I remember my parents telling me when I was a child that one of the best ways to spend a Saturday night as an adult was to visit a local bar and watch live bands with friends. However, as I grew older, I found it increasingly difficult to find such venues.
With the music industry generating billions in global revenue — from Taylor Swift’s stadium tours to Coldplay’s international sellouts — one might expect local scenes to benefit.
Instead, small venues from Pennsylvania to rural Ireland are shuttering at alarming rates. Vibrant shows, diverse crowds and strong community support for musicians should be the norm. Yet, in recent years, the opposite has happened. Attendance at small venues has plummeted and emerging artists are finding fewer opportunities to perform publicly.
While the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this decline, the trend had already been in motion for years. Fewer people are as interested in local music these days. But why?
One major factor is the rise of social media. With music accessible at our fingertips, listeners no longer rely on their local scene to discover new artists. Instead of attending live performances, they can explore endless music from home.
Digitized music
Bassist and lead singer of the band Heaven’s Gate, 21-year-old Mike Danocwzi, offers insight on the matter. “People have forgotten what it’s like to have to leave their home to experience a song,” Danocwzi said. “Instead, they get too lost in their feed to even appreciate the vibes.”
Having played guitar alongside Danocwzi at several shows, I can’t help but agree. Turnout is often disappointing and those who do attend seem more focused on their phones — texting, scrolling or recording — than on the performance itself.
A study by the Pew Research Center found that 99% of Americans and Canadians over 18 have a cell phone with social media. The Deloitte Center for Technology and Communications reported that 86% of Gen Z listeners discover new music through social media rather than live shows.
Economic factors have also played a role. The rising cost of living has left many young adults with less disposable income for entertainment. This, combined with the skyrocketing cost of college — nearly triple what it was in the 1990s — has created a growing divide between artists and audiences.
Another issue is the commercialization of the modern music industry. The so-called “middle class” of musicians is disappearing, mirroring the growing wealth gap in society. There is an ever-widening divide between mega-stars and independent artists.
People flock to the big stars.
Superstars like Drake, Taylor Swift and Metallica dominate the industry, leaving little room for smaller musicians to thrive. Music is no longer about unity through sound but rather unity through the artist — a shift that has changed how people engage with the industry.
Virginia musician and local staple Jerry Reynolds believes this change has altered the very definition of being an artist. “These new stars don’t understand what made the industry fucking great,” Reynolds said. “I remember starting in bars not so I could make fucking money, just so I could fucking play in my damn community.”
Reynolds, who chose to stay in the local circuit rather than chase stardom, argues that music should be about the song, not commercial success. He believes today’s artists have lost sight of what truly matters.
The decline of guitar-driven music is another factor. Before social media, being a skilled guitarist was one of the coolest things a person could do, often launching musicians to stardom. Legends like Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton became icons through sheer talent and showmanship.
Now, however, technical skill alone is no longer enough. The internet has accelerated the exchange of musical ideas to such an extent that virtuoso guitarists are no longer a rarity. As a result, the spectacle of live performance has lost some of its magic.
Local venues struggle across the globe.
This isn’t just a local issue. Around the world, small music venues and local cultural hubs are in decline. A 2023 Guardian article reported that the UK lost over 120 grassroots music venues in a single year — roughly 15% of its total. In Ireland, the closure of rural pubs — many of which double as performance spaces — is becoming a social crisis. These establishments often serve as the heart of small communities, acting as gathering places for conversation, connection and live music.
Similar stories have emerged in Australia, Canada and parts of Europe, where independent venues are battling rising rents, insurance costs and shrinking audiences. The Music Venue Trust in the UK warns that without intervention, the cultural backbone of the live music scene could collapse entirely.
At the same time, the stadium concert economy is booming. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour grossed over $1 billion globally. Coldplay has sold out massive stadiums with capacities of over 70,000, with average ticket prices reaching several hundred dollars. The contrast is stark: while the biggest names in music break records, many local artists struggle to draw a crowd or even cover travel costs for a performance.
What does this mean for the future of local music? And more importantly, can anything be done to reverse this trend?
The short answer is simple: support your local scene. Look up small venues, ask about upcoming shows and show up for independent artists. Better yet, start a band or organize a local event.
This isn’t just a problem in your neighborhood — it’s a global cultural shift. But change can start small.
The biggest obstacle facing live music is our own reluctance to step outside the comfort of our homes. If more people make the effort to rediscover the excitement of live performances, the local music scene could experience a revival. And with that resurgence, small artists may once again find a home within their communities.
Questions to consider:
1. Why are many small music venues struggling?
2. What is one reason younger people are not going to clubs to see live music?
3. What was the last live music you saw? How was it different from streaming the music?
Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher and political theorist, famously wrote in his Prison Notebooks, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”
This phrase speaks not only to Gramsci’s time, but to our own: when older sociopolitical and economic structures are collapsing, but no new stable order has yet emerged.
In such transitional moments, Gramsci argued, uncertainty, instability and reactionary forces dominate, creating a breeding ground for extremism, authoritarianism and political “monsters”—figures or movements that thrive in times of disorder.
For Gramsci, an interregnum refers to a period when the ruling class can no longer maintain its dominance, but the emerging class or system has not yet fully consolidated power. This results in a vacuum of authority, where competing forces—both progressive and regressive—struggle for control.
In these moments the legitimacy of the old order erodes, but its institutions continue to function in a dysfunctional, decaying manner. New movements and ideologies arise, but they lack coherence, structure or the ability to fully replace the old system. Meanwhile, monstrous forces emerge—authoritarian leaders, reactionary movements and political opportunists who capitalize on the instability.
Gramsci saw this dynamic playing out in early-20th-century Europe, where the decline of traditional aristocratic and capitalist structures, coupled with the failures of liberal democracy, gave rise to fascism and Stalinism. He viewed these as monsters—political mutations that emerged from the chaos of transition.
