Ethan Beardsley

I spent yesterday at the BETT Show (formerly known as the British Educational Training & Technology Show) in London. It was my first trip to BETT and a great opportunity to see what’s happening in one of the world’s leading market for educational technology.

Despite upcoming cuts in ICT spending as part of the UK’s severe austerity measures, the liquidation of BECTA and the shutdown of the pioneering Curriculum Online initiative which provided UK schools and teachers with more than 160€ million in e-learning credits, the market clearly remains quite vibrant thanks to the decentralized approach that’s been taken for allocating ICT ressources. Teachers and school-level IT coordinators were in the aisles, engaging with software publishers, looking at demos and signing purchase orders.

Walking down the aisle at BETT, I was struck by the diversity of the ecosystem. Sure, the big boys like Pearson and Scholastic were there but there were also lots of medium sized companies like Crick Software, Sherston, Espresso, Education City that have been around for a long time and are well implanted within British schools.  There were also startups like Manga High in the maths learning area or Language Nut in foreign language learning that are very ambitious in the scope and quality of their production.

One of the key drivers in successful introduction of ICT in British schools is that spending decisions are delegated to the schools or even to the teachers by the e-learning credit system. This model appears quite unique in relationship to other markets. In the US, ressources allocation decisions are primarily made at the school board level. In continental Europe, local politicians tend to be the main budget holders leading to spotty, uneven levels of investments.

If we want to accelerate the pace of ICT adoption while making sure that the technology is relevant, empowering teachers and local schools looks like a smart move. It would give a real boost to companies trying to create markets for innovative e-learning content and software.

Concluding a masterfully orchestrated teasing campaign, the Free Mobile launch took place in France yesterday. The kickoff was a showcase event led by Xavier Niel, the founder/CEO of Iliad, the broadband operator which is the parent company of Free Mobile.

It’s safe to say that Free didn’t disappoint.  The new plan/offer is a radical, simple, affordable alternative to the pricey, complex plans of its competitors. In fact, it’s the sort of plan that many consumers in other markets could only dream of :

• No commitment : No contract  – you can leave whenever you want
• Simple pricing : A 19,99€ all you can eat plan reduced to 15,99€ for Free DSL subscribers + a simple 1 hour + 60 SMS  plan for 2€ per month (0€ for Free broadband subscribers!)
• No surprises : No extra charges to block your kids prepaid plans + low additional charges for anything that might be outside the plan (international roaming for example)
• No hardware bundle : You buy your own hardware with no simlock. Free provides interest-free financing for you to buy your hardware if you need it over 12, 24 or 36 months.

The  new offer creates a radical challenge for the existing oligopoly between Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom. During his presentation, Niel showed how Free’s pricing (including phone purchase costs) reduced mobile phone costs for French consumers by an amazing 50%.

From my perspective, Free’s new offer and its track record of creating huge value for French consumers shows that :

• Regulators can’t really enforce true competition. The current trio of operators was condemned to a 534€ million  fine in 2005 for collusion yet it’s pretty clear that the market has continued to generate massive excess profits/ rents.
• Radical innovators understand the virtue of simplicity. The product/pricing plans of the current trio are similar to the product lineups of struggling consumer electronic or computer manufacturers companies like Blackberry, Dell or Sony. By contrast, Free’s offer  is similar to that of Apple : two products with simple, easy to understand plans.
• Creating a consumer-friendly company is hugely profitable. Free has created massive buzz for its launch without any marketing spend. Its operating margin was in excess of 25% in 2010 and its stock hit an all-time high this week.
• Entrepreneurs can deliver huge opportunities for growth. Free’s innovative broadband plan launch over ten years ago brought to France some of the lowest cost/highest quality broadband service in the world with huge spillover effects across the entire French economy.

France definitely needs more entrepreneurs like Xavier Niel if it wants to start growing again.

