our aim is not to defend the questionable practices of for-profit colleges, but rather to draw attention to the fact that colleges of every stripe are soaking up tons of societal resources and saddling students with excessive debt loads in the face of dubious job prospects.

“The Red Herring Crusade Against For-Profit Colleges” by Daniel L. Bennett and Zac Bissonnette @ Forbes.com

And a coupon?!  Impressive or excessive, at least it looks nice.  They also had great, responsive customer service and free shipping.  (The shoes are nice too.)

Mr. Yunus states. “When we were in the caves we were all self-employed … finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where the human history began … As civilization came we suppressed it. We became labor because [they] stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.”

From The Little Big Things, by Tom Peters

people first, people second, people third, people ad infinitum

That’s the way I like to do business.

From The Little Big Things by Tom Peters

Case in point: www.Quirky.com.

While working for GlobalClassroom.us I was collecting a vast repository of information (and tracking new information) on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, a huge majority of topics, sources and subjects were unusable (after all, why would a corporate blog trying to advance it’s own agenda talk about the great things that other companies and organizations were doing?).  Anyways, I didn’t want to sit on the data so I spend 15 bucks on 2 domains and 80 bucks on a hosting account with Bluehost.com (I am not at all disappointed).

I mapped the RSS to Twitter using Twitterfeed (great service), included some #tags in every post and was off to the races.  Literally.  Traffic the first month was up something crazy like 1500%.  After a predicted leveling off growth is still +100% month over month and this week was the biggest ever.

Here’s a taste of how things are rolling:

The jump this week (which was +1000 hits) was caused exclusively by the leaked photos of a Mobile app for Moodle (the first ever of it’s kind to be this crisp and well received.  Things will dip again a bit, but I’m thinking sustained growth will continue (albeit at a lesser clip).

Up and to the right!

Hi, I really love your company and believe that you’re what’s next in higher education.  I don’t care if it’s mopping or sweeping, I think that I should be working for/with you.  Let me know if we can work something out.

Cheers,

Joe

And that’s the short version of how I found myself newly employed at Straighterline.com as course manager.  Am I stoked?  You have no idea.

To borrow from my previous post, the win here is “efficiency + quality + freedom = a better way for motivated learners to get degrees“. Having looked through the courses already I can attest to the quality (and guarantee that the quality is going to improve based on student feedback and will be updated as we grow as a company).  Additionally the LMS integration with tutoring and a real course advisor leaves very small chance that a learner will feel isolated online.  Paired with real feedback on assignments submission (writing) and instant feedback from tests it creates a very efficient learning environment for the student.

Here’s some recent coverage we got by a local DC news outlet:

Now, working within a company often imposes higher transaction costs than running a project online.  Why turn to the person who happens to be in the next cubicle when it’s just as easy to turn to an online community member from a global marketplace of talent?  Companies are full of bureaucracy, procedures, and approval processes, a structure designed to defend the integrity of the organization.  Communities form around shared interests and needs and have no more process than they require.  The community exists for the project, not to support the company in which the project resides.

Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine – “Atoms are the new bits” (pg 105)

Seriously?  Why get hampered by an inept CEO with no concept of customer wants/needs when you can just collaborate with a friend/online colleague to accomplish the same thing.  It’s faster, better and you own it.  OWN IT.