Michigan’s in debt but they want to buy iPods

April 11th, 2007 • 1 comment education

This op ed is nearly a week old but I’ve had it on the back burner. Michigan’s idea is spot on except for the fact that they’re far too in debt to really accomplish this without making some serious cuts elsewhere. But this isn’t about debt or taxes, it’s about the possible future of this endeavour.

Many schools, especially post-secondary, are struggling to find ways to deliver their content to their students. Kids these days are becoming more and more distant in class while at the same time becoming less extroverted with their peers. This means children are doing less physical socializing and more digital socializing. With digital audio players such as iPods getting cheaper by the week, children are engrossing themselves with them more and more in order to stay within their own personal space. So what does this have to do with school? Well, since schools are struggling to get children actually interested in learning, many are starting to produce podcast lectures and put their work into other portable media formats for students who want their information on-the-go and in any format they so choose. This now enables students who prefer their white earbuds to white lined paper can now keep up with the rest of the class all the while staying within their own private circle of solitude, hooked into their own digital medium.

At my last job, one of my coworkers worked for nearly a year to get this set up for our students. Once fully implemented, the students actually started improving their grades and understanding of subjects once we got the video lectures posted to their Blackboards and the MP3s of their lectures uploaded. Since they were able to immediately subscribe to their class’s podcasts and grab the media enclosures, they soon sent them to their iPods and went on their way and amazingly started to learn. Now the school’s budget for this small project went from a little over $100,000 to nearly $1M USD in a year’s time because of the sheer increase in student achievement. Instead of just a few classrooms outfitted with the proper equipment and facilities to produce digital classes, they’ve increased the number to over 30 I believe. And we weren’t the first school to try this, we certainly were one of the only ones to do it on such a grand scale in such a small amount of time.

Now, what does all of this have to do with Michigan? They’re trying to learn from their contemporaries and give students their lectures in a portable format and give the students the means to make these formats portable for them without any cost for the student or the parents, directly. Instead of less fortunate students admiring a classmate’s shiny new iPod, they all get iPods so there’s no “me too” syndrome to be had. With this, they’re enabling their students to learn how and when they want to and there’s little to no worry about envy or jealousy from students about who has what since they’re all on a level playing field. Unfortunately for Michigan, this will mean a hike in taxes in order to support this and with their current debt, many people are outraged. Instead, they’re seeing this from the short-term effects instead of the long-term effects it could mean for their children and future students and their education. If children are the future and education is key, why cut off such an enabling endeavour from the outset?

I know from previous experience that the upfront costs are high but once you’re over that initial hump, most of the cost is a one-time cost. Michigan can buy a few million iPods in bulk, at what will most likely be a very deep discount through Apple Education or PowerSchool, and from there on, they get to outfit a few million students with a new learining tool that can really enable them to learn. From that, depending on success rate, they could continue to purchase iPods and in lower numbers since you do not have to give out new iPods to each student each year, your monetary output diminishes each year. And once the students leave high school, they’ll just take their iPods with them and hopefully use the same techniques in college to further their education.

While I can see why people are lambasting this idea from the get go, they need to look further into this and see how other schools and other school districts are succeeding with similar — if not identical — educational endeavours.