EdTech Policy & Reform

Dear School District Administrators,

Most open letters are written as a passive criticism or open critique of a large institution. I have no wish to be passive in my critique and observations. They are intended to spur conversation and reflection. These are the tools of our trade as teachers. I was hired to critique and foster reflection.

After studying and researching in your administrative offices over the previous year, you have embraced personalized learning as a targeted result, as we deploy technology throughout the district. It is a goal widely acknowledged to be systemic in scope and paradigm shifting by its nature. So with all sincerity, I applaud your willingness to step bravely into a well-reasoned approach to 21^st-century learning.

It is widely agreed that personalized learning is also a new pedagogical mindset that must extend beyond the classrooms; that fact pushes forward my primary question “How does the leadership of a personalized learning environment shift itself to accommodate the new network of change?”

As I continue learning to apply a more personalized approach to my teaching. I have found that many of those same skills can be used to reflect and evaluate options. So I have tried here to apply a similar cognitive approach, an open critique and sincere question on eight observations I have noted as my school, and our district has embarked on a journey of blended and personalized learning.

In the classrooms we are, approaching the close of another school year, you at the District offices are approaching the hiring season. As you do so, I would ask that you perhaps take some time to consider the qualities your prize as you develop a leadership team for the future. It is commonly understood that there is a shortage of new teachers in the US, as well as a disconcertingly high number of experienced professionals leaving our classrooms. But that is not the case for program administrators and principals. The number of people earning Masters Degrees’ in educational leadership or seeking an administrative endorsement is higher now than at any time in the past 25 years. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics

You have the opportunity to look broadly and consider carefully those that will help lead us through this systemic paradigm shift.

Personalized learning achieved through a blended curriculum keeps students engaged; it pushes them to grow and demands that they understand both themselves as learners and our curriculum as it pertains to their lives. In a very real sense, PL embodies the vision that led so many of us into teaching as a profession. The opportunity to connect not just with a child, but with a child through teaching and learning.

Personalization is full of hard data, human connections and an intricate web of lessons, apps, and projects. Peel back that top layer and the overwhelming nature of the idea begins to surface, PL disseminates the control of the learning within a classroom, the students practicing to take control of their own path. The teacher building supports and taking them away.

That complex dance of adding and subtracting scaffolding while it is being used is being successfully done. But it is severely limited when it has to fall within blocks of time and for a set number of minutes each week.

Where once our administration needed to be skilled at defining, defending and delineating blocks of time we are now asking them to find flexibility within a rigid structure and extra time where the was never enough.

? How do we as a district support the required complexity of a school schedule while still offering the time to rigorously dig deeply into an area of study?

Underneath the popular jargon and interview buzzwords that you will hear, like Grit and Mindset, are classrooms where those life skills are being developed. In those rooms, both students and teachers are failing, examining their efforts and sometimes failing again. Learning to fail and from failure is important for real success.

As an institution, we are built to reward success and admonish failure. As a culture of educators, we are largely populated by those that thrived in that climate exemplifying their own successes and hiding their failures.

? How do we insure ourselves and reassure others that our district leadership understands the role of failure and exploration as we move into a new mindset?

We do not work in an industry where taking chances, innovating or finding a creative alternative is celebrated, least of all at the administrative level. Rather we as a profession, are accurately profiled as safe, steady, stable, predictable types. Our administrators even more so than those of us in the classroom.

We are now in an era where we will need to be inventive, take calculated chances and create new ideas. We will need to look for those traits in our leaders as we move into uncharted paths with impressionable cargo.

? What are the important character trait of a 21^st-century school administrator, and how do we ensure that the status quo does not continue to be the status quo?

? How will the changing power dynamic in classrooms impact both our schools and our district as a whole?

One of the most powerful aspects of personalized learning is that it is, out of necessity, powered from the classroom up. Teacher-leaders are the ones moving the bar and setting the standards. Those classroom maestros will need strong support and stronger feedback.

Please remember as you consider the next steps for those that will be leading the dwindling number of magnificent classroom teachers that we are a profession built on the artful combination of personal connections, honest feedback, and transparent agendas with all of our students, not simply those in the most need.

? How can we use our transition into personalized learning, as an opportunity to both support and capitalize on the prowess of our teacher-leaders?

The devices, the web resources, the alignment of lessons and project to a standard, all of these pieces are new and as unfamiliar as they are integral to this shift. As a teacher, I know there is no shame in saying I don’t know, and that I will not be able to master all of those elements of the job I love without support. I am confident and comfortable say that my principal and school as a whole will need support as well.

It is not an uncommon critique to observe that the current structure of our educational system was built with management in mind rather than support and growth. Nor is it an uncommon refrain for teachers ask for support. It is uncommon, however, to have the opportunity to create the needed change.

? What structures of support can we enhance or establish to best help our schools thrive as centers of blended and personalized teaching?

? How do we find a way to structure and support creativity while still managing growth and learning?

If you are overwhelmed by the questions and standards set before you if you feel as though the task is disproportionate to the tools available. Please know that I, and every classroom teacher, that works for you is familiar with those insecurities. We grapple with them every fall, we understand, from experience I can tell you that the while the challenge never fades the overwhelmed feeling does.