Related articles

• The Man Who Set France Free (blogs.wsj.com)
• How France’s Free will reinvent mobile (gigaom.com)

The mobile offering for Free, a French ISP,  is set to launch before Christmas. Xavier Niel, its swashbuckling CEO, says he’s targeting a 25% market share within 10 years and 50% cost reduction for consumers.

Judging from Free’s track record and flair for coming up with simple, attractive and inexpensive products, this is great news for French consumers who probably have some of the most complex and expensive cellphone plans in Europe. Free has already actively contributed to turning France into one of the world’s highest performance, low cost broadband markets. Let’s hope that Free Mobile does the same thing for cell phones!

As France struggles to reduce its debt load and improve its anemic growth perspective, it needs more innovative companies like Free to disrupt the usual way of doing things. There are still too many incumbents operating in heavily regulated industries where political connections and state-driven “industrial strategy” rarely operate to the benefit of the consumer.

Mardi dernier, je suis allé au Colloque National sur L’innovation dans les Services organisé au Ministère des Finances. La journée était bien organisée avec de nombreux témoignages intéressants d’entrepreneurs et de spécialistes du secteur.

Au cours de la journée, j’ai plus particulièrement retenu les points suivants :

La position forte qu’occupe des acteurs français au niveau mondial : Avec des groupes tels qu’Accor, Sodexo, JC Decaux, Suez ou Axa, la France dispose de nombreux leaders mondiaux.  Le développement des groupes de service français est tout aussi important que les exportations d’Airbus.

La volonté relativement récente de créer une politique publique cohérente et globale par rapport aux services : La création de la DGCIS au sein de Bercy en 2009 reflète la volonté des pouvoirs publics de développer une stratégie d’ensemble pour un secteur des services qui représente 75% des emplois et 70% du PIB. En fin de colloque, Frédéric Lefevre, le Secrétaire d’Etat chargé des Services, a ainsi présenté à la fin du colloque son plan d’action en faveur de l’innovation dans les services.

L’existence d’un important mouvement de consolidation et d’une concurrence accrue : Sous l’impulsion de la libéralisation des services au niveau européen et mondial et du développement du numérique, le poids des 1000 premières entreprises de service est passé de 8% à 36% du CA global du secteur entre 2005 et 2010. La mondialisation et la concurrence internationale renforcée créent donc des opportunités et des risques pour un secteur qui était jusqu’à maintenant relativement protégé.

La contribution potentielle des entreprises privées de service dans la réforme de l’Etat : Un témoignage de la société Babilou, un spécialiste des crèches privées, a démontré comment il était possible de délivrer un service de qualité supérieure pour un coût moindre à une crèche municipale grâce à des systèmes de gestion plus performant et à des économies d’échelle. Jean-Charles Decaux a également présenté l’historique du Vélib en montrant comment cette innovation rapportait de l’argent à la Ville de Paris à coût zéro pour le contribuable tout en contribuant à améliorer significativement le cadre de vie des parisiens. Dans un contexte de réforme de l’Etat, les sociétés de service ont donc certainement un rôle à jouer.

Malgré la qualité des interventions, je regrette pourtant que certains sujets n’ont pas été abordé :

Le traitement du rôle de l’innovation technologique dans le domaine des services : Le leitmotiv du colloque était que l’activité de recherche-développement réellement technologique est peu développée dans les activités de services. Or il existe de nombreux exemples d’innovation technologique forte, notamment dans le secteur du software as a service. Il aurait été intéressant de développer davantage cette problématique en partant de témoignages d’entrepreneurs. Peut être cela n’a pas été évoqué pour des problèmes de découpage dans la mesure où l’Economie Numérique dépend d’Eric Besson mais cet oubli est regrettable car c’est un des principaux moteurs de croissance du secteur.

Les questions de fiscalité et de coût du travail : Tout entrepreneur français dans le secteur des services fait face à un coût du travail très élevé, cette imposition s’étant encore alourdie avec la réforme de la taxe professionelle qui fait peser davantage de prélèvements sur la valeur ajoutée. Dans un contexte de croissance de l’exportation immatérielle de services rendu possible par le numérique, le coût du travail risque de freiner la capacité des entreprises à se développer tant en France qu’à l’international et il faut éviter d’alourdir les charges sur les services car le secteur n’est plus protégé.

