Author Archives: Kirsten Winkler

About Kirsten Winkler

Kirsten Winkler is the founder of EDUKWEST, a media site covering the latest in education technology and startups. You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook or Google+

Adsense and Edupreneurs – Pros and Cons

Fellow edupreneur Sylvia Guinan asked if using Adsense to monetize personal blogs or websites in education actually makes sense. As the answer is a bit more complex I decided to put my answer in a blog post.

There are basically two schools of monetizing educational content. One says that you should rather focus on selling your own stuff on your website(s) blog instead of giving up valuable screen real estate to other vendors. This is also tied to the notion that you should try to keep each visitor on your site as long as possible instead of giving him/her a quick possibility to exit and likely having them buy stuff at a competitors site.

That said, most edupreneurs don’t have much to sell but their online or offline lessons. I know few who go through the trouble of creating downloadable or even physical content that visitors might want to purchase.

Hence, the second school of thought says any money is good money. If you are not going to convince the visitor to buy a lesson with you, you might as well profit and earn some cents through a click on a banner ad.

To me, both options are valid, and as I am in the position of maintaining several blogs and websites I basically use different approaches at the same time.

Different blog, different audience, different approach

Long time readers of KW will remember that even this blog used to have Adsense on it until I decided against it. You can read my post about it in the archives. On the other hand, my Deutsch Happen project is heavily monetized by Google Adsense, so is my latest blog Fair Languages. EDUKWEST has advertisements on it but no Adsense. So let’s break it down for the individual cases.

KW is my personal blog and I don’t feel that ads match this approach. In this case I could also wear branded clothing like sports professionals and insert advertisements in my daily conversations, just like Wayne and Garth.

It just does not feel right thus I decided against it. These days, I don’t even promote my own services heavily on this blog which may change again but I have not made up my mind about it yet.

Deutsch Happen started in 2008 as a side project of my online teaching. On the one hand, I wanted to build my personal brand as German teacher, on the other hand, I used the videos as additional resource for my students in between live lessons. Similar to Salman Khan I saw a rising interest in my videos, so I thought monetizing them might be a nice additional source of revenue. As we all know, Sal never monetized his videos but he also had some cash in the bank from his Wall Street days.
Deutsch Happen monetizes its content in two ways, Adsense on the website and Adsense displayed in the video lessons. The revenue isn’t great but also somewhat an excuse for me to keep on going with the project. Video production is time and cost intensive and doing it completely for free does not fit my hefty schedule anymore.

Fair Languages is a resource site for language learners. Hence, leading our readers to new and interesting language learning products is part of the experience. This can be done via links in reviews or, of course, advertisement on the blog. One way is to generate money is to sell ad spaces to interested companies in the language learning space. Moreover, we display Adsense in the spaces that are not booked.

EDUKWEST is a premium brand as it is very production heavy. It implies that I only accept premium advertisers that match the brand and who are willing to pay a premium price to reach the EDUKWEST audience. Which brings us to the pros and cons of Adsense.

Pros and Cons of Adsense

The pro is of course that it is pretty much “set it and forget it” or “passive income” as they used to call it back in the days. As soon as you are accepted to the Adsense program it is pretty easy to embed the code and get things rolling.

The con is that you don’t have much influence about what people will see in the ad space(s) on your site. It might be related but it could also be Asian dating sites, how to lose belly fat or cheap pharmaceuticals. There are possibilities to go under the hood of Adsense and block certain sites but I think that this is work that does not pay off.

Sylvia also asked if ads interfere with the site and its content. Again, it depends. If you take a look at Fair Languages I think we found a nice way to integrate the ads. As the site is pretty heavy on photos, the ads fit in nicely without disturbing the user’s experience on the site. I suppose, most people don’t even (actively) see them.

Deutsch Happen is much more “in your face” but the site also dates back four years now and does not run on WordPress. Redesigning the site would not make much sense and also potentially screw up our search ranking, so we leave it as it is.

Is it worth the effort?

The above brings us to the biggest problem of Adsense in education. Quite frankly, it does not pay much. Adsense is based on the content it is embedded into and advertising rates in education are pretty low. If you have a blog about insurances you can make up to $50 a click, in education you are lucky to get $1 once in a while. Most clicks are worth between $0.01 and $0.05.

If you take the old rule of thumb that among 100 visitors one of them will click on an ad you can easily predict what your blog or website might generate based on your monthly visitors. I hope you are tracking it! Also keep in mind that Google pays out your earnings based on a €75 / $100 threshold per month. As a result it might take you some months until you get something in your bank account.

Bottom line: I think it is worth to experiment with Adsense. You can’t really break anything and it will get you a better feeling of what your brand is worth. Another positive side effect is that marketers who see that you are monetizing your blog with Adsense may contact you and offer some direct advertising as well. I usually got offers for $80 to $100 for a text link on my blog.

Playing in Someone Else’s Sandbox Rules May Change

One of the major topics among edupreneurs, online marketers, blogger and others relying on Facebook traffic is the recent change in what fans actually see popping up in their news stream. I wanted to title this post “Waahaa – Cry Babies want their Facebook traffic back!” but that would have been a bit unfair . Nevertheless, I think the issue has been blown way out of proportion.

