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Get Paid to Teach Anything With New Online Education Platform

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Learnable

Quick Pitch: Learnable allows anyone to create and charge for online courses.

Genius Idea: Many schools have started to take online education seriously. By 2006, 66% of postsecondary learning institutions included in federal financial aid programs were already reporting that they offered some form of Internet learning, and a 2009 report from the U.S. Department of education found that those students who studied in online learning environments performed modelstly better than peers who were receiving face-to-face instruction.

This is great news for people who are looking to work toward a college degree, but there are few affordable parallels for people who just want to pick up a skill. Where does one go for affordable online lessons on homepage design? Javascript programming? Guitar? the Irish Whistle?

For many, the answers can be found on YouTube. But these “lessons” are usually one-off demonstrations rather than consecutive instruction. They lack a community component, and provide no revenue to reward the teacher.

Learnable aims to create what YouTube lacks as an education platform. Anybody can create a course by bundling articles, documents and videos into consecutive lessons that students work through at their own pace. A Q&A section attached to each course becomes its forum, and users can see who else is enrolled in the course.

Like a similar online learning platform called Udemy, Learnable offers an option for teachers to charge their students for lessons. Most lessons are priced around $20, and Learnable collects 50% of each student’s fee. Students can see an outline of course content and a bio of the instructor before they purchase a course, and all courses are approved by the company before they launch.

Learnable was spun off from Sitepoint.com, a resource for web developers that hosts forums, blogs, and, yes, courses on web topics. But the new site, which enjoys many of the same investors but is a separate entity, aims to be more universal than the site it sprung from. Only about a quarter of the 70 courses currently being offered relate to programming or web design (and yes, the Irish Whistle is represented).

Whether or not students will find courses like Learnable’s worth paying for, continue to rely on old how-to standbys like YouTube, or instead migrate to new (but free) learning platforms like Sophia, is what will make or break the new platform. It may also shape how people learn from each other each other in the future.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, education, Learnable, online education

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Bouncr Wants To Be Bit.ly for E-mail [INVITES]

Remember the StartupBus project that launched 38 startups on the way to SXSW? Barely birthed startup Bouncr hatched in less than 48 hours on the San Francisco bus to help shorten and anonymize e-mail addresses, much like bit.ly but for e-mail.

Bouncr’s simple idea for protecting e-mail addresses is really quite genius. Users need only enter an e-mail address to receive a shortened e-mail alias that they can then share out to social networks or with contacts. Users can also customize the assigned e-mail address to their liking.

Co-founder Max Mullen believes Bouncr addresses a real pain point as e-mail addresses are often abused by marketers, spammers and strangers. Bouncr provides e-mail with solicitation controls, so the minute a Bouncr e-mail address is being abused, the user can pull the plug on the alias.

Right now, Bouncr users are super limited in how they can use the product — a side effect of its infancy. Soon, users will be able to manage a bounce list and track responses. The next immediate feature release is boun.cr e-mail addresses (in lieu of bouncr.com e-mail addresses). Five hundred Mashable readers can get priority access to that feature here.

Bouncr’s eventual plan is to release a pro version that will be a white-label e-mail shortening platform for brands. The system will support campaigns and much more sophisticated management tools.

First things first, though, Bouncr will compete Monday against six startups in the StartupBus finale event. Regardless of the outcome, Mullen says he believes the seven-person team has built something with staying power.

More About: bouncr, e-mail, startup, sxsw

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How Foursquare & AmEx Are Putting a Fresh Twist on Loyalty Marketing

In the summer of 2010, Foursquare’s Head of Business Development Tristan Walker and American Express’s Vice President of Global Marketing Capabilities David Wolf started talking about ways to work together to redefine loyalty for local merchants.

The fruit of their conversations is now on display in the city Austin, Texas where 60 merchants — including Whole Foods, Starwood Hotels and Stubb’s BBQ — are offering Foursquare users “spend $5, save $5″ rewards when they load the special and swipe their AmEx cards.

The pilot program started Friday and will run through Tuesday, March 15. Participating merchants have posted “Austin Unlocked” window clings to highlight their participation, and Foursquare users need only register their American Express cards to unlock this new type of special — the Loyalty Special.

Loyalty and Location in Real-Time

On Friday, Walker and I journeyed to Le Cafe Crepe so he could demonstrate the special in action. Upon arrival, Walker launched Foursquare, checked in to the cafe, tapped to redeem the offer and then hit the green “Load to Card” button to initiate the special — see a 44-second walk-through in the video above.

Several minutes later (there was a long line), Walker placed his order, the cashier swiped his AmEx card, and then together we waited for proof that the $5 savings reward had been activated by his swipe. Seconds later, Walker received a push notification alerting him that he had successfully redeemed the special. Soon thereafter, he also earned the “Swiped @ SXSW” badge — for each badge redeemed, American Express is donating $1 to Grounded in Music.

Walker was quick to point out that the experience was nearly frictionless, happening exactly at the time of sale without requiring integration with the cafe’s point-of-sale system.

This is what Walker and Wolf believe is a ground breaking initiative that finally creates the closed loop between a consumer’s digital behavior and their offline spending behavior.

Phase One

Wolf calls the South by Southwest Interactive relationship with Foursquare, “phase one.”

Being a first-of-a-kind program, AmEx decided to not only fund the offer — it’s paying for all of those $5 credits — but to also send out a street team to recruit and train local merchants, print up informative cards for attendees and make QR code pins to get the word out at the festival.

