(Global) Education 2.0

I had a little chat with our old friend and fellow ReveNews.com blogger Shmuly Tennenhaus a few days ago. He is busy up in Seattle for a company who developed an interesting platform.

I have some experience with this type of model of a company. My former employer for over 7 years uses the same business model, only in a different vertical.

Their solution is GlobalScholar.com and it is an open marketplace for education. They focus on elementary school and junior college, but that is for business reasons rather than technological constraints. The platform is actually flexible enough to support all kinds of education channels and target markets. They are too small and too new to market themselves in the numerous verticals. This might change in the future when they are growing to a size that allows them to allocate resources to branch out or if the right partners come along who can use a white label version of the platform to expand on their business within their own vertical.

GlobalScholar.com allows students to find teachers to help them with specific problems they have with a specific task at the moment, or a whole topic or a complete subject. They can find teachers to get a question answered for their homework or to attend a series of sessions or a whole course, if they need to. The platform allows students and teachers to connect in real-time and use the proprietary communication technologies provided by GlobalSchoolar.com.

It provides features like an interactive white-board, two-way voice communication, instant messenger, mail and video on demand. Interactive communication sessions, including the use of the white-board can be recorded and played back again if needed. Teachers can indicate their online status that students know that they are available for immediate response. Finding the right teacher is easy. The site can be browsed by subjects, grades, type of help and for specific exam preparations.

Teachers have control over how much they want to charge for answering a single question via mail for example or for a one-on-one training session, on-demand webcast or whole seminar. Teachers can also provide details, such as a short bio to show off their credentials and qualifications, also a schedule with times when they are available etc. There is no problem regarding “fake” teachers or similar, because every teacher has to undergo a comprehensive background screening by GlobalScholar.com, before he is allowed to offer any services in the marketplace.

Once the teacher was approved, he can start adding listings and create his own personal branded “channel” within the marketplace. For quality assurance is it possible for students to provide comments and feedback on the quality of the help they received by the teacher, which can then be checked by other students who seek for help. The teacher can of course pick especially positive feedbacks and highlight them in a special testimonials section of his page.

Another neat feature on the site is the College Finder, which works very intuitive. Here I am pretending that I am interested in the Fresno City College. I started typing Fresno into the search box and the application started automatically to list matches while I was typing.

Here is the link to the detail page of the Fresno City College. Next to the sections with various details about the college, such as available programs and majors, costs, alumni & faculty, sports teams, contact info etc. is there also the option to look at the vicinity and property itself via Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D (click on the location on the map to switch to Microsoft Virtual Earth view to get here).

As I mentioned at the beginning, the platform itself is open and could be used for various educational verticals, including college or even affiliate marketing or search engine marketing/optimization education and certification. They won’t create a marketplace for that by themselves though, again, you have a hard time to sell anything, if you want to be everything to everybody, but with the right partner, they might do it. The partner could use his own name and brand to create his own marketplace, using the GlobalScholar.com platform invisible in the background.

Oh, the “Global” in the word GlobalScholar.com is not only for looks, it’s actually open for teachers and students worldwide. I mean, the best Chinese language teacher might be a teacher in China who also speaks very well English, right?

What I am missing is a referral program. Grass-root affiliate marketing should be a perfect marketing channel to attract not only new teachers, but students as well. Maybe not necessarily paying out hard cash, but giving free credits to students, for example, who refer new students to the site who become active and purchase lessons or answers…. Shmuly, did you hear that? Are you already too many months out of the affiliate marketing business that you forgot the basics of it? Hehe, I am just kidding.

Well, it sounds like an exciting job Shmuly is currently occupied with and it is also interesting to see how Web 2.0 components and technology are being put to good use for something essential for every society, education. Okay, despite setting out to bring Web 2.0 into today’s Web 1.0 (beta) classrooms, he did promise that he will start making movies again. He just promised it to everybody publicly at his old YouTube channel. See for yourself.

Cheers!
Carsten