A Different Approach to Higher Ed

The traditional model of higher education just wasn’t working for students of Paul Quinn College, Dallas, TX. The school’s solution was to incorporate flexibility, experiential learning, and entrepreneurial thought.

Under the New Urban College Model, the first federally recognized urban work college, participating students are employed for 10-20 hours a week and earn an annual stipend of up to $2,000 each academic year. Since nearly half of Paul Quinn students live at or near the poverty level, the institution uses open-sourced course materials so students don’t have choose between helping their families financially or buying textbooks. Varsity football was also eliminated and the field turned into an organic farm, providing hands-on learning and helping to feed the surrounding community.

The effort has driven down the cost to attend Paul Quinn College from nearly $24,000 annually to just under $15,000 for residential students. In addition, four-year loan debt averages are now less than $10,000.

“It is irresponsible to tell students from poverty that the way out of poverty is massive amounts of student loan debt,” said Paul Quinn President Michael J. Sorrell, during his presentation at the ASU + GSV Education Technology summit. “That is not right. We refuse to buy into that culture.”

The model has worked for Paul Quinn, which has been called an emerging national leader by The New York Times. Sorrell also earned a 2017 Social Innovator award from the Lewis Institute at Babson College for his efforts.

Teacher Buy-In Not Top Digital Priority

In a piece for eSchool News, a Discovery Education executive lays out her case for school districts not to let a lack of instructor buy-in stifle efforts to transition to digital learning materials.

Karen Beerer, vice president of learning and development for the provider of digital content and assessment tools, writes that waiting to get teachers aboard on new education technology can stall innovation and do a disservice to students by not preparing them properly for an increasingly digital world.

She acknowledges legitimate barriers, such as some students lacking digital access at home or tight budgets that may prohibit a 1:1 device rollout. “No matter our concerns,” Beerer says, “we need to recognize that our students are ready—they want to engage with textbooks that are replete with immersive and interactive experiences. They want access to up-to-date information and they want opportunities not only to consume content but to create content as well.”

Her suggestions include integrating digital approaches with traditional teaching strategies, and using new technologies—whether apps, virtual reality, or digital personal assistants such as Siri or Alexa—to help students discover new ways to learn.

Students will also help transition the classroom, she notes, "because when it comes to buy-in with digital, they are leading the charge."

Individualized Courses Isn't College

There have been predictions that technology will drag down textbook publishing, just as it did the music industry. Now, some experts suggest that the same consumer demand for single tunes will impact higher education as a whole.

“This last decade of the music industry presages the coming decade of education,” wrote Martin Smith, chief revenue officer of Noodle, a company that creates interactive tools designed to help students with online research, in an essay for Quartz. “Choice is expanding at every level, from pre-K to graduate school. The individual course, rather than the degree, is becoming the unit of content. And universities, the record labels of education, are facing increased pressure to unbundle their services.”

While Smith may have a point, it doesn’t mean he is right. Music lovers may have had little trouble turning away from $20 compact discs in favor buying a song for 99 cents or paying a monthly fee for a music-streaming service, but students deciding on college are not the same sort of consumer.

“The consumer choice is for the bundler—the brand, the label, university—and not the individual course content,” Derek Newton, senior communications director at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, wrote in an article for The Atlantic. “Consumers buy Stanford or Princeton in a way no one ever bought EMI or Universal.”

To Newton, turning the college experience into individual courses may provide plenty of great content, but also much less to study.

“In the current system, it may not be efficient to maintain fine-arts programs, but most people think it’s important to have them,” he wrote. “It has long been part of colleges’ mission to expose students to new ideas and disciplines. On campus, even business students, for example, are typically required to study literature and other topics in the humanities. Some may call that inefficient; others call it essential.”

More Kids are Reading Electronically

At a CAMEX 2011 education session in Houston, TX, Don Newton, executive director, CCSF Bookstore Auxiliary, City College of San Francisco, told attendees he believed digital content would not gain widespread acceptance until school-aged children began using it regularly. That day is getting much closer, according to a study from PlayCollective and Digital Book World.

The survey of 900 parents found that 67% of children age 2-13 now read e-books, up 54% from a similar report from 2012. It also found that many of the kids who read e-books said they read them every day, with nearly 92% reading an e-book at least once a week.

Use of digital reading in the classroom was cited as one of the main reasons for the increase in e-reading over the past year.

“In the last year, based on this research, the kids’ e-reading has reached and passed a tipping point,” said Paul Levine, co-CEO of PlayCollective, in a report in Digital Book World. “This is becoming a normal part of their lives and becoming habitual.”

Lessons from the magazine industry

The NY Post recently featured an article about the decline of magazine sales.

In 2011, overall newsstand sales of magazines declined by 10 percent, capping off three straight years of decline. Magazine publishers are currently faced with a shrinking industry, and many are indeed turning to digital sales. 45 percent of magazines titles are now in digital format.