Let’s start with the basics. When a platform is new the first priority is to get as many users as possible. Therefore the rules are pretty much beneficial for the users. It makes you use the product and hopefully get you to the point where you can’t live without it. A bit like selling crack-cocaine.

Facebook has given page owners a free ride for many years, driving the traffic away from Facebook to their own sites. Now ask yourself, is that something you would do with your blog or platform? Your goal is to keep your users on your site, not leading them away from it to other sites, right? So why on earth should Facebook do it without any benefit?

On top of that Facebook is now a publicly traded company, e.g. they have an earnings call with Wall Street analysts every couple of months. People invest in Facebook on the terms that the social network grows its revenue. Hence, it makes even less sense for them to give you free traffic.

Let’s say you are one of the people who have spent time and effort on building your brand outside of Facebook over the years you were most likely not shocked at all or even surprised as it (or something similar) happened before and will happen again. The thing is, you are constantly playing in someone else’s sandbox and surprise: it’s not you who makes the rules. Here are two examples.

Google

If you spent time on trying to get your page ranking on Google for related search terms you might have been hit by the infamous Panda update back in early 2011. It was so bad that it took out two big players in the education space, my favorite platform TeachStreet and the just newly refocused Mahalo. And even today algorithm changes affect startups. Just read the latest New York Times article on the matter.

YouTube

Like Google, YouTube is experimenting a lot with new ways to display and surface “relevant” content on the platform. I have been hit by the changes at least three times with my Deutsch Happen channel over the past years and even big YouTube stars like Mystery Guitar Man saw huge drops in audience and hence revenue.

But you know that all of the platforms offer you to get traffic in return. Google has Adwords, YouTube lets you promote videos and Facebook now lets you promote posts. Hence, if you really, really want (need) the traffic, there is an option for you.

As a long time reader of this blog you will know that I have always advocated that edupreneurs need to learn about the processes behind the scenes of technology they use. If you have at least a bit of an idea on how funding or even an IPO affects the destiny of a startup you cannot be surprised by such changes.

In August 2010 Andrew Lewis coined a phrase that is still true today:

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

Have you ever sat down and truly asked yourself if you were willing to pay for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other free service you are using on a regular basis? If the answer is “No, I won’t pay” then you have to ask yourself whether the startup actually built something meaningful at all. Which leads to the next question that when you don’t see any real value in the service, why should others?

A handful of edupreneurs like André Klein, Koichi and myself have always preached that you need to invest into your own website (sandbox) as it is the only place you are truly in charge of. All the rest is nice as long as it works and if it stops working you simply move on. The goal is that you need to get your audience to come to your site on their own because they want to, not because they might see a Twitter, YouTube or Facebook update pop up in their cluttered stream.

If you want to have something that catches their attention, get them to sign up for a newsletter. This way you are directly in their inbox as long as they choose to be on the list. You want direct contact, not filtered through a middleman.

Facing the Realities

On the other hand, the new Facebook algorithm might also have some positive side effects as it clears up the news stream from all the noise.

As a side note, when I take a look at both the reach and engagement graphs of my established pages Kirsten Winkler, EDUKWEST, Deutsch Happen and Deutsch Sprechen I have not noticed any significant drop in either graph on any of the four pages mentioned. The only drops I see are the ones I am familiar with, e.g. not updating the page or usually on weak days like Saturday.

All in all the number of likes your page got never reflected the actual number of engaged fans, anyway. The same is true for Twitter followers and YouTube subscribers. It’s a vanity number, nothing more. The new actual number of people “seeing” your Facebook page update also reflects how many people really visit your page or group in the first place. Taking the Edupreneurs Club as an example we have 200+ members but each posts gets seen by 7 to a maximum of 35 members. And that’s about the engagement I noticed over the months. There are about 10 active members and some lurkers. The rest joined but never came back.

This means, if people choose to visit your page anyway on a daily or weekly basis by clicking on the link on the left side, then all is well. If they just liked your page and never returned, anyway then you didn’t lose anything at all. You just get a realistic number of how many people actually care about your stuff. And yes, sometimes reality hits you hard, bro.

Picture by waterbridge via Morguefile

New YouTube Algorithm may help Educational Content

YouTube played around with its algorithm, again. Being an educational YouTuber myself since May 2008 I have seen a lot (of changes) over the years. Some were good and helped me to get more exposure and subscribers, others were bad for my channel especially the last change that affected content discovery.

Whereas a video I uploaded a year ago easily surpassed 1000 views in the first two weeks I now get around 500 which is kind of weird as my subscriber base has constantly grown in the meanwhile. Hence something is seriously broken in terms how people find the videos even when they are subscribed to my channel. It feels a bit like Twitter or Facebook where only a fraction of the followers or fans see your content as it will simply drown in the stream of updates (and supposedly, this won’t change as long as I don’t pay to promote my updates or tweets).

But on the upside, I still have good engagement and views on the video lessons which could help them to rise in the search results according to the announcement of the latest changes in the algorithm.

YouTube wants to focus on viewing time instead of clicks which is especially interesting for video lessons. When they are good or cover a topic people are interested in, they will of course watch the entire video and not click away to the next one.

