Outskirts Press, INC.

It is time to go "all-in" with the digital transition and realize its true end-point.

Containing studied critiques and survival strategies, The Consumerization of Learning is a distillation of knowledge from the author’s epic road trip to every major U.S. city. This is a book for educational leaders, teachers and parents as well as curriculum publishers. Find out about schools in the Age of Experience, the digital war for balance, what the future you will do to gain knowledge, the market blur, the jerk, digital curriculum evaluation, the hidden villain in institutional learning, teacher transformation, the anti-tech of Love, educators as software mavens, schools becoming thrilling Expos, conquering time, and other epiphanies.

Chapters include:

• Conquering Time
• The Grand Scheme
• A Model Architecture for Schools
• The Characteristics of Digital Curriculum
• Evaluating Digital Curriculum
• Un-gating Potential and Rigor
• Love, the Anti-Tech
• Paying for It

This is a deep dive into the disruption at hand for the way leaders lead education digitally. It highlights consumerization as the act of making something desirable and consumable by the individual. If schools fully discover and adapt to consumerization’s ingenuity, it has the power to give teachers back time spent custom building every digital resource themselves—time that can now be turned to attention on students, to create more hands-on learning activities, and to guide students in the fullness of a digital learning experience. Read this book and be part of the discussion about how schools are finding a new relevancy at the natural end-point of digital transition: maximized live experience and quality digital learning, also known as "expo" education.

Leaders in Education Praise The Consumerization of Learning

"The creators of Amazon know the future of retail is direct to consumer. The founders of Uber know the future of transportation is on-demand. The visionary at Tesla understands that the future of energy creation and storage is distributed. LeiLani Cauthen knows the future of Education shares all three of these characteristics. In The consumerization of Learning she shares her expansive knowledge of what it all means."
–Erik Heinrich
Former IT Director, San Francisco Unified School District

“A breath of fresh air – it is a thought-provoking, visionary book that every educator, teacher, administrator and parent must read. Change, as LeiLani describes it, is absolutely happening. Educators can join in... or be left behind.”
– Dr. Elliot Soloway
School of Education, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

“LeiLani has been asking essential questions as she investigates the educational system across the United States. In approaching trends and gaps from a business lens, she is able to highlight areas that may seem obvious after she points them out but may have gone largely unnoticed or unconsidered from an education focused lens. In the three years of knowing LeiLani, I’ve gained new insight and perspective shifts, learned about broader trends, gaps and predictions for future movement in digital content and strategy, and been able to fit together puzzle pieces I didn’t know I was missing before. She has a forward thinking vision for the future of education, paradigm shifts, organizational shifts, with students at the center.”
– Dr. Michelle Zimmerman
2016 NCCE Outstanding Technology Educator of the Year, Microsoft Innovative Education Expert at Microsoft Education Teacher/Researcher, Renton Preparatory Academy

The world has changed. Outside the school, media is no longer a one-way “tell” directed at you without any way for you to talk back as in the days of only television and radio, media is online and interactive. It “responds.”
The travel industry used to be made up of thousands of agencies with physical offices in cities worldwide, as were insurance agencies. Retail is being transformed significantly, with more and more closures, and millions of square feet of store space going unleased as shopping online explodes.
What I find so interesting in this is that my observations about the consumerization of learning is that it is an inevitability, not mere musings. Inevitable because consumer demand, industry marketing, and uninhibited access through the Internet are creating an unstoppable force.
The fact is, that as I write this, consumerized learning is a reality that is already here. I am imploring schools and teachers to see this train coming, to do what is in their power to shift.
The worry by some about any software learning being a dehumanizing force, lessoning human interaction, is evidence that they don’t know what it is and can’t imagine how tech could help teachers and schools because all they have ever seen is a tech incursion bringing mass confusion. In this they are entirely right. We should be ashamed of how the tech transition in the education sector has largely been mismanaged through lack of really visionary leadership from inside the tech reality.
Product pushing, the non-profits arms of major corporations funding the marketing saturation of tech though seemingly innocent give-aways and thought leadership fests, and just the whole explosion of potentialities has needed a firm hand to guide schools through.
What consumerized learning could be when it is fully matured is a direct route to quality knowledge, on demand.
It’s not true that it will be without all human interaction or lessen the fact that human teachers are an important part of a lot of learning. What can happen is that teachers are on-demand as many software systems offer currently with “pop-up” interactive video chat in shopping systems, and that teacher specialists offer office hours for specific mentoring. The perpetually popular live physical classroom is also probable in that schools will be offering a surge of more social hands-on and project-based activities to further enliven learning around the now largely digital object world. It is how they will stay relevant. Sophisticated systems with complete customizations for each learner will already offer intersection points for teacher decisions and assistance.
With this change is huge opportunity for individuals in the teaching profession.