Amplify's flop
In the last ten years all the sectors of the media industry have found a model more or less successful for operate of new digital economy. The only one sector a not yet to find it, and he's having an awful lot of trouble finding it, that's it of educational publishing. For theuniversity education there are some experiences rather interesting and you begin to glimpse possible models that also arouse a lot concern for their valence disruptive towards the current system. For education primary e secondary, instead, they are only collecting failures rather sensational: going digital is a green mile. Many cases bear witness to this, first of all that of News Corporation, the family-driven information giant Murdoch.
In 2011 Rupert Murdoch, the founder of the dynasty and undoubted patron of the media, defined education as “the last pocket of resistance of the traditional media” and as such a real one mine of opportunities. A'opinion which he shared with Steve Jobs which, in the last part of his life, he devoted a great deal of energy to decode a new educational model based on the tech. Unfortunately Jobs just didn't have the time, but Murdoch did. After purchased in 2010 the platform Wireless Generation for 360 million dollars, two years later he created a real one division inside of by News Corp., Amplify, delivered to a person of experience of Joel Klein by many considered the person more influences in the field ofpublic education negli USA.
Ampify said Murdoch "will revolutionize education" with his double project: to create a digital platform for handle by teachers and families the common basic public education program (Common Core State Standards Initiative) and build a tablets dedicated to teaching and learning in school primary e secondary (k-12). News Corp. has invested $XNUMX billion in Amplify. But it's easy to get burned in this industry, and even a cyclops like News has burned his fingers. In the 2015 theenthusiasm for education there is a lot cold and there is talk of liquidating everything. In three years Amplify has lost half a billion dollars and the much acclaimed tablets was a flop. Maybe the world just didn't need another tablet. If News Corporation quits, it's Pearson who tries ferociously.
Pearson and spaghetti
Pearson, £5 billion in turnover and 40 employees, is the largest publisher of the IT world;. Well, Pearson has decided to point all about education and school, selling or discontinuing all other activities. And what an activity! Pearson's new CEO, John fallon, showed by get serious. In a very successful two-pronged summer move, which brought a magnificent return to shareholders while leaving them puzzled about its long-term value, he sold at the maximum price holdings di Pearson in "Financial Times” (to the Japanese of Nikkei) and in the“Economist” (at the Exor of the Agnelli family). Fallon's predecessor, Texan Marjorie Scardino, had declared that to sell the "Financial Times" "they would have had to go over her corpse".
Actually the motivations by Fallon for these resignations they are rather founded and its reasoning è plausible: “Pearson cannot invest as needed in two sectors undergoing profound transformation such as information and education, he must choose one of the two and focus on this". Fallon is right. For example, the "Financial Times” on the digital has a lot to work: her uses for mobile they are beyond spring due to the inexplicable choice not to develop them in the native languages of iOS and Android, the digital replica of the newspaper (FT e-paper) requires subscribers to log in too often and can be browsed with difficulty, the graphs cannot be enlarged and the search it's a “high-five-that-I-found-it”. The Digital Edition paywall is inflexible and blocks the ability to share articles that can only be read by other subscribers. In short, there is need byinvestments and many investments. Today the digital activities are in balance not for the excellence of technology but for the excellence of the contents and the quality of journalism. The direct competitor of the FT, the “Wall Street Journal” is much better off on digital.
Fallon's reasoning would be perfect were it not that the strategy di Pearson in the sector on which he has decided to focus is anything but crystalline and Fallon himself has taken up the term "spaghetti" to photograph the state of affairs, promising to unravel it in a couple of years. Pearson has only collected one too many so far long string of captures more or less successful which have cost £2010 billion since 2,8. In the United States alone there are 50 data centers and the software platforms are too many and not at all interoperable. An experience that forced Fallon to declare that i capital deriving from resignations not will used for new acquisitions, but for boosts up la growth of the business existing. How? For now, uncertainty reigns. It is known that the project of Pearson is, as it was for Amplify, create a technological platform to distribute digital content to educators and manage their training activities in collaboration with families. This means andare very over i pdf of textbooks. It means to create original content, self-assessment and collaborative study tools in a design logic that is more similar to video games than to printed paper content.
