Go with free or pay the fee?

• Article 13 of 15
• EducationInvestor, October 2013

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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."

To reduce costs, the raw footage for Twig's content is acquired from companies such as the BBC: "As soon as you have to stick someone and a camera on a plane somewhere, it becomes too expensive," Cahn points out. However, Twig then adds its own information on top of that content.

The company also ensures that although its videos can be used anywhere "from California to Japan", it has specific modules tailored to specific curricula, including the UK's National Curriculum. "We spend a lot of money making these films bespoke to what you need to learn. If the curriculum says you need to learn the three types of volcanoes, our film tells these points. Then there are other films that are about the most active volcanoes and the most dangerous volcanoes - what's engaging for kids. But a lot of the time [with competitors' content] you'll get a thing about Vesuvius or Ian Stewart wandering around in some volcano in Africa but you're not actually getting the bespoke learning. Everything we make is for directly for the curriculum. Even something like Discovery Education - just to put a boot into one of our competitors - a lot of material is just clips from Discovery programmes which were not made in the first instance to help you learn."

That tailoring of content to the National Curriculum is one of the reasons Emma Chaplin, deputy head of Harbour Primary and Nursery School in East Sussex, still uses Espresso. Although she uses videos from companies including the BBC, National Geographic, the BFI and Pathé, as well as occasionally YouTube, Espresso is her first port of call. "The majority of things I need are on Espresso, on tap, and linked to the curriculum."

She notes that only the day after the Department of Education updated the National Curriculum for ICT, changing it in the process to Computing, she received an email from Espresso informing her of how it would update its content - and how it already had. "They listen to us and ask us what we want and need," adding that her and other schools' request for additional phonics teaching material had resulted in that material being added to Espresso's library, which is updated weekly, she says.

For many customers of premium content providers, it's the tailoring that makes the services worthwhile investments. Paradoxically, the sheer amount of quality free content available has made it less appealing, with teachers unwilling to spend the extra time required to find a video that meets their and the curriculum's needs from among the amount available - when it's simply far easier to head for a paid-for service and search there.

Rosemary Scales, a music teacher at Leighton Park school, finds that few companies produce the music theory videos she wants, so she's had to either produce them herself or search for them online. "YouTube, if you pick the right things, is fantastic. Some of the BBC documentaries are brilliant. There's the TED lectures, of course." She then gathers and curates all the videos herself, including those generated by students using iPads, on MediaCore.

An additional source of revenue and demand comes from parents - but not directly. In return for a small additional fee, many content providers will allow a school to extend access to content to parents. Many schools do this because as well as giving the parents ready access to content suitable for their children that they can work through with them at home, the providers offer a 'walled garden' suitable for children to explore by themselves.

Sue Wakefield-Gray, mobile technology co-ordinator at ACS Hillingdon, uses sources as diverse as the TED Talks, NASA and the Khan Academy. However, she pays for content from BrainPop because of the lack of advertisements on the site. "There are amazing sites, but often they link to ads for how to get flat tummies in two days, for example." Similarly, Sherston offers an all-in-one package that allows younger children to explore a large range of content themselves in 'safety', with content that's been tailored for that age group. "What appeals to me might not appeal to a seven year old."

It's this idea of curation that some companies are looking at in order to maintain their appeal to schools. Point2Educate's Skeels hopes that Point2School will become like a mall - or an iTunes - for educators: whenever they want something, instead of scouring the Internet, they will come straight to Point2School to obtain content from the many publishers in the 'mall', all of which would be guaranteed to be relevant and of high quality.

Charles McIntyre, one of the co-founders of edtech Europe, argues that these 'mall' providers will need to include measurement tools to maintain demand from schools. "With curriculums and the measurement of value-add being so important in education, obviously the ability to have tools that deliver against that are going to be ones that you see more and more of."

While that's happening, the market will undergo a certain degree of consolidation. "There are lots of new players in maths, science and English because they have the lowest barriers to entry, but there are now too many of them." TV companies, such as BBC Worldwide and Discovery, may well be interested in acquiring premium content providers as ways of exploiting their own content better.

Even before the digital age, free content was readily available in education. Premium content still managed to find a place where it could add value. By providing a one-stop-shop for time-poor teachers, whether that's by offering a complete package of content from one source or by curating their own content and others', content providers will still be able to find a niche in the future.

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