Education Week - Navigating the Ed-Tech Marketplace - S15

City-based Amplify staged a high-profile launch of
its new all-digital English/language arts curriculum
for middle grades. The product makes extensive use
of multimedia and learning games and is powered
by an adaptive-software engine that tailors content
for each student.
And New York City- and London-based Pearson
has been touting its Common Core System of
Courses, another digital-first product intended to
meet states' and districts' appetite for new content
in new formats.
But while the big players are "retrenching," Mr.
Richards of Consulting Services for Education said,
they face big challenges.
"The shift to digital really goes against a lot of the
sales history and relationships they've had," he said.
"It's not just developing new content, it's figuring
out how to sell the content."
Content Chunks in Demand
Major publishers are also facing growing competition
from startups and providers of free open education
resources, or oer, many of which are tapping
into educators' desire for more flexible, modular instructional
materials, said Mr. Fletcher of the state
technology-directors association.
"More and more of the people I talk to are expressing
clearly the desire for more of an 'iTunes
approach' to content," he said. For districts, that
means looking to access smaller chunks of content
from a greater diversity of sources-or even focusing
on producing their own content.
Mr. Fletcher pointed to the example of Arizona's
12,000-student Vail district, which has its own
Beyond Textbooks program through which digital
curricular and support materials and other digital
instructional materials are developed in-house and
made available online for free to all faculty members-and,
now, to more than 9,000 teachers in 88
Arizona districts and charters, according to the Vail
district website.
Other states-including Florida, Indiana, and
Texas-have also granted schools more flexibility in
spending money traditionally allotted for textbooks
on technology instead.
Mr. Fletcher said all that new energy is prompting
some forward-thinking district officials to reconsider
long-established purchasing practices-a trend that
will likely be amplified by the ongoing influx of digital
devices into classrooms and the continued need
to find common-core-aligned instructional materials.
"Opportunities are beginning to open up," he said,
"and it's an exciting time in the market because of
that." n
NAVIGATING THE ED-TECH MARKETPLACE
> www.edweek.org/go/edtechmarket
EDUCATION WEEK * June 11, 2014
| S15
ENGLISH/LANGUAGE ARTS
RULES CONTENT MARKET
Digital content providers represent the largest
segment of the ed-tech market, with English/
language arts being the biggest revenue
producer within that segment, according
to extrapolated data from the Software &
Information Industry Association.
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Education Week - Navigating the Ed-Tech Marketplace

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