Gramsci’s framework remains highly relevant today. The post–Cold War order—characterized by U.S. hegemony, economic globalization and liberal democracy—is unraveling, but a new, stable global system has not yet taken shape. In this vacuum, we are seeing:
The rise of authoritarian leaders (Putin, Xi, Erdoğan, Orbán, Trump) who exploit the failures of liberal democracy.
Resurgent nationalist and populist movements, fueled by economic stagnation, inequality and disillusionment with global institutions.
Economic disorder, as global supply chains, financial systems and labor markets undergo rapid disruption.
Technological and social transformations, including artificial intelligence–driven job displacement, misinformation and surveillance states.
In short, we are in another Gramscian interregnum, where the old world is collapsing but the new one remains undefined. The critical question remains: What kind of order will emerge from this instability, and at what cost?
The End of the Old Order and the Rise of an Interregnum of Monsters
The post–World War II geopolitical order, defined by American-led capitalism and Soviet-led state socialism, effectively collapsed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet, nearly four decades later, a stable new order has failed to materialize. The world remains in a state of flux—an era of competing powers, ideological uncertainty, economic fragmentation and political instability.
Slavoj Žižek’s characterization of our era as a time of “monsters” perfectly captures this interregnum, a period in which the old system has lost legitimacy but a new one has yet to take shape.
The “monsters” in Žižek’s vision are not just metaphorical; they include:
The resurgence of authoritarianism manifest in Chinese assertiveness, Russian revisionism and democratic backsliding in many countries.
Economic disruptions evident in supply chain crises, inflation and the decline of global economic integration.
Technological transformations, including drones, AI, cyberwarfare and social media–driven political instability.
Unstable alliances and shifting power centers resulting from the U.S.-China rivalry, the decline of U.S. hegemony and the European Union’s internal struggles.
This chaotic transition recalls other historical moments when an old international or regional order collapsed without an immediate replacement, creating instability, war and uncertainty.
Historical Parallels: When an Old Order Dies, but No New Order Has Yet Emerged
History is not a linear progression but a series of cycles, punctuated by moments of collapse and renewal. When dominant political, economic and ideological structures break down, they rarely give way immediately to a new, stable order.
Instead, the period between the death of the old system and the emergence of the new is often chaotic, violent and unpredictable. When great empires, ruling ideologies or geopolitical structures collapse, they leave behind a vacuum. This vacuum is rarely filled by a single force but instead becomes a battleground of competing factions, ideologies and power struggles. Only through conflict, negotiation and time does a new order finally emerge. Let me briefly describe several historical examples of such moments of transition, each marked by political fragmentation, war and economic collapse before a more stable system eventually took hold.
The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages (Fifth–Eighth centuries CE): The fall of the Western Roman Empire, traditionally dated to 476 CE, was one of the most profound civilizational collapses in history. For centuries, Rome had maintained political unity, trade networks, infrastructure and a legal system that stretched across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. But as Rome’s central authority weakened, it became vulnerable to external invasions and internal decay. The final blow came when the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 CE.
However, the fall of Rome did not immediately give rise to a new political order. Instead, Europe entered a long period of fragmentation, instability and decline. The vast Roman infrastructure—roads, aqueducts, cities—began to deteriorate, trade networks collapsed and literacy declined. Warlords, petty kings and shifting barbarian kingdoms—Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths and Franks—fought for dominance, carving up the former Roman provinces into competing territories.
The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) continued to exist, but it could not restore unity to the West. It took centuries before Europe stabilized under the feudal order, where landowning lords, bound by obligations of service and protection, became the dominant power structure. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church filled part of the power vacuum left by Rome, gradually emerging as a unifying institution across medieval Europe.
The monsters of the era include warlords and barbarian kingdoms: Visigoths, Vandals and Ostrogoths carved up Roman territory through conquest and shifting alliances. And without a central government, Europe descended into a patchwork of feudal kingdoms, often engaged in constant warfare.
The Thirty Years’ War and the Birth of the Modern State (1618–1648): The Thirty Years’ War was one of the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts in European history, a war that erupted after the collapse of the Catholic-Protestant balance in the Holy Roman Empire. What began as a religious conflict between Catholic and Protestant states soon spiraled into a broader struggle for power involving nearly every major European state.
For three decades, mercenary armies ravaged the continent, plundering cities and decimating populations. Entire regions of Germany were depopulated, with famine and disease killing millions. The political and economic devastation was so extreme that some regions took over a century to recover.
Eventually, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the war and established a new political order based on sovereign states, setting the foundation for the modern nation-state system. The idea that rulers had the right to control their own territories without external interference—the principle of sovereignty—became the new international norm.
The monsters of the era included:
Mercenary armies: Private military forces, loyal only to the highest bidder, wreaked havoc across Europe.
Militant religious factions: Fanatical Catholic and Protestant forces carried out massacres in the name of faith.
Warlords and opportunists: The war allowed ambitious nobles and military leaders to seize power in the chaos.
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815): The French Revolution (1789–1799) shattered the old European order by overthrowing the monarchy, aristocracy and feudal privileges. However, rather than leading to a stable democratic government, France descended into a decade of internal purges, political terror and war.
The Reign of Terror (1793–1794), led by Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins, saw thousands executed by the guillotine as the revolutionary government turned against itself. Meanwhile, the monarchies of Europe waged war to crush the revolution, fearing that its ideals would spread beyond France.
Out of this chaos rose Napoleon Bonaparte, a military leader who transformed revolutionary France into a new empire that briefly dominated Europe. His conquests spread the principles of nationalism and legal reform but also brought bloody war. Only with the Congress of Vienna (1815) did Europe regain a measure of stability, restoring monarchies and attempting to balance power between nations.
The monsters of the era included:
Revolutionary factions: Competing groups (Jacobins, Girondins) executed thousands in ideological purges.
Napoleon’s imperial vision: A charismatic leader who promised order, only to launch wars of conquest across Europe.
Mercenary armies: Warfare became a permanent state of existence, with shifting alliances.
The Aftermath of World War I and the Rise of Fascism (1919–1939): World War I (1914–1918) marked the beginning of the end of the age of empires, leading to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German and Russian Empires. However, the war did not create a stable new order. Instead, the 1920s and 1930s saw economic depression, political instability and the rise of radical ideologies.
