NOAH’S BrainPOP
BainPOP Cubed
BrainPOP describes itself as a creator of animated curriculum-based content which helps to support students and educators through engaging materials. BrainPOP offers lesson plans, video tutorials, quizs, games for most topics and curriculum componenets.
Here is sample video to get started…
Face 1: Market Focus
The market focus is the K-12 public school system. BrainPOP offers curriculum connections from k-12 in Spanish and English.
Face 2: Types of Offerings
BrainPOP is a content developer that create the curriculum based activities that can be access once a subscription our licensing fee is paid.
Face 3: Who is the Buyer?
BrainPOP has done an excellent job in regard to addressing the various levels of purchasing. By offering a variety of purchasing agreement BrainPOP access the level of learning bought for learner and learning bought centrally. Here is a list of the option: school wide, district wide, media lab, classroom, home school, family, or a virtual subscription.
Face 4 – Global Markets
The United States of America and wired Anglophone countries are the primary global markets. Although the content is offered in Spanish this is more for the Spanish speakers within the United States. As for the content it is primarily American centric in that the social studies and history aspects are in coordination with American curriculum organizers. The other aspects are more generally applicable and to offer a wide variety of topics to be explored.
Face 5 – Development of the Market
From my understanding of BrainPOP it would be situated within a market that supports export oriented learning and substitutions of imports. The American curriculum would make it better suited than perhaps a British or Canadian company offering the same products, but could be used in both of those countries as well.
Face 6 – Learning Technology Competing with Other Forms of Learning
BrainPOP works well with a well-developed learning system. In fact, BrainPOP is used as a way to reinforce the already exciting system and not replace it.
BrainPOP is a great resource I recommend trying a free trial….
I have many email addresses because of this feature…..
Noah
3 comments
1 Erik Van Dusen { 09.27.09 at 12:52 pm }
Hi Noah,
Nice job “cubing” BrainPOP. Our school (K-8) purchased a license to this software, so I’ve used it a few times in my classroom. I do find the content very “American”, but I don’t think that this slows sales down much in Canada because it seems as though every Canadian teacher I talk to loves BrainPOP.
2 David Vogt { 09.28.09 at 9:39 am }
Good summary, Noah.
As per my comments on Omar’s cubing of ExploreLearning, there’s an interesting question here about why BrainPOP can’t leverage their expertise in animations to embed their products broadly into other education-based media and with other publishers. It is very difficult to reach schools – BrainPOP is doing it largely on the web – so do you think they could be more successful if they piggybacked their way into the classroom?
Obviously BrainPOP has thought of this, and has probably tried very hard to build such partnerships, so the corollary question is about why the business models of traditional educational publishers tend to repulse outsourcing rather embrace it for the benefit of innovation and quality. The answer is likely about the marketplace being broken and controlled, therefore stifling innovation.
3 Noah Burdett { 09.28.09 at 7:08 pm }
I am going to take broken as meaning there may be too many monopolies or a select few players that control the marketplace. Framing my answer along those lines I would say that the problem is the somewhat standardized content that all players deal with.
For example, a large player produces content regarding the civil rights, they could use BrainPOP animation, allowing Brainpop to piggyback into the marketplace.
However, the large player may believe that by doing so they will lose clients in the future as people look to Brainpop as alternative provider for future content.
The large player thus determines to keep control of the animation, even though it may be inferior, in order maintain clients.
I guess it is model of try not to compete just delete by ignoring and not acknowledging an opponents skills.
So yes they could be more successful if they could piggybacked into the classroom I just think it is hard to find a ride as the above slightly confusing scenario describes.
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