Yesterday’s “one size fits all” textbooks and online programs are giving way to modern platforms that offer teachers tailored resources and the ability to adjust and adapt to new and emerging needs.

Pick up a high school mathematics textbook and you’ll see that it was authored by a number of collegiate luminaries, put through a series of pilot tests, and experienced numerous developmental cycles over a period of time. The same goes for most of today’s computer programs. After extensive testing, feedback and input from various schools and experts, the publisher puts together a beautifully-packaged set of printed and online materials that instructors rely on to teach mathematics. The assumption is that one set of instructional tools will work for everyone, yet we all know that no two schools, teachers, or students are alike.

In many industries, mass production of products and tools is out. Small batch, tailored production, even enabling end users to tailor products themselves, made possible by new techniques and technologies, is in. Craft beers, golf clubs, self-published books, and more can all be designed, produced and tailored in smaller quantities and at the point of use, precisely targeting tastes and needs and optimizing performance. 3D printers have become common place and affordable, enabling many complex products to be manufactured one at a time, as needed.

That’s problem number one- educational resources are “one size fits all” yet most of the rest of the world has rightfully moved beyond that.

Problem number two- long term commitments.

Whether necessitated by lack of options, limited and structured budgets, steep and long learning curves or an awkward cumbersome decision-making process (that no one wants to engage in very frequently) when schools purchase educational resources, textbooks and otherwise, they tend to commit for years at a time.

Here’s how it works:  A school and often an entire community (or even a state) goes through an in depth, protracted process of researching, evaluating and testing a set of textbooks and related resources that often are the best choice from a set of “less than perfect” options. Like any political process, one decision is foisted on everyone, and it’s guaranteed that many are dissatisfied. Perhaps most importantly, the commitment the school district makes is often for 5 or more years. It’s a difficult predicament, being forced to pick a suboptimal set of resources, and being expected to live with those resources for five or more years.

When you buy a fixed set of resources for six to eight years out, the expectation is that they will remain relevant, but this is rarely the case. And more often than not schools jump from one text to another each cycle because they end up dissatisfied with the persistent status quo.

In fact, the odds that a school district continues with the resources it adopted last time are minimal. It’s much smaller than you’d expect; there’s just not much loyalty after those five to eight years. The entire approach is obsolete.

Again let’s consider the rest of the world. Long term commitments are so “old school”. Rapid change is a fact of life. We are encouraged to maintain a “learning” state of mind. How is that consistent with a fixed set of resources? Even in education, educational resources aside,  as one article put it, the pace of change is changing! “The status quo won’t begin to cut it. Massive change is heading our way”.

In sum, one size fits all, static resources and long term commitments in an increasingly personalized dynamic and rapidly changing world are simply obsolete.

And now school districts and teachers have an alternative!

Modern Educational Resources

To fill these gaps, websites like Teachers Pay Teachers and LearnZillion and Pinterest are offer a variety of lessons and activities, and even lesson building tools, so that teachers can adapt to and address new and emerging needs in their classrooms. Moreover, lots of money has been funneled into not-for-profit efforts to deliver free resources on the web. Khan Academy, Mathematics Vision Project, Engage New York, and Illustrative Mathematics are all attempting to provide more choice and access to schools and teachers so they aren’t saddled with traditional resources and limited by budgets.

These are big steps forward and mostly very high quality, and they allow teachers to respond and react as needed but, unfortunately, they are only partial solutions. In fact, the vast breadth and variety of what’s available on the internet these days is as much a curse as it is a blessing.

It is very difficult and time consuming for teachers and district leaders to select, assemble and make use of these resources in a coherent, supportive, scalable and sustainable way. They are piecemeal solutions that may or may not address the appropriate educational objectives in the appropriate manner, and it takes a lot of expertise and work to put them to good use.

It’s kind of like understanding one tax form in a long and complex tax return. Putting the entire return together and making sure the calculations tie together and are accurate takes a lot of expertise. And every return is different. Thankfully we have TurboTax ®.

Likewise assembling educational resources and making they are, in their totality coherent and logical and fit the needs of each school, teacher and student, for every learning objective, takes a lot of expertise. Thankfully we have the Curriculum Engine ®.

Dynamic Curriculum in a Dynamic World

Wouldn’t it be ideal if every teacher, every school and every school, district had access to an experienced, expert curriculum department that understood each of their needs and the needs of their students? Both at the beginning of the school year and as the year progressed? With unlimited capacity and the ability to author new courses on demand and for free, for any need that might arise? Sounds unrealistic, doesn’t it. Well not anymore. I am glad you asked.

The Curriculum Engine has the wizards, algorithms tools and resources to make designing, authoring, assembling and distribution online and printed educational resources quick and easy. It has the underlying “connective tissue” to ensure that you can precisely target relevant learning objectives, no matter that state you have, and thousands of instructional components that have been curated and described so that they can be readily access and confidently put to use.

• By offering a resource that offers unlimited course creation and editing capacity on an “all you can eat” framework, we’re helping schools save money.
• We’re helping teachers and curriculum leaders and designers save time and improve outcomes, by enhancing and extending their expertise.
• We are helping districts define and tailor make courses to meet the needs of different schools teachers, classroom and students in their district.
• We’re helping improve educational outcomes by giving educators a tool to immediately respond to emerging needs, whether it’s a need for content recovery or credit recovery for struggling Algebra 1 students, additional homework to prepare for an end of course test, a new instructional sequence for a core high school math course or an entirely new set of state standards.

The modern world is dynamic and fast changing, and every district, school and teacher face this reality every day. Finally they can have resources and tools that match.

In finishing

As the educational landscape continues to shift—and the pace of that shift accelerates- the traditional textbook is becoming increasingly ill- suited and obsolete. Finally, educators can have access to more dynamic, personalized math resources that reach schools, teachers and students where they are at the moment of need. It’s time for a change.

Al Noyes is CEO of Walch Mathematics