Technology Entrepreneurship: Free Stanford University Online Course

Stanford University’s free online course, Technology Entrepreneurship begins this week. I have agreed to be a mentor to a maximum of two entrepreneurial teams in this Stanford online course.

In addition to being free you can follow the course on your schedule via the posted video lectures. The course will be taught by Assistant Professor Chuck Eesley.  The recommended textbook, Technology Ventures, by Thomas Byers, Richard Dorf, and Andrew Nelson, is available as an etextbook on CourseSmart or Kindle.  The first three course videos are available online now.

I will also be working this term with Professor Thomas Hellman at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business on his Technology Entrepreneurship course. I will be scheduling time to meet with students for both the Stanford and UBC Sauder courses.  Further information  on dates and times will be posted here.

VIDEO: Stanford University E145: Technology Entrepreneurship, Introduction & Overview

Register for this free course here: Free Registration for Technology Entrepreneurship

Recommended Textbook

Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise

Byers, Dorf, Nelson

McGraw Hill

ISBN:  978–0–07–338018–6

Mayo615 2013 Blog Stats Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The internet of everything–annihilating time and space

An excellent discussion of the deeper social implications of the Internet of Everything. Perhaps difficult for some to grasp, but consistent with many other futurists’ views. The current world of MOOC‘s in online education, for example, may only be a brief waypoint on the journey to anytime, everywhere education.

Reblogged from Gigaom

by Liron Shapira, Quixey

SUMMARY:In the future everyone will be connected—everywhere, all the time—making space and time no longer an issue for physical devices, people and products.

Which modern technology “enables us to send communications…with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space”? If you answered “the internet,” you’re right. If you answered “the telephone,” “the television” or any other speed-of-light telecommunication technology, you’re also right. That quote is from an 1860 book by George Bartlett Prescott, an American telegraph official.

In 1860, the fastest telecommunication link between California and New York was the Pony Express, which took at least 10 days to get a message to the other side of the continent. Then one day in 1861, the First Transcontinental Telegraph was completed and you could send the same message across the continent in 10 seconds. Two days later, the Pony Express officially ceased operations. Prescott was onto something.

The Ancient Greek word “tele” means “far away”. To telecommunicate is to communicate farther than you can shout. When you connect two points with a speed-of-light telecommunication channel, you annihilate the spacetime-distance between the points. You get a kind of wormhole.

The internet is a network of spacetime wormholes connecting every human being on the planet. If you want to chat with someone face to face, you just stare into your cell phone and they stare into theirs. You can’t tell if they’re a thousand miles away, or in the next room.

But when it comes to physical things, we’re still living under the tyranny of spacetime. Kevin Ashton, the inventor of the term “Internet of Things”, wrote in 1999: “We’re physical, and so is our environment … You can’t eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more.” Just look around the room right now, at anything other than your cell phone. All the things you can see and touch depend on where you are in space, or on how much time you spend moving yourself to a new location.

That’s a problem, because at any given moment, most of the things you care about aren’t in your line of sight. Almost none of the food you’re going to eat that day is. Almost none of the appliances you’re going to use that night are. That’s the tyranny of spacetime, which the internet of things is now beginning to overthrow.

The internet of things has three major spacetime-annihilating functions:

• Transportationmaking far away things come to you
• Teleportation – instantly getting copies of far away things
• Telepresence – interacting with far away people and things

Transportation

In the past, far away things had no way to know what you wanted from them or when you wanted it. The right things wouldn’t know how to find you. So you’d have to travel to where the things were — to a restaurant, to your house, to various stores.

If you shop on Amazon instead of going to the store, you’re on the internet of things. Last year, Amazon acquired robotic warehouse technology company Kiva systems. When you one-click on that toothbrush, Amazon’s robots move it from deep inside the warehouse onto the floor where employees pack it and ship it to you.

The internet of things transports things to you pretty fast, but not at the speed of light. It uses the internet’s fast-moving bits the way skydivers use a little pilot chute to pull out a bigger, heavier parachute.

Teleportation

Actually, sometimes the internet of things does make faraway things come you at the speed of light. The trick, called “teleportation”, is to convert things to bits and then back to things again.

The first teleporters were invented before the internet, but the far away “facsimiles” they brought you were just pieces of paper. Modern teleporters are a lot more versatile.

