Happy Holidays eduFire

Posted on 22. Dec, 2010 by Ryan Busch.

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Happy Holidays eduFire!

Hello All,

It is holiday time here in the US and I thought I’d take a moment to send warm wishes to everyone (regardless of your country or religion). We had a lovely Christmas party this past Sunday (thanks to Marco, Mair, Enrique, Alan, and everyone else who attended). We had a great presentation showing a variety of different Christmas traditions. Most memorable for me was talking with people from other countries (Romania and Egypt come to mind) about the celebrations that many of us have during this time of year. It is just terrific to imagine a world like we have here on eduFire where we can share ideas and learn from each other–I can’t think of a better way for the world to become more united than through mutual learning!

Here’s a lovely screenshot of the party:

eduFire Christmas Party

I also wanted to thank everyone who has provided feedback to me on the process that we’ve been going through–your patience, support, and commitment are great!

Happy Holidays wherever you are and I look forward to a terrific new year with you all.

All my best,

Ryan Busch | President of eduFire

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Getting Better Acquainted with Ryan

Posted on 08. Dec, 2010 by Ryan Busch.

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Hi all,

I mentioned that I’d spend some time letting you know more about me–but someone beat me to the punch (at least a little bit)!

TutorTek.com posted a little write-up about me (btw–thanks for the mention). He mentions my work with University of Phoenix and StraighterLine. So let me tell you a little more about my passion in this industry.

I started in higher education with University of Phoenix. While I worked primarily in marketing disciplines (that’s the ultimate basis of my career–whether in or out of education); I have spent time counseling new college students for Axia College of University of Phoenix, developed new innovations with Apollo Group’s R&D technology division on new learning technologies, support academic affairs operations as a projects director. My work at Apollo Group ranged from local to international efforts (as far out as China)–all focused, in some way, on increasing access to education.

That’s the basis for my life’s work to date–increasing access to education. It is my belief that education should be as widely available as possible, that is should not be hidden behind walls, and that cost should not be a barrier.

This is the philosophy that drew me to StraighterLine. From 2007 to 2009 I co-created the concept of StraighterLine (at the time, part of SMARTHINKING). As the original team member–working with the CEO, I developed the current concept of StraighterLine: self-paced, self-directed college courses available for students through a monthly subscription. StraighterLine has been doing well…but for me, here’s the biggest success: one student earned 12 college credits (a semester of college) for $99!

If StraighterLine could offer a full degree it would cost a student less than a thousand bucks. That’s a powerful thing.

My hope in working with eduFire is to bring out new opportunities for people with that same sort of power.

So what about you? Tell me about who you are :)

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Happy Thanksgiving eduFire!

Posted on 24. Nov, 2010 by Ryan Busch.

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Hello folks,

I know that eduFire is a global community–but as we in the U.S. are celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, I thought I’d extend good wishes to all of you out there in eduFire land.

So–regardless of where you live–Happy Thanksgiving :)

Best wishes from eduFire,

Ryan Busch | President

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eduFire in Mashable

Posted on 24. Sep, 2008 by reg.

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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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Happy Birthday to a Fellow Educational Entrepreneur

Posted on 14. Sep, 2008 by reg.

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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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Grockit Launch

Posted on 10. Sep, 2008 by reg.

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Back in July of last year I got my first whiff of Grockit, a MMOG for learning. Based on what I know of Farb and the team over there I was very impressed and excited to see it launch. Today, Grockit launched at TechCrunch50 and it’s a very cool looking application.

Basically a group of people get together around a question and discuss the right answer. One player can try to convince other players of right answers in attempt to reach a group consensus. It facilitates student-to-student learning which is a fantastic way to prepare for an exam.

Grockit hasn’t launched publicly but their presentation is embedded below. Kudos to the team over there for a great-looking product. I’m excited to see this evolve!

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TechCrunch50 and the Future of Video Learning

Posted on 09. Sep, 2008 by reg.

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My productivity has been hampered a little bit this week thanks to UStream’s continuous broadcasting of TechCrunch50. For those of you not in the know, TechCrunch50 is a conference put on by the folks at TechCrunch that selects 50 (er, 52, don’t ask, I’m sure it’s a long story) of the most promising start-ups and give them a chance to launch their company in front of an audience of VCs, bloggers and other big wig types. They’ve done a great job with it and have a fantastic variety of start-ups presenting.

