eduFire Classes Goes Live! Let Social Learning Begin!
Posted on 22. Jan, 2009 by Koichi.
It’s finally happened! Just the other day (on the same day as the Obama inauguration – we do feel bad for overshadowing his big day), eduFire classes came out of testing and went live (along with a brand new home page), and we’ve already seen a lot of activity. Classes are being added, and all that is left is for you to join them (or create some more)! Since we’ve recently added an “Other” category, there’s been a lot of new things as well, such as a class on raw foods, a class about Twittering for Business and Blogs, and even one about network security!
So what does this mean for you? Well, a lot of things, but here’s a few, nicely numbered out:
- Reduced Prices for More Students: Think of it like getting a bulk discount at the store. By allowing for more students (you can do up to 100 participants in a class), teachers can charge less and make more! Not only that, but students will pay less (or nothing, for some classes), which means everybody wins!
- Social Learning: Did you ever try classes when it was in beta? Learning with other people… learning with your friends… can be a lot of fun! Students help each other out, they can practice with each other, and have a grand old time. The culture of a group class is really interesting!
- More Choice: Now, anyone will be able to create a class. It doesn’t have to be about languages. It doesn’t have to be about test prep. Feel free to make up new categories, and teach a class based on your expertise! We definitely look forward to see what your creative minds come up with.
If you have a chance, help eduFire spread the word! Just a Tweet on Twitter, a blog post, or telling your friends about it will be much appreciated! We look forward to seeing you in a class!
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Jam Today? / When the Education Bubble Finally Pops
Posted on 13. Jan, 2009 by jon.
Jam Today? / When the Education Bubble Finally Pops.
Must-read blog post about the possible impending bubble in education. Plus there’s a plug for eduFire Classes. Each day that goes by I see the opportunity for start-ups to fundamentally change how people around the planet learn. It’s going to be incredibly fun to be a part of that change.
Thanks for the mention James!
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Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?
Posted on 11. Jan, 2009 by jon.
If you doubt the power of technology in education (highly unlikely if you’re ready this blog!) then watch this video:
Mind-blowing to think what could happen if we properly harness all the fantastic stuff we’re creating and bring it to the world.
(Thanks to Veer and Kareem for the tip.)
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Keyboard Shortcuts to Use in Adobe Connect
Posted on 11. Jan, 2009 by Koichi.
Recently, I took a class run by eduFire CEO Jon Bischke, and it was all about using shortcut keys and other software to make your Mac usage more efficient. Today, during a class, Quincy (an avid eduFire class attender) asked about keyboard shortcuts that you can use in the eduFire teaching platform. I didn’t know any of them at the time, but now I’ve done a little reasearch and found that there are quite a few!
The easiest way to get a list of the shortcuts would be to go where I went – The Adobe Connect Tutorials Page (where you can find a whole lote more, as well!). Just want the shortcuts? Here they are, in good ‘ol PDF format.
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What’s your genius? Teach it on eduFire!
Posted on 11. Jan, 2009 by jon.
We’re T-minus 9 days away from a very historic event. The inauguration of Barack Obama? Nope, the launch of eduFire Classes! OK, so we might be slightly overshadowed that day in the news but nevertheless we’re pretty excited to launch one of the first open platforms for interactive live video learning on the Web. And we’d love to have you be a part of it.
We’re looking for people who are interested in being pioneers in the field of online education to teach the first classes on the platform. The classes are done online using a combination of video chat, voice, presentation sharing and more. Students can attend from anywhere in the world. We’ve been beta testing for a couple of months now and hopefully have worked most of the kinks out. We think you’ll really dig the experience.
Although we’re mostly focused on languages and exam prep here at eduFire, teachers are willing to teach whatever they’d like on our platform (assuming it’s not R-rated :)). Examples of some of the classes that have been run during our beta period include Music Theory, PHP and The Great History of Egypt. You are welcome to run your class for free for students or to set a price for your classes. If you set a price you’ll pocket the vast majority of the class fee (85%).
