Technology

OK, here we are in 2006, and things still haven't improved a bit. The rest of the rant still holds. Seriously, if you send me an app and it needs Win98-style filesystem permissions (IE: none), I'm sending it back with a "don't buy" recommendation to management. Enough is enough.

With the recent trend toward educational standards initiatives such as NCLB (The Federal No Child Left Behind Act), and similar legislation in many states and local jurisdictions, public school districts are faced with an increasing demand for data collection, storage, and management. At the same time, the potential benefit of a technology-based curriculum is becoming both more apparent and with the explosion of personal computing in the last decade, much more accessible. The opportunity is here, the need is here, and a carefully balanced approach to using technology in the classroom is what schoolchildren deserve.

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Unfortunately, the educational software industry has not kept up with demand, producing products which are behind the times, unsafe to operate on a network, or simply inadequate to the needs they are supposed to address. Take as one example Student Information Systems: the core software by which school districts track such diverse issues as grading, attendance, discipline, medical and legal alerts, bus routes, and a whole plethora of state- and federally-mandated data reporting requirements. While many solutions exist, they are fraught with gaps, missing pieces, and all too often, a basic lack of understanding of the needs of public education. Some popular solutions are excellent and easy-to-use, but are only designed for a particular school/site, thus causing data migration nightmares each year as students matriculate through the system. Others are more comprehensive, but run only on one platform hardly a realistic expectation for the notoriously diverse computing environments found in cash-strapped public schools, which often rely upon donated hardware in order to provide enough computers for students to learn upon as well as to perform basic administrative tasks. Some solutions are so easy to set up that they lack the flexibility that districts need, while others are so granular that it takes a team of technologists weeks to bring them to a basic level of configuration.

A critical place where opportunity exists is in providing software that is technologically current. This week, I had yet another conversation with an educational software vendor who said that in order for their software to be run by a non-administrative user on Windows 2000, the entire program directory in C:\Program Files had to have Full Access granted to any user on the machine. Were this an unusual occurrence, it would not have been notable, but in the sadly dated reality of educational software, this is more the norm than the exception. Nor is this issue specific to Windows; Ive seen such work-arounds for software on OS X as well. Why such software isnt written to support basic concepts of privilege separation is an example of the poor performance of many, if not most, educational software manufacturers. While software that was written for the Win98-series OS and requires archaic privileges to run is somewhat understandable, in OS X this is particularly egregious: the fact that software was substantially re-written for OS X and yet utterly fails to work correctly in a multi-user environment is inexcusable.

The stark reality is that, while educators struggle to learn new skills and upgrade their infrastructure to meet the educational needs of the children along with an ever-increasing burden of mandates, as an aggregate, educational software languishes in the days of green phosphor monitors and 8-bit sound. When I am one of three people given the task of managing over 900 computers and somewhere around 2000 end-users, the expectation that I should be required to break OS security models on a per-machine basis in order to overcome the incompetence, lack of foresight, or just plain laziness of software vendors is absurd. Id rather be deploying and maintaining more student computers, or coming up with new ways to make our somewhat limited resources as useful as they can be. Something tells me that the taxpayers would agree.

Make no mistake: there is educational software on the market that is excellent, especially from a teachers point of view. I support one application in particular that is beloved by the teachers in our district, but that drives me absolutely nuts from a technological point of view. It is not properly network-aware, requires very strange permissions in Documents and Settings, etc. However, it is my job and inclination to defer to professional educators in matters where their expertise is key, and then try as I can to overcome the ham-fistedness of the technology. Much educational software is like this: from a standpoint of teaching basic and advanced essentials to students, the software is fantastic; but from the perspective of a harried network administrator and support specialist, the software is a management nightmare and huge security risk.

Some companies dont bother trying. Recently I spoke with a representative from a company that provides critical software for scoring Special Education examinations (distributed on a floppy disk), inquiring about a newer version, as what we have runs poorly on MacOS 9.2, barely runs in a Classic environment, and visually looks very much like something written for a dumb terminal from the nineteen seventies. When I asked about a native OS X version, I was told that there may be an OS X version of this mission-critical software sometime in 2005, possibly. I imagined that Longhorn users can expect to see a version sometime in 2012, possibly, but didnt ask.

The challenges for a software company working with education are many: a kaleidoscope of platforms must be supported, a huge variety in in-house expertise within school districts will keep the help desk busy, the need to provide software that is not only easy to use but more importantly is educationally beneficial is of course the goal, and a general lack of funds in education when compared to corporate offerings makes development of educational software a risky investment. Perhaps for such reasons, the field has shrunk to the point of renewed opportunity, especially when one considers the fact that schools are required by mandate to move a great deal of data to the computer which previously was kept on paper or not kept at all. Another fact worth noting is that every new teacher currently entering the profession has experience using a computer, for the purposes of word processing at minimum, and usually much more. These teachers expect that the software they use to help them educate their students operate at least to the level of competence and reliability which their preferred office suite has. Teachers tend to enter the profession for the long haul, making them very attractive from a standpoint of customer loyalty. A company which routinely produces software that is technologically current, educationally excellent, and helpful in making the lives of educators easier, rather than harder, will find itself in a significant competitive advantage in a huge and rapidly-growing market, and will reap the benefit of this advantage for decades to come.