Creating a course in Social Media Marketing

Objective – The objective of SMM class is for each student to understand and apply: the principles of social media marketing, the use of the key social media platforms by organizations, how SMM differs from standard marketing and internet marketing, key issues and changes in social media, and to demonstrate the capability to use social media to support the mission of a professional, business or non-profit organization.
Social Media Marketing is not Internet Marketing. In internet marketing promotional tools such as direct selling, coupons, advertisements are brought online and established success measures include SEO, click-throughs, etc. Social Media Marketing is really social networking online: reaching out and advancing real relationships with customers, prospects, and stakeholders. Promotional tools used in SMM can be jarring and counter-productive if not used carefully.
The “big four” SM platforms for professional SMM (per @michellegolden) are:

1.  Facebook [And FB fan pages]
2. Blogs
3. Twitter
4. YouTube
5. And… LinkedIn for anyone interested in networking or B2B or professional advancement…

 Reading: This is a rapidly changing field with many questions and few answers. There is a lot of reading including books, blogs and articles.
Books: We will use 4 interesting business-oriented paperbacks.

• Tao of Twitter by Mark Schaefer and
• Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk

are easy reads and should be read quickly as they will be discussed in the first two weeks. These two books are key to project 1 – your passion. Mr. Schaefer will address our class via Skype in one of our first four class meetings.

• Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day (Dave Evans) and
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR (David Meerman Scott)

are available in the bookstore or can be purchased through Amazon or a bookstore. I urge every student to get a copy of An Hour a Day; you can share the Scott book if you wish, but must keep up in reading.
Recommended books  include: Engage (Solis), Likeable Social Media (Kerpen), Social Media ROI (Blanchard)
Websites: I hope you follow many websites and blogs. These should definitely be included for this class:

•  http://fastcompany.com/
• http://www.smmmagazine.com/magazine/
• http://techcrunch.com/
• http://mashable.com/                                       www.technorati.com
• http://blog.hubspot.com/
• allfacebook.com
• http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/
• http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-tech-technology.html?mod=WSJ_topnav_tech_main
• http://www.wired.com/

•  http://www.businessesgrow.com/blog/  (Mark Schaefer)
• www.facebook.com/SMM4RU  (This Class)

Articles: As assigned by instructor
Class Projects: Projects are the focus of Social Media Marketing class. The instructor will post sheets with more detailed information about each project

1. Personal Campaign – each student designs + executes a social media campaign for a personal “passion.”
2. Turn an author into a best seller – each group will generate ideas and a SMM plan for a new book author.
3. Organizational SMM – each group will generate ideas and an SMM plan for an organization.

Student Content: There is so much to understand and so much changing that no one person…but the each group will help with two videocasts for the entire class to view.
Student reports – each group will create a video-cast for the class on one of these topics:

1.  Presenting pictures: Flickr and its competitors
2. Blogging on WordPress, BogSpot or Tumblr; video-blogging
3. SMM on singles sites: OKCupid, Casual Kiss, Plenty of Fish
4. Google+, What’s happening, what’s coming…
5. Promoting blog content: StumbleUpon, DIGG, Technorati, Delicious, etc. & Syndicating a blog – B2Community, Triberr, etc.
6. Influence measures: PeerIndex, Tweet Grader, Klout, etc.
7. Video – winning on YouTube, vimeo, blogs – merits of platforms and techniques
8. Internal social media – Yammer, Ning, etc.
9. SM ads (FB, Linkedin, etc.) and compare to Google Ads.
10. Guerrilla marketing for small businesses with social media
11. Forecasting with social media

Best practices – Contrasting a good and bad organizational social media effort – video-cast from each group.
Course Topics Outline

1. Types of social media: blogs, microblogs, networking, media sharing, special interest
2. The “Big Five” – Facebook (& Fan Page), Blog, Twitter, YouTube… and Linkedin
   1. Other SM platforms –Flickr, Google+, Tmblr, Digg, etc. Other important social media and benefits (presentations by students
   3.  Word of mouth marketing and theory
   4. Niche marketing: the long tail
   5. Engagement: Building a community
   6. Creating CONTENT

