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PRINT.IT
01732 759725
CLASSROOM TECHNOLOGY
be used primarily while connected to
the Internet, with most applications
and data residing in the cloud.
Now is the time to equip our
students with cheap devices and let
them break free and learn.
4. Educational analytics and
payment by results
Learning analytics is already a big
trend impacting schools, colleges
and universities. One interesting
opportunity that detailed learning
analytics creates is payment by
results.
Imagine an educational
publisher who has the confidence
in their product to say “If your
students spend 1 hour per week
using our courseware and we
cannot demonstrate a learning
improvement, you will not have to
pay for the software”. The Online
Courseware can track a student’s
time on task and their demonstrated
learning improvement. It is good for
publishers, teachers and students.
The learning improvement could
be showing mastery of a skill, a
demonstration of gained knowledge,
an improvement in grammar or
sentence length, comprehension etc.
Analytics also allows large
scale studies of the effectiveness
of learning interventions. e.g.
do students who use a writing
intervention improve their writing
faster than students who do not?
What does this mean for schools?
Schools can have confidence in
investing in the courseware because
the publisher can demonstrate
the learning improvement, and is
prepared to guarantee it if the school
commits to using it properly.
5. The flipped classroom
The flipped classroom – a
pedagogical model in which the
typical lecture and homework
elements of a course are reversed
and short video lectures are viewed
by students at home before the
class session, while in-class time
is devoted to exercises, projects or
discussions – will continue to grow in
education in the next 3-5 years.
One of the greatest benefits of
‘flipping’ is that levels of interaction
between teacher and student and
student and student increase
that isn’t best suited to that volume,
a rule can be set to redirect that
volume to a more appropriate device
and perhaps to recharge that volume
to a cost centre or shared account.
You can also introduce rules for
duplex printing, to force email printing
to mono printing, to force some
colour printing to mono printing and
to do a number of other things.
“In most situations, rules will be
applied. We take a global look at
the output volume by auditing the
environment over a period of time.
We then deploy a solution and look
at how best to reduce or disburse
print volume within an environment.
You can make devices more efficient,
you can make print volume more
cost-effective and you can make user
workflows more streamlined and
improved. It’s those three elements –
it’s looking at the whole environment
and putting in place rules-based
printing that can achieve all those
different goals.”
PrintIT:
How much typically can
you reduce costs by?
Bob Taswell:
“That varies and it
sometimes varies very dramatically
depending upon the existing cost
base. Education environments
across the field have huge existing
contract exposures due to financial
commitments that were made many
years ago and continue to have a
bearing on current costs. In one
case, a competitor company had
signed a contract with an academy
in North London based on three
machines that had a capital cost of
£80,000. Yet, the total commitment
– the lease cost – was almost a
million pounds. The academy had to
bear that cost because it had signed
a financial agreement and the lease
documentation.
“When we look at education
situations, we have to look at the
existing cost base of the equipment,
the existing deployment of the
equipment, the volumes being done,
the way those volumes are achieved
and what the customer wants to
move to.
“One of the big problems we
encounter is when people print
but don’t collect their print jobs. In
some audits we have done, that
volume accounts for between 10%
and 15% of overall print volume. A
2.3 million sheet school can save
300,000-350,000 sheets of paper
instantly simply by forcing people to
authenticate before their print job is
produced.
“Historically, schools did not
have a control solution in place.
When students, staff, external
workers pressed print and then
changed their mind or forgot about
it, print jobs would still be output on
relatively expensive printers, and
as you walked around you would
see quite a large volume of paper
in bins that people hadn’t collected.
With a control solution, if a person
doesn’t collect the print job it will
expire and automatically be deleted
and therefore not output. That saves
paper and the cost of the print. We
can produce a report showing how
much has been saved from the expiry
of these jobs. It’s rarely below 10%
and is often between 10% and 15%
of total volume.”
PrintIT:
Obviously there’s a cost
benefit in that. Are schools
interested in carbon reduction as
well?
Bob Taswell:
“Very much so. Some
more than others. What we find is
that every education establishment
is different, but carbon footprint is
important to us all, particularly in
high volume situations. We have
various tools within the software
that will give a carbon footprint
diagnosis of paper usage and paper
output, with dashboards showing the
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