shuebrook

REVIEW: Anouk, I am very impressed with your concept for Safe2Summit. You demonstrate deep knowledge of the market and the domain that your product seeks to serve, and are adopting the proven “freemium” business model. Your simulated app imagery is very effective. I think your elevator pitch would be stronger if you could include some mention of the MARKETING and product DIFFERENTIATION elements. I love the partnering/sponsorship aspects, your high awareness of global standards and government regulatory bodies, and your plans to align with safety requirements and to leverage public resources that will inform your project. These combine with your clear addressing of the ASK and RETURN aspects to convince me to invest in your venture! Re. your team, I feel it would be more effective to provide brief bios of each member, so we know what kind of expertise and experience each one brings to the endeavour. Also: would you offer different percentages of profits to different levels of investment? I may feel more compelled to get involved if I knew how much of that 55% IRR I might be able to secure for myself! Lastly, you might consider getting involved with Mountain Equipment Co-op for your Canadian market growth (https://www.mec.ca/en/explore/partnerships ). You might also get cross-promotion from conservation and wildlife NGOs if you consider adding crowd-sourced data collection or citizen science features ( https://www.bustle.com/articles/93141-6-citizen-science-apps-that-use-your-phone-to-help-aid-important-research ) into your app. There are so many opportunities for this excellent venture! Well done!

REVIEW: Jessica, I find this to be an excellent presentation and an overall very strong venture proposal! Your elevator pitch addressed the PAIN POINT and the SOLUTION but could have been even better with a brief mention of the DIFFERENTIATION and CHAMPIONSHIP aspects that are typical of strong proposals. Those elements, however, were NOT missing from your venture pitch, which did a great job of showcasing your well constructed team and some of the unique value propositions of G-Interact. I feel your MARKETING component could be stronger with more detail. For example, you say the product will “be marketed as an interactive educational tool to Google Classroom users and educators of any age group”? Are you going to target student users with advertising, or… what would that look like exactly? How would you reach existing G Suite for Education users? How about having a strategy that includes a sustained presence in online developer communities, or offering workshops at EdTech Team Google Summit events ( https://www.edtechteam.com/summits/) in your initial target area? I also recommend you consider availing yourself of the resources and business development opportunities at the Google Developers Launchpad ( https://developers.google.com/community/launchpad ). That would not not to help your team internally, but also provide increased credibility and exposure for your project! Good luck with this exciting venture!

REVIEW: James, I really enjoyed your venture pitch! Both you elevator pitch and your venture pitch addressed the PAIN POINT, the SOLUTION, and DIFFERENTIATION aspects of a strong proposal. You app demo with mockups was effective and reflects hard work with attention to pertinent detail. I feel your overall pitch would benefit from detailing more MARKETING elements. You state that you’ll depend on “widespread promotion to middle school math teachers”, but you don’t say HOW the promoting will happen. Including strategy details like having a booth at specific edtech conventions, or partnering with the sales teams of established educational publishers like Pearson or McGraw Hill wold help. The CHAMPIONSHIP aspect could be improved as well, by adding some team members (even fictitious) that can contribute app development and marketing expertise and experience. I recommend you look at a company like Sight Reading Factory (https://www.sightreadingfactory.com/) as a model with assets you can emulate. Overall, a compelling concept and a strong presentation; well done!

Team Wearables, THANK YOU for a fascinating, well-written, well-structured, well-paced and informative OER experience! I found your use of WordPress a refreshing and effective platform choice, especially the way you used a third party commenting plug-in to improve the UX compared to WP’s native equivalent. I loved learning about e-tattoos and enjoyed the companies you chose to profile. The section on design principles was also very useful, and I think I will apply it to some of my own work in the future, so thanks for that as well! Overall, you’ve created an excellent OER! The only >small< element I think could be improved is the video on the SAMR model. The one you used isn’t horrible — there are MANY out there that ARE — but it doesn’t give a good example for REDEFINITION in my opinion. Replacing a paper written essay with a collaborative public blog, an audio podcast and a fully edited video is replacing ONE technology with several, which is NOT a practical application of Puentedura’s theoretical model. How could a teacher realistically find the time to redefine that essay assignment with all those multimedia activities? Anyone can redefine an activity if the activity is radically changed. How can technology be used to redefine a student writing an essay on paper with a pencil? How about a speech recognition system, or a tablet with software that converts survive writing into digital text? (You get the idea...)

My pleasure! Sorry for the confusion!

Hi Kendra. As I said, I found your use of Prezi to be quite effective! Did you perhaps intend your reply here (directly above) for someone else?( I find this WP format of manually expanding and collapsing comment boxes can be difficult to keep track of...)

Hi Kendra! Related to your idea about summarizing academic articles for users, the point I was making in my critique was that your OER would be much more authoritative if you quote and summarize more academic articles in the content of your OER (i.e. in your Prezi slides). We expect every video and PDF from every microlearning company to talk about how their products are rooted in science, but how do we know all that isn't just sales speak? A perfect example is in Module 2. 100% of your "Benefits" and "Drawbacks" content is copied/pasted quotations from a single sales page for Atomi Systems' "ActivePresenter" software. Even though the ideas may be good, they are not CREDIBLE and RELIABLE, because they are marketing material that doesn't itself reference any research. If you add in some non-profit / research based sources for these same ideas, you can reference them and have a compelling section that doesn't undermine the credibility of the OER.

Congratulations Team Microlearning! I really enjoyed learning about this important phenomenon and will be looking to put it into practice in my school next year. I liked the “check for understanding” activities after each module and found the use of Prezi in this context quite effective. I do have some suggestions for improvement: 1) I think you should replace the ERPINNEWS article with a different source. The poor quality of the writing definitely lets you OER down! 2) I feel your site would benefit from highlighting a few more research based sources of information, and removing some of the marketing content. If you rely too much on industry sales pitches in some sections, you risk losing some of the trust and authority that you’ve worked hard to establish in other parts of the site. Thanks again for introducing us to this exciting and promising learning modality!

Kirsten, thanks for your enthusiasm and the feedback re. the mobile-friendly design. We're so glad it made a difference for you!

Amanda, thanks for your (typically) critical eye on this point; we appreciate the thought you put into your feedback! Also for your compliments. We agree that the ETHICS issues with AI cannot be overstated, and will consider how we might give them more weight in our OER.