Russ Pearlman's Blog

Executives from several major media companies testified before the Federal Trade Commission about the need for fees, taxes or tax credits for content being spread or aggregated across the Internet. The basic problem is that in the rush to get professionally published (i.e., newspapers) content on the Web, these companies decided to start doing it for free, hoping that advertising on the web sites would keep pace with what they were seeing traditionally in the print forms. These publishers have now learned, however, that on-line advertizing is a lot less lucrative – and with the switch from most people getting their news from “traditional” media to “Web 2.0 media”.

So, what is a major media company to do? Implement subscription models like the Wall Street Journal to fuel your success? Create premium member areas like ESPN.com or RushLimbaugh.com? Charge syndication fees to aggregators? Enforce copyright?

How about ask the government to give you tax credits to help defray your costs under the guise that our country needs a “free professional press”?

Within Digital Content Services at Capgemini, we have a pillar around Digital Monetization that helps to address these types of issues. While it’s a pipe dream that the US Government is going to be the ultimate savior here, major media companies need to figure out how best to fit within the new world of Web 2.0 and digital content. It’s no surprise that digital content is seen as less valuable than it’s physical counter-part (we’ve seen this in music, video, games and books). But, I think the biggest mistake an organization can make is to take old process and old ways of doing business and just try to apply the Internet.

When I buy a digital book on my Kindle, it’s just a digital version of something I could buy on paper.  They charge me $9.99 instead of $25 – so I’m happy. But, if they were to make the experience better – for example augmenting it with animations, providing extra features, or automatically making updates to non-fiction materials, I’d be willing to pay a more. But, that would take a new mind set and would require a whole new set of digital supply chain processes. So, Amazon would need to figure out which model it wants – one where revnue (and probably costs) are lower or when where revenue (and probably costs) are higher.

Or, perhaps, we can ask the US Government to provide a tax credit for Amazon selling digital books.

I’ve recently been working with a client who is a major textbook publisher for schools in the K-12 domain. A number of the major publishers provide technology (for free!) that schools can use to augment their textbooks. These online tools can be used by both teachers and students. In today’s world, much of this content is simply an electronic conversion of the text books. But, the ultimate goal is to provide materials that are much richer and experience and leverage multiple ways to teach our children concepts.

As part of the work that I’m doing, we are looking to build out the next generation of these tools, and, as a parent myself, I’m excited by the possibilities. In education, there is something known as exception based teaching which is the idea that teachers focus on the exceptions – students that are demonstrating capabilities well beyond average and students who require some remediation to be able to catch up. In a typical classroom with about 20 students to each teacher, it’s hard enough to be able to understand how each student is doing – so there is an obvious opportunity for software to help. So, encouring students to do some work on the computer along with on-line assessments can really improve opportunities for a teacher in the traditional classroom.

In a Father’s Day article for Parade magazine, Barak Obama said that: “We need to replace that video game with a book and make sure that homework gets done.” For such a young President, I think he misses t

he point – “games”, “books”, “computers”, “Internet”, etc. are all blurring. While his broader point that ‘entertainment’ should not be the substitute for ‘learning’, I agree – but we need to erase the basic premise that ink on paper is somehow “better” than electronic learning; we need to replace the idea that “fun” and “education” are mutually exclusive;

we need to find innovative ways to educate our society that often finds itself lagging behind much of the developed world.

Unfortunately, the attitude espoused by Barak Obama’s article – though subtle – mirrors those at the head of many educational publishers, schools and organizations. While they continue to hold onto the tra

ditional ideas of how education should occur, they really hold back the coming revolution of e-learning, interactive learning, computer based assessments, etc. I’m pleased that at least one major book publisher is trying to make head-way into this universe of possibilities, and for the sake of my children, I hope they don’t delay.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working with a few clients who are looking to launch new e-learning platforms in the near future. One client is a major test preparation company (helping students prepare for standardized testing and providing subject tutoring) and the other is a major K-12 textbook publisher.

As part of our investigations on how best to implement these platforms, we’ve been looking at learning management tools and learning content servers. Most of the off-the-shelf variety of education specific content tools support several standards including SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model).

SCORM is actually a standard that comes from the Department of Defence (not Education?) under the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative that was started in 1997. As you can imagine then, numerous government agencies are heavily using SCORM including the armed services, the FBI and many others.

So, what’s the problem with SCORM? Well, as you can image, standards by their very nature tend to be made to solve general problems instead of specific problems. Here are some issues as I see them today:

1) SCORM is effective for non-evaluative content (i.e., learning materials) but it is lacking in evaluative content (i.e., drills and assessments); for example, SCORM does not support short-answer or essay questions as part of an assessment How could you use this for K-12 or higher education without this support?

2) SCORM not only defines the content, but it also includes some presentation-specific scripting within the learning objects themselves. Anyone who’s had to deal with separation of data and presentation logic know how painful it can be if the core material is merged. This would be like storing HTML code in your database so that you can present it to an end user’s browser. If you then wanted to support, for example, an iPhone – you would have to parse through that HTML and provide a new look and feel. That’s a lot more painful that just parsing through core content.

3) Overcoming SCORM limitations requires some pretty significant – and non-standard – approaches. For example, most vendors suggest the use of custom developed Flash objects or other types of rich media for content or questions that can’t be supported by the standard.

4) Like any other standard SCORM progress is slow and it can be implemented with proprietary extensions by any vendor.

The most recent version of SCORM (2004) was released in March of this year. While they have added in some nice restrictions, they have not addressed fundemantal problems that would allow SCORM to become more of a universal educational language. That’s really too bad. As I wrote in my blog previously, I think the Federal CTO should be leading the charge in things like SCORM so that we could build a real platform to support education across K-12 and universities. I’d love for major book publishers, schools, teachers, etc. to all speak the same core language and instead of focusing in on technology focus in on the learning content and teaching our kids.