A New Rent-A-Teacher Startup

I have talked at length that in order for learning to occur, you just need a source of information and someone willing to learn it. You don’t need a student wellness center, a dorm, a cafeteria, nor a Deputy Associate Dean of Diversity Coordination and Facilitation (I made that last one up. Or did I?). (see The Empty School: A Thought Experiment)

I have also talked quite a lot about how anything information based that is organized along physical proximity lines is going to be broken up and reorganized. I call this idea the Theory of Disaggregation. In my mind, there is no reason why schools should exist in a location. They should exist as an idea online but not a physical location.

Therefore it comes as no surprise to see an edtech startup like PopExpert. (H/T Techcrunch)If you are trying to learn something you can learn a lot yourself online but sometimes you just want to talk to an expert right? PopExpert is a new site where you can hire experts in a number of fields who will do a live video chat with you to teach you something. It’s still starting up but I imagine things like this will be huge in the future. Imagine you are fixing your toilet. You see something you don’t understand. You can try to do a web search for it, but if all else fails you can connect up with an expert for a few minutes to give you advice. They can even look at your problem via video.

Any industry that is primarily information based can use this technology. As I see it, this adhoc, peer to mentor relationship system is very disruptive to the ways we have learned previously. Awesome. 🙂

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