Fortunately Pearson still has gods good contracts in the context ofpublic education. For example in the United States manages i Entry test provided by Common core Initiative in almost all American states and also manages the Stats tests in UK. These well-guarded positions are not yet the strategy that the market expects from the London giant and on these contracts there are gatherings of menacing clouds. For example, if he went to the presidenza US a republican other than Jeb Bush or John Kasich, the Common core would be put in discussion radically.
McGraw-Hill: focus on content designed for digital
in 2013 McGraw-Hill Education was spun off from the financial assets of the New York conglomerate (among which the Standard & Poor's rating agency stands out) and sold for $2,5 billion ad Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm with $162,5 billion in assets under management. TO direct the new company, now based in Columbus, Ohio, and no longer in Rockefeller Center, was named Peter Cohen who served as CEO of Pearson Education from 2008 to 2013.
The first obiettivo of McGraw-Hill is that of lead in digital their textbooks and their own manuals that are now thought and designed primarily for one fruition on one screen connected to the internet. Priority to digital therefore, but not abandoning the traditional textbook. The group stands moving with a lot caution in the belief that the transition from paper to digital will gradually and the two channels will continue side by side for years to come.
In fact Stephen Laster, Chief Digital Officer, acknowledges that not all schools are ready to go fully digital. “Digital is clearly the future – he declared – but we are in one mixed situation where digital and print is the mix our teachers are using today. McGraw-Hill doesn't think you should throw away everything you've made and start from scratch."
For this reason McGraw-Hill is not working on building a platform for managing the entire learning process and does not intend to enter the mobile device business with its own specific solution. It's about a strategy very diverse from that of Pearson and Amplify.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: focus on open digital content
On the same page as McGraw-Hill is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the third major player in US school publishing, is following a similar strategy for going digital. A strategy that is essentially based on granulation of the content, already owned by the publisher, in learning unit which can be assemble and combined into one platform, content-neutral by third parts works with any technology and device. These atoms of content and software also have the ability to track and verify the user's learning progress.
Thanks to the availability of these materials, the educator can work in a perspective di adaptive teaching Setting personalized study paths based on the specific abilities and levels of the students. The Boston publisher's holistic approach is close to the path that some schools have already taken in the United States in order to go beyond the single textbook. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, like McGraw-Hill, also follows an incremental approach and considers himself more of a follower than an innovation leader.
Cengage Learning: focus on the platform
Cengage Learning, another major educational publishing player in the US, is emerged in April 2014 fromcontrolled administration, after having restructured a gigantic debt, with theintention di turn from traditional publisher to real software house so you can get by your own cloud platform of learning, MindTap40% of revenues. An extremely ambitious goal that has aroused many perplexities among observers.
Joseph J. Esposito, a publishing and media consultant, commented: “Cengage & co. they are a software company like i am a dancer. It's easy to say (thinking of the investment community) that we are a software house and not a publishing house, but a company is shaped by the customers it reaches”. In fact, that's the point.
The obsession with control
Why these big ones multinationals from theschool diary they struggle so much to find one model effective at passage al digital of contents and services intended for school and training? Simply because, coming from a totally different experience, not have included how they develop relations, also economic, within this new market totally dematerialized. Their obsession, as good disciples of the hard-boiled school, is that of controllare thewhole system of production and distribution of a content as happens, in fact, in the market in which they are accustomed to operate. Such total control of business, as all the traditional media companies that are dealing with the new economy are realizing, è almost impossible in the new digital scenario. In this environment we go towards one segmentation and specialization roles and any monopsony are transients. Dominant positions tend to be ephemeral and can be quickly undermined by the consequences of subsequent innovation.
