(Originally published May 25, 2010 on Huffington Post)

An interview with Marco Masoni, CEO of Einztein, former high school teacher & lawyer, inspired this article, provided a great interview, and got me thinking more about what’s next in education as a result of his team’s efforts.

As graduation seasons draws to a close, study groups disband, and the reality of student loans sets in. Ron Lieber cogently writes of student loan debt in the New York Times:

It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners. For starters, it’s a shared failure of parenting and loan underwriting.

Partially in response to declines in state support and endowments, and a bevy of bureaucratic business reasons, it has become abundantly clear that in our own time higher education has aggressively priced itself out of it’s young (mostly lower wage, non-earner, parent-dependent) market. More importantly today’s college youth are not our exact replicas, in spite of efforts to educate them and sell education to them as if they were!

There’s a battle brewing to circumvent the bureaucracy of universities and the classroom execution of the traditional professoriate. It’s not a new story, in fact it’s been in slow motion for more than 25 years, perhaps beginning with easier online access to used books outside of university bookstores, distribution and even the requirement that professors publish their syllabi online. The abundance of personal blogs and sites of registered students who share knowledge acquired in their classrooms.

The education content industry has been destabilizing slowly for years, but we’ve reached a pivotal moment greatly exacerbated by the recession. According to Grapevine’s 200-10 report, 10 states had one-year declines of state support more than 5 percent:

California (down 6.8 percent), Hawaii (down 7.4 percent), Iowa (down 9.5 percent), Louisiana (down 6.2 percent), Michigan (down 7.1 percent), New Mexico (down 10.2 percent), Ohio (down 7.9 percent), Virginia (down 10.4 percent), Washington State (down 8.4 percent) Wisconsin (down 6.7 percent)

*read Scott Jaschik’s Historic Declines Inside Higher Ed, 01.2010

Indeed, today’s students are often the hyper-connected and information is available to them for consumption in many forms. But, those aren’t the only differentiators. Students now bear new financial challenges, which impact their ability to attend traditional universities like traditional students, according to a recent study released by Public Agenda of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation: 45% of students in four-year schools work more than 20 hours per week, 6 in 10 students attending community colleges work more than 20 hours per week and more than 25% work more than 35 hours per week, and 23% of college students have dependent children.

American colleges and universities have a history of iterating under pressure, most obviously in the 20th century redefining admissions standards for women, minorities, working class students, those students with disabilities, veterans, and more. Colleges and universities have likewise been challenged (at times fiercely, and especially by the new historian movement of the 60s and 70s) to overturn core curricula to newly discovered truths (please read Lawrence W. Levine’s Opening of the American Mind).

Those students who have found themselves burdened by college loan debt or simply priced out of the higher education market have formed a new underclass, and from within this predicament the internet, spread of the open content movement, and sheer ease of peer-to-peer sharing models offer alternatives to a life without access to higher education. If this disruption even faintly resembles what we’ve seen happen to the music, video, TV, you can plan on bearing witness to a major upheaval characterized by the spirit of an insatiable appetite to learn.

To understand this emerging frontier and its possibilities, you must first come to terms with the spread of the open content movement. Journalist and advocate Anya Kamenetz aptly noted in her seminal article, How Web Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education that:

MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world’s largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world’s largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.

The opportunity to innovate on top of open content is there for the taking, and former DC public school teacher and lawyer, founder/CEO, Marco Masoni of Einztein is guiding perhaps the most ambitious undertaking, making waves, and happy to enact a measure of change to inspire universities, the professoriate, and students to become participates and leaders in the movement to make education affordable, accessible, and downright smarter with less red tape and politics, and way more transparency.

Einztein is a non-profit search guide, set up to support the process of searching and developing new models for what Kamenetz has coined the DIY-U movement. Positioned as a non-profit, Einztein provides a unique service in the online learning space organizing more than 2,000 complete courses across 35 categories in multiple media formats from over 100 early providers. An editorial team of PhD resident scholars curates the content for relevance and quality. This initial platform is just the tip of a much larger endeavor, forthcoming is a larger social network with premium features, Einztein Knowledge Network.