Another part of this algorithm change is that YouTube will also take into consideration how much viewing time your videos drive across the platform. Hence, if you interlink your video lessons and people consume more of your videos it will help your lessons to come out on top.

In order to help you keep track of how your videos are performing, YouTube added a new tab to the analytics desk that shows you how long your viewers spent watching your lessons.

Picture by mconnors via Morguefile

Paying it Foward means You give a Loan not a Gift

loans

I feel that I need to explain the phrase “paying it forward” a bit as I am pretty sure that most people think about it as an altruistic move, a gift in the hope that someday, someone will come and pay back. Spoiler: that’s a fairy tale.

You read and probably will read about this concept a lot. I wrote about it just last week, André Klein wrote about it on Learn Out Live and many successful entrepreneurs in the Valley are talking about how paying forward eventually landed them good jobs and other opportunities.

What they and I did not tell you is the mindset you need in order to make “paying it forward” work. It’s not about serendipity, it’s about business. Paying it forward means that you are giving the other person a loan that you expect to get back with interest on top. And this means that you need to calculate the risk of paying it forward in the first place.

First of all, can I afford it? Working for free takes away time that you could use to earn money right away. Therefore, you need to ask yourself if there is a chance that the time you invest in a project or person is going to result in revenue or another opportunity down the road.

Secondly, are there other side effects of paying it forward that might help you to achieve other goals? Will the work strengthen your personal brand, will you reach new potential customers or are there other positive outcomes on the horizon?

Those are of course all factors you cannot predict without fail, but you should be able to see if there is the potential that something might result out of it.

Going back to my post about Today’s Campus, I could not predict that making 200+ video interviews and other webcasts would lead me to becoming Innovation Editor but I knew from the start that it would help me build my brand in the online education space which would lead to some opportunities like joining startups as advisor, offer consulting services or talk on events, eventually. It was a calculated investment with a medium risk as I invested the time and effort in my own project. Nevertheless, it took away (a lot of) time that I could have used to teach online or work on an online course etc.

Second example: building this blog eventually led to paid columns on other blogs which besides the obvious monetary effect also helped to build my overall reputation. But again, blogging and building an audience took time that I could have used to generate revenue as an online teacher.

To sum this up: always evaluate your potential return before you get engaged into paying it forward, especially when you get involved in a project that is not yours. At least unless you are absolutely fine with investing time and effort without any potential (financial or reputational) outcome but Karma points for the afterlife.

Fall Cleaning and New Agenda

One of the upsides of having a blog that goes back nearly four years now is that I have a lot of material I can use to write posts with titles like “Told you so”, at least when I can remember what I wrote when and where.

The downside is that when you are planning to do some clean up and trimming you look at your category structure and think “WTF have I thought?!”

In order to teach this old dog here some new tricks, I think I need to find a new structure and also some new topics as most of the education related stuff is now on Big Think, edcetera, Fractus Learning and of course EDUKWEST and Fair Languages.

So, here is the plan. I will cut down the nearly 30 categories of this blog to the following six ones

Next Ed
General and also shorter posts on education related stuff, online and offline.
Edupreneurship
Posts about freelancing and building for profit startups in education.
Social Media
Everything interesting that is going on in the social media space, education related or not.
Digital Society
Everything 1984 and Brave New World-ish. How are technology and the Internet changing the way we learn and live?
Startup Meals
That’s a new (old) one. I believe healthy living and good living is part of your personal success as well as of the success of a startup. I will start sharing simple and healthy recipes that even the busiest entrepreneur can realize at home or at work.
Personal
Everything personal, like this post.

Sounds like a plan? I think so, too. By the time you read this post I should have finished to sort the entire archive into the new structure.

Picture: Constant Puyo, via Wikimedia Commons

I joined Today’s Campus as Innovation Editor

I think, it’s time to give you some updates on what I’ve been up to during the past couple of months. Yes, I am still here – if here means the Internet in general

Honestly, I started too many times with a sentence like “I will blog more often here on KirstenWinkler.com” but we all know how that worked out, right? So, no more promisses – for now.

As if I haven’t had enough on my plate already I joined the team at Today’s Campus as Innovation Editor. Today’s Campus is one of the leading print magazines in the higher education space and now strongly growing its footprint on the Internet. In my new role I am going to interview innovation leaders, movers and shakers in the higher ed space similar to my EDUKWEST series.

Let me also give you a bit of the back story as I think it shows how our education 2.0 and startup world works. André Klein of Learn Out Live also wrote about the “mysterious ways” paying forward on the Internet can lead you to crossroads you would not have thought about in the first place.

It all started with Jon Bischke and eduFire. As you know Jon played a major role of how my blogging career actually started back in 2009. If you remember, eduFire got acquired by Camelback Education back in 2010 and he then introduced me to Steve Cooper, the founder and CEO of Camelback Education. We had some nice chats via Skype over the years but never about something really concrete in terms of working together.

One year ago Steve acquired the Today’s Campus Magazine, and together with Ryan Bush whom he had hired as publisher the magazine grew nicely month over month. And about three weeks ago Steve asked me if I would like to join the team as Innovation Editor. To be honest, it totally came out of the left field but hey, what a great opportunity! So I said yes, eventually.

