Jostens debunks the myths

Despite multimedia’s obvious perfect fit in the education market, the most common perception in the industry is that there’s no way that schools —weighted as they are with tight budgets, obsolete computers and locked-in distribution channels — will be able to support even part of a new media industry.

But according to John Kernan, CEO of Jostens Learning Corp., schools are “where the really neat stuff will happen” in multimedia applications.

At a recent seminar for venture capitalists in New York, Kernan pointed out that educators have always made use of diverse media: Cuisinaire rods, illustrated books, 16mm movies, overhead projectors and whatever else they could get their hands on. Teaching is “media-intensive” at every level. Thus, there is a huge market opportunity for producers of electronic media; education could be the long-awaited “killer application” that drives sales up the hockey-stick curve.

Clearly not everyone believes this. Kernan points to some widely held myths about the education market that may be keeping entrepreneurs away.

Schools have no money. Wrong. School districts annually spend an average of $5,000 per student. Colleges spend $8,000 per student. Education is a huge chunk of the national economy; if you add up the numbers — students, faculties, administrators — the total is equivalent to 25 percent of the workforce.

Some market research indicates that the market for learning materials is as much as $4.2 billion, and electronic materials are 19.6 percent of that total now. By 1996, some estimate that schools will spend 26.6 percent of $6.8 billion on learning materials.

Kernan says computer-based media are increasingly part of that flow of money.

Stuck with obsolete computers. Anyone visiting a computer center in a grade school is likely to find aging Apple IIs and PCjrs, not the powerful graphics machines needed to run the new, media-rich applications.

This might daunt the would-be entrepreneur, but it shouldn’t. Schools buy solutions, says Kernan, and they will buy whatever hardware the solution requires. Jostens sells only bundled systems: fast computers, CD-ROM drives and laserdisc players, installation, training, support and software. This, he says, avoids all chicken-and-egg problems.

Buy through the channel. The notion that schools will buy computers and media players by mail-order or at a local retailer is ludicrous, in Kernan’s view. Schools have purchasing procedures as cumbersome as any in the land; selling cycles are at least nine months long. The key is to field a well-trained sales force.

Kernan expects that the hottest categories in the next few years will include the pre-kindergarten age group, especially for bilingual English-Spanish titles, and prisoners. (We see plenty of parallels between prisons and schools besides mandatory attendance and authoritarian structures. Funding sources, citizen support, governing bodies, a need for remedial learning and public demand for better statistical outcomes are also alike.) Industrial training is another big growth area.

Not that simple. Of course, if it were really that simple, it would already be commonplace. Teachers are still uncomfortable with computer-based approaches. Some were turned off by the brain-numbing drills that were touted a few years ago. Others are just innately conservative.

At the venture capital conference in New York, Ellen Nelson, CEO at Decision Development Corp., pointed out that it took 20 years to get the overhead projector accepted in the classroom.

But perhaps the biggest obstacle to wider use of electronic media is that they haven’t found any champions within the schools. Appealing to the students isn’t enough (after all, they are addicted to video games). According to Tom Snyder, president of Tom Snyder Productions, if it is to be successful, “any educational innovation must find a central adult and benefit him.”

This observation belies the Nintendo Heresy: the notion that games where kids solve math problems while blasting space aliens will be good teaching tools. It doesn’t matter whether the kids like it; it must help some teacher or administrator by lightening his load, cutting absenteeism, improving test scores or whatever the school board is currently cranked up about.

Peter Dyson