Briar Jamieson

Gordon, I am with you. I want to open up online conferences to anyone that wants to have them. I am 100% in agreement. However, after several discussions with family and friends, everyone thought I should narrow the market to help focus marketing, building a reputation etc. It is one of the reasons, I put consulting to others in one of my revenue streams, lol, because I agree with you, why would I not provide conferencing to anyone. Hmm. Do you have further thoughts on this?
</br? Also, what are your experiences with online conferences, in what sector? I was unable to find direct competition or models for online conferences. It is really separated by the platform solutions only, and then smaller associations providing broadcasting of F2F presentations or one off webinar series. Yeah, let me know if you have specific examples of others doing this. Thanks!

Hi Chris, Thanks so much for your review of ONCON. Yes, 10% return, writing error on my notes that I mistakenly transferred over. That would be a big mistake. Also, I agree, too many overlapping skills in the team. Diversifying important, business decisions so difficult eh? Do you cut people you have worked with for years. Maybe. I need to develop a thicker skin. :)

Yes, Ugh, storage. I agree, I will need a few servers to store all of the videos generated. It is amazing to me how much space it takes! Although space is getting cheaper and cheaper! I can remember when I paid $100 for 1G! Lol! Now I can get what, a couple of Terabytes for the same!? Thanks for your comments.

Hi Esther, Yes, one of the risks is not getting enough registrations. What I wanted to do, is push that risk down a bit. I was thinking along the lines of a wedding event - the newly married couple pay for a certain number of guests but if not all of the guests come they are still responsible for paying for the quoted amount (after a certain time). Marketing directly to journals who already have a database of users, subscribers, I felt would reach a targeted group. However, I do love your idea of partnering with libraries. I wonder if libraries can share their data on journal usage etc.

Oh, and you totally caught me by pointing out a very important flaw in my business design. I am loyal to a fault. I have worked with the dream team for over seven years. We have been bumped around and always come out on top. I trust them with my money and reputation. I know I could develop this with other people but I would hate to loose someone from the team because of initial money flow restrictions. It is probably why I will never make it as an entrepreneur, sigh.

Hi Noan, thanks. I agree monetizing will be tricky. One of the ways I was trying to work around this, is to provide the service to journals not end users, this way I bill for the event not charging each individual. This reduces my risk of having not very many registrations which would be taken on by the hosting business.

Hi Erin, thanks so much for your comments. I wonder as an academic traveling to conferences, why do you think there are not more online academic conferences? It seems only natural to me, but then I have been online and learning online for so long already.

Noan,
From what I have come to know of you over this course, I believe that you can make anything happen. I also fully expect to see you at TED in the next five years (less?).

Game-based learning. Fun and educational and I agree that all ages are engaged in game play whether digital and online or even with board games around the table. I liked your stats about how many hours students play. I saw Richard Van Eek (https://members.educause.edu/richard-van-eck) speak about game-based learning a few years ago and it is really amazing the research that has been done on this area of education; his work might be interesting to you. One component that really struck me was how differently men and women play, I can't remember the specifics, but I do want to point this out to keep in mind incorporating different elements to appeal to all students.

I like how you are integrating the table game as well as the digital. It makes sense to bring this together. That you are leveraging a system that has worked in RLGBL means that you have worked out some of the game flow issues so you can better program for digital. That being said, I am sure you will try to avoid the trap of a simple digitalization. I have seen great F2F lessons that are put online but this fails to then capture the affordances of digital capability, and just becomes something too flat and text heavy. Just a caution, only because your excellent team is so immersed in the product, would hate for you to fall to a group-think mentality. Maybe try to bring in someone from outside to input and question your product.

When you review your competition, I wonder, when looking at Hunter's World Peace Game, why GENgine would not just approach them and design the digital component to it. Seems like it would be a great partnership? If you are already doing this for the games you have developed in your classes, try to capture a bigger game and do it for them. Instant client base. Maybe?