1. Social issues in online communities

Organizational Application of social media

7. Traditional vs. new media; organic vs. amplified word of mouth
   1. Networking – what it means and how it is done; Networking vs. Marketing: conflicts and synergy
8. Brand narrative, storytelling, and brand community
9. Innovation: Wikinomics, lead users, and crowdsourcing
   1. Co-creation and prosumers
   2. Netnography and SM customer research
   3. Forecasting with social media data
10. SMM for intra-organizational communication & collaboration (& supply/distr chain)
11. Mobile Marketing and location-based social media
12. Successful and unsuccessful firm use of SMM
13. Organizational Applications of SMM: Setting organizational goals and tracking them. Measures / metrics of influence –
    1. Google Analytics, Klout, etc. What do they measure? Do they really matter?
    2. ROI of social media efforts.
14. Selling, service and social media – Leads, pipeline, customer service and CRM
15. Developing an organizational social media plan – Integrated marketing, C-S, internal
    1. Integrated with organizational Marketing and Strategy

Workshops

1. Engagement and creating content: Blogging and Micro-blogging
2. Creating a great Fan Page
3. Mobile marketing and Location-based SMM
4. Determining ROI of social media
5. Benefits of Social media clubs and groups
6. Video-pods and presentations
7. Using video

When I first considered a new undergraduate social media marketing class I started with a few ideas and a half page outline. The outline in the previous post is the one I am now using in the course. It has benefited immensely from input from twitter, LinkedIn and blog friends.
Would I call the course “crowdsourced”?
Most of the help came from experts who consult to companies on social media marketing, have led seminars on SMM, have written books, or taught pieces of SMM in their university classes. (Although good suggestions came from students and others as well.)
So should I instead call it “lead user” innovation?
I think the process is best called “Community-sourcing.” I believe that this is a case study in why you should develop a focused twitter and blog following and community: the benefit from such a community is obvious at times like this but is also present day-to-day.

Stop Telling Students to Study for Exams

Among the problems on college campuses today are that students study for exams and faculty encourage them to do so.
I expect that many faculty members will be appalled by this assertion and regard it as a form of academic heresy. If anything, they would argue, students don't study enough for exams; if they did, the educational system would produce better results. But this simple and familiar phrase—"study for exams"—which is widely regarded as a sign of responsible academic practice, actually encourages student behaviors and dispositions that work against the larger purpose of human intellectual development and learning. Rather than telling students to study for exams, we should be telling them to study for learning and understanding.
If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the view that you go to college to get a degree to get a job to make money to be happy. Similarly, you take this course to meet this requirement, and you do coursework and read the material to pass the course to graduate to get the degree. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing is an end in itself. There is no higher purpose.
When we tell students to study for the exam or, more to the point, to study so that they can do well on the exam, we powerfully reinforce that way of thinking. While faculty consistently complain about instrumentalism, our behavior and the entire system encourages and facilitates it.
On the one hand, we tell students to value learning for learning's sake; on the other, we tell students they'd better know this or that, or they'd better take notes, or they'd better read the book, because it will be on the next exam; if they don't do these things, they will pay a price in academic failure. This communicates to students that the process of intellectual inquiry, academic exploration, and acquiring knowledge is a purely instrumental activity—designed to ensure success on the next assessment.
Given all this, it is hardly surprising that students constantly ask us if this or that will be on the exam, or whether they really need to know this reading for the next test, or—the single most pressing question at every first class meeting of the term—"is the final cumulative"?
This dysfunctional system reaches its zenith with the cumulative "final" exam. We even go so far as to commemorate this sacred academic ritual by setting aside a specially designated "exam week" at the end of each term. This collective exercise in sadism encourages students to cram everything that they think they need to "know" (temporarily for the exam) into their brains, deprive themselves of sleep and leisure activities, complete (or more likely finally start) term papers, and memorize mounds of information. While this traditional exercise might prepare students for the inevitable bouts of unpleasantness they will face as working adults, its value as a learning process is dubious.
According to those who study the science of human learning, it occurs only when there is both retention and transfer. Retention involves the ability to actually remember what was presumably "learned" more than two weeks beyond the end of the term. Transfer is the ability to use and apply that knowledge for subsequent understanding and analysis. Based on this definition, there is not much learning taking place in college courses.
One reason is that learning is equated with studying for exams and, for many students, studying for exams means "cramming." A growing amount of research literature consistently reports that cramming—short-term memorizing—does not contribute to retention or transfer. It may, however, yield positive short-term results as measured by exam scores. So, as long as we have relatively high-stakes exams determining a large part of the final grade in a course, students will cram for exams, and there will be very little learning.
An indication of this widespread nonlearning is the perennial befuddlement of faculty members who can't seem to understand why students don't know this or that, even though it was "covered" in a prior or prerequisite course. The reason they don't know it is because they did not learn it. Covering content is not the same as learning it.
Instead, how we structure the assessment of our students should involve two essential approaches: formative assessment and authentic assessment. Used jointly they can move us toward a healthier learning environment that avoids high-stakes examinations and intermittent cramming.
Formative assessments allow students to both develop their abilities and assess their progress. In this sense, they combine teaching and learning activities with assessment. These are sometimes called classroom-assessment techniques, and they do not require formal grading but rather an opportunity for students, after completing the exercise or assignment, to see what they did well and where they need to improve.
Authentic assessments involve giving students opportunities to demonstrate their abilities in a real-world context. Ideally, student performance is assessed not on the ability to memorize or recite terms and definitions but the ability to use the repertoire of disciplinary tools—be they theories, concepts, or principles—to analyze and solve a realistic problem that they might face as practitioners in the field.
Such an approach to assessment lends itself to the "open book" as a toolbox from which students can draw. Professional or disciplinary judgment is based on the ability to select the right tool and apply it effectively. If there is any preparation, it is based on a review of the formative assessments that have preceded the graded evaluation.
This all makes educational sense, and some enlightened colleges, while not necessarily adopting these assessment approaches, already have come to the realization that final exams do not advance student learning. Professors at Harvard, for example, now may choose whether to give final exams, and increasing numbers of professors are using alternative techniques.
But that is hardly enough. The education system is desperate for a new model, and higher education is the best place to start because postsecondary faculty have more flexibility to experiment with alternative forms of pedagogical techniques than primary and secondary teachers do. We can use these opportunities to make a difference in the way students study, learn, and understand.
Yes, our mantra of "studying for exams" has created and nourished a monster—but it's not too late to kill it.
David Jaffee is a professor of sociology at the University of North Florida