The Treaty of Versailles (1919) imposed harsh economic reparations on Germany, fueling resentment, hyperinflation and nationalist extremism. Meanwhile, the Great Depression (1929) devastated economies worldwide, discrediting democratic governments and strengthening totalitarian movements. By the 1930s, fascist regimes had emerged in Italy, Germany, Spain and Japan, ultimately leading to World War II.
The monsters of the era included:
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini: Fascist leaders who exploited economic despair and nationalism to seize power.
Stalin’s purges: The Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime carried out mass executions and forced labor camps.
Militarist Japan: Japanese imperialists invaded China and Southeast Asia, committing atrocities on a massive scale.
The Post–Cold War Era and the War on Terror (1991–Present): The end of the Cold War in 1991 did not lead to universal peace. While the United States emerged as the dominant superpower, the global landscape became more unstable, with failed states, terrorism and regional wars filling the vacuum.
Yugoslavia’s violent breakup led to genocide and ethnic cleansing. The Sept. 11 attacks triggered the U.S.-led War on Terror (2001–), which destabilized the Middle East. ISIS emerged from the ruins of Iraq and Syria, proving that power vacuums create new threats.
The monsters of that era included extremist groups like Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other militant factions that thrived in collapsed states, and insurgencies and rogue states as failed governments allowed warlords and factions to seize power.
Every historical interregnum has followed a pattern: collapse, chaos, monsters and eventually, stability. Today, we stand in another such moment—what emerges next remains uncertain.
Our Present Moment: A New Interregnum, a New Time of Monsters
History does not move in a straight line. It is instead marked by periods of stability, where dominant powers enforce a relatively predictable order and periods of transition, where old systems collapse but no new framework has yet taken hold. These interregnums—moments between the death of one order and the birth of another—are often the most dangerous and unpredictable in human history.
Antonio Gramsci’s invocation of a “time of monsters” refers to the forces—political extremism, authoritarianism, war, economic collapse, technological upheaval—that emerge to fill the uncertainty and chaos left by the collapse of the old order.
Like past historical interregnums, our world today is trapped in an unstable and dangerous limbo.
The post–World War II order, which was largely defined by the Cold War’s bipolar structure, has now been gone for over three decades, but a stable replacement has yet to emerge. The unipolar world dominated by the United States after 1991 has weakened.
We are witnessing the decline of U.S. hegemony, the rise of new powers like China and the fragmentation of global politics into multiple competing spheres of influence. In the midst of this transition, we are already seeing conflict, chaos and the resurgence of political forces that many had assumed had been relegated to the past.
A new world order will eventually arise, but the crucial question remains: At what cost? If history is any guide, the period before the emergence of a new stable order is likely to be marked by war, social upheaval, economic instability and political extremism. The world we recognize today may be unrecognizable within a generation.
A Fractured World: The Breakdown of Global Stability
One of the defining features of interregnum periods is the dissolution of previous structures of power and authority. The last 30 years have seen:
The weakening of U.S. global leadership: After decades of post–Cold War dominance, the United States faces internal political instability, economic stagnation and diminishing global influence.
The rise of China as an alternative power: While not yet a global hegemon, China’s economic, military and technological rise directly challenges U.S. influence, particularly in Asia and Africa.
The return of revisionist states: Countries like Russia, Turkey and Iran seek to challenge, alter or overturn the international order and reshape their regional environments through military force and coercion, testing the limits of international norms.
The decline of global institutions: The United Nations, the World Trade Organization and other international bodies have been weakened, sidelined or ignored as major powers act unilaterally.
Instead of one dominant global system, the world is now fragmenting into competing blocs, including:
A China-led economic and technological sphere, including much of Asia, parts of Africa and South America.
A U.S.-led bloc, still influential in Europe and parts of the Pacific but facing internal and external challenges.
A growing zone of instability, including much of the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, where states are collapsing and nonstate actors (militias, terrorist groups, warlords) are gaining power.
These fractured realities mean that global cooperation—on everything from climate change to economic stability—has become harder than ever before.
The Return of Nationalism, Populism and Authoritarianism
When old orders collapse, people often turn to strongmen, radical ideologies and reactionary forces for answers. This is not new—the 1920s and 1930s saw the collapse of post–World War I democratic governments and the rise of fascism, communism and militarism. The same dynamic is unfolding today.
Right-wing nationalism is rising across the world, from Europe to India to the United States, driven by fears of economic decline, cultural change and political dysfunction.
Populist movements are destabilizing democracies, as leaders use rhetoric against elites, immigrants and globalization to build political power.
Authoritarian regimes are emboldened, seeing liberal democracies as weak and in decline. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the most striking example of this trend.
Polarization and political violence are increasing, as societies turn against themselves, fueled by disinformation and deep ideological divisions.
Rather than a world moving toward greater democracy and cooperation, we are witnessing a reversal of the democratic gains of the 20th century, with more countries turning toward illiberalism, autocracy and repression.
Economic Uncertainty and the Decline of Globalization
Another feature of historical interregnums is economic instability, as old economic systems break down and new ones struggle to take shape. Today, we are seeing:
A shift away from globalization: Many nations are moving toward economic nationalism, erecting trade barriers and focusing on domestic production.
Massive debt crises and inflation: Governments across the world are struggling with unsustainable debt, leading to potential financial crises and the erosion of the middle class.
Technological displacement: Automation and technology-driven foreign competition are rapidly replacing traditional jobs, with millions of workers facing economic uncertainty.
The rise of alternative currencies and financial systems, including digital currencies that could further destabilize traditional financial institutions.
The predictable economic order of the late 20th century—characterized by free trade, global markets and stable growth—is unraveling, creating opportunities for economic monsters like black-market economies, corporate monopolies and financial manipulation.
The Role of Technology: AI, Misinformation and Surveillance States
One of the most unprecedented factors of our modern interregnum is the power of technology to both stabilize and destabilize societies.
