Cobb - Leading the learning revolution : the experts guide to capitalizing on the exploding lifelong education market

Leading the
LEARNING
Revolution

The Experts Guide to
Capitalizing on the Exploding Lifelong Education Market

Jeff Cobb

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cobb, Jeff.

Leading the learning revolution : the experts guide to capitalizing on the exploding lifelong education market / Jeff Cobb.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-8144-3225-9 ISBN 0-8144-3225-5 1. Continuing educationMarketing. 2. Adult educationMarketing. 3. Education and training services industry. I. Title.

LC5225.M37C63 2013

374dc23

2012032413

2013 Jeff Cobb.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.

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Printing number
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of
William Chapman
and
Vermell Cobb

No book like this gets written without the benefit of much experience. I am grateful to Elizabeth Kellison, Alec Hudnut, and Tom Geniesse for opening the door many years ago that led to where I am today, and to the many clients and colleagues who have since provided me with opportunities to learn and grow along the way.

To David Houlefriend, colleague, mentor, and collaborator: Thanks for helping to light the path.

Thank you to my association community colleagues Ned Campbell, Colleen Cunningham, Lloyd Tucker, and Dave Will for taking the time to share their experiences.

Thank you to Seth Kahan, Dorie Clark, and the other members of Alan Weiss communityincluding Alan himselfwho took the time to talk with me about the book and share their insights.

A special thanks to Leo Babauta, Howie Jacobson, Tom Kuhlman, Kristie McDonald, Monisha Pasupathi, George Siemens, and Michael Stelzner, none of whom knew me from Adam before I contacted them about doing an interview for this book, but were kind enough to make the time all the same.

To Emily Wilson, thank you for the use of your little house at Swansboro as a welcome writers retreat. Ed, thanks for helping to arrange that, and Laurie and Buddy, thank you for being willing to provide a great example from everyday life.

And thank you, finally, to Celisa, simply for being there and being who you are.

THIS BOOK is based on three straightforward ideas.

The first is that we live in a world that is more connected and changes faster day in and day out than has ever been the case before.

The second is that to thrive in this world, we must continually develop new knowledge and skills. Never before has ongoing, effective lifelong learning been so necessary for so many people both as a path to economic success and simply for making sense of and finding fulfillment in a highly complex world.

The third is that technology has reached a tipping point in the past few years. Not only are there many more ways to deliver education outside the traditional classroom; the technologies are dramatically less expensive, easier to use, and much more broadly embraced by the public than they were as little as a decade ago.

These three ideas together suggest a tremendous opportunity: We are at a point at which nearly anyone with a decent computer, a high-speed Internet connection, and expertise or access to expertise in a topic or skill set can reach a global audience in very sophisticated ways.

That anyone may very well be you.

Depending on your background and your perspective, little of this may seem like news, but consider what the situation was just a little over a decade ago.

In the go-go dot-com 1990s, I worked for a start-up e-learning company whose founders had a vision for capturing lectures from top-ranked schools and distributing them into community colleges and second-tier universities. The idea was to provide access to a caliber of content that students at these institutions might not otherwise get. It was a compelling vision, and the company produced some wonderful educational content. To do this, though, was no small matter. We spent millions on high-end audio and video equipment and the talent to go with it so that we could capture lectures. We paid dozens of Flash and HTML programmers to create interactive web content and employed teams of writers, graphic artists, and editors to create great text and visual content. Much of my own work involved traveling from business school to business school to secure complex contracts for the professors who would deliver the lectures. My colleagues and I were certain we had found a model that was going to transform the world of education. The market, however, was not so certain, and the sales we hoped for never materialized.

Of course, in those days it was all too easy to find and spend money on the next big thing. When the venture fell apart, it was also easy to draw the conclusion that maybe the Internet and the whole concept of online education were not going to be all that the hype had made them out to be. By 2002, the bubble had burst, and the people at my company, and at countless other companies, had dispersed and gone off to work on other things. The revolution we had been a part of had seemingly fizzled.

Now, fast-forward a decade, and consider what has happened in the meantime.

Many of the things we now consider a standard part of our Internet experience have come into existence only in this intervening decadesome only in the past five years. These include Google, YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, smartphones, and even low-cost, reliable web conferencing technologies, just to name a very few. Awareness and use of most of these technologies have become the norm in only the past few years, even if it now seems like they have been around forever.