7 Start-Ups Who Are Changing the Way We Learn

Malcolm X was once asked by an interviewer “What’s your alma mater?” His answer: “Books.” I’m also a drop out like Malcolm (but of college instead of middle school) who found a far better education in books than in the classroom. But I often wonder, if I dropped out now—even though it is only a few years later—would I have a totally different answer? So I asked Brad Hart, an investor and thinker, to put together this post on the future of education. From the looks of his research, the answer for ambitious people to the question of “What’s your alma mater?” will soon be “Technology,” “Start-Ups” and “Entrepreneurship.”
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Tech Companies Changing the Way We Learn
I graduated from Binghamton University in upstate New York in May, 2007. In the short time since I donned a graduation smock, the grades and accomplishments which landed me a spot at one of the best SUNY schools then wouldn’t get me a second look from admissions today. Having aspirations to create an Entrepreneurial University, as an alternative to traditional degree paths, I have been a keen observer of educational trends in America. It’s disturbing to see how rarely fresh ideas, approaches and technologies are talked about in mainstream media.

Perhaps universities with billion dollar endowments don’t really have any incentive to change the way that education happens. As a result, traditional degree paths can be woefully inadequate in preparing graduates for the workforce. Jobs lost in the last recession are not likely be replaced with the same type of jobs, as corporations must be scissor lean to compete. For job seekers, the playing field is constantly evolving. An entrepreneurial mindset, personal branding and individual accomplishments will set successful applicants apart. It can all be traced back to a marketing issue. The best ideas, applicants and companies may never see the light of day. It’s not enough just to have a great resume, product or service, those things must be presented in such a way as to demonstrate their value. What follows will be a look at companies changing the way that we learn. Hopefully this article will serve to bring some of their value into the limelight.
A better way to study?
For Becky Splitt and Christopher Klundt, founders of StudyBlue, mobile technology comes first. Their main objective is to create a seamless experience across every device  to view their concise, one topic centric, user generated note cards. Students have been jumping at the opportunity to create content on this free service, with over 50 million note cards and counting. 1.4 million people are studying and learning collaboratively, and the trend is not slowing down. Becoming a lifelong learner is an underserved pursuit in today’s workforce. StudyBlue helps create one large study group, hacking information, breaking down problems to their simplest elements and putting them back together in the most cohesive way possible. This is of incredible value to both job seekers and entrepreneurs, whose analytical skills in synergy can create a much better understanding of complicated concepts among those using the service.
User ratings keep the content current and relevant. Students concerned about privacy can decide not to share their notecards. Becky was kind enough to show me this enormous database in action, sorting by relevance of topic, and further by how many people ‘liked’ the content that was pushed to the top. “There isn’t a lot of junk or fluff. Students are here for a serious pursuit of knowledge, and take this seriously.” says Christopher.
StudyBlue was started in Wisconsin in the June of 2009 with a $2MM funding round, later securing $3.6MM in the summer of 2010. The founders are staying focused on growing and improving their service, choosing to keep their heads down as opposed to shouting from the rooftops. The strategy is paying off, as seen by their explosive growth. “I just wish I had something like this when I was in school,” one educational expert has said.  “This helps teachers too, as they can browse the notecards to see how well the concepts are being grasped, and pivot in real time.”, says Becky.
What about the high cost of tuition, textbooks, and student debt?
Colin Barceloux initially just wanted to make some cash on the side by selling ‘no value’ textbooks online to students at other schools. He came to see the potential for disruption in the space, and founded BookRenter.com in order to bring his vision to the world. “The high costs don’t come from the university or the bookstore, they come from the publishers and wholesalers”, says Colin. “Students spend over $10 Billion per year on textbooks, so we thought that with the size of the industry, coupled with the leverage of the internet, we really had something.”
When asked how iBooks might affect the industry in the future, he makes a great point. “Consumers will continue to move into digital media in droves, provided that they have the final buying decision. The benefits in access, distribution, and cost are easy to understand. Unfortunately, students are told what the approved content is by professors, who are given content by the big five publishers, so the changes are slow to happen.” BookRenter has become a major distribution network for publishers, a channel for tens of millions of dollars in inventory. “Students used to feel helpless, having to shell out thousands of dollars per year for textbooks they would likely use only once, sell back for 25% of the value, and see them being sold to the next year students for 75% of the regular price. Now with textbook rentals, there is finally another option.”
What really worries gradutes coming into the workforce today is their assumed debt load. Some say there might be an education bubble brewing, creating far more qualified prospects than spots to fill. With fewer jobs, and needing to defer debt, students choose to stay in school longer, compounding the problem. “Since 2002, the costs of educating yourself at a university have nearly doubled.” Uri Pomerantz, founder of Bright Frontier Financial says. His firm is currently working with banks and qualified lending candidates for a more scalable and sustainable financing system, where graduates receive affordable loan funding from lenders in their own communities. His track record, and how quickly he articulates and executes ideas, are impressive.

