QUESTION 3 What do schools think they need now?


One of the most salient themes here was that most publishers felt schools now had a sufficient saturation in terms of devices (both tablet and otherwise) to justify their investment in digitally published educational materials.


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Tere’s a real desire to get something that works seamlessly across all platforms


Cost was naturally mentioned as a key motivating factor in what schools ultimately want – everyone wants a cheap, efficient product that meets their needs. One of the challenges for the educational publishers we spoke to related to the budget assigned for digital products. These supplementary resources are often seen to be extra resources rather than a core need, and therefore often need to be allocated to IT and management budgets.


Schools are also looking for greater simplicity: there’s a real desire to get something that works seamlessly across all platforms, possibly with cloud-based synchronization for note-taking elements too. Enhancement that “supports the curriculum” and isn’t just included for the sake of it also seems to be a common requirement. A number of schools are struggling with their device upgrades, and publishers, more than ever, are required to step in and offer support with training and development in the classroom. Due to unpredictable broadband, there are also a number of schools requesting access to offline resources for the classroom.


QUESTION 4 What will schools need that they don’t know about yet?


Many spoke of the need to better educate schools about the benefits of ebooks and digitally published content in general, highlighting the lack of general knowledge about what they bring to the classroom as a cause of disruption.


A key example was given by one publisher who spoke of the misunderstanding among many teachers who see digital publications as essentially digital replicas of existing print copies. The publisher illustrated the sort of leverage digital publishing can bring by speaking about it in terms of data. Cloud-based synchronization of testing, reading patterns and so on provides a “hot bed of data” that would allow teachers to better identify problem areas before key tests, to give one example.


One publisher questioned whether resources created for teachers should be so similar to those of their students. There is definitely a need for fresh content, designed and devel- oped specifically for a teacher’s whiteboard or for a teacher using their own tablet in the classroom.


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Tere are systems that help you track and visualize data. Schools need to learn how to use this with data from students.


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