Though the Einztein Knowledge Network is still in stealth development, we believe that the exploding popularity of online education will lead to dramatic increases in online educational content. Not only will the format, quality and price range of the content vary widely, the content, itself, will be dispersed throughout the four corners of the web. Human curators and a streamlined platform for the social exchange of knowledge will be as vital to making sense of this new content as Google and Facebook are, respectively, to sorting information with sophisticated algorithms and sharing experiences via customizable community pages. –Marco Masoni

If Einztein’s social knowledge network is as successful as its founders predict, the education
publisher paradigm will consequently experience a dramatic shift, much like blogs and Twitter have done for journalists, celebrities, and the internet famous, online courses will create a new cadre of academic rockstars. Like artists, designers, and programmers, who post the products of their labor online, academics and teachers of all sorts will find it necessary to include an online course in their repertoire.

Publish or perish as a benchmark of academic success and viability is likely to be rivaled by a new question: what have you taught online lately (and how engaging was it)? If you’re a young-ish academic who can’t articulate what you know for the online public, you might want to consider a different career because it’s likely that you’ll end up on the endangered species list. –Marco Masoni

Einztein is accelerating a shift to take place, much like we witnessed in the canon and curricula revolutions of the mid-to-late 20th century, and it’s inevitable that universities will be forced to change. The simple fact that they have out-priced themselves makes it necessary that they find and experiment with new models. Otherwise those institutions might find themselves less relevant to students coming of age in the webcentric world, immersed in a hipper, smarter, more germane culture of open content.

By serving as a social platform to connect and share knowledge, Einztein is working to make learning more relevant and timely. We recognize how traditional education has increasingly become a sterile exercise that takes place in a vacuum, disconnected from real problems (and solutions). With its greater capacity for adapting and absorbing new information, online learning is poised to undergo a transformation, whereby the acquisition of knowledge and skills aligns itself more perfectly with the actual needs of society. –Marco Masoni

Will it even make sense to young people, especially those already under the influence of online self-education to pay 6-figures for what they can get in more relevant formats for free or greatly reduced prices online? As Masoni pointed out to me, someday soon the word “accredited” may become associated with “expensive.”

Flexible modes of accreditation will emerge, enabling students to adopt a la carte approaches to their academic work. They’ll have the option of cherry picking courses from a menu of educational providers and combine these together to earn an accredited degree. Think of how airlines started partnering with other companies, allowing customers to earn and use miles in a myriad ways like a form of currency. A similar phenomenon, inevitably, will transform the post-secondary education market. –Marco Masoni

I’m starting to imagine a world where Mark Zuckerberg creates a way for Facebook users to get badges for completing courses inside the platform and Larry Lessig of Creative Commons creates an equally powerful and culture-changing licensing structure that enables a form of “credit” for open course completion. How different is it really for a student who takes a course from a graduate teaching assistant to now take one with a similar peer-to-peer interaction online? Could NYC-based Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures create an online business course with years of real-world lessons that was more credible, interesting, and affordable than a semester-long business course at a state university? I think YES! The “consortium” and resident guest scholars aren’t new concepts at all, but creating a online connection to bring them together in a credit-driven program certainly is.

Professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has often stated that “Universities who fail to recognize and respond to the technological and other changes occurring in the societies in which they are embedded will find themselves irrelevant by 2020.” By 2020, if not sooner, universities will have indeed undergone dramatic change, and though perhaps not irrelevant for not heeding Wiley’s or the other harbingers, they will be positioned differently. Some will have moved forward to integrate online course and degree programs with corporate partners. Others will suffer from troubling tuition programs, and Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing efforts already in motion will replace decades of brand-driven reputation to attract and “sell” to prospective students.

Most exciting for underpaid, overworked, and often dispirited educators, is that alongside Einztein model, new jobs in online education will emerge. Among them, course curators, the human filters and influencers who become known for their course discovery and recommendations. Around the course curators a culture of pitches and marketing will emerge, and much like technologists launch products at tech conferences, educators may begin launching online course experiences and content in similar venues, vying for attention, uptake, and publicity.