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Uri goes on to paint a picture of a trillion dollar student debt cloud that hangs over graduates during what should be the most exciting and hopeful time in their lives. “We can also help recent graduates in non intuitive ways, helping them raise their credit scores and pay less over the life of a loan.” Echoing some of the ideas of Ramit Sethi and Robert Kiyosaki, Uri and I discuss the finer points of financial education and how many graduates know very little about money. “Those early years after college can make or break your financial future, people need to learn good investment habits and start building an asset base that will sustain them, instead of hoping to have enough money when retirement rolls around.”, says one expert. “Students should also be focusing on investing in themselves and their earning potential, but having more degrees may not be the answer. You really need to be increasing the number of tools in your entrepreneurial toolbelt.” Uri hopes to enact some real, lasting change in the way education is financed. While still in its beginning stages, this firm will be one to watch.
A more effective job hunt?
Andrew Maguire of InternMatch wants to help students avoid the shotgun approach to the internship search process, firing dozens of resumes at prospective employers. Finding an opening with a firm is only half the battle. You have to get their attention, sell yourself to them, and get them to give you an offer. InternMatch educates students on every step of the process; helping them put their best foot forward for the employers they find most compelling. “The typical listing model, where companies post a blurb that stays up for 30 days, makes it difficult for students to differentiate between internships, so it’s hard to customize an application. Employers hate generic resumes and cover letters.” says Maguire.
“We help companies to showcase the unique culture of their internship programs through rich content. Students want to get a feel for the people they’ll be working with, the office environment and the valuable learning experiences taking place. ‘Campus Hubs’ allow companies to interact with students year-round and gives content control to recruiters,” he continues. “Students need a way to connect with prospective employers that is highly personalized. Access to Campus Hubs gives students the opportunity to engage with employers through video, photos, social media, and Q&A so they can see if there’s a good fit before applying.
The ‘catch-22′ is that applicants need the internship to get experience, but experience is needed to get the internship, and ultimately the job. InternMatch encourages students to learn about exciting companies earlier in their career, so they can start to create a freelance portfolio tailored to the companies where they ultimately want to work, showing initiative and passion for what they will be doing. In order for a company to hire you to perform a task, you must showcase your aptitude and skills in the real world.  “You need to be blogging, tweeting, working on projects, and generally getting your name out there. This way, when a company looks for you online, you’re everywhere.”  Campus Hubs are their primary source of revenue, and InternMatch charges companies for access to the polished candidates they create as a result of their educational efforts. They work with over 180 schools nationwide. “Our services are free for students, and always will be. No one should be denied great tools and career opportunities because they can’t afford them.” says Maguire.
But what about those that seek an entrepreneurial education?
Historically, the entrepreneurial path been seen as an all or nothing approach, characterized by high risk and huge rewards for the few successes, with little attention paid to the droves of failed startups that litter Silicon Valley. Incubators, such as Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Y Combinator, and several others are beginning to bridge the all or nothing gap. “Not everyone has to look at a startup as Mark Zuckerburg or Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard and creating a company that changes everything”, says one analyst. “There can be a happy medium where budding entrepreneurs can learn the skills they need to make it without risking everything.” Many experts say that an alternative career path for those hungry dreamers, for whom the traditional educational model may not resonate, will be a great driver of success and create many more jobs in the economy than traditional institutions.
Steve Blank , legendary entrepreneur and professor, who teaches at Berkeley and Stanford, shares his thoughts: “We can’t just think of startups as smaller versions of big companies.”, he says, when asked why previous attempts to teach entrepreneurs might have failed. “We think we may have cracked the code. The key lies somewhere between a curriculum designed to teach entrepreneurs what they will need to know in the founding of their company, and having mentors available as resources.” He continues, “We certainly can’t guarantee the success of a startup, but by teaching them how to bootstrap, iterate quickly and cheaply, and by giving them access to people who have been in their shoes already, they will fail less.”  Online education will continue to grow and become more relevant, as better teaching tools become widely used. “I think the things that we are doing are going to surprise a lot of people, and the world shouldn’t count America out when it comes to innovation. We are seeing signs of a new American Renaissance”, says Blank.
While writing this article, I was bombarded with information, keen insight and hopeful possibilities for the future of education in America. Talking to these entrepreneurs about their successes, and where they see things going, was a truly humbling and eye opening experience. But in the end, I was already looking to be wowed. In the real world, it comes down to a marketing and awareness problem. Sadly, even though there are products and services that can solve many of the problems inherent in the current educational model, if they don’t come to the attention of the people in position to enact changes, then educational reform is dead in the water.

