Smart Contracts, Smarter Learning: How ODEM.io Is Turning The Education Game On Its Head

In this episode, Juliet Clark is joined by Johanna Maaghul to dive into the world of smart contracts and how they are revolutionizing education through ODEM.io. They explore how this platform uses blockchain to make education more accessible, verifiable, and affordable. From licensing opportunities for educators to the power of decentralization, this episode is packed with insights for anyone interested in the future of learning and technology. Tune in to discover how smart contracts could shape the education landscape.

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Smart Contracts, Smarter Learning: How ODEM.io Is Turning The Education Game On Its Head!

Welcome to the show. We have a literary agent who created an educational platform. That’s really exciting for every author out there because nobody knows the business better than the literary agent. I am pretty excited about that. Before we get started, I want to remind you to go over and grab your free subscription of Breakthrough Author Magazine.

Also, don’t forget that on November 1st, 2024, we are doing our Platform Planning workshop. You can register for it at PlatformPlanning.com. It will be on November 1st, 2024 at 9:00 AM Mountain Time, and it will be about 90 minutes. We have materials. When you sign up, you’ll get the materials. This is a $1,500 course that we do every year, but we’re going to do it for free in 2024 because we know that many people out there are struggling. Being able to get out of that struggle means planning for 2025.

I’d love to have all of you guys there, breaking down into small bite-sized pieces and getting your platform done. We noticed that many times, we’d put a strategy together, do a session, or put a plan together, and then it never gets executed. If you put the plan together and then you don’t execute it, you will not get results.

Guest Introduction: Johanna Maaghul And ODEM.io

Our guest is Johanna Maaghul. She is going to be bringing us ODEM. ODEM has her hands-on experience in project management, corporate strategy, and technological integration from education, healthcare, software creation, and the FinTech industries. Focused on ensuring that the ODEM platform meets customer and user needs in a rapidly changing education market, she works with laser focus to ensure ODEM always keeps an eye on the future while also meeting the current day-to-day needs of educational institutions, employers, educators, and students.

What makes this so exciting is that Johanna being a literary agent, we are going to have a robust amount of author education on ODEM. I find that really exciting because I know so many places out there do not have education on platform building. When literary agents get a proposal, a lot of times, they look at your numbers and they don’t look any further. This is an important step to making sure that authors not only make revenue from their books but also have revenue from what they do after this book. Stay tuned for Johanna and I.

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Johanna, welcome. It’s great to have you.

It’s great to be here. Thank you.

I am so excited about your new platform for so many reasons. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got here?

The Creation Of ODEM.io

My husband, Rich Maaghul, who’s the CEO and Founder of the platform, ODEM, was working in overseas education. What that means is he was bringing groups of students and executives primarily from Asia and different parts of the world to come to the United States to take advantage of our amazing education system.

He would set up custom programs for them, be it a week or three months, on particular topics of education. What he learned was that in the United States, we’re spoiled when it comes to education in the sense that we have so many different versions of it available to us at any time. For the rest of the world, that’s not the case.

Aside from being a literary agent, I’m also a technologist and a software programmer. I became very excited in 2016 and ‘17 when I learned more about blockchain and decided to devote myself in my technology career to all things blockchain. Those two things came together in an interesting merger. My husband and I had built another platform back in 2000 which was a knowledge management system. We’ve done this before.

We decided to start this company. At the time, we were working with a group of advisors out of Germany who recommended that we start the company in Switzerland if we were going to have some blockchain component to it. The idea was Switzerland, at the time, which was 2017, had the best compliance for blockchain of any country, particularly with cryptocurrency, which we have a component on the platform. I can get into that a little bit.

The original model was to make education more accessible, more verifiable, more transferable, and more affordable. How do you do that? You do that by taking out a lot of the middlemen and a lot of the layers and making it direct to a decentralized model where a user, be it a student or a professional, can come to the platform, create a profile about themselves, and explain what it is they’re trying to learn. We’re using machine learning to help articulate that so that they can better understand what the opportunities available to them are both professionally and then educationally to backfill to get them there. Does that make sense?