Les difficultés financières et bancaires qui freinent le développement de nombreuses TPE et ETI : Un des obstacles majeurs au développement d’entreprises de taille moyenne est lié aux problèmes d’accès aux financements. Cette thématique a été exclusivement traité sous l’angle du financement aidé et des subventions par OSEO alors qu’il aurait été intéressant de parler plus spécifiquement de l’accès aux financements privés (capitaux propres et financement bancaires) qui reste l’un  des principaux obstacles au développement des entreprises du secteur.

L’oubli des secteurs de l’éducation et de la santé : Il n’y a eu aucun témoignage fort autour des innovations réelles ou potentielles dans le secteur dit “non marchand” de la santé et de l’éducation qui représente plus de 14% de la valeur ajoutée du secteur. Ce sont pourtant des enjeux clés pour les années à venir qui doivent constituer de vraies opportunités d’innovation tant pour les acteurs publics que privés.

Une fois n’est pas coutume… je ne résiste pas à la tentation de faire un petit post en français pour parler d’un bouquin très intéressant qui mériterait une large diffusion en France. Il s’agit de “The Lean Startup” écrit par Eric Ries, un jeune ingénieur et entrepreneur américain.

Depuis un peu plus de trois ans, Eric est un des principaux évangélistes de mouvement Lean Startup. Ce mouvement, devenu très influent en Amérique du Nord, n’a malheureusement encore qu’un très faible écho en France alors que ses principes sont véritablement universels.

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty  - Eric Ries

Cette définition est le véritable point de départ du livre car elle met en évidence les caractéristiques essentielles de l’activité entrepreneuriale : créer une organisation capable de fournir un produit ou un service pour un marché incertain.

L’objectif du livre d’Eric est de développer une méthodologie permettant de réduire fortement les risques associés à cette activité entrepreneuriale. Les principes à retenir peuvent s’organiser autour de cinq thèmes principaux :

1. Se lancer en définissant un “minimum viable product” le plus restreint possible

Eric reprend une belle expression de Peter Drucker :“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Partant de l’idée à l’origine du projet d’entreprise, tout entrepreneur doit donc définir un minimum viable product (MVP) le plus restreint possible afin de pouvoir tester le plus rapidement possible la pertinence de son idée.

Prenant un exemple dérivé de son expérience de CTO chez IMVU, Eric explique comment il a travaillé pendant six mois d’arrache-pied avec son équipe pour produire une première version du produit avant de s’apercevoir qu’il n’avait aucun client potentiel. Il se rend ainsi compte qu’il aurait pu être plus malin et efficace de tester le concept grâce à une simple landing page fictive permettant de jauger un premier intérêt du consommateur cible !

2. Valider son hypothèse client le plus tôt possible et pivoter si nécessaire

Pour Eric, il est essentiel de tester son MVP le plus rapidement possible en utilisant des faits objectifs et de comportements clients et non de simples opinions ou déclarations d’intérêt.

Ainsi des entretiens réalisés avec des clients de IMVU ont permis de comprendre les erreurs du concept initial et réaligner le produit sur les besoins réels des clients, “pivotant” ainsi le modèle très tôt lorsqu’il y avait encore du temps et de l’argent disponible…

3. Utiliser des instruments de mesure objectifs pour mesurer ses progrès

The Lean Startup insiste fortement sur la nécessité d’éviter des vanity metrics tels que les visiteurs uniques ou le CA réalisé pour juger du succès d’une startup qui ne permettent pas de guider les actions du management.

