Intro
Going forward, the sustainability of public education is going to rely on its ability to respond to its consumers, parents and students, in modern highly service-oriented ways. This requires leadership to consider new operational paradigms. Education, as one of the last segments of society where technology has yet to become pervasive, there is a need for new viewpoint aimed at increasing the sophistication of thinking for administrators and teachers. Why?
Digital Education
The consumerization of educational digital curriculum is allowing parents to make choices. Parents are asking themselves, “Do I settle for what the ‘school’ says is the best curriculum and what my child should be learning, or do I go find what I want my child to be accessing to enable and facilitate their learning and interests?” Students are wholly invested in leveraging the connectedness of the Internet to pursue their own curiosity derived from their formal education pursuits, but also their own personal interests.
With Internet access becoming ever more pervasive in our homes and on-the-go, publishers and subject-matter experts are figuring out that learning applications can be marketed directly to the parent and student, completely bypassing “education”. Voting with their wallets, parents are outspending schools by 25% in the purchase of digital curriculum. This factor alone should signal to education leaders that its clients want something different. They want true digital, not digitized. They want education to become the personal experience that enables students to learn at their pace and ability level.
About Schools
Schools (i.e. private startups, some charters and a handful of public schools) are tackling the issue of school relevancy. They are making sure the instruction happening that day is not a one-size-fits-all approach. This means they are using technology to provide a precise interjection of the teacher into the personalized education path of a student. Furthermore, it means the teacher turns their focus to their human skills, while the orchestration of the technology across the enterprise of education is seamlessly supportive.
About Contributor
Here at the Learning Counsel, we are a new nexus of media and research to help schools chart a path to expositional learning, a positioning all signs point to becoming the demanded environment for learning. Visit us at http://thelearningcounsel.com to learn how we are working to help education leaders understand what they are facing down. And, join us in the first built-for-education social network, KnowStory, at http://knowstory.com and participate in the epic journey.
Author: David Kafitz, Ed.D.
VP School Relationships & Consulting