Below you can watch my first interview featuring Andrew Grauer, co-founder and CEO of Course Hero. Yes, I know you can’t see me but that will be fixed in the upcoming interview. I hope you will enjoy the talk nevertheless.

So, thanks again to Steve, Ryan and the Today’s Campus team for such a great start and giving me the opportunity to work with such a great group of people. And I thank you, my readers, for sticking with me through all these years, I really appreciate it! And there will be a second update, tomorrow. Promised

I leave you with one of my favorite quotes and music videos.

Silence doesn’t mean you’re forgotten. – Duran Duran

Picture by mxruben via Morguefile

Last Man Standing italki raises new Angel Round – Focus is now on Live Teaching

Back in January I predicted that italki will give it another shot and probably raise some more money. Well, yesterday I received an email from Kevin Chen in which he announced just that, a second angel round.

Though Kevin did not disclose the actual numbers, he wrote that the funding is “in the hundreds of thousands, and less than a million” with participation of individual angels as well as angel funds.

I have known italki for a very long time. It must have been the second or third platform I signed up for back in 2008. It was also one of the platforms that actually delivered students that were willing to pay for my teaching.

If you followed my posts about italki over the years here on this blog and over at EDUKWEST you know that the team managed to run the platform for years on a very low initial budget. The reason why those angels invested in italki is that the platform is apparently showing some good organic growth in terms of revenue and the new round will be used to bring italki to global scale.

Looking at what is left on the market after the past couple of years, italki might have a good chance to gain traction. Most players (which where all better funded) from back in the days are either in the dead pool or very close to go belly up. Hence there is a growing group of independent language teachers with at least some experience on the market who look for new platforms to offer their services on.

And according to italki more than 900,000 people are using (have used) the service up to today. This is, of course, just a friction of the traffic Livemocha or busuu are seeing, but for a service that focuses on live lessons, it is likely the biggest group of learners / teachers today.
As a little downer I will share with you that I know people from my Deutsch Happen project who have been using the italki platform to ask questions and get answers without ever having had the intention to pay for lessons with a teacher / tutor. Though with the relaunch of the marketplace this Q&A element of italki might not be an integral part anymore, it has surely had its part in the 900,000 people using the service. You know me, I’ve never been one to cheer on vanity numbers.

The relaunched italki is clearly focused on student and teacher discovery. It offers three different types of live learning: with an language exchange partner (free), with a community tutor (free or low price) and with professional teachers (regular price).

The payment system is still based on credits which makes it easier for students to pay through a large choice of different online payment methods.

Of course, it is hard to say if the last man standing will succeed in the end. But growing revenue based on students who are willing to pay for teaching services is not a bad sign. And the italki team is now very experienced in growing a service organically over years and I doubt that their style will change with the new round of funding.

If I was still teaching online for a living, I would gladly reactivate my italki account to give it a try.

Put Your Money Where Your Comment Is

By popular vote in our Edupreneurs Club, here is my take on the
Edulang / ETS kerfuffle. I am shocked. Shocked that people in the comments were shocked that something like this had happened.

In today’s publishing world the big players are pretty much known for their race to the bottom what payments for writers concerns. The story inside the company probably went like this: ETS says to subcontractor “We need a new textbook. This one from Edulang we still have lying around from contract talks is pretty good. We want a similar one.” Subcontractor has too much on his / her plate, gets late with the delivery and starts to copy and paste to meet the deadline. End of story. That does not mean that someone at ETS should not have double checked the book but it also does not mean it was a deliberate act from ETS.

But I am probably even more shocked that the commenters did not know what to say or do – just offering their best wishes.

OK, I understand that if you are under shock you are most likely not able to react, hence the word “shock” has been chosen wisely as it does not implement action from the commenter. Why aren’t they upset, enraged, infuriated or on the barricades instead?

There is a huge difference, especially for the Edulang team, between words and action. Now, I don’t mean that the commenters should sharpen their pitchforks, light up the torches and gather around the ETS Global headquarter but there are things that can be done that have some more impact than that.

The problem are the totally different company cultures. From my visit at Edulang I know that there is a great, personal spirit in the team, and their CEO Michel Nizon really cares about the quality of Edulang’s products and their clients’ success. Something you can only find in small to medium sized businesses. ETS, like other big publishers, is simply too big to care anymore. Caring takes time, resources and effort. If people are buying your products anyway (because they have to) you automatically scale back the caring to maximize the profit.

Which brings us to the solution. If you as an ESL teacher really care about Edulang, or any other small publisher, then you have to vote with your dollars (or Euros). It’s the same like complaining about caging chickens but still buying eggs from battery chickens instead of free range. If you want to change this, buy free range. If you want to crack the monopoly of big publishers, buy from small ones like Edulang. And then tell your colleagues, recommend it to your students, even better, use the material in your classes. If you have a blog, write about it, sell it on your website as affiliate and so on and so forth.

As people say, talk is cheap. Same applies for commenting. My friend Jason Calacanis once said that when one of your friends is publishing a book, it is your duty to buy as many as you can afford and give them to your family, friends and employees. If you want to support small publishers like Edulang, the same rule applies. Letting off steam in the comment section won’t hurt the big publishers. And yes, even buying a book from Edulang won’t change much (if anything at all) for ETS but it will make a huge difference for Edulang. And that’s what counts. So, put your money where your comment is.

