传媒大亨默多克：抢滩K-12电子教育市场，推出教学平板电脑Amplify

Public school systems are cheerfully decorated dictatorships: discipline, standards, and testing are the driving concepts of modern k-12 education. The very reason why districts purchase bundles of the same textbooks is so they can keep classrooms in lockstep alignment as teachers meticulous meet timely instructional goals. Amplify, NewsCorp’s new education division, finally revealed its long-awaited flagship product: a sophisticated tablet designed specifically for schools, which many finally be the perfect bureaucratic blend of classroom management, assessment, and monitoring that schools need to adopt technology en mass.

As to those features: Amplify’s Android-based 10″ tablet comes preloaded with all the basic learning software that teachers need to dole out information on any given subject: textbooks, multimedia lessons, Encyclopedia Britannica, and a graphing calculator. It even includes the widely popular Khan Academy suite of YouTube-based lectures, which were recently converted to an off-line textbook-style format.

More importantly, Amplify’s tablet suite is a managerial dream: teachers can carefully monitor students behavior, administrators can deploy content across an entire grade-level, and districts can evaluate schools with custom standardized tests.

Amplify gives teachers, as both disciplinarian and educator, impressive control. They can selectively enable or disable apps to direct student learning; distracted students get an “eyes on teacher” alert if their usage behavior indicates an inattentive mind. Impromptu polls and tests individually evaluates each student and gives them customized refreshers.

The very cost-structure of the tablet system is designed for administration. Even with a two-year subscription at $99 per year, the wifi-enabled tablet is still a pricey $299 (a 4G version is $349 with a $179/year contract). But, it’s meant to be purchased by whole schools, districts or states, and comes with 24-hour live technical support to ensure students are meeting goals in a timely fashion. If schools could replace some of their textbooks and IT overhead, the cost appears less daunting. But, it’s still high.

However, News Corp.’s plans for education were quickly derailed by the infamous phone-hacking scandal that forced Klein leave his position to lead the company’s internal investigation. After two years of investigations, trials and more, News Corp. rebranded its education unit last summer as “Amplify,” revealing some of the basic tenets that would shape its digital strategy, which include “assessment via mobile tools, curriculum design and the online distribution of resources via AT&T-powered tablets,” as Greg wrote at the time.

A little over two years ago, Murdoch set out leverage the News Corp. brand to help fix a public education system that, in his words, has “lower standards than American Idol,” hiring one of the more prominent figures in American education, former chancellor of New York schools, Joel Klein, to pursue opportunities in EdTech. With Klein as his new education guru, the pair quickly made their first big strategic move, acquiring New York-based software, assessment and data services startup, Wireless Generation, for a whopping $360 million.