Novel Approach Benefits Educators and Vendors
August 2011
ERAC is unique across Canada as it is almost entirely membership supported. ERAC brings together educators looking for materials to support the BC curriculum and vendors, large and small that are producing the printed materials, software, online resources and tools that teachers need.
Classroom teachers can visit the ERAC site and quickly see what resources are available and the benefits and challenges of each.
"Resources can become outdated very quickly," explains Sherry Kallergis, the consortium's resource acquisition coordinator. "Even more so now as we go increasingly digital." Vendors see the advantages to a partnership with ERAC. In the past, they would go from school to school or district-to-district to sell their classroom resources. "There are 1,600 schools and 33,000 teachers. So there were a lot of hidden labour dollars," Kallergis said.
ERAC charges a fee for evaluations based on a cost recovery model depending on the unique characteristics of each product and how it is delivered. A secondary school print text may cost $1,000 while a 10-minute video may cost $160.
Vendors are seeing the value of having items go through a rigorous and credible evaluation process just once and then having that information shared around the province. Chris Sabiston, director of sales for Scholastic's Education Division, said ERAC staff "is excellent to work with. They're always available. We understand what they're trying to build."