 

One quote in the piece caught our attention in paticular.  It reads, “If you’re not thinking about how to creatively destroy your business and recreate it, you’re in trouble because someone else is thinking about it.”  It is a good lesson for college stores to hear and consider.

The magazine industry is undergoing transition and upheaval as organizations try to bridge the gap from traditional paper to new electronic formats -- formats that are still somewhat "in development."  The changes reported in the story are not unlike those facing other industries along a spectrum:  the newspaper industry, the music industry, and the college textbook industry or publishing in general.  The traditional core products and revenue generation models are changing and those wishing to survive must learn to adapt.

Last Typewriter Manufacturer Closes

In yet another signal of change, on Monday The Atlantic reported on the last typewriter factory in the world closing its doors earlier this week. Many in the States might have thought that typewriters disappeared years ago -- not long after 8-track tapes. While still a booming business overseas up to a few years ago, in the past two decades the typewriter business has declined beyond the point of sustainability as computing -- and particularly mobile computing has spread rapidly around the globe.

The final manufacturer, Godrej and Boyce, has about 200 new units left in stock. Hurry now for this rapidly disappearing collector's item!

Truths for publishers are for retailers too

Last week the Teleread blog had a posting entitled, Three truths that publishers should try to understand about readers. The posting starts with the following observation:

The big shift that ebooks are bringing to the market is not necessarily the paper to pixels one—it’s the shift between the bookstore as customer and the reader as customer. The problem many print publishers seem to have today is that they don’t really understand who the reader is and what they want out of a purchasing experience.

An interesting statement -- for booksellers as much as publishers. The article goes on to discuss three truths for publishers. I will paraphrase those here, and recast for booksellers.

TRUTH 1: READERS DON’T REALLY CARE HOW PUBLISHING WORKS This is true, and the bookstore corollary is that the reader does not really care how the bookstore works either. Whether it is financial return which covers their financial aid, a book that is out-of-stock because the faculty member ordered it the day before class began, or a shortage of used texts because the publisher changed editions -- student consumers often do not care about your problems. They want their problem solved -- getting course materials required for a course in a usable format at the lowest cost. They do not want explanations or to be educated on difficulties with DRM, or publisher pricing models. To quote another passage:

When you find yourself seeing a reader comment and thinking ‘but there is actually a really good explanation for that!’ your response, publishers, should not be to try and educate this customer on why this baffling situation is actually just and right. It should be to recognize that you have a customer giving you input on what you need to fix in order to get their money.

That last line is particularly true of student consumers.

TRUTH 2: ‘FAIR PRICE’ IS A RELATIVE CONCEPT

We have yet to settle on what is a fair price for digital, and this is particularly true in the textbook space. Is it half the cost of new? Is it the same price as print? Are you buying the book, or just "digitally renting" it for a semester (publishers call this a subscription). Reader perception is that the digital should be much less than print because they believe the cost is in the paper and distribution, not in the content creation, editing, formatting, storage, etc.

Whereas education on what they are buying is mostly unnecessary with print books, with digital books the purchase is less clearly an easy option. Differing DRM which changes from one publisher, book, or platform to the next creates confusion. Differing definitions of what you can do with your digital book purchase can also vary, particularly with digital textbooks. What was once a simple purchase where you knew what you could do with the book, is now a complicated and often inferior acquisition experience from the point of the consumer.

With expectations set for a lower price and the experience being less than optimal, who would blame students for expecting ebooks to cost less?

TRUTH 3: DRM IS A RED HERRING

Again, a quote from the article is helpful here:

I get that piracy is an issue for you guys. Loss prevention is something that every business deals with. I understand trying to keep such losses minimal—you will always have a margin for this because every business does. But the best way to minimize these losses is to solve the problems that are causing actual, potential customers to turn away. And in that respect, DRM has become a bit of a red herring.

As the Teleread article goes on to note, there are other factors that are impacting sales of digital more than piracy, but publishers are so focused on illegal downloading that they miss the big picture. This is one of the big errors that the music industry made. They were so caught up in trying to define the business to consumers, that consumers turned to piracy to get what they wanted that the music industry was not providing. In the same way, by making DRM cumbersome, but not conquerable by those who really want to pirate content, they are driving students not to adopt digital options -- and in likely encouraging the piracy they hope to prevent.

Many years ago I was involved with a project where we observed that a number of individuals were more likely to break a particular law and pay the fine than adhere to the requirement. This is because adhering to the law was so complicated and costly. We used technology to make it easier and more cost effective for indviduals to comply, and surprise, surprise, legal compliance went way up.

The same is true with DRM -- if it is too difficult for students to acquire and use the content legally, then they will find other options from the legal (e.g., choosing not to purchase, going with print, etc.) to the illegal (e.g., piracy). Ignoring the problems with DRM drives away good customers who are willing to pay, and fosters more digital theft. It also encourages more faculty to consider open source solutions, which can have a price tag, yet still be DRM free. It is time we rethink content protection and business models, and retailers have as much stake in that outcome as publishers do.