That makes a lot of sense. With all of your work as a literary agent, you and I have been talking a lot about how we can build a segment of this that would benefit authors. There were two main things that I really loved. The first thing is there are all these educational platforms out there where you pay upfront to put your courses on and you pay a yearly fee. Yours is not like that at all.

There are a lot of people using the teachables. There are so many out there where they’re paying sometimes up to thousands of dollars a year for all the functionality, and yet nobody’s taking their classes. Explain your model a little bit because that was one of the things that impressed me. It’s free until somebody buys it.

How ODEM’s Marketplace Works

How that works for us is we wanted to make it a true marketplace, and we wanted to give everybody access to those tools to participate in that marketplace. To your point, anybody can create a portal on ODEM, whether it’s an educational portal or an employment portal. They can register as an independent educator or as a student.

If you create an educational portal as you’re doing and as you’ve seen already from being on and using the platform, you have a very easy-to-use set of self-service tools that allow you to create any model of education, whether it’s in-person, you’re doing a conference, or you want to do a Zoom call for six weeks that people show up and participate. It’s self-paced. The videos are already ready. Whatever that modality is, we want to accommodate that, and then we want to let you price the education to whatever you feel is the appropriate pricing model. That’s important because we want to create a real marketplace. We want it to be driven by demand and give everyone an equal playing field to start.

I personally worked briefly with the folks at Udemy to discuss content with them. I learned very quickly that they will only take the A-list of educators. They’re only going to take people who have 1 million or 2 million followers and who can already generate the income. They’re going to also take a large percentage of that offering. Udemy starts at 50% and they can go up to 75% of what they take. ODEM does take a fee. We take a 25% fee of whatever you offer. We think that’s a fair number. That could change over time. That could go down if anything because as we build more volume and add more self-service tools, we will have less involvement with those folks. We’ll empower them more to market and sell the programs.

The second thing that really motivated me, and I won’t even get into why, is that there are licensing opportunities there for your courses. You can choose to license them, which you have been great in facilitating something between me and another publishing company to carry my author platform-building tools. Talk a little bit about that because I don’t see that on any other platform.

We call it perpetual curriculum royalty. What it means is that like a book, you license your course to another educational provider. When you set up your course on ODEM, there’s a box that you could check to say, “I want to make this available for relicensing.” Once you do that, other sites and other portals on the ODEM platform can say, “That course really fits in well with what I’m offering. I’d like to resell that.” The person who has created it can also say, “I’m going to give up 20% or 25%,” or, “I want this course to get traction, so I’m going to offer a reseller partner 50% of my revenue.”

Those are some of the ways that not only do we create another layer of this marketplace that helps empower everyone, but it’s, in the blockchain world, called a trustless network. What that means is you can trust that whoever this other entity is that’s providing this product that you’re relicensing, the ODEM platform will deal with all of the transactional backends of making sure everyone is paid.

If you’ve done any affiliate marketing, that can be very cumbersome because you give everyone a link. At the end of the month, you have to go look at the links and you have to tally up on a spreadsheet on who you owe what to and all of that. We take care of all of that for you. All you need to do is say, “Anybody who wants to resell my program, it’s a 50% commission.”

Anytime that program gets sold on the ODEM platform, everyone is paid automatically instantly. That’s the beauty of it. We’ve created this model of true reseller partnerships. We look forward to helping the smaller players network and mesh together to build a bigger fabric that then gives them the power to compete with the big guys. That’s the only way that that can happen.

That is amazing. I used to work for JVIC. That’s affiliate marketing. One thing I saw over and over, especially in an economy like we have, is you would be my affiliate, but then I would use the money for other things and go, “I’m sorry.” That cuts that out. Back when I was doing that, we identified that a lot of the big players weren’t paying what they said they were. This eliminates all that and keeps everybody honest, which I love.

From our perspective from ODEM, we don’t want to be in the business. I’m not an accountant. I don’t pretend to be. I don’t want to be. I don’t want to hold anybody else’s money. That’s always trouble. Most people know of crypto through crypto exchanges and the opportunities to make money. They’re talking about this coin and that coin, but in reality, there’s not a lot going on.

