Lots of teaching platforms have experimented with the idea of “instant lessons”. A student comes on the platform and wants to take a lesson right away, clicks on the topic he/she wants to learn and picks a teacher or tutor who is online at this very moment.
I wrote about the difficulties on this blog once or twice, nevertheless it seems as if startup founders are quite fancy such a business model, just today I had a nice talk with a founder who thinks about making this part of his tuition service for Math.
Now, one startup even got some substantial funding by prolific investors. So am I wrong in being sceptical about such an idea?
The startup I am talking about is called Shop Squad. It launched at Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH Conference in late February and has now received $1.25 million angel funding by a couple of renown Valley angels like Josh Silverman and David Sacks.
The idea is to connect buyers who don’t know what product to pick based on their personal preferences to experts who give shopping advice via video chat and co-browsing, so pretty much the virtual classroom experience we all know from education 2.0. I remember that after the presentation the same questions I asked myself for teaching platforms came up for Shop Squad, like how to make sure that there is actually an expert online at the very moment I need help to choose the perfect digital camera for me? And, even more interesting, the statement by Mo Koyfman who doubted that consumers (which also includes students online, I suppose) don’t care that much about video calls and that live video was too much of a hype in general. But that’s another story.
Coming back to education 2.0 the remaining questions are
a) is there an actual interest in unplanned, unscheduled, spontaneous live language lessons and
b) if one single platform was able to build a sufficiently big database of teachers around the globe in order to guarantee that at least one teacher will be available for each student at any given time.
The more languages or subjects in general you offer on that service, the more teachers you will need. It seems to be possible with one target language, though. I recently talked with a startup that offers Chinese lessons based on such a 24/7 model and Languagelab has also at least one teacher available in English City at any given time. It might also work in a decent way if you are only targeting one single timezone in order to keep the possible times tight. To make it work on a global scale you needed a huge amount of human resources and I am still not sure if the need for such a service is really there.
On the other hand, if we take into account that people will learn increasingly on the go through various forms of asynchronous content there a growing need of an instant, non-machine generated answer or help may develop. Similar to help desk call centers today. So is the future of live online teaching short one to five minute calls to talk about a very specific question? And if so, could teachers answer those calls simply via their mobile phone on a who answers first will get paid basis?
Picture: vlima.com
