The More We Know: Inside NBC News' iCue, and Why It Didn't Work

Eric Klopfer · Jason Haas

Thu., June 16, 10:30–12:00, Browsing Library

In 2006, MIT’s Education Arcade began a project with NBC News ultimately called iCue, an educational website featuring NBC News’ archives in a platform that leveraged the learning potential of gaming and social networks. The site was intended to save NBC News from a shrinking audience base and to provide MIT with hard data about students learning and use of 21st century skills in new contexts. It did neither of those things. During its evolution, the site faced numerous challenges that robbed it of clarity of vision and certainty of purpose. While the NBC archives were rightly perceived as an asset, they were not quite ready for primetime. The Education Arcade wanted to implement an educational software project at scale but found navigating its role to be problematic given that it was not as a co-designer but rather ultimately as a research/evaluation group. And then there was the market. Selling to schools is very difficult, and both The Education Arcade and NBC News learned just how difficult.

At the time when the project was initiated, NBC was rapidly losing an audience, and audience that was also seriously aging (mean viewer age for NBC Nightly News was in the 60‘s). After being shown an innovative idea by the Education Arcade’s Alex Chisholm, they believed that, by combining their archives with games and social networking, they could access a new, younger audience. Almost immediately, they were facing questions of whether they were going to distribute the game through school or direct-to-consumer channels. As they gravitated towards schools because the market was more quantifiable, the peculiarities of selling to schools became apparent, and it slowly winnowed away the site’s more innovative features. NBC News also changed the nature of the research expected of The Education Arcade, moving them from collaborators to evaluators as it became clear that in order to sell to schools, NBC News was going to need more traditional educational research data.

In reflecting on this experience, The Education Arcade’s Principal Investigator, Eric Klopfer and iCue’s lead Research Associate, Jason Haas, decided to write up both their research and their experience as a book. During this process, the two revisited the assumptions upon which the project rested as well as the project’s ultimate outcomes. What they discovered was an (obviously) failed website, but also a thriving educational initiative at NBC News. At NBC News, the rise and fall of iCue gave way to a strong streaming video product sold to schools and a commitment to convene annual “Education Nation” conferences in New York (with sizeable television and online components) in order to address the state of education in the U.S. The proposed session would engage the audience in the history of iCue, the various dimensions of the site’s design, and the data that shows just how iCue failed. Moreover, we’ll talk about what we learned and how that has informed and will inform our practice going forward.