Welcome to discusslearnist!

“Everyone is an expert in something.” This statement from the Learnist home page is the guiding principle behind Learnist, a website for social learning, open to contributions from all members. Learnist works like Pinterest in how you can create boards for posting on the site. Generally the boards instruct the reader in creating things, creating functions, many which carry an educational theme. However, the site has many examples of topics of interest, not necessarily educational, posted to simply enrich someone else’s life.

discusslearnist.wordpress is a forum for discussion about items posted to Learnist as well as how Learnist does what it does, news about Learnist, and topics of interest connected directly to Learnist. Enjoy the commentary and leave your own to share with others.

What is Learnist? And What is DiscussLearnist?

This is my first post to the blogsite, discusslearnist.wordpress.com. The web URL pretty much says it all – this is a blogpost discussion about the Learnist website.

I discovered Learnist after googling “best unknown social media sites 2015” and jumping to the Small Business Trends article by author Tabby McFarland. Her 2/24/15 piece, “25 Social Media Channels You’re Probably Not Using Now” features Learnist as the sixth entry after Pheed, Thumb, Medium, Chirp, and Ask.fm.

I was drawn in by McFarland’s description of Learnist as a “social learning service.” Through Wikipedia, I’ve had fair experience with social learning online, along with tens of millions of other users. Wikipedia functions well as an online encyclopedia, and its research article format and layout pose few challenges to those of us who grew up with encyclopedias in book form. The typical Wiki article demonstrates its research through footnotes, cross-links to millions of other articles, and a no-nonsense page layout that conserves space (read ‘cramped’). I’ve probably visited Wikipedia several thousand times in the past decade, and have been very satisfied with what it has to offer and how anyone can contribute to the common fund of knowledge represented on this site.

What does Learnist have to offer that Wikipedia does not? After all, both are social learning sites, with content contributed by users.

But Learnist’s difference from Wikipedia is apparent upon first glance. The layout is open and easy to read. In graphic design terms, the Learnist layout ‘breathes.’ It isn’t hard to find things in Learnist. There’s an easy to read table of contents in the left-hand sidebar, and the featured articles are diverse, spanning politics, culture, science, medicine, technology, business, travel, education… but their tone makes them easy to read and understand. The tone itself ‘breathes’- light, airy, not dense. This sense is greatly helped by the large size of the type (around 14 pt.), the leading, and again, the small size of the paragraphs. You can read these paragraphs in 10 or 15 seconds.

A good example of a Learnist article, Candice Walsh’s “Tips for Improving Your Narrative Travel Writing” is structured in bite-sized chunks. Each tip is printed in a short subhead in bold type. The body text is the size of a small paragraph, positioned to the left of photo or graphic. The text generally carries no links – those are reserved for the photos, hot linked to other articles offsite. Some of these linked articles are written by Walsh, others linked to articles directly related to Walsh’s theme on good travel writing.

More on Learnist in the next post. Click here to jump to Learnist.

Where Learnist Stands on Gartner’s Hype Cycle

Since first conceived in 1994, Gartner’s Hype Cycle For Emerging Technologies has become one of the standard measuring tools for online media creations.

(Diagram taken from Google Images.)

Learnist is probably somewhere about two thirds of the way up to the Peak of Inflated Expectations, for a variety of factors.

Firstly, Learnist is perceived as ‘hip’ in the arts and entertainment communities, as evidenced in this 2/27/14 Adweek article on a deal signed between Learnist and artists such as director Gus Van Sant and actress Olivia Wilde. Content from these and others is sold ‘a la carte’ to Learnist subscribers at $1 for one to two hours of video and multimedia content. Olivia Wilde’s entry, “10 Women Fighting for Justice” has garnered 1562 ‘added to their reading list’ as of 3/5/15, and Gus Van Sant’s article on Lateral Thinking has 3518. This is in an environment where most articles get between 50 to 200 ‘reading list’ additions.

Secondly, because Learnist is ‘undercover hip’ because “only those in the know, know about Learnist,” there are possibilities that Learnist has more climbing to do before reaching the Peak. My sense of it is that Learnist’s plunge to the Trough of Disillusionment may get ugly due to its ‘hip’ status: nothing tarnishes so badly as what was ‘hip’ two days ago, two months ago, two years ago.

To further delve into a Gartner-style analysis: As defined in Gartner Inc.’s press release from 8/11/2014, Gartner identifies “Six Business Era Models in the Digital Business Development Path” in these stages:

Stage 1: Analog

Stage 2: Web

Stage 3: E-Business

Stage 4: Digital Marketing

Stage 5: Digital Business

Stage 6: Autonomous

The press release goes on to state that the Hype Cycle emphasizes emerging technologies and therefore centers around stages 4, 5, and 6 in the Development Path. Learnist seems to occupy a position of slow, forward progression between Stage 4, ‘Digital Marketing,’ and Stage 5, ‘Digital Business because its social education model is innovative and in the long run, may have good prospects for durability in the marketplace.