Smart Contracts And Trustless Networks

It’s mostly market-makers moving those needles through what are called the whales, the people who hold the highest percentage of these tokens who can make a trade. The reason they use the analogy whale is to think of all the tiny fish that swim with the whale. That’s exactly what the crypto market looks like. We are using crypto for the actual utility use case. Meaning, the crypto is the rails. Anytime a transaction happens, we can use the smart contracts of the blockchain and crypto to program the money.

Marc Andreessen, if you remember him, is one of the original tech investor guys. He put it perfectly. He said that blockchain will do for money what email did for communication. If you can imagine prior to email, what did it look like? That’s an interesting analogy. Although people think we have that with Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and so forth, the difference is that those are controlled by a centralized body. Blockchain is a true peer-to-peer transaction. Anybody can buy something from somebody else and there doesn’t need to be a third party that verifies that transaction. All we do is write the smart contracts that move the money. We don’t approve or don’t have any involvement in that transaction per se.

There’s a third pillar of your platform that I haven’t seen anywhere else either, which is the possibility if you meet certain criteria, and those are very key there, to have your course become part of continuing education curriculums. If you can tap into that market, people have to take your courses. It’s a good revenue stream. 

That’s exactly right. We call that prior learning assessment. It is a complimentary pillar to the perpetual curriculum royalty. We started the company in 2017. We’re 8 years or 7 years in. We were way ahead of ourselves in building this because education in the last few years has seen drastic changes. There is a statistic out there that one university or college a week is going under in the United States. You’ve got to be very competitive, and you’ve got to be offering something really concrete. Like Mike Rowe and what he’s talking about, more people are going to trade schools.

What happens in academia that people don’t realize is that it’s static. It’s difficult to create new models of education quickly. Our industry is moving at a much faster clip than academia. As they roll out new jobs and are like, “Who’s going to fix the Tesla power stations on I-5 at the Harris Ranch?” You start thinking about the infrastructure for new energy which has gone so fast that there’s no time for the community colleges to create certificates in those kinds of things, let alone the university. What we’re proposing is if you are a subject matter expert and you can create a class, let’s get that class in front of the community colleges. They can take it on or bolt it onto their continuing ed programs. There’s an opportunity there for that to happen.

You are getting ready. I’m really excited about this. Back in 2021, I talked to a couple of literary agents who said they get proposals all the time. First, they look at the numbers because they have to have profitable numbers or audience numbers to send them over to pitch it. You are creating a course, which I can’t wait for because I don’t think people understand what proposal writing is all about and what makes a good one. When are you going to have that ready? It’s going to be on ODEM. Do you have any up-to-date information on when that will be ready? 

Opportunities For Authors On ODEM.io

Yeah. We’ll have that class ready hopefully, at least for signup, on October 1st, 2024 when we launch the Waterside portal as well. This is a great topic because I’d like to talk a little bit about why this model is really useful for authors in particular. Like any vertical space, the publishing world has so many facets and components to it. It’s one of the few industries, and you might agree, that hasn’t changed that much in a way.

One of the challenges I have in being a literary agent is that I’ll get people who come to me with a book when they have been really successful in some other aspect of their life. They’re a famous musician, actor, lawyer, or something they’ve done where they’ve achieved the height of their career. Their natural next step is to write a book about it. I know you deal with a lot of clients who are in that space as well. For me, it’s like they’re going from 60 to 0 and they’re very confused about this process of publishing a book. They’re like, “I did it successfully. We move fast. If I put more pressure on the gas pedal, we should be able to get this done.” It’s never that way.

The difference with publishing is it’s about this old-school protocol and model. It involves reading. Reading is going to slow everything down. As a literary agent, I’ve only paid if a book does well. I’m like a realtor. I don’t make any money off spending lots of time on the phone, helping people with their stuff. I am personally invested in educating authors in this process, whether it be writing a book proposal, understanding a contract, which will probably be a class we’ll do, building your author platform, which in this case is what you and I are discussing, or turning a book into a course, which is not as easy as chopping up the chapters and talking about them. There’s more to it.

