PILOTed

Conferences: Back to School and Ednet14

Every Fall, two of my favorite conferences are the BMO Back to School Conference and Ednet. Neither disappointed this year.

Back to School Conference

This conference is primarily aimed at investors, with presentations by private and public companies. Up to three years ago, the main focus was proprietary schools in higher education (known in the press as For Profit Colleges). But the tremendous growth in this market seems to have stalled, and there is a growing focus on other segments.

This year, a rising strand was career and workforce development and professional development.

Professional development purchasers are increasingly demanding providers to measure the effectiveness of PD: the impact on student achievement, retention, truancy, and staff retention. Staff retention is a huge issue; for example, the churn in Chicago Public Schools is 25%. Imagine the cost of replacing 9.000 employees every year.

Workforce development is especially hot for information technology careers. There are high paying jobs, plenty of people wanting to upgrade their skills, and almost by definition, students who are willing and able to learn online.

The biggest job growth is likely to be mid-level skills, not necessarily in IT. While there are many organizations focusing on health care jobs (many of which offer false promises of high paying jobs that don’t really exist), there still seems to be a bona fide opportunity in other fields, especially those that target local job growth.

Certified badges seem just on the cusp of mattering to employers; 2015 may finally be the year that badging takes off.

In K12, there was common agreement that to scale, products need to focus not just on teacher and student needs, but on how they help the district administrators. Reporting, data collection, increasing classroom efficiency, and interfacing with school systems are all areas that products need to address in order to sell at the district level.

Ednet

Ednet was founded by Nelson Heller 26 years ago. The biggest news of Ednet14 was that Nelson announced that this was his last. EVERYONE in the education business sector likes and respects Nelson, and we all wish him many happy years.

The Parthenon Group’s Robert S Lytle had some fascinating insights:

1. For the first time in 8 years, the money spent on education is actually increasing in the US, by about 3% per year. The problem is that healthcare and benefits cost increases will eat up the entire amount, so that there will still be no increases in money available for systems, content, or teachers.
2. However, the switch to digital content is on. And who are the biggest adopters of digital technology in schools? Mid-career teachers. On the other hand, fewer than ½ of 1% of classrooms actually use district-purchased digital content.
3. While there has been a popular backlash against the term “Common Core”, the standards themselves have sticking power. Virtually all rewrites have just had minor tweaks, and have substantially readopted the standards, just under a different name. The real battle is that states have been lying about student achievement for years; more than 2/3 of students actually are performing at pretty low levels, and the standards just make that evident to everyone. But no one wants to see low scores for his or her child.
4. And the last insight, it is not reasonable to expect that automated assessment can directly prescribe learning resources to students that will strengthen student achievement anytime in the near future. No matter how much we want to automate processes, teachers are and will be the best evaluators of student needs for the foreseeable future.

My one disappointment about the conference was the lack of diversity. Latinos represent 30% of the student population today. Blacks and Asians represent another 20%+. Where were the Latino, Black, or Asian voices; who is making solutions that address the cultural differences and different needs of these populations; and who is helping classroom teachers and districts manage widely divergent classes?

Other than the Ednet team, the top tweeter at the conference was Katrina Stevens of EdSurge. And next was me: @weisburghm. If you are interested in learning how to track the impact and reach of your social networking strategy, contact us.

Verso App

Please welcome Academic Business Advisors’ newest client, Verso Learning. Verso is having tremendous success in Australia helping teachers flip classroom instruction. Verso uses student voice as a driver for deeper, personalized learning; transfering the ownership of learning to the student with rapid cycles of self and peer feedback. ABA is helping Verso scale in the US, where their free app is already growing at over 5% a week.

Related articles

Verso App Gives Teachers a Powerful Assessment Tool for Student Engagement

The 2014 Honor Roll: EdTech's Must-Read K - 12 IT Blogs

Teacher Pensions, Recruitment, and Retention

Changes at Academic Business Advisors

We are thrilled to announce major changes at Academic Business Advisors.