AI-driven disinformation is undermining trust. Social media algorithms and AI-generated content make it easier than ever to spread propaganda, conspiracy theories and false information, eroding the shared reality necessary for democratic governance.
Surveillance technology is empowering authoritarian states. Countries like China are perfecting digital authoritarianism, using facial recognition, AI and big data to monitor and control their populations.
Cyberwarfare is replacing conventional warfare—Future conflicts may not be fought with tanks and missiles but with hacked infrastructure, financial system disruptions and AI-driven attacks.
While technology has the potential to create solutions, it is currently being weaponized in ways that amplify chaos rather than order.
A New Order Will Emerge—but at What Cost?
Every historical interregnum has eventually given way to a new order, whether it was the birth of the nation-state system after the Thirty Years’ War, the formation of modern democracy after World War II or the collapse of communism leading to the globalized 1990s. But the transitions have rarely been peaceful.
What will it take for a new world order to emerge? Three possibilities stand out:
A negotiated, stable transition: Major powers could collaborate to reshape international institutions, preventing catastrophic conflict. This is the most hopeful outcome.
A prolonged period of instability and fragmentation: The world could remain in political, economic and military chaos for decades before a new dominant system arises.
A major global conflict or crisis forces a new order: As in the aftermath of World Wars I and II, only after widespread destruction will nations work together to build something new.
The ultimate question is: Will today’s leaders and institutions manage to shape a new order without the suffering and bloodshed that usually accompanies such transitions? Or are we doomed to repeat the violent cycles of history?
Until that question is answered, we remain in a dangerous interregnum—a time of uncertainty, instability and monsters.
Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and recipient of the AAC&U’s 2025 President’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Education.
I’ve been having trouble blogging lately. Part of it has been that I’ve spent the last two years heads-down, building a business. But now that I’m looking around, I don’t see much happening in EdTech. Anywhere. I can write about big trends that will affect education. Plenty is happening in that arena. But at least at first glance, the EdTech sector looks frozen. I’m not talking about frozen as in the normal much-activity-but-little-progress way. I mean that, other than integrating ChatGPT into everything in shallow and trivial ways, I don’t see anybody doing much of anything.
I’m probably seeing an oversimplified picture. First, I have bigger blind spots than usual at the moment. Second, there’s so much happening in the macro-environment that some EdTech companies are probably working on larger plans behind the scenes. With changes like major demographic student switches, huge swathes of the economy being reconfigured, and profoundly impactful technologies popping up seemingly out of nowhere, companies need time to plan and implement appropriately significant responses.
But I also sense a lot of paralysis. Some may be confused about various large shifts and be confused about how to make sense of whatever sparse data they can get their hands on. (I certainly am.) They may not know what to do yet. And since we’re in a financial environment in which very few companies have a lot of money to spend, some EdTech firms may simply be unable to execute any strategy other than treading water at the moment.
Then again, some companies—even some industries—may not have effective responses to the changes. They may disappear.
I fed Bob Dylan’s famous line “He not busy born is busy dying” into OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image generator, having very little idea of what the software would do with that prompt. Surprisingly, its output perfectly sums up my current thinking about the EdTech situation:
Love ’em or hate ’em, it’s hard to dispute that Pearson has an outsized impact on education in America. This huge company—they have a stock market valuation of $18 billion—touches all levels from kindergarten through career education, providing textbooks, homework platforms, high-stakes testing, and even helping to design entire online degree programs. So when they announce a major change in their corporate strategy, it is consequential.
That is one reason why I think that most everybody who is motivated to read this blog on a regular basis will also find it worthwhile to read Pearson’s startling publication, “The Incomplete Guide to Delivering Learning Outcomes” and, more generally, peruse their new efficacy web site. One of our goals for e-Literate is to explain what the industry is doing, why, and what it might mean for education. Finding the answers to these questions is often an exercise in reading the tea leaves, as Phil ably demonstrated in his recent posts on the Udacity/SJSU pilot and the layoffs at Desire2Learn. But this time is different. In all my years of covering the ed tech industry, I have never seen a company be so explicit and detailed about their strategy as Pearson is being now with their efficacy publications. Yes, there is plenty of marketing speak here. But there is also quite a bit about what they are actually doing as a company internally—details about pilots and quality reviews and hiring processes and M&A criteria. These are the gears that make a company go. The changes that Pearson is making in these areas are the best clues we can possibly have as to what the company really means when they say that they want efficacy to be at the core of their business going forward. And they have published this information for all the world to see.
These now-public details suggest a hugely ambitious change effort within the company.[…] I can say with absolute conviction that what Pearson has announced is no half-hearted attempt or PR window dressing, and I can say with equal conviction that what they are attempting will be enormously difficult to pull off. They are not screwing around. Whatever happens going forward, Pearson is likely to be a business school case study for the ages.
Pearson put out an announcement that looked like fluff, ultimately producing results that looked like fluff that blew away in the wind, but nevertheless tried very hard to change itself. For years.
The problem, as I noted back then, is that textbook companies like Pearson are neither positioned with their customers nor internally equipped to think about improving student success in a way that would be helpful:
Of course, Pearson[‘s] decision to pursue this strategy as what has historically been a textbook company also raises some different questions. As you think about Pearson declaring that they are now focused on evaluating all their products based on efficacy, one reaction that you may be having is something along the lines of, “Wait. You mean to tell me that, for all of those educational products you’ve been selling for all these years, your product teams are only now thinking about efficacy for the first time?” Another reaction might be, “Wait. You mean to tell me that you think that you, a textbook company, should be defining the learning outcomes and determining the effectiveness of a course rather than the faculty who teach the course?”[…]
It’s impossible to unpack the meaning of Pearson’s move without putting it in the context of the historical relationship between the textbook industry and the teachers who adopt their products. Despite all of the complaints about how bad textbooks are and how clueless these companies are, the relationship between textbook publishers and faculty is unusually intimate. To begin with, I can’t think of any other kind of company that hires literally thousands of sales representatives whose job it is to go visit individual faculty, show them the company’s products, answer questions, and bring feedback on the products back to the company. And speaking of those products, the overwhelming majority of them are written by faculty—many with input from an advisory committee of faculty and pre-publication reviews by other faculty. You can fairly accuse the textbook publishers of many different faults and sins, but not taking faculty input seriously isn’t one of them. Historically, they have relied heavily on that faculty input to shape the pedagogical features on the textbooks. And they have had to, because most of the editors are not teachers themselves. More often than not, they started off as textbook sales reps. If they taught at all, it was typically ten or twenty years ago, and just for a few a few years—long enough for them to figure out that teaching and the academic life weren’t for them. This doesn’t mean that they don’t care about pedagogy or don’t know anything about it, but it does mean that most of what they know comes from talking with their authors and customers.
