Archive for September, 2008
Recorded Sessions
Posted on 30. Sep, 2008 by jon.
I’m probably biased but this is probably one of the coolest features we’ve launched on eduFire.
Now when you take a tutoring session on eduFire you can have that session recorded and placed in your profile to get back to watch or listen to at your leisure.
A big part of learning is repetition, especially for language learning. When you take a class or a private tutoring session it can go by rather quickly. Inevitably you have those moments of “If I could only go through that again?” or “What was my teacher saying again?”
With eduFire you’ll have those moments no longer.
Now when sessions begin on eduFire the teacher can choose to record the session by going to Meeting > Record Meeting (see screenshot). Once your session is complete, a recording of your session will be automatically placed in your profile next to the lesson. It will be ready for viewing 2-3 hours after your lesson is complete.
I’m currently taking Japanese lessons on eduFire and all I can say is that this feature is huge for me. While I feel like I’m learning Japanese at a very fast clip the ability to go back and replay lessons will really help to enforce my learning. And a great way to warm up for your next lesson is by replaying your last lesson.
What’s great too is having a history of your lessons on eduFire so you can see just how far you have come. It’s a brand new feature but it’ll make it fun to go back months from now and say “Wow, I’ve really come a long way!”
For all of you students, make sure to remind your teacher to turn on recording of your sessions. We’re adding instructions into our session tool but it won’t hurt to double-check with your teacher since sessions aren’t automatically recorded.
Enjoy this great new feature! :)
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Some great new Tutor welcome videos
Posted on 30. Sep, 2008 by jon.
Really impressed by the creative and energy you guys are showing! Here are a few of my favorites!!!
Nice work guys. Reply in the comments if you have an intro video that I missed and I’ll add it to a future round-up!!
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Perspective
Posted on 29. Sep, 2008 by jon.
The Dow dropped 777 points. The sky is falling. Oh my gosh, what are we going to do…this is so important!!
Pardon my French…
Bullshit.
I just found out that one of our students has Stage IV lung cancer. That’s real. I guarantee you that she’s not super-concerned about whether the market was up or down today. When you’re faced with the very real possibility that you might not live that much longer the not-so-important stuff tends to fall away.
Steve Jobs said it really well:
All external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
My greatest wish for myself and for everyone else is that we always remember to give meaning to the meaningful things. And while I’ll let our student remain anonymous, if we could all send a little positive energy her way tonight that would be completely awesome.
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The Launch of MySpace Music and What It Means to the Future of Education
Posted on 25. Sep, 2008 by reg.
Last night at Midnight MySpace launched MySpace Music which allows you to, for free, stream millions of tracks from all sorts of artists (e.g., I’m streaming Prince while writing this). It’s perhaps the most ambitious step in the “Content is Free” direction since YouTube starting getting traction a few years back. So I know what you’re about to ask…
What the heck does this have to do with eduFire and education?
I’ll offer a simple answer: Everything.
For decades music has been predicated on you having to pay to access content. Sure you could listen to the radio for free but if you wanted to listen to something of your choice then you had to buy the record, 8-track, CD, mp3, etc.
Now, with sites like Imeem and MySpace Music, you can now listen for free. That’s big.
For decades education has been predicated on you having to pay to access content. In the case of education the content came in the form of university lectures and what not. You paid big bucks for the privilege of consuming this “content”.
Now, with stuff like iTunes U you can watch this content for free. That’s big.
These changes have far-reaching implications. More far-reaching than just about anybody realizes.
So as the price point for content falls closer to zero (ultimately all music will be available for free) does that mean content has no value?
Actually, it’s more likely to be just the opposite of that.
Huh?
Just because you’re not charging for content doesn’t make it lacks value. What MySpace has done in one fell swoop is just re-focused the Attention Spotlight back on itself. It may never be your social network of choice but it just became the best (if not perfect) place on the Web to consume music. So if you’re a music lover you are probably going to find yourself giving more of your attention to MySpace in the coming months than you did in the past.
And that gives MySpace an incredibly competitive advantage in terms of creating community around content, attractive advertisers and building its brand.
So again…how does apply to education?
