March 14, 2000

Education: Web's New Come-On

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E-Commerce Sites See Online Courses as a Novel Way to Lure Shoppers

By LISA GUERNSEY

few years ago, when educators and company executives first talked about the prospects of online education, they borrowed terms from the business world. Students are consumers, they said. Treat them as valued customers and offer them convenient courses at prices they can afford.

	Matthew Sturtevant for The New York Times
	SCHOOL'S IN, ONLINE: Michael Rosenfelt, founder of notHarvard.com, a commercial education site, with colleagues, from left, Paul Danziger, Judy Bitterli and Bruce Gee.

Traditionalists cringed at the commercial mentality. But many were heartened by the thought that the product being packaged was still education. And few disagreed that adult students, especially, would do some comparison shopping before devoting their time to an online course.

Now a group of Internet entrepreneurs is trying to turn the shopping analogy into something more literal. Students are not merely consumers of knowledge, they argue. They are consumers, period.

A student in a photography course, for example, could be in the market for a new camera. Someone learning French might be inclined to buy a travel guide or airline tickets. Instead of relying solely on revenue from tuition, the entrepreneurs asked, why not offer online courses -- perhaps even free ones -- and make money from people who might shop while they study? Why not use education as a marketing tool to attract potential shoppers the way other sites use free e-mail or home pages?

Michael Rosenfelt, the founder of notHarvard.com (notharvard.com), argues that the combination of courses and consumerism will be the next marketing wave to hit the Internet. "Education has always been at the basis of commerce," said Mr. Rosenfelt, who coined the term eduCommerce to describe the concept. "Sellers need to teach, and buyers want to learn."

Some who follow trends in education do not know whether to be amused or appalled by the concept. "It would be interesting to consider what is meant by the term 'course,'" said Alex Molnar, director of the Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. "If you mean something as straightforward as having people learn a fact they didn't know before, that certainly doesn't rise to the level of a course as most people think of it."

William L. Rukeyser, a former official in California's Department of Education and director of a nonprofit organization called Learning in the Real World, also questions the concept. "If the so-called education has the intent of getting people to buy a product," Mr. Rukeyser said, "then there is an open question as to whether it can be dignified with the name education at all."

But the companies involved are confident that adult students, their primary targets, will understand the value of these courses. NotHarvard.com is banking on the concept entirely. Instead of charging tuition, it is making deals with commercial Web sites that will offer the courses at no charge in an attempt to acquire new customers.

"We make no pretense that this is, in fact, a for-profit venture," said Mr. Rosenfelt, who once had the title "marketing weasel" on his business card.

(Officials at Harvard University are not content with the apparent differences between their institution's name and that of notHarvard.com. They have asked lawyers to explore whether notHarvard.com's name is a trademark infringement.)

Other companies that are hoping to profit from student shoppers include Smart Planet ( smartplanet.com), Hungry Minds ( www.hungryminds.com) and Learn2.com ( learn2.com). Learn2.com creates its own courses and tutorials; most of them are free, but some are subsidized by courses that cost money. Smart Planet and Hungry Minds are designed to be clearinghouses for online courses developed primarily by other companies and universities. Most of their courses are not free, so the sites make some money on commissions on tuition or on sales of CD-ROM tutorials.

But for all three companies, shopping still plays a role: students at each site are invited to make online purchases, and the sites pockets a percentage of each sale.

Mark Lyons for The New York Times
Karl Kornel, a Cincinnati high school student, took computer-related classes online.

"We are essentially a marketing platform," said Stuart Skorman, chief executive and founder of Hungry Minds. In his company's case, that marketing takes the form of promoting courses that are available for a fee from places like the University of California at Los Angeles and consumer products from stores like Reel.com and Amazon.com. Students browsing Hungry Minds courses, which include subjects like art history and alternative medicine, are invited to shop in the Knowledge Store, where they can buy items like books, music and software.

Such mixtures of marketing and education could backfire, critics say. Adults may shun courses that seem to focus more on selling than teaching. And qualified instructors may not want to teach for companies that can change the content of the courses the instructors want to teach or are blatantly using education as a way to increase sales.

Dr. Molnar said he could not imagine spending his time as an instructor for such sites and did not expect that his colleagues or students would want to, either. "That is not an edifying model of a scholar," Dr. Molnar said. "That is a scholar as a used car salesman."

But Chris Dobbrow, president and chief executive of Smart Planet, said the strategy could work, as long as lines are drawn between course content and advertising. "The trick," he said, "is not to make it an infomercial."

A Web site called CodeWarriorU provides a view of the kind of education offered by notHarvard.com. CodeWarriorU ( www.codewarrioru.com) was developed by notHarvard.com for Metrowerks, a software maker that creates tools for computer programmers. Its first courses were offered in February: one on C++ programming for the Macintosh and another called an introduction to Code Warrior, one of Metrowerks's software packages. In both courses, instructors posted new lessons every week and responded to questions posed by students on the course bulletin board.

In the introductory Code Warrior class, the instructor was Joe Zobkiw, a software developer who started his own company. The class on C++ was taught by Ronald Liechty, a Metrowerks employee who has been teaching similar classes for more than six years. Metrowerks screens all instructors to determine whether they know the material and can lead a class, said David Perkins, the company's chief executive.

