Why Seth Godin’s altMBA matters to journalism schools

I have designed and taught four online courses in media practice at Southern Oregon University: Digital Life, Multimedia Writing, Mobile Photo & Video and Strategic Social Media. But these courses probably don’t look much like any courses you have seen before, either online or off.

In my online teaching, I only use our institutional Learning Management System to publish course policies and report numeric scores. These courses feature no packaged video lectures or slideware. Nearly all instruction and course interaction runs through the popular online collaboration and messaging platform Slack.

My online courses feature MANY assignments, often with daily deadlines. Most assignments include collaboration elements. I assign virtual teams using private channels, and assess students as they show their work via participation in Slack, Zoom and G Suite. Most assignments also feature the completion of some kind of public deliverable, typically published on Medium, Instagram, WordPress or other social media platforms.

Pitch decks produced by virtual teams of students who connect and collaborate via Slack

I usually teach online courses in an abbreviated four-week format. The pace proves punishing for some students, but many also appreciate the intensity and immediacy of the experience.

There are no tests.

I have designed these courses to simulate current professional practice in media and tech industries, which I have most recently observed via extensive networking in Portland, Austin and other tech centers.

You might be tempted to think that I am teaching “job skills,” such that students can show on their resumes that they have mastered platforms such as Slack and Google Docs. But the social practice of these courses runs deeper. Most employers in tech and media expect employees to collaborate and communicate remotely, and most of my students learn how to confidently collaborate and communicate in a vernacular that will resonate in the modern workplace.

If any of this sounds familiar, then one place you might have heard about a similar learning experience is Seth Godin’s altMBA. Godin is a best-selling author and digital marketing expert, and he launched a provocative series of professional development workshops in 2015.

Excerpt captured from the altMBA homepage

These workshops enroll cohorts of 100 working professionals, who undertake a four-week sprint in which they complete collaborative assignments every three days. Coaches help organize sub-cohorts of participants who connect via Slack, Zoom and other online platforms. In a promotional video for altMBA, Godin and his students offer these descriptions of the experience:

• “How do I make a course where people are profoundly changed?”
• “It’s a way to level myself up.”
• “What was your best on Monday is going to be better on Tuesday night.”
• “Every single person ships work every 72 hours.”
• “We’re putting a group of people in a pressure cooker.”
• “What we do over and over again, through more than a dozen projects, is take people on a journey.”
• “Now when I hear a loud bang, I run towards it.”

Public information about the precise content of Godin’s program seems sparse. But I take the methods and the testimonials of the program as external validation of my own pedagogy. I am committed to push students out of their comfort zones, to have my hands extended when they start to fall, and to be ready to do it all online.

What does all this mean for journalism schools?

1. Remote collaboration is essential to the modern journalist (and most other media and tech professionals). But it is probably not yet acknowledged as a specific instructional priority in most J school curricula.
2. Despite what you might have heard about Millennials/Digital Natives, most students don’t collaborate online naturally. It takes practice, and they need help to learn how to do it correctly.
3. Few existing online courses deploy a rich social experience. Online course offerings rarely help to engage students in the same way that J schools do when they train students to connect with communities and engage with audiences.
4. Rich online instruction can’t and shouldn’t fully replace the in-person experience of learning. But some exposure and proficiency in online learning is essential to helping our students reach their fullest potentials.

When you spend some time going through Godin’s testimonials, you might also note this affinity with journalism: the participants speak reverently of their experiences creating and shipping projects at breakneck speed, and the transformative effect of that on their professional identity. Journalists and ex-journalists among us might call that a regular day’s work, especially the days when we hear a loud bang.

And that’s my altJschool commitment: not just online learning because it is efficient or scalable, but online learning that transforms the way students think about what they’ve learned, and how they will navigate their futures. Coming soon, my next step: an enterprise plan and a practical model for delivering that kind of radically collaborative digital course to journalism students at any institution.

This blog post is one in a series of position statements regarding my vision for altJschool, an online learning consortium for innovative college courses in journalism practice. This work has emerged from my 2018 Tow-Knight Fellowship in Disruptive Journalism Education, and I will be presenting more details at the Online News Association national conference in Austin (Sep. 13–15). For more context, please see my earlier posts on altJschool and the future of learning to be a journalist and Of craft beer and learning to be a journalist in the 21st century.