It's Always About The Client

Like in any business, in the Business of Education the focus is always on the client: the student

The classroom teachers, directly interacting with the student know that their job is to know their client’s needs and preferences, and thus tailor instruction to their learning style and find the best resources for academic success. The support staff in schools know that their job is to analyze data coming from the classroom and based on it, find strategies to correct, improve and accelerate each student’s learning. Principals know that their job is to provide their students with a safest, most engaging, and current learning environment, by providing all the conditions for excellence, ensuring their staff has optimal professional development to understand and support the best learning experiences for the client. The districts know that their job is to enable the best learning conditions, secure necessary funding, provide timely opportunities for teacher professional learning, and engage all stakeholders in decisions that impact the clients’ success.

As granular or big-picture as the roles get, the one constant is always the customer service:

it’s always about the student

A new breed of educational participants has been shaping over the past few years, with the ubiquitous online access to digital learning: the digital learning provider. They come in all shapes and sizes, providing equally diverse services to our students. They enter the class, virtually or physically, via their products, and interact directly with the students. So it shouldn't be a suprise that educators would think their main focus is the client (our student) as well. It seems, however, that some think about the business of education as being “all about the product”. They strive to make the best product, which is great, and try to offer as many services under the same umbrella as possible. They want it all in their bucket, for fidelity of implementation and data reporting, which makes perfect sense. The only problem is that in the process, they make all the components proprietary, so that once locked in their product, the districts can never leave without l it all behind, and starting over from scratch. Their view is skewed.

It's no longer about the client, but about the product

This business model is no longer a valid one With the fast-paced development of the digital world, and out of the need to break free from the dependency, the educator breed has mutated - we became the financially conscious choose-the-best-from-all-that’s-out-there. We can now pick and choose what best fits our students, and offer it to them, differentiated for their need, with different tools, in different ways, because there are plenty of choices. Like any good customer service provider would do. We have become, in fact, quite knowledgeable about products, comparing and contrasting their qualities (or lack thereof), and how they impact our client. We also have the advantage of participating in the development of new resources, both in-house, and with newcomer digital providers. We can now influence the product, (and we are) and do not rely on a product manager to tell us what is best for us. We have build in-house experts who understand both, the tools and the actual needs of our client, the students, and can determine what really works best.

We now can enable the same great learning digitally It seems that the more senior companies, as someone at a recent SIIA event described them, experienced and having bundles of products, bank on the fact that their established product is irreplaceable. They are too big and the investment educators made over the years is too large to be able to break free from them. They also buy out newcomers to ensure perennial validity of their product, but once they absorb the new products they get locked into the same patterns. A headline about Pearson this week made me remember a conversation not long ago about redundant and antiquated systems. Like anywhere else in business, they are rejected and replaced with agile new ones. It is the business way, but it is also an old truth about everything in life - what is no longer relevant is retired, and new products that supply the need take its place.

The wake-up call for many established digital learning providers is now. Over the past year and a half the business of education adopted a very important feature: choice! It is not going away and there are enough options on the market to make this change possible.

If we really think about it, nothing changed in the way we do business, the concept is quite the same: it’s always about the client. There is no profit or longevity without client satisfaction.

Maybe it’s time for everyone to realize that when times change, we must all adapt