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January 27, 2009
...OpenCourseWare Startup
Here’s a business opportunity for anyone looking for an idea. Many universities are making free courses available online via a movement called OpenCourseWare. The course materials being offered for free online from many of the leading academic institutions of the world is an amazing data asset. Unfortunately, there’s not much community services (blogs, wikis, forums, etc) baked into these university sites, and the only organization that ties these offerings together today (the OpenCourseWare Consortum) is dropping the ball on creating a meta-layer that adds real value. I think there’s an opportunity for a web service to come into this market and provide:
- An index of all courses available that is searchable/sortable by discipline, difficulty, type of media available, activity, and school. Today, the only way to find courses is to first choose a school, and then browse by discipline… seems silly to me and needs obvious fixing.
- This index would ideally be driven by a wiki, so people could edit the data set that drives the index collectively as more universities come online with courses (or as universities remove courses).
- User-generated reviews of course quality.
- A forums or chatrooms for people taking the same class together. Learning can be more difficult for certain people when done alone with a book. It would be great to create a way for people to work together and help each other with the classes that interest them.
- Tie into Meetup so people can meet around their geography to discuss a course they’re all taking together.
- Accessible via Facebook App so that people can leverage the group organization resources of Facebook to consume, rate, and enhance the OpenCourseWare offerings.
The best organization positioned to do this today is the OpenCourseWare Consortium, but their website today is hardly more than brochure-ware. They offer a list of all participating school in the OpenCourseWare project, but their members page is a static website that links only to the homepages of the universities instead of the OpenCourseWare index for each university. It makes finding actualy OpenCourseWare content a real pain, which means the only reasonable resource for finding OpenCourseWare materials is Google. This post could be considered the outline of a new company, or my dream product roadmap for the OpenCourseWare Consortium.
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