Where Learnist will grow from this point is not yet clear, due to factors of popularity and consequent profitability. And while certainly not dictating a lock on audience share, the interesting quality of Learnist’s offerings will tend to ensure a defined audience block to certain marketers with innovative offerings. Speaking to profitability, there is plenty of ‘pay per view’ content on Learnist in addition to the deal noted earlier in Adweek in this blogpost.

Click here to jump to Learnist.

Learnist Audience Analysis

How many people read Learnist? As Digital Marketing Ramblings stated in 2013, Learnist had over a million signups. That number has grown to 10 million, as cited in Society Media & Marketing Daily on 2/27/14.

And who are these 10 million users and contributors to Learnist? In spite of the lack of statistical demographic data for Learnist online, an assessment about the target audience can be made first by analyzing the content types featured on the Learnist site.

As stated in previous blogs, Learnist carries a lot of generalist subject matter. However, the content – especially the instructional content – is, as a rule, highly engaging, easy to follow, and memorable for that reason. Because the content is engaging, it will probably keep an audience of ‘amblers’ coming back for more. Tania Sheko explains this beautifully in her WordPress article on Learnist.

Learnist is by no means a household name. People continue to stumble upon the site, oftentimes when they were looking for something else (which is what Ms. Sheko says she and others do within the Learnist site).

So, this audience includes innovators and early adopters. They are students or recently graduated from college, interested in knowledge for its own sake. They are also professionals in the arts and business entreprenuer communities who’ve been referred to the site by friends or colleagues. They are willing to pay the $.99 for PREMIUM articles featured on Learnist by celebrities such as Olivia Wilde and Gus Van Sant. Click here for the 2/27/14 Adweek article about the celebrity deal.

Marketers with new technology products and services can use Learnist as window into the social world of innovators, early adopters, and front edge of the early majority group. Products interesting in and of themselves stand a good chance of getting talked about on this channel, given the interest level displayed by site visitors, bloggers and article authors.

Farb Nivi, from his LinkedIn account.

More on Learnist in the next post. As cited in this 2013 Gigaom article, Farb Nivi stated that “We want to be the Instagram of knowledge-sharing… like a smart RSS.”

See for yourself if Learnist is like an “Instagram of knowledge.”

Competitors to Learnist: Wikipedia

As stated in our first blog, Learnist bears some resemblance in aim and material to Wikipedia, the now-dominant online, user-sourced encyclopedia.

Does Wikipedia present competition to Learnist? In other words, would people normally look for the same material on Wikipedia? Furthermore, is it easier to access material on Wikipedia than on Learnist, especially when using a search engine to locate information on a subject?

In answer to these questions, Wikipedia is real competition for Learnist with some common searches used by students. Example: the search term, “Roman Empire” shows the Wiki article at the top of the search list, and Learnist doesn’t show on the first, second or third pages. You get the same results for search terms ‘Biology,’ ‘Algebra,’ and ‘Advertising.’ Given that Learnist is about education and these are common education topics, Learnist’s lack of visibility in search results is notable. Secondly, Learnist is accessed by a registration process requiring username, password and an email address. These qualifiers get you into the Learnist community.

By contrast, Wikipedia has no such requirements. Instead, it is open-entry: no username/password are required, and Wikipedia contains its own search line for other articles within Wikipedia (as does Learnist). Though Wikipedia makes no strong claims to the title, they are arguably ‘the biggest game in town’ for a single, open access information source, as these recent statistics* show:

Pages: 35,175,208

Active users: 142,472

Articles: 4,727,019

Users: 24,168,748

*Wikipedia Statistics

Wikipedia’s target audience is “whosoever will,” i.e., anyone who wants to find out something about anything else. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, stated in a 2005 video that his vision was for “…every person on the planet [to be] given access to all knowledge… a free encyclopedia, empowering people everywhere to make good decisions,” based on free access to all knowledge. The Guardian’s 2/7/2014 article on Wales stated that by 2014, Wikipedia was the 5th most popular website on earth. Wikipedia’s growth shows no signs of slowing down, even though the site layout bears a lot of resemblance to Web 1.0 format. The bells and whistles are accessed when an article author links them to their article.

Wikipedia is open-source: anyone can post an article to Wikipedia, and content is policed by notes at the top of the page stating, “this article has issues,” implying that content is either not researched enough or has tell-tale signs of bias. (This note often appears at the top controversial political or cultural articles which by nature have high potential for subjective viewpoint.)

