jason-schmitt-writing

[jason-schmitt-writing]

A little-known technology change will make video streaming cheaper and pave the way for higher quality

(Appeared in Yahoo News, August 19, 2020)

A new format for compressing video, called Versatile Video Coding (H.266/VVC), at first glance might not seem to be the most exciting or profound change to influence humanity. But in a world where 4.57 billion people identify as active internet users, 3.5 billion regularly use a smartphone, 80% of global internet traffic is compressed video data and 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, data is more than binary numbers. Data – and video specifically – is now part of humanity’s collective nervous system.

COVID-19 has greatly increased internet usage around the world. It now has the dual purpose of keeping parents and kids connected for both work and school through video conferencing. Further, families are now regular users of a growing array of streaming providers like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Prime Video, Peacock and HBOMax.

A 50% reduction in video file size is a big deal for humanity’s collective knowledge in our new digital economy. And size reduction of video files is just one win associated with switching.

The new H.266/VVC codec – the program that prepares video for streaming over internet – presents a massive change that will result in video load times becoming shorter, video resolution becoming greater and internet providers having more bandwidth available. Most importantly, cost for data usage will decrease, which will help to reduce disparities of access to digital content for a global consumer. The creator of this new codec, Fraunhofer Heinrich Institute in Berlin, Germany, claims that the first software to support H.266/VVC will be published in fall 2020.

What is a codec?

Codec stands for compressor/decompressor. Codecs are what allow streaming media to be universally readable by computers. They have two specific components: One is the encoder that compresses the files and makes the lights and sound turn into a digital format a computer can read, and the other is a decoder that then decompresses or reads the file and plays back as originally captured.

The new H.266/VVC codec stands on the shoulders of two earlier predecessors with equally attractive names: H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC).

H.264 (AVC) compression, which was created in 2003, has been the gold standard for video compression and still plays a dominant role in online video. However, it works best for the older high-definition HD (1920x1080) video formats. Eventually, H.264 was even employed to create things never initially intended, like newer 4k (2160x3840) video files, but many websites blocked them because they were difficult to process.

A new codec that efficiently manages large file sizes was needed. H.265 (HEVC) launched in 2013 and was tooled toward 4k video compression, but never caught on like its predecessor. From early on, the H.265 codec created massive turbulence for technology company legal departments due to licensing issues, and the wrinkles were never clearly ironed out for mass use. Because of this, many might feel in some ways we are leaping from a H.264 (AVC) world directly into the future with H.266/VVC.

What does H.266/VVC do differently?

H.266/VVC has its focus on extremely high-resolution video, which is imperative in a world that is continually evolving toward bigger, better and more detail. This codec is beneficial now with the widespread proliferation of 4k video and TVs. It will be even more imperative as resolution increases to 8k and beyond. Recently, a new 12k video camera was released that, again, puts more focus and importance on strong compression that H.266/VVC provides.

Perhaps learning from the more turbulent licensing of its predecessor H.265 (HEVC), the Fraunhofer Institute, which is licensing the technology, now takes a uniform and transparent licensing model based on the FRAND principle (fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory). This FRAND directive has front and center the idea that to build up a new widely adopted codec for universal adoption around the globe, equitable access for all is key.

How well H.266/VVC will be adopted by technology leaders is still to be seen. However, as of now, over 30 companies have joined the Media Coding Industry Forum that was created for equitable access to the technology.

As a media and communication scholar who wants to reduce global disparities, I see the arrival of the H.266/VVC technology as an important step toward our media-saturated world becoming more inclusive. I am hopeful that something as unassuming as adopting a new video codec will actually make significant changes to creating more equitable access to digital content globally. After all, the more perspectives we add to any conversation, the more informed we all become.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Paywalls block scientific progress. Research should be open to everyone

(Appeared in The Guardian, March 28, 2019)

Academic and scientific research needs to be accessible to all. The world’s most pressing problems like clean water or food security deserve to have as many people as possible solving their complexities. Yet our current academic research system has no interest in harnessing our collective intelligence. Scientific progress is currently thwarted by one thing: paywalls.

Paywalls, which restrict access to content without a paid subscription, represent a common practice used by academic publishers to block access to scientific research for those who have not paid. This keeps £19.6bn flowing from higher education and science into for-profit publisher bank accounts. My recent documentary, Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, uncovered that the largest academic publisher, Elsevier, regularly has a profit margin between 35-40%, which is greater than Google’s. With financial capacity comes power, lobbyists, and the ability to manipulate markets for strategic advantages – things that underfunded universities and libraries in poorer countries do not have.

Furthermore, university librarians are regularly required to sign non-disclosure agreements on their contract-pricing specifics with the largest for-profit publishers. Each contract is tailored specifically to that university based upon a variety of factors: history, endowment, current enrolment. This thwarts any collective discussion around price structures, and gives publishers all the power.

This is why open access to research matters – and there have been several encouraging steps in the right direction. Plan S, which requires that scientific publications funded by public grants must be published in open access journals or platforms by 2020, is gaining momentum among academics across the globe. It’s been recently backed by Italy’s Compagnia di San Paolo, which receives €150m annually to spend on research, as well as the African Academy of Science and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) of Zambia. Plan S has also been endorsed by the Chinese government.

Equally, although the US has lagged behind Europe in taking a stand on encouraging open access to research, this is changing. The University of California system has just announced that it will be ending its longstanding subscription to Elsevier. The state of California also recently passed AB 2192, a law that requires anything funded by the state to be made open access within one year of publication. In January, the US President, Donald Trump, signed into law the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act, which mandates that US federal agencies publish all non-sensitive government data under an open format. This could cause a ripple effect in other countries and organisations.

But there is a role for individual academics to play in promoting open access, too. All academics need to be familiar with their options and to stop signing over copyright unnecessarily. Authors should be aware they can make a copy of their draft manuscript accessible in some form in addition to the finalised manuscript submitted to publishers. There are helpful resources, such as Authors Alliance which helps researchers manage their rights, and Sherpa/RoMEO, which navigates permissions of individual publishers and author rights. In many cases, researchers can also make their historical catalogue of articles available to the public.

Without an academic collective voice demanding open access to their research, the movement will never completely take off. It’s a case of either giving broad society access to scientific advances or allowing these breakthroughs to stay locked away for financial gain. For the majority of academics, the choice should be easy.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

For-Profit Publishing, Plan S, and Pulling the Band-Aid Right Off

(Appeared on Eurodoc: The European Council for Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers, October 23, 2018)

I’ve spent the last two years traveling 45,000 miles around the world interviewing leading researchers, academics, librarians, and philanthropists about the current publishing climate for my newly released documentary Paywall: The Business of Scholarship. During all of these conversations, not one person referenced the current publishing system, whose aim is to serve humanity and act as a catalyst for our planet’s progress, as healthy, effective, or equitable.

If you watch Paywall, what you will see is a uniform clarity that distinguishes itself very quickly: scholars and the global community need Open Access (OA) to research and data in the future; however, when that will occur is still, unfortunately, to be determined. I’ve heard numerous times that the classification system revolving around our current push toward OA is more akin to a Tiffany’s jewellery display rather than an easy to discern way forward: there are, for instance, ‘platinum’, ‘diamond’, ‘gold’, and ‘green’ models, each bringing unique attributes and concessions. All these methods take some unpacking and a certain cognitive affinity to understand.

It isn’t just the taxonomy of access methods that complicate up-and-coming scholars’ paths forward, but also the multiplicity of voices in disciplines, scholarly society’s reluctance to change, tenure review processes, and general in-fighting by so many different initiatives within the OA community. From my subjective viewpoint: it’s a debacle.

Based upon the prior frenzy, it is no wonder that for-profit publishers continue to succeed with lavish 30-40% profit margins. In fact, the status quo makes it easy for them to do so. The research journal economic model has to be the easiest (and slowest) gazelle the lion ever caught.

But that model will change.

In many ways, our lumbering speed of fleeing from the lion’s grasp is related to the fact that scholarship seems addicted to the status quo. For-profit publishing and cigarette smoking have more in common than you might think. We can always cognitively justify ‘just one more prestige publisher publication’. After all, we crave impact factors’ ease of use and concise nature. It feels comforting, relying on a staff of publisher-supplied publicists, graphic designers, and coordinators, which we know is excessively expensive and not at all healthy. But days turn to years and, then, decades (it was 16 years since the original Budapest Open Access Initiative was set forth in 2002) and, perhaps, that longitudinal timeline alone acknowledges it is time for an intervention.

I’ve never witnessed someone quit smoking a pack-a-day by doing so gradually. In my mind, it is either all or nothing; exactly like ripping a Band-Aid right off. In many ways, this is what excites me about the new ‘Plan S’ to achieve full and immediate OA by 2020 and this specific moment in time. Let’s quit pontificating and get to action already. And just like a smoker needing to throw out his or her cigarettes, let’s keep the old options off the table so we don’t fall back on them due to habit.

For researchers wanting to publish in OA: see Think Check Submit.

For a list of organisations working in the OA space: see Open Access Directory.

Some universities have affiliated institution deals with specific OA journals to reduce or remove ‘article processing charges’ (APCs): see Erasmus University Library.

Recent negotiations and cancellations of big deal publishing contracts between research institutions and publishers: see SPARC.

How journals could flip to OA: see Martin Paul Eve.

I’d also recommend supporting EIFL and SPARC Europe!

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Why For-Profit Academic Publishers Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank

(Appeared on BoingBoing September 18, 2018) 

If you’re not an academic or scientist, then you probably have no idea how off kilter research scholarship has become.

For the past two years, I’ve focused on this misalignment, traveling around the world to document this issue, and just released my documentary, “Paywall: The Business of Scholarship,” this month. It focuses on why the world needs open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google.

