Business as Usual?
Right before I was leaving for work yesterday a colleague shared a blog post from Google highlighting some key points from a recent even they had.
They are adding a bunch of features to the Google Workspaces for Education product and they are also implementing some new pricing tiers. For the longest time Google Apps for Education (the original name) has been free. It was only a little bit ago that they implemented an enterprise level solution that carried a pretty hefty per user price tag with it.
It would appear that with this move forward the new pricing tiers could be a good option for school districts that want those extra features, but don't want to pay the premium price tag for the enterprise level product.
That is just some background and not really the point of this post...
After I read the email from that colleague, it really got me thinking about where we go from here. Barring another global pandemic, I have a feeling that the majority of school districts in the country are just going to go back to business as usual.
They will use the same traditional teaching methods they used in the past. Face to face instruction and simply using computers to search the Internet for research will become the norm.
So what happens to they companies that have made a killing this past year banking on remote work?
Sure, the likes of Zoom, Webex, and Google Meet are probably not going to go away. There are many businesses who have found that working remote is far more feasible than they previously would have thought. I think there are going to be a lot of businesses who shed the burden of a physical location and keep most of their workers remote.
Not so the case for schools.
I know of a lot of districts who paid for the enhanced version of products like Zoom. If they are no longer teaching remotely, why would they keep that expense on their books.
Again, barring another pandemic, I wouldn't be shocked if the same flood of new customers that companies like Zoom saw last Spring becomes a flood of mass cancellations come fall 2021.
Public school budgets are already battered beyond recognition. Even if they wanted continue doing remote instruction in some form, they likely can't justify the cost.
Take Zoom out of the equation for a second and assume the district uses the free version of Google Meets like mine does.
We still have a good 40% of our student population who doesn't have reliable Internet at their homes. We have about 200 mobile hotspots distributed to our students currently. Those hotspots carry a price tag of about $50 per month for the service on them.
At $120,000 per year, you can quickly see that there is no way school districts would be able to sustain that. This raises the question, how do you deliver remote instruction if the students don't have Internet?
This is question is going to lead to an even bigger one by the companies who have really profited from the pandemic.
Companies like Zoom are likely asking themselves how do we move forward when the pandemic is over?
Like I said, people will still use Zoom and Google Meets and all of the other options. However, I would bet the school districts make up a pretty big cut of their current subscribers, so if they leave, there is going to be a huge void to fill. If not, I believe we will be reading about a flood of cutbacks.
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