Last week we announced the second phase of Curious’ plan for world domination: opening up the Curious publishing platform to all teachers (of all topics). When we launched Curious this May we started with over 100 hand-picked teachers offering over 500 lessons in topics ranging from pipe soldering to beer brewing to Calculus. Those numbers have now swelled to over 400 teachers and 3000 lessons, but we’ve still been inviting teachers onto the platform.
On Friday we officially opened up our lesson-building platform to anybody who wants to teach on Curious--no application required. This is a really exciting step for us because we’ve always intended Curious to be a place where teachers of anything can reach the world’s learners without our intervention. But to do this has required a lot of work.
First, we had to perfect the Curious LessonBuilder, which is the online software that turns flat videos into interactive Curious Lessons. If you’ve taken lessons on Curious you know that we have our own LessonPlayer that breaks lessons into conceptual sections, offers clever exercises to make sure you are paying attention, and allows documents or products to be attached to the lesson. You can even send videos or photos to the teacher for feedback. The LessonBuilder software is the way that we have been “assembling” Curious lessons internally, and its WYSIWYG nature has evolved to the point that we feel it is ready for the outside world to use.
Besides the LessonBuilder, we also knew it would be critical to provide a set of tools and resources that helped our new teachers be able to leverage the Curious platform. That’s why we created the Curious Teachers’ Lounge, which includes a learning center, a promo center, and a comment manager--all essential tools for success in online teaching. You can go to www.curious.com/teach and see demos of these tools in action, or go to www.curious.com/curiousteachersupport to watch Curious lessons on how to teach with Curious (so meta!). Or just sign up to be a teacher and give it a shot.
We know world domination is going to take longer than five months, but it’s fun to be ahead of schedule. :o)
--jsk
Originally posted on CEO Unplugged.
