You Get What You Pay For

As I wrote about previously, I recently returned from a conference on changing the way biology is taught in U.S. colleges and universities. We were all asked to present posters at the meeting, and rather than a generic "here is our cool software" poster, I decided to try and make myself unpopular by extolling the virtues of capitalism. I've morphed into a businessperson, after all, and what good is it to invite that perspective to an academic conference unless I say something different. Self-indulgence aside, I've come to believe that a capitalist perspective, with competition, is one of the more powerful change agents we can harness. Competition works to promote evolution in the natural world, and it could work to promote evolution in the world of biology education.

Here's the basic argument: there are a lot of people trying to make innovative educational materials. NSF's CCLI program funds 10-20 college biology projects per year. NIH funds some more, as does the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and other foundations, and many professors write materials independently as well. The vast majority of even the best of these efforts never reach the polished stage which would promote wide use. Hardly anyone finds them, and those who do realize they would take effort to adopt and don't go farther. This is especially true for educational software. I spent the better part of a day searching the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) for biology education "simulations". Of the 46 I found, only 12 were worth looking at (21 didn't even exist anymore). Six of those were from Jon Herron, who has since become a collaborator of ours on EvoBeaker in order to get paid for his work. The other six were all supported by large organizations like HHMI or major science museums. Out of all 46 listings, perhaps 2 or 3 showed evidence of being upgraded over time. The NSDL is NSF's showcase repository for free science materials (I think they've spent in the hundreds of millions of dollars on it so far), and they intend for it to be a destination for science teachers. What's actually there is pretty discouraging. An earlier well-regarded attempt to collect biology education software, the BioQuest library, met a similar fate—they had some nice stuff for a while, and it just degraded away (though BioQuest itself still exists and does some great work). You can go from one example to the next and find the same story.

Contrast that to commercial education products. Say what you want about biology textbooks, but they are polished, well-written, and generally easy to use. Not only that, any innovations in textbooks are heavily promoted—an instructor will have no trouble finding the best that textbooks have to offer. Our own software, whose first versions came out over 15 years ago now, is similarly polished, well-written (if I do say so), checked every year to make sure it will work smoothly, and regularly upgraded. It's also easy for an instructor to adopt, and we heavily promote it, bringing state-of-the-art teaching tools (if I do say so again) into a lot of classrooms. What's the difference between these and the NSDL? I think its simple: if we or the textbook publishers don't convince lots of people that our stuff is so good its worth paying for, we don't have a salary. Being able to pay for groceries is a very strong incentive to innovate, improve, and disseminate products. Knowing that there is competition keeps us moving forward quickly.

So although its antithetical to the academic mindset of open sharing (which I'm all for in research), I've come to believe that certain kinds of educational tools, such as software, textbooks in rapidly changing areas, and other tools that are either very expensive to develop or need constant maintenance and upgrades, are better done as commercial products. Moreover, these products should be sold in a way that the authors can receive a substantial income, enough to support themselves. Where the money comes from is not so important—it could be students purchasing, like with textbooks, or schools purchasing, or even the government purchasing and then giving to the schools. But some system should foster competition among educational tools, and reward the authors of those who make the best ones and get people to use them.

Now academics and educators are not known for their business savvy. So just saying "you have to go out and compete and sell your great new teaching tool" is not going to work. I believe what is needed is a marketplace that makes this easy. The equivalent of the application stores popping up for cell phones, a place where authors can sell their educational creations. If the marketplace itself is heavily promoted, instructors will know to go there first when designing a class, and all these great tools will be discovered and used. For the past 5 years, we've been developing just such a marketplace, called SimUText (in part with NSF support). Some of you have been helping beta-test over the past year, and we'll be slowly releasing it in the coming year. While its currently designed just to host our own virtual labs, we think it's to everyone's benefit (ours included) to have just one or a handful such marketplaces. That way, instructors are not confused about where to go, and good tools will get lots of exposure. So we intend to open SimUText up to other authors soon—if you are writing biology education software and wondering where to put it, get in touch.