Want to team up with software developers?
Here's how to make the partnership smooth sailing

By Mary Axelson

Your district regularly invests in reviewing software products and site licenses. And you allocate substantial portions of the budget to creating your own curriculum. But have you thought about developing and selling your own software?

Increasingly, school districts and states are doing just that. Led by Peter Lenkway, project manager for the Bureau of Educational Technology, Florida's Department of Education and Florida State University have developed numerous software programs in partnership with various companies. Among the Florida titles: Choosing Success, developed with Computer Curriculum Corp. (CCC); Connections, Challenges, Choices, with Decision Development Corp.; a K-12 integrated learning system, with Jostens; Communism and the Cold War, with ABC News InterActive; a CD-ROM Atlas of Florida with IBM and Apple; and Vital Links, developed with Davidson & Associates and state education departments in California and Texas.

Florida is not alone in enjoying the advantages of working in partnership with software publishers. In North Carolina, state curriculum directors and teachers worked with McGraw-Hill to develop collections of test items for their vocational education program. Though royalty revenues for sales outside of North Carolina won't make the state rich, the partnership considerably shortened the development time for a project the schools would have otherwise pursued on their own.

The school district in Plano, Texas, has invested four years in developing a K-5 integrated curriculum with Edunetics, a Steck-Vaughn company. Creating and updating this curriculum is an ongoing effort, and the school board supports districtwide use of all materials that come out of the project. Print materials have been out for about a year and a half, and the first software product is scheduled for release in 1998. The district receives royalties for the print materials but not for the digital components of the project.

Taking a slightly different tack, the Philadelphia schools distribute their local video (created with a $500,000 satellite uplink van and a sophisticated in-house production studio) through Distance Learning Associates (DLA), an organization specifically designed to distribute educational materials created by schools and museums.

Students first

These business ventures are guided by student needs, not dreams of hitting the edutainment jackpot. For one thing, the home market--not the school market--owns that elusive bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow. More important, this kind of arrangement works only when the education half of the partnership is focused on serving its own students first. Says Lenkway, "The primary objective of these projects is to provide professional-quality educational materials to meet the specific needs of Florida students that are not being addressed by existing commercial products." Everybody wins: Schools get the precise curriculum they want at a price offset by a partner or by subsequent sales. Developers get the expertise of teachers and students, and that lends relevancy that a hired consultant can't provide.

Go back about four years ago in the technology biz, and the buzz was content. CD-ROMs, the Internet, and other vast repositories of data are meaningless if you don't have something to store on them. Bill Gates formed Corbis Corp. to buy digital rights to the world's great art, historical documents, and other archives. Programmers started shoveling data out of the National Archives and other pubic domain resources onto digital media.

Today, the word is storytelling--organizing and presenting data in a compelling way. And who knows better how to do that than a good teacher? That means your schools now have to compete with industry to keep your best teachers. But if you can keep your classroom teachers and curriculum writers at home, it means you have an extraordinarily valuable resource.

Why a partner?

Wending your way through school buying schedules and other purchasing decisions can be a difficult task--it takes a seasoned navigator to help you recover some of your development costs. What's more, trying to market a product can seriously compromise a public institution. That's where a business partner comes in. Distribution is the primary value of such a partner.

"Public-private business partnerships are very valuable, but they must be structured in a way that maintains the raison d'etre of the government funding authorization," says Bernard Solomon, who until recently managed Philadelphia's distance learning video program and now runs technology assessment services within the district. "Schools need a corporate partner to participate in the corporate world.

"School districts, in my opinion," he continues, "are simply not equipped to function in the entrepreneurial world due to the massive legal and educational code restrictions. Also, there is always the concern of interfering with the school district's tax-free status."

"Use of school funds to create education for students outside of the local area could be deadly," agrees Fred Zolla, who is president of DLA, the distribution partner for the Philadelphia schools. "Using existing programs and contracting for outside distribution, which creates a pure revenue stream back to the school system, seems to work."

But, Zolla says, "this type of business spirit does not fit with the traditional model of educators." For districts that plan to enter such business arrangements, he has a word of warning: "Be advised that some will cheer you on, and others will make you a target."

Production values

How important is a fancy and flawless production when you're developing educational software? That's debatable. Zolla tells the story of touring a large media center with hundreds of hours of instructional video that had been created because the institution could not find commercially produced resources. When he first previewed some of the programs, he recalls, he was not impressed: "I was accustomed to professionally created educational media resources," he says.

But on a hunch, Zolla submitted 20 programs to the California Clearinghouse, a state-run evaluation center that rates educational media on a scale of 1 to 5. When he received the ratings some months later, he says, the average score was 4.7. Says Zolla: "Teachers indicated in their evaluation that, even though there was no glitz or polish, these programs were created in a manner consistent with current trends in transferring knowledge in a classroom setting."

Then again, professional productions can give your products the edge they need to compete. Kids who use edutainment titles at home expect 3D at school as well, and classroom virtual reality is just around the corner. Although producing your own programs or scripts has great learning value, home-grown multimedia must have tremendous wit and style to engage sophisticated students. And programming a simulation or scripting an authorware sequence, while within reach, might not be the best use of a classroom teacher's time. Software companies have programming expertise and speedy artists who make production much more efficient. They understand interface design--the process of making the user's interaction with the software as intuitive and appealing as possible. They're clever at compressing data and searching for bugs. They're skilled at researching legal clearances for art, text, and other clips that are not in the public domain.

