Last week, I introduced everyone to the concept of the Education.com expert panel, but I didn’t have a chance to go into detail about who is actually on our expert panel.  If you read the last post, you may be thinking, “Ok, so they have involved some so-called experts, but I still don’t know who is influencing the content on the site.” Fair enough. I’m going to share some background on five of our experts today along with their plans for bringing up-to-date research and information on topics you care about to the site over the course of the next year.  Without further adieu, let me begin:

The first expert I would like to introduce you to is Dr. Jeanne Funk.  Dr. Funk is a child clinical psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Toledo in Ohio. As a researcher, she has been studying the impact of media violence, particularly violence in video and computer games, on children’s adjustment and behavior. Dr. Funk has traveled the world, talking with parents, researchers and video game makes on this topic, most recently visiting Saudi Arabia. Intrigued? So am I. At our Expert Panel Meeting, Dr. Funk committed to gathering articles from the folks who have been studying and thinking about kids and video games for years. Some of the topics she would like to tackle include stereotyping in video games and effects on kids, the effects of video games on a child’s brain, video game ratings explained, video games and teachers, and much more.

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Whether you are brand new to Eduation.com or you have been visiting us for a while, you have likely asked yourself, “Alright, who are these guys? Who is behind all this content?” You have probably discovered that the majority of our articles are from top-notch non-profit, government, and university organizations. In short, we have aggregated the best-of-the-best in one place. But how do we decide who is the “best”? As we have all learned from a plethora of recent lawsuits in advertising, determining who is number one in low fuel efficient vehicles, fewest dropped calls, and, yes, who is the best in high quality parenting and education content, can be a challenge.

Dr. Daniels and I do our best to review the content from our partners, but we are just a small team of two (albeit a very “mighty” team of two!). Thus, the smart founders of our company foresaw that we would need some help, reinforcements, if you will. Thus, on the seventh day…an expert panel was formed (cue ray of light!)… We gathered together twelve super brains in education and child development, to help advise the direction of the company and assure that we were “staying close to our roots.” For a quick list of our expert panel members, please see - http://www.education.com/about/experts/.

In true Education.com style, this isn’t some group of people who only serve a perfunctory role on the site, in addition to consulting throughout the year, we bring them together once a year to review the progress of the company and discuss future plans and directions. Our second annual meeting was held last week, October 9-10th in Palo Alto, California, and we couldn’t be more excited about conversations and plans that were made over the course of the two day conference.

One of the first priorities of the meeting involved discussing expert involvement in the Education.com online community. That’s right; our experts are actively involved in the Education.com community, answering questions on regular basis. We think this makes our online community pretty special because we have both parents AND experts patrolling the community, providing expert opinion and advice. Not all of us have immediate access to a pediatrician, psychologist, and/or teacher, so we’ve removed some of the leg-work and brought them all together in the Education.com community. For instance, Dr. Wayne Yankus, a community pediatrician in New Jersey, practicing for almost thirty years, is a regular on the community discussion boards. Dr. Yankus has been sharing his wisdom and expertise in the community on a daily basis for over a year now. If you want to talk with a straight-shooting pediatrician who has seen it all, Dr. Yankus is your guy.

We have plans to dramatically improve the usability of the current community section of the site and expert involvement will continue to be a prominent feature of the new community. At the meeting, we shared plans for the new tool (coming soon!) with our experts, and we discussed the process for experts to respond in a timely fashion. We are all very excited about the new tool and the value that we can bring to parents with our expert support team. Check back later this month for a peek at the new Education.com online community!

The second focus of the expert panel conference involved a special project initiated by each expert panel member that will focus on an important and pressing topic for parents. We’ll talk more about this later this week!