Go with free or pay the fee?
- Article 13 of 15
- EducationInvestor, October 2013
Many firms produce films and short clips for use by schools. But how are schools using this content? How does it fit in with the rise of the tablet? Is it going to be hit by the problem of the ubiquity of free content? And are there going to be more firms or fewer in the future, with the possibility of acquisition by larger content providers looming?
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These days, anyone can make a video. Indeed, anyone with a smartphone can not only capture high-definition video content but edit it and upload it to a web site as well, all without any training or investment in technology they don't already have.
Surprisingly, one of the biggest uses for such technology on YouTube - other than funny videos of cats and the Harlem Shake - is educational videos. Want to know how to do something? Search YouTube and you're very likely to find someone has created a tutorial for it. There's even a dedicated YouTube education site, www.youtube.com/education, where universities, schools and training organisations around the world provide high-quality, free content that others can either learn from or use themselves to teach.
Add to that free educational content available from Khan Academy, TED and the like and it's no surprise that many people are looking at providers of paid-for educational content and wondering how long they can survive in such a climate. Why would cash-strapped schools buy films and videos when they can get it all online for free? The fact that Espresso, one of the biggest providers in the UK, is up for sale (again) only seems to highlight the risk for such companies. Even the likes of Pearson is having to accept the existence of not just free educational content but demand for that content from their customers.
"They've started to open up their platforms to content from other places," points out James Cross, educator in residence at MediaCore, which develops a cloud-based video education platform. "Their new next generation OpenClass platform includes the OpenClass Exchange, which pulls in content from places like Khan Academy and YouTube, alongside paid-for content from Pearson."
A look at the market for educational multimedia CD-ROMs and DVDs certainly suggests a dark future for premium providers. The availability of online content, free or otherwise - as well as the advent of tablets - has largely killed this market completely, says Ian Skeels of Point2Educate. And for those publishers, trying to convert that content so it's deliverable online is expensive, making it hard for them to move with the change, Apple's refusal to support Flash on its iPads only adding to the difficulties. "If you have a big back catalogue of titles, it can cost you 100s of thousands of pounds to convert that into online resources."
Skeels' company was founded three years ago with the aim of combining existing CD-ROM content with online delivery: multimedia applications can be converted in just a couple of hours into products that can be sent to schools over the Internet. To cope with the poor broadband connections that rural schools, for example, typically have, these titles are downloaded overnight.
To make the software appeal to schools, Point2Educate rents these applications through its Point2School portal, rather than sells them. "It's difficult for publishers," says Skeels. "They'd rather sell the product outright for £500, rather than rent it out for four months for £60, say. But schools might only use a title for one term so they don't want to pay hundreds of pounds for it."
For example, teacher Rachel Tilden Walker, who uses Point2School in her school, says: "Rental for me is fantastic. I can choose the software I need for a particular project. The same amount of budget goes into finding the right things for each project and makes sure I get what I need all the time, not just for one project."
Initially, Point2Educate was only going to offer converted Windows multimedia applications using this delivery model. But the company found that the broadband issues that affected application delivery meant that schools wanted to obtain ebooks and online services the same way.
Videos from company Twig World were a popular request. The firm has been in operation since 2010 and offers a mixture of free and premium content to schools. COO Catherine Cahn says that the reason Twig World's content is so popular, even when compared against the free content available online, is quality. "It's night and day in terms of the level of engagement and interest." It's also more accurate, she argues, having been checked by teachers and scientists. "It's like HBO in the US - it's worth paying for."
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