There are a lot of aspects of the publishing industry that will really lend themselves well to educating authors and empowering them for this process. Even the publishers will appreciate it. Sometimes, I will get an author who comes to me in their mid-negotiation. They have an offer and they’re dealing with the publisher but they’re like, “I’m confused about this or that.” I’m like, “If you bring me in, I can help you navigate all of that.”

The publishers prefer that because then, they have someone knowledgeable negotiating. There’s some downside because I could negotiate a better deal for the author, but the more educated the author is when they step into this process, the less they’re going to be disappointed and disillusioned with how different this process is from whatever other business model they’re familiar with. Does that make sense?

It makes a lot of sense. I tell people all the time, “The publishing industry has its own language. What you are hearing may not be what they’re saying.” I relate this to if you came and asked me to build a bridge, I’m not an engineer. I could probably build a bridge but I would not recommend that you drive over it because I don’t speak the same language.

It’s the same way with publishing. People are really disappointed because they heard something. It doesn’t help that there are a lot of publishers out there, whether it be self-publishers or hybrid publishers, that blow a lot of smoke up your behind too. They’re like, “That’s the best book I’ve ever seen but it’s not that great.” There’s a lot of that going on too.

I feel like this education cuts to the bone and hopefully forces a lot of these aspiring authors to be real about what’s going on. That’s why you and I are doing the course. With hybrid publishers, when you publish that way, I rarely think you get your money back out. It’s what you do next with it that builds your ROI. When we have people come in, most of them are not digital marketing compliant, which you need, and at the back end, they don’t have a course. We’re looking at probably a complete failure once all is said and done. I don’t mean it’s bad because the book is out there, but you’re not going to sell thousands of copies more than likely. It is a big deal.

I want to talk about that point because it’s a really important one. There are ways to step into the intention of a book. One of the things I won’t say I discourage people from but I will bring to their attention is if their model is, “I’m going to sell 100,000 copies of this book so I can fuel the rest of my life,” that’s not a model that’s going to work, number one. Number two is, “I’ll publish this book. If it only sells 1,000 copies, I’ll do another book right away.” That’s also something I don’t encourage people to do.

A book is a very long game thing, and you want to be in it for the right reasons. You want to reach readers where they have that moment where the serotonin sparks up in their brain because they’re seeing some perspective or they’re understanding some perspective they’ve never thought of before. That experience, if you’ve read a good book, is so powerful. Focus on that. Everything around it needs to support that. That’s where you and I are on the same page. It’s exciting, but if you’re not set up correctly to do it, you are going to lose a lot of opportunities.

If you get your ego involved and you’re not following the advice given to you about, “You might have a great book but you need to be a business partner with the publisher to make it work. Are you ready to do that? Are you ready to put everything else in your life secondary, or not everything but a lot of things, to make this book a success?” education will help break all that down.

Closing Remarks And How To Connect

If we’re interested in exploring ODEM more, where do we find you to connect and find out if it’s right for people?

It’s ODEM.io. One other thing I want to add before we go is for authors, there’s a second wave here of opportunity, which we’ve talked a little bit about in your class, which is amazing, on the idea of helping authors turn their books into a class, through our publishing arm at Waterside, we’re going to give authors the opportunity to create those classes.

In a sense, there’ll be two audiences. There’ll be a whole bunch of education for authors themselves, and then there will be an opportunity for those authors to create those courses for their readers. Those are opportunities for authors to educate themselves and another opportunity for selling their book and their messaging too.

Thank you so much for sharing this.

Thank you.

I’m very excited to be working with you guys. I’m hoping we can get most of our authors over there and share as well.

Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Thank you.

Important Links

• ODEM
• Breakthrough Author Magazine
• Platform Planning

About Johanna Maaghul

Johanna brings to ODEM her hands-on experience in project management, corporate strategy and technological integration from the education, healthcare, software creation and fintech industries. Focused on ensuring the ODEM platform meets customer and user needs in a rapidly changing education market, she works with laser focus to ensure ODEM always keeps an eye to the future while also meeting the current day-to-day needs of educational institutions, employers, educators and students.