glen

This is pretty remarkable. We have use MTurk to help develop educational content and have thought about using virtual TAs to help w/research and tutoring, but not for actual grading. To me, that feels a bit like a stretch. However, on the other hand, if you've got qualified people that can do a better job than you can do as a professor, then you may actually be doing your students a service by using this platform.

Educational services are quickly becoming a global market. Quick example. Our CTO was less of a believer in the power of MTurk. We (www.nixty.com) were converting a physics course from MIT. The tests were in PDF form. (a. problems; b. solutions). We wanted them to be in multiple choice form. No one on the team had the capability to create relevant multiple choice responses. We created a HIT on MTurk. A guy from Bangalore signed up for the HIT. He had a Master's in Science and had taught Physics earlier in his career. He banged out the multiple choice responses in a day. We had them cross-checked and they were solid. Pretty cool, right?

Become a for-profit : ).

Great resource.

Pretty soon you'll be able to find all of these in an easy to work through sequence, so that you won't have to track PDFs, the course calender, video etc. Instead, it'll be like Lesson 1 - step 1: video, step 2: transcript, step 3: discussion board (much like HN where best responses get voted up/karma points etc.); step 4: problems, step 5: solutions, step 6: discussion board, step 7: test (to assess knowledge) etc. We actually have over 120 courses built out on NIXTY now and probably 20-30 of those are EE/CS courses.

I've actually been trying to figure out how to bring up the idea of a p2p CS university/program. Kind of like a HN University. The goal would be for people to be able to easily take courses and interact w/others around all things CS.

One of the beautiful things about computer science is it seems less and less dependent upon degrees as predictors of success. We believe that this is where most fields will go in the future. People pointing to references from trusted others, work examples etc. will prove to be better predictors than degrees. Consequently, we are investing a fair amount towards using the CS curriculum as a type of pilot project.

If you are passionate about this kind of thing and want to help out, shoot me an email at glen at nixty dot com. (p.s. really trying not to make this sound like an infomercial for NIXTY. just trying to be clear about what we are doing and our plans. thanks).

Congrats! Thanks for your valuable posts. Indeed, remember to take care of yourself now that you can work anytime you want -- tho your last job sounds like it was quite demanding.

This is a great concept and Shai is to be applauded for his efforts here. It is a bit of a bummer that they need 5 MM in funding to keep it going. Anyway, even here in the states, you can cut the cost of education significantly by testing out of courses. Through the College Level Examination Program you can test out of most of your freshman and sophomore year courses for $75/per test. Most private colleges are now b/n 30-50k/year, so saving can be pretty significant. If you go to a state school saving can be really considerable as well. e.g., 1200 vs. 8k. +++ you don't have to take 15 weeks of a course to test out of it. More info can be found here: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/clep/about.html. Education inflation is insane. We see this as one way to keep educational costs down.

Good point about them drawing on the same qualities. Makes sense.

Well, we ended up hiring a person already. I was just intrigued by the thought that server guys are usually not good programmers and vice versa. What do you think?

You really shouldn't feel tacky. You offer some great advice. This article from several years ago (http://www.tonywright.com/2008/bootstrappers-beware/) was particularly helpful to us when we were just starting to profitable. Thank you!

Sorry (see comment below). Couldn't agree more that you should manage your online web presence.

Yikes. Posted quickly w/out thinking about it, while eating. You are right. Would delete it if I could. Thanks for keeping me honest :). Will do better next time.

Couldn't agree more! We at NIXTY think this is particularly important for a person's future educational and occupational opportunities. A blog is great and a LinkedIn profile is great too; however, we think what is needed is a more robust ePortfolio - an online presence that has a cv/resume, recommendations feature, and work display. The work display is particularly important because it allows the person to post work (documents, videos, papers etc.) that illustrate their competence. Further, it allows those w/credibility (professor, supervisor) to comment on the work so that others can get a better way of assessing a person's competence.The url for the person's eportfolio is www.nixty.com/name.

People definitely need to be proactive about defining their presence online. This is just one small way that we are trying to help.

There is a actually a fair amount to learn. We went through an incubator program at William and Mary and learned a ton about identifying FABs (Features, Advantages, Benefits), crafting language to appeal to decision makers (i.e., showing them how your product solves their specific problems), segmenting markets, using your resources narrowly -- rather than trying to do too much, b2b sales etc.

We are going to roll out www.nixty.com in beta mode in couple of weeks. I'll try to populate the system w/a course on sales from MITs Sloan School of Business. You can go there directly too. Our version will just be a bit more accessible.

Yes, you are correct. Thank you for your thoughts.

Good point. I'm a real fan of a/b testing and customer development in general, but not sure that is appropriate in a pre-launch stage or in logo development.

Don't want to respond yet, just in case it biases others' opinions.

One was created by a friend with design skills. The other was created by a design professional with a portfolio of work for some pretty big companies (Chase, Polo etc.).

I'd highly, highly, highly recommend: Kim Knight of http://www.kimknightstudios.com/. She does regular work for heavies like IBM, Chase, etc., but is affordable and incredibly professional.