Here are the only things you’ll need to run a class on eduFire:
An eduFire account – That will take you all of 30 seconds :)
A microphone and headset attached to your computer – This doesn’t have to a fancy set-up. In fact, many of our teachers plug in a pair of iPhone earbuds into their headset jack and it works just fine!
A webcam – This is technically optional but typically makes the experience more life-like for your students.
If you’re interested in being a teacher when eduFire Classes goes live, you can start preparing the items above and drop a line to Koichi at koichi at edufire dot com or Marco at marco at edufire dot com. They’ll answer any additional questions you have and get you all ready to teach your first class.
We’re very excited to launch this new service and would love to see you sharing your genius with the world!
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5 Necessary Steps Towards Global Intelligence
Posted on 08. Jan, 2009 by jon.
Was very encouraged by the response to the blog post on Global Intelligence earlier this week (already in the Top 50 on Google for the phrase!). Wanted to follow up with some thoughts on what things are currently lacking for this vision to get closer to reality. In other words, what’s need to get us to a true Global Intelligence System (GIS…I kind of like the sound of that!). Here’s a start. If you have more thoughts please add them in the comments:
#1: Much better filters for content – There just aren’t that many great content filters out there right now (and I mean filters in the “tastemaker” sense of the word rather than the “restrict access” sense of the word). Sites like Digg and Reddit are *way* better than what we used to have but there’s still a lot to be done in this area. For example, I recently came across the excellent videos from the Business Innovation Factory. They’re kind of like a hybrid of Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast and the TED videos. I love ‘em. Which makes sense because I love ETL and have listened to almost every podcast and I’ve probably watched 100+ TED videos.
So why is that I’m only now discovering the Business Innovation Factory stuff? It’s because there’s not a great filter out there for me to discover them. That filter not only needs to be more all-encompassing than something like Digg (which offers a very male, very young, fairly geeky take on things) and it also has to be personalized for my tastes.
People are working on this right now but we still have a long ways to go here.
#2: Connections between disparate networks – I spent a fair amount of time in 2008 learning about nutrition. There are a number of different forums and social networks that are focused on the subject. However, there’s very little that connects these together. Hence, I’m hesitant to invest myself fully into supply my knowledge to any one network because the only people who will benefit from it are the people on that network.
This *is* starting to change. Some examples of companies that are helping to push this change forward including Disqus (which we just rolled out for our blog comments), Ning (which at least allows common authentication across all of its social nets) and Facebook (Facebook Connect could help significantly with this problem).
The silo approach that networks have historically operated with is a huge barrier to true sharing of global intelligence. And I say that knowing full well that eduFire is still predominantly a silo (something we’re intending to improve upon this year).
#3: Easier publishing tools – I think we made a major step forward in this year in the last couple of years. Leading the charge were micro-blogging platforms like Tumblr and Twitter, social networks with easy publishing capabilities like Facebook and Ning and video sharing platforms like YouTube, Vimeo and Viddler. It’s getting really easy to share information.
The next major leap forward will be the increased ability for “set it and forget it” information sharing. For example, if I’m giving a talk at a university it needs to be incredibly easy for me to have that talk recorded, uploaded to the Web, tagged appropriately, RSS-ified, etc. Sites like UStream.tv are doing some very cool things in this area. But there’s still too much work involved. As it gets more simple you’ll see an absolute explosion in content.
Of course with the explosion in content the question naturally arises “Won’t we be overwhelmed with all this content?” I think that question is best answered by #1 above (better filters). As long as the filters are high-quality it doesn’t really matter how much content is created. I’ll only see what’s best-suited for me at any given moment.
#4: Better publishing hardware (for audio and video) – Publishing tools only go so far. If the hardware blows, the content that they generate is going to be lackluster. Look at webcams…most webcams end up generating video of people that would suggest to the uninformed observer that dwell in a cave somewhere. The video is grainy, the lighting is bad…and that’s if you know what you are doing.
As with the other items, there are some cool things happening right now. Just about every video blogger I know seems to be talking about the new HD Flip cameras. I’ve also heard of some good audio recording devices for the iPhone. But we’re not quite there yet. We’ve come a long way in the last 3 years and that’s in large part due to the stellar success of YouTube and the relative success of podcasting.