Selon Eric, il est possible de mesurer la viabilité d’une startup à partir d’échantillons très petits et d’un petit nombre d’indicateurs bien choisis. Il raconte notamment qu’une campagne Adwords de 5$ par jour était suffisante pour permettre le réglage initial de IMVU en terme de conversion, de churn et de monétisation. Il explique aussi l’importance de réaliser cette analyse en “cohorte” afin de mettre clairement en évidence les progrès réalisés mois par mois.

Une partie particulièrement intéressante du livre rend compte des metrics devant être choisi par une startup en fonction de son “moteur de croissance” fondé sur la fidélisation (sticky engine of growth), la viralité (viral engine of growth) ou l’acquisition payante (paid engine of growth).

4. Poursuivre une stratégie d’itération produit rapide et rigoureuse

Un des thèmes centraux du livre porte sur la nécessité d’une stratégie de continuous deployment consistant à faire des dizaines de mises à jour quotidiennes  (principe des small batches) afin d’éviter de passer trop de temps à développer des fonctionnalités qui ne correspondent pas à un besoin réel.

Pour Eric, cette stratégie d’itération rapide et ciblée permet de tester de façon fine l’impact des changements réalisés grâce à l’utilisation de split testing. En déployant la nouvelle version sur une partie de la population et en la comparant à un groupe de contrôle, il est facile de mesurer l’impact du changement de façon précise et de décider soit de la déployer à l’ensemble des utilisateurs soit de l’éliminer afin d’éviter d’empiler des fonctionnalités inutiles dont l’utilisateur n’a aucun besoin.

5.  Travailler de façon transversale et apprendre de ses erreurs

Les aspects organisationnels nécessaires à une lean startup sont également fortement mis en avant par Eric Ries qui considère essentiel que les équipes produit et développement travaillent ensemble de façon très étroite et que les metrics utilisés soient simples, partagés et compris par toute l’organisation. Dans la vision d’Eric, il est essentiel que les développeurs puissent aussi être en contact avec le client final et qu’il participe aux décisions concernant les évolutions du produit.

Dans une philosophie directement inspirée des principes du lean manufacturing pratiquées dans des entreprises comme Toyota, Eric développe aussi une stratégie fondée sur une analyse exhaustive (five whys) permettant d’analyser les causes fondamentales de tout incident et d’en éliminer la cause profonde. Il argumente de façon très convaincante qu’un incident technique cache le plus souvent un problème d’organisation ou de formation et insiste que l’organisation doit accepter de faire des erreurs afin de nourrir son processus d’amélioration continu : “... mistakes and failures must be viewed as an opportunity to get better.”

En résumé, un excellent livre, clair et bien écrit, qui devrait servir de guide pour tout entrepreneur cherchant à diminuer ses risques et à augmenter ses chances de succès ! Il sera sans doute plus pertinent pour des entreprises du secteur digital mais il contient aussi des exemples d’expériences d’autres secteurs et montre comment les principes du lean startup peuvent être utilisés pour générer de l’innovation au sein d’entreprises plus importantes.

A quand une traduction en français ?

Another piece in Matt Richtel’s series on “Grading the Digital Education” in yesterday’s NYT stirred my blood this morning.

In this article, Richtel focuses on a Waldorf School in Los Altos Hills which schools the children of Silicon Valley’s elite yet bans the use of computers for grades K-8,  considering that “…computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans”.

It’s certainly a great angle. I mean what are all those hypocrites at Apple and HP doing? How can they be peddling PCs and iPads in education while at the same time sending their kids to a tech free environment?

Well, think again…

Kindergarten at this school costs a cool 17.750$ per year. It has 9.5 students per teacher  vs. a California average of 21.5 students per teacher. With personal, individualized attention from your teacher and highly educated and supportive parents, I bet that you can get great outcomes with or without educational technology!

Richtel seems to suggest that eliminating computers is driving strong outcomes but this is overly simplistic. Sure too much time in front of computers isn’t good for kids but so is too much TV or junk food. The cause of this school’s success is not the lack of computers but the quality, creativity and commitment of its teachers.