After traveling 45,000 miles and interviewing over 70 key leaders in all facets of academics and research, I can wholeheartedly say:  you don't want to have scholars negotiating business contracts for you. My crew and I uncovered that public funds, which come out of taxpayers’ pockets and are earmarked to fund important scientific research, are often locked behind paywalls (which require subscribers to pay for access). This makes this information inaccessible to the general public while, at the same time, generates an unfathomable revenue stream for for-profit publishing companies. As I learned about these issues, I was struck by the global energy and enthusiasm toward open access and the strong resistance to this movement by many of the world’s top publishers.

However, it shouldn’t take long for general society to see that the costliness of the current system is a major burden to the higher education market and contributes to the rising tuition fees at all universities, resulting in the closure of many institutions and—this is the big one—limiting innovation in science, research and progress.

From researchers within the Global South to used car salesmen in Richmond, Virginia, “Paywall” paints a clear picture that limited access to research helps no one and for-profit publishers need to change. One major highlight includes a rare interview with Sci-Hub creator Alexandra Elbakyan who has faced the wrath of these for-profit publishers head-on. Grabbing this interview was difficult because Elbakyan, who created the pirate database that currently houses more than 67 million research papers, is currently in-hiding in Russia because these for-profit publishers (specifically Elsevier) want her arrested for copyright infringement and intellectual property theft.

Staying true to the open access model: this film is free to stream and download personally and publicly and maintains the most open CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons designation to ensure anyone regardless of their social, financial or political background will have access to view this film.

I never wanted this film to be geared toward the academic community. My audience is everyone else—people who may not be aware that this issue is happening, but who are affected anyway, especially when comes to innovation that could help them (or someone they know). And the message of the film seems to be reverberating all around the world. In fact, I had to figure out another way to make it readily available because my server crashed within hours of its global release due to massive traffic.

We currently have screenings scheduled at 250 universities and institutions around the globe this fall, including the United Nations, UC-Berkeley, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Brown University, Oxford University and Erasmus University. Earlier this month, it premiered in Washington, DC, and before a sold out audience at the MIT Media Lab.   I’m appreciative that I was able to bring this issue to mainstream society and hope you not only watch it, but help spread the message to the world.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Asia Advances Open Access Research

(Appeared in the March 30, 2017 edition of The Huffington Post)

Over 75% of Taiwanese universities have officially boycotted Elsevier’s prestigious research journals. This signals either Taiwan’s disinterested stance toward funding prominent research journal access or a new method of obtaining access to scholarship.  Whatever the rationale is behind the subscription lapse, the scientific world has taken notice and is waiting to see what happens next.

Taiwan’s shift away from a reliance on Elsevier research journals is important by itself and more poignant as other countries like Peru and Germany have also rallied behind similar actions.  Couple these scholarly revolts with the Netherlands’ 2016 Elsevier boycott and it appears that the future direction of scholarship is tilting in favor of lower cost opportunities to research represented through the growing open access movement.

Yet, recent financial statistics might tell another story.  

In contrast to the last several years of increasing open access conversations and corresponding publisher boycotts Elsevier’s 2016 financials look far from impacted.  In fact, Elsevier’s own June 2016 calculations posted a 35.4% profit.  Perhaps even more noteworthy than just a profit margin is the fact that Elsevier’s operating revenue is up 2% while their operating profit is up 4%. This suggests that when the publisher fine-tunes more efficient digital delivery methods, it has elected to increase profits rather than decrease costs of delivery for customers.  

Although Elsevier’s financial health is strong—and the company is acting in a manner consistent with most corporations that want to realize a strong profit margin—some of the ramifications of a profit motive associated with the act of publishing scholarship takes a toll. The very regions that are already underprivileged on the world stage are the least likely to gain access to costly research journals which further sets them apart.  

Roshan Kumar, a medical doctor from Nepal, told me recently, “People residing in this part of the world still cannot access a lot of material that they require. Open access levels the playing field with Western countries that have more prominent access and helps to increase our competency to the same level as Western physicians.”  

Talking more about disparities with Western countries, Kumar continues. “We have very limited access.  Our libraries don’t have the ability to afford the subscriptions to such highly priced journals so they just give us a minimum of accessibility and we need to somehow satisfy ourselves with what they have. That is the reason we need accessibility to all journals—because it is really important for us to thrive in a global world.”

From Kumar’s beliefs in equalizing his Nepal-based medical peers within the global community he has taken on a secondary career in addition to his medical position: promoting the need for broad access to research within Asia.  “We try to put in the ears of the big publishers you have two options: Either you need to make it so cheap that anybody can access it or you need to go open access. These publishers have no intention of providing access to resources in our subcontinent and that is very disturbing to me.”

Kumar also acknowledges this current lopsided scenario is not exclusively made by publishers with for-profit motives, but also—and perhaps more importantly—senior researchers and scholars who still prioritize the publication in historically prominent and costly research journals.

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“There is a feeling I see amongst established researchers and professors that they will still somehow go out to publish in conventional publications despite the fact that we won’t be able to read any of it. There is a taboo that you need to publish in high impact factor journals or you need to be cited in the high impact factor journals and that is the only way to increase credibility.  I find that disturbing,” says Kumar.

While research access is clearly a sought after commodity, the need for open access within Asia is far from a one size fits all solution.  “There are so many differences in the economic situations, budgets of universities, and funding that is available from governments,” says Kostas Repanas, head of the Office of Science Communications & Open Archives at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore. “I can’t imagine anyone in Singapore saying, ‘I want to access this journal and my university doesn’t subscribe.’ But if you go to a different level: Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, the situation is really completely different.”

Repanas details that there is a decisive effort from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to try to collaborate for broad reaching open accessand adds that BioMed Central drove efforts for an Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference in Thailand in 2014.  Working with colleagues from Japan, Repanas and others worked to create the Asia Open Access Summit to serve that region with its first conference in November 2016 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which resulted in an increased awareness and desire for more open scholarship resources.

Although Repanas and Kumar are clearly pulling their respective weights to further promote a conversation of open access toward research, Repanas believes that other nations are doing a better job at circumventing some of the reasons for high price research journals in the first place.  

“Australia has been doing a much better job lowering the reliance on journal impact factors,” says Repanas. “They have a range of metrics where they don’t just focus on the impact factor alone.  In Asia, it is overall pretty much focused on impact factors of specific journals. I think, for example, some of the universities in Singapore have been in this race to be the top universities in Asia and they are actually pushing it quite hard.”  Repanas alludes to a rumor from colleagues in China who say that their country will pay scholars to publish in high prestige journals.  Clearly, these attributes prioritizing high impact factor journals for additional credibility undermine the plea from less developed nations to do away with high prestige, high exclusivity, and high price journals.  

If there has been one creation that has been a worldwide equalizer to the access of research, it has been the online search engine Sci-Hub, which bypasses publisher paywalls for its 58 million journal articles.  Sci-Hub and its creator Alexandra Elbakyan are currently engaged in a lawsuit with Elsevier that alleges copyright infringement from the search engine.

“Sci-Hub is a tricky thing.  Some people choose to ignore it.  I don’t like that. Because, in my opinion, Sci-Hub is there for a reason. If there was not a need, it would not exist,” says Repanas. Yet, Repanas is aware of the complexities that surround Sci-Hub as being a solution to the open access dilemma.  “There is no easy answer.  That is why you won’t hear many open access advocates telling others, ‘Why don’t you just use Sci-Hub? What if Sci-Hub stops existing in six months?  You cannot treat it as proper infrastructure.”

As Asia continues to refine its stance on the appropriate funding for research journal access, ultimately, its decision will have powerful consequences on all regions within Asia, including under represented areas. The irony is, of course, that the regions with the strongest economies, library budgets and voices in the conversation are the exact places that are least burdened by current accessibility to research.  Although that scenario could be skewed toward those with power, the current boycott in Taiwan and open access conversations throughout Asia highlight a cognizance toward the full equation and equally powerful ramifications.  And because of that,  medical researchers in Nepal like Kumar remain optimistic for the future.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Creativity In The Digital Era: OK Go’s Damian Kulash Schools the Next Generation

(Appeared in the January 13, 2017 edition of The Huffington Post)

OK Go walks the fine line between musicianship and avant-garde spectacle with a couple dashes of brand promotion thrown over their shoulder for good measure. And I feel confident in saying that OK Go would recommend using Morton Salt for all your throwing-salt-over-your-shoulder good luck needs.

There is a common dominator for all the revolutionary video content this band produces: it is captivating as all get out. And, beyond the excitement and 400 million video views, there are lessons to be learned that go beyond the typical music success story. Understanding OK Go as a phenomenon is a key to understanding the digital era that privileges creativity and the don’t-follow-the-leader mentality.

Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go, recently led my social media course and talked with 50 of my Communication & Media students at Clarkson University about digital success. Some of his statements were geared toward future facing digital strategies and reminiscent of the rules of Fight Club. “The places in which there is still room to grow is exactly not where you think they are,” says Kulash. Clearly Kulash knows his stuff because his digital sophistication and viral sense is a prized commodity and one that many brands and campaigns would like to have on their side.

Regardless of Kulash’s prior digital accolades, he knows there are new hurdles towards notoriety in the digital ecosystem. “We are no longer in the early years of the internet gold rush. It is not wild west out there. Google owns a lot, Facebook owns a lot and Apple owns a lot. The playing field has been tilted again,” says Kulash.

It was that industry tilt and trying to appease so many different critics that was exactly what he didn’t like about the early record industry. “Good songs didn’t just float to the top,” says Kulash.

“You had to write something that appealed to the record label in a certain way so they would then make it appeal to a set of radio promoters in a certain way so that they would then try to make it appeal to radio stations in a certain way. If it were successful it would then appeal to MTV in a certain way. The one song you were making had to check all those boxes because they were the gate keepers.”

