KaKoo

Marco Masoni is a lawyer turned educator who co-founded Einztein.com to address the related problems of searching for good online courses and real-time coursework interaction.Marshall McLuhan’s classic expression “ the medium is the message" hasn’t lost its luster yet, as entrepreneurs and designers re-invent products and services for the web, unleashing thousands of new applications and sites every single day.The news industry is also in the throes of adjusting to the digital age, with countless print publications failing and folding after many years in the business while online news outlets and other platforms for news sharing, proliferate. Education is the second largest industry in America behind health care, and it too is experiencing a similar shift as it struggles to adapt traditional design and delivery models to the demands of modern audiences who are accustomed to digital interactivity.The challenge to transition successfully is especially pressing for online higher education. The Sloan Consortium reports that two-thirds of post-secondary educational institutions are seeing an increase in online courses and programs, so it’s a market that education providers simply cannot afford to ignore.

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It's About Course Quality, not Quantity

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All too frequently, providers meet the challenge of satisfying the rising demand for online education by simply throwing courses up on the web and seeing what sticks, without catering to student needs. This amounts to a loser’s gamble since it risks pushing away students looking for schools that boast high online student retention rates. After all, why would you want to spend valuable tuition dollars on a school that isn’t likely to hold your interest long enough to earn a degree?What’s required are innovative approaches to course design that set aside old models of instruction where theory often trumps actuality. Online course providers must embrace the web’s potential to match students with the kinds of timely knowledge and skills that address current issues head-on, and enable them to thrive in the global marketplace.It’s not enough for a course to be accessible online, it must also be designed in a way that keys into the digital pulse of current events, trending topics and insider knowledge endemic to the web. The three-quarters of 18 to 29 year-olds who have profiles on social networks are likely wondering why online course offerings aren’t nearly as enticing as the content that they find on their favorite social websites.To attract and retain the typical college-age demographic, as well as the larger population of adult learners in search of relevant and engaging educational content, the next generation of online education must be characterized by courses that build in the social, real-time information capturing components that have made the web such a dynamic medium for sharing information and knowledge.

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Learning From Events in Real-Time

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Consider what’s happened recently in the Gulf of Mexico. BP's major oil spill is perhaps even “the” news story of the year. By now facts, opinions, and graphic images of the damage and underwater video of the spewing oil have been circulated on countless websites, informing our shock and outrage. The wonders of the digital age have successfully kept us current on the disaster in real-time, but how can they help us repair the mess and learn about our mistakes? How can we enlist the social media zeitgeist in order to build a better online learning paradigm?Unfortunately, higher education providers are not racing to develop online courses that can seize on important events events like these, as they happen. Beyond the immediate victims, there are millions of people around the world who would certainly be inclined to learn about the incident so that they can apply the lessons to their own lives and communities. In mid July, another major oil spill occurred in the Yellow Sea, after the explosion of an oil terminal in the port city of Dalian, China. And recently, in Michigan, nearly a million gallons of oil leaked out of a forty year-old pipeline and into the Kalamazoo River.

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Innovation Pays

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The web, as a real-time medium, is begging us to build innovative courses that can be used for the rapid delivery of education designed in a way that integrates current news, information, insights and research about topics like the oil spill and thousands of other current issues.After exploring some of the leading interactive educational sites that have been created by public institutions and non-profit entities, including Webby nominee Your Life, Your Money and Webby winner The Ocean Portal, it’s hard not to come away wondering why online courses rarely rise to the same level of quality and relevance. The most obvious explanation for this is the relatively high cost of producing an online course with similar design and functionality, plus, the added back-end resources involved in administering such a course. But is the cost really so prohibitive?One can’t help but wonder what would happen if an education provider came along that offered, for starters, 20 or 30 online courses that were of “Webby” caliber. Even if the courses cost more to initially produce than your standard offering, the high market demand for online education might show that innovation pays when you begin creating online courses that look, teach and engage like they were purposed for the online medium.For the time being it’s up to innovators like the folks over at TED to remind us how to use the web for exchanging knowledge in the search for solutions to global problems like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Online education providers everywhere could learn a thing or two from this approach and take a chance by creating real-time courses.