#5 – A different mindset – This really has nothing to do with technology. It’s all about our individual approach to sharing information and knowledge with the world. Too many people (myself included) are still too wrapped up in hoarding knowledge. There’s still too much of the mentality that I need to keep what I know to myself lest you learn from it and benefit. This is called scarcity mentality.
But look at two stunning examples of what happens when you take an abundance mentality: TED and 37Signals. A few years ago I blogged that I hoped TED would be made available to the world. A couple of days later I was surprised to see an email in my inbox from Chris Anderson, TED’s curator, letting me know that something very cool was in the works. Indeed it was. By sharing all of the TED content for free on the Web not only have they helped educate and inspire millions, they’ve also done more for their brand than anything else they could do. Three years ago, TED was relatively unknown outside of certain circles. Now it’s rare that I bump into a young professional type who hasn’t heard of TED.
37Signals is another great example. Sure they’re predominantly a software company that makes killer products. But they’re also one of the best examples of an abundance mentality out there. By blogging openly about their products, methodologies, etc., they’ve built up a legion of fans. Their book Getting Real has inspired many entrepreneurs (while have the nice ancillary benefit of getting a lot of revenue for their company) and their recent live events have been a big hit. Sure, they could have been very covert in their approach to software development but they chose not to. And not only did we all benefit, so did they.
OK, this post is getting on the long-ish side so I’ll stop there but I’d love to hear any thoughts that you might have. What other things are necessary for us to move towards a Global Intelligence System? Please post in the comments!
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eduFire Classes Launching Soon – Important Info for Tutors
Posted on 08. Jan, 2009 by jon.
For the last couple of months many of you have been participating in our eduFire Classes Beta. We’ve ran hundreds of classes and have been very happy to hear your feedback (most of which has been quite positive!). We’re happy to announce that we’re just about to move out of the beta period.
eduFire Classes will launch officially on January 20th. I’ve included some additional details in this forum post. A very important thing to mention is that when we move out of the beta period classes that we’re created in beta that have recurring sessions that extend past the 20th will need to be re-created. That’s pretty easy to do using our cloning feature but definitely something we wanted to make sure all of our tutors knew about.
So go check out the forum post and if you have any questions or comments please add a reply in that thread.
We’re really excited to launch eduFire Classes. As far as we’re aware it’ll be one of the first (the first?) open platforms for live interactive video learning on the Web. That’s pretty cool and it’s awesome to have such a great group of people who are excited to be pioneers in online learning!
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How to Record Your Lessons
Posted on 06. Jan, 2009 by Koichi.
Recording your lessons is a great way to allow you to go back and review, especially since the recording is full sized, making it really easy to experience the same lesson twice. Currently, students and tutors of one-on-one sessions can record their sessions and re-watch them later. We’re working on one-to-many recordings, so I’m sure you can expect them in time.
Recording your one-on-one classes is really easy. When you’re in your session, just click on “meeting” then find “record meeting.”
From here, you’ll get a prompt. You can name your session and add a description if you want, but you don’t have to. All that is up to you. There is however, one thing you don’t want to do, and that is clicking on the “Record audio from speaker phone” button. If you click on that, you’ll suddenly find that your audio doesn’t work. Just skip that step and click “okay.”
And now, you’re recording! Your students can now go back and review everything that went on (and so can you!). Definitely take advantage of this amazing feature!
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Global Intelligence
Posted on 05. Jan, 2009 by jon.
I’ve been pumped to write about this for a while because I think it’s one of the most important trends that’s happening right now. Perhaps the most important trend. I don’t say that lightly either. We’re on the verge of something that’s incredibly powerful and the acceleration of this trend has become really apparent in the last couple of years.
What do I mean by Global Intelligence?
A bunch of people have written about this before and I think everyone has their own definition. I probably started thinking about it a lot right around the time I saw this video:
For me Global Intelligence means the following:
#1 – An interconnected world where when one person gets smarter, we all get smarter. I use “all” loosely here as at this stage of our development it doesn’t mean everyone. It more likely refers to a small portion of society that is digitally connected and actually seeking out information and knowledge. Perhaps that’s about 1% of the world’s population. Maybe slightly higher.
