Your prosumer reference is indeed a useful description for what teachers and students ought to be in the 21st century. Alas the gap that you mentioned is a very wide one, and somehow I’m not optimistic that the gap will close any time soon as educators are resistant by nature and the KPI of academic results does not lend itself well to taking risks to try new things.

wow I’ll be interested to know your processes with regards to developing your point of sale software. Are employers typically clear or vague about what they want and require you to plug in the gaps?

I think your surmising of vertical integration in education is on the correct path. Perhaps the concept of “PROSUMER” – the merging of the producer and consumer – introduced by Alvin Toffler in the 80′s might help to close the gap.

Currently as you have mentioned despite digital teaching, formal education still depends quite a bit on textbooks and other published material. The vertical integration you might be looking for may lie in integrating the whole supply chain – students (products), schools & teachers (producers), publishers (medium) and the employers (consumers).

I believe there is still much of a gap between what the market wants and what the educational institutions produces.

However if employers are engaged continually in the educational process, this gap will close. Graduates will be in great demand the moment they leave school or even before that.

Apple’s type of vertical integration was a business success because in the consumer IT gadget market there is no hard and fast rules of what is needed. Steve Jobs and his team simply created products and pushed them out into the market with much marketing spin and cool design. I read that they never went around making consumer surveys.

In the business software market however businesses know what they need based on their operational requirements. Same with education employers already know what they need but currently there is not much of system to integrate employers’ inputs into the educational institutions.

I know how important such business end-users inputs can be because over the last 8 years I have been developing a Point of Sale software based almost entirely on such inputs.

If anyone who comes across this post has any questions about ClassDojo or needs help getting setup, please don’t hesitate to reach out – hello@classdojo.com

Cheers!

If anyone who comes across this post has any questions about ClassDojo or needs help getting setup, please do not hesitate to reach out at hello@classdojo.com!

Cheers!