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More Education Resources from Mashable:

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- 5 Organizations Helping Women Get Ahead in Tech - 5 Innovative Tech Camps for Kids and Teens - 5 Fun Ways to Help Your Kids Learn Math Online - Social Media Parenting: Raising the Digital Generation - 6 Free Websites for Learning and Teaching Science

Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, pagadesign, marinephotobank

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Immediately after hearing BP's announcement that no oil was leaking into the Gulf for the first time in nearly three months, we over here at Mash started wondering: What's satirical Twitter account @BPGlobalPR going to do now?Back in May, an anonymous fellow launched a TwitterTwitter account that set out to mock the way BP was handling PR surrounding the oil spill. We conducted an interview back then with the mysterious man -- back when he had around 55,000 followers. Now he has 185,860 and has gained recognition both for raising cash for healthygulf.org and for his cutting wit.Although homeboy is still anonymous -- he calls himself "Leroy Stick" -- he's become an InternetInternet phenomenon. And, in true, dark style, after the oil spill he tweeted a simple message:After the spill, we e-mailed "Stick" a simple query: "The spill is unspilled: How do you feel?"His answer: "Well, we shall see. I'm definitely relieved. As far as BP is concerned, I have a feeling they are gonna be cutting corners like crazy with cleanup and compensation, especially since this will probably slip out of the public eye a bit. In short, I don't think my job is done, but I am very happy that the new cap seems to be working."What do you think? Does @BPGlobalPR still have his work cut out for him?

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We're losing interest in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill just a few weeks after it became a big media topic -- and long before we've even made a dent in cleaning up after this mess -- if Internet search and discussion trends are to be believed.An estimated 100 million gallons or more of oil have surged into the Gulf of Mexico. Spread by wind and underwater currents, the pollution has drifted toward coastal areas, coating wildlife and natural environments in thick layers of crude oil.Yet on TwitterTwitter, GoogleGoogle, blogs and even YouTubeYouTube, we're already wrapping up our collective discussion of the oil spill and how to repair its damage.

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Twitter

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On Twitter, the oil spill enjoyed a prolonged trending period thanks to @BPGlobalPR, a spoof account that snarkily lampooned the oil company's woes and became a viral hit.This Trendistic chart, however, shows that while we might share a laugh over a corporate blunder, our attention span has about hit its limit when it comes to tweeting about the oil spill: At its June 15 peak, the term "oil spill" was found in .17% of all tweets. Currently, only .02% to .05% of tweets contain that term.

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YouTube

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The good folks at TubeMogul were kind enough to pull together some data for us.This month, people are uploading clips about the oil spill at a rate of 226 clips per day, on average. This might seem like a lot, but just last month, YouTube users were uploading around 1,021 oil spill videos each day. That's a decrease of nearly 78% month-over-month.And we're not really interested in watching clips about the oil spill as much as we once were, either. Here's a chart showing views of videos from BP's official YouTube account:

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Google

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As a web search term, "oil spill" is on the decline. It first began to peak around April 30, when news surfaced that oil was beginning to wash ashore. The term reached its apex of popularity around May 27 and has since begun to fall.Along with searches for this term, related news reports have plummeted. In other words, when public demand declines, media coverage follows suit.Not surprisingly, however, Louisiana residents are still searching for "oil spill" on Google, as are the residents of many other Gulf Coast areas. New Orleans-area Google users are by far the largest geographical group still searching for information about this disaster.Here, you can see the relation between web search and news articles:

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Blogs

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Finally, the tireless bloggers of the web are also getting tired of talking about the oil spill. Nielsen's BlogPulse shows that during the third week a June, .4% of all blog posts were about the oil spill.Now that percentage hovers between .15% and .175%, a significant and disturbing slide.

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What You Can Do

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If you'd like to get more involved, check out Sloane Berrent's Six Ways to Help the Gulf Coast Today. Berrent is a New Orleans resident and social philanthropist, and she has the 411 on how to do your part in the cleanup process, from donating your money to volunteering your time.And at the very least, we should all continue this conversation until the matter is resolved -- not just until we get bored and move on to the next hot topic.Are you and your friends still talking about the oil spill? Have you found any good ways to help with cleanup? Let us know in the comments.[img credit: marinephotobank]

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BP has purchased sponsored links that appear at the top of Google and Yahoo’s search results for terms like “oil spill” in its attempts to improve its public image in the wake of its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP’s PR problems are severe. U.S. President Barack Obama said this morning that he’s talking to experts so he can determine “whose ass to kick.”

The outrage has been particularly clear on the web, where a fake TwitterTwitter account was set up to mock BP’s PR efforts, and nearly half a million FacebookFacebook users have rallied behind “boycott BP” pages. One design firm even put together a Firefox extensionspedr.com – firefox extension that blots out all the web’s mentions of BP with oil stains.

Companies buy sponsored links (which are clearly labeled as such) at the top of search results so their side of the story is the first a member of the public sees when he or she searches for information. The links at the top of the Yahoo and GoogleGoogle results link to BP’s “Gulf of Mexico Response” page, which hosts articles and videos explaining how BP is trying to resolve the environmental crisis.

The satirical BP Twitter account is running wild with this news, publishing mock tweets like “We’re paying Google a lot of money to make sure you only have access to the best possible info on the oil spill: our info,” and, “By the way, we made it so if you google image search “oil spill” or “bp” you’ll see some great celeb sideboob pics. #bpcares.”

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