The MakerBot Digitizer can scan 3D objects and store their structure as a file of bits. The MakerBot Replicator can read a file of bits and print a 3D object. Put the Digitizer and Replicator at opposite ends of an internet connection and you get a teleporter.

Thousands of objects can already be teleported at the speed of light – silverware, vases, lamp frames, and even some weird-looking, but functional shoes. Soon the internet will be able to teleport physical objects into your lap as easily as it teleports web pages into your screen, and you’ll be able to surf the internet of things.

Telepresence

Sometimes you want to interact with far away things without having them transport or teleport to you. Then what you want is telepresence.

For example, you often move far away from your locked bike. Normally that means you can’t unlock your bike to let a friend borrow it, and you also don’t know when thieves are cutting your lock. LOCK8 is a smart bike lock that lets you unlock it from far away, and notifies you when a potential thief is tampering with it. No matter how far away you are from your bike lock, LOCK8 gives you all the benefits of being near your bike lock.

What if you’re far away from your office, but still want to attend meetings as if you weren’t? Virtual presence systems like Anybots and Suitable Technologies’ Beam let you remote control a walking, talking, seeing, hearing robot. You can travel halfway around the world, and still have a physical presence at your office.

The future: The internet of everything

Did you know you have two wireless modems in your head? Your eyes constantly receive radio signals in the visible spectrum, and your sense of vision connects your brain to nearby physical things, like a de facto Local Area Network. But your sensory LAN connection only extends as far as your line of sight. It’s nothing compared to a Wi-Fi internet connection.

In the future of the internet of things, Wi-Fi is going to be everywhere, and the internet will connect you to every person and thing on the planet via transportation, teleportation and telepresence. A trillion wormholes will let you reach out from anywhere on earth and hug your loved ones, or try on a new pair of shoes, or unlock your bike.

In the future beyond the internet of things, all your senses will be wired directly into the internet’s wormholes, and you’ll be completely indifferent to the location of your physical body. When you look around you, you won’t be looking into a nearby region of space. You’ll be surfing an internet that annihilates all time and space – the internet of everything.

Liron Shapira is the co-founder and CTO of Quixey and is an advisor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI).  Follow him on Twitter @liron

Gigaom

Which modern technology “enables us to send communications…with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space”? If you answered “the internet,” you’re right. If you answered “the telephone,” “the television” or any other speed-of-light telecommunication technology, you’re also right. That quote is from an 1860 book by George Bartlett Prescott, an American telegraph official.

In 1860, the fastest telecommunication link between California and New York was the Pony Express, which took at least 10 days to get a message to the other side of the continent. Then one day in 1861, the First Transcontinental Telegraph was completed and you could send the same message across the continent in 10 seconds. Two days later, the Pony Express officially ceased operations. Prescott was onto something.

The Ancient Greek word “tele” means “far away”. To telecommunicate is to communicate farther than you can shout. When you connect two points…

View original post 955 more words

How To Answer The Dreaded “What is your biggest weakness?” Question

For my UBC students facing tough interviews, here is some serious advice on how to answer the dreaded “What is your biggest weakness? question.

Reblogged from Forbes…

1/21/2013 @ 2:35PM |191,470 views

How To Answer The Dreaded ‘What Is Your Biggest Weakness’ Interview Question

Posture to counteract weakness and enhance blood flow to the brain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ok, I get the intent, but I am not sure that this drawing conveys the best image..What do you think?

As a former recruiter and now career coach, many job seekers ask me about the ideal answer to common interview questions. Of the questions job seekers are curious about, most ask specifically about the Weakness question. Variations on this question include: What would your boss or colleagues say is your biggest weakness? What is your biggest mistake? Tell me about a project where something went wrong? In all of these cases, you are asked to reveal something negative that could decrease your chances of getting hired. Here are three strategies for handling the Weakness interview question:

Be specific.

You want to minimize the reach and scope of what you reveal. So don’t confess to a general skill set as a weakness, such as communication skills, but rather point to something very specific. One candidate I interviewed who handled the weakness question well stated her weakness as presentation skills, specifically presenting to a large group. She offered how she was working on this skill and how she handled it in the past (yes, she can make presentations but set aside extra time to prepare.) Had she not answered so specifically I might have assumed that she can’t handle meetings or communicate well at all. You must be specific in what you share, or the interviewer will imagine the worst.

