In the last blog post we talked about discovery vs. creation of opportunities. As I promised in my first blog post, I’m going to use my own entrepreneurial journey as an example or my own entrepreneurial journeys as examples for the academic concepts, which I’ve introduced here. So you might one to read the previous post before you continue. So let’s have a look at the open education platform Crowducate. Btw, for the tech-savvy: Manuel Schoebel (@DerMambo) gives you a great introduction to how we developed the prototype of Crowducate.

Crowducate is a brand new startup project. I seriously believe that the best quality of education emerges when the crowd produces and monitors (i.e. updates) the course. I am radically democratic in this sense. At Crowducate people can create courses, which are divided into sections and, on the next level, divided into “bite-sized” lectures. You consume the courses by reading/watching the material and afterwards you could check your understanding via some quizzes. The key features are that learners can send concrete change requests for the lectures and quizzes and furthermore COPY the course to their own profile in order to develop it into a different course (e.g. change the language or just take some of the sections/lectures as basis for a new course). The key features, namely change request and copy course, are inspired by open source software and GitHub (pull requests and forks). Read more about the vision of open education at Crowducate.

But here comes the big question: Did I discover or create this opportunity? After having heard the story how the idea came into being, you might have guessed the answer. Ok, let’s begin. Some of you might have encountered the new phenomena called MOOC (massive open online courses). Most of the greatest universities and many others are offering their courses for free on education platforms (check out edX and iVersity for starters). In some of these courses more than 100,000 online students participate. Yes, hundred thousand! An example from my own experience in this area might give you a clearer picture about the workings of MOOC. In the course of  my “PhD-years”, I decided to  learn more about programming and after my first MOOCs, I stumbled upon one of the greatest MOOCs out there: Startup Engineering by Balaji Srinivasan and Vijay Pande from Stanford. I loved this course. I couldn’t wait until it started. And I learnt a lot.

However, as Balaji mentioned during the MOOC, delivering an offline course online is not trivial. The lecturers in the course were obviously very busy, having full-time jobs outside the university. It was plainly impossible for them to handle all the students. Some parts of the script or quizzes needed further elaboration. The course’s discussion forum was a tremendous help as loads of knowledgeable people voluntarily helped others out whenever they got stuck. What struck me was their intrinsic motivation. It was the sheer number of volunteers in every course and platform that suddenly made me ask myself: What if we open up the education model in a way that not only the lecturers create a course but also the students? Sure, a discussion forum is a first step but somehow it often seems not enough. It also seems inefficient in some cases as many repetitive questions are answered over and over again. A quick fix of the course’s content could save headaches for future learners. In other words, everybody can copy or request changes and so courses become a little better all the time.

I didn’t search for this opportunity. I stumbled upon it. I had the same problem with many other MOOCs where I wondered if it weren’t more efficient if we used mechanisms of social open source software (Github) to enhance education. To make my concept clearer, I started asking people around what they thought about this and a lot of people could grasp the concept and vision behind it. Thus was the initial idea of Crowducate born. I have a very clear vision for Crowducate but Start-ups have to pivot quite often (i.e. repositioning themselves according to user feedback). So coming back to the question: Was the idea of Crowducate a creation or a discovery of an opportunity? Because I was not actively searching, and uncertainty is more immanent than risk in the narrow sense of the word, it was more of creating an opportunity rather than discovering one.

Image credit: Frederic on Flickr