Kulash says that OK Go thrived in operating within the early digital era where it was possible to make something that excited people which in turn grew their fan base holistically. People saw their work and were attracted to the message.

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“The internet allowed for that, and still does allow for that, but there are gatekeepers now. You can put anything you want up on Youtube but no one is going to see it. You can put anything you want up on Facebook but no one is going to see it. The industry exists again,” says Kulash.

It’s Only Rock And Roll

The internet’s move from the wild west to a more controlled corporate interest isn’t a new phenomenon. Kulash details that rock music itself charted that very path.

“Rock and roll in the 1950s was for a bunch of outcasts trying to dance nasty to each other. Rock and roll by the time I was a kid was a big business. Rock and roll now is more or less what jazz was when I was a kid. It’s for old dudes. These things are only new once and the zone of opportunities only happens once before a lot of things glom onto it and make an industry out of it.”

But like the evolution of art in a modern world, the rules of the game are never set in stone for the long haul. Denise Lauer, director of communications & corporate brand strategy at Morton Salt, Inc., talks about her organizations recent partnership with OK Go for the One Moment video and Morton Salt’s recent Walk Her Walk campaign, which is a promise from the brand to make and promote a positive impact in the world.

“We wanted to shake up the way people thought about the Morton brand. Basically, everyone knows that Morton equals salt. We don’t really have to drive awareness of what we do. But what we did need to do is reframe the way people think about Morton and create a more emotional connection with our brand and not just what we sell,” says Lauer.

Clearly, the Morton Salt/OK Go campaign with nearly 30 million views, has done just this. It allowed a band to make great art and find compensation for the act of creating while also allowing the Morton Salt brand a chance to target and highlight its product and stance to a new generation of millennials, which, Lauer says, was important in their brand strategy sessions. “OK Go’s videos have a very optimistic, positive, uplifting feel and that is the basis for the Walk Her Walk campaign, so we felt like there was a match from a tonality perspective,” says Lauer.

Although it appears that OK Go has figured out a formula for success, Kulash tells my students, “The people who are making real money on Youtube are usually doing it by putting out something every day or three times a week with very low production values. So follow us in terms of the way you keep your mind open about what ideas you are having, but do not try to make very expensive things once a year—it is a terrible business model.”

Although the revenue from OK Go downloads may not be an extremely profitable factor for financial success it is that notoriety and track record which make them an A list artist for social impact. And that is a difficult accolade to put a price tag on.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

College 101: What Musk and Zuckerberg can teach future leaders

(Appeared in the November 11, 2016 edition of The Huffington Post)

Shooting clay pigeons with a shotgun for the first time is an interesting afternoon endeavor and one that doesn’t seem directly applicable as a metaphor for career advice for my college students. “It is extremely difficult to miss, in this game, by being in front,” says James Ross, chief shooting instructor at Orvis Sandanona in Millbrook, NY. After listening to Ross, it becomes readily apparent that the hardest part of learning the clay pigeon sport is not the stance, shooting the shotgun, or the speed of the clay pigeon (which usually cruises at around 45 mph). Success, instead, lies within the ability of the shooter to see the clay pigeon, develop a swing in their stance equivalent to the speed of the target—and, then, lead the target. If you aim directly at the clay pigeon you will never hit a single one. By the time the shot from the shotgun arrives at its location, the clay pigeon is gone. It’s a moving target. Leading is the only way for success.

Just like leading a clay pigeon, predicting the direction society will progress is equally essential for college students. It is extremely hard to miss employment potential by aiming in front of trends. Some of the top leaders in the digital economy have based their entire careers on staying ahead of trends.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, SpaceX and Chairman of SolarCity, recently considered his time as a college student in 1995. Musk tells The Henry Ford On Innovation project, “When I was in college, I tried to think ‘what are the really big problems that face the world, that will most affect the future of humanity?’And the three that I thought the most important were the internet, transition to a sustainable energy economy, and, third, was space exploration.”

Clearly, over the years, Musk has attempted to make headway with all of his college predictions. But, perhaps, his natural inclination of being a college student that was constantly thinking outside of the “when is my next exam?” mindset was the true predictor for his continued success.

Likewise, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with Silicon Valley startup company accelerator YCombinator, discusses his view of witnessing the early internet culture that lacked person-to-person comradery and how he tried to figure out where to situate himself as a college student. “When I looked out at the Internet in 2004, which was when I was getting started, you could find almost anything else that you wanted,” says Zuckerberg. “You could find news, movies, music, reference materials, but the thing that mattered the most to people, which was other people and understanding what’s going on with them, just wasn’t there.” Zuckerberg put all of his effort into meeting an underserved societal problem by creating Facebook. Clearly, this tactic worked out well.

By using both Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s strategies as successful case studies, a college student can hone in on how to focus toward future leaning problems and resulting solutions. The irony is that these skills of future thinking and foresight are rarely evident in most college curricula.

On Oct. 6, 2016, Pew Research released the new State of American Jobs study. This study is a strong indicator as to where industries, jobs and society will head over the next several years. According to the study, “employment increased 77% (from 49 million to 86 million) in jobs requiring higher levels of analytical skills” and, likewise, it highlights that Americans believe knowledge of computers, social dexterity, communications skills and access to training are keys to success for today’s workers.

The Pew study also highlights that Americans believe that the ultimate responsibility for preparing and succeeding in today’s workforce falls on each individual’s shoulders.

If the brunt of responsibility for career success does, in fact, fall upon an individual’s preparation to meet new growth markets, then the last couple of weeks provided a fairly significant glance at future progression.

Michael Abrash, chief scientist at Oculus VR, took the stage during an Oct. 6, 2016 Oculus Connect event to talk about virtual reality (VR), and says, “This is the year that consumer VR finally launched.It is the culmination of a series of amazing and highly improbable events that nobody would have predicted five years ago. And, yet, this is just the beginning. The really interesting stuff is yet to come.”

“Virtual reality is the perfect platform to put people first,” says Zuckerberg during his Oct. 6 Oculus Connect demo. “It is this feeling of real presence, like you are there with another person or in another place.”

Zuckerberg says that there are now more than one million people using VR products and highlights the broad investment currently in progress by adding,”We have Samsung investing in virtual reality, we have Valve and HTC investing in virtual reality and we have Google and others.”

Beyond VR, the White House has recently acknowledged new directions of technology embedding with humankind. The White House’s October 2016 Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence report says, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology have opened up new markets and new opportunities for progress in critical areas such as health, education, energy, and the environment. In recent years, machines have surpassed humans in the performance of certain specific tasks such as some aspects of image recognition. Experts forecast that rapid progress in the field of specialized artificial intelligence will continue.”

All of the prior highlight the fact that there are multiple indicators that showcase future growth potential and new industry creation. The next generation of leaders in our digital economy will be able to look at the paths currently in their infancy or new markets created in the wake of growing industries and prepare accordingly. Ultimately, it is important for the next batch of leaders to recognize the Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world aren’t incomprehensible figures, but instead, represent calculable paths of accumulated action. And sometimes life is best understood from actions. At least that’s what happened to me when I set out one afternoon to shoot clay pigeons with a shotgun and, instead, found a clear explanation on the need for innovation strategy to aim ahead of the curve.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Why Hundreds Of Asian Students Are Flocking To This Boutique Online University

(appeared in the October 31 edition of Forbes-Asia)

The market of online education is heavily influenced by large scale massive open online course (MOOC) players like Coursera, which directs 22 million learners, and edX, which leads 9.3 million in the pursuit of education. But boutique education providers are emerging, tailoring their online education to fill niches and address individualized needs.

And not unlike the confrontations between small stores and large big box retailers, these new online education platforms need to compete on cost and relevancy while carving out a way to differentiate themselves in the growing marketplace.

Created by Jennifer M. Jaster

The University of the People (UoPeople), based out of Pasadena, California, bills itself as a tuition free online university and is making headway in the online education space. Currently, the platform serves 180 countries, offers accredited degrees, and works to differentiate itself from the masses. Shai Reshef, president of UoPeople, says, “I like the MOOCs and I think distributing the knowledge worldwide is a great usage of the internet. But we are very different from the MOOCs.”

Reshef stresses that UoPeople is a university, which means that students need to apply, be accepted, follow a curriculum and maintain a minimum grade point average. Through this process, students eventually earn an accredited associate or bachelor’s degree in business administration, computer science or health science or an MBA.

Perhaps UoPeople’s most remarkable trait is that only 20 to 30 students are enrolled in each course. This small class size fosters student interaction and provides a network of personal support—both of which are important and rare in broad based online curriculum. In fact, Reshef finds that his educational platform’s incorporation of this support scaffolding is about as opposite from the mass educational offerings as possible. “MOOCs have about 5% retention and we have about 95% retention,” says Reshef.

Something is clearly working and catching on as UoPeople has grown over 500% in Asia since 2014 with Pakistan, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and China accounting for some of the strongest growth markets. Although the growth measures are significant, UoPeople currently only serves 6,000 total students with 902 in Asia, which equates it to being similar to a street vender compared to a multi-national conglomerate. Regardless, the platform is reinstalling the virtues of small classroom education while providing degrees that serve a wide range of the global student body.

Opportunity (re)knocks

“I didn’t think I would have any opportunity at a Vietnamese university,” says Tam Le, 34, a stay-at-home mother in Da Nang, Vietnam. Le is now an online education student working toward her bachelor’s degree in business administration at UoPeople. Talking to her via Skype while her six-year-old son plays in the background, Le says, “Our local university is strict with their entrance exams. For someone like me, who has been out of education for 10 years, it is impossible to get back to the circle of knowledge that they are testing.”

