

School District Dumps Online Textbooks Because Students Don't Have Broadband - japhyr
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121215/12010421395/school-district-dumps-2-million-online-textbook-program-after-discovering-some-students-cant-afford-broadband.shtml

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russell
The Pearson executives should be publicly whipped for producing such a system.
My girlfriend took a graphics design course at the local JC and the whole
system was managed by Pearson. She has a disability so she likes to view her
textbooks on her iPad and do her programming and photoshop on her desktop. She
couldnt do that because Pearson didnt support the iPad. And there's more. All
communication with the teacher was done through a Pearson email system, so she
had to logon to their system to see if there was any email for her. She got
dinged because she didnt use their email system to communicate with the other
students. For her final project she was required to upload her website project
to their system for the teacher to review, but there was a 256K limit on file
uploads so she couldnt upload her images. There we were at 2am Monday morning
setting up a website on 1&1 so she could present her site to the class that
morning. (And I had to get up at 5:30 to commute to San Francisco, 220 miles.)

Fortunately the teacher was willing to accept a url to a commercial website
instead of the Pearson garbage.

I could rant on and on, but thankfully (for you) I have a meeting in 5
minutes. :-)

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incision
I've worked with a couple of school systems. Generally speaking, they're a
mess and a situation like this comes as no surprise.

The kids and actual educators are caught between the competing interests of:

1) Parents groups, potentially led by self-serving parents. Multiple times
I've seen a group demand the county a adopt a specific technical solution -
which happens to be sold by the company where one parent is an account rep.

2) Individual schools trying to create their own standards. Not uncommon half
a dozen schools spend tens of thousands each on some solution rather than pull
together on a something centralized at a tiny fraction of the per school cost.
Any large-scale solution ends up being a committee-driven decision, likely
involving #3.

3) Aggressive vendors and VARs who sell solutions from the top-down via
relationships and Gartner studies in place of quality or specific fit.

4) Under-skilled administrators.

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betterunix
This sounds absurd. Why should _any_ Internet connection be needed to read a
book, do exercising in a book, or anything else with a textbook?

Sounds like the school district made some bad technical choices to me.

(edit: perhaps I should have read more of the article, which mentions this...)

~~~
freehunter
The school district made some bad technical choices, and also forgot one of
the most important facets of rolling out a new technology: making sure the
users can actually use it. If you can't satisfy the technical requirements,
investing the money is flushing it down the drain. Even a survey going out
with students asking if their house had broadband would be enough.

Sounds like what I'd expect from a committee without oversight, though. Far
too often in my own job do I encounter a rogue team or business group that has
bought licenses for software that the infrastructure is not prepared to
support. It looks cool and they had a great marketing pitch, that's all that
matters. IT will take care of the back-end, right?

~~~
betterunix
I suspect that this had more to do with marketing on Pearson's part than
anything else -- the officials who made these decisions probably had not paid
attention to the fine print about broadband connection requirements. They were
probably looking only at the cost per-book or per-student (and it never
occurred to them that this makes no sense when talking about computers, since
books should be something that computers can rapidly copy) and were dazzled by
fancy interactive features.

At least that is how things seem to work at the university level. Maybe things
are different at a local school district.