American Express is making the financial investment because it believes it can use phase one to get to phase two: when the company’s local merchant network will be able to set up, run and fund their own offers.

Wolf talks about the partnership as a strategic move on behalf of the company to align itself with a hip startup working on the location-meets-loyalty challenge. “We wanted to partner with a young, innovative company who understands the importance of providing value to merchants,” he said.

Wolf also explains that “American Express is anxious to play in this space because of this closed loop of information that we get.” To create the closed-loop effect, American Express is allowing a third party to access its APIs for card member data, merchant data and transaction data for the first time ever.

Regular Since 2009

On Foursquare’s end, Walker speaks of the startup’s desire to work with a preeminent company that truly understands loyalty, understands customer appreciation and has connections to local merchants. One of Foursquare’s goals, he says, is to recreate the type of brand affinity that consumers have with American Express.

“Foursquare has taken inspiration from AmEx’s ‘member since’ designation as to how we allow our users to evangelize or stake their claim to place. Much the same way that AmEx allows for that ‘member since’ designation, we want to create a ‘regular since’ designation … and allow merchants to communicate with those folks who are the most fervent, and are evangelists for their brands,” said Walker.

In working with AmEx at SXSW, Foursquare is taking this “regular since” idea to the next level, while also delivering on its closed-loop promise to American Express and the participating local merchants.

Next up, phase two.

Disclosure: American Express is a Mashable sponsor.

Image courtesy of Flickr, The.Comedian

More About: american express, amex, foursquare, loyalty, MARKETING, sxsw

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Plugin Prevents Your Passive Aggressive E-mails From Going Out

An upgraded and more full-baked version of ToneCheck, the Outlook plugin from Lymbix that checks the emotional tone of content in e-mail, is available Wednesday. Version 2.0 offers e-mail senders more precise sentiment analysis for less awkward e-mail exchanges.

“If we can stop one e-mail a month from going out that saves a relationship or a sale, then ToneCheck is valuable,” says Lymbix co-founder and CEO Matt Eldridge, who sees the product as message therapy for text-based communication.

An earlier, admittedly clunky, version of ToneCheck was released in July 2010 to solicit feedback from users. The new release is lighter, smarter and more dynamic than its predecessor and includes a much improved user experience and now automatically spot checks negative tone based on user-defined sensitivity levels, while the user is typing.

In examining the first release, Eldridge says the company found that users only cared about potential negative connotations in e-mail, and were far less concerned with being overly positive. As a result, the product has been adapted to zero in on negative tone only.

Best of all, though, is the ToneAlert bar that sits in the lower right-hand corner of the user’s Outlook inbox. Here, e-mail senders will instantly see the bar turn red as negative sentiment is discovered. The user can then hit the tab key to call up the ToneCheck pane to review the problem and see how the tool categorizes content.

Gmail users, I know what you’re thinking, what about us? Eldridge assures me that the startup is working with licensed API partners to bring both a Gmail add-on and a BlackBerry utility to market by the end of the second quarter.

Will ToneCheck ultimately prevent all of our miscommunication pangs? Perhaps not. But, even if all it does is stop us from hastily sending e-mail with emotional overtones, then it’s a step in the right direction.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mikkelwilliam

More About: email, lymbix, Outlook, Outlook plugin, sentiment analysis, ToneCheck

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New Platform Uses Social Features To Improve Online Education

Buried within platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia lies valuable educational content that can reinforce classroom lessons, help self-motivated learners teach themselves new concepts, and upend the way that the world looks at education. But it’s hard to separate this content from the cat videos, ads and uninformed contributions that share the same platforms.

Social learning startup Sophia, which launched its public beta Monday, aims to solve this problem by focusing exclusively on crowdsourced educational material and encouraging users to help sort the academically sound, engaging lessons from the sub-par lessons.

Anybody can compile a “lesson packet” on Sophia using slideshows, videos, audio clips and text that they either upload or pull in from sources like YouTube. About 200 private beta users have already covered lessons ranging from Camera Angles & Shots to Coordinate Geometry of Quadrilaterals.

The idea is to make it easy for students to find reliable knowledge on any topic quickly and efficiently. In the search options, for instance, students can even select specific text books to find corresponding packets. If students still don’t understand something after viewing a lesson, they can post a question to a Q&A board attached to each packet.

CEO Don Smithmier says one of the most common uses of the platform since the private beta that launched in November has been to curate the best content about a given concept from other social media platforms like YouTube.

“There’s a ton of good information on the web, but it’s hard to find,” he says. “And part of it is that if you don’t already know what you’re doing, it’s hard to evaluate the good from the bad.”

After a packet is submitted, Sophia has multiple ways to gauge its quality. When users sign up for the site, they have an option to identify themselves as subject experts, if they hold a degree in that field or teach courses on it. Three such experts need to certify a lesson as “academically sound” before it is labeled as such.

There is also a five-star user rating system similar to the seller ratings at Amazon.com, and lesson creators have lifetime “Sophia ratings” that gauge how successfully they’ve contributed to the community. Other rewards for providing quality content include earning followers via a Twitter-like feature and badges.

sophia_score_image

Sophia.org is free, and the company is committed to barring advertising, as well as the content manipulations that come with it, from the site. But the project isn’t purely a labor of love — eventually the company will sell a white-label version of the product to schools and universities that want their own private, white-label versions of the product. For now, the project is backed by an investment from online education company Capella.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enviromantic

More About: edu tech, education, online learning, social learning, Sophia, startup

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