In a world of true Global Intelligence there is a tremendous multiplier effect. Think back 20 years ago. Let’s say that I was studying nutrition and decided to write a book on the subject. First of all, the likelihood that I would even get published was very, very small. If I did manage to get published the total number of people who would read what I wrote would also likely be much smaller than it would be today. So the multiplier effect of my learning would be somewhat tiny, especially in the aggregate.
Fast forward to today. First of all, if I’m studying nutrition I don’t need anyone’s permission to share my knowledge with the world. I simply create a blog or a YouTube channel or whatever and start getting my wisdom out. This has created an explosion in knowledge/content all along the “tail”. And if my work is really good? Well the audience that consumes it is going to be much larger than it would have been in the past.
#2 – The ability for people to get more knowledge out of their head and onto the Internet. Twitter has been fascinating to watch over the last couple of years for this reason. Think back to a decade ago. Getting the knowledge in your brain on to the Web was actually pretty tough. Then along came blogging tools and there was an exponential increase in the amount of knowledge available online. However, blogging was still something that required a fair amount of effort.
Along came YouTube and now people had the opportunity to share their knowledge via video in a much easier way. So you had an explosion in video knowledge transfer, tons of video tutorial sites and an exponential increase in video blogging. Very powerful stuff.
Then came Twitter. Twitter has two distinct components. The “Just has a cup of coffee and preparing for the workday” type of tweet is moderately useful in term of social connectedness, personal expression, etc. However the much more powerful part of Twitter is what’s commonly characterized as the micro-blogging component. It’s essentially a much easier way to get knowledge out of your head and on to the Web than we’ve ever had before.
I installed the most excellent application RescueTime this fall and I noticed something very interesting in my logs. I spend almost as much time searching Twitter as I do searching Google for information. That astounded me. The reason is that a lot of the information on Twitter is very different from what I would find on the Web. For example, if I’m looking for what people are saying about eduFire or another online education start-up I’m more likely to get timely and intimate feedback from someone’s tweet than from their blog post.
This is a huge trend. A while back I wrote a blog post here where I asked our readers how much of the world’s collective knowledge is available on the Web. The answers were interesting and most people tended to agree that a very small percentage of our individual knowledge is available collectively. What tools like Twitter have done is increase that percentage by some factor. Time will tell whether it’s by a small amount or a large one but my guess is that it will be larger than most people think.
#3 – Connection of knowledge seekers with knowledge providers. This is the third component of Global Intelligence. If I have a question (and we *all* ask ourselves hundreds or thousands of questions on a daily basis) there’s almost certainly someone in the world who has an answer. The difficulty is in connecting to that person or that knowledge. Search engines have helped dramatically with this. Social networks are also helping. However, we still have a long way to go.
As friction reduces in this area there is going to be an increasingly realization on the part of most people that they can turn to the Global Intelligence when they have a question rather than using many of the inefficient methods they have used in the past. As they do that you’ll see markets emerge for Global Intelligence and you’ll see much better tools for search and discovery than you see today.
So I’ll leave it at that for now. We’re hardly on an unimpeded path towards Global Intelligence as there are a good number of counter-balancing factors including spam, information overload, the digital divide and proprietary data stores. I’ll address those in a future blog post. But, as I mentioned in our year-end blog post, I am really encouraged about where we’re heading right now and how far things have come in just the last couple of years. It’s going to be fun for all us here at eduFire to play a role in pushing us further down this road.
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Year-end State of the eduFire
Posted on 31. Dec, 2008 by jon.
Hey all. I’ve been pretty quiet on the blogging front lately (Koichi has been doing a fantastic job in my absence!) as we’ve been gearing up to launch some very cool new stuff. But I wanted to pop in to offer some reflection on 2008 and look forward to 2009 and beyond. First, some highlights of the last year:
Our launch – This seems almost bizarre to me but a year ago there was no eduFire. I mean we had this blog up and all but that was it. In the last year we’ve launched the site, kicked off live one-on-one tutoring, unveiled flashcards and started beta testing live video classrooms. I can take only a smidgen of the credit for all this as I’m fortunate enough to be working with a fantastic team. Looking back it’s very awesome to think about all that we’ve done in a year’s time.