Overcoming the Chicken and Egg Problem – Old Models in New Markets

Earlier today I had an interesting Skype chat about the possibility of me launching a MOOC for German. During this talk I had a somewhat Faustian inspiration: what if the classic publishing model wasn’t as bad as it seems?

Yes, I know – me on the side of the dinosaurs and selling my soul to the devil. But let me explain. Publishers used to be the ones who disrupted the market back in the days, like the record industry disrupted sheet music. The book print had an equally big impact on society (if not bigger) as the Internet has today. And while the old model might not work in a proven and mature market like books and newspapers anymore it could be a winner in a new and unproven market like online courses.

Publishing online courses, may they be MOOCs or whatever you call them, is still in its infancy. And right from the start we get high quality courses for free like the ones from MIT, Coursera or Udacity. So what about selling online courses?

To me sitting down and developing a complete online course without the prove that I will get paid for it makes no sense. I have lots of stuff on my plate, and I won’t do work in advance without payment anymore. Think I am getting older (and wiser?). Hence, the only bait I would swallow would have $£€ signs all over it.

And I guess, I am not alone. With the exception of the ones specializing in exactly that, every teacher avoids creating course material like the plague. Why do you think publishers can sell textbooks? And why do you think there are people who create them? Hence if you want to get a good teacher to sit down and create a course the benefit must be an offer one cannot refuse. And as laying cut off horse heads in teachers’ beds at night is not legal, and most teachers don’t own expensive racehorses, this benefit is probably an advance on the course itself.

The problem is, the platform that offers this advance needs to be sure to be able to not only get their money back on the sales but also eventually make profit. Which makes discussions like this far more interesting for me.

If the platform is refusing to pay an advance on the course it basically says that they are not sure (enough) to be able to sell the course. On the other hand, they want to tell me that there is no problem for me to sell the course if I do the work in advance. Something does not add up, Watson.

Part of today’s discussion was that the platform is 100% positive to get me 10.000 students by the time I deliver the course. Now, if they are sure that it is possible to get these students to sign up for the course there should be no problem in paying me in advance for the course and then pay me a small percentage as ongoing royalty for every student that will take the course, right?

This kind of model worked very well for some hundred years in the offline world and I think it would be an interesting model for the new online market. Startups nowadays use to have tons of cash lying around which they usually blow on Google Adwords, “social media experts” and so on. But the real problem is to attract great teachers / content creators as you cannot lure them with promises, vanity numbers and marketing talk. And even if you get them to start the project 90% won’t finish it as there is no real benefit in doing so.

Therefore, instead of blowing your money on Google Ads and call center agents that bug your teachers why they did not create a class yet or signed up for the premium feature, take some of that cash, give it to great online teachers and get some great courses in return which you then can sell for a profit.

Not sure if after this post I still qualify for further talks but that’s my bottom line anyway. If you are willing to pay me in advance, we can talk. If not …

Put it all on Blue or Split your Bet – Thoughts on Facebook Marketing

On Saturday a group of members from the Edupreneurs Club got together in a Google+ Hangout. Initially I thought we would be talking about the different online payment systems and the need for platforms as a middle man or better put to put the middle man out, but a big chunk of our talk was dedicated to Facebook and if it is worth putting time and effort into the social network.

After we finished our talk a lot of comment threads around the topic have popped up in the Edupreneurs Club. George Machlan of My ESL Friends stated

I guess that I was surprised how little our community of Edupreneurs like/respect FB. I too have serious concerns about the value of FB, but is it simply that we have not learned how to effectively use it?

Mau Buchler from Tripppin wrote

After the G+ hangout in which we trashed platforms and expressed our disdain for FB as a marketing tool, I got to thinking: FB is a platform, but we seem to fail in using it as a marketing tool for education because, in part, that’s not what its operational structure was built for. Nevertheless, it works pretty well for what it was built for: sharing info.

and Jason Levine aka Fluency MC commented

Underestimating the power of FB is a dangerous thing, indeed…

As you can see, we got a mixed bag of comments around Facebook and its impact on our online teaching businesses. So let me add my two cents to the stack.

First of all, I think we need to step back and ask ourselves: what is the reason we are using Facebook. I have the feeling that many edupreneurs are afraid to say “I want to make money.” – but if this is the reason you are on Facebook with a page, group or personal profile then the measurement for Facebook’s efficiency is what ends in your pocket or PayPal account.

If you got thousands of likes / fans but you are not able to sell something to these people, then Facebook does not deliver and probably makes no sense to spend time = money on. As André Klein pointed out for him the Facebook conversion sucks (pardon my French) and I can state the same. A like on a picture or video or survey does not convert into cold cash hence if making money is your goal, Facebook fails.

Let’s think about those likes for a second. Firstly, most people on Facebook don’t take a qualified decision before they click the like button. It’s like people on Twitter who follow thousands of people – it is impossible for them to actually know what is going on in their stream. And if people like 100 or more brands / pages on Facebook you can imagine what their news stream looks like. Your message = new article / video or what ever simply get buried underneath an avalanche of kitten pictures, inspirational quotes and marketing talk. If you don’t get spammy and post an update every five minutes there is no realistic chance that your message gets through. Plus Facebook only shows your update to a part of your fans which again lowers your chances.