But here’s what I’ve found to be the most interesting. TechCrunch50 is actually a tremendous learning opportunity. I advise a few start-ups and yesterday morning as I was starting to watch the stream I immediately hopped on email and told them “start watching!”. There were a couple of can’t-miss presentations including a panel on venture capital, a panel on raising angel funding and a great talk with Peter Thiel that was hosted by Michael Arrington (embedded below).

I’ve sat in a lot of MBA classes over the years and listened to a ton of business podcasts and I have to admit that this is some of the best “educational” content I’ve seen. And here’s what’s awesome: I didn’t need to leave my house to consume it. Here’s what else is awesome: None of the presenters/panelists at TechCrunch50 had to do anything extra to “create” this content. 30-ish hours of the conference, 30 hours of content created.

This actually represents a fairly radical shift in information sharing. Similar to way back in the day when I asked for TED to be shared with the world (it happened although I can’t of course take any credit for it), this represents a massive change in the knowledge distribution. Something like TC50 is now no longer only available to those who can fork out $3,000 for a ticket but rather available (at least the “content”) for free. And what will happen to TC50 next year because they’re making this available? Will no one go because you can watch it in your living room? Nope, exactly the opposite effect will happen. More people than ever will want to present at TC50 and attend the conference because of the awareness that having this conference online brings. Just look at what happened with TED. The number of people who know about TED today dwarfs the number who knew about it a few years ago and that’s largely thanks to making TED available to download, on iTunes, YouTube, etc. (Check out Ken Robinson video below…it’s awesome!)

For the better part of the last decade this is exactly what I’ve wanted to see happen. Being a teacher I’d always ask the question “If you could stick a camera at the back or every classroom and mic up every instructor what would be the value of all of the content you are creating?” The answer, I think, is enormous. At eduFire we’re pursuing this problem in a different way than UStream or most anybody else out there but we share the ethos of trying to create an explosion in video learning and helping to democratize human knowledge.

My hat is off to Mike and the gang at TC50 for what they’ve done. It’s also off to UStream and others like Justin.TV who are making streaming live video over the web easier than it has ever been.

The world is changing very rapidly right now and in large part that’s due to the fact that we increasingly have access to much better information/knowledge then we have ever had. Google has been able to create a mammoth business by indexing the information and intelligence on the web and making it easily accessible. The companies of the next 100 years will create mammoth businesses by indexing the information and intelligence in our heads and making that easily accessible.

But that’s a topic for a later date. :)

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A couple of cool eduFire mentions

Posted on 06. Sep, 2008 by reg.

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It’s cool to see more mentions of eduFire these days. Even a few tweets which is cool to see. :) Today I came across a couple of cool mentions and thought I’d blog about them.

The first is in Clayton Christensen’s new book Disrupting Class. A while back I connected with one of Clayton’s co-authors, Michael Horn. Michael and I had a great chat about the future of education and it’s an honor to see eduFire mentioned in the book even if it’s just a couple of sentences (below). The authors describe the emergence of “user-generated, collaborative learning libraries through which participants worldwide can instruct and learn from one another”:

EduFire is another mover in this area. It provides a place for tutors to work with students.

We also had a short write-up in a TechPluto article entitled “Five Frontrunners of e-learning 2.0″.

They aim to create a platform which allows live learning taking place all over the Internet anytime from anywhere. They also give an opportunity to the tutors to get paid for the time a tutor invests into live-tutoring. The best part is that the tutor sets the price of tutoring and majority of that price goes into teacher’s pocket only (unlike the KPOs, charging big money from the learners and feeding meager bucks to the tutors).

Thanks for the mentions guys! Cool to be mentioned and associated with some of the other companies doing cool things on the forward edge of learning.

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Paul Graham wants to fund us

Posted on 22. Jul, 2008 by reg.

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Cool post up on the YCombinator site this week detailing different ideas that Graham’s quasi-incubator would like to fund:

Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund

#13 is online learning. Here’s the blurb:

13. Online learning. US schools are often bad. A lot of parents realize it, and would be interested in ways for their kids to learn more. Till recently, schools, like newspapers, had geographical monopolies. But the web changes that. How can you teach kids now that you can reach them through the web? The possible answers are a lot more interesting than just putting books online.

One route would be to start with test prep services, for which there’s already demand, and then expand into teaching kids more than just how to score high on tests. Another would be to start with games and gradually make them more thoughtful. Another, particularly for younger kids, would be to let them learn by watching one another (anonymously) solve problems.

Good stuff!

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eduFire in the News

Posted on 16. Jul, 2008 by reg.

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It’s been a while since I’ve rounded up the press eduFire has gotten recently so I figured I’d take the time to do so. Thanks to any of you who helped to make these stories happen!