And by “customers,” I mean faculty, despite the fact that it is the students who actually buy the product. Pearson’s choice to build their learning outcomes effort around a term that comes from the pharmaceutical industry is an historically apt one for the textbook industry. In higher education in the United States, faculty prescribe textbooks and students purchase them. As a result, textbook publishers have generally designed their products to please faculty rather than students. One consequence of this is that they had no need to distinguish product features that offer faculty convenience from those that actually impact student learning. When faculty/customers said to the textbook publishers, “I want my book to come with slides, lecture notes, and a self-grading homework platform so that I don’t have to put as much work into that annoying survey course the department head is making me teach,” then that’s what they provided. Whether that collection of materials had positive impact, negative impact, or no impact on student outcomes was not a question that the textbook publisher had any particular reason to ask. For the most part, the publishers relied on their authors and customers to make good decisions for the students. As long as the they provided the raw materials that the faculty said they needed, the companies’ work was done.
Nothing in Pearson’s history prepared it to think about how effective its products are at helping students learn. That wasn’t what its customers had looked to it for. They had little data and little historic expertise from which to start their transformation. By and large, their digital products were not designed to provide data necessary to improve student learning, never mind.
Worse, they really didn’t know how to work with their customers on their new mission. Academic institutions were not about to cede their responsibility for student success to textbook publishers. It would have to be some kind of partnership. But Pearson and their peers had no idea what that partnership should look like.
Internally, changing the way they think about answering the questions that the framework asks them will entail as much subtle, difficult, and pervasive re-engineering of the corporate reflexes and business processes as the work being undertaken now. As I described earlier, all textbook companies that have been around for a while are wired for a particular relationship with faculty that is at the heart of how they design, produce, and sell their products. Their editors have gone through decades of tuning the way they think and work to this process, and so have their customers. When Pearson layers a discussion of efficacy onto these business processes, a tension is created between the old and new ways of doing things. Suddenly, authors and customers don’t necessarily get what they want from their products just because they asked for them. There are potentially conflicting criteria. The framework itself provides nothing to help resolve this tension. At best, it potentially scaffolds a norming conversation. But a product management methodology that can combine knowledge about efficacy, user desires, and usability requires more tools than that. And that problem is even worse in some ways now that product teams have multiple specialized roles. The editor, author, adopting teacher, instructional designer, cognitive science researcher, psychometrician, data scientist, and UX engineer may all work together to develop a unified vision for a product, but more often than not they are like the blind man and the elephant. Agreeing in principle on what attributes an effective product might have is not at all the same as being able to design a product to be effective, where “effective” is shared notion between the company and the customers.
Pearson will need to create a new methodology and weave it into the fabric of the company. There are a number of sources from which they can draw. The Incomplete Guide mentions Lean Startup techniques, which are as good a place to start as any. But there is no methodology I know of that will work off-the-rack for education, and there certainly is no talent pool that has been trained in any such methodology. I have worked with multiple educational technology product teams in multiple companies on just this problem, and it is very, very hard. In fact, it may be the single hardest problem that the educational technology industry faces today, as well as one of the harder problems that the larger educational community faces.
In retrospect, the fatal flaw in the industry may be its very raison d’être. In the analog world, textbook publishers enabled faculty to outsource portions of their course designs to other faculty who, as authors, were aided in design, production, sales, and distribution by the companies. Because the products were just pages in a book, their adopters could pick and choose what they used and how they used it. But they also had to pick and choose. And adapt. And fill in gaps. That process, the work of turning raw curricular materials into a finished, tailored curricular experience, is increasingly where the value is. It was in 2013 and it certainly is now. But nobody turns to textbook publishers to help with that job.
I wrestled with this same problem when I was an employee at Cengage, just a couple of years before I wrote the Pearson post. MindTap was the first learning platform from a major publisher to shift the paradigm from a learning experience modeled after a classroom—the LMS—to one that centered on the substance of the course itself. It started with a loose book metaphor—think “scope and sequence”—but was very flexible and configurable. Beyond our plan to support all the LTI tools that plug into an LMS, we had a very flexible MindApps API that enabled a richer integration. For example, we integrated several different note-taking apps. Students using, say, Evernote, could take their notes in the margin of a MindTap title. The content would be synchronized with Evernote. And it would stay in the students’ note-taking app forever. MindTap was intended to be the hub, but not the walled garden, of a new, more expansive digital learning ecosystem. One that was centered on tailored, student-centered learning design rather than on publisher content.
Customers liked MindTap a lot. Some of them liked Cengage’s textbook franchises less. They wanted to license the platform and put their own content in it. Despite the urging of some of us both inside and outside the company, Cengage refused. The company was focused on the value of its content.
Since I wrote my Pearson efficacy post, which was the same year that the firm’s stock price peaked in that 10-year graph above, publishers have lost 35% of their revenues. They have been bought by private equity firms, filed for bankruptcy, tried and failed to merge, bought OPM companies only to put them up for sale, and tried many other tactics. Nothing has worked.
Generative AI is a commoditizing force. It is a tsunami of creative destruction.
Consider the textbook industry. As long-time e-Literate readers know, I’ve been thinking a lot about how its story will end. Because of its unusual economic moats, it is one of the last media product categories to be decimated or disrupted by the internet. But those moats have been drained one by one. Its army of sales reps physically knocking on campus doors? Gone. The value of those expensive print production and distribution capabilities? Gone. Brand reputation? Long gone.