‘Me.edu’: Debating the Coming Personalization of Higher Ed

What does educational personalization look like? How finely should technologists try to parse it—down to individual learning styles? How will personalization conflict with existing regulations? And what are the risks?

Debating those questions was the focus of a panel this morning at an education innovation conference hosted by Arizona State University. Some 700 people—companies, investors, educators—are convening here over the next two days, many of them hoping to ride the surge of investment in education technology.
“We’re entering a world that is going to be so data-mined it will be unrecognizable to us in 20 years, the way our kids laugh at us for buying records,” said one panelist, Jose Ferreira, founder of the interactive-learning company Knewton. “What that means for education is profound, because education produces vastly more data than any other data industry.”
Knewton, which has partnered with Arizona State on math courses, customizes the learning experience for students by mining what it knows about their proficiency and behavior to deliver specific educational content.
But Mr. Ferreira’s vision drew some pushback from Emily Dalton Smith, program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “That assumes that all the answers are captured within the platform or the existing set of content or strategies that we have now,” said Ms. Smith, who stressed the importance of interacting with people, not just tech tools.
Bror V. H. Saxberg, chief learning officer at Kaplan Inc., pointed out another key aspect of personalization: pace. “Everyone benefits from being able to speed up or slow down what they’re learning,” he said. Yet nontraditional models that aren’t based on time spent in class can conflict with government regulations.
Other topics under discussion at the conference include the future of degrees and new models of delivering education. To follow along, you can watch videos of the sessions here or join the Twitter conversation at #eisummit

Creating Innovators- Books

Harvard’s Tony Wagner, author of Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, speaking at Skillshare’s Penny 2012 conference.
Wagner’s insights echo John Seely Brown’s in the excellent A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, as well as Sir Ken Robinson’s vision for changing educational paradigms to better foster creativity.

Programs encourage new grads to try entrepreneurship

About 45 newly minted college graduates begin training in June to work for two years with small start-ups in struggling communities through a just-launched non-profit called Venture for America. Companies in Colorado and Massachusetts are offering paid summer internships to college students and new graduates through Startup America, a national initiative. A competition at Harvard, which opened an innovation lab in November, is providing funds and workspace to teams of students who have proposed ideas such as a car-sharing business in India and a restaurant offering interactive menus.
The flurry of opportunities reflect the mixed job picture for young adults. Corporations plan to hire 10% more new graduates this year compared with 2011, says a survey last month by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which tracks job hiring trends for recent graduates.
Even so, employers scaled back on hiring in March, according to the latest Labor Department data, and younger workers were hardest hit. By the end of 2011, just 54% of 18- to-24-year-olds were employed, the lowest rate since the Labor Department began collecting the data in 1948, says a Pew Research Center report released in February.
"The majority of students are … taking what they can get," says Clint Borchard, 30, a junior at the University of Nevada-Reno, who, with classmates, plans to launch a company this summer that manufactures affordable homes powered mostly by renewable energy. The business plan, which anticipates creating 40 jobs within five years, is a finalist in an inaugural campus competition aimed at spurring regional growth. The winning team will get $50,000.

