I've invented a holistic teaching system with lots of implications and potential. Now what?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hey all,

I’m a musician, producer, engineer and music educator. For a number of years I’ve been slowly building a framework for music education that is at long last complete.

It turns out that what I’ve designed has significant potential in several major areas - according to a variety of fellow educators (music and otherwise), students, business types and computer science types. All who have reviewed and discussed the material have been folks I trust immensely -mostly family - mom’s a senior administrator at a private school and advises curriculum development for state of MD, dad’s a retired cryptanalyst specializing in dist computing and neural networks, brother’s a network engineer and designer for FB, before that Google Labs and all have had overwhelming response to this. Several other folks - mostly education, music and computer types at the grad/post-doc/prof level have been extremely interested. In addition, several business types -sales, marketing and development - have been extremely excited by the business potential.

Obviously, it would be shortsighted and foolish to delineate things here on an open forum, but I can give the big picture and hopefully solicit a variety of feedback on where I am and what to do…

Basically, the system is a framework for holistic education and knowledge acquisition. It can utilize third party materials as well as providing a framework for creating content from micro (topic, point, lesson) to macro (unit, course, program, curriculum).

The system as a whole trains for proficiency/mastery of a given area or subject, training a set of core proficiencies and then offering multiple methods for exploring or presenting those core proficiencies through the perspective of several knowledge hierarchies - for example, range, which at the macro level is field or discipline and drilling down to subject, concentration, focus and aspect. There are several other hierarchies that provide other nominative data.

Students complete educational units and their completion of modules or units allows them to expand study areas as they wish. They can study anything in the system, if they’ve achieved the pre-requisites to do so. Differing perspectives of a subject (say, jazz vs classical performance) require different proportions and degrees of various core and perspective related pre-reqs.

There is a comprehensive assessment system that allows for both objective (#/attempts to complete, time) and subjective (aptitude for a given topic against previous students on a bell curve). This metrical system also cross-correlates all data and knowledge linkages in the system itself, with a ton of evaluative and analytical tools.

The combination of core and hierarchical knowledge creates a matrix of information and datapoints of correlation in multiple dimensions, so that any concept or lesson can be evaluated as to difficulty, # and proportion of core competencies addressed or required for comprehension, as well as data linkages across all hierarchy metrics.

There’s a fair bit of tools and metrics built in that allow for tracking progress and evaluating data linkages, and it turns out that you can generate correlations across data as well as infer connections among disparate areas given the right metrics and analysis.

The system is extremely modular, scalable and allows for implementation to current curriculum, development of curricula, facilitated learning and self-study. It works entirely standalone as a brick and mortar style analog system, but really starts to shine when the network and database layers are added in.

The system works great, I’ve been building and testing it for several years. It’s only weakness is that while any educational specialist can use it to derive curriculum, it requires a subject matter expert (SME) to generate new content or analyse third party material for translation to the system.

So where do I go from here?

The educational types tell me to publish it as a tool for curriculum development and analysis, and say it could make some waves there

The business types tell me to position it for corporate training and also for the educational print publishing industry (it’s extreme modularity allows for lots of little components for sale as needed by end user.) and licensing it.

The compsci types are telling me to hook up with high level developers of search and informatic analysis/neural network/AI types and go from there (there’s some amazing things we can do with this that I haven’t discussed here)

The musicians and students tell me to start publishing and developing content and offering it via the web.

Me, I’m a head in the clouds musician with a flair for teaching and a unique perspective. With no money to speak of beyond the necessities - I’m a complete freelancer, and while I keep my head above water, things are fairly tight at the moment and certainly for the next few months.

I lean toward protecting my work and ass, first. Then I’d like to figure out how to start monetizing this, but I also want to put it where it can do some good in the world.

How would you proceed in my shoes?
What are your thoughts, dopers?

2

Sounds like you have CRM software, or something analogous to it.

You should get the names of companies who vend that, and see if they are interested in purchasing it, either to keep it off the market, or to upgrade their own stuff.

The difficulty is that this is multimillion dollar stuff that is usually purchased on bid by government agencies, and only purchased once, although service contracts and such keep a little money flowing in.

Lagan is one such type of software (our government uses it) and it can be modified heavily to match the organization. It can be a single tool, basically the only thing on the computer, and open all links and handle all contacts, or you can use it as a database, or anything in between.

We are using it at about 25% of its possible use right now, I think, but we will use it more as we go forward.

What you have is a great thing, but I bet it is much the same as many things out there. The only way it would take the world by storm is if you offer it free- as I say, it is so expensive, so time consuming, and so all powerful that you won’t have very many sales- if you sold to every major city and school that wanted one, you would still be looking at a maximum in the thousands of units sold…

And that is if they have the budget, and can be convinced that they need it. They will eventually need it, and they will likely go with one of the big names in the CRM field.