Just a few days ago, Cengage announced a $500 million cash infusion from its private equity owner[….]
What will happen to this tottering industry when professors, perhaps with the help of on-campus learning designers, can use an LLM to spit out their own textbooks tuned to the way they teach? What will happen when the big online universities decide they want to produce their own content that’s aligned with their competencies and is tied to assessments that they can track and tune themselves?
Don’t be fooled by the LLM hallucination fear. The technology doesn’t need to (and shouldn’t) produce a perfect, finished draft with zero human supervision. It just needs to lower the work required from expert humans enough that producing a finished, student-safe curricular product will be worth the effort.
How hard would it be for LLM-powered individual authors to replace the textbook industry? A recent contest challenged AI researchers to develop systems that match human judgment in scoring free text short-answer questions. “The winners were identified based on the accuracy of automated scores compared to human agreement and lack of bias observed in their predictions.” Six entrants met the challenge. All six were built on LLMs.
This is a harder test than generating anything in a typical textbook or courseware product today.
The textbook industry has received ongoing investment from private equity because of its slow rate of decay. Publishers threw off enough cash that the slum lords who owned them could milk their thirty-year-old platforms, twenty-year-old textbook franchises, and $75 PDFs for cash. As the Cengage announcement shows, that model is already starting to break down.
How long will it take before generative AI causes what’s left of this industry to visibly and rapidly disintegrate? I predict 24 months at most.
This week I saw a quick, offhand demonstration of a platform provider’s integration of generative AI into their system to create structured learning content. It worked. That conversation, along with investigations and experiments I’m running in preparation for an EEP project on the topic, strongly suggest to me that the tech is good enough today to change the economics of course design enough to completely disrupt the old publisher model.
I don’t think the next step is “robot tutor in the sky 2.0.” But fundamentally changing the economics of learning design is entirely plausible in the near term. AI will assist learning designers rather than replace them. It will make the job much easier, more affordable, and quite possibly more fulfilling for the people doing the work. It will be so cheap that it won’t even be a product. It’ll be a feature set.
I believe the era of AI-assisted OER and local design is coming. That could be exciting, right?
But it hasn’t happened yet.
At this moment, we’re waiting. Meanwhile, the publishers must see what’s coming. What are they doing to prepare? Generative AI is going to shift the value of digital learning products from the content to the platform and from crafted finished products to products that enable craft. Theoretically, it may not be too late for the publishers to respond. In practice, I’ve heard from friends in the industry that their employers have been disinvesting in their platforms over the past few years. I don’t know what they’re thinking right now.
So we’ll wait and see.
LMSs
We could call the textbook publishers’ root problem one of product/market fit. Their product no longer meets the needs of the market and they haven’t been well-equipped to either change their product or focus on a different market.
Many have argued for a long time that this is true with the LMS. That the product category is going to die. The people making that argument have been wrong. Repeatedly. Forever. For so long, in fact, that the loudest voices in this camp have largely left EdTech.
But are they finally right? I don’t know.
Before I get into the details, here’s a depressing question: How many broadly used EdTech product categories can you think of that were created since the invention of the LMS?
Yes, shift happens. But less often than one might hope.
Back in 2014, I wrote an unintentionally infamous rant called Dammit, the LMS in which I took on all the critics who were arguing the LMS was dead or dying. I’ll quote at length because it gets to the heart of the product/market fit conundrum:
Let’s imagine a world in which universities, not vendors, designed and built our online learning environments. Where students and teachers put their heads together to design the perfect system. What wonders would they come up with? What would they build?
Why, they would build an LMS. They did build an LMS. Blackboard started as a system designed by a professor and a TA at Cornell University. Desire2Learn (a.k.a. Brightspace) was designed by a student at the University of Waterloo. Moodle was the project of a graduate student at Curtin University in Australia. Sakai was built by a consortium of universities. WebCT was started at the University of British Columbia. ANGEL at Indiana University.
OK, those are all ancient history. Suppose that now, after the consumer web revolution, you were to get a couple of super-bright young graduate students who hate their school’s LMS to go on a road trip, talk to a whole bunch of teachers and students at different schools, and design a modern learning platform from the ground up using Agile and Lean methodologies. What would they build?
They would build Instructure Canvas. They did build Instructure Canvas. Presumably because that’s what the people they spoke to asked them to build.
In fairness, Canvas isn’t only a traditional LMS with a better user experience. It has a few twists. For example, from the very beginning, you could make your course 100% open in Canvas. If you want to teach out on the internet, undisguised and naked, making your Canvas course site just one class resource of many on the open web, you can. And we all know what happened because of that. Faculty everywhere began opening up their classes. It was sunlight and fresh air for everyone! No more walled gardens for us, no sirree Bob.
That is how it went, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
I asked Brian Whitmer the percentage of courses on Canvas that faculty have made completely open. He didn’t have an exact number handy but said that it’s “really low.” Apparently, lots of faculty still like their gardens walled. Today, in 2014.
Canvas was a runaway hit from the start, but not because of its openness. Do you know what did it? Do you know what single set of capabilities, more than any other, catapulted it to the top of the charts, enabling it to surpass D2L in market share in just a few years? Do you know what the feature set was that had faculty from Albany to Anaheim falling to their knees, tears of joy streaming down their faces, and proclaiming with cracking, emotion-laden voices, “Finally, an LMS company that understands me!”?
It was Speed Grader. Ask anyone who has been involved in an LMS selection process, particularly during those first few years of Canvas sales.
Here’s the hard truth: While [one LMS critic] wants to think of the LMS as “training wheels” for the internet (like AOL was), there is overwhelming evidence that lots of faculty want those training wheels. They ask for them. And when given a chance to take the training wheels off, they usually don’t.[…]
Do you want to know why the LMS has barely evolved at all over the last twenty years and will probably barely evolve at all over the next twenty years? It’s not because the terrible, horrible, no-good LMS vendors are trying to suck the blood out of the poor universities. It’s not because the terrible, horrible, no-good university administrators are trying to build a panopticon in which they can oppress the faculty. The reason that we get more of the same year after year is that, year after year, when faculty are given an opportunity to ask for what they want, they ask for more of the same. It’s because every LMS review process I have ever seen goes something like this:
Professor John proclaims that he spent the last five years figuring out how to get his Blackboard course the way he likes it and, dammit, he is not moving to another LMS unless it works exactly the same as Blackboard.