We are beta launching www.nixty.com. I've got a # of interviews scheduled with people in New England to demo the product and get initial feedback. If you live in New England and are interested in seeing NIXTY, then shoot me an email at glen at nixty.com. To borrow Fred Wilson's term, our BHAG is to become the "educational operating system of the web", just as Amazon is the default shopping system and google is the default search operating system -- we want to become the default educational platform for individuals, trainers/educators, and institutions.

This ship has sailed. States simply do not have the money to fund more programs to help strengthen our educational system. Even if they had unlimited funding, the problems are not a result of a limited amount of money, but rather arise from a variety of complex, systemic socio-political problems. Christensen, Horn, and Johnson (2008) have applied the disruptive paradigm to education and have some really startling insights in their book: Disrupting Class: How disruptive insights change the way the world learns. Definitely worth checking out if you are at all interested in transforming education.

Krugman also highlights another problem. The financial crisis has resulted in real job cuts. Consequently, there will be less specialized classes, AP classes etc., especially in rural and urban areas. Christensen's point is that this is a great place to introduce an education based disruption. That is what we are doing at www.nixty.com. As a country, we have limited "teacher bandwidth" (David Wiley, 2009). Whether we like it or not, this bandwidth is going to continue to decrease. We need to find ways to harness the Web, informal learning, opencourseware etc. to create real learning opportunities for people of all ages and across different backgrounds. Many of these disruptive processes are already underway in the homeschooling and unschooling domains. It'll be interesting to see how they play out and impact the traditional K-12 and higher education systems in the coming years.

We are looking for people interested in helping us solve these problems. If you would like to join us, then shoot me an email at glen at nixty.com

Travis. Really good point on the recommendation side. It probably makes sense to hold off on publishing the information until the educator affirms that it is accurate.

We will likely use MTurk to enter additional educator and school information. I haven't yet used the new service, crowdflower.com, yet, but this might be a good opportunity to try it out.

Thanks for those guidelines. This makes perfect sense. Do you have any data as to how seeding/prepopulating results in uptake? I've looked at compete.com and compared sites similar to teachstreet, but there really isn't a way to control for the other variables.

Great article. Accreditation has to evolve. At www.nixty.com we are working on a form of open accreditation - or personal accreditation - that employers/peers can look at to assess a person's competencies. Degrees are still somewhat valid indicators of a person's knowledge, but their predictive value is steadily decreasing for a number of "anonymous institutions". What is needed, instead, is a form of personal accreditation that is based on test scores, work display (papers the individual has written that others can download/comment on), resume, and recommendations. We hope that this type of open accreditation will yield strong results that can help support the current form of accreditation.

Really good article. We at www.nixty.com are creating a platform that supports traditional ways of education, but also facilitates informal learning. The future, as Mr. Reiger pointed out in the article, is definitely going to be a mixture of both. The challenge, and believe me it is a challenge, is to create an atmosphere that supports both the traditional and emerging ways of online learning.

If you are interested in helping us beta test the product, then please sign up at www.nixty.com. Thanks!

Couldn't agree more with this article. For a more rich analysis, I'd recommend checking out Disrupting Class by Christensen and Horn. All about how disruption is going to transform education.

We are working on a startup that hopes to facilitate this wave. If you are interested in helping us beta test, then please sign up at www.nixty.com. Thanks!

Yes, there definitely has to be an integral community moderated system, so that the best content rises.

It'd be a lot more structured like a course that you could work through. Lessons that would walk you through each part of a learning module. One lesson might consist of a video (from iTunes, Standford, or MIT lecture), test with feedback, discussion area (like HN) where questions are asked and answered etc. There would be a series of lessons like this that would contextualize some of the free stuff out there and also provide peer to peer learning.

Here's a question for you guys: If there was an easy platform to teach others, do you think there would be enough collective interest in putting together lessons/courses on programming?

We at www.nixty.com are building out this platform and there are obvious areas where there will be pick up (homeschooling, skill development [ie., photoshop] etc.), but for a while now I've been wondering if hackers would actually collaborate and create a sort of Hackers U.

There is a guy who frequently posts/links on HN to different lessons on learning python and other languages. I think that is great, so it is nice to see some initial movement in this area.

A couple of thoughts: 1. Assign clients to your reps, so that they both don't service the same client.

2. Don't worry about paying commission on a sale that occurred 2 days after the phone call. It is likely the rep played a key role in them signing up, so they likely earned most if not all of the commission.

3. Consider increasing your commission rate and/or lowering your salary (if you are providing one). It seems to me that your reps are not terribly motivated. This lack of motivation can occur for a variety for a variety of reasons: role confusion and rule confusion (see #1 above), lack of financial incentive for new sales/commissions, too high of a base salary. Basically, you need to find the right level of giving them a solid enough base, but low enough for them to be really motivated to make new sales.

4. Add a bonus if certain sales goals are met.

5. Be generous - I've found that a number of startup folks under value the role of sales/marketing in a startup. If you have measurable sales goals and they are meeting those goals, then be generous.

Yef, check out this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=529650