Online Education Landscaping Pt. 1

This stock footage isn’t corny at all!

I want to start analyzing what’s out there already in terms of tech providers, course providers, and companies doing internal trainings. Leggo!

Let's take riseup as in interesting example of something I'm finding online--that the best software solutions are designed for internal learning. They're built for companies to train their employees. Which intuitively makes sense right (depending on your org's culture)? Oftentimes the people we take care of the best are our employees, and our customers are an afterthought (or I suppose just as often the reverse). All the "features" that riseup is advertising for internal company-wide trainings are things that external students would benefit from:

• Personal goal setting

• Skill development plans

• Peer-to-peer learning

• user-friendly UX

• a mobile app

• Almost makes me wonder if this is where I should be looking for inspiration: not at other courses online, but at companies/software doing internal training for companies

Another one is Thinkific.

• This is an external-facing platform for people who want to build courses online. As opposed to doing it for Skillshare or Udemy, this would allow a client to build a course and sell it straight from their website I guess? You're not getting the cross-traffic that a big course company provides, but you're also getting a larger cut of course revenue, so if you're already doing great on social media this makes sense.

• Doesn't make sense for Foundr, as a lot of these features we could develop ourselves. Better to spend the money once building it internally rather than paying monthly for someone else to host our stuff. If the features were mind-blowing...but they're not.

• Let's move on.

Edmoto is designed for classroom teachers.

• Like Riseup, I gravitate more towards software built for other purposes. The stuff built specifically for what I'm looking for isn't forward-thinking enough--it just does what everyone else is doing.

• It looks essentially like a landing page, with some community features like a Facebook-style "wall" for people to leave messages, start threaded discussions, etc. A place for instructors to post assignments or handouts and stuff. Not especially interesting, though if I was a teacher forced to teach remotely I would be super interested in this--and it's probably free or cheap.

Ziplet is a great example of doing one thing well.

• Exit tickets for every student who completes a course, giving them an opportunity to provide feedback

  • This is such an essential, simple idea that makes me upset! "Why aren't we doing this?!" Obviously we need to be doing this.

Tomorrow I’m going to do a quick run-down of other course providers.