This year challenged the way people do many things. For Justin Reich that meant rethinking how to promote his new book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, published in September. With bookstore tours and readings out of the question, Reich came up with an idea to get the word out about his book.
On March 24, I submitted the final copyedits for my new book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education. Schools across the country had begun to shut down, and many parts of the country would follow into lockdown soon after. The book release was planned for September, right in the midst of back-to-school season, and over the course of the spring it became very clear that I wouldn’t be doing any kind of traditional academic book tour.
While planes were grounded, I came up with the alternative of conducting an online book club. We would meet for one hour every Monday afternoon for ten weeks of discussion, one session for every chapter in the book. The goal was to create a format where interested readers could have some structure for reading the book with a community, get some expert commentary, and have a place for discussion and reflection. Each session had a one hour live conversation that we edited down and then released as a podcast episode.
I hired my dear colleague Audrey Watters to serve as a co-host for the series, alternatively joining as subject matter expert or co-host for the discussions. Each session had one or two guests, sometimes joining as experts on the topics and sometimes joining as subjects from the chapter of the book. I encouraged guests to bring a sense of “friendly pugilism” to the discussion; I was worried that folks might be too friendly as guests, so I actively encouraged them to find points of disagreement that could make for lively discussion.
Each episode had a basic run of show, at least to give us something to deviate from. We did introductions by asking guests to tell their “edtech story,” a memorable experience from their teacher or student days encounter with education technology. Then either a guest or Audrey would give a short rundown of the main idea of the chapter, both to help orient people who didn’t read the book in time and to provoke some thinking among listeners. The next section was “Stump the Chump,” borrowed from the great Car Talk segment, where I asked guests to reflect on what I missed or got wrong in the book. Usually by this point, some good questions or lively dialogue would have gotten underway in the chat, and so at some point we could often continue the conversation using questions from the audience. Typically, that plan was enough to fill an hour of conversation.
I was grateful for the terrific group of participants that came together. We had about 600 people sign up for the book club, and the early chapters got 100+ live attendees, dwindling to about 50 or so by the end (there is a MOOC attrition joke in here somewhere). The participants were educators, education researchers, and technology designers; I was particularly pleased that we recruited several folks with titles like “Director of Learning Science and Research” from some prominent edtech companies. The group included many of the kinds of people from industry who I hoped the book would be in dialogue with. I suspect that I would have spoken with more people on a ten city/university book tour, but I had a much deeper engagement in this format.
Most of the mechanics of hosting and recording the book club were handled through Zoom. I used the Zoom webinar feature to create a recurring 10-session series, and then participants could just sign up once for every session.
Other than Zoom, we had two websites for the project. A book website (failuretodisrupt.com) advertised the book club, and we set up a simple Discourse discussion forum site where people could discuss the book in advance of the sessions.
In my lab at MIT, the Teaching Systems Lab, we conduct design research on online learning, so we have a talented production team on call, who remixed all of the episodes and are in the process of publishing the refined versions on our podcast, TeachLab.
Throughout the fall, I settled into a familiar routine for communicating with all of the stakeholders. On Friday, I emailed a run of show to the following weeks guests and added them as panelists to the Zoom webinar. On Sunday, Zoom sent an automated reminder to registrants. On Monday, myself, guests, and Audrey showed up about 30 minutes early for some chitchat and a soundcheck, and then we chatted with everyone for an hour. On Tuesday, I sent an email to registrants with a Zoom link to the recorded webinar and a preview of the next week’s discussion.
When everyone gets vaccinated, I still hope I have a chance to travel around and discuss ideas from the book with colleagues in person. But in the future, if you have to release a book in the midst of a global pandemic, I can recommend online book clubs as an enjoyable way to generate interest, connect with readers, and build community.
