This crossed wires goes back to the area of putting the ‘e’ into ELT publishing – something I touched on in a previous post.  Several issues are causing people to scratch their strategic heads at publisher central.

Firstly the opportunity: now they’ve got (or are getting) their content in native digital format, what else can they do with it? ‘M’ is for -’monetization’.  Are there new formats and channels which  will make money?

Then there is the threat:  there is a lot more involved than having a new whizzy website and maybe trying some of that social network based marketing: they are going to have to give some of their content away!  And what happens when e-content becomes the norm, and everyone has got a netbook / kindle / iphone clone? What will they need publisher content for?  No definitive answers but some quick case studies …

TEFLclips – content value chain 101

ELT teacher and author Jamie Keddie won an English language teaching gong for TEFLclips.com  (Complementary review here). Very simple concept: every so often he devises a lesson plan for publically available content made my someone who he hasn’t met  (e.g. Youtube video) and publishes it on his website. No suggestion by the way that content is used without permission. The important thing to note is there is no direct link between content producer and redistributor. The internet, as visionary Chris Anderson points out, is a great copy machine. Here a specialist adds learning value by republishing this with his own wraparound content for ‘his’ audience EFL teachers.  As it isn’t for profit, he can do this under Creative Commons.

Teachitworld – make my life easier dot com

Teachitworld companion sites such as teachit.co.uk are apparently doing extremely well with teachers of English literature in the UK and US.  Lots of interesting things here:

• > teachitworld has a free subscription option. Paper based lesson plans and other goodies which make teachers’ lives easier are all there for immediate download.
• > the free offer includes access to activities based on content licensing deals with publications such as The Week.
• > there is a paid-for subscription priced at something I guess teachers wouldn’t find offensive and for that people can access richer media such as audio, video and web-based interactive exercises AND
• > paying subscribers can edit the downloadable paper based resources
• > they use crowd-sourcing for content. Anyone can submit materials and if they pass quality assessments, the authors apparently earn a small fee and royalty payments

English360 – more than just content

English360 is a variation on teachitworld and, potentially, much more complex. Their blurb:

Designed for teachers, by teachers, the English360 learning platform leverages what the web does best: connect people with people, connect people to digital tools, and support the collaboration, creativity, and learning that results. As an open platform, e360 gives you an easy, simple way to teach with newer web approaches such as social software, tagging, and dynamic, user-generated content.

Interesting here is:

• > They are already in a partnership with a major publisher – Cambridge University Press
• > They provide pretty high end content – currently for business English – at a higher level than an activity as with teachitworld. English360 will give users access to a whole module or more.
• > This content will apparently be modifiable in some ways, again, to tweak it for a subset of users.
• > The above includes online content so a pretty sophisticated set of tools will be needed for adapting and republishing their own content.
• > They talk about english360 as a platform where a teacher or institution may use as a portal in support of their own students so it is either an outsourced or embedded learning management system, especially if it tracks performance.

On the face of it, English360 appear in danger of having too many good ideas at once and may run into trouble trying to implement them all. On the other hand, they are highly innovative, insightful ideas, very much worth chewing over.

Conclusions?

• > Publisher’s core markets of insitutional book buyers aren’t going away any time soon. This only applies to core programme content such as course books. Learners may well question the logic of buying supplementary materials such as grammar and vocabulary practice if these are freely available online i.e. ad-supported websites.

• > More scarily ELT-specific materials may not be required. Again the student looking for supplementary practice will be looking online where 99% of available material is not specifically designed for them but, could be made acessible with a little intermediate tweaking (teflclips).

• > Blended, blended the future is blended. Just not like ELT has done it before or is doing it now. Macmillan publishers come closest with their campus offering but it is their content which you can resequence. Very 1.0 and still too inflexible. What about my content or embedding your content in my context? Most institutions may not even have realised this is where their interests lie and why the English360 insight is so valuable.
• > What about the other ‘M’ word – mobile? What should people be doing about that? Well, for me, mobile is a soon to be very important channel (hardly original) but publishers should think of web broadly first and mobile as a subset of that.
• > There is a lot to ‘get’ in the web. Remember 1.0 was A Website.  Now the web is a personalised, customised space where people increasingly access content which has been aggregated, embedded, redestributed and overlayered. Oh, and this content is not being paid for directly by the end user – it’s free. Hard to swallow as that may be, it isn’t even the end goal, only the starting point. As of tomorrow peole will have to give away some of their lovingly created, carefully graded, nicely designed, rights protected content. And to anybody, not just in a format which only makes sense if the user has bought the book.

But how much and to who and what will they get in return?

Tags: British Council, Cambridge University Press, e-learning, EFL, English teaching, Macmillan, Oxford University Press