It’s been another fast paced year in educational technology, with nothing more certain than change.Yet as much as there is innovation and exciting new products and ideas, there is a lot that I keep hoping will change, ideally at a rate faster than the speed of smell. So here is my Ed-Tech New Year wish list in no particular order of urgency:
·-Transparent pricing: We are in education and cost IS important; if we have to use Chinese water torture to get a price for your product or service or to figure some outlandish set of options and upgrades, we may shop somewhere else.
·-Fair contracts:Contracts need to take into account that we get funded by fickle entities. Stop writing auto renewing contracts with no outs, or worse yet, multi-year auto renewals.Sometimes the entities that fund us, decide we could use less funding or that we do not need it at all.
·-Learning content standards:Digital content is exploding everywhere, yet much of it is locked in proprietary content prison cells, inaccessible from our learning management systems.Let’s all get behind a common standard, like “Learning Tools Interoperability” or LTI for short.
·-Easy log in: If your company cannot support LTI, at least bless us with some sort of common authentication or single sign-on. We can’t bear to have teachers or administrators waste one more second administering accounts or wasting time logging in to a web site.Their time is much too valuable to waste logging into your poorly written application that you rushed to market.
·-Old web technology: And worse yet – your application was written for the web in 2002, and it is still using technology that is old.It’s far past the time to layout web pages in tables, run Flash animations, and use Java to validate forms.Join this century and leverage HTML 5 and responsive web design, so all of our devices can access your 1999 web site.
·-A common wireless video standard that actually works: Students and teachers all have different devices and all have great things to share with the class, but in most cases, most of their devices cannot share their content to a TV or projector over the same standard.There is money to be made by someone solving this!
