Programmers started shoveling data out of the National Archives and other pubic domain resources onto digital media. That means your schools now have to compete with industry to keep your best teachers. But if you can keep your classroom teachers and curriculum writers at home, it means you have an extraordinarily valuable resource. What's more, trying to market a product can seriously compromise a public institution. That's where a business partner comes in.
Distribution is the primary value of such a partner.
Schools need a corporate partner to participate in the corporate world. Using existing programs and contracting for outside distribution, which creates a pure revenue stream back to the school system, seems to work. Zolla tells the story of touring a large media center with hundreds of hours of instructional video that had been created because the institution could not find commercially produced resources. But on a hunch, Zolla submitted 20 programs to the California Clearinghouse, a state-run evaluation center that rates educational media on a scale of 1 to 5. When he received the ratings some months later, he says, the average score was 4.7.