As you know ABA was founded in 2005 by Farimah Schuerman and Mitch Weisburgh, and our whole premise has always been to find excellence in education and then catalyze growth, networking, and distribution.

Farimah has found her dream company in which to accomplish that: Copia is partnering with major publishers to offer digital content through their platform to both the higher education and K12 markets. Farimah has been working at Copia full time overseeing their state, school, and publisher partnerships.

Mitch and the ABA team of associated education professionals are focusing on organizations with products that have the potential for dramatic impact on kids’ and young adults’ lives, from K to 20. We are creating and helping execute marketing, distribution, and sales strategies to reach millions of students and educators.

Please reach out to either of us to find out more about our exciting initiatives.

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TCEA 2012 Recap

Texas, as the rest of the country, is in the midst of an education revolution. Tight budgets, cognitive research, and new technologies are forcing wholesale changes for students, teachers, and administrators. This was the backdrop of our trip to the Texas Computer Education Association conference the week of February 6, 2012.

We definitely noticed that attendance was down. Vendors commented that traffic was down, but that gave them more time to have deeper conversations, so the net effect was increased opportunity.

Almost by definition, if you are attending an ed tech event, you are interested in learning more and using technology, so the crowd was not necessarily representative of educators as a whole. That said, educators were looking for technology that allowed them to engage students, teach deeper, teach more in less time, and handle larger classes. Spending priorities on content seemed to be ELA first, Special Education second, ELL third, and if there were still funds available, Math. But the number one spending priority was on finding ways to use money to keep staff and avert layoffs at districts of all sizes.

We got the chance to listen to schools rave about three of our clients: Atomic Learning, HELP Math, and School Improvement Network, so that was gratifying. You always want to hear how your products are helping teachers teach better, and turning a failing student into a star.

And I was able to attend Edubloggercon, which will be called SocialEdCon at ISTE this summer. This is always a highlight for me, because the talks are unrehearsed, and the ideas free-flowing from the presenters and the audience.

For those interested in (usually free) interesting applications discussed at presentations, below are my highlights of the sessions I attended.

Kevin Honeycutt on Art and Music in Education

If you’ve never had the chance to hear or see Kevin, you’re missing something from your life. He connects education philosophy, technical savvy, empathy, first-hand experience with the effects of bullying, art, and humor in all of his presentations.

His main point in this session was that we are at the beginning of a major jobs war. Globally, there are 3 billion people vying for 1 billion good jobs. The winners are going to be inventors and innovators; yet we are cutting all the opportunities for individual expression and creativity from schools. What are some quick tips on tapping and expanding kids’ creativity?

1. Give a school event where the price of admission is student content, like a dance but only allow students to come if they have written a song (which really isn’t that hard given applications like PocketGuitar and GarageBand)
2. Give every teacher $20 on iTunes and let them find their own applications to use in class, but also make them share what they’ve done in some type of forum like a PLC.
3. Make sure the local press reports on student created content, so the parents demand more of it.
4. Put iPads in special education, and let those kids create content that the whole community hears about, so other parents demand that their own kids get the same opportunity
5. Make it safe for kids to try new things. If they are using a new music application, let them use headphones so no one hears their mistakes until they feel comfortable to go pubic.

Motivating the technologically unmotivated teacher

The most common excuses are that they have no time, and the way they have always done it works. Here are the ways the group came up with for trying to overcome them:

1. In tech PD, take 45 minutes and give the teacher one thing that will work in his or her classroom instead of trying to cram more into a session.
2. Find ways to publicly applaud successes. For example a tech laggard, when applauded for some tech accomplishment on the district website will be more likely to try something else.
3. Do an unconference with teachers on PD day. Have the teachers come up with their own 30-45 minute topics, and find a person who is willing to lead the session.
4. Find teachers who are willing to be the experts, you can’t just rely on the tech team.
5. Do a collaborative session with the teachers, and then use this as a model for the teachers to do collaboration with their students instead of sit and git.
6. Use Google docs or Evernote for collaborative note taking on PD sessions.
7. Plant some folks in tech PD sessions who will be enthusiastic
8. Use a parking lot to note issues that should not immediately be resolved, so you can stay on target.