Overall the ask seems small for what you are going to accomplish in 6 months. Might want to add a software architect not just programmers, you will need a much bigger platform as you are developing a fully system with multiple functions (game, learner roles, assignments) and you will need some kind of database for all of the information too; a specifications document and system design before the UI. Also Webhosting seem exorbitant, what else does this include? Whereas IT support seems too low, way too low. (lol from my experience anyways...ugh).

You use the term Digital Natives, I get it and I think the population outside of academia gets it and it makes sense. I wonder though because the term is dated, and the concept criticized, you might want to seek out a different term. I would hate for GENgine to be seen as ill informed when it comes to pedagogical considerations just because one term amongst all for your good work make the product seem more play and populist than pedagogy.

Love the idea and can't wait to download the app!!

Sincerely,
Briar

Dear Tomek,

It is not easy to put your work out there for others to review, I think it takes even more courage to share this personal story and venture when it has even more immediacy to the wellbeing of your learners. I send you a warm virtual embrace.

Your 1 minute pitch was definitely more marketing oriented, rather than geared to an investor market. However, given that in your environment, funders may not really understand what you are trying to do, giving them an example of what the beneficiaries will hear and how they might be feeling might give investors something more tangible. I also loved the imagery and voiceover. I thought your metaphor of a bamboo forest and other students being in the same place a sense that they were not alone. It was peaceful and meditative. At about 0:54, you might want to change the line about Bamboo Dan leading them to another way or the light, it felt a too focused on Bamboo Dan being the only answer.

How it works. Appreciate that you have an example in the Good2Talk site. It gives me a clearer picture of what you are trying to accomplish. However it also seems like you are trying to do a lot more than counselling, you are also trying to be a place for learners to engage with professors about homework. I wonder if you might be doing too much and then your customer doesn't know exactly how to engage. Also because of the professor presence will that confuse the anonymity of the site?

You might want to consider just focusing on one aspect, it will help you focus your campaign and allow others to understand how they might fund or volunteer with the project. If you have too many things going on you will have less time to vision and steward all of the different areas; perhaps grow each section in different phases.

Costs. I see that you have lots of volunteers and people that want to support the initiative. This is great, the momentum in crisis brings a lot of energy to the mission. I wonder though about how you make this sustainable. Who are paid? Who volunteer? What are your fixed and variable costs. You should start breaking this down. Also as a Not-for-Profit, you can calculate volunteer hours as in kind contributions and show funders in dollar amounts how much they are saving by having volunteers.

Wonderful initiative Tomek! I wish you every success in this project! Let me know when there is a Donate Now button on your site.

Sincerely,

Briar

Argh. My spacing all off. Trying links again for other conferences

Hi Chris, Love the suit and tie. Professional pitch. Nice details about OER. Great company name. And you are talking about OERs a topic that I am developing a certain passion for, 5 stars from me. Let’s talk details… As others have mentioned, assessment and online is a huge need. I also think your added angle is niche and gaining in popularity so your company would be ahead of the game. You are satisfying a very specific market so you are aligning principles and price for the most impact. All good, nice to be a bit of a scrappy underdog amongst the big players in publishing online content and assessment ;) Also, ‘hear, hear’ about the limitations of open textbooks. I love them, don’t get me wrong, but I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis that they are limited to text (although more and more are introducing links to resources, images, etc.). Again another point in the favor of your company. You mention OER and online assessment. What I want to see more of, is what guiding principles are you using in your business that are Open beyond just housing OER assessment tasks?. Will your platform be developed using Open Source code? Will you be uploading code back to the community, say to, GitHub? My understanding from your website is that you are going to build a website that acts as a repository for text type questions and these questions. Your team is primarily tech and marketing (great team BTW), but it does make me wonder about content development. Will your OER assessment tasks will be community generated? The platform might be a bit a bit slower to populate without dedicated content designers. Also, from what I gather, you also want to build a platform that student can log into. This creates another layer of complexity for your technology build, but not out of the question. Your marketing plan is well thought out. I will suggest however that you attend the conferences that will connect you with Open Educators, you are going pretty main stream. Try these ones: OE Global OER16 OpenEdConference CreativeCommons Summits OpenStax Conf Well done Chris!