A $400.00 lightbulb - part 1
Is educational technology worth it?
Another interesting conversation has emerged at work. Does the cost of technology equal it’s benefit?
In business, this idea is referred to as ROI (return on investment). We invest X dollars into technology, support, and infrastructure. Does that equal the educational return?
In keeping with my idea of 2 realms in educational technology (blog post series: part 1 , part 2 and part 3) I want to approach the idea of ROI remebering technology serves different roles in education.
Spending - hypothetical high school with ~ 1200 students and 70 teachers
Disclaimer: This is a very rough idea of the yearly costs associated with running a high school technology program. I will demonstrate in another post how quite a bit of money can be saved.
Network Administrator: $50,000
Computer teacher (faculty position): $50,000
Part time technician: $20,000
Programmer (the person who makes the schedule - might be a guidance counselor):$45,000
Bandwidth (T1 or greater) : $12,000
3 labs with 30 computers each: $40,000
3 laser printers - one for each lab: $2000
70 teachers with a computer each: $25,000
1 printer per department (5): $2500
1 laptop cart with 30 computers: $5,000
5 projectors on mobile carts (example) : $5,000
Windows OS licensing: $20,000
Office licensing: $20,000
Server licensing: $10,000
Student information system licensing: $5000
Router / switch licensing: $5000
Anti-virus licensing: $5000
Course management licensing: $5000
Help desk licensing: $1000
wireless licensing: $1000
Office staff desktop computers: $15,000
Office staff printers: $1000
So this equals about $344,000 a year. Wow. Add in additional software costs (which I didn’t include here) and staff development and training, and our fictional high school is spending about $350,000 a year on technology.
Are we getting $350,000 worth of better education? As usual, the answer is: it depends
To be continued....
On 18 January 2008, Ira David Socol inscribed the following thoughts about this post:
As you move forward, hopefully you will be exploring the nature of the infrastructure assumptions here. For example, much of what schools pay for might be replaced with the (very inexpensive) Google Account. Worrying less about “locking down” systems would save huge amounts of money. Leveraging student-owned mobile phones (especially the kind of phones the rest of the world uses that are now beginning to enter the US market) can replace much of the equipment costs.
I am not suggesting that “technology” (this definition, not the logically more expansive one which includes “print technology” - “furniture technology” - “lighting technology” - and “architectural technology") is expensive - so are restrooms, so are gymnasia, so are parking facilities, etc. But I think that when we speak of technology in education we need to understand it both in light of our “unexamined expenditures” and in education’s role as the worst possible consumer of new technologies - organizations which almost always spend the most to accomplish the least.
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