With sincere thanks for all that you do to move us forward,

Brian Cleary @oldbrainteacher

Mike Hale, Ph.D. VP Education North America

VitalSource

Why Doesn’t this Happen?

If all required learning materials, including textbooks, were provided to all students on or before the first day of class, the average price per student of learning materials would drop and students would be more successful.

Then why is it the vast majority of college students do not come to class with required content on the first day of class, and a significant number never get their core textbooks at all?

First, because required doesn’t actually mean required in higher education. Is this because colleges and faculty do not care about the success of students? Of course not. Ask any academic leader on a college campus if students would be better off if they had all required learning materials and the answer will be a resounding, YES. Faculty spend valuable time planning their courses and choosing resources; however, in the end, after all that work, most institutions and most professors are willing to leave it up to the student whether or not they actually acquire and engage with the content.

The actual content domain to be mastered in the course is, astoundingly, practically the only thing left to the whims of student choice. It is absolutely required that all dental students MUST have an articulator for class (an instrument for studying tooth and jaw). You cannot pass; you cannot even come to class, without one. But is it absolutely required that students possess the material detailing the various bones, muscles, nerves, and tendons involved? It is not.

Traditionally, little thought was given to the price of the resources or whether the students will purchase them. Why didn’t professors pay attention to price if they are so carefully choosing these resources?

One reason is that resources used to be reasonably priced and another is that professors don’t have to pay for the content. Economists call this the Principal Agent Problem, meaning that the decision-maker (agent/faculty) is not the one affected (principal/student). This doesn’t mean that faculty don’t care about the price of textbooks, it is simply that it has not been the predominant factor in their equation for determining course materials. Certainly some instructors care strongly about cost, but the means they use to address the problem—think third-generation scans of articles, not properly licensed, or two copies of a book in the library for a class of 400 students—reduce the quality of instruction and are in the long term not effective against cost.

What is preventing all colleges and universities from including the course materials in the cost of the course given that is guaranteed to cut student costs of learning materials and increase student success?

Ironically, one reason is that institutions are sensitive to the perception of adding any cost tied directly to the institution. The cost of tuition has more than doubled (measured in constant dollars) over the past 30 years and institutions are reluctant to be perceived as increasing student costs. However, students spend an average of $1300 per year on textbooks and supplies alone. That’s the equivalent of 39 percent of tuition and fees at a community college, and 14 percent of tuition and fees at a four-year public university on average. Including textbooks in tuition would save students at least $800 per year, a more than 60 percent reduction in cost.

Rather than consider the total cost of education, which includes required learning materials it is easier to give students a list of “required materials” and leave that decision-making to them on how, when or whether, they get them. While conveniently allowing institutions to wash their hands of the costs of course materials, this model has directly led to the massive increase in cost of learning materials: an 82 percent increase in the cost of textbooks over the last 10 years. This number is more than three times the rate of inflation.

How can this be? The economics are simple. Education publishers invest tremendous resources into the creation of textbooks working with experts in the field – often leading professors – to author, curate, organize and deliver content and assessments in a package designed to facilitate learning. They then sell this print book into the market to students through a variety of channels including student bookstores and online sellers. However, unlike the food these same students may have purchased, that book does not get consumed and most students sell this book back into market. Sure, some students do keep for future reference and I do have a section on my personal bookshelf dedicated to titles from my formal studies. However, a quick review of that shelf will find that most of these were actually used when I purchased them.

The other issue here is scale. A textbook, regardless of how widely adopted, has a limited market. A New York Times bestseller has to hit an average of 9,000 copies a week to make the list. That is about 500,000 books a year. For a book to reach Amazon’s top seller list, that number is about 3,000, which equates to approximately 150,000 copies a year. A college textbook would be lucky to sell one-tenth of that number, concentrating the development cost across fewer anticipated sales.

This textbook, for which the publisher received revenue one time, may then be resold another six times without the publisher receiving any revenue. Making matters worse, rental textbook programs have grown significantly over the past five years as well, reducing the sell through of “new” titles even further. As a result, publishers have to maximize the price of their initial sale to cover the lost sales. It also reduces the number of years between new editions, since a new edition represents another opportunity for publishers to make a sale again before that title enters the used and rental markets.

When publishers sell new textbooks at absurdly high prices, it is easy to make them out to be the greedy villain in this story. However, publishers are just responding to the economic realities of their business and they are ready to participate in a better solution.

That solution is absurdly simple. Breaking the cycle and lower the total cost of education by eliminating the print textbook. Do this and students will benefit both economically and educationally.

With a digital learning solution, there is no used or rental market, so the publisher gets paid for every student and can significantly lower the price of the content. You might say, digital textbooks are available today and students can simply choose them and that is true. However, the retail price of digital textbooks is simply not as competitive with rental and used. Again, this is due to the market…if institutions ensured every student had access to the content, the publishers would make the sale on every student, and they can significantly lower the cost of the content. Education publishers can then go back to what they were originally founded to do: compete to create the most effective learning solutions.

