Last week, our CEO Michael Staton was on a panel during Internet Week New York, called “Beyond Facebook: How Will Today’s Students Use the Web of Tomorrow?”  Hosted by Mark Moran of FindingDulcinea, the panel included 4 other executives of interactive online educational tools. Each spoke to the ways students might be using and influencing the Web in the next few years, as well as what kind of content they will demand and how to create it.

Ariel Aberg-Riger (Creative Development and Marketing Manager at Fourth Story Media) An interactive site based on story telling that unfolds across multiple platforms, including the web, mobile phones, and books. It invites kids to participate and become characters in the stories they read.

Jordan Goldman (Founder and CEO of Unigo) Unigo is the #1 search on google for college search videos. Over 250 schools, with 1,700 more coming soon, are featured in about 60 videos each, shot by actual students on the campuses. It is fully searchable by school, major, extracurriculars, demographics, and more.

Kate Hillis (Co-Founder and Partner Qwidget) This is a widget that can be added to any site to engage visitors in dialogue around the content. It allows the authors to post provocative poll-style opinion questions that offer an easy entry point to comment-posting. It allows for the same questions to be posted on different sites, allowing for cross-web conversation.

James Rohrbach (Founder and CEO of Gulliver) Gulliver is the first comprehensive online resource for Study Abroad students that includes an extensive database of program profiles and student reviews. It also provides a trip planner and the ability to connect with other students who have interests in the same program, and helps colleges and programs by providing a streamlined marketing channel.

Inigral’s Unique Perspective

Michael’s conversation focused on the fact that most high school and college students are on Facebook and that this is a very convenient place to meet them with engaging educational interactions. There is potential to weave education into their well-established social activities, for greater engagement and more academic success.

All 5 of the tools represented by the panelists feature user-generated content. The idea is that often, the audience wants to be apart of the story. A major point raised by Michael is that this requires careful curation of content. As soon as organizations, especially colleges and universities, open up social spaces like Nings or Facebook pages to their community, they need to worry about brand management and moderation of user comments and posts. Inigral’s tool – Schools on Facebook™ – makes this management alot easier.

Michael also addressed the issue of engagement. In order for an interactive educational tool to be successful, it needs to be user-centered. Users don’t care about you or your brand, they care about themselves and their peers. Along with having the freedom to post what they want, users also have to find themselves a niche or a certain audience in order to continue being engaged with the tool and with other users. It is a good idea to consider how your tool will help breed community, hopefully uncovering relationships based on similarities in personality and interests, or even overlap in off-line activity, with actual face-to-face time coming out of the online interaction. Schools on Facebook™ can match users based on courses, dorms, clubs, and organizations in order to discover connections where they’re sometimes difficult to uncover.

One of the more interesting questions posed to the panel was “If you became a consultant for universities, what would you tell them about how teens are using the internet?” The panelists were all in agreement that in order to reach a younger audience and keep them engaged, the most important things to do are:

1. Be out there early and claim your space.
2. Don’t be afraid of letting go of some control of the content – users want to contribute and interact.
3. Be responsive and authentic.