Seeking funding to develop an educational portal website
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Next-generation Online Education: Configurable Modular Ultra-user-friendly Features
Is Education Now Prohibitive?
· Difficult to afford.
· Difficult to meet time-of-day restrictions.
· Difficult to meet class duration restrictions.
· Difficult to get to physical location.
Many of us cannot afford the high cost of education and we cannot work around the time and location restrictions. By addressing the business concepts noted earlier, imagine a worldwide online education system that does not bind the user to time, location, or quantity. Envision one class and a hundred thousand students or more, viewable at any hour anywhere in the world (with online access).
In our next generation of online education, the user will take online aptitude assessment tests to determine the suitability of a new career. The user can take advantage of the job locator that identifies cities and the average salary versus typical housing costs to determine a quality-of-life index for a career choice. A service can inform the user of the specific education (or life experience) for the desired job. The potential student can choose a program from online colleges to meet the qualifications of that career. Online counselors for that region and occupation can be available to help. The OE2.0 site can provide an independent crowd-funding service whereby the prospective student can explain their situation and solicit donations for their education and goal — and third parties can provide verification of the story. Potential donors can search to locate stories relevant to them. The user can go through an online vetting process required by the university. Ultimately, the classes can be viewed online live or recorded.
Classes can be supplemented with email, chat, and video exchanges with the professor. The student’s online behavior rating can encourage timely and consistent online work. Ratings can earn the student credit points redeemable for more exchanges with the professor, online books, or other student needs; and be added to their degree or certificate. Online behavior can be used as a form of verifying the identity of the user. Textbooks can have an ebook option and reading habits can be monitored and earn credits.
Tests can be conducted at designated locations administered by certified personnel and monitored by video surveillance. Oral reports can be recorded by mobile devices and made available to the professor using a cloud management service. Video presence equipment can put the online student into the classroom and voice-recognition and translation software can translate classes, chats, webpages, and emails – scenarios employing existing technologies.
Some universities might require the student to live on campus for a year or make regular visits to the campus and professors before becoming a full-time online student – or vie to opt out by citing comparable life experiences. The OE2.0 site can offer incentives to universities for early adoption into the program. In fact, the OE2.0 site portal could lure online universities wanting to eliminate the costs of maintaining online services.
Of course, there are a lot of partnerships and design required to pull this off, but I envision in full implementation, the OE2.0 site can usher a user through the process from job seeker to new-career aspirant, to online student, to new-career applicant, to new employee with a new life-enriching career.
The OE2.0 site could offer the de facto source of a relevant education-training-life rating quotient – that would factor in accomplishments such as a Toastmasters certificate; giving a TED talk; or being verified on Twitter; or producing a successful documentary – that is accepted and respected by professionals worldwide.
How Will We Survive with No Education?
· How will we keep education affordable?
· How can we lower the cost of education?
· How can we educate the middle class?
· How can we help keep people employable?
· How will education look 10 years from now?
· How will we all avoid going homeless?
· How will we survive?
About Me
· Grew up in Bay Area and entire career in Silicon Valley.
· Business degree from San Jose State University.
· Have a Silicon Valley mentor who has been a CEO, founder, VP, and Director at tech companies.
· Worked at Sun Microsystems/Oracle, Procket Networks, Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Force10 Networks, Brocade, LinkedIn/Microsoft, and others.
· Lifelong creativity and generator of ideas.
· Like problem solving, technology, UX, business, visual design.
· How Will We Survive with No Education?
Roadblocks to Education
These hindrances must be minimized:
· Cost
· Location/proximity (single parent, remote residence)
· Time of day (need after work hours)
· Amount of time (need to customize time of consuming material)
· Lack of confidence
Do the Impossible
· We already had the horse, but the car was better.
· We already had the typewriter, but the work-processor was better.
· We already had paper maps, but GoogleMaps did the impossible.
Do the impossible!
What is the answer?
· Online Education 2.0
· The next generation of online education
· Educational institutions subscribe and upload their class content and material.
Business Advantage of Online Education
· No restrictions to time of day, duration, or location.
· Capitalization Rate: An online class can have thousands consume content 1000x more than brick and mortar.
· Economies of Scale: When a maker produces one widget, they can only sell one widget, but an online class can serve a million learners.
· Eliminate backlog: An online class does not limit the number of simultaneous users. Like DVR, video-on-demand, email, and voicemail, we are not bound by time or location.
How Are We Different?
· Sell to educational institutions … or anyone.
· Supplemental content AND primary content—An education that leads to a DEGREE.
· Sell use of the GUI platform.
· Every UI-friendly service you can think of.
· Services client can turn on/off depending on class needs.
· Educational institutions …
· Eliminate cost to maintain their own site.
· Provide the content, files, links, etc.
· Start at a low-commitment level if they prefer.
About Me
· Grew up in Bay Area and entire career in Silicon Valley.
· Lifelong creativity and generator of ideas.
· Like problem solving, technology, UX, business, visual design.
· Founder: Met and sent business plan (2015).
· Past CEO: Met and sent business plan (2016).
· Current CEO: Talked and liked my approach (2017).
· PM Director: Put my ideas on the roadmap (2017).
· UX Researcher: impressed with my ideas (2017).
· Product Managers: Enthusiastic and supportive about my ideas (2017-present).
· VP of Engineering: Referred me to VP of Learning (2020).
· Then Sun Microsystems CTO Eric Schmidt liked my business concept (1997).
The Site
· Modular services.
· Subscription by educational institutions.
· Upload learning content.
· Features many UX features.
Coursework Identifier
· Education-Experience Quotient
· Education-Training-life Quotient
· Emerging Jobs
· Job Locator
· Pitch for Funding
· Professor Contact
· "How Do I Learn" service
· Transferrable skills
· "No-tears education"
· Class bailout option
And many more.