Education Industry Investment Business Breakfast: An Afterwards

Call it three hours of intense discussion and you might have the expectation that people would walk away from this kind of thing exhausted.

It was anything but that.

Josh Schwartz, East Wind Advisors
Daniel Pianko, The Noah Fund
Stephen Gilfus, Gilfus Education Group

These gentleman led us through a pretty charged up three and a half hours or so of ramped up discussions on for-profit operations in K12 and Higher Ed that was pretty much future-focused and hopeful.

I'm going to do a quick rundown of the topics that came up, but I retweeted them @Educationinvest on Twitter and I broadcast the general themes @Douglascrets

I've cut and pasted some of the themes, and I will continue to do this throughout the week:

The thing in higher ed is to be greenfield oriented in what you can offer the market in technology. Interesting take. ed that boosts tech.

Towards the end of the morning, this flared up as a kind of important and provocative idea: that basically there are great platforms, and there are great distribution models, but where are the offerings that blend the content that is really hidden from outside view (the teaching that goes on in the classroom, the curriculum created by teachers, etc.) and when is the mash-up of the two going to happen? The company that solves this and makes it compelling, long-distance and monetized is the golden egg company. Then we can sit down and talk about a US$100 mln spin out.

Is there a blurring between Ivy League brands and the for-profit vocational brands?

There was disagreement on this point. The point here being some in the audience and on the panel thought that tech leads the lower-run higher ed institutions in the land grant space to lose their brand value, because there are free models out there and students are paying less attention to brand. There was also the defense that, actually, no lower-rung land grant or online offering can come close to the job placement value that higher order institutions provide, regardless of the attractiveness and accessibility created by low cost and scale.

One panelist made a great point by saying that there is no way a small, liberal arts college in the Midwest, that is not in the top 50 stratosphere, can maintain charging US$40,000 a year in tuition. It can't be sustained in the online courses industry.

And then there was this compelling interlude:

Is there a viable business model around educating teachers? But 20% of Ivy Leagues apply to Teach for America. Talking about this now.

Some people pinpointed that of all the professions, teaching seems to be this land-locked industry, where a teacher that enters at age 25 will pretty much be doing the same job when he or she is 45 years old. That rarely happens in any other industry, save maybe in blue-collar jobs. A person can enter into JP Morgan, for instance as a broker or a sell-side analyst, and in ten years achieve such insight into the financial markets that she can launch her own firm. Why can't that happen in teaching?

Yet, 20% of Ivy League graduates enter apply to Teach for America? Guilt of the privileged? What is going on here? I think that is actually a social issue. People look down on teaching and when they do, they think, "Ah, gee, I should do something good for society, maybe do my part to help society, before I make it big in business." Well, you do good for society by working in business, in finance, insurance, right? So why this disorder rising up in the teaching profession?

Seems like it was all about lack of any meaningful social development for teachers. The teaching model is irrelevant. There's no way to improve a teacher, and "get more out of their performance." This seems utterly sad and devoid of hope.

Teachers should be paid more, but there is this socialist attitude around teaching. One panelist said that he could foresee that the teacher's union is the last great union that needs to be broken. It's limiting attitudes on what is viable in teaching and what can enrich the society.

I even jumped in and circled back to this point about a JP Morgan analyst. Why can't a teacher build herself up as a brand? Why can't she sell her brand? Why can't she be paid for things like being a consultant, or be a speaker at a business conference because she has figured out how to run her school classroom like a business, using a John Dewey model of taking the student out of the isolated icebox of a classroom and allowing the free world to come in and the student to go out in it.

School, I alluded, has always been about control, as if there is this social mindset that what happens in school is only about training, when it can indeed be about fixing social problems, making money from fixing them, and being the incubator for the world's greatest entrepreneurs.

India and China can do this. I have sat in a classroom in China that created a brand new open source software model for school curriculum. Three people did this, with a group of students who, Great Firewall permitting, can log onto google, look out into the world, and in once case, sell stuff on China's version of E-bay, a site called Taobao.

What is going on here?

