TY - JOUR
T1 - Lifting the veil on TeachersPayTeachers.com
T2 - an investigation of educational marketplace offerings and downloads
AU - Shelton, Catharyn C.
AU - Koehler, Matthew J.
AU - Greenhalgh, Spencer P.
AU - Carpenter, Jeffrey P.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - TeachersPayTeachers.com (TpT) has emerged as an alternative to traditional curricular publishing houses; however, the critical investigation into this for-profit platform is limited. The aggregate content offered and downloaded from the platform through 2019 was Web-scraped, enabling us to construct a content model of TpT and provide descriptive results regarding the interactions between content, technology, and users/usage on TpT. We find TpT’s content model implicitly redefines what constitutes an education, elevating holiday activities and classroom decor to the same level as established curriculum. In terms of content, learning standards were largely absent and user ratings were uniformly high, casting doubt upon the validity of these technological features. 87.9% of resources were under $5, however, many small sales add up across users, indicating the platform extracts significant value from educators and schools. We discuss how the online educational marketplace phenomenon stands to impact the future of curriculum production and the teaching profession.
AB - TeachersPayTeachers.com (TpT) has emerged as an alternative to traditional curricular publishing houses; however, the critical investigation into this for-profit platform is limited. The aggregate content offered and downloaded from the platform through 2019 was Web-scraped, enabling us to construct a content model of TpT and provide descriptive results regarding the interactions between content, technology, and users/usage on TpT. We find TpT’s content model implicitly redefines what constitutes an education, elevating holiday activities and classroom decor to the same level as established curriculum. In terms of content, learning standards were largely absent and user ratings were uniformly high, casting doubt upon the validity of these technological features. 87.9% of resources were under $5, however, many small sales add up across users, indicating the platform extracts significant value from educators and schools. We discuss how the online educational marketplace phenomenon stands to impact the future of curriculum production and the teaching profession.
KW - Curriculum
KW - education publishing
KW - instructional materials
KW - online educational marketplace
KW - online teacherpreneur
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85111889205&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85111889205&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/17439884.2021.1961148
DO - 10.1080/17439884.2021.1961148
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85111889205
SN - 1743-9884
VL - 47
SP - 268
EP - 287
JO - Learning, Media and Technology
JF - Learning, Media and Technology
IS - 2
ER -