On average, entrepreneurs are about 43 when they launch their companies, says the Kauffman Foundation, a research group that studies entrepreneurship. It says lack of access to capital and concerns about paying off student loans are among barriers for younger entrepreneurs.
Efforts are underway to bring that average down. The White House hosted a forum Monday aimed at encouraging entrepreneurship among students at historically black colleges. A campaign called #FixYoungAmerica this week is pushing for student loan forgiveness, better education programs and other incentives for younger entrepreneurs. And a number of colleges, including the University of Miami, Stanford and Yale, have begun offering programs for enterprising students with big ideas.
Students "are looking at the economic environment and saying, 'How do I make my own way? How do I follow my passion?' " says Doug Neal, executive director of the University of Michigan's Center for Entrepreneurship. "Many of the students are very passionate about having an impact on the world."

Educating the Next Steve Jobs

Most of our high schools and colleges are not preparing students to become innovators. To succeed in the 21st-century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks and learn from failure. To find out how to encourage these skills, I interviewed scores of innovators and their parents, teachers and employers. What I learned is that young Americans learn how to innovate most often despite their schooling—not because of it.

Though few young people will become brilliant innovators like Steve Jobs, most can be taught the skills needed to become more innovative in whatever they do. A handful of high schools, colleges and graduate schools are teaching young people these skills—places like High Tech High in San Diego, the New Tech high schools (a network of 86 schools in 16 states), Olin College in Massachusetts, the Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford and the MIT Media Lab. The culture of learning in these programs is radically at odds with the culture of schooling in most classrooms.
In most high-school and college classes, failure is penalized. But without trial and error, there is no innovation. Amanda Alonzo, a 32-year-old teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif., who has mentored two Intel Science Prize finalists and 10 semifinalists in the last two years—more than any other public school science teacher in the U.S.—told me, "One of the most important things I have to teach my students is that when you fail, you are learning." Students gain lasting self-confidence not by being protected from failure but by learning that they can survive it.
The university system today demands and rewards specialization. Professors earn tenure based on research in narrow academic fields, and students are required to declare a major in a subject area. Though expertise is important, Google's director of talent, Judy Gilbert, told me that the most important thing educators can do to prepare students for work in companies like hers is to teach them that problems can never be understood or solved in the context of a single academic discipline. At Stanford's d.school and MIT's Media Lab, all courses are interdisciplinary and based on the exploration of a problem or new opportunity. At Olin College, half the students create interdisciplinary majors like "Design for Sustainable Development" or "Mathematical Biology."
Learning in most conventional education settings is a passive experience: The students listen. But at the most innovative schools, classes are "hands-on," and students are creators, not mere consumers. They acquire skills and knowledge while solving a problem, creating a product or generating a new understanding. At High Tech High, ninth graders must develop a new business concept—imagining a new product or service, writing a business and marketing plan, and developing a budget. The teams present their plans to a panel of business leaders who assess their work. At Olin College, seniors take part in a yearlong project in which students work in teams on a real engineering problem supplied by one of the college's corporate partners.
In conventional schools, students learn so that they can get good grades. My most important research finding is that young innovators are intrinsically motivated. The culture of learning in programs that excel at educating for innovation emphasize what I call the three P's—play, passion and purpose. The play is discovery-based learning that leads young people to find and pursue a passion, which evolves, over time, into a deeper sense of purpose.
Mandating that schools teach innovation as if it were just another course or funding more charter schools won't solve the problem. The solution requires a new way of evaluating student performance and investing in education. Students should have digital portfolios that demonstrate progressive mastery of the skills needed to innovate. Teachers need professional development to learn how to create hands-on, project-based, interdisciplinary courses. Larger school districts and states should establish new charter-like laboratory schools of choice that pioneer these new approaches.
Creating new lab schools around the country and training more teachers to innovate will take time. Meanwhile, what the parents of future innovators do matters enormously. My interviews with parents of today's innovators revealed some fascinating patterns. They valued having their children pursue a genuine passion above their getting straight As, and they talked about the importance of "giving back." As their children matured, they also encouraged them to take risks and learn from mistakes. There is much that all of us stand to learn from them.
—Mr. Wagner, a former high-school teacher, is the Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. His new book is "Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World."