As the Internet evolves toward becoming a truly sophisticated medium for sharing knowledge, in addition to information, entertainment and experiences, there will be a greater need for people with subject matter expertise who can serve to guide online learners seeking new knowledge and skills. These guides or “curators” will be experts in amassing, evaluating and disseminating educational content for popular academic audiences. –Marco Masoni

There is a battle brewing against universities and the professoriate and American education, and alongside are the courageous endeavors to take on big, hairy, audacious goals, by organizations like Einztein and visionaries like Masoni. We are living and learning in interesting times! Let the battle brewing bravely begin!

(I encourage you to read “An Open Mind” by Katie Hafner of the New York Times for more insight into the challenges, trends, and truths of online education and the independent learner. For more stats and metrics-driven analysis please read 2009 Trends in College Pricing & 2009 Trends in Student Aid, produced by College Board)

Marco is a lawyer and educator with several years of management experience in the nonprofit sector. He combines a passion for education that began when he taught law to public high school students in Washington, D.C., with the savvy that comes from having successfully launched a user generated video startup in the pre-YouTube era. He foresees a day when anyone with access to a web connected device will be able to individually customize a college degree by combining world class courses from multiple providers at an affordable cost. As the father of three small children, his personal goal is to bring that day closer to reality through his work building Einztein into a leading online learning community.

With thanks to Rebecca Reeve @rsquared for the introduction & ongoing fact-finding & support.

Share on Facebook

Editor’s Note:

For scheduling reasons and maybe as the result of awkwardly shaped serendipity I interviewed Jen Nedeau, Director of Digital Strategy at Air America Media, the week before Air America announced that it was filing for bankruptcy. The majority of this article therefore was written in advance and without knowledge of Air America’s last live broadcast.

Jennifer Nedeau, former Director of Digital Strategy, Air America Media

I mention this because it’s important to note that the majority of what Jen and I discussed had to do with radio as an organizing tool in the Web 2.0 world. Those discussion points are not only still relevant, but perhaps more so because the left has lost an important social platform. Air America’s end reveals a great opportunity that the left needs to find a way to fill and fill fast. As Jen explains below, it’s important for the left to be “loud” and arguably more so because of Scott Brown’s surprise election based largely on a better online, app-driven, and much louder campaign.

Radio as an organizing tool in 2010? Indeed. Radio has not only changed alongside of technology, but it’s continued to develop in popularity. People like to listen. People like conversation. People need something to do while they drive, exercise, and work. Audio has an important place in the media tool set.

During the 2008 Obama campaign, the left took credit for innovating in online advocacy and leveraging the Web 2.0 world where “you” are the media. The election of Scott Brown then, and to another degree the loss of a major voice, Air America, comes as a warning that progressives need to take seriously. The right is surpassing the left in both its simple use of existing tools as well as innovation of new tools. These aren’t sneak attacks, rather they’re evidence of how the right continues to employ “Mad Men-like” persuasion tactics to technology to organize successfully, generating more buzz online, creating and cultivating louder and more conversation, closing in on the lead once boasted by the left.

1. In the world of online organizing and mobilization towards both online and offline goals (petitions, rallies, house parties, protests, etc.) where can radio fit in as a part of a larger set of community organizing tools that includes some online social tools like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

While political talk radio has always been a community-organizing tool for its ability to connect with audiences on specific issues, online technology is opening a lot of doors for the expansion of online audio tools. For example, with the advent of mobile podcasting through services such as Utterli, it is possible for activists, journalists and everyday citizens to record what is going on around them by simply talking into a cell phone. This creates an online podcast that also connects with audiences on Twitter and Facebook with just a click of a button.

Traditional talk radio has a loyal market — the morning drive and the afternoon rush hour — where people are committed to listening to certain personalities. While online tools require you to be on a phone or a computer, radio can be pretty hands free and present live coverage to a different audience that is not always plugged in to the social media landscape. Therefore, it is a good idea to leverage on-air, online and offline tools in order to get a message across.