This means only your core group of true fans who visit your page or group “by hand” are the ones who count here. And I can say that for my 2150 Deutsch Happen fans it boils down 25 true fans = 1%. If I add the 4800 subscribers of the Deutsch Happen YouTube channel to the total number it only gets worse.

And even if you set your goals lower and “only” want to drive traffic to your website or blog Facebook often does not deliver, either. And it’s obvious as Facebook does not want their users to leave the site. FB has done everything possible to train users not to feel the need to leave the platform in order to get what they want on the Internet. Hence, the winner is always Facebook – you create and deliver the content and Facebook is profiting. The return for you and your brand is marginal.

Does that mean you should call it a wrap and leave Facebook? No, basically you can’t as everyone who is not on Facebook today automatically seems to be kind of weird. Also, it is important to stake out your claim in the social media landscape. Even if you are not planning to use it right away it is important that the account belongs to you. A good example is the evolution Google went through in the past months. Hangouts did not exist a year ago and on Saturday we had our Edupreneurs Club meeting on it. Linking it to the E-Teachers Academy YouTube account then allowed me to stream it live and record the talk with only one click. All because I secured the different social media assets (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube & Google) years ago.

Hence, even if Facebook is not performing the way you actually want it to you cannot risk to do nothing. But you need to decide how much work you are willing to put into the social network risking that it might never play a major role for your business.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about Facebook’s potential to create a true world currency with Facebook credits. And though they dropped those credits in favor of third party payment options I still think that it is possible that Facebook can become an e-commerce powerhouse. All it takes are some big brands that train their customers to buy via Facebook which also means that the payment process needs to become far more frictionless, similar to Amazon’s “One Click” payments.

As soon as this happens people will also shop around for other offers, e.g. the stuff you offer via the social network. That’s why I started the experiment with André Klein and set up a market page for my Deutsch Happen project.

To sum this up: in most edupreneurial use cases Facebook stinks as it has no interest in sharing its user base with you. Likes are vanity numbers that basically mean nothing when it comes to true engagement and sales. Nevertheless, Facebook is still a crucial part of your social media marketing mix, just don’t get high on the numbers and split your bet / time on other tables as well. And always put the biggest chunk on your own table / website. If you make the rules you will always win.

In my next post I will talk about social proof and how these Facebook likes might be not as useless as they appear to be after finishing with this post.

Below you can watch the recording of the Edupreneurs Club Hangout.

Picture by The Jenson Society, NY, 1910 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

How to learn English on the Internet

This is a quick post for all the people on my Facebook fanpage who request that I help them learn English.

Most regular visitors of this blog know how to make the distinction between coverage and analysis of all the exciting things that happen in online education, writing my articles in English and actually teaching English online. That said, I have had the chance to talk with quite a few companies that aim to help learners improve on their English.

So, for everybody who keeps asking, here are some companies I think are interesting to you. Of course this does not represent all of the great startups out there but it’s a start. All of them offer at least part of their content for free, but keep in mind that education in general and learning languages in particular is an investment in your own future and career.

However, free only gets you so far. I’d therefore recommend to also have a look at paid solutions of you’re serious about studying online.

Mobile applications

Mobile learning can be a great way to “stuff” some learning time into your busy schedule, may it be on the way to work or during lunch break.

StudyBlue

The startup allows you to study and share online flashcards, study guides and quizzes. With more than 2,000,000 flashcards added every week, the community is pretty active and you’ll not come to a dead end any time soon. You can study on the web or also download StudyBlue’s mobile app.

I made a quick search for “English” and the system came up with 15.9K cards. This search is, of course, very broad and ranges from American history, the Bill of Rights to studying English. If you search for “English language” you’ll still get 990 cards – all for free. I think, that’s a great basis and you might even want to contribute yourself and start by creating your own flashcards.

Link: studyblue.com

Voxy

With Voxy you’ll have the best experience if you’re mother tongue is either Spanish or Portuguese and you want to learn English. The startup offers an interesting mobile approach to language learning and focuses on the personal or individualized experience which essentially means that you only get learning materials that fit your interests.

Voxy uses real content, no textbooks and have recently integrated Skype tutoring and learning English through music.

Link: voxy.com

Live lessons with teachers & tutors

Next on my list are some fellow Edupreneurs who offer their programs online using various outlets such as teaching platforms, Facebook or YouTube. I picked these two because the think outside the box which I like (needless to say..).

My ESL Friends

Created by George Machlan, My ESL Friends gets you in touch with some non traditional approaches to teaching English, off the beaten track. To get an idea, visit their Facebook fanpage at facebook.com/MyESLfriends

Besides, George also uses a virtual classroom to offer his Edupunk lessons. You can find the schedule for his different live online classes on his blog.

Link: myeslfriends.com/wordpress/edupunk-english

Fluency MC / Collolearn

I let Fluency MC aka Jason Levine speak for himself: it’s all the 3Rs – relax, repeat, remember. If you’re looking once again for an innovative and fun approach to learn English for free, you should join his popular Facebook fanpage at facebook.com/FluencyMC and subscribe to his YouTube channel collolearn that’s he’s been growing over the past two years.