Avoid deal-breakers for the job.

That same candidate also chose her weakness well because her role didn’t involve a lot of public speaking. Had I been interviewing for a corporate communications role or a teacher/ trainer, presentation skills would have been a terrible weakness to share. In her operations role, however, it was an infrequent part of the job, and she showed that she could get by given advance time to prepare. Review the job description closely and steer clear of skills and expertise directly related to the role you want.

Remember that a weakness isn’t necessarily bad.

This candidate confessed to needing extra time to prepare and to not being good at spontaneous and impromptu speaking. She didn’t say she was a nervous wreck or someone who gets booed off the stage. A weakness is just an area that isn’t a strength. It doesn’t mean it has to be terrible. Think of things that don’t come naturally to you that require extra preparation. Think of projects where you might have done things differently in hindsight – what specifically would you do differently and can this be turned into a weakness that you are dealing with?

There is no single best answer to any interview question because it must be authentic to you (therefore it varies person-by-person) and it must be relevant to the interviewer (i.e., a weakness can’t be a deal-breaker, a strength should be a key responsibility). In addition, interview questions are framed a multitude of ways (see all of my weakness question variations above). Therefore, I can’t tell you word-for-word what you should say in every instance. But by identifying specific, non-essential, and not damning areas of development, you can come across as a self-aware, reflective, and thoughtful professional.

How two-thirds of my students never showed up, but half of them passed

By Owen Youngman 6 hours ago

Owen Youngman is the Knight Chair in digital media strategy at Northwestern University’s Medill School. He was an editor and executive at the Chicago Tribune.

Taking attendance gives you the denominator. Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji

My first massively open online course ended recently, and I just can’t stop asking multiple-choice questions.

Here’s one: Which of the following statements might be true?

1) Two-thirds of those enrolled never showed up

2) More than half of the students earned a passing grade

It’s obviously a trick question since the answer is “both.” The apparent contradiction is entirely dependent on another, perhaps bigger question, one that is often phrased as a challenge—if not to to the idea of MOOCs, to the idea of their value: What good is a class where only 2% of the students bother to finish?

Or, to put it a little more quantitatively: What denominator should we use in computing student participation, engagement, and completion in a course like this, when the numerator is going to be the number who passed (in my case, 1,196)?

While there are plenty of ways to answer that, the one I decided to try—in keeping with the modality of a MOOC—was asking the students.

So, halfway through “Understanding Media by Understanding Google,” my Northwestern course on Coursera, that’s what I did. And though the 302 students who replied didn’t entirely agree, the preponderance of the evidence pointed me to a different answer than any of those I first offered as possibilities. Should it be, I asked them, based on the number of people who watched even one lecture—or all the lectures? How about the number who tried the first quiz? Or should we just stick with that great big enrollment number?

None of the above, they told me. Just count the ones who were at least trying to pass.  And if that’s the standard, perhaps this chart shows how to get to “more than half” with a straight face, even though 55,412 people were enrolled at one time or another.

So, back to my opening pair of answers. The “two-thirds who never showed up” are the 36,378 people who never encountered any course content after enrolling.  That number is 66% (or 55,412 enrolled minus 19,034, the number who actually at least started to watch one lecture).

And the “more than half” who passed? Since a student had to turn in at least two homework assignments to have a mathematical chance to earn 70 points, that denominator would be 2,385.  And 1,196 is indeed a little more than half that total. (You could get marginally higher percentages by using just the students who remained registered throughout, represented in the chart by the blue segments of the bars.)

There is, of course, sample bias at work in the students’ definition: Most who weighed in were still doing the work halfway through the six-week course. Several of the 302 responses, however, did come from people who said they never intended to earn a grade. They reported they would think of themselves as having completed the course if they watched all of the video lectures. In fact, they assigned themselves the well-established label of “auditors.”

 Still, why do the numbers seem to shrink so?

Let’s move from our idea of “auditors” to another staple of academia, the course catalog. And let’s do a little comparing and contrasting.

I’ll start with the people I could call MOOC-omores, 55,000 people who happen to sign up for a free course that sounds interesting. Then I’ll create a completely theoretical population of second-year students at Bricks and Mortar U. who at the same are trolling for enjoyable on-campus electives—why, let’s call them sophomores. And I’ll set the second population size at 100 for ease of math.  How do these two groups proceed?

