Dive Brief:

• Alabama’s Decatur City Schools is considering a fully digital transition by 2018 that would include adopting a student-directed learning model and doing away with traditional textbooks.
• The idea, which was proposed by a committee, now faces scrutiny and doubt from a skeptical school board.
• The potential digital conversion is based on a plan previously executed by North Carolina’s Mooresville Graded School District in 2007, where tech funding was supplied by cutting teaching staff and pay.

Dive Insight:

There may be a potential economic advantage to foregoing textbooks, but access to tech remains an issue for low-income students, whose families still might not have Internet connections or even computers at home. To counter the issue, the committee suggested creating a plan to offer discounted Internet at home to families. And because the district is already aiming for a 1:1 ratio of computers to students by 2018, a lack of a home computer likely wouldn’t end up being an issue.

The new digital model would highlight student-directed learning, a trend that continues to catch on nationally. It also potentially means even slimmer profit margins for textbook publishers, though many of the larger publishers have largely already made the digital transition themselves.

Yet funding ambitious digital plans like the one currently being considered for Decatur City Schools can be controversial. In North Carolina’s Mooresville Graded School District, a reported 37 teaching positions were eliminated to pave the way financially for the new technology.

A digital conversion would, however, unquestionably help prepare students for the increasingly digital modern workplace.