Education is notorious for being slow in its business reponses. We buy a system (e.g., Black$Board or My$Classes) and stick with it foreverrrrr. Same with infrastructure. When was the last time you saw a truly innovative teaching space instead of one with rows of chairs and desks? (Ngunnawal Primary School’s Redwood Teaching Unit is my answer … what’s yours?)
Some of this can be put down to budgeting issues and a lack of funding in general. But not all of it. Perhaps not even most of it. Indeed, often let slide are the poor business and product decisions made by educational administrators and management, who (perhaps through their not being on-the-ground teachers themselves), lack the vision required to make the creative, anticipatory, adventurous decisions that teachers need them to make. Add to this the reconciled acceptance of second-best on the part of wearied educational leaders and we have fine mix, conveniently self-adjusted for exploitation by business. In other words, business has come to rely upon our own ordinariness.
So, why not claim our market share? Why can’t we start demanding quality products and products that give us what we want? And why can’t we demand that they be free? In fact, it’s the ‘free’ bit that I’m really talking about here … The market capacity of education is huge, and yet are we so ‘umble as to not think that we can’t start demanding what we want — for free?
Why can’t we ditch expensive, unweildy learning mangement systems such as Black$Board and go for the free stuff? Is it because the free stuff won’t let me link in with my student database? Then demand that it can. Is it because the free stuff might have privacy and security issues? Then get the assurances you need.
We like to think of education as being ‘different’ or ‘singular’ and, of course, we are in the sense that what we do is for The Greater Good. But when it comes to business, we need plain, old, hum-drum canniness — nothing special, nothing exceptional. Young people demand stuff for free out of their web-based services all the time — and they get it, too. We need to start being a bit smarter in education about how we get what we want.