Could Many Universities Follow Borders Bookstores Into Oblivion?

March 7, 2012, 7:44 pm

By Marc Parry

Atlanta — Higher education’s spin on the Silicon Valley garage. That was the vision laid out in September, when the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new lab for disruptive ideas, the Center for 21st Century Universities. During a visit to Atlanta last week, I checked in to see how things were going, sitting down with Richard A. DeMillo, the center’s director and Georgia Tech’s former dean of computing, and Paul M.A. Baker, the center’s associate director. We talked about challenges and opportunities facing colleges at a time of economic pain and technological change—among them the chance that many universities might follow Borders Bookstores into oblivion.
Q. You recently wrote that universities are “bystanders” at the revolution happening around them, even as they think they’re at the center of it. How so?
Mr. DeMillo: It’s the same idea as the news industry. Local newspapers survived most of the last century on profits from classified ads. And what happened? Craigslist drove profits out of classified ads for local newspapers. If you think that it’s all revolving around you, and you’re going to be able to impose your value system on this train that’s leaving the station, that’s going to lead you to one set of decisions. Think of Carnegie Mellon, with its “Four Courses, Millions of Users” idea [which became the Open Learning Initiative], or Yale with the humanities courses, thinking that what the market really wants is universal access to these four courses at the highest quality. And really what the market is doing is something completely different. The higher-education market is reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is, what the value is. I don’t know why anyone would think that the online revolution is about reproducing the classroom experience.
Q. So what is the revolution about?
Mr. DeMillo: You don’t know where events are going to take higher education. But if you want to be an important institution 20 years from now, you have to position yourself so that you can adapt to whatever those technology changes are. Whenever you have this kind of technological change, where there’s a large incumbency, the incumbents are inherently at a disadvantage. And we’re the incumbents.
Q. What are some of the most important changes happening now?
Mr. DeMillo: What you’re seeing, for example, is technology enabling a single master teacher to reach students on an individualized basis on a scale that is unprecedented. So when Sebastian Thrun offers his Intro to Robotics course and gets 150,000 students—that’s a big deal. Why is it a big deal? Well, because people who want to learn robotics want to learn from the master. And there’s something about the medium that he uses that makes that connection intimate. It’s not the same kind of connection that you get by pointing a camera at the front of the room and letting someone write on a whiteboard. These guys have figured out how to design a way of explaining the material that connects with people at scale. So Stanford all of a sudden becomes a place with a network of stakeholders that’s several orders of magnitude larger than it was 10 years ago. Every one of those students in India that wants to connect to Stanford now—connect to a mentor—now has a way to connect by bypassing their local institutions. Every institution that can’t offer a robotics course now has a way of offering a robotics course.
I think what you see happening now with the massive open courses is going to fundamentally change the business models. It’s going to put the notion of value front and center. Why would I want a credential from this university? Why would I want to pay tuition to this university? It really ups the stakes.
Mr. Baker: There used to be something called Borders, you may remember. Think of Borders, the bookstore, “X, Y, Z University,” the bookstore. If you’ve got Amazon as an analogue for these massively open courses, there is still a model where people actually go into bookstores because sometimes they want to touch, or they like hanging out, or there’s other value offered by that. What it means is that the university needs to rethink what it’s doing, how it’s doing it. And how it innovates in a way of surviving in the face of this. If I can do the Amazon equivalent of this open course, why should I come here? Well, maybe you shouldn’t. And that’s a client that is lost.
Mr. DeMillo: All you have to do is add up the amount of money spent on courses. Just take an introduction to computer science. Add up the amount of money that’s spent nationwide on introductory programming courses. It’s a big number, I’ll bet. What is the value received for that spend? If, in fact, there’s a large student population that can be served by a higher-quality course, what’s the argument for spending all that money on 6,000 introduction to programming courses?
Q. You really think that many universities could go the way of Borders?
Mr. DeMillo: Yeah. Well, you can see it already. We lost, in this university system, four institutions this year.
Mr. Baker: The University System of Georgia merged four institutions into other ones that were geographically within 50 miles. The programs essentially were replicated. And in an environment in which you’ve got reduced resources, you can’t afford to have essentially identical programs 50 miles apart.
Q. So what sort of learning landscape do you think might emerge?
Mr. DeMillo: One thing that you might see is highly tuned curricula, students being able to select from a range of things that they want to learn and a range of mentors that they want to interact with, whether you think of it as hacking degrees or pulling assessments from a menu of different universities. What does that mean for the individual university? It means that a university has to figure out where its true value sits in that landscape.