Link: youtube.com/collolearn

Language Learning Communities

Back to something more traditional. The following companies have been around for the past five or six years which makes them to established players in the world of online learning. As they’re still around today somewhat proves that there must be something to the way they let you learn languages on the net.

busuu

busuu is an online learning community on the internet which lets you learn English and other languages for free. You might even find a partner for language exchange in the community.

If you’re looking for something mobile or professional with a curriculum busuu offers various paid solutions that have found quite some success in the internet community.

Link: busuu.com

Livemocha

To my knowledge one of the oldest language learning communities on the internet, at least the one I discovered early on. Since the days I tried it out in 2007 and 2008 a lot has changed, in the company’s structure, design-wise and about their offer.

I reckon, Livemocha offers the biggest variety of languages among the language learning communities that you can start learning for free. English is naturally the most popular by far. Similar to busuu Livemocha offers paid solution, e.g. if you want personal tutoring that comes with a pricetag.

Link: livemocha.com/pages/languages/learn-english

Palabea

Unlike the two big language learning communities mentioned above, Palabea adjusted their offer and differentiates from the others by focusing on topics that you love and cultural discovery. If you search for “English” you’ll find lots of users that also want to practise and offer their native language in exchange.

I guess, if you’re not necessarily looking for a professional tutor but have achieved some level already, this might be a good way to practise your English.

Link: palabea.com

Voxopop

Voxopop was designed by my friend Dean Worth and is a voice-based e-learning tools that lets you explore or create talkgroups.

The talkgroups aim to improve students’ speaking skills. Teacher and students record quick voice messages to communicate or discuss a certain topic. Voxopop is used by people from around the world and entirely free to use.

Link: voxopop.com

Edutainment

As the name suggests, edutainment is a mix between education and entertainment. It’s getting more and more popular as you learn while you also have fun by watching movies, playing games and so on.

English Attack!

English Attack’s approach to help you learn English is entertainment based. You’ll learn through watching video, listening to music, play games and find new friends in the community. For instance, each day the startup releases a new video booster, free Photo Vocab or lets you play a free practice game.

There is lots available for free. However, if you want to have access to the entity of English Attack’s offer, you can activate your so called Booster Pass, their paid offer.

Link: english-attack.com

I hope, this gives you a number of tools at hand to learn or improve your English by studying online.
Depending on your preferences and personal taste you might prefer one method over another; I recommend you try my different suggestions out, explore further and get more recommendations from the people you will meet on the different services.

And that’s a wrap!

Picture via Wikimedia

The Phonograph killed Sheet Music – and Piano Makers

There was an interesting discussion on the last The Verge Show. Joshua Topolsky, editor in chief of The Verge talked with Tim Wu who coined the term Net Neutrality. During this talk he made an interesting point about industries getting disrupted all the time and that the companies that disrupt those industries will eventually turn into what they once fought.

The music industry we know today once was the disrupting force. As Tim Wu points out during the talk, the phonograph and record music killed sheet music and in some way music instrument makers. And the argument was no different from today. Sheet music makers said that record makers were pirates, taking their notes and turning them into playable music.

Before recorded music you would need to make your own music at home, hence buy sheet music of “the latest hit”, learn to play it and, of course, own some kind of an instrument may it be a violin, flute or piano.

Let’s think about this for a minute. If sheet music makers were suffering as well as music instrument makers who else was affected by this? I guess, in some way furniture makers who built seats for pianos and music stands. And of course music teachers. If more and more potential clients bought a gramophone instead of learning an instrument this also must have had an effect on their business. And I imagine, music shops also felt the pinch sooner or later as well as street musicians like the hurdy-gurdy man.

On the other hand, records brought the joy of music to far more people than sheet music, especially with another disruptive technology: the radio. But then again, radio brought us an universal music taste that has slowly but surely killed local music styles and folk music.

This really made me think of the parallels we are seeing today in the tutoring and life long education space. Online learning platforms and applications replace lots of tasks and topics learners once needed a tutor for. Online universities and learning platforms like Coursera bring quality education to far more people, but as Jason Calacanis in his interview with Sebastian Thrun of Udacity pointed out, this will also probably lay off the bottom 20% teachers who do not perform for whatever reason.

The question is: what will those startups be replaced with in twenty years as everyone becomes what he despise? My best guess are brain implants similar to what we know from the Matrix movies. You simply load what you want to learn directly into your brain. No social interaction or effort needed whatsoever.

Did Skype Jump the Shark with In-Call Ads?

About two weeks ago Skype introduced in-call advertisements in voice calls or “conversation ads” as they call it. Well, we can’t say that we did not see this one coming as Skype has talked about plans to monetize the platform through ads for a while now. And you know that I am probably the last one to blame a company when it wants to make money, in fact the question “What is your business model?” is probably the one I use in every talk I have.

And let’s be honest. If you were really annoyed by the ads there is a pretty simple fix. Just add some credit to your account. When it’s short to expire just call yourself on your land line number for a couple of seconds and your credit will be good for the next six months or so.