Virtual Field Trips

Dwight Goodwin is another person you should go out of your way to see. He keeps his presentations at http://classroomnext.blogspot.com/ where he has presentations on iPads in the Classroom, Google Earth for Social Studies, Websites that work well with Interactive White Boards, and Virtual Field Trips.

There are generally four different routes for Virtual Field Trips. You can often find an expert in the field who will be happy to share his or her expertise with a class. Many museums have virtual field trips. Many historical places like Jamestown, Vicksburg, and Williamsburg have virtual field trips, and there are many trips using Google Earth.

One good source for finding trips and experts is CILC. I also maintain my own Diigo list of virtual field trips. Skype has a new educator’s site which has tips and possible collaborations. There is a web site devoted to Google Earth Literature Trips. The Google Art Project has interactive tours of many of the world’s top art museums.

Five Lovely Tools

Gail Lovely presented five new useful tools.

SoapBox creates a back channel without requiring email addresses of names (unless you want to). For example, you can set up so students can anonymously can indicate if they are confused, so a teacher can decide to speed up or slow down. Later, you can pull off the questions and answers to use for student notes.

iPiccy is an online photo editor, also not requiring logins or email addresses. You upload your picture, and can apply special effects like “teeth whitening”, “eyelash”, or “thinnify”, and then pull your picture back down.

Qrvoice creates a QR code that plays text to speech. If you were creating a school tour, you could have students or parents listen to explanations on their smart phones. TagMyDoc allows you to upload a document and create a QR code to access and share it.

Myna is an online sound editor, allowing you to record sounds along different tracks, put in license free music tracks, and download the sound file for use in a presentation, animation, or video.

TitanPad lets multiple people work on the same document simultaneously, without requiring logins. It also allows the document owner to create “return to” points so nothing gets accidently overwritten.

 

Related articles

• EDUC 6135: Week 3 - Scenario Post (waldenhwg.wordpress.com)
• Field Trip! (And I Don't Mean Virtual) (oldschoolteach.wordpress.com)
• No Bus Needed: Telepresence connects students, cultures (blogs.cisco.com)

The Higher Education Market

I gave a talk on the Higher Education market at the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Here is a summary of the talk.

College Enrollment Trend

As you can see, enrollments are expected to be flat for the next eight years.

While you could say that this does not bode well for anyone looking to sell into higher education, that's actually far from the truth. Below, we'll go through some of the market niches that are, in fact, growing.

Growth in Online Courses

Over 4.6 million students were taking at least one online course during the Fall 2008 term. This is a 17 percent increase over the number reported from the previous year, and far exceeds the 1.2 percent growth of the overall higher education student population.

More than one in four higher education students now take at least one course online.

Growth in For-Profit Enrollments

The for-profit market is growing at 12.5% a year. Currently, they are under a 10% market share, but they were under a 3% market share at the beginning of the millennium.

The for-profits have capitalized on three trends: the ability to provide federally backed student loans, their ability to adapt to job-related education, and the adoption of online courses.

Growth in Minorities

While there has been an increase in White students, there have been huge increases in minority students. The compound annual enrollment growth rates of different races are shown below:

White	0.7%
Black	4.7%
Hispanic	9.1%
Asian	8.8%

The increasing numbers of minority students provides opportunities to target services specifically for their needs. Below shows the total enrollments for the different groups.

 

Technology budgets

While many think in terms of publishing content for students (which, in higher education, the students are the ones who actually purchase), there are opportunities selling directly to schools, both in academic and administrative products and services. Below is the breakdown of academic spending in 2009.

Changes in the way content is sold

Historically, textbooks have been sold to students through the campus bookstore, on recommendations or requirements of the professor. the student would purchase the book from the book store, or perhaps buy a used book, as below.

