There will be a lot of commentary that will make parents and educators think that Apple has done it again. But be wary of reports that say Apple has “revolutionized the education industry.” It hasn’t.Apple has been revolutionary in the past. But if you stack up the company’s previous success in changing the way we consume music and the impact of mobile devices on our lives, then Thursday’s announcement of iBooks 2 — with its increased functionality, the ability to publish and charge for your own content (if approved by Apple’s iBookstore process) and the repackaging of iTunes U — fall short of what is actually needed in the world of digital education. It is the iPad that has saved the aching backs of students, not iBooks 2.
The core focus of business is to address a problem. And the problem in education when it comes to the digital space isn’t a lack of content or publishing solutions; the problem is discovering quality.
Education has enough content. There is more generic content out there for any individual subject than is possible to know. There are digitally proficient teachers who customize and repackage that content and those tools in ways that are appropriate for the students in their classes — from kindergartens and high schools into colleges and universities. Anyone in education knows there is a fast-growing community of teachers online doing their best to share the best tools, the best content and the best news ideas that they can. But what educators and parents alike are asking is, “Where do I find the best-quality content?”
Yet, instead of helping to create tools that allow for improved discovery, Apple is only adding to the problem by offering more tools to create and share content. In doing so, it will contribute to the feeling many have of being overwhelmed and overloaded with content, which they are struggling to sort through and are left to their own devices to sort, rate and organize.
Apple relies heavily on the crowd to do this. But for many areas, the crowd is not enough.
If you are seeking new music, games, videos or any other form of popular entertainment that is driven primarily by individual taste and perspectives, then the crowd works really well. The systems established to chart taste and what people think about particular pop-culture content work well. You can follow and find others in the crowd who have the same tastes as you, and the crowd collectively can make decisions on what content its members prefer through voting and commenting systems. This works well in the iTunes Store for pop-culture content. It does not, however, work well for content that relies on a higher level of understanding or expertise.
Areas such as education and health that the whole population is interested in and has an investment in, but which they don’t all have an in-depth knowledge of, require more than just the crowd to make decisions about what constitutes the best-quality content and tools. Education is not the type of activity you want directed by a popularity contest. But a star-rating system driven by the crowd (as in iTunes) is just that. How does this work if the majority of the crowd doesn’t have enough knowledge about childhood development or the expectations of children’s literacy at 6 or 15 years of age? How can they rate the educational value of an app without adequate respect for the pedagogy of digital learning?
The crowd plays a role, but the real revolution that we need in the area of digital educational content is how to find the best quality.
The catch is that the people at Apple know this. They know the importance of quality — just look at the eBooks they used to promote the new device at launch. They do it at every launch: The apps they use to demonstrate their new initiatives are the best of the best. They make sure the demonstration content has the most vivid images and the most purposefully interactive content; they celebrate and value the quality of these. But visit the iTunes Store, and the way offered to parents to find the best apps is haphazard. We are left with “apps of the week,” a “new and noteworthy” section, a collection of “staff picks” and then Top 10 or Top 25 categories in each section that are based primarily on sales and downloads. There is no transparency or support in understanding how any of the decisions around these featured apps are chosen, no guide to their quality.
I understand that Apple has rarely based its business on doing the thinking for you. The company provides tools and is happy to allow the user to make the most of them. However, everything about the web and the internet over the coming years is screaming curation. The next step forward is finding better ways to discover content: the most useful apps, the most worthwhile online browsing experience in terms of content relevant to your question.
I am not sure if Apple has a team working on curation. But for Apple to continue to ignore the importance of helping parents and educators sort through and make sense of the tens of thousands of apps in the education section of the iTunes App Store is a missed opportunity to lead another revolution.