More of this later. Shout outs and comments welcomed. Follow me on Twitter.

And do not forget to attend our Education Industry Investment Forum on March 1-3, 2010. Leave me comments.

When, Where, What, How and Why?

When considering the traditions of educating students, the all too common notions of when to educate, where to educate, what information to deliver, how and why to deliver it as part of the education process was pretty much a wrote process that never changed, year by year.

“Too early in the AM to be awake”,

“off to school”,

“same old stuff that was taught last year”,

“same old textbook, just the back part this time” and

“why bother shoving all this at us if we never will use it after graduation”

seemed to be the common curses shared between my friends and I as we walked to school in Flint each day back in the 70’s. You know that time – when Hippie culture waned, the birth of Disco, the Vietnam war concluded, moonshots ended and we couldn’t wait for the 80’s to “get here” for some inexplicable reason.

So much has changed since then with the education process, whether considering for-profit or public schools that to sit in a classroom of just a few decades ago would seem an ethereal, disorienting experience when compared to a typical classroom today.

Information technology developments have had perhaps the greatest influence on changes with education in the classroom. In writing that term “classroom”, am chagrined as I think what does it mean to be in a “classroom”, circa 2009? Nowadays, with connected, mobile learning solutions, the “classroom” is actually just about anywhere! And it is important to note that the pace of change with information technology parallels the pace of change with curriculum and how it is delivered. I believe they are intimately linked.

IT has changed the landscape through ever more portable computing power that easily fits in the palm of your hand and “interconnected” communications via regular cell phone calls, micro-blogging, text messaging, web surfing, social networking sites, etc.. The ability to share information effortlessly around the world is limited only by the expense of a “smart” cell phone and the intention to use it.

Just a casual glance at current technology available for students and classrooms illustrates some obvious capabilities and benefits for students, whether K-12 grade levels or attending colleges, universities or trade schools.

Readily available smartphones and wireless connected netbooks have liberated students from having to coordinate their entire learning process to specific times and locale where their paper-based content can be reviewed. My iPhone can be used for the “quick hit”, as a referential tool for lookup on subject matter on the internet or for navigating a course on iTunes U – checkout Apple’s mobile learning solutions. The first part of this webpage deals with the devices and the bottom of the page deals specifically with iTunes U for education institutions. Many higher level education institutions are already established on iTunes U with their courses and training videos. Here at Holly Area Schools, we’re pursuing the K-12 front on iTunes U. “Going to school” now breaks the mold with mobile learning solutions, as learning can occur anywhere the content can be retrieved, stored and played back.

Now let’s look at “What” and “How” – just one solution changing the norm, is the eBook reader. The thrust of eBook readers in the past several years has the potential to turn content that was always static due to its method of delivery, to a dynamic and engaging experience for students. Note a recent excerpt from a Computerworld article on eBooks. The eBook market has huge transformational potential for displacing traditional textbooks with an interactive experience for students when reading or listening to a textbook. That’s right; I did say “listening to a textbook”. Use of eBook readers across all grade levels can truly individualize the learning experience, regardless of the learning capabilities of the student. It is much more effective for educators to customize a set of parameters for an eBook that can be targeted for specific learning needs of students, even if they have learning or physical disabilities. There are great opportunities for development of new solutions which allow an educator to easily select from a library of preset parameters of an eBook, to deliver precisely the needed visual and audible format for each student. Development of such solutions might also incorporate State dictated GLCE’s, i.e. “Grade Level Content Expectations”.

The “Why” of adopting current, state of the art technology in the education process naturally deals with enhanced student achievement and the resultant improvements in their standardized test scores. Not simply buying into “technology at any cost”, the adoption of eBooks for instance, would greatly reduce the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) investment when compared to traditional textbooks. This assumes that textbook manufacturers will adopt eBook price structures that reflect the decreased cost of textbook duplication in an eBook format. The added benefit of eBook readers is to also have access to periodicals and newspapers simply on-demand.

Matt Mello, Director of Technology, Holly Area Schools
matt.mello@has-k12.org