XplanaZine

As a kid I spent my summers on a construction crew building things. Mostly we build modest houses, unimaginative, copycat cracker boxes that the public couldn’t seem to live without. We’d start at one end of a street in June and work our way down, slamming up prefabricated walls and pre-cut joists, all in an effort to build one house after another that looked the same. Indeed, I was a builder.

Now, what I always wanted to be was a creator. I wanted to be a guy who thought up new and imaginative ways to construct houses. I wanted to focus on creative details, the little things that could make houses cool and unique.

Don’t get me wrong. I could see the importance of the building phase of my career. It taught me the basics of construction and showed me what went in to making a house. But I could see that there was more and that there was better. I could see that, on top of those boring boxes you could add fancy hip roofs with room to spare for an imaginative loft. With the slightest touch of bay windows, recessed lighting, or wood beams, I could have turned those boring houses into artistic creations.

Of course, the reason I never got to create those special effects is because the company I worked for understood their business and their market. My company wasn’t an architectural firm. And they weren’t a creative agency. They specialized in buying land and developing it. The homebuilding gig for them was just icing on their cake. And, as such, it wouldn’t have been profitable to run up production costs by trying to create new home designs. Especially not when the market has already made it perfectly clear that the “me too” style of house that we built. Heck, I never started on a slab that didn’t already have a sold sign on it.

Knowing your business strengths and having the sense not to introduce needless inefficiencies is a big key to success for most companies. Which is why I continue to struggle with the fact that publishers spend more and more money to create elaborate homework management systems or LMS platforms. These are systems that do pretty much exactly the same thing as BlackBoard, WebCT, Sakai , Desire2Learn, Angel, or Moodle. That is, they do the exact same thing except they actually do a little less because the companies that create them aren’t specialists in technology, they don’t have to compete in the same competitive technology marketplace, and they don’t have to constantly invest in technology research and development in order to stay alive.

This means that publisher platforms like McGraw-Hill’s MathZone, Wiley’s eGrade, or Thomson’s iLRN are, in essence, copies of existing LMS platforms except that they do not necessarily adhere to all of the same standards or provide the same robust functionality as existing systems.

One argument for publisher platforms, of course, is that these systems are built uniquely for their content. Publishers argue that the LMS platforms available out there don’t necessarily provide the best functionality for that content. Well, looking under the surface a bit renders that argument ridiculous. While that may have been true back in the early days when there was less competition in the LMS space, it simply isn’t true today. There are six major platforms competing in the North American education space and the competition between them has driven rapid expansion of feature sets and interoperability. Publishers simply cannot and will not keep pace with these dedicated LMS companies or solutions. So why try?

Publishers also make the argument that they sell to many schools that don’t have an LMS platform and that they need to offer a hosted alternative for those institutions. And, providing the best alternative is part of their competitive edge against other publishers. Well, if they are looking for competitive edge, publishers should stop building LMS platforms altogether. Instead, they should adopt one of the existing platforms (I would go for Sakai or Moodle since they are free) and focus their energies on creating the very best third-party tools possible. Instead of spending millions on reinventing the wheel, why not spend a hundred thousand or so on content specific tools that can be used across all six platforms?

Publishers are content creators and they are most successful when the build better and better content. They must anticipate technology changes, partner with technology providers, and manage their content in the most efficient and flexible manner possible in this digital age — but they should not build LMS platforms. It’s not who they are or what they do. And it will only be a drain on valuable resources.

As I look back to my youth, I think how cool it would have been if they let me go to the different houses after they were almost complete and add special touches that I thought would make a difference. Publishers have that opportunity with existing LMS platforms. Or, they can continue on their current paths and just rebuild the same houses that someone else has already built.

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