Professor Jane says that she hates Blackboard, would never use it, runs her own Moodle installation for her classes off her computer at home, and will not move to another LMS unless it works exactly the same as Moodle.
Professor Pat doesn’t have strong opinions about any one LMS over the others except that there are three features in Canvas that must be in whatever platform they choose.
The selection committee declares that whatever LMS the university chooses next must work exactly like Blackboard and exactly like Moodle while having all the features of Canvas. Oh, and it must be “innovative” and “next-generation” too, because we’re sick of LMSs that all look and work the same.
Nobody comes to the table with an affirmative vision of what an online learning environment should look like or how it should work. Instead, they come with this year’s checklists, which are derived from last year’s checklists. Rather than coming with ideas of what they could have, the come with their fears of what they might lose. When LMS vendors or open source projects invent some innovative new feature, that feature gets added to next year’s checklist if it avoids disrupting the rest of the way the system works and mostly gets ignored or rejected to the degree that it enables (or, heaven forbid, requires) substantial change in current classroom practices.
This is why we can’t have nice things.[…]
There. I did it. I wrote the damned “future of the LMS” post. And I did it mostly by copying and pasting from posts I wrote 10 years ago. I am now going to go pour myself a drink. Somebody please wake me again in another decade.
Well, here we are. A decade later. Has anything changed? I’m told that something called a “Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE)” popped up during my slumber. But it was gone by the time I woke up. Other than that, my friends in the trenches tell me that largely, no, not much has changed. The rapid shifts in market share of various LMSs have slowed now that Blackboard has staunched the bleeding. (Former Instructure CEO Josh Coates once told me, “We know we can’t keep feeding off Blackboard’s carcass forever.”) Moodle is still out there, Moodling along. Every once and a while, I get a question from somebody about whether they should choose D2L Brightspace or Instructure Canvas. Invariably, their question ends with some version of, “It probably doesn’t matter much, right? I mean, they’re pretty much the same.” My answer has been, “That’s mostly true, except when it’s not. The differences might or might not matter to you depending on the specifics of how you’re using the system.” Nothing in the ecosystem has forced shift. Customers complained but didn’t demand anything different. Quite the opposite.
That said, I’m sensing that more may be shifting than is apparent on the surface. How much will change and how much those changes will matter both remain to be seen.
Instructure and Blackboard are both owned by Private Equity companies now. While that sentence often cues ominous music, I’m not sure it’s the case here. Blackboard is part of Anthology, which does…well…honestly, I’m not entirely clear. (I guess it’s time for Rip Van Winkle to have a look around again.) At first glance, it looks to me like they have a student administration and success platform along with a bunch of services. So…that’s different. They also have the Ally accessibility management tool, which is one of the very few products I’ve seen customers get genuinely excited about in EdTech. When I add those pieces up, I…well…I can’t add them up yet. There’s too much I don’t understand. At some point, I’ll reach out to my friends at the company and get a clearer picture from them.
Instructure bought Badgr and seems to be leaning into CBE. They also bought…a digital adoption platform? I worked extensively with that tech in corporate L&D 20 years ago, long before SaaS and product-led growth. Back then, we mostly used it to boost worker productivity when using complex and confusing software applications. I always wondered why the product category didn’t catch on in education and training. Anyway, Instructure has made a couple of interesting and surprising tuck-in acquisitions. Is there a larger strategy here? Again, I should ask my friends over there.
D2L has been making some early moves into content production (building on an infrastructure that’s always been relatively better than its competitors for learning design) and has been quietly rebuilding its architecture into microservices in a Ship of Theseus sort of way. In their case, I actually have been talking to them a bit about what they’re up to. I’m not clear on the degree to which they’ve converged on a holistic strategy but they definitely have some interesting moves in mind. I’ll have to find out from them what I can share and probe a little more about how it all adds up.
In total, it feels like these companies are getting ready to finally differentiate from each other, not because existing customers are demanding change but because the market is saturated. Everybody in higher ed has an LMS. International growth is…fine, but not transformative. K12 and corporate markets are tougher than they appeared to be. LMS companies are not going to get enough growth by just selling the same product to more customers. They need to either sell different stuff to their existing customers or rethink their core product so that it’s useful in big new ways that attract different customers. They have to find new needs to satisfy. Each of the major higher education LMS companies appears to be approaching the challenge in a different way.
That would (finally) be interesting, wouldn’t it? But again, not much visible has happened yet. The Blackboard thing seems pretty dramatic. But I haven’t yet heard from anyone who thinks it will change the market meaningfully. Blackboard doesn’t even come up in any LMS selection conversations that I’ve had.
One area we might see an opportunity to change the value proposition could come from…wait for it…generative AI. If learning design and content generation costs are dropping through the floor, then the value shifts to platforms that can generate those experiences, fine-tune them, run them for students, and return data back. Is the LMS the right platform for that? It hasn’t been a great fit so far, but…maybe?
OPMs
I don’t know what to say about OPMs because I don’t know what they are anymore. If Coursera, Noodle Partners, iDesign, Guild Education, and Project Kittyhawk can all be considered OPMs, then it’s hard to have a coherent conversation about the “product category.”