2. There’s a lot going on in the world of online collaboration (workspaces, social gaming, etc.) and radio, unlike the web, has always been interactive, so as you contemplate the future of radio do you think there will be a time when radio becomes able to manage a larger conversation than just a few voices? Or is the curation of audio too tenuous?

Instead of a one-way broadcast, it is important for those in radio to think about how to integrate the conversation across several mediums at the same time, constantly contribute to the conversation and go beyond the broadcast.

At Air America, I worked with the hosts and producers to make sure they not only responded to direct calls into the show, but also to what people were saying on Facebook and Twitter. This allows the show to be part of a larger conversation outside of the market where the show is on air. With the help of online streaming, the audience can literally be anywhere. Just as it is important for brands to meet the consumer where they live, it is also important for radio shows to be relevant and engaging across multiple platforms. With the help of live chat, Twitter, Facebook, and user-generated content, radio can expand it’s microphone into the collaborative, two-way conversation model.

3. How do you see advertisers leveraging radio in the future? Do you see radio confronting the challenges that are being felt by newspapers, monthlies, and weeklies? Is the traditional ad model changing?

A recent survey said that while “daily newspaper usage dropped 4.1 percent and television usage dropped 3.6 percent, radio usage increased 2.9 percent and online usage increased 1.9 percent.”

These types of statistics led me to believe that if radio can continue to grow even despite the challenges facing other media that the advertising dollars would follow.

When it comes to the traditional ad model changing, I do think that radio shows should consider online engagement when selling ad space on air. For instance, if a show host, such as Ana Marie Cox, has 1.4 million Twitter followers, her show could reach a lot more people than the listening statistics recorded by Arbitron.

4. Is there the possibility that radio might fail in a world where the web has come to be the dominant medium?

Is it possible that radio might fail? Well, anything is possible. But talk radio really began the “two-way” conversation in broadcast and it is now expanding into other forms online. We will not lose radio; it will likely just take on a different form as most media does in order to stay relevant, informative and entertaining.

5. How do you see citizen participation and user contributed content playing into how radio journalism works? Do you find that it’s harder to mobilize a force like CNN’s “iReporters” or verify the credibility of the reporting itself?

We hadn’t dived into user-contributed content at Air America yet. But in terms of my personal observations about platforms such as CNN’s iReporters, I think they are great. If we can hire citizens who are on the scene, the information would not only be more relevant, but also save news bureaus from sending a dozen different staffers to the same place especially for breaking news type of stories. I think it is important that every news organization verifies it’s reporting and gets multiple sources to confirm a fact, but citizen journalists can be a huge help, particularly as we have seen with the Haiti earthquake, where they have been used to report breaking news from the ground, share insight and deliver raw footage before journalists can ever get to the scene.

7. What are the biggest issues that Air America is trying to spread the word about right now?

Air America aimed to provide informative, relevant, entertaining news and commentary. It was a progressive media company that worked to create a place online where liberals came to find out the most important issues of the day.

Air America also helped to push back against conservative media outlets such as FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and other right wing noise machines that tried to get in the way of progressive policy. Air America worked to hold decision makers accountable on progressive issues such as health care, women’s rights, the economy and foreign affairs, to name a few.

8. Can you pick a particular issue and share the strategy of what tools you are using to spread the word? (both online social tools and offline tools) How are you measuring success?

When it came to the Air America, we measured our success through weekly statistics that gauged how many people were talking about the brand. We looked at several online platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Video to see if our content was attracting the right audience and then tried to react accordingly to consumer feedback like any other responsible company would.

9. How do you market those issues in a compelling way that can engage people online to become part of the conversation? Is uptake a large challenge based on your demographics?

As a news organization, good content is the best marketing tool one can offer. By investing in smart writers, radio hosts and producers, Air America tried to break through the noise by offering a unique perspective on the daily news. Air America had a loyal audience that appreciated the stand it took on issues and they engaged with the brand everyday via email, article comments, as well as on Twitter and Facebook Fan Page posts.