The MOOC-omore		Activity		The sophomore
Clicks “Enroll Now”	55,000	Likes a title in the course catalog	100	Adds to a “shopping cart”
May or may not un-enroll, but stops considering	25,000 vanish	Finds an even better-sounding course or encounters a scheduling conflict	45 vanish	Removes course from the cart
May or may not un-enroll, but stops considering	Another11,000 vanish	Assesses the syllabus negatively	Another20 vanish	Removes course from the cart
Remains enrolled	19,000	Assesses the syllabus positively and tries first class	35	Formally enrolls
Becomes an auditor, un-enrolls, or picks another MOOC	Another13,000 vanish	Decides not to take quizzes	Another 24 vanish	Withdraws and transfers to another course; rarely, audits
	Another4,000 vanish	Decides not to do or grade homework	Another 7 vanish
Keeps coming to class	2,000	Tries to pass the course	4	Keeps coming to class

Admittedly, we don’t have many four-person elective classes here at Northwestern’s Medill School, where I teach journalism in some of those bricks-and-mortar buildings, so the comparisons do finally break down somewhat. But then again, the sophomore has limited tuition dollars as well as limited choices. The MOOC-omore has limited time and attention, but hundreds of choices, whether among other online courses or other life activities.

It’s also a factor that, as recently noted in the New York Times, signing up for a MOOC “takes less time than signing up for an iTunes account,” and that it then takes even less time simply to disappear from a crowd of 55,000.

For now, as I work on evaluating how much the 1,196 learned en route to the finish line, I think I have one helpful way to think about the 54,000 who didn’t get there. (Soon, I’ll have results of my post-course survey of students both who passed and who didn’t, perhaps allowing me to further refine my thinking—and my choice of metaphors.)

This is what I say for now: Sure, the entire population of the Chicago suburb of Mount Prospect can sign up for a course. But when it’s over, we can hold graduation in the same auditorium on Northwestern’s campus that we use for the journalism school.

Owen’s blog is the Next Miracle and you can follow him @YoungOwen. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Cisco System’s Vision For Online Education Is Emerging Now

Google is driving the deployment of Gigabit Fiber to the Home (FTTH), which holds the promise of orders of magnitude higher bandwidth and dramatically lower cost.  But people have asked the question, “what will people do with all of this massive bandwidth?” Having lived with Moore’s Law for most of my career, I smile in bemusement. I can remember a fear that the 256Kb flash memory chip was “too big.” The truth is that if you were asked 20 years ago to predict how we would be using the Internet today, I doubt many would have accurately predicted our current global village.  The few exceptions would be visionaries like Dave Evans, Chief Futurist at Cisco Systems, who authored a Huffington Post article, providing an excellent prediction of how FTTH may impact just one aspect of the future: education.  Read below:

Read more: How Gigabit fiber to the home will transform education way beyond MOOC’s

Now we are seeing actual glimpses into that future,  and how Cisco Systems vision for the future of education is already emerging.

VIDEO: Could your child could benefit from a 24/7 tutor?

The Invasion of the Online Tutors

They teach via chat windows and digital whiteboards

By

SUE SHELLENBARGER

Nov. 12, 2013 7:21 p.m. ET

In the world of on-demand tutoring, kids can log on 24/7 to sites with problems or questions. But how well do these really work? Sue Shellenbarger reports and mother Peggy Bennett shares her own experience. Photo: Justin Clemons for The Wall Street Journal.

It’s a nightly dilemma in many households: A student hits a wall doing homework, and parents are too tired, too busy—or too mystified—to help.

Ordering up a tutor is becoming as easy for kids as grabbing a late-night snack. Amid rapid growth in companies offering online, on-demand tutoring, students can use a credit card to connect, sometimes in less than a minute, with a live tutor. Such 24/7, no-appointment-needed services can be especially helpful to students with tight budgets or tight time frames or those in remote areas.

“All of a sudden, the world opens up to them,” says Michael Horn, executive director of education for the Clayton Christensen Institute, a San Mateo, Calif., education and health-care think tank.

That said, the quality of on-demand scholastic support can be uneven, and the catch-as-catch-can approach to enlisting a tutor may not be best for struggling students who need sustained help. Sessions can bog down on technical glitches, and language barriers can cause problems on sites that rely on tutors from abroad.