I’m also disturbed that this article continues to a theme of strong criticism of educational technology without providing sufficient balance.

Richter previously wrote about a disastrous implementation of educational technology in a Texas school system in which  inexperienced teachers did a poor job of implementing weak educational technology.

In this piece, Richtel writes about great teachers getting great results without using educational technology.

I hope that his next article will provide a balanced assessment of great teachers using blended educational technology. How about a look at a day in the life of schools that have implement approaches similar to School of One ?

Related articles

• Grading the Digital School: At Waldorf School in Silicon Valley, Technology Can Wait (nytimes.com)

I had a conversation today with a friend who’s setting up a financial model/business plan for a new venture. Based on my experience, I have some pragmatic recommendations which I thought might be useful to share :

1. Don’t use a “generic” spreadsheet template when setting up your financial model: all businesses are different. You can work off an existing model to get started but you’ll need to adapt it to your  business.
2. Keep your initial model as simple as possible. Include input tabs for your scenario planning and your core assumptions. These input tabs should link to output sheets which will contain your P&L, forecast balance sheet, cash flow etc. Don’t mix inputs and outputs since this will make it difficult to update your model. Make sure you build checks which allow you to make sure your financial information is coherent and consistent (e.g. does your cash-flow statement tie into your balance sheet?).
3. Set up your output sheets so you can cut and paste them directly into your business plan presentation and avoid keying in the numbers. Make sure that these output sheets are easy to read and understand. They shouldn’t be overloaded with information and should be in a large font.
4. Make sure you can run sensitivity scenarios easily in your business model. As you think about your business model, it’s essential that you be able to ask “what if?” questions very easily. What happens if my conversion rate increases by 10%? What happens if my churn goes down by 5%? Being able to play around with your numbers easily makes it much easier to think about your business strategically.
5. Try and keep your metrics simple and easy to manipulate. For example, if you’re building a freemium business model, I’m not sure it makes sense to build a detailed cohort model at first. You should probably wait until you’ve got actuals data that you can start feeding into the model.
6. It’s critical that your model include a robust cash-flow model. When you break down your expense categories for your P&L, think about when the expense will be paid. This will make it a lot easier to forecast your cash position.  You’ll know payroll is paid immediately, contractors are paid at 30 days etc. and you’ll be able to “stagger” your P&L items to set up a forecast balance sheet and cash forecast which will be both accurate and easy to understand.
7. It’s a good idea to set up your model on a monthly basis from the beginning. This may seem like a real pain at first but it will make it easier to update and use for your business plan for forecasting and budgeting. You will be able to update your business plan continually on basis of actual performance and set up comparisons with prior versions.
8. You absolutely need to make sure you understand your revenue recognition model and what drives your working capital requirements. These sound like horrible, abstract issues for CPA nerds but they’re vitally important. For example, if you’re running a B2C consumer business and selling subscriptions over long periods of time, your revenue model should prorate your subscriptions over time but your cash-flow model will need to recognize the cash upfront.
9. Don’t obsess over modeling immaterial non-cash expenses. If you don’t have a lot of capital items, just expense your spend and don’t worry about developing a sophisticated model to manage capitalized items and depreciation. If you do have large capital spending, you will need to tackle this issue however since it’s likely to have an impact on your tax liabilities.
10. Remember to always check your numbers for sanity. It’s way too easy to get caught up in the intricate details of your model and to forget to see if it makes sense.  Whenever possible, try to pull in some comparisons to other businesses in terms of growth or margins. When reviewing your scenario planning, you should probably make sure your downside scenario is “brutal” and avoid an overly optimistic “base case” since your ramp will ALWAYS be slower and more difficult than expected.

Tech companies involved in content mostly focus on organizing and sharing user-generated or recycling content produced by traditional news, media & entertainment companies. Neither Google nor Apple want to get caught up in the messy, low-tech world of news and content production. They’d much rather aggregate and distribute other companies’ content and make their money that way!

