GOOGLE EDUCATION: Schools are ditching Google from all
fronts. Up until the pandemic, Google Clasroom interest was increasing year after year. But,
since 2020, interest in Google Classroom has struggled to even reach levels of 2015. Instead,
many schools are opting for third party solutions like Schoology, Canvas, and Blackboard. It’s not
just Google’s virtual classrooms that schools are ditching either, schools are also ditching Gmail.
A quick Google search will bring up dozens of articles from school newspapers detailing the
change. Here’s a few examples. If you look up the opposite, however, not only do you find
fewer results but the results you do find are often from 2010. And as for the oh so famous
chromebooks. These used to be the go to device for many school districts but more recently schools
have started to complain about them. Apparently, chromebooks have very short life span making them
a rather bad investment. This is a very bad sign not just for Google’s educational business but
their office suite as whole. Here’s the thing, everyday people virtually never pay for Google
Drive or Google Docs or Gmail because the free tier is more than enough for most people. So,
much of them money that Google and Microsoft make from such products come from corporations
and schools. Google was never really able to break into the corporate market with their office suite
but it did seem like they were breaking into the school market. The collaboration features
and online nature of Google’s office suite made it perfect for team projects and presentations.
Combine this with the pandemic and you would think that schools would be paying Google
more than ever, and that was the case at the beginning. When schools didn’t know where to go,
they turned to a familiar brand leading to chromebook sales rocketing by 87% between 2019
and 2020. But, now that schools have had time to become familiar with Google’s shortcomings
and research other solutions, it appears that a popular choice is to ditch Google and here’s why.
MICROSOFT DOMINATES: To understand why schools are
suddenly ditching Google, we first have to take a look back at why Google became so popular amongst
schools in the first place as it was definitely not because it was the best option. I mean there’s
really no comparison between Microsoft Office and G Suite. Though G Suite had a few unique features
like easy collaboration and autosaving onto the cloud, Microsoft Office was the clear winner.
And this is why corporations never really jumped on board with G Suite. They were looking for the
best tools available. Not to mention, people were already familiar with the Microsoft Office Suite,
so going with Microsoft was a no brainer. For schools, however, the choice wasn’t as clear.
Sure, Microsoft was better but what real value would children especially in elementary school
get from Excel or Word. The reality was not much. I remember, back when I was in kindergarten and
1st grade, our class would go to the computer lab just to practice typing. As we moved into 4th and
5th grade, we would write and revise our essays on paper. But, when we were ready for the rough
draft, we would switch over to computers. But that was really the extent of computer use. So,
safe to say, Microsoft Office was quite overkill for most school applications but it wasn’t just
Office that was overkill, it was really the whole computer experience. Most students had no use for
a full on Windows machine or Outlook email client. In fact, this just made students harder to manage.
Instead of working on the final draft of an essay, students would just jump onto Armour Games or
Miniclip. So, giving children access to a computer was often more of a distraction than a tool.
Not to mention, Windows and Office were quite expensive. Schools often had to shell out $100+ to
Microsoft alone with each computer. Clearly, what schools needed was a cheaper watered down version
of the whole computer experience. This seems like the perfect opportunity for Google to step in with
the G Suite and that’s what they tried doing in 2006 but it wasn’t as successful as you might
think. While Google’s offerings did mesh better with the needs of schools, it wasn’t something
that schools really paid too much attention to. After all, each school only had 1 or 2 computer
labs, so paying a premium for 25 or 50 computers wasn’t the biggest concern. Not to mention,
schools had full control of when they would incur these costs. They could just stick around
with Windows XP and Word 2003 as long as they wanted. So, in the late 2000s, schools weren’t
exactly jumping up and down to switch to Google but all of this would change with the 2010s.
GOOGLE BREAKS IN: Google’s popularity within the educational space
can really be summed up by one trend: schools aiming for a student to device ratio of 1:1.
Suddenly, buying Windows licenses wasn’t just a matter of purchasing 25 or 50. Elementary schools
themselves had to buy several hundred. Middle schools and high schools had to buy thousands
and colleges had to buy tens of thousands. Some richer schools continued to shell out money for
Microsoft licenses but this didn’t last for long as Microsoft would shoot themselves in the foot.