Chloe Friedman of Dallas uses Tutor.com for homework help between dance classes. Justin Clemons for The Wall Street Journal

Prices, ranging from about $24 to $45 an hour (and often prorated to the minute), are cheaper than what many skilled tutors charge in a student’s home. And parents and students say the quick homework fix can ease stress and make evenings at home more peaceful.

Whenever Peggy Bennett of Dallas tried to help her 13-year-old daughter, Chloe Friedman, with her eighth-grade physics and algebra homework, “we’d always end up bickering,” Ms. Bennett says, with Chloe often objecting that the teacher did it differently. “It was a lose-lose situation.”

Chloe says she was skeptical when her mom helped her sign up last month on Tutor.com, a New York City-based provider of on-demand tutoring. But after she logged on one evening for algebra help, a tutor, identified only by a first name and last initial, responded within a minute. Chloe says she was guided to figure out the answers, using text chat and an interactive “whiteboard” that displayed their writing and calculations on a shared screen. After hearing nothing but typing for about 10 minutes, Ms. Bennett says she heard Chloe yell from the other room, “They told me I did a good job!” Ms. Bennett adds, “That was all that she needed.”

Chloe, who takes classes in dance, acting and singing, also uses Tutor.com on hersmartphone at the dance studio between classes. She says she recently got help solving a math problem in less than 10 minutes.

Enlarge Image

Math Mentoring on the Fly: A text chat between Chloe Friedman of Dallas and her Tutor.com tutor. ‘He didn’t give me the answer,’ she says. ‘He went through it with me like my teacher would at school.’ Justin Clemons for The Wall Street Journal

Ms. Bennett now lets Chloe use her credit card to extend her Tutor.com subscription whenever she needs help. So far, Chloe has spent $79.99 for up to two hours of tutoring. Tutor.com subscribers pay once a month for time used; unused minutes can be carried to the next month.

Most sites enlist moonlighting or retired teachers, college professors or professionals with tutoring experience; most offer scheduled tutoring in addition to on-demand sessions. The most common users are middle- and high-schoolers, and college students taking basic courses.

About 95% of the 1,200 tutors available on Bangalore, India-based TutorVista are recruited from India, says C.S. Swaminathan, president of TutorVista, which was recently acquired by the London-based publishing and education companyPearson PSON.LN -0.76% PLC. Tutoring sessions with its mostly U.S.-based customers are usually held via whiteboard and text chat, to reduce potential language difficulties, Mr. Swaminathan says. Still, students say, language barriers can sometimes slow communication, and grammar glitches can occasionally creep in.

Saira Sultan, an Irvine, Calif., college student, says the TutorVista tutors she taps several times a week for help with her English and math courses are pleasant and knowledgeable. She recently uploaded a business letter she had been assigned to write for her English class, and the tutor marked errors in the text and texted instructions on correcting verb tenses, rearranging paragraphs and rephrasing sentences to read more smoothly, Ms. Sultan says. The one-on-one edits have helped her learn to write more clearly, she says.

View Graphics

The drawback, she says, is that communicating via text chat “takes a lot of time.” Mr. Swaminathan says TutorVista can provide audio-chat sessions if scheduled in advance.

As with in-person tutors, knowledge levels and teaching skills can be uneven. Stephanie Dobbs of Los Angeles says one InstaEDU tutor who responded to her daughter Sarah’s request for calculus help “didn’t know the material at all.” But Sarah, who uses the site two to three times a week, says it has so many tutors that switching is easy, and the convenience outweighs any drawbacks.

An InstaEDU spokeswoman says on occasion, tutors can halt billing while they figure out the material, or students can be given refunds or a different tutor.

James Nickerson agrees that on-demand tutors need winnowing. When he turned to InstaEDU recently to help his 16-year-old daughter Emma with an advanced-Latin class (they couldn’t find a skilled Latin tutor in their hometown of Stevens Point, Wis.), he didn’t turn Emma loose online. Instead, he sat beside her while she chose a tutor, urging her to bypass a math major who claimed a sideline expertise in Latin in favor of a New York University grad student majoring in classics. He also helped her schedule sessions, to provide continuity with the same tutor.