Our community – The most inspiring part of my first business (2000Tutor.com) was building a community of technology professionals that I believed was the most thoughtful and supportive on the Web. It was awesome to watch people come to our site as technology newbies and six months later see them prepared to go out and land an entry-level job in IT.
At eduFire I see the same thing happening. I see an amazingly cool and helpful group of people coming together with the express purpose of getting smarter and becoming more effective teachers. There have been so many cool community-related things that have happened here this year that I can’t even begin to list them. And what’s great is that we’re just getting going. I feel the seeds are definitely there for one of the strongest educational communities in the world. That’s awesome to be a part of.
Our vision – I think one of the things that has attracted so many people to eduFire is the vision of what this can become. eduFire today is about 1% of what I think it can ultimately become. I think a lot of the decisions we’ve made might not make immediate sense to someone on the outside looking in but over time will become a lot more understandable. There are certainly a lot more recognizable models and easier ways to make money in the short-term than what we’ve chosen to embark upon. However, we’re most concerned with the long-term impact of what we’re doing and very excited about how what we roll out in 2009 will start to accelerate that impact.
Which brings me to saying a few words about what we’re excited about going forward.
First, 2008 was a year in which I felt for the first time the true possibility of a Global Intelligence. By this, I mean a world in which access to the wisdom and insights of the entire planet was available to each and every one of us. Some of the things that helped spur this feeling were the growth of tools like Twitter (I can go on for hours about why I think tools like Twitter represent a major step closer to a true Global Intelligence), Ning and Facebook. The continuing growth of blogs and the explosion in video blogging in 2008 were also huge steps in this direction. I’ll likely be blogging more on the subject of a Global Intelligence soon but for now I’ll just say that I’m very, very excited about this possibility.
Second, I was really encouraged by all the innovation I saw in the online education space in the last year. When we had the original idea for eduFire back in 2007, online education was a bit of a wasteland. There were a few funded companies like Tutor.com and Tutorvista and very little true innovation. In the last year and a half that has changed dramatically. It seems like just about every week I’m seeing a cool new edu-related start-up. Some of my favorites include Cramster, Grockit, Innovative Languages, iTalki, Knewton and Teachstreet (and I’m leaving a bunch out…my apologies!).
Not all of these companies will succeed but the fact that people are trying out new approaches and models is incredibly cool. I think there is no single greater opportunity to change the world than through educational start-ups. Reading Jeffrey Sachs’ Common Wealth over the holidays has made me even more fired up about that. If we can develop platforms for learning that are more fun, more efficient and more portable than previous models than we can export those platforms globally and fundamentally change the planet by empowering everyone to have access to a world class education. Seriously, what could be more exciting than that?
Finally, I am blown away by the energy I’m seeing around teaching and learning online. We have thousands of people who’ve signed up to do that at eduFire despite the fact that we’ve yet to start really marketing the site. The most common request we hear from teachers is that they can’t wait until they can quit whatever else they’re doing and make a full-time living teaching on eduFire.
And the students who’ve been using the site are raving as well. Although there is a bit of barrier someone has to cross to experience online learning for the first time, once they do they often tell us that they can’t imagine getting in a car again and driving 20 or 30 miles to a class somewhere. Indeed, the convenience and flexibility of learning from home will only increase in coming years and lead to online learning usurping face-to-face learning at some point in the future (although that could be a while of course!).
I want to close out this post by saying thank you to the people who’ve made 2008 such a special year for us. First of all, our team who has done fantastic work and demonstrated a huge amount of passion. Second, to our investors who’ve believed in us all along the way and continue to support us. Third, to our community of teachers and students for what they bring to eduFire. Your excitement about the future of education is contagious and inspires us to build an even better product.
If indeed education is like the lighting of a fire than 2008 was the year when we saw the spark here at eduFire. Now we’re looking forward to turn that spark into a full-blown inferno in the coming years. Happy New Year to all of you and my sincere hope is that 2009 is the best year of your life.
