I am happy to announce that we are working on the setup of the fourth E-Teachers Conference. As topic for this edition we chose something that should interest online teachers who are planning to generate revenue with their products and services online:
Monetization of Educational Content
Last friday I hosted the third edition of the E-Teachers Conference about the Future of Teachers in a Global and Digital World. The panelists were Christopher Grant of Sclipo, Duane Sider of Rosetta Stone, Shiv Rajendran of LanguageLab and Stephan Stephensen of Mingoville.
All of them did great presentations covering various aspects of the changes teachers will have to face in this changing environment.
Yes, we are back!
The third edition of the E-Teachers Conference will be on November 27th at 6PM CET.
There was a great discussion going on in the chat of this ETCon. Below this post you will find the complete transcript for you to download.
As I could not answer all your questions during the conference or get deeper into the conversations that were going on, I would like to do it now.
Before starting to give you my personal review I have to thank a couple of people. Let me start with Vikrama Dhiman of WiZiQ who supported me all the way from the planning to the ETCon today. I think he did an amazing job, so Kudos to you! You made the second ETCon a really smooth event for everyone involved.
Secondly I want to thank the members of the panel. Jason West of Languages Out There who did a great presentation about communities and shared emotion, Bernhard Niesner of busuu who gave us an inside view of his company and his thoughts on self regulating communities and the difference between in house developed content compared to crowdsourced content, Kevin Chen of italki who talked about problems of international / global platforms and the right member mix and last but not least again Vikrama Dhiman who explained how non educational companies use crowdsourcing and that crowdsourcing not always needs a community.
And of course I have to thank the great audience. You asked awesome questions that led to a resourceful discussion of the panel at the end. Thank you for attending the ETCon and spreading the word. I really appreciate your interest!
Although I am the initiator of the E-Teachers Conference I would like to share my personal point of view of the evening mixed up with some comments I got in chats and via email.
Let me start with a general overview.
I opened the ETCon with my provocative theme “Lesson Slides and Virtual Classrooms. Do we really need them?”. The presentation had three parts: thoughts about slides, thoughts about webmeetings and thoughts about users.
Basically I explained that both slides and webmeetings are not “education natives” meaning they were developed for the corporate world for a whole different use. I also mentioned the problems involved using lesson slides like boredom and information overload and with webmeetings like weak internet connections and overstrained users.
In the part about the users I mentioned the different kind of user types today, the digital natives, settlers and immigrants and that most of the potential customers today belong to one of the last two groups.
My conclusion was that on Monday I did not really need a virtual classroom to teach but that I see potential for the future when the majority of potential users won’t have infrastructural problems to use them anymore.
Just finished a talk with Bernhard Niesner, Co-Founder of busuu.com about the E-Teachers Conference. He told me that he did not know about it because I did not mention it in my blog. Funny, I did not even realize that I have not yet blogged about it.
Let me fix this.