Because of Le’s current coursework and experiences she now says that she has a plan to start her own business, but Le feels the biggest payoff of the curriculum is her increased personal confidence. “Since I got married, I stayed at home as a full-time mother but when I take classes online I feel I can do anything and achieve something that I’ve always wanted.”

Vy Nguyen Hoang, 27, also enrolled at UoPeople, lives in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and expresses similar sentiments to Le regarding his hard educational restart. Hoang says, “I dropped out of my university and learned it is very difficult to start again with a traditional university here.” Hoang says the misguided curriculum and repetitious style of educational delivery at his brick-and-mortar university was a catalyst for his dropping out of the traditional path. “My local university doesn’t have the hands on knowledge that can be applied to work,” says Hoang, who goes on to say that he saw this firsthand in 2009 when Intel established their main factory in Ho Chi Minh City and struggled to find quality employees.

Hoang’s view that traditional education is often misguided is echoed by others. Pham Thi Ly of Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City, talking about education meeting technological growth, says, “There are enterprises abroad that say it takes two years to delete some of what students have learned. Then it takes another two years to teach the skills that they need,” according to a recent Vietnam Net article.

While UoPeople provides access and entry points into higher education and a pedagogy which differs from many countries’ focus, perhaps its core virtues are best understood in serving those with the most need. Reshef says, “We have survivors of the genocide in Rwanda, the earthquake in Haiti. We have about 1,000 refuges from all over the world. Because this is the population, small classes ensure they get personalized attention.”

Free isn’t free, but it is low cost

UoPeople, while being “tuition free” is not in fact completely free. Students are expected to pay $100 per exam. With this cost structure it brings an associate’s degree total cost to $2,000 (20 x $100) and a bachelor’s degree to $4,000 (40 x $100). Although scholarships have been widely available and utilized in the past, one of the disadvantages of UoPeople’s recent growth is a lack of adequate scholarship opportunities.

“Right now we have some students in developing countries that got accepted but cannot afford to pay the exam fees and we don’t have scholarships for them,” says Reshef. “So we tell them ‘wait until we have scholarships,’ and we feel very bad about it. Nobody should be excluded.”

Time will tell if UoPeople can survive in the wake of much larger and financially stronger learning platforms. As of now UoPeople is not financially stable on its own merit and requires external grants and sources of funding to keep operations running. Regardless of its small stature and less than perfect profit margin, the platform does highlight some of the shortcomings of MOOC offerings through its focus on personal connections and student accountability.

Perhaps UoPeople will be a forward-looking example of how the education markets can embody low cost accredited education tailored to student learning. One thing is for sure: mixing a small class size, a global student body, accredited degrees and an emphasis to help those less fortunate is a recipe for success. The future will show if public admiration can translate into a sustainable university bottom line.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

The Philippines And Other Developing Countries Ramp Up Online Education Culture

(appeared in the August 25 edition of Forbes-Asia)

Akshay Kulkarni wasn’t winning any awards as an undergraduate engineering student at Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) in Hyderabad, India. All he had to show for his effort was a mediocre grade point average and growing skepticism focused on how his college degree would eventually help his future aspirations.

“Out of 400,000 seats available for engineers at colleges in my state,” says Kulkarni, “there were only 200,000 people even trying to get into those seats.” Although it was extremely easy to get an opportunity to earn an engineering degree in India, Kulkarni knew that landing a good engineering job was actually increasingly difficult.

Kulkarni understood that there had to be a way to differentiate himself from the thousands of other minnows floundering in the job market. Frustrated by the overall climate and structure of his undergraduate experience, he sought out a different avenue toward his future career: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

“I ended up taking something like 15 MOOC courses while completing my engineering degree,” says Kulkarni, noting that he focused almost exclusively on the MOOC educational alternative instead of attempting to get As in his in-person courses at CBIT.

The big moment for Kulkarni, who now works as a software engineer at Microsoft, came when he realized his path less traveled actually worked. “My MOOC experiences made a big impact in my interview with Microsoft. I think my online courses and certificates helped to compensate for my low grade point average in engineering school. The Microsoft interviewer asked me, ‘Do you know anything about cloud computing?’ and I was like ‘I just TA’ed for a MOOC cloud computing course at Berkeley.’ That was the last cloud computing question I got asked.”

And Kulkarni isn’t alone.

Countries are investing deeply in developing digital training platforms and their own MOOC course structures that can meet future job growth trajectories in order to help workers launch and retool career opportunities. While only 9% of global students acknowledge taking part in a MOOC, the percentage of users is expected to steadily grow over the next three years.

Likewise, across the globe, more governments are passing legislation to create national models for online education and MOOC coursework opportunities. This international focus on the evolving MOOC landscape creates an inclusive way for countries to gain ground within the global economy. In fact, developing economies and nations may have the most to gain by aligning to these new models of education, empowerment, retooling and cost effectiveness.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Facebook Schools MOOCs on Engagement

(appeared in the May 19, 2015 edition of EdSurge)

If MOOCs want to build student engagement, they may want to take a lesson from Facebook.

That’s the takeaway from a recent study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who found students favor using Facebook groups over MOOC forums in part because they have more positive interactions on the social media site and feel a stronger sense of community there. Trust plays a role; on Facebook the students tended to use their “real” names and could see one another’s profiles.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory analyzed data on student use of forums for three MOOCs from Coursera and course-related Facebook groups, and interviewed instructors and a dozen students. The research was presented at the ACM conference on Learning at Scale.

The upshot: “Although there were more people enrolled and more posts shared in Coursera relative to the smaller group of people who joined the Facebook groups, when it comes to user engagement, Facebook was a more attractive place for them to stay actively and longer,” the authors report. Interviews with students suggested that Facebook groups were more convenient to use, fostered greater collaboration, and made them feel closer to their instructors.

On MOOC forums, “they feel they don’t get attention, don’t get replies,” says Saijing Zheng, lead researcher of the study and now a research scientist at Microsoft. Some students introduced themselves on the forums only to hit a wall of silence.

The lack of responses might not simply be driven by MOOC users neglecting one another, but by the difficulty they have finding the conversations in the first place. Students considered Facebook posts better organized.

“On the Coursera discussion forum, anyone can start a thread...The information overload is very severe, it is unorganized, and you can’t guaranty the quality,” Zheng says.

Not Your Parents’ MOOC

Why might MOOC forums lag in elements that foster engagement? Lou Pugliese, managing director of the Action Lab at Arizona State University (ASU) and the former CEO of Blackboard, points out that student retention and accountability weren’t MOOCs’ original mandate.

“The challenge with the MOOC environment was that it was highly experimental to see if it could disrupt a current system,” Pugliese says. “Coursera, edX and all the platforms were basically designed for a very one dimensional learning experience. ‘If you want to do this and complete this course it’s your choice’—and we designed it that way. So now what we have to do is insert these third-party web service applications and make it more than it is, which is a real problem because it is hard.”

Regardless of MOOCs’ original focus on education for education’s sake, we are seeing their infrastructure grow and mature, and, recently, raid the mainstream higher education markets in a classic case of disruption. The Global Freshman Academy, a partnership between MOOC-provider edX and ASU is bringing MOOC courses into an accredited pathway with credit available for first-year classes. OpenClassrooms, a French MOOC platform, offers degrees recognized by the French State, and Topica Edtech Group of Southeast Asia has partnered Coursera in a deal that will allow Vinh University in Vietnam to recognize credits from any of Coursera’s online courses.

“The credit cohort gets extra services that cost money,” says edX CEO Anant Agarwal. “What technology has done is it has given us education at virtually zero marginal cost… When something is nearly zero marginal cost you make that for free. But when something is not zero marginal cost, like mentorship, advising or hand grading, you provide them for those that are paying for it.”

Beyond the for-credit model, the MOOC curriculum in its broadest sense needs to evolve to include more effective student-to-student engagement. If MOOCs don’t evolve their social forums, it appears the status quo of Facebook will fill the void. But two platforms create holes, and holes lose information. It would be a shame to see great ideas continue to fall in the cracks between two separate platforms instead of fueling our cumulative growth.  

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Mortar is Messy: Online Tech Fills in the Higher Ed Brick Walls

(appeared in the April 4, 2016 edition of The Huffington Post)

Morgan Richards, a 31-year-old mother of three, is a trendsetter in her pursuit of a university degree. Richards stumbled upon the Global Freshman Academy, a mash-up between Arizona State University (ASU) and edX, which is one of the massive open online content (MOOC) providers. Her interest piqued when she discovered she could take her whole freshman year of university credit on the platform, pay for the courses only after successfully passing them at $200 a credit hour, and transfer all accredited course hours to ASU. In other words: she could get one year of her undergraduate degree at a bargain basement price from any location on the planet without any sacrifices.

Richards tells me, “I see friends that are drowning in student debt and these 18 and 19-year-olds-they just don’t think about that. I think students need to consider this type of option because it gives them the flexibility to be able to work or enjoy their life and travel without the massive amounts of student debt and they are still getting the same classes.”

The classes Richards has taken within the edX Global Freshman Academy have exceeded all her expectations. Her first class, Human Evolution, was led by ASU professor and paleoanthropologist Don Johansson who is the man behind the discovery of Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor fossil in Ethiopia. “The course was amazing,” says Richards. “You know when you’re watching something on TV and you just can’t get up? That class was like that for me.”

The push towards recognizing a larger allotment of MOOC courses in a credit-bearing direction is increasing. OpenClassrooms, a large French MOOC, just released a four year degree on their platform that is recognized by the French State and Topica Edtech Group of South East Asia released a partnership agreement with Coursera that will allow Vinh University in Vietnam to become one of the first educational institutes to recognize credits from any of Coursera’s 1,800 MOOC offerings.

The digital tools for providing a quality education online are quickly ramping up thanks in no small part to the education technology sector securing $6.54 billion of investment in 2015. This financial outlay is trying like heck to figure out ways to untangle the complexity, cost, and, ultimately, the utility of higher education.

