Sep
2
Right Strategy, Write Experience
Filed Under Blog, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Its a testing world. Having spent an anxious summer awaiting a son’s GCSE results (excellent, thank goodness) I can testify that it is not only the student who goes through the wringer, and I am certain that it is not only the anally fixated British examination system that produces these reactions. And the stupid thing is that we know the answers, we know they are attainable, but we know that we lack the people and spending climate and administrative cultures to apply them. The answers lie in the area of personalized learning, in the context of allowing students to learn at their own readiness pace, and grow in confidence with individual tuition which supports their successes, gives them a feeling for their progress, and corrects their mistakes in ways which help them learn from those mistakes. Since we will never be able to staff that system, machines must do the heavy work, under human supervision.
About ten years ago I first saw prototypes of automated essay marking systems, then produced as research projects by that wonderful combination of research and assessment development, the Educational Testing Service (http://www.ets.org). This research has now blossomed into written assignment marking tools which are as widespread in the US examination system as they are rare in Europe and the rest of the world. But, and perhaps more importantly, they are starting to go mainstream in learning processes themselves, and this was clearly signified this week by the announcement of Write Experience by Cengage (http://www.cengagesites.com/academic/?site=4994&secid=3882). In a world where teachers cannot set written assignments in the quantities that they would like because they do not have sufficient time to mark them, this seems to plug into needs in the system at several different levels.
So what is Write Experience and what does it do? Using technologies rather broadly described as “artificial intelligence” (in fact eWrite IntelimetricWithin) it gives a real time guidance system to the essay writing process. The system makes suggestions (if it works like autotext then it could be seriously trying as well) and provides pointers and support. So far it is available in the US in Basic Writing, whatever that may be, and in a range of higher education business education contexts -accountancy, organizational behaviour, small business studies, strategic business management etc. Cengage promise a widening range of coverage: if they get the next elements right then a significant part of the future is here.
The next elements are the next three tools out of the box. Students who are hooked into MyTutor then move on through MyEditor, which explains mistakes, suggests other strategies and helps develop strategies for learning from them. Then comes the Performance Report element, which will be the piece which gives constant feedback and helps the student to appreciate where she is in the learning process, and then the Revision Plan, which re-integrates the learning activity for the user. Bear in mind that this is a first commercial launch, and clearly there is a great deal of progress to be made. The partnership of Cengage with McCann Associates is an interesting one, since the latter’s long association with GMAT testing has included the development of automated writing assignment marking systems and it is clearly their technology which is doing the heavy lifting here.
Elsewhere in the world we are still desperately convinced that it is content which does the trick and works the magic in terms of what we still, for want of a better expression, call “educational publishing”. But Pearson, and, here, Cengage, are clearly concerned to take bigger strides into unknown territory which concerns strategies for the future of learning and not for the maintenance of publishing formats. And, no, I am not saying that eBooks, resources, reference etc have no future here. Plugged into these learning systems they become mighty again, but unless you are a systems/platform developer then you simply license content for use in the context of workflow. That is a different business from the business publishers have now, with different quality of returns and earnings. Cengage seem to be clearly concerned to hold onto their centrality in the learning process and this must be right. Whether you take the view that the future of education belongs in the infrastructure layer (in which case Pearson and Cengage will be bought by Oracle, or IBM, or new-look HP) or not, some of the current crop of former publishing players must move strategically into the learning systems developer layer. Cengage, with Write Experience, seem to have the right strategy in mind.
Jul
8
How big is the eBook?
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Lets start with a complaint. I seem to be the only citizen of the UK who has not received a letter from the Police saying that my phone might have been hacked by Murdoch’s News International newspapers. This is at once humiliating and ungrateful. Only recently I sent Rupert a birthday card (https://www.davidworlock.com/2011/03/birthday-greetings-rm/) I wonder if compensation will be offered to the bruised egos of those of us whose voicemail did not assuage the ferocious appetites of the newshounds at the now defunct News of the Screws. But I know that if I had the Tycoon’s dollar in my grasp I should be forced to pay it over to the benefit of the 200 wholly innocent computer operators, secretaries and cleaners who have lost their jobs in this debacle, and will be unemployed until Rupert gets the Sunday Sun launched later in the year.
