More CNET Cuts — Company Kills Online Classes
On the heels of today’s news that CNET will layoff 120 employees, 10 percent of its workforce, FishbowlNY received an email sent to the company’s online course teachers saying that CNET will be “dropping” the program beginning in April.
Hi Everyone,
Couple pieces of bad news:
First and foremost, CNET will be dropping the Online Course product beginning in April. For active class leaders, that means the final courses we will run are Mod My PC and Windows Vista Basics, both starting next Monday and ending April 11th.
The other courses, tutorials, and hubs will be live until May, then will be archived. If you worked on any of the content and would like to retain copies, please grab screenshots before May. I can’t guarantee that you will be able to access it afterwards.
Across the net, online classes have never sold better — evidenced by The New York Times launch of its Knowledge network and the success of mediabistro.com’s own online courses, which in 2007 surpassed the number of live classes for the first time — making CNET’s timing unusual. After the jump, a former CNET teacher offers his vision for why the company failed: “poor management of the product.”
The online courses product’s death should be more attributed to the poor management of the product and not an unfortunate casualty of CNET’s downsizing. In 2005, the service was offering courses that had very high participation levels, at least in the ones I was leading. Topics such as wireless troubleshooting, PC troubleshooting and anything relating to digital photos was a big draw. Then for some inexplicable reason they decided to revamp the structure by instituting a “learning hub” model, which grouped similar topics into one hub. The idea seemed good in theory, but they made a critical error in not specifying class dates and times as before. Instead, users could visit a hub at their leisure, ask a question in of the “courses” and wait for a response from a class leader. What they did by implementing that structure was to severely undervalue the importance of timely engagement with users who were mostly novice on the classes they were taking. It felt to me like I was throwing them a deflated life preserver two days after they had drowned.
It got to the point where some hubs were so seldom visited that they were being assigned to class leaders in bulk, like 15+ courses at one time — just something to keep an eye on in case someone asked a question. As a result, I was a given a couple topics I really had no business giving “expertise” on. The community placed their trust in us to deliver advice and guidance, and in most cases we did that very well. But the inability of the product managers to successfully identify and stay appraised of course leader’s core expertise, and create a meaningful learning topics around that was probably the worst offense.
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