Back to School Starts Now: Why the K-12 Ecosystem Needs You to Be Ready

While we wind down the 22-23 school year, it's time (past time) to start looking at what schools will need to be successful next school year. New compliance requirements, an increasing emphasis on data privacy and security, and ongoing updates to rosters and grade pass back are just a few of the issues curriculum companies have to address. Now. So let's look at the mindsets and the motivations for ensuring you're ready for the next iteration of K-12's digital ecosystem. 

Do We Really Need to Think about Back To School in May/June? Yes. Here’s why.  

First, August will be here before you know it. Sure, students and teachers will still be in sandals, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be off and running all too soon. If you’re in the curriculum space, you will want to be sure school districts have everything in place to deliver your award-winning curriculum. Second, teachers and students need to start strong every year.

Shaking off the summer slide means engaging quickly and sustaining that engagement for 180 days. If a product isn’t really ready for school, students won’t make the demonstrable gains your product is capable of delivering, particularly if teachers are burdened with translating content into curriculum. 

How C2C thinks about Back to School

At C2C, we’re all about making great curricula 100% classroom-ready. Back to School is an exciting time of year for us because we know what a difference our platform can make in adoption of your curriculum product. As you will have figured out by now, back to school, for us, is right now. 

If we’re adamant in encouraging curriculum publishers to get started now it’s because we’ve found these four preparatory steps to be key to your success, and they take time: 

• Conception - We show you how your curriculum could look and function on our platform including greater interactivity, engagement, alignment, and reporting.

• Goal Setting - Together, we’ll set goals and establish all requirements to get your curriculum from content to classroom.

• Launch - Through rapid prototyping and iterative development we will help you pilot your program, implement feedback, and support your marketing, sales, and training teams.

• Progress Monitoring - We’ll be with you every step of the way through customer feedback, new feature requests, new product launches, and every sales campaign.

Tick, tock. It’s already POSTING MONTH. It’s really time to think about Back to School, and we’re ready to help you make it a season to celebrate. But before we start popping corks, there are some fundamental issues that providers must be thinking about. And yes, thinking about right now. 

Ecosystem Readiness

First and foremost, any curriculum management system (CMS) must operate within the technology infrastructure schools are already using. That includes being compatible with existing Single Sign-On (SSO) capability, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Student Information Systems (SIS), Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), and more. Can it meet the technical standards required to support the curriculum creation, management, and delivery processes, communicate with other systems, handle millions of concurrent users, and scale as you grow?

Those requirements may already limit the pool of possible content management systems  to those specifically designed for education. There's a good reason for that. A CMS built for another industry won’t meet a school’s needs.  For example, a marketing or e-commerce CMS is not designed to facilitate the learning process. A library CMS is not designed to build curriculum. And, despite the close affinity, LMS platforms are not a viable alternative. Why? Because an LMS is not an aggregated publishing solution. An LMS will only be able to distribute content within that specific LMS, not the dozen or so LMS solutions your program will also need to work with.

Even a generic CMS that can be customized, will have to be customized. That means the school will need the money, time, engineers, product developers, subject matter experts, and more, to support that customization. 

You may have heard of Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS). While these get closer to the features and capabilities specific to education that will save time, reduce cost, and eliminate barriers, LCMS are often built with a particular learning stage or educational focus in mind, like Corporate Training, Licensure and Certification, Professional Development or Higher Education. 

K-12 is a unique curriculum development space for a number of reasons, one of which is security.  Student data is subject to some of the most stringent security protocols. Adherence to CIPA, COPPA, and FERPA is the minimum threshold for safeguarding data. A cloud-based CMS must be continuously monitored to ensure it meets state and district compliance standards.

Standards are another major requirement for management of K-12 content and the CMS saves editorial time in standards mapping development, maintenance and updates. Subject matter standards (from providers like EdGate) must be aligned and mapped to individual pieces of content. This will provide greater transparency in curriculum scope and sequence and enable creation of customized curriculum for different customers. 

Student Engagement 

One stand-out of a digital-first learning environment is how subject matter can leap off the page and take the student along on a journey. Elements like video, audio, images, interactive websites, simulations, graphic organizers, Google files, and presentations make learning memorable and impactful.  

Having all those assets is one thing. Making them seamlessly accessible to students is another. The CMS will need powerful search capabilities that allow thousands of assets to be organized, tagged, aligned customized, and built into a curriculum path. Videos, high-resolution images, interactive lessons, and assessments can be large files. Schools will want to know they have ample storage and room to grow. 

Digital’s ability to transform content from passive to interactive is one of its core strengths, schools will want to know they are getting the full benefit of being digital-first for students, and teachers.  

Teacher Lift

Teachers are the center of the K-12 universe, so we have to make sure, as they enter into the next school year, they can do so with good energy. That means reducing the burden - the lift - they have to carry in preparing lessons. 

Digital offers opportunities to make instruction more efficient for the teacher in ways that print simply cannot match. When all the elements of a curriculum are integrated into one CMS, it streamlines the process of content creation, delivery, and usage. No more moving across systems, clunky spreadsheets, manual updates, time-consuming QA processes, or costly external validation and complex reporting.

Any teacher time saved in planning and administration tasks can be redirected into instruction. Functions like autograding, standards and skilled-based data and intelligence, curriculum sequencing, instructional or differentiation support, when automated or made faster and easier, lighten the load on teachers.  

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This last point - accounting for the teacher lift - is so critical for back-to-school success. At this point in late spring, teachers are spent. Many are in review mode as they prepare for end-of-year assessments, and prepare to wrap up the year. Know what else they’re doing, though? They are thinking about next year. They are thinking about what changes they’d make to their own teaching practice, what materials they want to discard, keep, or update. 

The emphasis on digital delivery remains high, underscoring the importance of any/all curriculum providers to be ready. However, every leap forward requires getting over some hurdles. For digital K-12 education, that means new compliance requirements, an increasing emphasis on data privacy and security, and ongoing updates to rosters and grade passback. 

There’s a lot to do between now and the first day of school, with too little time to do it alone. That’s why providers need a platform partner that never takes a day off. C2C is here to provide not only the platform but also the guidance to take your program to the next level. We’ll be here preparing for a smooth back to school for educators and students across the country. Though we’ll probably wear sandals while we do it. 

Join our B2S webinar on Thursday 6/1, 10am ET

For many students, the first day of school is less than 120 days away. While back to school is furthest from their mind, it should be top of mind for any curriculum company that wants to be ready for digital on day one. Join Johanna Wetmore of C2C and Dr. Adam Phyall, Director of Professional Learning and Leadership at All4Ed, for a discussion on what leading curriculum companies are (or should be) doing to make sure they are ready for back to school, starting now.