In an applaudable fashion, these new market entrants are unraveling some of the burdens of higher education while also gaining an early mover advantage in the education marketplace. Bob Daugherty, executive dean of the Forbes School of Business, tells me, “I think Coursera has the potential to really take over the market below the top 100 schools. I think their ability to package that to some accredited or certificate diploma and offer that to the rest of the world at a very different price point is going to fundamentally change the way we think about colleges and universities. That is where the future of education will ultimately come from.”

It appears that the free market and technological innovation will be the solution to correct some of the financial burdens of higher education. Yet there will be tradeoffs. Daugherty poses the dilemma associated with spiraling loan debt and says, “The dirty secret in Washington is the average interest rate on a student loan is about 6% so if we lend those people over there $1.2 trillion at 6% interest they would be sending us about $70 billion a year in interest. $70 billion a year coming into Washington, D.C. They might stand up and say ‘oh this is awful but keep sending the dough because we’re spending it like drunken sailors.’ Honestly, it’s a disincentive for them to actually fix the problem.”

Luckily, education’s recalibration has a lot to do with private market pioneers envisioning the space in a new manner. Bill Gates showed his support for new digital entrants into the higher education market during his keynote speech at during the April 2016 ASU+GSV Education Summit and said, “Right now our opportunity is to think about the classroom and how we all get engaged in making it better for the students, a place they want to be, making their learning experience every bit as engaging as all the other digital experiences they have. At the end of the day, I believe success will come to the innovators who focus on these new needs, who look at this new majority, who look at why kids are dropping out now, why costs are going up.”

Gates is clearly a proponent of ratcheting up the educational merit with digital innovation. Yet, there is a thorn in the side of digital innovators: accreditation.

Anant Argwal, CEO of edX and professor at MIT, tells me, “Accreditation completely inhibits education. The closest example I can find to that is taxi cab medallions. The medallion is the currency of the taxi cab industry. The inability for a common innovator to get ahold of a taxi cab medallion makes it hard for innovators to come in. In a similar way, credit is the gold coin of the academic realm. It is controlled by certain agencies and it is very hard to foster innovation without it.”

Gunnar Counselman, CEO of Fidelis Education, expands on accreditation’s early foundation in US education and tells me, “If you think what accreditation is: the government gave accreditors the power to be the watcher’s watcher when the GI Bill was being abused like crazy in 1948. Somebody has got to make sure these things are good—and so they gave the power to the accreditation agencies.”

One person with accreditation power is Barbara Bittingham, president of New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), an accreditation agency. Bittingham tells me that there is a need for a strong accreditation authority and says, “Right now, the government spends $150 billion of taxpayer money on the federal financial aid portion of higher education, not the research component. And that is a lot of money. It is only natural that there is an increased expectation for the role of accreditation for, in the words of the Higher Education Act, ‘the reliable authority as to the quality of education.’”

Perhaps to the chagrin of accrediting bodies, MOOCs are getting more adventurous at finding pathways into the degree process and around existing accreditation hurdles. Pham Minh Tuan, CEO of Topica EdTech Group in Vietnam, which received early funding from the Gates Foundation, talks about his group’s recent partnership with Coursera and says, “We are solving the credit recognition problem for them. They have been struggling to get accreditation. We are one of the first in Asia to give them full-credit recognition.” Tuan outlines themutually beneficial relationship between his Topica EdTech Group and Coursera and says, “Since we have been working with the local universities for eight years now, and we have their trust in terms of bringing academic quality to the table, and Coursera has the trust because they are working through us. We are connecting the two sides.”

Although, globally, MOOCs are creating full degree pathways, it appears for the near term the US will stay at a partial model for MOOC degree completion. Pierre Dubuc, CEO of OpenClassrooms, the largest MOOC in France feels the US shores can evolve further and says, “The Global Freshman Academy serves 25% of the educational experience and that is noteworthy -but they didn’t create a fully online degree and I think it is because they are trying to innovate on their current business models. They are doing it halfway but not completely because they are afraid of breaking things.”

Perhaps, like Dubuc alludes, the US and by association their educational accreditors are rightfully more cautious of putting all the poker chips in on the future of MOOCs symbiotic relationship with higher education institutions—likely because they have more to lose. And, maybe global markets have significant reasons for the quicker acceptance on their shores. Regardless of the national buy-in, this whole conversation would not have happened a few short years ago. Higher education’s evolution is taking a stance that is clearly future leaning. If online technology continues to fill in the gaps within our brick and mortar higher education model, education at its core will continue its pursuit to find a new normal. And, perhaps, with a bit of luck, we can win big and boost relevance, engagement and completion rates while simultaneously decreasing our financial outlay. Regardless of our technological leaning we can all agree those assets are merit worthy.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Higher Ed Gen Ed Misled?

(appeared in the March 1, 2016 edition of The Huffington Post)

We’ve been hit by the digital plague. Abandoning higher education’s traditional mantra is scary. We were nurtured by the very industrialized curriculum that has shown itself to be sweepingly inefficient. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus,” says renowned entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Likewise, it is hard to pull the plug on our old bloat filled friend, the traditional college education, even when we read Goldman Sachs’ December 2015 Emerging Theme Radar stating, “graduates from the bottom 25% of colleges earn less, on average, than high school graduates.”

But I’ve lived through this all before. I worked at Atlantic Records in 2000 when Napster — with the help of Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker — destroyed the music industry business model and took away our holiday spirit. The sentiment shift that started with music quickly bled into motion pictures, magazines, books, and the list goes on. Robert Tercek, writing in his 2015 book Vaporized, says, “Any part of a business or product that can be replaced by pure digital information almost certainly will be.” Tercek says, “That’s why we are seeing so many companies’ crater and collapse completely, undone by nimbler rivals who use digital media to undermine their old-school counterparts.”

Specifically, the way content has been monetized up to this point is by selling the container. The CD, DVD, book, and college experience, are nothing more than nice looking containers holding information that is easily digitized. And fewer and fewer people want to pay $200 for a Led Zeppelin boxed set, let alone $100,000 for a college education.

For 561 years, since Gutenberg’s press was created in 1455, the container method has prevailed. But containers possess bloat. And bloat is expensive in all marketplaces—especially markets that are looking for cost effectiveness and global consumer growth; both of which fall into higher education’s purview.

All this talk about digital imperatives and container bloat makes me feel like getting in an innertube and finding a 645 foot lazy river or, perhaps, a 25-person hot tub to kick back and relax in. Luckily, Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, has both as they just spent $8.4 million, like many other higher education institutions, adding these quality amenities to their container. In the name of education.

Courtney Rubin, writing for The New York Times, found that dozens of schools are building water attractions with the hopes of attracting prospective students and over 92 schools are reporting over $1.7 billion in capital projects. This version of higher education leadership doesn’t exactly meet the “we are raising tuition because of less state support” pathos driven plea. It might be more akin to Polaroid deciding to launch a new 1980s styled instant camera—in 2016—but with gold plating and a price tag 100 times the original price. This shallow educational admissions tactic also raises flags in a similar vein as the 2006-2007 financial loan excess predated the rollercoaster fall of housing value.

It’s not just financial bloat and mismanagement that are leading the standard model of higher education astray. Students are required to take hosts of irrelevant courses for their major field of study in the name of general education. Yes, Gen Ed breeds a broader view of the world perhaps in the same way that listening to all the songs on a Led Zeppelin album breeds a deeper understanding of the band—but it isn’t essential for you to sing along with “Black Dog.” There is absolutely no way this excess, across the broad higher education spectrum, will continue into the future, especially in the $1,000 a credit-hour variety.

The Damage

A 34-year-old undergraduate student recently came into my office. He has been going to college on and off for sixteen years. He has two classes left to take to graduate with his Bachelor’s of Arts degree. In addition to a ridiculous transcript that shows him withdrawing from more courses than passing, he is accompanied by another trail: six figures of student debt from his educational enrollment at a long list of colleges and universities. He currently works in the food service industry at a college dining hall making sandwiches and fries. In one of my low ethical grading assessment moments, he passed his senior capstone with me with a grade of a D-, not necessarily because he earned that grade but because at this point I don’t want to hurt him any further. Higher education has not done him any favors.

The educational foot soldiers are not the only ones seeing the effects of educational bloat on the frontlines both with student indebtedness as well as prospective student (and families) well-reasoned skepticism. Goldman Sachs finds, “The average return on going to college is falling. For the typical student the number of years to break even on the cost of college has grown from 8 years in 2010 to 9 years today.” Specifically, the document finds that college graduates in the year 2030 will not break even on their college investment until they are 33 and 2050 college graduates won’t come flush on their investment until the age of 37.

Unlike the scenario that Goldman Sachs paints, we all know that college debt ratio and student enrollment ratio will not continue in a similar trajectory as it has over the last decade. It is impossible. The President of the United States, Congress, state governments, college families and general economic infrastructure are all clear that this is not an option. But, as the Titanic fills with water, all of a sudden you have a stronger distinction between first class, second class and third class passengers. “The choice of college and major are more important than ever to students given the changing return profile,” says Goldman Sachs. Their surveys show median wages of recent college graduates in architecture and engineering are 51% higher while wages of those majoring in the Arts are 15% lower than the median across majors.

So the answer is clear: we need to only mint architects— and we need to steer clear of those damn artists. If you listen closely, you can hear Sir Ken Robinson and his iconic TED talks crying in the background.