Very roughly, the market seems to have bifurcated. The biggest players are sticking to their roots, which is helping universities find more enrollments. Yes, yes, they provide many other services, stand for mom and apple pie, yada yada yada. But at their heart, they help universities expand their ability to spin up, market, and sell more online programs. This is rapidly evolving into a technology platform game, which may be one reason why the Department of Education’s “dear colleague” letter took such a broad swipe at EdTech and not just traditional OPM services. As I wrote in “Coursera is Evolving into a Third-Wave EdTech Company,”
Coursera has always thought of itself as a two-sided market. For those unfamiliar with the term, a two-sided market is one where the company’s primary business is to connect buyers with sellers. Amazon, Etsy, Airbnb, and Uber are all examples of this sort of business. Yes, they were attached in the early days to selling a particular form of MOOC as an individual product, much as Amazon only sold books in the early days. Much of the attention during the early years of MOOCs was on the pedagogical model of the MOOC itself, which is not very effective, and on the MOOC course delivery platforms, which directly translated lecture-model courses into an infinite lecture hall, with some relatively modest technological improvements. The innovation that got the least attention at the time was Coursera’s nature as a two-sided market. I remember talking to Daphne Koller about this circa 2014 (in front of one of those ridiculous fountains in the Swan and Dolphin Hotel at a Sloan-C conference).
I’m not sure that EdX ever fully grasped the implications of the two-sided market model. 2U might; it’s hard to tell right now. The company’s in-process rebranding is confusing and their clearest marketing point so far has been that MOOCs lower the advertising costs for degree programs. Coursera, on the other hand, understood the business model implications early on, one of which is that two-sided markets tend to produce one big winner in any given space. Who is the second-largest competitor to Amazon? Walmart? Wayfair? The distributed network of stores that Shopify powers? I don’t know. The answer isn’t obvious. It’s not like Coke and Pepsi….
The Coursera platform, writ large, connects universities, learners, government agencies, megacorporations, and local employers. It helps open up new opportunities for universities to reach students without falling afoul of the “dialing for dollars” problem that plagued for-profit universities and create ethical and legal complexities for OPMs.
A multi-sided market also offers some benefits to the educational mission relative to other models. If, for example, you’re an OPM that has heavily subsidized the creation of a degree program in exchange for a share of the revenues for ten years, then you need to make sure your up-front investment pays off. This is true of any business that invests up-front in building products, including textbook publishers. In a multi-sided market, depending on how the compensation is set up, the marketplace owner shouldn’t care much about whether the company sells 100,000 units of one product or 1,000 units each of 100 products. For education, some programs are essential for students, local economies, and important business niches, even if they don’t require a lot of trained individuals. So a well-functioning multi-sided market should, all else being equal, offer more educational opportunities within a scalable model.
Amazon, at its heart, is a way for product vendors to sell more stuff to more people with less effort. MOOC platforms, as they exist today, seem to be a way for certificate and degree vendors to sell more stuff to more people with less effort. Sure, the MOOC companies have course authoring and delivery platforms underneath. But nobody would care about those platforms if they weren’t attached to a marketplace. I know a handful of American universities that adopted OpenEdX as a stand-alone learning platform. Most have dropped it. I haven’t heard anybody begging for Coursera to make its platform available separate from the marketplace either.
This is why Guild is now getting lumped as an OPM with increasing frequency. If you think the point of an OPM is to fill more seats in online programs, well, that’s what Guild does. So yeah, it’s hard to define what an OPM is or how it works, which may be why the Department of Education seems confused on the topic.
Is this part of the space evolving? I don’t know. Everybody is so cash-constrained right now. I haven’t noticed the big players making any big moves. Also, their strategies feel incomplete to me. I see a lot more movement inside some universities toward competencies. The platforms do help break down the degree into smaller marketable units and sell enough of them to give them credibility. A “MicroMasters” is a thing now. Sort of. But overall, the connective tissue with employers, both on skills definition and on proof of competency driving employment, is still pretty sketchy except in a few niches.
Meanwhile, fee-for-service shops like iDesign seem focused on helping universities build capacity of various forms—mostly in program and course design. That’s great. It’s needed. But it will never be a giant business. And I’m not sure if generative AI helps or hurts them. They may find themselves having to react to moves made by better-funded learning platform companies. Or not. There’s nothing about generative AI that would require the resources of a big LMS or courseware delivery platform company to deliver value.
The OPM gold rush has run its course. Now we have chaos. Something, or some things, are going to emerge out of it. But I don’t know what they will be or what value they will provide. Or when. Or from which providers.
What else is there?
As usual, I won’t write about ERP and CRM. Not because they’re unimportant. They’re very important. But they’re also an entirely different sort of mess. For reasons that I won’t go into, these product categories are incredibly difficult to make work smoothly and intuitively in education, where complex workflows vary so widely. Until I see signs that this fundamental dynamic is shifting, I won’t devote significant attention to following these big enterprise systems.
I could run down a list of product categories that either completely imploded or are struggling along. Learning analytics. Courseware platforms. ePortfolios (a.k.a. Comprehensive Learner Records?). Some of these may become more interesting than they have been. I’ll save them for future posts.
What else?
AI, AI, AI. Nobody has any money to invest or spend on anything except on AI. So far, most of the product ideas I’ve seen are either trivial or pie-in-the-sky. My AI noise filter is set pretty high at the moment. But I’m going to start lowering it a bit. There are some folks who have been thinking and working hard on real products since before the ChatGPT hype hit (some of whom have been very persistently and creatively trying to get my attention). I will start taking a few of these calls. A few. At this point, I’m looking for thoughtful approaches, realistic thinking about the tech, and identification of real and solvable problems. I don’t expect the products to be right yet. I’m more interested in the people.
On the bigger picture, I read countless articles about AI and the future of work. While that kind of thinking is fine and probably necessary to a point, I personally don’t like to write about possible changes that are further out than I can see clearly. I can see AI having a direct impact in several areas, which I will write about as opportunities come into focus. There will be impacts on education and EdTech in the near future, some of which I may see coming and some of which I definitely won’t. None of it is quite here yet. Generally speaking, we tend to overestimate how quickly these technologies will penetrate particular markets because we forget about all the human stuff that gets in the way. And there is a lot of human stuff in education.
That said, one of the more remarkable affordances of generative AI is its ability to make natural language function as both a user interface and a programming language. It reduces friction like nothing I’ve ever seen before. So maybe we’ll see meaningful innovation faster this time.
