An open marketplace for live video learning:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/j4yvnSAoTog[/youtube]6 thoughts on “EduFire”
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An open marketplace for live video learning:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/j4yvnSAoTog[/youtube]You must be logged in to post a comment.
No, I would not invest in this venture. The pitch focuses on explaining the service, but leaves too many gaps that make me wary. Chief among them are:
1) No information about the speaker or his expertise, so I don’t have any confidence that he could successfully launch this service. And since he doesn’t give a background, I was unable to accurately judge if some of his claims were true or not, for example, “live video learning is a fast-growing, multibillion dollar industry.” It could be, but given he hasn’t established his credibility, it seems like it’s a stat pulled out of thin air.
2) No information about what problem Edufire is solving or what gap in the marketplace it is filling. He says they are building the open market place for live video learning, but I still don’t get a sense as to how it is different or better than current options.
3) Finally, the pitch lacks any marketing and financial information, apart from a brief description of their revenue model. I don’t get a sense of how many users they currently have or how much money they would need to expand to other verticals and launch their virtual classroom. I also don’t know what they are projecting these plans for growth would result in.
Even though this is an elevator pitch, and I would expect a lot of these details to be abridged, the information provided is still so sketchy that I would not be confident that this investment would pay off.
You make some great points here about what is missing in the pitch. I was drawn in to the (nameless guy’s) charm and confidence in the product, and the picture that he painted of a one-stop-shop resource for video instruction was very appealing. But as I piece together where his company currently stands in development, Edufire is a one-to-one language e-learning company. Why would I need to invest in such a company which can run on free programs like Skype or Google+? How will the development of their own multi-student learning platform allow students to learn “what they want, when they want”? Can I learn to SCUBA dive using this platform, or will it be limited to more academic subjects like most other OLEs? I feel the pitch should have focused on why building this new platform was even necessary, rather it was practically mentioned under his breath.
https://angel.co/udemy
Though it is one of my pitch critiques, I am putting this here as the idea is almost exactly the same, in case anyone would like to compare.
Another NO – While the AngleList site does provide some financial projections and other bits of information, I have two major issues with this concept. The first is the assumption that online education can be marketed to anyone. While attempting to marginalize other forms of learning using descriptives like “expensive” and “boring”, it ignores the reputation that e-learning has already developed because of its distal limitations when compared to a F2F class. As an investor, I would rather be informed of how the differences of e-learning can be advantageous. The second issue I have is the platform itself, which is not described in the pitch but certainly could have been. There is a short paragraph under the video, which describes the platform briefly as one where anyone can easily design and upload a class. This assumes that an instructor does not require special training to transfer their courses to an online environment. There is no quality control here, and the inclusion of big name-dropping in the pitch only serves to further distract an ill-informed audience from the likeliness that Udemy is set up to be another YouTube, not a TED talk (in terms of content value).
It’s true that these two particular pitches from apparently operating entries are short on the details needed for a rigorous venture analysis. I wonder whether there would be enough for a venture analyst to dig a bit deeper and ask additional questions of each. I think some of the pitches we review may not be a perfect match for the criteria we provided, but might compel others to “venture” a second or deeper look.
When I looked a little deeper at each web site, I got a better sense of the potential quality metrics of the businesses and the target audiences they sought to reach. One was fairly thin on scope, and the other somewhat broader, and quite a bit more polished in presentation.
In neither case do I think that a venture analyst would be considering the pitches in relation to a FTF class, as we might as educators. I think an analyst would be thinking about the general public as a target market, the differentiation of the services and their potential market return in the context of value for cost and a track record of attracting paying customers. These factors would be key components of the equation that calculated potential downstream return on investment (ROI).
The irony may be that each of these ventures has attracted funding. But clearly, our eagle-eyed reviewers would give them a thumbs down.
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I suppose my issue with Uderny’s appeal to the general public is how it assumes that online education is not in recovery from its reputation as an inferior learning form. As an example from my own experience of teaching in super-competitive Korea, any adult student I talked to would not consider online schools acceptable for a successful education. When I researched the matter at the time, I found this may be due to earlier online education platforms having being hastily erected with inappropriate management and credibility (Motlik, 2008). I feel that I could reword Uderny’s sales pitch to read just that: perfect for the hasty and ill-informed (in terms of educational technology) educator.
David, you noted the difference between an educator and an analyst making an investment choice. Do I have the wrong approach to this EVA role-playing task in considering these ventures from the perspective of an educator AND an analyst?
Motlik, S. (2008) Traditional to online media in China and Korea: Unfulfilled promise.
International Review of Research in Open & Distance Learning, 9(3), 1-8.
Nope, you own the educator and EVA lenses, as I alluded in my final sentence. You’ve given a thumbs down using those combined perspectives. Other analysts projecting on the numbers may not even consider the alternative view, just what is in front of them.
Sometimes the venture market funds a concept anyway. That’s why they really needs us, and your colleagues need you, to help assess the viability of new educational technology ventures that appear before us.