Enter Venture Capital

We don’t just have to hypothesize as to what the future of higher education will look like. Hosts of companies are expanding our cognitive realization of what online platforms can do. Coursera (Mountain View, CA), edX (Cambridge, MA), and Udacity (Mountain View, CA) are all blazing for-profit trails while simultaneously posting staggering growth in the educational space. In addition, video-based self-study courses from providers such as Udemy (San Francisco, CA), SkillSoft (Nashua, NH), Lynda (Carpinteria, CA), Grovo (New York, NY), and BigThink (New York, NY) have been bringing the ability of learning to anyone who has a hankering for new knowledge. Finally, professional education and certificates from platforms such as SkillShare (New York, NY), Pluralsight (Farmington, NM), and General Assembly (New York, NY) are taking the competency-based model and showcasing it in the professional world—and growing support for the process. All of the prior are scaling with venture capital backing, international prowess, and corporate savviness. Change, it is a-coming and it’s coming down the broadband pipeline.

Within the last month, I have had three students transfer credits toward their undergraduate degree from Straighterline.com. Straighterline provides students with a three-credit course for $49 after tests and a final exam. All the tests are proctored via web video. Brett Baldwin, a senior at Green Mountain College, tells me, “Straighterline took control of my desktop for the test and I had to show the test proctor all around the room with my laptop video capture and they watched me answer the exam on the video feed as well.” In a few short weeks, while doing his due diligence with course reading and studying, he completed several credits of undergraduate coursework. On the cheap.

Burck Smith, CEO of Straighterline, says, “93% of colleges charge the same or more for their online courses as their face-to-face instruction, when in fact if should be a lot less.” Smith tells me the birth of Straighterline was to focus on the general curriculum and says, “We decided to focus on the Gen Ed courses, which are the bulk of online courses, offer them much closer to the costs of delivery as opposed to trying to use them to subsidize face-to-face infrastructure, and create transfer agreements with willing colleges. Typically colleges are eager to bring in transfer students and, then, we started to create much lower priced pathways into degrees.”

Cost Savings is Not Rocket Science Digitizing the general education segment of the university experience and creating a general educational hybrid model can quickly implement a tuition cost savings across a large segment of colleges and universities—with little loss to major specialization and rigor. This hybrid Gen Ed move, perhaps shown best by outside the ivory tower entities like Straighterline, will also not diminish the external attributes we know and love about higher education like interest clubs, sports, theater and partying at the local frat house on Saturday night.

The hybrid model, like the Toyota Prius Hybrid, has more moving parts and potentially more maintenance. Its virtue is that the hybrid nature does not disrupt the standardized model but instead works in conjunction. You have a digital economy engine operating with a traditional 87 octane, brick and mortar power source. Regardless of some complexities, this move is a solid interim choice between where our educational system is currently and where the bulk higher education system will be in 2025.

If higher education administration can’t evolve the content model of their institutions in a fairly quick manner, I have some directions: Partake in a conversation with tax accountants discussing TurboTax, bank tellers on ATMs, cashiers toward self-checkout lines, small scale lawyers on LegalZoom, stockbrokers with ETrade, as well as travel agents and their friends at Priceline. The majority of traditional higher education can’t afford an old-school business model. Replacing general education with hybrid curriculum is a great floatation vest. If we don’t change on our own accord, someone will be happy to show us the way. But, under that set of variables, they will also end up showing us the exit.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Five Career Essentials Not Taught in College

(appeared in the January 11, 2016 edition of The Huffington Post)

There are 5,000 minnows just like you swimming in your career pond. Your minnow doppelgangers have the same degrees from similar institutions around the world, similar career aspirations, similar credentials, and similar generic responses that fall into the “I am organized, efficient, and do not need excess supervision” camp. All of this sameness fills rows and rows of Times New Roman on boring resumes that flood recipient’s inboxes like litter. Entering or climbing up the work force requires separating yourself from the masses at every turn.

Although the following isn’t guaranteed to land every opportunity you dream up — these tips definitely move the advantage into your court and help to diversify you from the other 5,000 minnows.

1. Hack email addresses

The digital brain based economy might have the ability to play havoc on our work/life balance and may have depleted the industrial economy — but knowing how to use the “connected” nature to your advantage is a strong special power for digital era networking and career climbing.

The case and point for this is that nearly anyone on the planet can be contacted. As Randy Pauch said during his famous last lecture, “The brick walls are there for a reason, to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” If you really want it the option is out there.

You found the manager, director, or contact at an organization of your choice. If you could only get your information into their hands — and not the generic “catch all bin” of email correspondences. With a little finagling every company shows their organizational category for email. For example, you want to contact Roy Greene and he works at the Boston Globe. First, you need to find out how the email is organized. A quick search on their site shows @globe.com is the email suffix. Further a quick perusal of any available email addresses at the company shows that first name initial followed by full last name is the formula. Now rgreene@globe.com is your desired and unlisted email address. Most emails either take the first.last@company.com format, first initial last name:flast@company.com or last name first initial combination: lastf@company.com.

2. Be a writer — the benefits are too great not to partake

This is not about becoming the next great American Novelist but instead to write to be an expert in your field. Specifically, the act of writing career field specific pieces is three-fold. First, it gives you a reason to contact leaders in your area of focus with a real reason for an in-depth conversation. Most of your peers only reach out to those career leaders to ask for jobs/internships — and this is usually met with a cold shoulder. Interviewing field specific leaders for a piece you plan to publish diminishes the guard and opens the willingness to help.

Second, by writing and publishing in your field you are distinguishing yourself from your peers who only have in-class or limited field experience. Clearly you know more about the field than they do — as you have written these well-crafted pieces and interviewed many key leaders for them.

Finally, when the time comes to look for an upward moving position you have contacts you now can call on and discuss career strategies. The key change is discussions now revolve in the “I have known you for a while” category as opposed to “I just met you because I want this job” category. The distinction between the two outcomes is significant.

A great source for hosting your writing is the newly evolving platform Medium.com. It hosts top-level writing in all fields and has credibility — yet anyone can submit pieces to the site. You are guaranteed to have your pieces hosted in a quality platform for the world to see.

3. Get gutsy and plan

In the digital era you are applauded for your successes and your failures evaporate into thin air. Due to this, it is important to be striving and not get comfortable with status quo. Don’t settle. Instead ask for extra leadership responsibilities, push your comfort zone, and use your down time effectively (as opposed to endless scrolling of Facebook).

As we bump up levels in life we often are met with an inner voice that says we don’t belong at this new plateau. Disregard those thoughts because everybody is amazed at the scenery at the top of a mountain hike — but after you live on that mountain for a few months the views still might be excellent but not as mesmerizing.

It is equally important to ask yourself where you want to be in five years — and do something (even extremely small things) to keep making your way to that end goal. If you are in the middle of an ocean on the helm of a sailboat, and wind is in your sails and you are traveling at a good speed, you appear to be heading somewhere. But if you don’t have a GPS waypoint you could actually be doing huge circles that are not discernible on the ground vantage point yet your course would quickly show up on a GPS navigation plot line as ridiculous. We need to maximize our traveling in life and not be doing redundant circles.

4. LinkedIn detective work (no premium subscription required)

It has never been easier to find a person online at a company of interest. LinkedIn is an asset. Couple LinkedIn information followed by a quick Google search — that is a digital superpower.

LinkedIn often only tells us the first name and last initial of a contact we would like to make — yet currently do not share a common connection with. Unfortunately when you are starting out in the job market we often lack a strong connection framework and are met by this dilemma often. LinkedIn tells us Ron F. is a marketing manager at Atlantic Records. Google search Ron F. marketing at Atlantic Records and now you found him. Comes right up as Ron Fraiser.

So you found a good LinkedIn connection whom you don’t know. Let’s now unravel how to make small talk:

Find the profile of a person you want to contact in the company you have interest in.

Find what groups they belong to.

Join the group.

Hover over their name to contact them (and hope they are not the 3 percent that change default settings to not accept contact).

Express interest and compliment them on something.

Keep your writing to three or four sentences in length to limit scrolling and make a quick, succinct request.

Thank them for their help.

5. Intrinsic interest and diverse skills win

If you don’t need to occasionally wake up at 2 a.m. to jot something down because you are deeply thinking about how to solve a problem, you may be lacking intrinsic interest and be heading in the wrong career direction. The problem with this lack of intrinsic interest in your career is that down the line you will eventually compete with people who do have an authentic intrinsic interest in the job — and they always win out. Why shouldn’t they? They wake up at 2 a.m. because they are truly engaged about the task at hand. They use their subconscious. And they are motivated with more than a paycheck. They live for this and you don’t. It makes sense that they should win.

A biology major with a documentary studies minor, a double major in economics and dance, now those are unique combinations. Unique parings make for unique ways to see the world. And in a creative, brain-based, digital economy it is those unique virtues that rise to the top.

It is never too late to get more expertise. There are so many unique skills that can be mastered at an expert level from your house with minimal or no cost. Sites like Lynda.com make this easier than ever.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Hype It Up: How Video Built the New Product Launch

(appeared in the January 8, 2016 edition of The Huffington Post)

If the brand new 2016 American Girl doll Lea Clark were to be driving in a 2016 Ford Focus RS — my household would explode. We couldn’t handle that sort of energy. My seven-year-old daughter wants the new 2016 American Girl doll so bad she can hardly speak about it. Likewise, I want the new 2016 Ford Focus RS so bad I spend my evenings on the forums discussing actual release dates, features, and allotment numbers to dealers. My channeling of enthusiasm is nerdy enough I shouldn’t speak about it. The point of the prior is that in our house a seven-year-old and a 39-year-old are both potential customers who underwent the enthusiastic viewing of a series of captivating product launch videos, released sequentially, which cultivated us both into diehard supporters. My daughter spent the entirety of last week captivated by the newest American Girl 2016 video launch sequence. Every morning was the same: She woke up and asked to watch a video providing the latest clues (on the American Girl site) which helped her to figure out who, what, when and where the new doll Lea Clark’s history would be situated. We purchased Lea Clark at 1:04AM EST on January 1st — four minutes after it was available. The video perhaps wasn’t an essential for a die-hard 7-year-old customer — but it kept the idea, and more importantly the brand — at the forefront of our household conversations. 