By the end of February, the courses had attracted more than 2,000 students -- well over the 500-student limit per course. Many who did not sign up in time audited the course by reading lesson plans without posting any messages.

To register, students were asked to provide their names and e-mail addresses and to identify their interests.

NotHarvard.com collects that data, Mr. Rosenfelt said, only to get a sense of what courses it should offer. Students were also directed to a Web page that listed the course's required materials, which included a book on C++ and one of two versions of Code Warrior software, priced at $49 or $119.

That unabashed attempt to promote the software did not faze Karl Kornel, a high school senior in Cincinnati who took both courses. "I saw obviously that they were planning to sell some kind of products," Mr. Kornel said. "I wasn't surprised." He had already bought the software to supplement a computer-science course he was taking at school, so he was able to take the courses by spending only $36, the cost of the book.

Mr. Kornel said the course had been better than just reading a textbook or a tutorial because he could interact online with other students and the instructor. "It's pretty well laid out, I must admit," he said.

Yet when asked if such a course would ever replace computer courses offered by universities, Mr. Kornel was skeptical. "If you are paying for education, it is probably going to be written with a lot more forethought," Mr. Kornel said, adding, "I have not heard of any colleges saying, 'We'll give you credit for CodeWarriorU courses.' "

NotHarvard.com is developing courses for other commercial Web sites, each of which will be designed with input from the host companies. The CodeWarriorU courses, for example, are fairly light on advertising, Mr. Rosenfelt said.

Other companies may want to promote more products, but Mr. Rosenfelt said his company would try to ensure that the course content did not become an advertisement. A site sponsored by a car dealership, he said, would not offer a course on how to select the best car dealership or even the best car. Instead, it might offer a course on car maintenance, in the hope that people would come back to the site to shop. "As with anything," Mr. Rosenfelt said, "there are agendas. We just need to be sure that we are upfront about what this is."

But Mr. Rukeyser, whose organization examines educational technology's effect on the way students learn, wonders whether the terms "education" and "courses" are deceptive in the case of notHarvard.com. "There is a cloak of objectivity and disinterest that wraps around somebody who says, 'I'm here as an educator,' " Mr. Rukeyser said.

Sites that are offering courses as part of a marketing strategy, he said, should ask themselves: "Are the signals clear enough for people to perceive it is in fact primarily advertising and secondarily instructional?"

A site like Hungry Minds raises slightly different questions. Instead of developing courses that are offered through the Web sites of specific companies, it displays online courses created by its own online guides or by outside instructors. The site encourages those course creators to list related Web sites, books and videos.

"When someone recommends something, it's totally from the heart," said Mr. Skorman, of Hungry Minds. "It's not, 'Let's sell something because we can make money.' " And what if a teacher has written a book and lists it as required reading? "We're going to watch it very, very closely," Mr. Skorman said. "If they are going to sell their own book, we'll say this is their book and they'll profit from it." (Questions about such potential conflicts, of course, can also arise on even the most prestigious campuses.)

Steve Gott, the president and chief executive of Learn2.com, said that it might take awhile for consumers to become used to linkages between commerce and online learning. "It's a new concept, to buy while you learn," Mr. Gott said, "but we're there and ready for it, when people become accustomed to it."

The sites' founders say they are not trying to replicate the experience of traditional offline and online college courses. Instead, the commercial sites' courses are intended to attract adults who are engaged in what is called "lifelong learning," a buzzword among college administrators and among people running corporate-training and continuing-education programs.

The Internet is considered by many experts to be the main arena for this new version of education, and universities have been scrambling for the past few years to stake out their spaces online. Many colleges are already offering online education tailored to adults, like the State University of New York, which delivers hundreds of such courses, many for college credit, and New York University, which offers many noncredit courses through the Internet.

Now colleges face competition from commercial Web sites that may not offer exactly the same kinds of courses but have the potential to overlap in areas like computer training and self-improvement courses.

"There is nothing wrong with traditional education," Mr. Skorman said. "But it is just a piece of the puzzle."

Even offline, education comes in many forms. The Home Depot, for example, sometimes offers free how-to classes. No one is forced to buy Home Depot products, but it is obvious that The Home Depot is using the classes to win customers and build loyalty to its brand.

Mr. Rosenfelt of notHarvard.com said the Home Depot model was similar to what he was trying to do online, with a much larger audience. He likes to say that his company is simply offering people another choice.

"It's like saying: 'Hey, you can go physically take classes, you can go online and pay for them, or if you'd like, there is a new option, which is this notion of eduCommerce. Here are free courses taught by branded, compelling instructors. They are free, but they are sponsored by a company,' " he said.

At the same time, he said, notHarvard.com has to remember that people will not take courses that feel like advertisements. "Education is a lot more than simply a veiled marketing message," he added. "We have to provide, and we think education provides, a real value to consumers."

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Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.

• notharvard.com

• smartplanet.com

• www.hungryminds.com

• learn2.com

• www.codewarrioru.com