10. Over on Daily Kos a blogger wrote that the left is in big trouble, stating, if you want to win, you will ORGANIZE. You will organize in the same way the Right has done for the last 40 years, and you will spend money on persuasion, where it really matters.” Whether or not you agree/disagree can you think of a way in which the Left can leverage radio successfully in a move towards truly developing and becoming a part of the persuasion industry to reach their goals, in ways where the Right has proven successful?

Organizing on the left is much more difficult than organizing on the right for one reason: liberals like to think for themselves.

In seeing first hand how the right reacts online and on the radio, I find that the “dittohead” concept is definitely true. Those who listen to right-wing radio, watch FOX News, or read conservative blogs are great at taking the message from the messenger and sharing it over and over again without contradiction. Additionally, if you think about it, the conservative movement is meant to conserve what has been for the past 10, 20, 50, 100 years on gun control, abortion, taxes, etc. The Left is more about creating change and adapting to current problems and social issues. It is much harder to get a handle on the moving target that are liberal talking points compared with memorizing a conservative creed.

When it comes to using radio as an organizing tool, I think you have to look at where the liberals are and speak to them in their medium. Whether that is through radio on, social networks, blogs or the mainstream press – if you want to reach your audience, you have to find them first. A democracy only works if its citizens are informed to make the best decisions about policy and politicians.

That is what we tried to do at Air America every day while also standing up for core progressive beliefs.

11. Radio has the challenge of not being text-based or visual, which seems to put it at a disadvantage in the competition for attention against print and video, how do you see radio and online radio developing more tools to increase the trend of easy social sharing? How do you see online organizers for the left developing a larger and more engaged audience?

I think that as technology advances and we have more voice-to-text options, it will be easier for radio to optimize the web. Text based mediums such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs have often been slower to utilize audio, and therefore the link sharing can be limited. But with how popular video has become online, it seems natural that radio could learn a lot — and with the new mechanisms to podcast from anywhere – there will be a place for radio on the web, it is just a matter of how to revolutionize the format of it.

Air America’s absence from the airwaves leaves a large void that the left needs to move to fill, otherwise politicians will only be able to talk to the right. Talk radio is a staple medium, a valuable organizing and advocacy tool, and has the opportunity to continue to transform alongside advances in technology, especially as we move towards more mobile and streaming. There’s an audience primed to listen, a clear place for radio on the web, entrepreneurs innovating in streaming technology, and nothing short of a wide-open opportunity for the left to get loud.

(More about Chrissie Brodigan at www.chrissiebrodigan.com & work with her at jjomedia.com)

Bio: Jen Nedeau is a new media professional, writer, progressive activist and feminist speaker based in New York City. From June 2009 – January 2010, she worked as the Director of Digital Strategy at Air America Media. From August 2008 – December 2009, Jen pursued her passion for writing and activism by serving as Editor of the Women’s Rights Blog for Change.org where she facilitated daily discussion about the feminist movement as it related to politics, technology and social norms. In her free time, Jen volunteers for New Leaders Council, a non-profit that offers exclusive training for young progressive leaders, where she serves as the Chief Technology Officer and participates as a member of local advisory boards. Jen first began her career as a political journalist after studying at The George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. She is originally from San Francisco, CA. You can follow her on Twitter @HumanFolly and learn more www.jennedeau.com

Share on Facebook

Challenge: Designing unique alerts for growing collection of content verticals, encouraging sign-up, and encouraging sign-up across verticals.

Huffington Post News Alerts Design

Share on Facebook

Goal: January 2008, community members had very little personalization or presence on Huffingtonpost.com, so I was tasked to create a personalized destination page for community members.

Huffington Post Community Member Profile Page (Logged In)

Huffington Post Community Member Profile Page - Comments Aggregated & Organized

Share on Facebook

The Daily Brief is Huffington Post’s flagship newsletter. I redesigned the Daily Brief, January 2008, and was able to increase interaction with the site’s content and conversion to newsletter sign-up.

Huffington Post Daily Brief Newsletter

Share on Facebook