In a similar vein to my daughter, I spent the last two months waiting patiently for new weekly videos, released by Ford, featuring rally driver Ken Block, documentary style, which shows the crafting, testing, and approving of a ridiculously fast and aggressive Ford Focus RS (0-60 in 4.6 seconds/top seed of 165). From the videos, my interest in the long history of the Rally Sport (RS) badge as it related to earlier iteration of Ford products grew. I am now quite knowledgeable not just on the 2016 model — but on the long history of the special vehicle line. What these two releases have in common is multiple segments of video working together to increase the brand appeal — and it works across a large demographic of customer bases. Consecutive video segments foster and grow a dedicated fan base much differently than that of static advertisement. The sequential releases of a desired product build the intrinsic interest of customers. And intrinsic interest increases loyalty. This all increases a supportive customer base. And a supportive customer base is much more likely to diffuse what they like on their own social networks. The snowball effect continues to gain viewership and promote further messaging as it rolls down the hill. The sequentially released segments also have a secondary appeal for brands. The releases keep the brands in the top of a scroll down news environment. Every new Ford video placed the Focus RS back at the top of news worthy conversation, excited the associated automotive forum environment with new posts about the weekly released information—and the more people who see the message on top of news feeds and forum conversations-the more people who again share and diffuse the message. Video it is The new push toward sequential video segments to ramp up brand products directly relate to the growing acceptance of the heavy use of online social media video content. Facebook perhaps punctuates the push toward video better than any source in the 2015 calendar year. In April 2015 Facebook had 4 billion video views per day — and by November (seven months later) the platform was recording 8 billion video views per day. Doubling video viewership in the billions doesn’t signify an increased interest — it indicates a paradigm shift for the media. We now live in a world where 760 years of video watch time are consumed each day by Facebook users alone. YouTube has 1 billionusers and 300 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute. Snapchat is building its ever increasing business around video. And Twitter, although historically not the go-to source for brand video, has recently launched its Amplify feature which according to Twitter “enables media companies and brands to capture the excitement on TV and distribute it to fans and audiences across Twitter, beyond their followers.” As 2016 begins its course we can be sure the increase of sequential video segments will be a growing strategy to turn viewers into loyal customers. In many ways, this is the ultimate form of advertisement — everybody is happy. The consumer is captivated by exciting videos, the brand drives sales, and social media platforms have even more ammunition for our video laden social media streams. In fact, it could be the start of a perfect storm.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Can’t Disrupt This: Elsevier and the 25.2 Billion Dollar A Year Academic Publishing Business

Twenty years ago (December 18, 1995), Forbes predicted academic publisher Elsevier’s relevancy and life in the digital age to be short lived. In an article entitled “The internet’s first victim,” journalist John Hayes highlights the technological imperative coming toward the academic publisher’s profit margin with the growing internet culture and said, “Cost-cutting librarians and computer-literate professors are bypassing academic journals — bad news for Elsevier.” After publication of the article, investors seemed to heed Hayes’s rationale for Elsevier’s impeding demise. Elsevier stock fell 7% in two days to $26 a share.

As the smoke settles twenty years later, one of the clear winners on this longitudinal timeline of innovation is the very firm that investors, journalists, and forecasters wrote off early as a casualty to digital evolution: Elsevier. Perhaps to the chagrin of many academics, the publisher has actually not been bruised nor battered. In fact, the publisher’s health is stronger than ever. As of 2015, the academic publishing market that Elsevier leads has an annual revenue of $25.2 billion. According to its 2013 financialsElsevier had a higher percentage of profit than Apple, Inc.

Brian Nosek, a professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Center for Open Science, says, “Academic publishing is the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher has no idea how much anything costs.” Nosek finds this whole system is designed to maximize the amount of profit. “I, as the researcher, produce the scholarship and I want it to have the biggest impact possible and so what I care about is the prestige of the journal and how many people read it. Once it is finally accepted, since it is so hard to get acceptances, I am so delighted that I will sign anything — send me a form and I will sign it. I have no idea I have signed over my copyright or what implications that has — nor do I care, because it has no impact on me. The reward is the publication.”

Nosek further explains why researchers are ever supportive by explaining the dedicated loyal customer base mantra, “What do you mean libraries are canceling subscriptions to this? I need this. Are you trying to undermine my research?”

In addition to a steadfast dedication by researchers, the academic publishing market, in its own right, is streamlined, aggressive, and significantly capitalistic. The publishing market is also more diverse than just the face of Elsevier. Johan Rooryck, a professor at Universiteit Leiden, says, “Although Elsevier is the publisher that everybody likes to hate, if you look at Taylor & Francis, Wiley, or Springer they all have the same kind of practices.”

Heather Morrison, a professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa, unpacks the business model behind academic publisher Springer and says, “If you look at who owns Springer, these are private equity firms, and they have changed owners about five times in the last decade. Springer was owned by the investment group Candover and Cinven who describe themselves as ‘Europe’s largest buy-out firm.’ These are companies who buy companies to decrease the cost and increase the profits and sell them again in two years. This is to whom we scholars are voluntarily handing our work. Are you going to trust them? This is not the public library of science. This is not your average author voluntarily contributing to the commons. These are people who are in business to make the most profit.”

Should a consumer heed Morrison’s rationale and want to look deeper into academic publishers cost structure for themselves one is met with a unique situation: the pricing lists for journals do not exist. “It’s because they negotiate individually with each institution and they often have non-disclosure agreements with those institutions so they can’t bargain with knowing what others paid,” says Martin Eve, founder of the Open Library of the Humanities.

In addition to a general lack of pricing indexes, the conversation around the value of a publication is further complicated by long-term career worth. David Sundahl, a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, says, “We actually understand how money passed through to artists who wrote music and authors who wrote books — but it is not clear how the value of a publication in a top tier journal will impact someone’s career. Unlike songs or books where the royalty structure is defined, writing a journal article is not clear and is dependent not on the people who consume the information but rather deans and tenure committees.”

Disruption Doable?

It is precisely the prior lack of a pricing and value barometer that leads to the complexities associated with disrupting the main players in academic publishing. “Adam Smith’s invisible hand works to lower prices and increase productivity but it can only do so when valuation or pricing is known and the same thing is true for disruption. If you don’t know how to value something, you actually don’t have tiers of a market,” says Sundahl.

If a disruptive force was to significantly change academic publishing it needs to happen in a market that is currently underserved or undesirable by the large-scale publisher. “Disruptive innovation is usually driven by a group who can’t afford to build something that is as big, fancy and sophisticated as the existing solution — they then have to find a market where either people don’t have anything available to them or they are satisfied with something less than perfect,” says Sundahl.

Should academic scholarship keep existing in a similar trajectory as in the past decades Sundahl finds incumbents (existing big publishers) almost always win when competition takes place along those sustaining strategy lines. “To revolutionize academic publication, a new system would need to be developed in a basement market which would eventually enable people to gain enough credibility doing this new solution. People would then begin to value this lower end, well done research, and that is when the world starts to change,” says Sundahl.

The prior is exactly what large entities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or perhaps even top tier research one (R1) universities can’t do. “They have to play the game the way the winners are already playing it. Incumbents almost always win under those conditions,” says Sundahl. And to further complicate matters, junior colleges and community colleges, which perhaps would represent fertile grounds to be served by a newer, “basement market” entrant, may be less likely to spearhead this new outlet themselves due increasing government constraints focused nearly exclusively on job placement and starting salaries in lieu of a research-based, theoretical curriculum.

Open Access Packs a Punch

Driven by the lopsided power structure the move toward open access and the unrestricted access to academic information has been exponentially growing. Perhaps it is, itself, a “basement market” for leveling the academic publication environment and creating a market where respect and credibility can be fostered, grown and transitioned into the existing academic prestige, merit, and tenure conversations.

“The open access environment is one of the more fertile environments for people to be thinking: if we don’t like the old way, what should the new way look like,” says Heather Joseph, executive director at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Joseph finds that the quantifiable numbers of open access journals speak for themselves and says, “You can look at the number of strictly open access journals if you look at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). When it started tracking open access journals there were a few dozen and now they list over 10,000 open access journals.”

The push toward open access is not only growing in sheer numbers of journals but also in an increasingly confrontational strategy that academics leverage against large publishers. “At the moment, the Netherlands, the whole country, has said to Elsevier that we want all of our researchers to be able to publish open access in your journals at the same rates we would pay for a subscription last year and if you can’t do that we’re going to cancel every one of your journals, for all of our universities nationwide,” says Eve. “They have a few days left to resolve this, and it looks like they are going to cancel all the Elsevier journals.”

Rooryck found his recent very public decision to step down and move his Elsevier journal Linga to open access met with complete support from the other six editors and 31 editorial board members. “The process went very easily. We were all aware of the pricing and Elsevier’s practices and within a week everyone agreed to resign,” says Rooryck. Eve’s platform, the Open Library of Humanities, will now house the new open access iteration ofLingua, which will be called Glossa. Eve says, “Right away it is 50% cheaper to run it through us then when it was with Elsevier. So anybody subscribing to it already sees 50% more revenue.”

Rooryck finds the move toward broad open access a natural progression and says, “The knowledge we produce as academics and scientists should be publicly available in the same way we have a company that delivers water to our faucets and electricity to our home. These are things we have a right to.Public knowledge and education is a human right and it should not come with a profit tag of 35%.”

Although it appears open access has the ability to simultaneously diffuse academic knowledge to a larger body of readers and cut costs significantly, many feel that the for profit academic publishers are still situated to continue into the near future. Joseph says, “I think the play for most smart commercial publishers is to try to preserve the current environment for as long as they can: delay the policy changes, delay the culture changes and to be working on things like tools and services applying to aggregation of data, where they are then embedding themselves more deeply in the workflow of researchers and becoming essential to researchers in a different way.”

