Sydney Hamilton

Hi Marc, I think you’re on to something really good here! I love the idea behind your app, and the success of Pokemon Go is a strong indicator of how quickly AR apps can gain traction. I can definitely see the value for both educational and tourism sectors. I likes your talking head video for your elevator pitch – I think keeping it clean and simple kept my focus on you and what you had to say which was great, and also very professionally done which enhances your credibility. Your slide deck is also very well done, easy to follow and beautifully designed, again, supporting the professionalism and credibility of your venture. Your idea is well researched and I feel the emphasis on the future of the VR and AR markets are important in gaining buy-in for a tool of the future. My main criticism would be that including print advertising in your marketing plan would be a bit off-putting as an investor as print advertising is pretty dead. I think some sort of experiential marketing tactic; using brand ambassadors and street teams, for example, with tablets to create buzz on the streets and give users a chance to actually experience it first-hand (and maybe download the app at that moment) could be a better use of your marketing dollars. I didn’t see anything regarding revenue generation, but I would assume there would be a cost to download the app? Or free with pop-up ads? Also, I did get a bit confused at the difference between CityLearn Ventures and Neighbourhood AR. Overall though, I am very impressed and would definitely consider investing in your venture.

Hi Ryan, I really like how your idea for VR in the Round breaks away from some more traditional uses for technology in education to focus on arts and performance. Having been actively involved in theatre and music in my k-12 education, I can see how an immersive learning experience that uses VR can encourage creativity and participation in theatre for students that don’t have access to these opportunities at their own schools. While I would argue that schools that don’t have budgets for performing arts would likely not have the budget for VR hardware either, your video demos show how a similar experience can be had using 360 videos on a desktop. I think that what also makes this more viable stems from both unique value proposition, that it’s ahead of the game (building for the needs and technologies of tomorrow, not today) and that performing arts can draw you in emotionally, potentially making an investor more vested dur to personal interests. I felt your decision to do your elevator pitch inside a theatre was clever and caught my attention right away. My one criticism would be in the flow of the website as your main venture pitch, as I had to click around a bit to make sure I found everything I needed to read about and learn. I would also recommend presenting a bit more information about the market and your buyers before the $50K ask so that I had all the facts first. Overall, I was really impressed with your venture idea and hope to see similar ventures come to life to put more emphasis on the value of performance arts and creativity in education. Thank you for sharing your idea with us.

Hi Brogan, in my experience, the proof is in the pudding and the time you put into your prototype would go a long way for an investor. Your elevator pitch sparked my interested right away, In my field, investment or buying decisions are hardly made without a POC (proof of concept) so I think it was a wise choice. Like you said,for the scope of this assignment, you could have gone a bit deeper in your “More Information” page for a more data-driven decision, but I think it was concise and sufficient to get the investor interested in learning more. Nice work!

Hi Sarah, Thank you for introducing us to Open Teach. I really enjoyed your pitch and think that your app addresses a growing need in this digital age for knowledge creation. I especially like the value you place on teaching as a way of learning within your app. Overall, I think your idea is brilliant but feel that it would require further development and refining for an EVA to have enough information to make an investment decision. I felt like I had a lot of information about the idea and why it was important, but not enough about the “how” the active knowledge creation happens as a user of the App. I’m, still having a hard time understanding where the creativity happens within the apps, and how it differentiates from other teaching and learning apps. For that reason, I would have liked to see a bit more on the market outlook and how you intend to generate revenue and exit strategy as part of your pitch, as I feel time would have allowed for this. I felt that your decision to use TouchCast Studio to create your videos was excellent, and I feel it served the purpose well. I liked that I could see you, but that there was additional content introduced to reinforce what you were saying. At the same time, I would have liked to have seen a bit less overlap between the content from your elevator pitch and your investor’s pitch; I found that because it started the same, I found that the second video didn’t capture my attention in the same way and actually had to double check that I wasn’t re-watching the same video.I also felt that asking for the $100,000 investment to be a bit too much as part of the elevator pitch as I felt that I didn’t have enough information at that point to asses. I would want to know where this number came from, does it cover developer/partner salaries, etc? All in all, I think this is a great idea and we need more tools that support creative learning as part of the traditional education system, and an app like open is a good start.

Kudos Adaptive Learning team for developing a fantastic OER. I am in the process of redesigning some of the training programs in my workplace and adaptive microlearning has been a very big focus in our strategy towards improving the learning experience. I recently shared this video with my team, which you may also find interesting: I liked your choice to do a podcast for your introduction. I’m not sure if that was intended as the primer or more of an “about us” type replacement, but combined with your poll’s and the persona quiz, I was hooked from the first page – Thank you. One suggestion would be to add two more buttons after the persona quiz, so that I could jump straight to the persona that I was identified as (rather than having to go through Susan first) – not a big thing but worth considering for your final product. I think that what I appreciated most about your OER is the intention and thoughtfulness behind the use of persona’s, highlighting how important it is to cater the learning experience to the unique requirements of the learner, and how learning is adapted based on prior knowledge and understanding, as well as application. I also like the variety of the interactivity between the polls, discussion boards and flipgrid videos. I learned a lot here will 100% be referring back to this resource as I explore adaptive learning options in my work.

