XplanaZine

This week, publishers in the higher education market will hold their bi-annual sales meetings and announce what they have already learned from their monthly sales reports. Book sales are down. The numbers, and that means revenues, are flat. And those are numbers inflated by price increases (the publishing industry is very similar to the movie industry — it keeps meeting sales goals in spite of reduced volume).

The big questions for publishers this year revolve around how to make a productive transition into digital content and how to sell it to faculty and students. What configuration of objects, say, can they put together that will help build new business as well as encourage existing adopters to use more of their print materials?

These are the challenging questions of the current educational publishing market space. Recent reports by publishers and higher education leaders suggest that one of the big issues is that publishers have yet to provide digital content in formats that prove irresistibly enticing to instructors or their institutions.

• A recent Campus Technology survey reveals a growing dissatisfaction with market-leading LMS platforms and suggests that instructors are not jumping to buy digital content offered by publishers. ( http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=10308 );
• Current blogging activity among technology leaders reflects a sentiment that publishers should adapt to educators and their needs for digital content, rather than making educators adapt to publisher offerings (see, for example, this post by Stephen Downes — http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/research.cgi?item=1104442419 );
• A CETIS/JISC report outlines the limitations of current-generation LMS platforms and, in particular, their inabilities to scale in terms of mobility and flexibility of content. (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Component%20Frameworks.ppt#271,4,Why a ‘Personal Learning Environment’?)

Other research validates these additional, significant trends in higher education:

• The increase in number of predominant LMS platforms in the market place;
• The increase in standards-compliance for learning objects;
• The increase of digital content created by instructors;
• The increase in e-portfolio usage on major university campuses.

What these developments point to is an increased need for standards-based, portable content that can be reused in multiple environments and for different pedagogical purposes. Based on this information, I see three primary opportunities for publishers to expand their position in higher-education publishing and to position themselves as primary digital-content partners for instructors and educational institutions.

1. Focus on reusable content . The trend towards standards-based, mobile content is clear. Increasingly, instructors are going to demand content that is:
   1. Granular — content that is untethered from a specific course or collection, and presented in convenient libraries from which they can select learning objects that best supplement their own efforts;
   2. Portable — content that can be used in multiple learning environments and systems, and that can be repurposed with relative ease.
2. Build cross-discipline pedagogical templates . The most recent Sloan Consortium report reveals that the growth of online learning is exceeding their projected 20% per annum predictions. This trend, along with the added players in the LMS platform market, suggest that more than providing platform alternatives for instructors, publishers can succeed by building teaching templates or "how-to" models that can be reused in multiple platforms.
3. Construct Portable Learning Environments (PLEs) . Current LMS platforms have difficulty meeting the varied needs of educators in higher education. In particular:
   
   1. LMS platforms cannot scale pedagogically. A primary limitation of LMS platforms is that they necessarily become inflexible in terms of pedagogy. As increasing amounts of features are added to the platform architecture and core functionality, the system necessarily becomes too entrenched in a singular pedagogical vision. Moreover, because so much functionality is embedded in the platform core, these systems are extremely difficult to adapt to new teaching visions that demand different information architecture or features.
   2. LMS platforms cannot scale technologically. As the CETIS report points out, the current server model in LMS platforms has its limitations. This limitations, in particular, are related to evolving technological and learning trends:
      1. Lifelong learning : increasingly, learners attend multiple institutions (sometime simultaneously) over time and they need to be able to manage their own records.
      2. Mobile and distant learning : as the current war effort in Iraq has reminded us, there is a need and demand for online/offline learning models. Mobile learners need a continuous connection to their learning but they need solutions that don’t require them to be physically connected to a network at all times.
      3. Disparity in connection speeds . The most recent PEW Internet survey shows that, for the first time, the number of broadband Internet users in the United States outnumbers the number of dial-up users. Still, a significant number of users lack broadband access and that number is even higher when considering mobile (from military to business personnel) and international users.
      4. Demand for simulations and adaptive assessment . Video games and other learning environments are causing an increased focus on more experiential and interactive learning assessments. Both adaptive and simulated learning experiences present scalability challenges and need to be presented in mobile formats.

PLEs address these limitations by distributing part of the learning load to the user’s personal machine. This is particularly useful with regards to adaptive assessment as a wider range of user response variables can be measured without causing undue server taxation. Additionally, because they are lightweight, PLEs are more adaptable to evolving technology trends. They can be rewritten or modified with relative ease and without "trashing" expensive development investments. Finally, PLEs offer instructors and learners much more flexibility in terms of pedagogy. PLEs can be configured or manipulated easily to meet the specific pedagogical needs required for a particular discipline or course.

As an somewhat informed and tech-saavy instructor, I tend to use learning technology the way I use textbooks. Just give me something and I’ll do my thing with it. I’ve developed my own bag of tricks and I’m not dependent on any particular LMS or content from a publisher or colleague.

My colleagues, on the other hand, are generally not like me. They haven’t been doing this "forever" and many of them will use publisher digital provided by publishers if it is available in ways that are flexible and and if they can pick and choose only those pieces they need or want. In addition, many would appreciate having content available in "suggested templates" that could cut down on their workload and let them focus on being subject matter experts.