Mr. Baker: Another thing we’re looking at is development of a value index to try to calculate, to be vulgar, the return on investment. Our idea is to try to figure out ways of determining what constitutes value for a student, based on four or five personas. So for, let’s say, a mom returning at 50 who wants an education—she’s going to value certain things differently than a 17-year-old rocket scientist coming to Tech who wants to get through in three years and knows exactly what she wants to do.
Mr. Demillo: Jeff Selingo wrote a column about this, having one place to go to figure out the economic value of a degree from a university. It’s a great idea, but why focus only on the paycheck as an economic value? There are lots of indicators of value. Do students from this university go to graduate school by a disproportionately large number? Do they get fellowships? Are they people who stay in their profession for a long period of time? You start to build up a picture of what students tell you, of what alumni tell you, was the value of that education. Can we pull these metrics together and then say something interesting about our institution and by extension others?
Q. What other projects is your center working on right now?
Mr. DeMillo: The Khan Academy—small bursts of knowledge that may or may not be included in a curriculum—was a really interesting idea. Can students generate this kind of material in a way that’s useful for other students? That’s the genesis of our TechBurst competition [in which students create short videos that explain a single topic]. It turns out there’s a lot of interest on the part of the students at Georgia Tech in teaching what they know to their peers. The interesting part of the project is the unexpected things that you get. We had a discussion yesterday about mistakes. This is student-generated stuff, so is it right? Not all the time. Which causes great angst on the part of traditionalists, because now we have Georgia Tech TechBurst video that has errors in it. If these were instructional videos that we were marketing, that would be a very big deal. But they’re not. They’re the start of a thread of conversation among students. There’s one on gerrymandering. So it’s a political-science video, it’s cutely produced, but in some sense it’s not exactly right. And so what you would expect is now other students will come along and annotate that video, and say, well, that’s not exactly what gerrymandering is. And you’ll start to see this students-teaching-students peer-tutoring process taking place in real time.
Q. What about the massive open online course Georgia Tech will run in the fall?
Mr. DeMillo: The idea of a massive open course is something that people normally apply to introductory courses. What happens when you look at a massive open advanced seminar? A seminar room with 10,000 students, 50,000 students—what does that even mean? We’ve got some people here that have been blogging for quite a while about advanced topics. In fact, one of the blogs—Godel’s Lost Letter, by Professor Dick Lipton of Georgia Tech, and Ken Regan of the University at Buffalo—is about advanced computer theory, so it’s a very mathematical blog. It’s in the top 0.1 percent of WordPress blogs. A typical day is 5,000 to 10,000 page views. A hot day is 100,000. The question is can we take this blogging format and turn it into an online seminar.
Q. How would that work?
Mr. DeMillo: The blog is essentially an expression of a master teacher’s understanding of a field to people that want to learn about it. We think that there are some very simple layers that can be built under the existing blogging format that can essentially turn it into a massive open online seminar. It’s also a way of conducting scientific research. When you think about what happens in this blog, it celebrates the process of scientific discovery. I’ll just give you one example. Last year about this time some industrial scientist claimed that he had solved one of the outstanding problems in this area. In the normal course of events, the scientist would have written up the paper, would have sent it to a conference. It would have been refereed. Nine months later the paper would have been presented at the conference. People would have talked about it. It would have been written up to submit to a journal. Refereeing would have taken a couple of years for that. Well, the paper got submitted to Lipton’s blog. It just caused a flurry of activity. So thousands and thousands of scientists flocked to this paper, and essentially speeded up the refereeing of the paper, shortening the time from five years to a couple of weeks. It turns out that people came to believe that the claim was not valid, and the paper was incorrect. But what an education for future research students. You get to see the process of scientific discovery in action.
This is an interesting bookend to the idea of a massive open course. Because the people that are thinking about the massive open online courses for introductory material have a set of considerations. Students are at different levels of achievement. Assessment is very important. The credentialing process is dictated by whether or not you want credit. If you go to the other end of the curriculum, and say, well, what happens when we try to do these advanced courses at scale, credentialing is completely different. Assessment is completely different. You can’t rely on the same automation that you could in the introductory courses. Social networks become extremely important if you’re going to do this stuff at scale, because one professor can’t deal with 100,000 readers. He has to have a network of trusted people who would be able to answer questions. The anticipation is that a whole new set of problems would come up with these kinds of courses.