Related

• Work & Family Mailbox: Readers’ Questions

On-demand tutoring is just one of a growing array of online homework-help options. Khan Academy, one prominent example, offers interactive tutorials in addition to educational videos. Chegg.com provides answers to homework questions, while crowdsourcing sites such as StudyBlue enable students to share study guides, notes and flashcards.

Some school districts pay New York City-based TutaPoint and other online-tutoring sites to provide free access to students; about 2,000 libraries let students use Tutor.com without cost. Free access to tutoring sites can help level the playing field for students from all income groups—if they provide trained, qualified tutors, conduct background checks and safeguard users’ security, says Nora Carr, president of the National School Public Relations Association, a professional group.

But the sites can also tilt the playing field in favor of kids with plenty of money for tutoring help, creating pressure for other students to have a tutor too. Parents should monitor kids’ use of the sites and track fees, which “can get very expensive very quickly,” says Ms. Carr, who is chief of staff of the Guilford County Schools in Greensboro, N.C.

Yamini Naidu says online tutoring last year through InstaEDU helped her earn As in advanced-placement classes at her Beaverton, Ore., high school. Now a freshman at Yale University, Ms. Naidu works eight hours a week as an InstaEDU tutor.

She says that students who come to sessions with a list of questions or assignments to work on—and who block out time to concentrate—benefit most. Text chats occasionally stall, though, if students are distracted or start multitasking; Ms. Naidu tries to re-engage students by asking questions to spark their interest, she says.

Bharathy Chummar of Plantation, Fla., turned to the online tutoring site Eduboard last summer to help her 15-year-old son Prajwal research possible science-fair topics. Prajwal had a 45-minute audio and text chat with a tutor, who is also a physician, about an idea involving bacteria. The doctor later sent him a research summary with links to more studies.

Online tutors “fill a huge gap that can never be filled by parents,” Ms. Chummar says.

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com

Teachers are earning millions of dollars selling their lesson plans on the “iTunes of education”

Real evidence of the “iTunes of education” already up and running

BY ERIN GRIFFITH
ON NOVEMBER 4, 2013

TeacherspayTeachers has never raised a cent of outside venture capital. That’s fine — the 28-person company, launched from a New York apartment in 2006, has been profitably helping teachers sell their lesson plans to each other for some time now. This week, the company crossed the threshold of $60 million in teacher-to-teacher sales. That’s up from just $5 million a year ago. It’s just another positive milestone on the company’s quest to become the iTunes for digitally delivered educational content, according to founder Paul Edelman.

If, in this metaphor, textbook companies are the record labels and teachers are indie artists, it’s the teachers, not the labels, that are earning handsomely with this new platform.

One teacher, Deanna Jump, has sold $2 million worth of lesson plans. The sales have allowed her to buy a mansion in Florida and made her a celebrity in the teaching community — she’s taking a year-long sabbatical to speak at education conferences.

Jump’s resources became popular because they’re creative and well-designed, Edelman says. The secret sauce of TeacherspayTeachers’ platform is that it allows teachers to promote themselves within the community. Jump has more than 33,000 followers on the site, so each time she posts a new lesson plan or materials, her fans are alerted.

“Because she’s a real teacher, her resources are far more engaging and effective than what publishers put out there,” Edelman says.

I’d argue that TeacherspayTeachers is less like iTunes and more of a marketplace, like eBay, or a sharing economy startup, like Airbnb. Either way, Edelman’s bet that teachers are their own best resource was spot on: TeacherspayTeachers has accumulated 2.6 million registered users by word of mouth, half of which joined in the last year.

Of that group, 40,000 are active sellers on the platform and more than 800,000 have bought a lesson plan. Around 15 percent of the site’s content is free, but the average item on the site costs $4.44. After Jump, the next four-highest earning teachers have heard more than half a million dollars; 64 teachers have earned six figures and 384 have earned more than $20,000.

During the Fall, TeacherspayTeachers has been processing more than a million in sales every week.

But it’s about more than the money, Edelman assures me. Even teachers that only sell a few lesson plans get some gratification from sharing their work. “It feels great to know that other teachers and students around the country and world are benefiting from their teaching ideas,” he says.

The company takes a 30 percent cut of sales for free users. Once a teacher’s lesson plan becomes popular, Edelman says they often upgrade to a premium account, which costs $59.95 a year and gives teachers 85 percent of their sales. That nets TeacherspayTeachers’ cut out to an average of 198 to 19 percent.