Right now most of the folks in the education space are still trying to build the best silos. Instead, they should be viewing the industry the same way that MySpace is viewing the music biz. By leveraging the power of “free” content. By building brands around their All Stars. By creating fantastic user experiences that leverage th “3 Cs” of context (Why am I here?), content (What am I doing?) and community (Who am I doing it with?).
MySpace gets this. They are taking something that is free and creating $2 billion worth of value from it. If that ain’t alchemy I’m not sure what is.
Silos seems to work for decades and alternative strategies seems entirely counter-intuitive. And then someone comes in and drops a bomb and in the matter of a short decade your industry has been entirely transformed. And music isn’t the only industry that’s being radically transformed right now.
A lot of people don’t think this applies to education. A lot of people didn’t think it would apply to the music industry either. But when these changes happen they tend to happen faster than almost anyone realizes. And my sense is that they’re about to happen pretty fast in education.
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eduFire in Mashable
Posted on 24. Sep, 2008 by reg.
Mashable wrote up a good piece on eduFire this week describing our launch into the test prep space. Here’s the link:
eduFire Expands Live Tutoring Service to Offer Test Prep for Higher Ed
In light of fiscal woes and increased pressures to employ test prep anyway one can, without having to consult costly private, local institutions, a place such as eduFire seems to target a need that is almost definitely going to become more evident with time.
Great to see the word spreading about eduFire!
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Power to the People
Posted on 22. Sep, 2008 by reg.
Union Square Ventures is high on my list of venture capital firms I respect most. They’ve invested in a bunch of my favorite companies including Disqus, Etsy and Twitter (and I’m about to be a Tumblr user for my personal blog which I’m highly looking forward to!). This weekend there was a good article about Union Square posted in the New York Times (HT: Kareem) in which they talked about education as a sector that hadn’t been touched in a big way by web services:
The partners said they planned to look at how Web services might transform sectors not yet touched in a big way, like education and the environment.
We at eduFire couldn’t agree more. Then I hopped over to their blog and read this cool post entitled “Power to the People“.
Lectures could historically only be heard at the time and place of the lecture. Now we can watch a video recording of a lecture over the web. A tutor had to be in the same place to look at the work of a student and provide feedback…With access to course materials, ability to watch lectures and even tutor at a distance, we believe that we are only at the beginning of the web’s impact on the fundamental structure of education. We expect much of that change to be away from the existing educational institutions and towards empowering individuals and newly-formed groups.
Um, amen.
What Union Square and some other smart VCs get is that the fundamental organizing structure in education could likely change very radically in coming years. For starters, schools have done a tremendously ineffective job at properly organizing education. Tons of good teachers quit. The ones who stay are hampered by stifling bureaucracy.
But schools don’t need to be the fundamental organizing structures for education. Just because it’s been that way for quite a while doesn’t mean that it will always be that way. Indeed, you’re seeing more and more people opt out of a bad system (over 1 million students are now homeschooled in the US alone) and that’s likely to only intensify as online learning alternatives increase in quality and quantity.
That’s one of the great things about about the Web. If it’s broke in the “real world”, you can, in most cases, fix it on the Web. Don’t like the way video works in the real world. Create YouTube. Think that the music industry in the real world is messed up. Create MySpace or Imeem or Pandora. Don’t like how the education system in the real world works…
OK, better get back to fixing it! :)
(P.S. Bonus eduFire T-shirt for first commenter who can tell where the photo above was taking without clicking through to Flickr!! :)
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Why We Do What We Do, Pt 14291
Posted on 17. Sep, 2008 by reg.
Wow. I’m not really sure where to start here.
Every once in a while (and it seems, more frequently lately), I’m reminded in a powerful way of why we started eduFire. Thinking all the way back to that first blog post and how far we’ve come since then, it’s really inspiring. But it’s easy at times to lose sight of why we’re working so hard and just who it is that we’re working for.
And then I see a message like this posted to our forums and it reminds me all over again.
My favorite companies of all time are the ones that have created economic opportunities for millions of people. eBay of course. Google which has empowered many people to make money through AdSense. Etsy more recently.
But when I see something like this I’m just completely blown away. To think that someone halfway around the world whose home was destroyed in an 8.0 magnitude earthquake might be able to get back on their feet, at least in part, by teaching Mandarin on eduFire…well, that pretty much leaves me speechless.