With this increasing use of the Internet, online materials, new devices, and e-books, the distribution channels have become more confused:

Education publishers still go to professors, but they can select from an ever-increasing universe of free materials, and students can choose from a plethora of sources. Look for continued channel confusion, disaggregation, and disintermediation until the channel finally gets sorted out, sometime in the next ten years.

Textbook market concentration

Of a total market of about $4 billion, the top three education publishers, Pearson, Cengage, and McGraw-Hill, control about 75% of the market.

Their national sales forces give them the ability to reach US college or university faculty in any state and of any size institution. On the other hand, the additional pressure of institutions to reduce the costs of textbooks, the availability of free materials, and the flexibility of smaller competitors to create targeted content, does not guarantee that this situation will continue indefinitely.

Where are the opportunities

Following, from our vantage point, is a summary of five big opportunities:

1. Remediation: over 85% of community college students cannot do college level math, and over half cannot do college level reading and writing. In total, over half of all entering higher education students need remediation.
2. Dropout prevention: since the 1950's, about half of all college entrants do not graduate; this is a prime goal of the Obama administration.
3. Online: the use of online courses and online materials are far outstripping the growth in enrollments
4. For-profits: the for-profit institutions have been able to move quickly to meet market needs, and with cutbacks in state funding, their growth may continue.
5. Community Colleges: this is the cheapest way to get a degree and to spend the first two years of college. With a dismal job market, they are more in demand than ever. But, with state spending cuts, they are in distress. They have a huge need to meet the demands of more students at a lower cost.

A lot of this material came from the 140+ page report we wrote for the SIIA on the Postsecondary marketplace, available here: http://www.siia.net/estore/10Expand.asp?ProductCode=EPMR-09

Farimah Schuerman wins Pinnacle Marketing Award

ABA Managing Partner Farimah Schuerman won the QED Pinnacle Award this month. The Pinnacle Mentoring Award is for outstanding mentoring of fellow professionals. This award recognizes the individual who fosters and actively supports the development and growth of fellow professionals in the field of education marketing.

Farimah was nominated by Berj Akian, CEO of ClassLink Technologies.

Following was taken from the application:

Farimah has been a key to the success of ClassLink Inc through her oversight and guidance as a consultant to the organization over the past two years. Her input has been so substantial that she was invited on to the Board of Directors in 2005. She has provided invaluable advice on a variety of disciplines including Marketing, Management, and Strategy to three of the four members of the firm’s management team.

Berj Akian, CEO, has relied on her for introductions to key individuals in similar leadership positions within the Education industry. She uses her extensive network to forge relationships between like-minded professionals within Education to the mutual benefit of both parties. During key periods of the company’s growth, she has offered insight into trends within the market and has encouraged specific product development and modification to enable ClassLink to capitalize on market trends.

Our VP Education, has benefited from Farimah’s experience and willingness to mentor as well. Farimah has encouraged her professional development through a variety of activities. First, Farimah ensured that our VP has access to key players within the industry both through direct introductions and by inviting her to join the DOLS networking organization. Farimah’s powers to connect people have helped her find great talent to assist in grant-writing proposals. Farimah also offers insightful advice to her regarding the many presentations she delivers at industry conferences allowing our VP to continually improve her presentations. Finally, Farimah is a sage and non-judgmental sounding board for new ideas.

Our VP Marketing and Strategy, is the newest member of the management team and yet, even in her short tenure, she has reaped the rewards of Farimah’s expertise. Farimah helped her transition from her traditional business background to the Educational sector through countless conversations explaining the similarities and differences in the two arenas. Additionally, she offered a wonderful perspective through many key Marketing activities including product naming, website revision, and the wholesale revamping of marketing collateral. Like the rest of the management team, our Marketing and Strategy VP was taken under Farimah’s wing and introduced to key players at industry conferences even before she officially had joined ClassLink’s management team!

I wanted to congratulate Farimah, thank ClassLink for those very kind words, and echo the sentiments of both the awards and the people at ClassLink: Farimah is a great mentor with incredible insights and creativity.