TeacherspayTeachers’ sales are almost entirely in the US. That’s it’s next growth opportunity. Edelman is based in France and his tech teams are based in India and the Ukraine. His next mission will be to expand TeacherspayTeachers’ user base, too.

Strategic Inflection Point: iTunes University Transforming The Ivory Tower Whether We Like It Or Not

Seemingly unrelated disruptive events mark a strategic

inflection point for education, well beyond MOOC’s

Gigabit Fiber to the Home (FTTH)

Much noise is being made about Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC‘s), and the rise of organizations like The Khan Academy and Silicon Valley startup Coursera.  Universities, including this one, are scrambling to develop strategies to respond. While institutions like M.I.T. and Harvard have already embraced open, free education, smaller institutions see a catastrophe on their horizons.  IMHO, broader and deeper disruptive change is already occurring in all education, not only higher education.  The MOOC’s movement is but a small piece of the emerging new paradigm for education. A few months ago I was struck by the visionary predictions of Dave Evans, Chief Futurist, at Cisco Systems in Silicon Valley. Evans very intelligently strings together a vision of education well beyond the current discussion among educators. In Evans future, MOOC’s themselves will be completely obsolete. Google’s strategic initiative to deploy Gigabit fiber optic connections to the home, and to bring Internet connectivity to the farthest corners of the globe may have a greater impact.  I have written on this:

Read more: How Gigabit fiber to the home will transform education way beyond MOOC’s

Precursor event: John Sperling, the “new college” movement, and

the University of Phoenix.

John Sperling, Cambridge don, founder of San Jose State University‘s “New College“, and founder of The University of Phoenix

My university education included the experience of knowing and working with Dr. John Sperling. The California State University system was in its golden period in those days, which is why Sperling was attracted to teaching in northern California at SJSU. As a member of the student government at SJSU, we worked closely with John. One of my fondest memories is of John stimulating students to think about the first Earth Day, which led us to the now legendary burial of a Ford Maverick on the university commons. My friend and student body president, Dick Miner went on to Harvard, and later rejoined John.  I was a student in the nationally acclaimed Speech-Communication program, but my hometown roommate was a member of Sperling’s “New College.”  Sperling had created a completely unorthodox educational program for students who could not otherwise meet the university’s admission requirements. Sperling fostered all kinds of cool and innovative things at New College, and faculty from all disciplines fell all over themselves to be a part of it. Before long, “new colleges” were popping up all over North America. The newest campus of the University of California, at Santa Cruz also adopted many of John’s ideas, and the two campuses cross-fertilized each other. It was a heady time in higher education.  Before long Sperling came up with the idea of a “massively open” for profit educational institution, well before the Internet. The University of Phoenix has had a chequered history, with equal amounts of scathing criticism and high praise. It has now embraced the online world as well. John is now a retired Billionaire who  lives very reclusively in San Francisco.  But it dawns on me that the current strategic inflection point in education actually began with John and the “New College” movement at San Jose State.  It took the Internet to push it into orbit, and now the Internet is taking it well beyond the orbit of Massively Open Online Courses, and into interstellar educational space.

 

Academic establishment rearranging Titanic’s deck chairs.

Despite Sperling’s innovations 40 years ago,  all of the signs  on the road, the flow of money to this change, and technological advances, I sense that many university academics are still carrying on as if nothing has changed.  This is classic strategic inflection point behavior. Andy Grove described a strategic inflection point as a hiker on a trail, who suddenly realizes he is lost, but has no idea when or exactly where he became lost. I see academics pursuing their traditional behaviors, and worst of all, their petty politics of ego and power instead of embracing the changes, as if they were Andy Grove’s hikers who have not yet realized they are lost.  Some academics characterize themselves as agents of educational change, but in actuality they are merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. A few months ago, someone I know had sat through a meeting with UBC President Toope, and came away with the impression that Toope was resisting, and not at all onboard with the coming changes.  I read this recent article below by Toope with some interest, as it seems that he may have rethought his position, a hopeful sign. But we are still a very long way from iTunes University.

Universities must give up control: UBC president

STEPHEN TOOPE

Contributed to The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Oct. 24 2013, 7:00 AM EDT

The common denominator, the phrase associated with every recommendation for change in universities, is the necessity for radical transformation. Whether it’s government asking us to ‘tweak’ our research agenda to speed up commercialization; industry questioning our ability to meet the need for skilled workers; grantors placing geographical limits on eligibility for funding; or students wondering why our entire course calendar and library system aren’t online yet; we are getting it from all sides.

