Educators who use Remind as a tool for reaching students with course reminders are alarmed about proposed fee charges from Rogers and Bell. (Remind image)
Back in 2011 in this space I wrote about a then-new service called Remind101. Within months Remind101 had become a must-have for educators across North America, and a service that students came to appreciate, and indeed become dependent upon.
Remind101, later rebranded as simply Remind, took then nascent texting technology and repackaged it in a way that made it a safe communication tool, initially from teachers to students, but later incorporating two-way texting as well.
Remind’s success lay in the fact that neither party, teachers, nor students, knew the cell phone numbers of the other party, and communication occurred through “classrooms” or other groupings created by teachers. Students joined such groups through a simple code or by scanning a QR code.
Educators quickly realized that Remind was such a simple tool for reaching their students with course reminders (Complete xyz for homework tonight; Don’t forget to bring your French reader to class tomorrow; Football practice at 4 PM) that it became a must-have tool.
Using Remind required nothing more than a cell phone with texting capability, in essence a near-universal tool with students, particularly at the high school level.
Fast-forward to 2018 and now into 2019. Canadian mobile telephone giant Rogers decides that it might be able to make some money off the text messages being sent by Remind. It sends a note to Remind suggesting that come Jan. 29, 2019, it intends to increase the fee it charges Remind by a factor of 25. Yes, 25!
At the start of 2019, a second telecom giant, Bell, serves notice that it too will follow the example of Rogers. About a week later, American provider Verizon decides that charging Remind more might be good for its business, not anticipating a major backlash from educators.
In Canada about a million students make use of the Remind service. In the United States it is about 10 times as many.
Most users of the Remind service are using its free version. In Canada that is currently all users as it is only in the United States that the company offers a paid version for large districts. These paid subscriptions allow schools to directly set up Remind groupings for their teachers through integration with the school management system.
Remind CEO Brian Grey notes that the mobile phone companies are painting the service as equivalent to spam. Furthermore, he notes that the claim from the companies that the charge is actually being levied by texting aggregator Twilio, is simply false, and that Twilio is simply passing along the increase from the phone utilities.
It is true that Remind does have a standalone app that can bypass the texting aspect but such apps may not be usable by every student. It may not work with older phones. This raises an issue of equity; those who cannot afford a smartphone are left out.
In an interview with The B.C. Catholic, Grey says the company has approached education ministers across Canada, as well as the CRTC, seeking a way to reverse the pending action of Rogers and Bell.
There is a glimmer of hope in the action taken by Verizon in the United States on Jan. 17. A sudden and intense social media campaign using the hashtags #ReverseTheFee and #NotSpam, seems to have caught Verizon off guard and it issued a statement implying support for education and stating it would be reversing the extra charge levy set for the end of the month.
Whether or not Rogers and Bell here in Canada will follow the example of their much bigger counterpart to the south remains to be seen. If they don’t, Remind may have to accelerate plans to bring its paid subscriber version to Canada. As of this writing, Verizon had yet to actually sign an agreement with Remind that would maintain the current texting fee structure.
It is unlikely that the CRTC or education ministers across the country will intervene in this fee spat. Remind, after all, is a commercial service that has raised some $50 million in venture capital, and that will thrive or disappear on the basis of its business plan. The education sector is unfortunately used to seeing free technology services come and go.
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