Education Week - May 22, 2013 - Special Report - S10

S10

EDUCATION WEEK: DIGITAL CURRICULA > www.edweek.org/go/digital-report

MAY 22, 2013

Providers Work
To Keep Up With
Growing Market

John W. Adkisson for Education Week

CONTINUED FROM PAGE S9

Angel Camacho gets help from teacher Jody Cohen while working on math problems using LearnZillion in his 6th grade class
at Mooresville Intermediate School. North Carolina’s Mooresville district has earned a national reputation for its computing program
and digital-content development.

Educators Seek Quality Video Content
CONTINUED FROM PAGE S8

Internet connections and high-resolution mobile cameras is increasingly common. And whether those
providers are companies that have
origins in educational technology
services, traditional print-textbook
publishing, or video production for
audiences outside of K-12 education, they are generally finding
that the most functional video content doesn’t live in a vacuum.
For example, D.J. West, a consulting manager for New York
City-based McGraw-Hill Education, one of the “big three” textbook-publishing companies, said
he has spent a lot of time making
presentations to educators about
free or affordable software programs that help teachers make
their own educational videos—yet
none of that software is made by
McGraw-Hill Education.
The goal is to encourage teachers to then combine the resources
they create with digital McGrawHill products that allow the
teachers to curate those resources
alongside content produced by the
company.
“As a content provider, we really do feel we’re providing a base
level of research content and then
allowing you to customize,” Mr.
West said. “We just see it making
it easier for teachers to include it.”
Some content providers, meanwhile, have found that as more of
their consumers become familiar
with creating their own videos
through apps and mobile devices,

they are more forgiving of lower
production values, as long as the
informational value doesn’t lag.
“We want it to be great, don’t get
me wrong,” said Susan Williams, a
professional-learning designer for
Atomic Learning, a company based
in Little Falls, Minn., that specializes in online video tutorials for
common educational technology
tools. “But we also know if we want
to capture someone’s story and we
have to use a webcam in front of
their computer, then yeah, we’ll do
that.
“If the content is really good,” she
said, “then the production quality
is forgivable.”
It’s partly for that reason that
content providers whose roots lie
in video have been trying to diversify even as video as an educational resource becomes more
popular.
For example, Silver Spring, Md.based Discovery Education, which
began as solely a video-streaming
service, has for a handful of years
been expanding its Discovery
Techbook line, which features etextbooks for science and social
studies. More recent iterations of
the Techbook line have been designed to ensure that users can
tap its video features while also
maintaining a view of interactive text or other multimedia elements.
“There are times when you certainly want to use text, and there
are times when you want students
putting a seed inside of a Dixie
Cup and growing a tomato plant,”

said Scott Kinney, a senior vice
president for the company. “It’s
not necessarily that video is good
for one thing or another, but it’s
how to make sure you utilize the
breadth of resources that are available to you in the most appropriate
way for the situation.”

‘Tip of the Iceberg’
Even the Khan Academy—which
offers about 4,000 free educational
videos on K-12 math and science
topics, humanities subjects, test
preparation, and other subjects—
has in more recent years focused
on understanding how its videos,
which are credited with helping
the flipped-classroom movement
gain steam, are best used alongside
other resources within the context
of a classroom.
The nonprofit organization,
based in Mountain View, Calif., has
written five case studies resulting
from the use of its video content in
K-12 schools, as well as a library
of text resources for teachers and
other educators to give guidance on
how to use that content effectively.
It has also analyzed the habits of
its users to see what factors may
lead to the most consistent progression through Khan Academy
lessons.
“We probaby didn’t realize initially how powerful the peer-learning element of the classroom would
be,” said Shantanu Sinha, the organization’s president and chief operating officer. He added that Khan
Academy users appear to be more

successful when working under a
coach, and especially when doing so
in small groups that may represent
a family structure rather than an
educational study group.
The future possibilities for educational video may lie far beyond
how the medium can more effectively deliver content to students.
The cameras and apps available
on smartphones and tablets are
already making possible the ability for students to conduct video
analysis out in the field, especially
in science subjects such as physics
and biology.
Further, a growing number of
educators are assigning students
to create their own video—either
as a stand-alone element or as part
of a multimedia project—to demonstrate content knowledge.
But with the flipped-education
movement growing, and an increasing emphasis on producing
content that is relevant to a generation of learners that has grown
up not knowing life without mobile
devices, the video-content movement may just be beginning.
At least, that’s the opinion of Ms.
Arfstrom of the Flipped Learning Network, whose Ning socialnetworking page increased its followers by 500 percent, to roughly
12,000, during a 16-month stretch
that ended in April.
“I think right now we’re still
in the awareness stage,” Ms. Arfstrom said. “We’re talking with
the teachers who want to know
about this, we’ve just hit the tip of
the iceberg.” n

ing consumer demands, and in
many cases, using video to do so.
In general, those video resources
are included as part of a suite of
purchasable content services.
For example, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Fuse math apps
for mobile devices offer around
300 video tutorials to accompany digital lessons. Pearson’s
KnowledgeBox online learning
platform for students in grades
K-6 includes video as part of a
range of interactive content, and
the company also offers a service
to produce custom videos for a
range of secondary educational
courses.
Like its two traditional competitors, McGraw-Hill offers digital
curricula, mostly geared to secondary students, that includes
video content as an instructional
tool. The company has also made
efforts to encourage its educator
customers to become video creators while offering the ability
for teachers to link to their own
resources through its digital curricula, said D.J. West, one of the
company’s educational consulting
managers.
“The ability to integrate [provider
and teacher content] has been
around really for the last three to
four years,” Mr. West said. “The
more digital we go, the more we’ve
been able to allow teachers to incorporate materials through Webbased resources.”

CONTENT
COMPANIES
While the “big three” publishers have dominated the printcontent world, the shift to digital
content has opened significant
opportunities for other companies to get involved, including
with video.
Discovery Education of Silver
Spring, Md., may be the most
obvious example. The company
originally grew out of what was
exclusively an educational videostreaming service. More recently,
though, it has appeared most focused on growing its Techbook line,
a digital curriculum built on those
video resources and other specifically developed multimedia con-

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Education Week - May 22, 2013 - Special Report

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