Zits, not glitz

Your teachers understand the content and how to present it. Your district also has funds for curriculum development, and these can encourage a software developer to enter the difficult school market. And your involvement, as Theresa Poprac, multimedia sales manager for Davidson & Associates explains, gives the developer a "higher level of product credibility."

You also have a large collection of end-users, known in school circles as students. And unlike young people carted off to a marketing focus group, your kids are in an environment where they can have prolonged exposure to the product and where they can easily voice their opinions. When CCC designed Choosing Success with the Florida Department of Education and the Dade County School District, students sent the experienced company back to the drawing board. The zitless actors in the video segments made the students tune out immediately. CCC listened when the kids said, "Make it real." The result, says Anita Kopec who guided the project for CCC and is now president and CEO of Steck-Vaughn, "was not only a product that has received many, many, awards of excellence, but even better a product that reaches and helps kids."

So, what's the dollar value of this content expertise? More than a substitute teacher. Less than the value of marketing, sales, and distribution. The
development costs vary widely, but content--especially when it's separated from programming and interface design--is one of the smaller pieces of the budget pie.

RFP and agreement

After you have identified a curriculum area that can best be developed internally, those who have tread the co-development path recommend publishing a request for proposals, or RFP. The Florida DOE purchasing department maintains a mailing list of bidders. The state mails a letter describing the bid with information about how to request a complete bid package. In some cases, the Florida DOE is the fiscal agent, but in other cases--such as a Dade County program for teaching English as a second language--the local school district assumes that role.

You can create your own mailing list from two Internet sources: The Software Publishers Association (SPA) has a searchable database, and the PEP Registry of Educational Software Publishers has a complete listing of educational software developers. SPA's list has more complete and rapidly available information, but the PEP Registry is more comprehensive.

You'll want to concentrate on developers in the school market--unless you're working on something really innovative for a home connection. Brøderbund, for example, would not be likely to respond to a curriculum-based RFP; Skills Bank would; 7th Level might. There are also opportunities for administrative software development with companies such as Chancery Software of Canada. Although Chancery's main business is customizing its software for school needs, the company certainly considers new ideas for commercial development if existing products don't meet school needs.

Refine your list by calling to make sure you are sending the RFP to the appropriate person. Expect a title something like vice president of school products or vice president of product development. You might also find it helpful to get in touch with a company through its sales representative for your district.

The next step is working out an agreement.

"The nature of co-development is that both partners bring equal resources to the table," says Lenkway, who explains that Florida's half of the bargain has ranged from $70,000 to $3 million.

"In all co-development agreements, the private sector partners provide the co-development products to Florida schools at cost and, to offset State development costs, pay royalties on all sales outside of Florida," Lenkway wrote in an e-mail panel discussing co-development. "Other parameters of a co-development project require that both parties must contribute substantially to the financial development costs of the product. While part of the contribution may be in-kind services, some significant financial contribution is also required of the partner. Both parties accept the risk that all funds invested in developing the product may not be recovered. Both parties must also contribute expertise to the project."

Intellectual property rights

Most existing projects channel profits back into the schools, often to specified programs. Teachers are released from classroom responsibilities to develop curriculum, and the school owns the materials produced. This latter point should be clearly defined in advance for teachers and any students involved with the project. Current law automatically assigns copyright to the creator of an original work unless it is work-for-hire. It may be necessary to have students sign-over their copyright to art or other creative work.

When projects are taken beyond simple efforts, such as students producing web pages for local business, to large-scale commercial projects, Lenkway says, there are several unresolved issues. "In Florida," he says, "intellectual property rights for university faculty are defined as part of their contract through United Faculty of Florida. The issue of intellectual property rights has not been resolved at the K-12 level. There has been some interest from the legislature to address this, but for now it is a local issue."

As distance learning and school-created curriculum materials expand, it will become crucial to resolve the intellectual property rights of teachers and students. In North Carolina, McGraw-Hill encountered content with fuzzy copyright, and the only recourse was to remove it from the final product. The issue is likely to be addressed by local school boards and unions on an as-needed basis before national organizations take a position on this new situation.

Starting small

If full-scale co-development sounds like a big step, don't worry. Opportunities to test the waters without making substantial financial investment are available via the Internet. For example, CCC continues its collaboration with schools on CCCnet, a collection of curriculum resources available through subscription.

One school that has taken advantage of the arrangement is Kent Elementary School in Carrollton, Texas, which hired an occasional substitute to free science teacher Barry Rose to collaborate with CCC. With his years of teaching and involvement with the SCOPE project (Super Collider OPportunites for Education), Rose was able to make a substantial contribution with less than five hours worth of work. In exchange for this modest investment, the school gets a free subscription to the service for a year. Rose says he was happy to share his thoughts, so long as it didn't take him away from his students for too long.

It is no secret that schools and businesses have different priorities: Businesses must focus on creating a saleable product with an investment that can see a sizeable return, and your schools must focus on educating students. These two goals can blend well, but the approaches are different.

Take working time: Expectations of how long it takes to complete a task differ widely from business to school. A day in business means eight hours of concentrated working time; a day in school might mean having one hour free from classes to work on program development. Another difference is that businesses thrive on memos summarizing the hired expert's opinion on what needs to be done, while educators are accustomed to a democratic exchange of ideas about possibilities.

If your schools decide to team with a software publisher, remember that you are in charge of the content. Define expectations of time and production levels in advance. And use the tech-time to seek renewed visions of teaching through creative uses of interactivity.

-- Mary Axelson moderates Edubiz, a series of forums on educational software design on KCPT's LINK 19.