As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education many states are implementing budget cuts of 5% -15%.
http://chronicle.com/article/Further-State-Budget-Cuts-Loom/47448/
Clearly, the entire issue is a complex one. Tax revenue to the states and municipalities has decreased based on both lower realty tax revenue and income tax revenue as a result of economic contraction and the real estate meltdown of the last few years.
As The Chronicle points out today, “Colleges are trying to preserve student services as money gets tighter”.
Yet education is as important as ever, given the competitive nature of globalization and the rapidly changing demands and demographics of society and the economy.
No Textbooks
There have been a number of initiatives announced over the last few years to de-emphasize the use and associated cost of text books.
California’s recent state budget dramatically reduced state spending for text books. California state funding previously earmarked nearly $334 million this year solely for textbooks that can now be spent by school districts for other needs over the next four years, providing flexibility that educators say is essential at a time of severe budget reductions.
The amount spent annually on text books is staggering, as is shown in the chart below.
Note that these costs are for K-12. College and university texts are equally expensive however those costs are born by the students themselves, and are not centrally reported. Effectively therefore, this is a different problem than the one educators are grappling with.
As William M. Habermehl, Superintendant of Orange County Schools stated in a recent New York Times article, “In five years, I think the majority of students will be using digital textbooks. They can be better than traditional textbooks.”
“Schools that do not make the switch could lose their constituency.”
“We’re still in a brick-and-mortar, 30-students-to-1-teacher paradigm,” Mr. Habermehl said, “but we need to get out of that framework to having 200 or 300 kids taking courses online, at night, 24/7, whenever they want.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/education/09textbook.html?ref=education
How can they meet ever increasing objectives with fewer resources?
Clearly a gap is widening as to what publically funded school boards can do with the resources they are presented.
The idea of providing each student with an Amazon Kindle® has been discussed, but so far, costs have prohibited any wide spread usage at a K-12 level.
I fully expect higher-ed would be a very appropriate target for electronic books and Kindle-type tools however, as the cost of the device could possibly be offset in a single year if publishers lowered the prices of e-books significantly.
In K-12, I believe PCs and the web could do quite a bit to help. Currently, 73% of North American households already have PCs and internet access. The growing proliferation of affordable Netbooks also makes access reasonably priced going forward.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats2.htm#americas
Therefore, schools could use this resource to their advantage by making more material available online, for access both in the classroom and at home.
Has some of this happened already?
Certainly, most states now have Virtual High Schools, but the movement to online of supplementary material for traditional brick and mortar schools has been slow.
Many school boards have started using some types of learning management products, such as Blackboard, Moodle etc.
Our own product, the social LMS TOPYX makes it easier than ever before to upload content of virtually any type for distribution. Therefore, in many cases, schools and teachers may be very well be able to upload content that they already have, as it supports virtually any type of format: Video, Audio, PPT, Word, Excel, Flash. If a school has access to professional content development products like Articulate, Captivate, or Quiz Maker, TOPYX supports these as well.
We can reduce education costs by using highly affordable tools, that enabling existing and new content to be easily built, updated and distributed to a wide variety of platforms.
Once content has been uploaded, it can easily be updated and refreshed on an ongoing basis. It need not become obsolete the way text books gradually become. Leveraging existing eLearning software, like TOPYX LMS or Moodle, the ongoing costs of educational materials would drop and the access to information would radically increase.
All of the content would be accessible from PCs, both Windows based and Mac, and can also be accessed from an expanding list of smart phones including iPhone, Blackberry and Google Android Phones.
In summary, the tools are available to support a gradual transition of content from traditional text books to digital. Publishers will gradually provide what the market wants, many have the ability to provide digital content now, but eventually they all will. Supplementary content can be uploaded easily, and the access to the content is getting less expensive by the year.
If you are interested in learning more about eLearning technologies that are available today that are revolutionizing the classroom, please visit interactyx.com