This will to control of the ientire business, generated by their content, translates intoidea of the large traditional groups of to build one of its own digital platform in which to make this concept work. The other platforms are seen as competitors. This is the only way to explain certain choices such as the most sensational, in my opinion; the reluctance, that is, to leave 30% to the online stores from which apps and ebooks are downloaded when there are no problems in recognizing wholesalers and bookshops a larger slice of the pie.
The fact is, however, that all i channels able to collect adigital user significant, which adheres to certain patterns of consumption and purchase, they already are occupied e control yourself by large Internet organizations and by media hubs such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Alibaba and so on. These are organizations born, raised and developed in the new environment that constitutes their unique business scenario.
È possible change this state of affairs making sure that theusers also start at to attend and invest time and money on resources online of school publishers? Here is the big question mark. From what we have seen so far, these resources are small: they are very often built with logics that are far from those to which digital users are accustomed because their focal point is not il consumer but the business of publishers. In general they are difficult to navigate, are unnecessarily complex, lack social activities, there are many barriers and even the price is not what the web is used to. Despite the fact that this state of affairs is there for all to see, publishers do not resign themselves to giving up the idea of controlling the business through these expensive distribution hyper-structures with which to make accessible their contents which continue to be content di excellence, contents that no other subject possesses or is able to build in a short time. It's right in content la strength of publishers, the greatest legacy they find themselves managing and perpetuating. It's right on content they should to focus looking for the best way to spread them through i new media.
Instead they keep on disperse resources and throw away opportunities in the fight thehegemony of large organizations network which are technologically the state of the art and the driving forces behind an innovation that works. These organizations would be one huge resource if publishers got into a different mood: from “hands off” to “let's collaborate”.
But there is something even more basic to discuss: does the traditional school publisher have the technological culture, mindset and knowledge of the new media appropriate to build something that can attract millions of subjects and convince them to operate on that platform for the most important of the tasks, that of transmitting a basic education preparatory to their working careers? For now the answer is no; he doesn't have it.
Who is the school publisher's customer?
There is, however, something to keep in mind specificity of the market ofschool publishing which is also a mitigating factor for the poor results obtained so far in the transition to digital. That's what Joseph J. Esposito was alluding to. The client of the school editor è generally different twigs consumer. clientis generally apublic institution o private or a subject with an institutional role. It is a sort of broker that stands between the content producer and the direct consumer. The publishers they reason and act with the institutional moment with the consequence of underestimate the end user. But it is precisely the latter attitude which, in the end, determines the choices of the level institutional. If it comes to public facility exercises it throughbroader public opinion, through theelectoral orientation of the families very sensitive to public education policies and other forms of control and direction which tend to reflect the point of view of consumers. If it's a private customer it is even easier to send specific messages related to the cardinal principle of every commercial activity: the customer satisfaction”. In the new economy, the final consumer is the boss.
THEeditor must therefore do a nice mental leap building their own proposals in such a way as to andare over theintermediary institution to achievefinal user and seek satisfaction. We must also consider that this hypothetical final user is already client of someone, is already joined by one platform, within which it already plays many activities commercial ones and probably aren't willing or don't have the time to add or migrate to another one.
Content is the wild card
Maybe there choice towards which they are directed McGraw-Hill e Houghton mifflin harcourt, namely focus on content leaving lose each ambition to build its own platform, for learning, is thecorrect option in the new digital scenario. Maybe the future same of all publishing lies in the capacity di select, to build e refine content da deliver to the big ones distribution platforms of the network that will ensure that they reach consumers in the specific modalities of the moment.
Le resources available to publishers are limited; publishers don't have the near-unconditional financial backing that techs enjoy, their traditional businesses are in decline, and the media conglomerates to which they belong tend to spin off these assets. In front of them there can be only one way specialization on production di content built with new media in mind. Getting out of the logic of control means winning the digital challenge and succeeding in the new environment. For now it's just shouting at the moon.