And you can certainly understand where they’re coming from. Traditional media & entertainment businesses like film, TV production, music, videogame or book publishing are often hit-driven businesses where you make large upfront bets based on creative talent and engage production teams over long periods of time before releasing the product in a deluge of paid advertising… Hardly the “lean and mean” startup model which is the rage in Silicon Valley.

For this reason, there are far fewer investments in the digital content space than in the internet sector at large. Try and go see a VC when you’re pre-revenue and pitch them a story and some graphics rather than a strong albeit me-too business concept and you’ll immediately see what I mean…

This doesn’t mean however there aren’t opportunities out there for content-focused entrepreneurs. Time and dollars spent by consumers on the Internet increases every year yet there is still little specific content produced for this channel.  Areas like education are still starved for appropriate content that is not being delivered in sufficient quantity or quality by traditional publishers.

So how should you proceed if you’re working on a “content startup”? How can you develop a credible strategy to raise capital for your project? If I were pitching my idea, I’d think very hard about my answers to the following questions :

1. Do I have strong product development discipline? If you’re thinking about creating an online videogame, you need to be reading a book like The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell which lays out some great ideas for “de-risking” game designing. Artists can get carried away with their creative vision. You need to make sure you have a product lead who will make sure that the overall vision is both balanced and compelling.
2. Do I know what my minimum viable product is? Clearly it’s going to take much longer for a content-focused startup to get to a MVP but there has to be a point where you can release a product that’s “good enough” and can be used as a basis for iteration. Khan Academy is a great example which started out as a couple of low-priced videos on You Tube before growing into something much bigger.
3. Do I have a product portfolio strategy to mitigate the risk? By developing several smaller properties, you reduce the risk of betting on a single property. This is what Rovio did with Angry Birds. Before creating a hit, they’d produced a whole bunch of low-cost games. An investor will prefer to know that you’re not betting the farm on a single product.
4. Am I leaving enough money for product iteration? Like any other digital startup, you’re building a prototype and you should make sure that you save sufficient firepower for post-launch iteration. Don’t bet that your day one product will be perfect. Keep your operational costs as low as possible until you’re really ready to scale and leave plenty of money to improve your content.
5. Is my organization sufficiently integrated? Start ups are incredibly hard work and your creative team is central to your success. The studio/publisher model may be attractive for larger organizations but your chances of success will probably be much greater if your creative teams are founders and ready to put in the late hours and weekends that will be required to achieve success. Make sure your team’s incentives are perfectly aligned.
6. Does my team have strong technical expertise? In all digital startups, having a technical co-founder is a great idea. The engineer mindset helps keep things running smoothly and will help make sure you keep strong control of your development and infrastructure.
7. Do I have a technological advantage over my competitors ? Perhaps you’ve created a game engine which gives you an advantage over your competitors and lets you create high quality content more cheaply than your competitors. This is something that could get investors excited if you can persuasively argue that you’ve got something that’s new and powerful.
8. Am I choosing the right technological solution? I’ve been following from afar a gaming company which spent millions developing a 3D plugin which will be obsolete when Flash releases its new 3D functionality. It’s vital to make sure your technological choices are cost-effective and to use generic/open-source solutions whenever possible.
9. Is my market big enough? It’s important to show that your product has broad, international potential and is well positioned against its direct competitors. Be credible in your assessment of your competitors and show how you can think you can carve out a niche and create strong word-of-mouth marketing.
10. How credible is my go-to-market strategy? Do I have a network effect that gives my content competitive advantage? Zynga’s Mark Pincus clearly didn’t pitch Farmville to VCs when he was looking for funding. Instead he probably talked about using Facebook as a plattform for social gaming.

These are the main ideas that come to mind at this point. Let me know if you see any other things that you think might be critical to the success of a content startup…

There was a great article by Marc Andreessen in the WSJ this summer in which he talked about how “… software is eating the world”, how it is radically transforming every industry from travel to music, from banking to education, from telecommunications to entertainment…

The disruption of the software revolution is indeed having a drastic impact on entire industries and their workforces. A huge number of office and clerical workers are being displaced by this process of “creative destruction”, their jobs will no longer be needed and their skills no longer required.