A quick note about Open Education Resources (OER), which have been touted as an answer to the high cost of course materials. Without question OER materials can significantly lower the cost to students. However, no materials should be adopted primarily because of cost. We want students to get the best materials available, be they OER or commercially produced. Students shouldn’t receive inferior materials just because they are cheap or free.

By far the most important reason to provide students with the required materials they need is to level the playing field for success in college. According to the last data from the National Center for Education Data, the six-year graduation rate for first-time, full-time undergraduate students at four-year degree-granting institutions is 60 percent. Thirty-nine percent of those enrolled in two-year programs complete within three years. These statistics are worse for students who are the first in their family to go to college or have financial challenges. The high cost of course materials is particularly egregious for lower income and disadvantaged students. Fifty-two percent of those whose families earn less than $50,000 feel that avoiding or delaying purchasing the materials negatively impacted their grades, compared to just 39 percent of those whose families make more.

Beyond lowered costs and assuring the students get their materials, there are many other educational benefits to providing digital learning materials on or before the first day or class. Once all students and faculty are in a digital learning environment, the content can evolve from static pages to interactive learning solutions providing formative and summative feedback opportunities as well as insight into student learning behaviors. There are fantastic digital learning solutions available and in use today that I will discuss in a future blog post.

What would it take to implement a program that significantly lowers the cost of learning materials and ensures all students get them at the beginning of the course? Nothing more than institution to simply say yes to a course fee model. The federal government has responded to the rise of these programs and by publishing new rules that allow any institution to include learning materials in a course provided students are given the option to opt-out on a per course basis.

These programs have been implemented in pockets around the country and VitalSource is powering them at more than 400 institutions around the United States saving students more than $100,000,000 in the past 12 months. To break that down a little bit, students are saving an average of $60 per title and we delivered more than 1,700,000 titles through inclusive access programs at traditional 2/4-year programs. Our technology powered these savings through our VitalSource Access program, but also through programs run by some of our partners Barnes and Nobles Education, Pearson, Follett, and more than 20 other partners serving higher education institutions.

Beyond the cost savings, all of these students received the content on the first day, and their faculty and institutions now had brand new insights through our analytics product as to exactly what each student was doing with the content. Print can’t do that, and students choosing digital won’t either.

Everything is in place to improve learning and cut student costs. If just half of all universities implemented these programs across campus, no less than $1 billion dollars could be cut from student costs. What are we waiting for?

An Open Letter to District Administrators

Where once our administration needed to be skilled at defining, defending and delineating blocks of time we are now asking them to find flexibility within a rigid structure and extra time where the was never enough.

? How do we as a district support the required complexity of a school schedule while still offering the time to rigorously dig deeply into an area of study?

As an institution, we are built to reward success and admonish failure. As a culture of educators, we are largely populated by those that thrived in that climate exemplifying their own successes and hiding their failures.

? How do we insure ourselves and reassure others that our district leadership understands the role of failure and exploration as we move into a new mindset?

We are now in an era where we will need to be inventive, take calculated chances and create new ideas. We will need to look for those traits in our leaders as we move into uncharted paths with impressionable cargo.

? What are the important character trait of a 21^st-century school administrator, and how do we ensure that the status quo does not continue to be the status quo?

? How will the changing power dynamic in classrooms impact both our schools and our district as a whole?

? How can we use our transition into personalized learning, as an opportunity to both support and capitalize on the prowess of our teacher-leaders?

? What structures of support can we enhance or establish to best help our schools thrive as centers of blended and personalized teaching?

? How do we find a way to structure and support creativity while still managing growth and learning?

What Would Happen if Learning Materials Were Provided to All Students on or Before the First Day of Class?

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EdTech Policy & Reform

Where once our administration needed to be skilled at defining, defending and delineating blocks of time we are now asking them to find flexibility within a rigid structure and extra time where the was never enough.

? How do we as a district support the required complexity of a school schedule while still offering the time to rigorously dig deeply into an area of study?

As an institution, we are built to reward success and admonish failure. As a culture of educators, we are largely populated by those that thrived in that climate exemplifying their own successes and hiding their failures.

? How do we insure ourselves and reassure others that our district leadership understands the role of failure and exploration as we move into a new mindset?

We are now in an era where we will need to be inventive, take calculated chances and create new ideas. We will need to look for those traits in our leaders as we move into uncharted paths with impressionable cargo.

? What are the important character trait of a 21st-century school administrator, and how do we ensure that the status quo does not continue to be the status quo?

? How will the changing power dynamic in classrooms impact both our schools and our district as a whole?

? How can we use our transition into personalized learning, as an opportunity to both support and capitalize on the prowess of our teacher-leaders?

? What structures of support can we enhance or establish to best help our schools thrive as centers of blended and personalized teaching?

? How do we find a way to structure and support creativity while still managing growth and learning?

Main Links

Blog

Pedagogue

My Profile

? What are the important character trait of a 21^st-century school administrator, and how do we ensure that the status quo does not continue to be the status quo?