Technology moves fast, but education takes a long time to embrace new ways of learning. What do you do as an educational publisher?
Eric Razenberg, CEO of ThiemeMeulenhoff, tells the story.
“It starts with the curriculum, which is drawn up by SLO, the national agency for curriculum development. They decide the what: what do children need to learn to be ready for further education or for society? Once that is clear, we set to work on the ‘how’. How are we going to teach it? We create an outline of the method, put that to teachers and authors, and then we start building it. For each method the process takes roughly two years.”
Developments in education
The question is always whether educational publishers drive developments or simply follow them. “We are not in charge of what is taught in schools, the government decides that, so we are certainly not the driving force there. At the moment there is a lot of attention for language, arithmetic and reading, because for many children those basic skills are not good enough. Those subjects are emphasised in the curriculum, alongside digital literacy and citizenship, and we make sure the methods we develop line up with it.
So we do not lead on what is taught, but we do have a view on HOW children and young people learn. Our knowledge of educational processes and of what works in learning and teaching counts for a lot there. We pay a great deal of attention to learning design: what does the research say about effective learning, how do we apply those principles, what form should the material take, which structure works best, which forms of teaching are inspiring? That is how we try to challenge pupils and produce the best method we can.”
“We keep challenging schools with innovative teaching methods, in the interest of education.”
Education is slow to respond, unfortunately, Eric says. “With ThiemeMeulenhoff we always try to stay at most one small step ahead. Move any faster than that and schools simply ignore your method. We once put millions into a platform for personalised learning, but there was no appetite for it at the time. Teachers thought it was clever and promising, but did not dare to start using it, because they could not see exactly what the computer was doing. They felt responsible for the children’s learning, quite rightly, and the computer was a black box to them. We think teachers would handle it differently today. We keep challenging schools with innovative teaching methods, in the interest of education, but we now pitch it better to the pace at which schools can move.”
How does the Netherlands compare with the rest of the world? Are we ahead on educational innovation, or behind?
“Ahead, absolutely. Innovations for education mostly come out of Silicon Valley or the UK and are often tried out first in countries such as Denmark, Israel and the Netherlands. For companies in the US and the UK, those three are the springboard to the rest of the world. We have an innovation-minded economy: the Netherlands is known as a country that takes up new things easily and can then sell them on to other countries. We are a good ten years ahead of Germany, for instance, certainly when it comes to adopting technology in education. Even so, progress here is slower than you would hope, especially when you consider that internet penetration in this country is 99%. It is odd, then, that only half of primary-school pupils in the Netherlands have a laptop or tablet at school. All the same, the Netherlands is much further along than most of the world.”
In his career at ThiemeMeulenhoff, Eric has set many changes in motion. ThiemeMeulenhoff is a strong brand, but Eric has also had to shift down a gear a few times. “I have had to temper my ambition and my enthusiasm more than once. Innovation in education simply takes time, as it turns out. Honestly, I am not sure I will live to see every school making the most of what technology can do.”
“It is often said that teachers do not want to innovate. That is nonsense. It is certainly not unwillingness. I think that in the current education system they are ‘surviving’.”
There is a serious shortage of teachers, so they sometimes have to keep an eye on several classes at once. Is a full classroom a safe place for a teacher to try something new? No. Make one small mistake and you spend a quarter of an hour getting the class back on task. You lose your credibility. Teachers certainly have the ambition to learn and to improve, but they are not given the chance. School leaders have to make room for that and let teachers introduce it slowly but surely. In my view, head teachers and school boards often lack the leadership this century calls for.”
A lawyer for publishers
Educational publishers run into all sorts of legal questions. “To get straight to the point: copyright is our lifeblood. Some time ago there was a case against a platform that had come up with a clever online way of making arithmetic more fun for primary-school pupils. They had gone round the various publishers to ask whether they could use the content of their methods, and had been told ‘no’ everywhere. So they simply copied it, from several publishers at once. Well, that is one way to go about it. Naturally we acted against that together. We joined forces with other publishers and brought proceedings. But the other side got wind of it, reacted at lightning speed and replaced all the copied content. These are the matters that lawyers like Jetse help us with.”
AI brings major challenges of its own where copyright is concerned. “If you have a text written by ChatGPT, there is no copyright on it. But how are we going to prove, in future, that our texts were written by our authors and not by AI?”
Another hot topic is privacy, Eric explains. “In 2015 there was a provocative item on RTL Nieuws. The headline ran: ‘The data of two million pupils could easily end up in the wrong hands’. That was of course wildly overstated, but suddenly there was a great deal of attention on the fact that data about children and young people sits with educational publishers. The government wanted to talk to us urgently about how we safeguard the privacy of these pupils and students. That eventually produced the Education Privacy Covenant, which sets out everything we have agreed on this. The covenant is revised regularly and adapted to new developments and circumstances.”
As a publisher you want to use the data you hold to improve your products, the methods, and to fine-tune learning to what pupils and students need. “In digital learning environments especially, it is interesting to analyse the data and give a pupil harder or, conversely, easier problems when that is what they need. The scope to use data that way is unfortunately still limited.”
AI in education
Zoom in on AI, which also runs on a great deal of data, and the question becomes what these tools are doing to education. It is already clear that this is a major challenge for schools. “Higher education uses software for plagiarism checks, for example. If you lift chunks of text from the internet, the software recognises it. Text from ChatGPT or other tools cannot be traced. So setting an essay is suddenly no longer a good way to assess anyone.”
Even so, we should embrace AI and give it a place in education, Eric believes. “It offers enormous opportunities. And yes, as a publisher we face challenges created by AI too, but I know it is not going away. I am currently taking a course at MIT in America on the impact of AI and what it could mean for our business strategy, so that I can make good choices for the future better informed. One of our designers recently had AI draw up a table of contents for a new title, without saying that AI had put it together. The authors were impressed and could not fault it. Speeding up processes like that with AI saves an enormous amount of time, which lets us bring methods to market faster and at lower cost. AI can also serve as a virtual teacher within a method. If a child gets stuck on a sum, they can ask the AI tool, which explains again briefly how it works so the child can move on. In short, we try to surf the AI wave rather than be swamped by it, because the impact is enormous and there are a great many interesting opportunities. For education, and therefore for us.”
Lawyers involved
Jaap Versteeg
LawyerJaap acts extensively for clients in the creative industries, including music, television/streaming/film, events, theatre, art and culture. He advises and litigates in the fields of intellectual property law, music law, unlawful publications, contract law and employment law.
