Free training and Tribes

I am creating a training day for the ABCTE staff and have spent a lot of time reading in preparation. In trying to stretch the mindset of our amazing team, we will be talking about Tribes by Seth Godin, and The Long Tail and Free by Chris Anderson. I will throw in a smattering of Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen just to tie it all together.

The point of this training: education technology is changing so fast that if you don’t keep up you will lose. And one person cannot be the only one keeping up.

Tribes is a great book and a quick read. The point for a small non-profit like ABCTE is that we need to constantly build our tribes in order to grow. We cannot afford expensive advertising campaigns so we need people out there singing our praises. Every state where we have been accepted is due to an ABCTE fan who kept pushing with us. It is much easier for a group like TFA that has a close connection with their teachers to rapidly build a tribe. But we are a virtual learning platform and have to create a virtual community in order to better connect with more people. Building our tribes will be training task number 1.

The scary thing about Free is the concept that all digitized content will eventually be free and we are a digitized teacher preparation program. Those under 30 get this and those of us over 30 sometimes have a hard time with a concept like this. Also note that over 30’s are usually in charge of setting strategy which spells doom for most companies. Taking our own process, I can see Anderson’s point. We continue to add more content into our program for free – the price is really for the certification. We also just created a free one week trial even before I read the book – giving the content away knowing it will get people to enroll. The book could be shorter, but it really does help you break out of the mindset and ensure you are looking at new revenue streams to offset the loss in content revenue.

The interesting thing about Free is the potential it has in the higher education world. Burk Smith has created straighterline.com to take the commodity classes required in college and provide them at a steep discount. Why should you pay $1,000 to sit in an auditorium with 400 other students when you can do it online on your schedule for $139? It isn’t free, but it is close. Randy Best is doing the same thing with Higher Ed Holdings for Master’s degrees – offering a Master’s in Education for $5,000 by doing it online. The dramatic disruption is coming and it will change the face of higher ed.

As for The Long Tail, ABCTE already customizes the program to fit the needs of each teacher. But we have not really branched to far down the tail to create more revenue streams by reaching different sets of customers. So that is another challenge for our team training.

Amazing that you can invest about $70 in books and train 35 people. Pretty much free when you think about it.