Kadenze

Desiging Kadenze and Kannu to offer online education for arts and creative tech
Role: product design, graphic design, frontend development

Summary

As part of the launch team at Kadenze, I worked toward the company's mission of uniting educators, artists, and engineers from leading institutions around the globe to provide a world-class education in the fields of art and creative technology. 

Problem

Two important issues when it comes to arts education are the obvious rising cost of higher education in general and the less clear fact that the influx of research into online education and alternative models over the last decade or so has almost exclusively focused on STEM, often leaving the arts behind. Kadenze primary challenge was to offset the rising costs of creative education and make arts and tech pedagogy possible outside traditional classroom environments. Some objectives in transforming accessibility gaps into opportunity were to:

• Eliminate educational access barriers such as cost and geography
• Source and deliver a world-class education in arts and creative tech
• Create unique solutions dedicated to creativity and collaboration

I helped storyboard and script a welcome video to share our mission

Business Models & Audience

Kadenze utilized two distinct business models to pursue its mission of ensuring greater access to arts and creative technology education. The primary business model was a massive open online course platform (e.g. Coursera, Udacity, edX) with a freemium media subscription model. The entire catalog is freely accessible and subscribers can engage more deeply via graded assginments, forums, and more for about the price of a Netflix subscription. A complementary revenue stream surfaced shortly after launch when Kadenze released Kannu, a learning management system (LMS, e.g. Blackboard, Canvas, Google Classroom) tailored to the needs of arts and media institutions. Colleges, universities, high schools, nonprofits, and companies around the world licensed Kannu via a SaaS subscription.

One of the most considerable challenges in a stealth-mode startup environment is a lack of data and research resources. Our decision making processes largely relied on extant domain research, heuristics, and deep empathy for the problem space. Part of that was knowing our audience and its constituent niches inside and out. As an example, we further segmented our student audience into 3 more specific personas: pre-college students, concurrent college students, and "lifelong learners" (closest to continuing education students but with a number of very important distinctions).

Personas for students, instructors, and administrators

Awareness

In order to succeed, Kadenze had to inform its audiences about available alternatives to traditional models of creative education. To raise awareness of Kadenze's offerings, I contributed to design and some development for a press page and press kit, a blog to house valuable editorial content for our audiences, diverse social templates, creative campaigns to cross-promote with our partners, and more. The blog announced new features and delivered engaging content about education for different personas. One interesting tactic was profiling users of our platform who had interesting stories behind their reasons for enrolling. This created a strong sense of community among users and was a clever vector for organic growth.

Early design for the Kadenze Blog feed

Some of the creative campaigns I led were institutional partnerships with companies like Adobe and Autodesk. One example was the Summer of Music campaign where we partnered with pro audio companies like Ableton and Native Instruments to cross-promote course bundles with their software products. Two advantages of this were extending reach to improve awareness of our offererings using these companies massive platforms while also lowering another significant barrier to entry for much of our audience: high software costs. Our partnerships allowed us to offer significant discounts on many of the tools students might use for audio production or other creative technology pursuits.

Key visual for the Summer of Music campaign