4 ms·

School District Dumps Online Textbooks Because Students Don't Have Broadband

14 points by japhyr 14y ago

betterunix 14y ago
This sounds absurd. Why should any Internet connection be needed to read a book, do exercising in a book, or anything else with a textbook? Sounds like the school district made some bad technical choices to me. (edit: perhaps I should have read more of the article, which mentions this...)
- freehunter 14y ago
  The school district made some bad technical choices, and also forgot one of the most important facets of rolling out a new technology: making sure the users can actually use it. If you can't satisfy the technical requirements, investing the money is flushing it down the drain. Even a survey going out with students asking if their house had broadband would be enough. Sounds like what I'd expect from a committee without oversight, though. Far too often in my own job do I encounter a rogue team or business group that has bought licenses for software that the infrastructure is not prepared to support. It looks cool and they had a great marketing pitch, that's all that matters. IT will take care of the back-end, right?
  - betterunix 14y ago
    I suspect that this had more to do with marketing on Pearson's part than anything else -- the officials who made these decisions probably had not paid attention to the fine print about broadband connection requirements. They were probably looking only at the cost per-book or per-student (and it never occurred to them that this makes no sense when talking about computers, since books should be something that computers can rapidly copy) and were dazzled by fancy interactive features. At least that is how things seem to work at the university level. Maybe things are different at a local school district.
- csense 14y ago
  > Why should any Internet connection be needed The most aggressive DRM schemes require a client-server connection. A lot of content publishers (not just textbooks: think newspapers, video games, movies, music) are really scared by what the Internet is doing to their industry, and a large subset of them turn to the most invasive, aggressive possible DRM as the answer. > Sounds like the school district made some bad technical choices to me. As another commenter pointed out, the people running the school district aren't technically literate, probably aren't even aware of the concerns about DRM, and aren't willing or able to listen to those who are. (By "unable" I mean -- think of non-technically minded people whose eyes glaze over as soon as you start discussing how something works. Not even necessarily a highly technical concept like DRM, maybe something as simple and familiar as the physical reason a bicycle will fall over when it's standing still, but not when it's moving.)
  - jgamman 14y ago
    rubbish. their job is to allocate funds and if they aren't competent enough to do that themselves then they need to hire expertise. FFS, they are spending millions and can't afford to spend a few grand on hiring their own technically literate representative? seriously, you're representing yourself in court next week? hhmm get back to me on how that works out for you. it's a level 0 mistake. i could cut you some slack that a lot of people don't kknow how to select a competent representative but that's a good discussion to have and certainly one that you should spend time and effort on _before_ writing the big cheques...
russell 14y ago
The Pearson executives should be publicly whipped for producing such a system. My girlfriend took a graphics design course at the local JC and the whole system was managed by Pearson. She has a disability so she likes to view her textbooks on her iPad and do her programming and photoshop on her desktop. She couldnt do that because Pearson didnt support the iPad. And there's more. All communication with the teacher was done through a Pearson email system, so she had to logon to their system to see if there was any email for her. She got dinged because she didnt use their email system to communicate with the other students. For her final project she was required to upload her website project to their system for the teacher to review, but there was a 256K limit on file uploads so she couldnt upload her images. There we were at 2am Monday morning setting up a website on 1&1 so she could present her site to the class that morning. (And I had to get up at 5:30 to commute to San Francisco, 220 miles.) Fortunately the teacher was willing to accept a url to a commercial website instead of the Pearson garbage. I could rant on and on, but thankfully (for you) I have a meeting in 5 minutes. :-)
incision 14y ago
I've worked with a couple of school systems. Generally speaking, they're a mess and a situation like this comes as no surprise. The kids and actual educators are caught between the competing interests of: 1) Parents groups, potentially led by self-serving parents. Multiple times I've seen a group demand the county a adopt a specific technical solution - which happens to be sold by the company where one parent is an account rep. 2) Individual schools trying to create their own standards. Not uncommon half a dozen schools spend tens of thousands each on some solution rather than pull together on a something centralized at a tiny fraction of the per school cost. Any large-scale solution ends up being a committee-driven decision, likely involving #3. 3) Aggressive vendors and VARs who sell solutions from the top-down via relationships and Gartner studies in place of quality or specific fit. 4) Under-skilled administrators.

