Time for a Revamp

The back story:

About twenty years ago, I designed a new system of education, got my husband to create a website that served up interactive lessons from a database, and then started a lab school to try out the ideas on other people's children.  I spent a very intense five years continuously refining the system...and then left the school (which closed shortly thereafter) to deal with some health and family situations.  Academically the school was a HUGE success but it was never strong financially.  The website has limped along since then with distance home school students and tutoring students but it's overdue for a major upgrade.  A 14-year-old website is pretty ancient in internet years!

Today:

With my health on the mend and my kids up to school age, it's time for the website's revamp,.  I've created detailed website mockups and gotten a database developer to create the new backend functionality.  Now I just need a new web designer (we're upgrading from .ASP to .NET) to plug in the front-end functionality and we're in business!

Since I work really well with deadlines, I decided to take the 6-week "Technology Entrepreneurship" course at Stanford to work through my business plan and get some feedback from other people.  With any luck, I'll also find a couple of super capable people who are interested in going into business with me, because if there's one thing I learned during the five years running the school, it's that one person shouldn't be the CEO, school principal, chief lesson writer, bookkeeper, and custodian. 

Here's my invitation to join the team in the Stanford class:

This team will be studying the viability of revamping an online education website that has been in use since the year 2000. The new system will allow anyone to quickly and easily create an online, interactive, multimedia, multilingual lesson with an accompanying hands-on lesson plan; or use any units or lessons. The old system was tested and continuously refined for five years in a private lab school plus several years with home school students; all that experience, along with hundreds of lessons, will be ported over to the new system. In addition, the new system will allow for greater flexibility and feedback for users, be platform independent, and add a few new features.

 

This one engine will power three different vehicles, each with a different targeted customer base. In the Open Curriculum Project anyone can create a lesson about anything; lesson writers (typically classroom teachers creating custom lessons for their own use) will get free credits to use any lessons with their students, while most paying users will be home school students. With the Private Curriculum Project, lesson writers can restrict access to lessons (i.e. for employees or paying members) with a paid account or charge the public extra for premium content. Once we’ve used these two projects to work out all the bugs, we’ll launch the Complete Curriculum Project, where selected teachers will create assigned mini-units of exceptional lessons as part of our K-12 level Scope and Sequence in exchange for huge curriculum grants for their schools; all of these lessons will also be tagged for use with the Common Core and other state academic standards for use in public and private schools.

I will be looking for three specific start-up partners after this class, but you can also just join the team for fun. Specifically, we'll need a business manager, a technical lead and a chief lesson writer. Please note that this course is only intended to research the viability of the idea and make changes to the business plan; if you're a good match for one of those three positions and join the team for the class, this is your chance to show that you would also make a great business partner. But joining the team for the class is not a guarantee of a percentage ownership in the company, since the company is well past the initial idea stage. Please feel free to message me if you have more specific questions about this.