Publish or Perish
Educational Content at a Crossroads
October 22, 2009
It's not news that we're experiencing increasing change. The quantity of information available is growing astronomically, new offerings are increasingly quick to be copied, businesses are under pressure to do more with less, and the internet is a disruptive force, threatening all manner of content industries.
Organizations have to become more nimble, more agile. Optimal execution is only the cost of entry, and organizations have to be tapping into continual innovation.
Publishers are not exempt from this. There are major pressures coming in a variety of guises. Yet, surprisingly, we're seeing little innovation in products, services, or business models.
Open Information
One of the major new pressures is the increasingly available content on the internet. From information from organizations establishing credibility and individuals publishing their own understanding, the quantity of information available on the web is increasing dramatically. Consequently, more and more individuals are choosing to live with what they can find rather than spend money.
And user-generated content is the next generation of the web, with ever-easier publishing opportunities. The amount of free information isn't going to go away. The open courseware movement is a further source of information.
Worse, the continuing effort to change textbook offerings with new editions is facing increasing pressure from irate students. Costs are high, and the novelty of the offerings isn't sufficient to make a compelling value proposition to a learner.
And it's not that the free information is suspect. When you have brands like MIT, there's little question of the authority. And Wikipedia has been demonstrated to be equal if not better than the Encyclopedia Britannica. The value of vetted information resources is decreasingly in demand.
(Not) Coping
Charles Jennings, former CLO for Reuters, recently cited the examples of Reader's Digest and Learning Tree International (offering instructor-led training, but with a library of offerings) suggesting that their problems arise from "a failure to innovate and a failure to adapt."
Both are publishers with solid content, but have been unable to create a new business model. In my own experience I have seen and learned how they're hampered by outdated technology and inflexible business models.
Some publishers are making inroads with online offerings, and new companies are coming up with disruptive models. The question is whether publishers as a whole can adapt or are doomed.
The Publisher Value Proposition
The question of whether there's a value proposition is not the issue. The value of editing, both in choosing what's worthy of publishing and ensuring that that quality is manifested in the final product, is still worthy. Indeed, in the age of information glut, it may be ever more valuable.
And the value proposition of a book is not diminishing. Individuals still buy—and read—books. The value of text is still high owing to a good data-to-bandwidth ratio, and likely will remain so whether the delivery vehicle becomes a smart phone, a tablet, or e-paper.
The real question is how that experience is revisited in the era of the internet. The online world provides new opportunities, but also requires new thinking. Giving away ancillary sites for textbooks isn't a valuable business model. Online content alone isn't sufficient.
The Experience
Pine and Gilmore, in their book The Experience Economy, talk about how the basis of business moves up a value chain. Starting with commodities, you add distinctiveness to create goods, then add activities to create service. The next step, they argue, is the experience. This is where the concept of the total customer interaction comes into play, from pre-sales to after sales support.
The opportunity is clear. The old cliché "it's not about books, it's about content" doesn't go far enough. What's needed is to make a compelling online experience, based on the content, tapping into the additional capabilities of the digital environment while not abandoning the value add.
For educational publishers, there's an additional consideration, and a market-differentiating opportunity. Pine and Gilmore suggest that the level beyond the experience is the transformative experience, where you pay for experiences that change you in desired ways. This is the core of education, when done right, and the ability to turn expert knowledge into a meaningful learning experience is a captivating premise. The question then is, how do you take a content business and turn it into an experience business?
Delivering Experiences
There are several components necessary to take a content development organization, and create an experience delivery capability. This includes executing an experience design process, developing and augmenting content for flexible delivery, and the capability to develop, trial, and deliver multiple and flexible business models.
Experience Design
Experience design is a new area, involving information architecture and design, engagement, and diverse media skills. Critically, it's having someone own the ultimate vision of the experience, and coordinating the elements to create the necessary engagement.
For educational publishers, an extra layer is learning experience design. To truly execute against this vision of an engaging experience and an effective learning experience, you have to understand not only learning, but also the alignment with engagement.
Learning experience design capability needs to be placed as a core competency, and one that is not in most publishers today.
Content Development
Underpinning the experience design is the content model. There are several ways in which an experience can be delivered: a monolithic version can be developed, which delivers the highest quality experience, but at a high cost and with limited flexibility; at the opposite end, compositing loose content is easy, but yields a low quality experience; in between is an approach where tight definition around learning components provides the ability to flexibly create different offerings yet structure compelling experiences and keep a tight rein on costs.
Developing against this model requires new rigor in processes and tools. Having authors write to an outline will no longer be sufficient, and a more coordinated approach to content development is required, developing the different components in synchrony from an agreed-upon vision. The notion of author will, of needs, have a new interpretation.
Tight definition supports flexible delivery. With strict constraints upon the content components, you get dual benefits: quality control upon the individual elements, and the ability to combine the elements into different offerings.
The dynamic market for content will require the ability to semantically define appropriate offerings, and pull together appropriate content packages that meet those needs. That only occurs if you have tight definition around the semantic components, and the ability to combine those elements programmatically through business rules.
Business Model
Adaptive and custom content delivery enables new business models. An initial investment in creating the underpinning understanding, resources, processes, tools, and systems is necessary to enable the creation of new business opportunities. While existing systems should be able to be coupled to the integrated infrastructure with service-oriented architectures, a comprehensive set of capabilities need to be enabled that include content management and governance, and flexible delivery tied to both business models and customer authentication.
The existing infrastructure of publishers is, by and large, not ready to accommodate these changes. The barriers are not technical nor procedural, but organizational, in the ways that financing is on tap to support experimentation, evaluation, and continual innovation.
Publish or Perish
Ultimately, the only persistent success model is continual innovation in experience offerings, combining services with offerings that meet transformation experiences with viable relationships between value and cost. Educational publishers must deliver a variety of cost-effective experience offerings that strike a balance between desire and affordability. Without market-relevant offerings, an organization will perish. Rather than publish paper, organizations must recognize that our technology has changed, and so too must the medium of delivery.
The increasing change we see in information, competition, and customer expectation makes the ability to continually experiment an imperative. The issue is not print versus digital delivery, but instead whether the ability to deliver quality content in any available format that creates a comprehensive learning experience is on tap for creative business relationships.
The need is for an infrastructure and associated processes that create a flexible platform for delivering quality content in meaningful experiences. That comes from integrating experience design, content structure, and experimentation around offerings to derive new offerings. The experience design, content structure, an the associated infrastructure can be defined to support flexible new offering, but the commitment needs to be made.
Educational publishers have a lot of opportunity to change, but little choice. The nature of their business and the changing environment provide little opportunity to do aught but find new ways to capitalize on their core value add of high quality content. Doing that in the digital era means leveraging that content to create a compelling learner experience. Understanding learner experience, content development processes that can deliver flexible learner experiences, and the ability to explore different offerings and exploit those that have market resonance is the fundamental change needed to publish, not perish.
Acknowledgement
While these thoughts developed across many experiences over the years with educational publishers and conversations with Mohit Bhargava of LearningMate, they have recently been reactivated and refined by exchanges with Algis Leveckis; I'm grateful to all.
About the Author
Clark Quinn has been designing innovative architectures, systems, content models, and learner experiences for more than 30 years. With a PhD in applied cognitive science, a passion for learning, a fascination with technology, and experience in both academia and business, he has delivered compelling solutions under real world constraints. The author of numerous articles, chapters, and books, he's also a in-demand speaker, having keynoted and spoken both nationally and internationally. Quinn delivers his services through Quinnovation and his partners for Fortune 500 businesses, not-for-profits, government, and publishers.
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