Still, I have never been a fan of advertisements to monetize a service or platform, especially when this revenue model is added at a later stage like in this case. Yes, I know that my Deutsch Happen project is pretty much plastered with ads but hey, it’s free. Skype has been my tool of choice when it comes to online teaching and content creation for a long time now and I have to admit that it is still the best VoIP client out there. Nevertheless, I feel an increasing personal need to find a new service that has the potential to replace Skype as I ran into a lot of minor problems with Skype and the tools I use that are based on Skype lately. I am just not 100% happy using it, anymore.

For example, Chris and I gave it a shot and we tried out ooVoo, a VoIP client that I had used in the early days of EDUKWEST to record my interviews. And though the advertisements are even more intrusive than on Skype in the free version, the advantage is the integrated call recording that works like a charm. Downside however are the smaller videos you get from the callers and the audio also cannot compete with Skype.

The second option I am currently playing around with is Google+ Hangouts, and it might be a potential Skype replacement for some of our shows like ENT. The platform seems to be pretty robust, similar to Skype and there are advantages like live streaming on your Google+ profile and your YouTube channel. The recording will automatically be added to YouTube, as well.

But still, Skype is on nearly everyone’s desktop, mobile phone or tablet these days. At least I have this impression when I am talking to interviewees for our shows. It has become the VoIP client that people use on a regular basis – at least here in the western world. We should keep in mind though that Skype is banned in UAE and the recent articles around a new law in Ethiopia which might put people in jail for using VoIP services, though it seems that it was a misunderstanding. Talking about internationalization in education this is definitely something we have to take into account.

I believe, reactions to ban Skype are largely due to the fact that governments cannot control what’s being talked about on the service. And I assume as long as Skype and other VoIP services are not willing to open a back door (and I hope that they remain firm here), those services will remain unavailable. On the other hand, these reactions also show the increasing popularity of VoIP as an alternative to telephones all over the world.

But back to my search for Skype alternatives. Asking people in advance if they are on Google+ to add them to a Hangout or sending them a link to join an ooVoo call via the web feels unprofessional and looking back at my early interviewing days it also did not work in 50% of the cases.

One thing is clear though. In the coming weeks and months you will see more live events from me and probably our EDUKWEST team. The experiences I had using Google+ Hangouts were pretty positive, especially from the viewers’ side the reaction was very positive. There is definitely a need for live content and, probably more importantly, live interaction with the audience. The interview Benjamin Stewart did with me on WizIQ lately was another reminder for me to get back in the trenches and talk with people in real time.

Is a YouTube Channel a Key Success Factor for Edupreneurs?

My old friend George has just rebooted his Edupunk / My ESL Friends venture with the premise to finally earn a living from teaching English on the Internet. Hurray to that!

Of course, offering live classes on the web that have a price tag attached to them is a magnitude more difficult than offering them for free and even free classes are often not overbooked if we take a look around the various platforms that still exist.

So he asked for some ideas to market the classes in our Edupreneurs Club on Facebook (if you are interested to talk about making money teaching online and professional exchange in general, that’s the place to go and we are always happy about new members and their input).

My advice was to use YouTube as a marketing funnel, and as I think the reasoning behind might be of interest to the readers of my blog as well, here is a slightly extended version of my answer.

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Skype has become boring and why that’s a good thing

boring I quoted Clay Shirky on that quite a bit already, but I think his idea that tech first needs to become boring in order to make a real impact on society is straight on, still.

It seems that Skype finally reached that point of being a boring commodity as it has made its way into mainstream news coverage for a couple of months now. Even the most conservative news shows on TV invite guests via Skype these days and the verb “skypen – to skype” has also found its place in the German language when someone talks about making video calls.

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The End is Nigh: Ads in Skype Calls and Teens rather ask a Search Engine

Well, I suppose this had to happen sooner or later. Today, I saw my first ad during a Skype call. Though I was able to minimize it, there was still a constant little message reading “show ad” on the right side next to the picture of the person I called .

At least the call was not interrupted with a video or audio sponsor message, still it feels not right, at least not in Skype. Yahoo! Messenger, sure. MSN, yeah, go for it. But Skype… Next time I’ll make a screenshot or if you experience these new ads (I think you need to upgrade Skype to the latest version) post one in the comments.

Looks as if I have to bite the bullet and finally upgrade to a business account. Well played, Microsoft.

Otherwise, I wrote a new post over at Disrupt Education. Apparently, teens don’t bother to ask parents or teachers anymore when they have a question. They rather google it or look it up on Wikipedia. Oh, they also think their parents are not smart enough to actually help them with their homework. Brave new world!

Picture: By NASA, via Wikimedia Commons

TED-Ed turns Education into Hollywood

Hollywood It’s up to you to decide if this is a good or bad thing, I for once say it is better than most stuff we have at the moment. I have always been a fan of production quality and thought that education needs to get out of the nineties and get more “sexy”. I wrote about that in my post about the new and innovative YouTube channels last week.

Today, TED announced the launch of their own YouTube channel in the education vertical and I think the most interesting part about it is the way they come up with their videos as it reminds me of the way Hollywood is doing its movies.

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Follow the Money – Be an Egoist to become an Altruist

Here is a short one, but I’ll work out this thought in a lengthier post this week. I see many educators creating content in order to support learners from less favored corners of the earth. They want to make this world a better place.

Though this is an admirable attitude, it also often leads to dead ends and the shut-down of promising projects. The reason: no money comes in.

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