CourseSmart claims that it's saved college students $100 million by comparing apples to oranges

CourseSmart has put out a press release claiming that it's saved college students more than $100 million on eTextbooks and digital course materials since the company was founded in 2007. The press release doesn't say how CourseSmart came up with its savings figure, but it most likely compared the rental price for its eTextbooks with the full retail price of the equivalent print textbooks. The company clains to have 30,000 titles from "more than 33 publishers" (does that mean 34?,) representing over 90% of the core textbooks in use today.

The press release refers to a Book Industry Study Group survey that found that "close to 35% of students considering bookstore exchange or buyback programs say that it is not worth the effort or believe that the bookstore would likely not accept their textbooks." Of course, that means that 65% do believe that it's worth it to sell their textbooks back. The reason that CourseSmart is making this argument is that it only rents its eTextbooks; there's no purchase option, so students have nothing to sell back (or to keep, for that matter) at the end of the semester.

McGraw-Hill Education cuts "pay-for-performance" deal with Western Governors University

In what's certainly one of the first deals of its kind, McGraw-Hill Education has agreed to a "pay-for-performance" compensation deal with Western Governors University in Salt Lake City, which specializes in online courses. The publisher will sell its eBooks and adaptive learning tools to the University for a discounted flat fee; in turn, the University will pay McGraw-Hill a premium for each student who uses the materials and passes the course. The press release doesn't say how deeply McGraw-Hill is discounting its eBooks and tools, but given that the publisher is selling directly to the University instead of through a third-party bookstore operator, it has quite a bit of room to discount without affecting its profit margins.

Should you get an MBA if you want to do a startup?

There's a continuing thread of discussion about the value of getting an MBA if you want to do a startup. Some people think that it will give you valuable business knowledge, while others believe that it will put you in a financial hole that will take years to recoup.

You need to know a little about my background in order to put my opinions in perspective. I've got a BS in Management as well as an MBA in Marketing and Management Policy. I went directly from undergraduate to graduate school, something that was common when I was in college but is very rare with MBA programs today. I don't have an engineering or CS degree, but as of this summer, I will have been programming for 40 years (although I earned a living as a software engineer for only a few years.)

My bottom line is that if you've already got a BS in Engineering or Computer Science and you didn't take any business courses in undergraduate school, a MBA degree can be very helpful, but not necessarily in the way that you might think. Yes, you'll learn about the business essentials: Management, marketing, finance, economics, accounting, business law, advertising, market research, etc. However, what's even more important is the network of contacts that you'll make and your access to the school's alumni programs once you graduate. These contacts and services can help you throughout your career. Getting into a highly-regarded MBA program is disproportionately valuable, not only because the reputation of your school will rub off on you, but also because the contacts that you make while in school are likely to be of a higher caliber.

If you can't get into one of the top 20 programs, I'd suggest going for the most cost-effective program you can get--possibly a college or university with a good regional reputation. You'll still get education in all the business essentials, but you won't have to pay the huge tuition and fees that many MBA programs charge. Some of the top schools offer night programs that are less expensive and time-consuming, but are still taught by the same professors and lecturers as their full-time programs.

If you're still in undergraduate school or even just at the point where you're thinking about undergraduate school, you should take business courses along with your EE or CS major. A lot of people will disagree with me, but in my opinion, there is very little difference in the information you'll learn in undergraduate and graduate business courses covering the same topics. If the school that you're going to has a good undergraduate business program, and many engineering schools do, you can get an excellent business education while you're learning engineering.

My experience is that undergraduate business courses are better at teaching you about how to really do things than are MBA courses. Students graduate from top MBA programs ready to be CEOs in big companies. They're far less ready to get into the trenches and do the grunt work, but that's exactly what you'll do in a startup. If you're part of the founding team in a startup, you may have to shift your thinking from development to finance to sales to hiring to marketing to legal, all in one day. You're going to be doing the work, not a cadre of subordinates and staffers.

So, do you need an MBA in order to do a startup? Absolutely not. Is getting an MBA counterproductive? Probably not, but it may take a long time to pay back your student loans. Should you get some kind of business education? Yes. It will help you to understand concepts and avoid mistakes, and can save you (and your startup) an enormous amount of grief.

Videoconferencing: "Good enough" is good enough

I'm watching seminars put on by Stanford University's MediaX program. The first seminar, on the impact and use of new mobile video technology for news gathering, was technically a little shaky, but informative. The second seminar, on the value of new video technologies in business and education, seems to be more a sales pitch for Cisco's telepresence technology and similar offerings than a real discussion of the value of video. (If you haven't seen Cisco's commercials, their telepresence model uses big screens that allow you to see the participants in both sides of a teleconference in near life-size. Cisco's even bigger telepresence systems, which haven't been featured in television ads, use specially-built rooms and wall-size displays to give the illusion that the participants are all in the same room.)

Cisco-style solutions are very expensive; tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per site, with major bandwidth requirements. To vendors of these systems, Skype and similar services will never be a good substitute, because you can't see and hear every nuance of every participant. Sometimes the picture freezes. It's not immersive.

The problem with these arguments is that time and time again, high-end, high-quality offerings are rejected in favor of "good enough" solutions. CDs are being replaced by MP3 files that don't have the same sound quality but are far more flexible and less expensive to buy. Consumers eagerly watch video on their computers (or their phones, for that matter) that isn't the equal of what they can see on a HDTV, because they can watch what they want, how, when and where they want.

Teleconferencing works the same way. If I can use Skype or Apple's iChat to pull together an ad hoc videoconference with existing equipment and at little or no cost, do I really need to see if someone in the 23rd row is picking his nose? Just as consumers gravitate toward "good enough", smart businesses and educators will do the same thing.

How aggressive is Apple getting with its educational iPad pricing?

I learned from a source last week that Apple is offering the entry-level 16GB iPad to schools, school districts, colleges and universities for $230. That's about the same price as a Kindle 2, and reinforces earlier reports that the manufacturing cost of the iPad is far below the sales price. It also indicates that Apple is very serious about getting the iPad into the hands of as many students as possible. They've turned the iPad into almost an impulse purchase, especially for college students.

At Apple's introduction of the iPad, there was no mention of any textbook publishers or titles, but that content will have to be there in order to justify iPad sales into the academic market. I expect a flood of textbook and educational publisher announcements next month, to coincide with the first shipments of the iPad and to try to snag sales for the school year starting in September. It's going to be a long spring and summer for educational eBook vendors.