So that is the topic that I do not choose to talk about. And I would have liked to talk about Facebook: everything in the social network devolves to video is a theory I have held for a long time. The Skype-Facebook alliance brings Microsoft back into play, but Google+, the social network, while it has few takers, has group video. The manifest destiny of social networks is video chat, and that is a subject for another day. Meanwhile, Facebook has seen its first net user declines. Watch this space.
Still with me? The most important issue of the week was definitely getting a copy of a new report on Market Sizing and forecasts for eBooks. I was delighted to see that this came from my erstwhile friends and colleagues at Outsell, not least because they have filled a real gap and we are all going to be grateful to them. As they would expect, I could argue with the forecasts, but so could most of us: the important thing is to have a forecast, based on historical data, which can be the focus of debate going forward. Outsell have decided to divide the market to be measured into three – consumer, educational and professional. This was very wise. They have also made the very first attempt that I have seen to get global estimates – Europe, Asia-Pacific and the USA will all be markedly different in their development in this area. It is comforting, after so many attempts at global trend analysis (thinly disguised US forecasting globally extrapolated) to see genuine attempts to understand players like Kodansha and fit them into the grid. The future is manga as well as Stephanie Meyer. So, inspired by these efforts, let me add a couple of thoughts on top:
- the three vertical sectors chosen are developing in markedly different directions. Having a global figure for market size is less important than tracking those differences.
- while I agree that children’s books will be a focus in consumer, surely the self-published efforts of Amanda Hockings, John Locke, et al, come in here ? At 99 cents and the huge volumes already indicated in this blog and others, they will profoundly change the US market. Amazon is probably the largest eBook player already.
- as we come to the end of the reprint/facsimile phase of eBooks for consumers, and move into it as an original publishing medium prepare to see these figures alter drastically. While I am sure that the report is quite correct in seeing eBooks as 3%+ of consumer sales in 2010, be prepared for 12% in 2011 (that self-published stuff must go in), and 50% by 2015. This will effectively reconstruct this side of the marketplace.
- then think of education solely in terms of portability. Moving textbooks to eBook is a short term factor , in my view, mostly driven by the cost of print textbooks. Moving content into VLEs and LMS storage and whiteboard re-utilization will be a big game when it is on, but in education’s full manifestation as a networked workflow in K-12, there will only be a limited role for this type of transfer technology. I expect to see market share go up to 10% and then start to decline.
- in the professional sector other thoughts come to mind. For example, this is where custom publishing via eBook is taking strongest root. So I expect to see continued steady growth to a 50:50 market by 2017, but in order to see this we have to measure Safari as well as McGraw Hill.
The report notes that many publishers feel happy with eBooks. They should be deeply disturbed, in my view. The eBook is a transitory phase, and anyone complacent enough to believe that it “solves” any of the underlying issues of movement to a networked, digital marketplace needs a strong cup of tea and a good talking to, as my mother would have said. It is already clear that the only thing that these three markets examined by Outsell have in common is that they all define the word “book” in “eBook” very differently. “Book” is the packaging word of the print world: calling something an “eBook” does not mean that publishers can regard it as a format environment in the same way. In current attitudes to ebooks, especially in those devoted to ePub3 who point to the newly announced standard as a breakthrough in multimedia publishing, there remains the hope that eBooks can become an extension of businesses which are primarily print-based and wish to see change at their own pace. The problem is that neither customers or self-publishers, or custom course content producers or anyone else, is going to wait for them.
In the meanwhile, we all need to know where we are on the change graph, and then we can begin to adjust our own strategies as we guage how fast the water is running. Outsell have done us all a real service in getting all the data together: now we need to acquire it and begin the internal argument from here.
Worldwide e-Books: Market Size and Forecast Report, 2009-2013 (June 30, 2011) (www.outsellinc.com)
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