Some final guiding thoughts... The truths and lessons for Publishers in the TeleRead piece have implications for retailers too. I have said it before, but do we really know what business we are in? Beyond that, do we know what our customers really want? Successful businesses solve problems for their customers. Do we know what our customers problems are, and are we trying to solve those problems? How could we solve those problems more efficiently or effectively? If we fail to do so, someone else will, and at that point it is not really fair on our part to complain about the competition. If the competition is viable, it is because they are providing something that the customer values, and their value proposition is greater than the one we offer. Just something to think about.

Whither Print Communication?

The following article appeared in the January 2011 MACS Newsletter -- page 10. It is short and worth sharing. Reprinted here with permission from the newsletter and author. Also, Peter suggested that as a postscript, I note the recent news published in many locations that ebook sales have now surpassed paperback book sales. Amazon sold 115 ebooks last year for every 100 paperback books, and 3 times as many ebooks as hardbacks. That is total for the year, not just Q4.


WHITHER PRINT COMMUNICATION?


By Dr. Peter Mires
Manager, Delaware Tech, Georgetown Campus


We‘ve been hearing for some time now about the decline and demise of the printed word. Newspaper circulations are dropping to unsustainable levels, e-book sales at Amazon have eclipsed their hardcover list, and even some school libraries, such as Cushing Academy, a private prep school in the Boston area, have gone digital.


Digital delivery makes sense for many reasons, not the least of which is cost. After all, who buys print reference ma-terials such as encyclopedias, atlases, and almanacs anymore? This information is available online. Aside from arguments that Internet sites have issues of ques-tionable authenticity and ―inappropriate‖ sites abound, educators know that excel-lent databases (e.g., Tennessee Elec-tronic Library, EBSCOhost) are out there.


Those of us in the college store industry are aware of this trend. You‘ve proba-bly seen scenarios like online access codes, which used to be considered an-cillary, replace textbooks, or instructors put more material on e-learning plat-forms like Blackboard. Doubtless these and other changes have you wondering about the future of your store and how to adapt.


Allow me to relate a personal experi-ence. I recently published a print-on-demand book (entitled Bayou Built: The Legacy of Louisiana’s Historic Architecture), which is available in both print and digi-tal formats. The digital version is 37 percent less expensive and my royalty is 40 percent greater. The reason is sim-ple: there are no associated printing, shipping, and handling costs.


I confess that I don‘t own an e-reader, like Amazon‘s Kindle or Barnes & No-ble‘s Nook, preferring instead to hold an actual book. Call me old school, Lud-dite, or what have you, but I‘m able to separate trend from tradition. Like it or not, the printed page is for the most part obsolete; it will eventually go the way of my Olympia manual typewriter. I have fond memories of pulling ―all-nighters‖ in college hammering out papers on that durable device, but the writing, so to speak, was on the wall in the early 1980s when personal computers became widely available.


Textbooks, the traditional bread-and-butter of the college bookstore, are go-ing digital. Everyone seems to agree that our bi-annual book rushes will no longer be synonymous with trucks ap-pearing at our loading docks with pallets of boxes. The college bookstore of the foreseeable future is increasingly partici-patory in e-commerce.


It is not without a tinge of sadness or nostalgia that I witness this transition. But, who among us would type when the rest of the world is keyboarding?

Interest in E-Textbooks at the College Level Accelerates

A new study out reports that interest in e-textbooks and multimedia tools is starting to grow. Simba Information in a press release yesterday noted that while new textbook sales continue to grow, used textbook sales are expected to begin leveling out -- particularly because e-textbook options are starting to take hold among students and faculty. The release notes:

Multimedia materials have the greatest potential to change the perception of instructional materials in the college market, to change the concept of a textbook and to change how content is used in college courses.

The article does have some interesting statistics that some might find interesting.

Aside from this article I have heard a few other stats over the past several months. That the conversion rate from print to digital for e-textbooks has now hit the 2-3% mark (same rate we saw in music during the first year of iTunes). I heard a similar iTunes-like comparison for the Kindle and e-books in general recently. Students are generally a tech-saavy bunch, and more so every day. Because student populations turn over rather quickly (about every 4-5 years), it is not inconceivable to see digital go from almost nothing, to something substantive, in just a few years time. Does that mean all print will go away? No. The used market is likely to slim down a bit as competition for printed used gets more intense. New delivery models will likely decrease the amount of print editions available, or might generate more customized local editions with little market value beyond a particular faculty member or institution. If the "Kindle for Textbooks" comes out next year, and if that results in a faster shift to digital among students, will college stores and other content providers be ready for the shift? What will it take for stores to demonstrate they are capable and credible sources for course materials in a digital context?

Yesterday's press release is just one more indicator that a shift is coming. It is like being on a roller coaster, headinng for that first big drop. The top of the hill is coming, but we can not quite see the size of the drop on the other side. The moment of anticipation, where you hang briefly at the top seeing what is ahead before racing down the first hill is just a few clicks of the pull chain away. Better double check the safety bar and seat belts!