The only way I can see that you have an advantage is because of the people you know. Have THEM network for you, and you might make something out of it, if they can market to a city, county, or school district, or other large non-tech (Tech companies will use what they feel like making) company.

Otherwise, I would try to sell your creation, as it doesn’t sound like you want to do the relentless marketing that would be required to sell and then support the beast.

Just my 2-bits, and there may be a lot more possible, this is what I see as this is what I know.

3

Before you attempt to market this system, shouldn’t you test it first?

4

Thanks for the response. I can see where it could be construed as a CRM system, but it’s really - from my perspective, at least - strongest as a teaching and learning system.

A lot of the metrical stuff lends itself to CRM type usage,but the strength of the system is in the application in knowledge/information/data correlations to the learning process, and all elements are geared towards the imparting of knowledge along pathways - self-guided, curriculum guided, or inferred/suggested by the system (I call it SMOKE - scalable matrix oriented knowledge engine)

One of the major strengths is the inclusion and development of creative/soft skills and their integration into a multi-perspective framework. Any area of interest can be pursued along any dimension or linkage pathway, so long as the pre-requisite areas of accomplishment have been completed or assessed satisfactorily.

In addition, multiple frameworks (FIRE - functionally integrated relationship environments) can link to create entire new network of correlations, but in this case, an overarching system of cataloging data allows for plug and play functionality. So, a school could use it for music, and also for history, and also for math. If those FIREs are linked via SMOKE, ideas across those three disciplines become instantly integrated. This pretty much turns it from a teaching system to a research/knowledge system. The system itself doesn’t generate inferences, but provides tools for sorting and ranking probabilities of inferred relationships across data, skills, concepts and disciplines…through any perspective.

Thanks for the feedback. You’ve got some good critique there that bears consideration.

Cheers

5

In what way is it “holistic”?

6

from the OP…
“The system works great, I’ve been building and testing it for several years.”
I’ve been using the framework with students for a number of years and have run numerous simulations of the analytics and metrical systems on larger populations and content frameworks.

It works, quite well, as a teaching and educational system, and shows enormous promise in several other areas, which I have no means to test for on a scale that would be useful for high level critique of those areas. All I can do is run the metrics and data sets through every possible function/analysis/derivation I can come up with. So far, it’s stable and useful as far up as I’ve taken it.

I’m asking for opinions on how other people, given my situation, might choose to proceed from here.

7

I’m hesitant to divulge too much in the way of specifics. Suffice it to say that as core competencies are defined, correlations are drawn among overlapping skills, concepts or application. Linear progress along each of the core competencies is rated, sorted and informed by the curriculum, specific areas of study, breadth and range of that focus and reinforced through variable pre-requisites which adjust based upon previous study, assessment and planned future study.

Basically, the system uses a bunch of variables, linkages between areas of knowledge, student performance and curriculum mandates to generate the available areas of learning progression. Lateral, any vertical, ancillary or supplemental materials or coursework can be accessed at any time, so long as pre-reqs and assessment permit.

A student’s past progress, planned future progress, achievement levels, aptitudes and interests all suggest or require differing areas of study. This is in conjunction with a set curriculum - or in facilitated or self-study - and all variables/formulae can be tweaked for top down control of the process.

8

It sounds like you have tested the system yourself, but this could mean that it is successful due to your personal style and perhaps not because of the system itself. Have you had others use your system yet and if so, how did it compare to your results?

9

Ah, I see your meaning. Others have successfully used the system to some extent…defining curriculum, developed content, used basic analytics. Several other music teacher friends are starting to use it for teaching fundamentals, but no one has taken it into the wild for a full scale test or for really esoteric/advanced subject matter.

The biggest issue with that is that a) content development across a macro scale takes a fair bit of time and b) teaching with the system is easy, developing content is not too hard, but using the analytical tools requires a fair bit of training and experience with the system. It’s not hard so much as specific.

I’ve been simultaneously designing the system as a stand-alone system as well as developing content for it from the perspective of a music educator…so I have a working model for beginning to intermediate music, and lots of content for several instruments, genres, styles, as well as training and reference supplements.

this showcases the system in practice, but I’m just starting to train some others to develop advanced content and curricula and perform analyses and informatic assessments. That’s when things should really start to clarify as to broad applicability.

10

Any good CRM system IS a teaching system, as any user should be able to log in and be able to follow script prompts and use (in lagan a Knowledge base) a searchable database for information.

Everything you have detailed is what CRM software advertises itself as, including the enterprise scaling and the add-ons, connection to third party software, and scripting functions to hide back-end actions from the user.

I wish you well!

11

Interesting, I’ll look further into that. thanks so much!