Pearson’s bold proposal

Pearson, the academic publishing company, has announced that it intends a very different future direction. Pearson is making a bold bet that educational resources for higher education will go digital and will eventually offer learning resources involving elements not presently part of even digital books.

Pearson describes what it is embarking on as a “digital first” approach. At the most basic level, this approach will allow updates and modifications to be made in an on-going fashion rather than once in every textbook revision cycle (3 or more years). Pearson projects that a digital approach will allow textbooks to be sold for $40. There are substantial cost savings in materials, printing, and shipping for a digital product, but perhaps the most significant advantage to a company comes from the elimination of the resale market. My experience with the resale issue translates as students sell a book to be used in a subsequent semester back to the bookstore at 50% of the sticker price and the bookstore resells the book for 75%. See my somewhat cynical description of this as the “beer money ploy” (students don’t tell parents they sold their books and use the income for spending money). A new industry has been created to serve a similar resale function. Off-campus services buy books, pay for transportation, and then resell books online. I guess competition is good and essential when a prof decides not to use a book the next time a course is offered. Again, I know from experience that profs are “encouraged” to stick with their books to keep the money local and prices to students low.

As a textbook author, I have a little different perspective (not always understood by the consumer). Authors and textbook companies make their money on the initial sale and drastically less once used books are available to compete with the sale of a new book. I assume this reality is figured into the initial cost and some cynically believe a motive for a company to push the newest books when making recommendations to faculty members. A different way to look at the same situation not explained when people criticize the initial cost of a textbook is that this amount of money is all the publisher and author(s) will ever get even though that book is likely resold two times. The actual initial cost to the student ends up being half of what the price at purchase time says. It is the book stores that make the easy money. All they have to do is put the used book back on the shelf.

Anyway, my understanding of the initial Pearson approach is that it is very similar to how we proposed modifying our Cengage textbook 5 or so years ago. I was becoming frustrated with the three-year revision cycle not allowing involvement for 2.5 years or so and then after getting approval for another edition having to sprint to finish in three or four months. This is not an ideal approach for conducting thorough research to make changes to a wide variety of topics. After creating 5 editions, I argued that the quality of our work could be trusted so it made more sense for us and for the learner to write continuously. New updates could be placed online immediately and then worked into the next edition if a normal cycle was maintained. In addition, we proposed scaling down the “book” to a core of information least likely to change. Note that technology moves rapidly and it made sense to us not to describe the classroom application of a program or service online rather than in the book. In one case we experience, such a description in our book was actually discontinued by the time a new edition was put in the hands of students. We wanted this shorter Primer to be sold for $29 dollars supported by free access to assorted online content organized to augment and keep current the chapters in the Primer. We went back forth for 5 years long after our existing edition should still have been on the market. We eventually settled on getting our copyright back and did what we proposed generating a $9 Kindle book competing against our own dated Cengage edition still being sold for $140. I guess that with innovations the timing of an idea is everything. Pearson could have piloted what they now propose five years ago had we been working with them.

If anything about our efforts to change the textbook model seems interesting, use the book tag associated with this post to locate multiple posts now buried early in this blog.

In one of those weird coincidences we all sometimes experience, we were having dinner with a former grad student the night before the Pearson announcements began popping up. He happens to be a senior design researcher with Pearson (the only person I think I know working for Pearson) and he was describing their new initiative.

He indicated that even more innovations may be coming. You only get a hint of this from the EdSurge description. He works with research tools tracking learner engagement with content (e.g., eye tracking, changes in posture and galvanic skin response) and is trying to understand what seems to be responsible for the greater difficulty learners have remaining active when reading content from a screen. He proposed that content be prepared according to instructional design principles more likely to be applied in computer based instruction than textbooks. In this approach, content is organized into more focused segments rather than long rambling chapters. Content is supported with clear goals and embedded and perhaps individualized learning supports (a simple example would be inserted questions and perhaps learner selected expanded explanations) are added. Of course these innovations would be far easier to offer with an online delivery system.

Taking the perspective of an author, I wondered what the role of an existing author would be? I taught in an instructional design program so I was familiar with the way designers work with content experts in creating instructional content for what I tend to classify as training – focused skill or knowledge instruction typically outside of formal educational institutions. Would the authors who now write textbooks work with Pearson as content experts under the new model? Too early to tell, First, a more traditional approach providing digital books.

As I think about this possible trend for higher education learning resources, I also wonder about what this would mean for instructors. One way I think about instructional design is that it moves some functions provided by a face to face educator to the learning content. A teacher can establish goals or goals can be embedded in content. An instructor can ask questions to guide cognition or questions can be embedded in content. An instructor can respond to individual students with additional explanations and personalization examples or content can be expanded to offer learners the opportunity to consider extended explanations or select from multiple examples. Moving teacher functions to content is not ideal, but the traditional approach of a teachers trying to meet the differing needs of a large group of students is also not ideal.

In the K12 environment, self-paced learning allowing learners to work through designed content at different rates depending on differences in understanding is often criticized using the image of a room full of students working on computers while the teacher sits at a desk making certain discipline is maintained. This should be a stereotype, but it probably does happen. The ideal model would be for the teacher to move about helping individual students in a way not possible with group-based instruction. Still, given the reaction by some in K12, how do you think profs would react to more highly designed material?