Brandon Muramatsu

My notes from Fred Wilson’s talk to EdStartup 101

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Unfortunately I missed this EdStartup 101 talk live because of some meetings last week.

Fred Wilson is awesome, I’ve been following his AVC blog for a year and a half now, I’d strongly encourage everyone to read it. It’s not just about startups but also technology, products, design and even sports (perhaps most notably is the concept of Minimum Viable Personality).

Here are some notes I took that I think are relevant for my day job…

  • Coursera reminds Fred of WordPress (from 6-17min, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV3SKcJD9rw&t=6m)
    • WordPress: free .org, hosted .com, VIP tier
    • Thinks Coursera is going to be some variation of WordPress (he has no inside information)
    • It’s going to take capital to get there
    • Does Coursera morph into providing the commercial back-end for online for-pay, traditional enrollment online versions as a partner with a brick-and-mortar university? <- he wonders why there is any mystery, seems obvious to him.
  • On the notion of choosing a platform (from 17-29min, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV3SKcJD9rw&t=17m)
    • His advice to university presidents: Support multiple tools and have an open mind, try and have some common standards around look and feel between the platforms, let the market settle itself out
    • David Wiley points out that there’s often one platform, and faculty can’t vote with their feet, and that it’s painful to migrate
    • Fred says, exclusivity doesn’t benefit the university, instead they should facilitate a competitive market for product and services, focus on common standards (look and feel)
    • Fred, new way of enterprise software (including the things like LMS, MOOCs), users (faculty) will bring these into the enterprise, they can figure them out themselves, they’re free, they don’t require 18 people to support them, they penetrate the organization because they’re good

What are they interested in with respect to education technology and learning startups?

  • Credentialing and accreditation: Eventually we need to know if people have learned the material and validation of what they’ve learned
  • Peer-to-Peer: Leverage web-scale community to create learning content and tools that people can leverage to reduce the cost of creating the curriculum and learning content, move from the one (aka Khan Academy) to the many (aka Skillshare, “Every room can be  a classroom, and every person can be a teacher of some thing”)

Ki Mae Heussner at GigaOm has a slightly different summary of the talk: Fred Wilson on ed tech: 4 takeaways for educators.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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