The thing is, I have an overwhelming feeling that this is only the beginning. I’m reading a fantastic book right now called The Power of Unreasonable People which has the tagline “How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World”. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here at eduFire. Develop a market that will change the world. Give hope and opportunities to the BOP. And advance the goal of giving everyone an increasingly equal chance at a world-class education.
Umair wrote something today that rang completely true to me:
Now is the time for revolutionaries to step up and build something better, something more real, and something greater.
There will probably never – at least in our lifetimes – be an opportunity for total economic reinvention this tremendous.
Or this meaningful. Because that’s what it’s really about – not shareholder value, money, or “competitive advantage”.
But doing something that means something.
It’s my deepest hope and prayer that what we’re doing here at eduFire is something that truly means something.
And by the way, I’ve never been more excited for a language lesson than I am for my Mandarin lesson tomorrow with Lily.
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What happens when classrooms are replaced by learning ecologies?
Posted on 14. Sep, 2008 by reg.
Moved today by this post over on the 21st Century Learning blog.
Why do we need to understand the shift in education? Because they can learn and teach themselves anything they want to know without leaving home. When you move from a classroom structure to a community structure- the students become teachers AND learners and so do we. 21st Century teaching and learning is about shifting classrooms to learning ecologies.
Sheryl goes on to provide a few emphatic examples of this including the following video…made by a 7th grader. :)
Anyone can be a teacher and anyone can be a student…indeed that’s the world we’re moving into. A wealth of knowledge at your fingertips? Yup, we’re hoping to be part of the infrastructure that is making this happen.
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Happy Birthday to a Fellow Educational Entrepreneur
Posted on 14. Sep, 2008 by reg.
Wanted to wish a quick Happy Birthday to Dave Schappell, the founder of TeachStreet. Dave’s one of a handful of entrepreneurs who’s approaching the education space in an innovative and very smart way. If you haven’t taken a look at TeachStreet yet, please do so. Dave and the folks at TeachStreet are helping to make life easier for those teacherpreneurs among us by empowering local teachers to reach students and provide better information and organization around their offerings. They’re in Seattle and Portland now but will be expanding into other cities.
Happy Birthday Dave and we here at eduFire wish you guys continued success!
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The #1 Reason Why Traditional Education Companies are in Trouble
Posted on 12. Sep, 2008 by reg.
The #1 reason why I think that many “traditional” education companies (e.g., tutoring companies) are going to be in trouble in the coming years can be summed up as follows:
Compare how traditional educational companies treat their teachers with how Google treats their engineers.
If you’re an engineer at Google, you’re a rock star. You have fabulous amenities, an opportunity to be creative and devote time to interesting projects and most importantly, you’re treated with utmost respect.
Now compare that with how most (certainly not all) traditional educational companies treat their teachers. Some are worse than others but the majority of people you talk to who have worked for tutoring companies will complain of low pay, lack of appreciation and stifling working conditions. My most vivid memory of time teaching for Kaplan was when I shared some links to helpful study websites with my students and was chastised by my supervisor because I was sharing links that weren’t Kaplan.com.
The reason why this stark difference is so important is that Google gets that attracting top talent is one of the most important forms of competitive advantage in the modern era, perhaps the most important form. Tutoring companies don’t typically think that way. They usually tend to think that it’s “the system” or “their brand” (more here on why it’s probably not that). Sure, in the short term those things have power but over the long haul if traditional educational companies lose the majority of their top talent they are going to have a difficult, if not impossible, time competing.
If you believe teachers are rock stars you treat them one way. If you believe that teacher are expendable cogs in an omnipotent machine then you treat them very differently. I’d love to think that most education companies treat them like the former but sadly the evidence just doesn’t bear that out. Which is why many teachers leave those companies and go on to do other really cool things.
At eduFire we believe in treating teachers like rock stars. It’s in our ethos and we’re excited to continue to create opportunities for teacherpreneurs around the globe. We think that one of the reasons why over 1,000 tutors have signed up in the short time since we’ve launched is because they’re looking for something different. They’re looking to feel appreciated. And we’re in turn excited to be working with such a smart, creative and forward-thinking group of people who deserve every bit of the appreciation they expect.