By contrast, Learnist’s focus is more narrow, being defined by Farbood Nivi’s vision for an online education format. Learnist, as its name implies, sets out to offer learning to its visitors. But because of Nivi’s own views on what constitutes an education (social in nature) and how people are actually educated (again, socially), the tone on Learnist is inviting and conversational. You are invited in to hear and see what someone else has to say on Learnist. The authors are all identified on Learnist whereas in Wikipedia, the authors are always anonymous, however numerous their named research sources are. It should be noted as well that certain Learnist articles are only accessed through ‘pay per view’ and these articles are designated “PREMIUM” as in ‘premium’ Learnist edition. The idea seems to be that if an article is for sale, greater pains are taken to write it and it’s more likely to be accurate. And the vetting process for articles submitted to Learnist seems to be more strict.

More in the next blog on another competitor to Learnist. in the next post. Click here for a few of  Farbood Nivi’s ideas on what he sees Learnist providing to the online community.

Competitors to Learnist: Panopto

Positioned in an even narrower band than Learnist, Panopto is a social learning application centered around video as the medium and targeted toward corporate/enterprise audiences as well as the education field.

On the corporate level, specialists and managers can video-record instructional material using Panopto. The instructions Panopto highlights are the kinds of procedural or technological processes, often proprietary within the corporation, that usually are lost when an employee moves on. This necessitates repeated instruction by other specialists who must relearn the given process and then repeat it to multiple end-users.

In the classroom setting, Panopto proposes a concept it calls the “flipped classroom.” According to Panopto’s website, this model allows “…students [to] watch pre-recorded lectures before class, then use in-class time for discussion and engaging activities.”  While it doesn’t go into how students might feel when faced with what they might perceive as ‘double class time,’ the website states that students “are more engaged” with the subject when they are prepped using the flipped classroom model.

Panopto is positioned as a video tool with a highly focused intent and clearly defined users as its targeted audience. The same users might use the Learnist business category for some of the same purposes, but a quick glance at the Learnist Business page reveals general (though helpful) business topics. They are news articles, “items of interest” including tips on how to dress, common sense success secrets, marketing to millenials – these items have their own ‘boards’ and keep the reader interested and engaged. But the audience drawn in will be the general reader, not necessarily engaged in business at all.

Theoretically, the Learnist platform is broad enough so you could include boards on some corporate business process, but then you’d have to close it off from the general public. Panopto’s tools are designed for the closed corporate intranet.

Panopto only presents serious competition for Learnist in a narrow, highly defined arena. It is much more of a curation as well as an instructional application, centered around video, and as such I doubt you could call it serious competition in the sense of taking away significant business from Learnist.

Click here for Gartner’s 2/27/15 press release on emerging technology trends in education. The article cites ten trends on the horizon, heading this way.

How Learnist Began – The Background Story

Learnist got its start in 2012 as a spinoff from Grockit, a social education startup founded by Farbood Nivi in 2006. Grockit means serious business about training students to study for and excel at taking standardized tests such as the SAT, GSAT, ACT, as well as tests for courses on the high school subject level. Due to its stated aim, Grockit’s tone carries a strong element of competition and its aims are straightforward and deliberate: train students to ace tests.

But that isn’t the entire story, as explained in Charles Severence’s vimeo from 2011, “EdTech Pioneer: Farbood Nivi.” Nivi spent ten years as a teacher in the classroom before founding Grockit, and during this time he did some serious thinking about how people actually learn. He also researched how people learned before learning was “industrialized,” to quote his phrase. Employing social learning and ‘gamification,’ Grockit became so successful in its approach that Kaplan Test Prep bought Grockit in 2013 (see Kaplan’s press release).

After Nivi sold off Grockit, he and his team put all their energies behind Learnist, which they had begun before selling Grockit. Where Grockit is pointed at the serious student, Learnist’s audience is the life-long learner: in other words, anyone interested in learning anything about anything. For this reason, Learnist boards are like reading a newspaper.

In the IdeaMensch article from 1/19/15 titled “Farbood Nivi – Founder of Learnist,” Nivi explains how he came up with the concept for Learnist: “We wanted to make it easy for people to share what they know and learn from one another… with a little more structure and context than a tweet, status update, or single blog post. We now have a taxonomy — tens of thousands of guides and lessons in thousands of categories.”

Click here to jump to VentureBeat’s article on how Nivi started up his new company. The article goes on to state, “Nivi likes to describe [Learnist] as ‘Wikipedia on steroids meets Facebook,’ a term he borrowed from one of its first users.”

More on Learnist in the next post. Click here for more history and detail in TechCrunch’s article for how Nivi’s team moved from Grockit to Learnist.