education.
the turf war over digital books
"Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., and Amazon.com Inc. are joining a coalition that hopes to rally opposition to Google's digital book ambitions and ultimately persuade a federal judge to block or revise the internet search leader's plans.
"Among other things, the alliance will try to persuade the U.S. Justice Department that Google's broad settlement with authors and publishers could undermine competition in the digital book market, just as more consumers are gravitating toward electronic readers like Amazon.com's Kindle."
"Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon all have financial reasons for objecting to the class-action lawsuit settlement that Google reached with authors and publishers 10 months ago. Amazon might have the most at stake, given that it's a major book seller and is mining the Kindle for even more sales.
Google plans to offer free access to some books through its search engine and sell others as part of a registry that will share revenue with authors and publishers if the class-action settlement is approved."Opponents of the deal--which include some universities and library groups--believe it will give Google too much pricing power, and they have raised concerns about the company's ability to stockpile more personal data about the users of its search engines by tracking what they're reading."
more on digital rights management
Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books
This is good for open edu:
“Some restrictions on the use of e-books are likely to remain a fact of life. But some publishers and consumer electronics makers are aiming to give e-book buyers more flexibility by rallying around a single technology standard for the books. That would also help them counter Amazon, which has taken an early lead in the nascent market.
“On Thursday, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, plans to announce that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.
“Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.”
Court Rules Against Kaleidescape DVD Ripping Technology
This is bad for open edu:
“Kaleidescape functions in a similar fashion to Apple's iTunes, where users can store content and know it is easily accessible without worrying about the physical location of the disc.
Still, the California Court found that Kaleidescape had violated its contract and opened the door for the DVD CCA to return to court and seek an injunction that would force Kaleidescape to comply with its license, The Wall Street Journal reported.”
the whirlwind w the textbook industry
3 Reasons Why Students Aren’t Ready for eTextbooks:
- Cost Savings Must be Greater
- A Standard Format is Needed
- Questions of Ownership
online edu > classroom edu
NYtimes article on the research showing the power of online edu:
“The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
“Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.
“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International."
Link to the full report.
the online edu bubble
It appears that students are overextended on the amount of debt they take on for online universities and the schools are only adding fuel to the fire:
Some of the nation's biggest for-profit colleges and vocational schools are boosting enrollment in tough times by making more loans directly to cash-strapped students, knowing full well many of them probably won't be able to repay what they borrowed.
The schools still make money because the practice boosts their enrollment and brings in tuition dollars subsidized by the government. But some of these students could end up saddled with high interest rates and loan payments they can't handle, a burden that could damage their credit for years to come.
These colleges expect only half of the loan to be repaid:
In fact, two publicly owned college chains have set aside roughly half their internal lending amount as a loss reserve — essentially telling investors they don't expect students to repay more than half of what they borrow.
This is a terrible equation for edu. The colleges are in a position where they can still make money overextending the students and issuing bad loans. Part of the growing appeal of the community colleges and online universities has been that the ROI hasn’t been eaten away by years of legacy cost structures and tuition hikes. Not exactly what happened in the mortgage bubble, but certainly could foreshadow where all of this is going.
the eduPunk bandwagon
From How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education
The need for change:
“College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt.”
“Once the world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies,”
The movement:
“The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that's structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor's degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.”
“A loose-knit band of education 2.0 architects sharpening their saws for that forest.”
The leaders:
7,000+ Textbooks via the iPhone
E-textbook provider, Course Smart LLC, is releasing an app to the iPhone app store that will allow for college students to access its 7,000-plus titles.
As quoted from the WSJ.
"Nobody is going to use their iPhone to do their homework, but this does provide real mobile learning," said Frank Lyman, CourseSmart's executive vice president. "If you're in a study group and you have a question, you can immediately access your text."
Albert N. Greco, a professor at the Fordham Graduate School of Business Administration who studies the book industry, estimates that sales of printed college textbook this year will reach $5.02 billion, up 3.5% from last year. He expects college e-textbooks to hit $117.5 million in sales in 2009, up 10.3%. "Once the recession ends, we will see a major, national push to make all higher education textbooks available in digital formats, as well as a move in that direction for high-school textbooks," Mr. Greco said.
![[etextbooks]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-AX707_etextb_DV_20090809195359.jpg)
As quoted by SFGate.
CourseSmart is a joint venture of five major college text publishers, including McGraw Hill Education, Pearson Education and Cencage Learning. The private, for-profit company would not reveal too many business details, except that its student customers are in the "hundreds of thousands," from nearly 6,000 U.S. colleges and institutions, said Lyman. "There's a lot of potential for education on the iPhone," he said. "You can search the text anywhere, at any time, which students seem to demand, given their mobile lifestyles."
Also in the news, 16 "open source" digital textbooks submitted to the state of CA for consideration. One of the hopeful front-runners is the Palo Alto nonprofit CK-12 Foundation, whose advisory board includes Jimmy Wales, founder of San Francisco's Wikipedia, and high-powered valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, former CEO of Santa Clara's Sun Microsystems Inc. One of its rivals, Curriki, is backed by Sun co-founder Scott McNealy.
