One-Minute Pitch: “Course Aggregator”
Posted: January 27th, 2010 | Author: Gordon | Filed under: economics, technology | Tags: donations, non-profits, online learning, opencourseware, podcasts | View CommentsIndividuals are now empowered to create their own content, publish it on the web, and profit from it. Two prominent examples are Adsense-linked blogs and Youtube revenue-sharing. There is also overwhelmingly strong demand for non-traditional learning channels; think Rosetta Stone, online colleges, Live Mocha, Opencourseware, podcasts, and blogs.
Course Aggregator (CA) leverages these two trends to create an education ecosystem for knowledge creators to publish their content for mass consumption.
The difference between CA and other sites like Academic Earth is that there is revenue sharing between CA and content creators. This creates strong incentives for creators to not only publish existing materials, but to also develop entirely new content. Another distinguishing feature between CA and Academic Earth is that content from individuals and institutions will be consolidated. For example, you can learn about venture capital from dynamic sources like (blogs) and supplement it with structured university courses.
Learners will use the site because it will be a convenient ‘one-stop shop’ for learning about wide variety of subjects and interacting with high-quality content creators. Content creators will want to partner with CA so that they can gain access to a large audience and grow revenue through profit sharing agreements. Distributing content through our platform also enables non-profit educational institutions to keep advertisements off of their websites and avoid being perceived as for-profit or ‘too commercial.’ We can label our contributions to non-profit institutions as donations. This has two benefits: institutions will not seem commercial, and we will benefit from goodwill and PR.
In the future, as the platform grows, there is the potential to charge small user fees for premium features on a recurring revenue basis. Built around the core course aggregator will be social features that will allow content creators and consumers to interact and learn from each other.
