I don’t know if this forum is the right place but any advice would be appreciated, it seems so hard to speak to the right authorities, anyway here I go again….
Situation :
For several years, we have been developing applications for learning French from kindergarten to grade two. Our application identifies a student and follows him step by step in his progress, results, errors and behaviour. In addition, these results are stored locally and on a server. This allows a student to subscribe to a teacher. The teacher has another application allowing him to see the progress and results of all is students and thus make academic and pedagogical decisions. In a home environment, where there is one tablet and one application per child, there is no problem. Even to subscribe to a remote teacher.
Problem :
The problem is in a school environment. Let’s be positive and say that we have 80 tablets shared between 400 students. A ratio of five students per tablet, which is very good. Let’s be honest, a school with 400 students won’t manage 400 tablets. For our applications to work, a student should be able to take any of the 80 tablets and use it for learning, as long as the app is on every tablet.
Solution :
One solution is that a student should be identified with a simple login whatever the tablet he is using. The student is no longer associated with a particular tablet. In the old days, there was the notion of licence. We sold a licence to a school, and all students could use the application, even if very few applications retained student results. As for us, it is inconceivable not to keep the results of the students and for the teacher not to have access to the results of his class. This is our business model and our business advantage.
Proposal :
We do not want to implement a sales system and subscription within the application that the student uses, this is not a good strategy for schools. Moreover, we are not sellers and we have nothing to sell, else education and there will never be advertising in our applications. We are researchers, developers and teachers.
We therefore are proposing, only for the school version, to create a free app for a school administrator, only for the sole purpose of selling educational licences in which your sales interface will be implemented. This will allow you to pick up your X% on both the sale of each application and the sale of the licence. If you have a different strategy for an educational context, we would greatly appreciate the knowledge. If you think that this is a solution that you can live with, please give us your consent so that we can go back and do what we do best.
Conclusion :
Technologies change and we can adapt and enjoy it. But manufacturers and developers have to take the time to understand the reality of a school and the educational environment. We will not be the last developers to deal with such problems and opportunities. I think that there will be more and more applications who will follow students results and that these results should be available for parents, teachers and administrators. We must find solutions suitable for all parties in the interest of educational applications and serious learning.
Thanks for reading and all that you are doing for the way that students will learn from kindergarten to universities in the near future.
Raymond Leblanc
www.verslecture.com