The irony of course is that there’s a huge need for qualified workers which the software industry is finding hard to fulfill. As Andreessen points out,

“…many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high…”

As our economies struggle through our latest financial crisis, it’s important to think about this tragic imbalance in skills and education which has an immense potential impact on long-term growth and competitiveness.

What can be done? I’d  argue that two relatively simple initiatives need to be urgently added to the public policy agenda.

First, we need to do invest in retraining obsolete workforces. As Philip Greenspun recently argued, it makes no sense to let the unemployed stay at home being paid “… to play XBox for 151 weeks.” Periods of unemployment should be used actively to acquire the critical skills required by the digital economy. Sure not everyone can be turned into a Java specialist but people will certainly be more employable than if they had stayed at home watching TV or sending out resumes which showcase outdated skills.

Second, we should prepare for the future by making sure kids get early exposure to software programming. As Eric Schmidt pointed out recently, it’s inacceptable that computer science is currently seldom taught at schools.  By integrating computer science into a mandatory core curriculum, by exposing kids to computer programming at a very early age using tools like MIT’s Scratch,  a new generation of workers would stand a much better chance of competing not only as software engineers but also as product managers, artists, patent lawyers and digital marketers…

Wow, I got a strange impression when I read the article in the New York Times about the failure of digital initiatives in an Arizona school district.

This school district has spent $33M on laptops, interactive whiteboards and educational software but has not yet seen an improvement in its test scores. The district intends to keep on spending 3.5% of their budget on technology.

I can’t say that I’m surprised at the disappointing outcome. The activities of these kids seemed scattered and you did not get the impression of a coherent strategy to use technology to improve core skills.

What’s the point of teaching kids to use Facebook by having them create Facebook pages about Shakespeare characters ? These kids, like mine, are already spending way too much time on Facebook.

The article mentions “… a review by the Education Department in 2009 of research on online courses — which more than one million K-12 students are taking — found that few rigorous studies had been done and that policy makers “lack scientific evidence” of their effectiveness…”.

This is probably the core issue. All this investment in hardware doesn’t make sense unless you can provide kids with great software and a structured approach that’s designed to help them master their core skills.

Instead of the improvised approach at work in this school district, imagine a “workflow” system in which :

1. Kids use a curriculum focused software which allows them to test their mastery of core concepts at their own pace in school or at home
2. Teachers access online reports where they can instantly access the proficiency level of their students
3. Teachers design custom online or offline programs for kids that have mastered the core concept so they can stay stimulated
4. Teachers spend additional time mentoring kids that are having a hard time mastering certain concepts
5. Kids that are struggling retest their skills using the software… Once the skill is mastered, they move onto the next subject matter…

This would be a real process for making sure that no child gets left behind.

Before spending millions on hardware, we need to make sure that we’ve got the right software. If this is done well, the need for standardized testing might even disappear since the software would be mapped against the local or national curriculum.

Sites like Khan Academy are working hard on creating the right basis for a digital revolution. In addition to his fantastic videos, Sal Khan and his team are gradually developing practice exercices which do a great job of testing a student’s mastery of the concept and letting teachers see at a glance whether their student masters the concept.

Massive efforts are still required to create structured and age-appropriate e-learning content for kids.  For example, sites like Khan Academy or Dreambox have focused mostly on math and science skills but we’ll also need to come up with innovative solutions for language arts, for learning foreign languages etc.

If schools had the right software, the payoff could be immense. Teachers would spend more time on one-to-one mentoring, bright kids could move forward as fast as they want, kids having a hard time could spend more time getting individual instruction…  Massive investment in hardware and systems is hardly likely to be a game-changer until we’ve got the right software. That’s where we need to focus…

Related articles

• Teaching the Khan way (theglobeandmail.com)