“If you are no longer essential to researchers in the, ‘you have to publish in my journal in order to get tenure and promotion’ what do they replace that with? I think the smart publishing companies like Elsevier, like Springer, who are very smart in that regard, have been thinking about where they can go to be playing a role of continuing to be seen as essential by the research community once they are no longer playing the role of providing assessment,” says Joseph.

Onward and Upward

“In the US Congress we have been finally making progress with the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) bill. It moved through the committee it was referred to in the Senate and is poised to move out of the Senate and potentially be considered by the House and hopefully pass. Ten years ago, I would have said we didn’t have a chance to do a stand-alone bill,” says Joseph.

Perhaps the recent congressional support Joseph refers to is one more verifying measure that the majority of articles will be moving toward an open and accessible framework. Many in the academic community hope that this government support signals the reprioritization of a research framework and the switching of the guard. And while the prior is extremely important, others in the academic community are hoping to grow “basement markets” from the ground up.

The Center for Open Science, which provides seed funds to startups in the academic scientific research space, is led by Nosek and focuses on aligning scientific values to scientific practices. “The open science framework is just a means at connecting all the research services that researchers use across the entire research life cycle,” says Nosek.

Nosek is optimistic about the evolution of technology in open science and says, “There are a lot of startups going at different parts of the research life cycle. Whether it is publication and what a publication means, or looking at full articles and whether you can make articles convey information in smaller bite size pieces.” Nosek tells me that there are so many solutions happening in research right now and mentions it is hard to judge what the true solutions will look like. “I sometimes think some of the ideas haven’t a chance, but what do I know? I could be completely wrong about it. And that is the whole point — do some experimentation and try out ideas. And the fact is there are a lot of people who see what the problems are and have a unique sense of a potential solution — it is a very lively time to try out different answers.”

Time will tell if open access will be the needed disruption to allow the academic environment to right itself or if a new market emerges from startup incubators like the Center for Open Science. Regardless of how the future vision is realized, most in the academic community hope that the new iteration of scholarly articles and publishing will do more good toward humankind than that of a hefty profit margin.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Why Upper Deck Baseball Cards Taught My Generation to be Timid

(appeared in the December 15, 2015 edition of The Huffington Post)

The 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card was an icon. The blue Seattle Mariners baseball hat, brim aiming toward the sky with the youthful Griffey, bat on shoulder, primed to make a big splash: it all worked flawlessly. This card received the coveted number one spot in the compete set. The whole Upper Deck line, launched that same year, felt exciting and smelled different: more mechanical and sophisticated than their Topps gum-filled pack brethren. Sure, the wood grain on the 1987 Topps looked fancier than the 1986 cartoon style font and Gregg Jefferies on the front of a 1988 Donruss clear pack was a cherished gem for kids of my ilk. But 1989 Upper Deck was my generation's Ferrari; we couldn't lose with Upper Deck.

All of my closest friends had multiple three ring binders (mega size) filled with our favorite baseball players, each binder organized by alphabetical order of last name. The Starting Lineup action figurine fad as well as the coming and goings of Garbage Pail Kids editions made small splashes, but we were baseball card collectors through and through.

The bike ride at the end of each month to the independent bookstore to get the new issue of Beckett, the baseball collectors' version of Sports Illustrated, was a lust filled conquest. I could never make it all the way home without first stopping to lay my bike on the grass and quickly thumb through the lead articles, tips on where to invest, and a quick scan of value changes for my best cards. I was hooked on collecting.

And we had role models: A guy who went by the unambiguous name of Mr. Mint was at the helm. He wrote books and told stories about how he cleared a million dollars in baseball cards. He was an inspiration. Needless to say, all of my expendable income in those days went toward my world domination of the baseball card market.

If the story of my youth, which is similar to many of my generation, were to stop there, I would say we were all primed to be risk takers and, eventually, become savvy investors on the NASDAQ. Yet, the true outcome of this scenario was a lesson in the discrepancy between the supposed value and the actual value of goods. And that education was taught to my generation by the strict hand of the 2008 housing crash. We still flinch at the memory.

It wasn't until a reprioritization of my own life's important features, perhaps spurred on by the Come To Jesus 2008 moments, which brought my family to sell our curb appeal ridden house in Grosse Pointe, Michigan for a complete change of direction, opting instead for a rustic and rural Vermont cabin. This move brought me to dust off my baseball cards. Two dogs' life expectancies had passed since I had last laid eyes on them.

Opening my well-packed boxes created by the youthful, ever energetic iteration of myself -- I was in awe of the sheer amount of time and effort I spent decades earlier in organizing complete sets by hand, alphabetizing "common" cards," and listing out card values.

I was astonished to see my baseball cards in a modern light and felt as if I had blinked and now found myself in my late thirties looking at a time capsule of my former ideals. I really wanted to convince myself that I should save the collection, but cross country moves and a daughter who is pretty clear she has no interest in old relics of a sport that she generally doesn't care for, help sift out some of life's non-necessities. I called the few sports card shops (not referred to as baseball card shops anymore) and was met by a continual passive voice echoing the same response, "We are not interested in anything from those years." My generation's aspirations seemed to have fallen into the overproduction bin.

Like an investment gone toxic, I couldn't find one person on the planet who wanted my collection. The day before our move, with moving vans parked in front of our house, I made a desperate craigslist plea at one 22-year-old collector. He showed up in a 1997 Dodge Neon with what I assume to be an empty pizza box on the passenger seat. He could barely fit my collection in his trunk. As he handed over the $140 (I negotiated up from the original $100 offer), I felt as if I had given away a part of myself for free.

I did take one card out of the collection, prior to the finalized transaction: the 1989 Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie card. I felt I owed Ken Griffey Jr. a debt of gratitude, not for his lustrous baseball career or investment potential, but for what his card signified for my life journey.

[jason-schmitt-writing]

Technology and Topspin: Will Connected Tennis Harness the Crowd?

(appeared in the September 3, 2015 edition of The Huffington Post)

Tennis could be witnessing one the most important technological evolutions in its history: connected tennis. The new digital connection and associated apps allows players with a connected tennis device such as Babolat Play ($249), Sony's Smart Tennis Sensor ($200) and this week's release of the Babolat Pop Wristband ($90) to import, share, and analyze quantifiable data on their game as well as challenge other players. 

Although digital access to power, spin, serve speed, endurance, and impact zone has little to do with how the game is played on court in the moment, the connectedness and the associated hard-fast data that is generated for players from these new devices has the potential to move the sport - and our individual abilities - to a new level.

As early as 2010, Chris Anderson, creator of the TED lecture series, told the world that crowd-accelerated innovation, on the heels of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, was drastically changing and strengthening how individuals learned complex activities. Anderson said this new media environment was creating connections between users that had never existed before and that these virtual connections spurred the cumulative audience to evolve more quickly, completely and accurately.

Will connected tennis spur crowd accelerated innovation within the sport? I would be skeptical regarding connected tennis changing how the game is played if my life hadn't already experienced a digital-life induced revolution: Runkeeper. Over the course of two months I switched from running three miles twice a week to running 10 miles four times a week. My drastic change in running patterns wasn't due to some deep down desire for fitness. It was instead due to an app on my phone connecting me to friends who also run. The connection increased my intrinsic desire and my associated competitiveness skyrocketed. My tennis game is also beginning a similar revolution.

Tennis star Rafael Nadal talks about his connected racket and says, "It feels exactly like my usual racket, but I will have access to a lot of information about my game like the impact zone of the ball. It's going to be very helpful for players."

"Connected tennis will change the way you approach the game because you have more information than your perceptions. I've found that sometimes you have the wrong ideas about what is going on, on the court. With the new technology, every time you play you see how you did," says Jean-Marc Zimmermann, Director of Connected Players Experience at Babolat.

What Zimmermann points out is what players up to now have been expected to extrapolate from tennis matches for themselves. During a few points that might not be a hard task, but when you assess shots, placement, spin, and power throughout three or five sets in a match, our minds and post-match body fatigue are not always objective in assessing what needs to be improved.

Eric Babolat, CEO of Babolat agrees with Zimmerman and tells me, "In tennis you are alone on the court and that is why tennis is tough. It is not only technically difficult, but also psychologically difficult. We see that at every level players are missing information on their game. When you play connected tennis you can relive the match, show your data, show your shots, and challenge friends."

My Pop Wristband Experience

Using a new Babolat Pop Wristband at the Manhattan Racquet Club in NYC, I played tennis in a new way. I was able to see my serve speed in real time, which in itself was extremely addictive. I was also able to see the power and spin of my shots. I was put on a team with four people using the new wristbands, which included Heather Watson, Britain's top female player, and my seven-year-old-daughter. Clearly the playing level of our team ran the gamut of ability levels. The Pop wristbands made individual ability level less important as all team members were helping our cumulative point score rise. It was refreshing to have a new reason to compete.

The Pop wristbands seemed to prioritize topspin and fluid ground strokes as that combination was awarded the highest score for each shot. The wristband was also useful as it can be worn with any racket selection so players do not have to change up their racket-of-choice to get useful data.

The connected tennis environment is an exciting merge for a sport with such longstanding traditions. As digital evolution comes into the tennis mix, we are definitely in-line for a stream of continual upgrades and technological evolution. Eric Babolat looks into the future of connected tennis, and says, "My vision is that every racket will be connected--that is the direction we are heading. What you do with the ball is the basis of tennis, but your footwork, how you move on the court is of course something not to be missed. We will enrich the experience soon with a connected camera or connected phone in addition to the data. I think every sports lover and tennis lover wants to have as much data as possible."