14 points by japhyr 14y ago

This sounds absurd. Why should any Internet connection be needed to read a book, do exercising in a book, or anything else with a textbook? Sounds like the school district made some bad technical choices to me. (edit: perhaps I should have read more of the article, which mentions this...)

freehunter 14y ago
The school district made some bad technical choices, and also forgot one of the most important facets of rolling out a new technology: making sure the users can actually use it. If you can't satisfy the technical requirements, investing the money is flushing it down the drain. Even a survey going out with students asking if their house had broadband would be enough. Sounds like what I'd expect from a committee without oversight, though. Far too often in my own job do I encounter a rogue team or business group that has bought licenses for software that the infrastructure is not prepared to support. It looks cool and they had a great marketing pitch, that's all that matters. IT will take care of the back-end, right?
- betterunix 14y ago
  I suspect that this had more to do with marketing on Pearson's part than anything else -- the officials who made these decisions probably had not paid attention to the fine print about broadband connection requirements. They were probably looking only at the cost per-book or per-student (and it never occurred to them that this makes no sense when talking about computers, since books should be something that computers can rapidly copy) and were dazzled by fancy interactive features. At least that is how things seem to work at the university level. Maybe things are different at a local school district.
csense 14y ago
> Why should any Internet connection be needed The most aggressive DRM schemes require a client-server connection. A lot of content publishers (not just textbooks: think newspapers, video games, movies, music) are really scared by what the Internet is doing to their industry, and a large subset of them turn to the most invasive, aggressive possible DRM as the answer. > Sounds like the school district made some bad technical choices to me. As another commenter pointed out, the people running the school district aren't technically literate, probably aren't even aware of the concerns about DRM, and aren't willing or able to listen to those who are. (By "unable" I mean -- think of non-technically minded people whose eyes glaze over as soon as you start discussing how something works. Not even necessarily a highly technical concept like DRM, maybe something as simple and familiar as the physical reason a bicycle will fall over when it's standing still, but not when it's moving.)
- jgamman 14y ago
  rubbish. their job is to allocate funds and if they aren't competent enough to do that themselves then they need to hire expertise. FFS, they are spending millions and can't afford to spend a few grand on hiring their own technically literate representative? seriously, you're representing yourself in court next week? hhmm get back to me on how that works out for you. it's a level 0 mistake. i could cut you some slack that a lot of people don't kknow how to select a competent representative but that's a good discussion to have and certainly one that you should spend time and effort on _before_ writing the big cheques...

russell 14y ago

The Pearson executives should be publicly whipped for producing such a system. My girlfriend took a graphics design course at the local JC and the whole system was managed by Pearson. She has a disability so she likes to view her textbooks on her iPad and do her programming and photoshop on her desktop. She couldnt do that because Pearson didnt support the iPad. And there's more. All communication with the teacher was done through a Pearson email system, so she had to logon to their system to see if there was any email for her. She got dinged because she didnt use their email system to communicate with the other students. For her final project she was required to upload her website project to their system for the teacher to review, but there was a 256K limit on file uploads so she couldnt upload her images. There we were at 2am Monday morning setting up a website on 1&1 so she could present her site to the class that morning. (And I had to get up at 5:30 to commute to San Francisco, 220 miles.) Fortunately the teacher was willing to accept a url to a commercial website instead of the Pearson garbage. I could rant on and on, but thankfully (for you) I have a meeting in 5 minutes. :-)

incision 14y ago

I've worked with a couple of school systems. Generally speaking, they're a mess and a situation like this comes as no surprise. The kids and actual educators are caught between the competing interests of: 1) Parents groups, potentially led by self-serving parents. Multiple times I've seen a group demand the county a adopt a specific technical solution - which happens to be sold by the company where one parent is an account rep. 2) Individual schools trying to create their own standards. Not uncommon half a dozen schools spend tens of thousands each on some solution rather than pull together on a something centralized at a tiny fraction of the per school cost. Any large-scale solution ends up being a committee-driven decision, likely involving #3. 3) Aggressive vendors and VARs who sell solutions from the top-down via relationships and Gartner studies in place of quality or specific fit. 4) Under-skilled administrators.