In 2010, Microsoft would introduce a subscription model for Office called Office 365 and this would
eventually become the only option. Really, the only reason for this move was that a subscription
model was more lucrative for Microsoft than a licensing model. Most corporations would just
pony up the cash and jump onto the subscription model because for professional use, the G Suite
wasn’t really a viable option. For schools, however, Google’s offering started to seem a lot
more attractive. Google’s offerings were not only cheap starting at just $3 per student per year
but you could even get it for free if your school met certain qualifications. Around the same time,
Google would also come out with the Chromebook which was also perfect for schools. Schools didn’t
have to worry about kids doing anything too crazy with Chromebooks because they couldn’t do much to
begin with. It turned out that Chromebooks and the G Suite were the exact watered down versions
of computers that schools were looking for. And before you knew it schools were switching
to Google left and right. This isn’t to say that they ditched Microsoft completely. Schools
might’ve still had a few dozen Windows and Office based computers in computer labs. But, as for the
hundreds and thousands of computers that were being issued to students, these were of course
chromebooks. So, when Google launched Classroom in 2014, it’s no wonder why it became the go to
option for most schools. But, this hayday for Google education only lasted for a few years.
By the late 2010s, teachers and students started noticing quite a few shortcomings. You see, Google
Classroom was nothing more than a UI to share and manage Google Drive documents and presentations.
When a student turns in a document, literally the only thing that’s happening is that the sharing
permissions are being changed. The document gets shared with the teacher’s drive and the student
loses editing permissions. That’s pretty much it. This in itself was a pretty crappy solution
because students could no longer edit the document once it was turned in which didn’t really make
sense in a lot of situations. Also, there were no robust systems for self grading assessments,
announcements, gradebooks, online discussions, or meetings just to name a few. These are all
basic features that are available in every other e learning solution. But, despite the shortcomings,
most schools put up with Google throughout the late 2010s because it was cheap and
was mostly sufficient for their needs. But all of this would change with the pandemic.
GOOGLE GETS LEFT BEHIND: When the pandemic hit,
there was a massive influx of schools switching to chromebooks and Google Classroom because
that’s what was popular. But as the pandemic raged on, schools simply started investing in
better solutions and the reasoning isn’t rocket science. Virtual classrooms were no longer an
extension to in person classrooms. For a period of time, they were a full on replacement to in
person classrooms. And even with the shift back to in person classes, the utilization of these
e learning platforms is larger than ever. In fact, it seems that the in many schools, the
in person aspect is now the extension. Nowadays, every homework, every quiz, every test, and every
project is completely online. The instructions are posted online, the students work together online,
and the project is turned in online. Basically everything other than the teacher’s lecture itself
can be found on Canvas or Schoology or whatever platform the school is using. At universities,
even the lectures are automatically recorded and uploaded onto these platforms. In terms of cost,
Canvas does have a free tier, but that’s mostly for small scale implementations. For example, if
you were running a yoga class or a math tutoring service, you might use the free tier. For district
wide and university wide implementations, Canvas is not free, it’s actually quite expensive. Canvas
doesn’t have any sort of set pricing and each school is handled on a case by case basis. But,
here are some of the numbers that are floating around online. It seems that on average, schools
have to pay an upfront fee of several thousand dollars to setup the initial system plus about
$25 per user per month. This could be a higher or lower depending on what level of integration and
branding a given school is looking for but that's a ball park number. As you can see, that’s several
times more than Google’s $3/month and free tiers but systems like Canvas are also several times
more effective than Google’s offerings. And given how heavily these systems are now utilized at
schools, it simply doesn’t make sense to go with a watered down versions from Google. The same
logic applies to chromebooks as well. Students no longer go to the computer lab once a week to
practice typing. They use computers the entire day at school and after school as well. Also,
they’re doing increasingly complicated tasks as well. Nowadays, students are 3d modeling
in engineering classes and coding algorithms in computer science classes even in middle school.
Also, every job in the world uses windows or mac, so it really doesn’t make sense to train students
to use chromebooks. Some districts are even going as far as purchasing Macbooks and iPads
for students. But even those that aren’t going that far are very much seeing a resurgence in
Windows and Office and more professional tools in general even though they’re more expensive.
THE STATE OF GOOGLE: In the end, it seems that Google’s greatest
advantage within the educational space has also become their greatest weakness. When
tech adoption was still relatively early stage within schools, Google was able to make a big
splash by offering tech for extremely cheap whether that be chromebooks, the G suite,
or Google Classroom. While these options had their shortcomings, when the virtual classroom
was simply an addition to in person learning, they held up alright. But virtual learning is
front and center, the whole Google ecosystem starts to fall apart. We should also mention
that school districts are now being run by a newer generation that better understands
tech. They realize that investing in good tech for students is way more valuable than buying
pencils and papers and desks or even building new buildings. The ROI is simply incomparable.
And that’s why schools are giving up on Google. They’re simply leaning towards
more professional solutions that make more sense in our increasingly tech driven world. Education
may not be the only realm in which Google is losing ground. They may also be losing ground
with YouTube with their new adblock policies. If you wanna know why, check out this video.