As schools continue to creep toward replacing print materials with digital content, teachers, principals, and district leaders may be forming very different views of the challenges related to that transformation.
All three groups ranked affordability as the biggest of 10 challenges related to using digital content, according to a proprietary 2015 Education Week Research Center survey of roughly 1,000 registered users of edweek.org.
About 40 percent of district leaders, 41 percent of principals and other school-based leaders, and 51 percent of teachers found it very challenging that the cost of the desired content was unaffordable.
But from there, the three groups diverged.
Asked about a series of challenges with digital content, teachers found nine of 10 of those obstacles more problematic than school or district leaders did. This raises questions about the extent to which district leaders, who may have more influence over selecting instructional content, are familiar with the realities of how digital-content purchases play out in classrooms and in schools.
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As these school-based educators move up the ladder to the central office, there may be a sea change in priorities for digital-content purchasing. Newly minted administrators could bring fresh perspectives from having coped with vexing problems on the front lines of classrooms.
The dichotomies begin with Internet bandwidth. For teachers and school leaders, the top challenges in using digital content are inadequate network bandwidth, along with affordability. The survey defined digital content as core content, individual lessons, supplementary material, and other instructional supports delivered through devices or apps.
For district leaders, bandwidth barely registered a blip. They were about half as likely as teachers to say bandwidth was a big barrier.
District leaders said teacher training was the No. 2 challenge. For teachers and school leaders alike, training was much less of a problem. Behind bandwidth and affordability, the next-most-challenging problem for teachers and school leaders was a lack of evidence that digital content had improved or would improve their students’ achievement.
District leaders were less than half as likely as teachers to report that student-achievement concerns were a major challenge.
All three groups, though, did say that concerns about students’ lack of home access posed a relatively big barrier to using digital content.
Compared with school and district leaders, teachers were the most likely to find home access to be a significant challenge. The share of educators who found students’ home access very challenging ranged from 31 percent for school leaders, to 35 percent for district leaders, to 41 percent for teachers.
Teachers Search for Support
Teachers’ next-biggest problem behind affordability, bandwidth, student achievement, and home access? Lack of support from digital-content providers. More than three times as many teachers as district leaders found lack of provider support to be a major challenge.
In a recent Education Week article on why print persists in schools despite interest in digital content, Robert F. Carbon, a high school math teacher in Florida, said he used both print and digital textbooks.
He gives students the option of using either one at home, especially since some students prefer flipping through paper textbooks, or complain that the screens of their devices are too small for reading the text.
“I like the combination of both,” Carbon said. “The fact [the district is] not forcing it one way or another is the way to go. If they went all-digital, I would not be a happy camper.”