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We do need to change, we need to change a lot, and we need to change fast. But “vital change’ is not the same as radical transformation. ‘Radical’ means ‘root.’ It means changing in essence. And if we do that – and some of us are already making moves in that direction – we’ve lost.

I have one change driver that you can use as a lens to look at all change drivers; and one criterion you can use to evaluate every next step. The common denominator of every driver of change, from digitization to climate change to global mobility, is direct experience. Universities arose out of an ecclesiastical culture that presumed a responsibility for mediating its followers’ experience of the sacred. That paternalistic dynamic stayed with us even after our transition to secular institutions, and has perpetuated that ‘ivory tower’ reputation among those we’re meant to educate and serve that persists to the present day.

Other sectors have led the way for us, demonstrating both what to do and what not to do. The music industry now has its iTunes, and the film and video industry, its Netflix. In both cases, the end user has access to all available content at any time and in any way she wants it. The business model is both economical for the user and profitable for the owner.

The proprietary, exclusionary control of content is obsolete. Every change, from the ones that are upon us to the ones we can’t see coming, is going to be driven by people’s desire for ever more direct experience.

It is a university’s job to lower barriers that limit or disallow direct experience. I’m talking about the invisible barriers between individuals of different backgrounds, cultures, and orientations on our campuses; I’m talking about the borderlines we’ve drawn between our campuses and the communities we serve; the boundaries between disciplines, fields, and faculties, and those between our institutions that exist because of geographical distance or philosophical difference or market share competition.

Why are our undergrad students left to make so many of the connections themselves? To do the integrating and synthesizing? Why do young professors with joint appointments fear they won’t get tenure? Why do so many of our funders limit the grants and scholarships available to international scholars, and so limit the nature of study and research partnerships? Why do so many of our staff see themselves as ‘supportive of’ rather than ‘integral to’ our mission and vision?

I’m also talking about the barriers – from financial to political – that keep too many local students and scholars homebound and too many would-be international students and scholars locked out. We claim to be graduating global citizens, but how many of them have traveled? How many have had a transformative encounter with someone whose views and beliefs differed markedly from their own? How many, actually, have left our campuses after four years without ever having thought seriously about how their fields of study – whether music or mathematics or marine biology – relate to the fundamental challenges of our day?

I will say that universities’ failure so far to fully democratize access to direct experience – whether it be information or intercultural encounters – is based in fear. Our fear – of losing control. Of being irrevocably and detrimentally altered.

So what do we do? Is there one magic criterion by which every decision in the difficult decade to come may be safely gauged? I believe there is …Be yourself.

Universities have a mission that is unique in all the world: to serve the world, through the preservation and dissemination of knowledge, and the creation of new knowledge. That is our task, and our task alone. Our survival rests in holding to the unique and necessary role we carved out for ourselves 800 years ago. Our challenge lies in the fact that we are no longer optimally organized to fulfill it.

We’re nation-based, and our national systems do not fully support our need for mobility. The classrooms in our older buildings are physically structured for a hierarchical and passive dynamic of pedagogy, and don’t reflect what we now know about how people best learn. Our most important funding mechanisms are inwardly focused. And we are often preoccupied with superficial measures of reputation, short-sighted research funding, and commercialization over sustainability.

We have forgotten the value of the core service we provide. Four years ago, UBC launched the most ambitious fundraising and alumni engagement campaign in Canadian history, with parallel goals of raising $1.5-billion and engaging 50,000 alumni annually in the day-to-day life of the university. With two years still to go, we’re already approaching both targets, and I believe it is because we are better serving our alumni and because we have opened up meaningful opportunities forthem to serve.

Show – don’t tell, show – your political leaders of every stripe the economic long view, and your place in strengthening it. Offer your faculty members incentives for crossing barriers of discipline and geography. Reward your staff for the ways they contribute to sustainability, intercultural understanding, international engagement. Expand free access to course content. Add online components to your face-to-face classes, and vice versa.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Know yourself. Know your value. Let your barriers down and invite in the messiness of transformation. Change structurally if you must, but don’t change radically; keep your medieval roots.