Hello team AI. Thank you for all your hardwork into producing this OER. I learned a great deal about AI tutors sepcifically and this definitley gave me further insight into how these could be applied in my own work. At the same time, based on some of the examples that you shared, I feel that the technology for AI tutors is not advanced enough yet to provide real value, and may prove to be more of a source of frustration than a positive learning opportunity where it is now. In terms of your OER, I can see that your team put a lot of hard work into this and as a result you covered a lot of material. I think it could be refined a bit more to be more consumable as I felt it was a lot to go through before getting to the interactivities. I liked your survey and that you gave us the opportunity to ask our own personalized question, and the inclusion of your own chatbot. One thing I would suggest is perhaps brief survey at the end to assess if the learner would change their responses, or has any questions at that point that they would like answered after having more insight into the content. I would also suggest adjusting the timing for your AI primer as I personally found the automatic slide animations to be much too fast to keep up with the text, and had to pause and control it manually. Overall, I really enjoyed this week's lesson - thank you!

Firstly, thank you team DT for introducing me to Visme. This is such a fantastic resource and I will be recommending a team license it to my organizaition for a number of projects we have in the works. Graphic Designers to build manuals in InDesign are incredible expensive, so I love the user friendly nature of this resource and that projects can be worked on by a number of people at once. Also, I think your tea, did a fantastic job creating this OER and educating us about the landscape of digital textbooks in education. I especially liked that you used a variety of different mediums to present your information, and that you did not rely solely on text and pictures. I also thought your idea to do the stopmotion video as an introduction to your OER was clever and certainly got me excited about learning more. One thing I would have liked to see in one of the chapters (likely Chapter 2) would have been some of the pitfalls of digital textbooks and why the move to purely digital is slow despite the fact that there are so many positives. At the same time, I really enjoyed this weeks lesson, and can clearly see that a great deal of work went into preparing this lesson. Thank you for the great kickoff to our Opportunity Forecasts!

Scratch is a remarkable tool and what Michell has created as an open source educational tool is quite remarkable. I would also imagine that the software that he developed previously is also quite powerful, though I am not familiar with it myself which I agree makes him a very successful entrepreneur. Based on the information provided here, however, I feel that as an aspiring entrepreneur that he may not be the best role model; primarily because of how the platform came about and the team that was involved. I think that as an entrepreneur, it would be difficult to relate to someone who had the minds of 63 of the some of the world's brightest minds from MIT and the like voluntarily working on a project with me. While I think it speaks to the importance of working with a strong team of like-minded individuals, especially if you are trying to create something that will be free to use, I don't know that it's a realistic expectation from many entrepreneurs. I don't feel that this takes anything away from the incredible tools tha the and his team have built, his success as an entrepreneur or that educational value that scratch brings to children aroudn the world; I simply feel that how his venture came about based on the story told here, may be quite different to what many entrepreneurs may be faced with (e.g. was his work/research funded by the university?).

Thank you for introducing me to a new LMS Lee, and for showcasing Sandi's success. Sandi is definitely a role model for aspiring entrepreneurs, female entrepreneurs and women in tech as a whole. I believe the wealth of knowledge and experience (including the value in the cultural element that Lee highlights) that comes from her time at Amazon is also a strong indicator that Skilljar will also have a similar, people-first culture which is especially important in the changing tides of the workplace. Sandi's story is inspirational and she is setting a standard for equality in the workplace, which is also imporatnt for budding entrepreneurs to see.

Thanks for sharing this report Marc. This is something I have thought about quite a bit myself, and what we can do as a society to better prepare young learners for real world. It seems that so many young grads feel surprised and overwhelmed by what they are faced with in the real world. I especially liked the proposed commitment to ensuring that 100% of grads have a practical work placement of some sort. The report also highlights that its not about being an expert coder, but rather having fundamental digital skills. I recently learned about the changes that Canada Learning Code (formerly Ladies Learning Code) have made in the last year in breaking into coding education for educators (with their code mobile), and bringing this various communities accross all provinces in Canada. Their programs are broken down into simple steps. designed to be teachable for people who know very little about tech and coding, and their goal is to bring a basic level of digital literacy to all, rather than focusing on making kids and teachers coding pros. With financial support from the Canadian Government and several organizations, they received enough funding to make this a priority so it will be interesting to see what strides that this organization, and others like it, can make in better preparing our youth for the future of work.