JonBischke.com

For the last six months we’ve been working on something at eduFire that I’m very excited to be able to announce for the first time. It’s called eduFire SuperPass and it’s the best answer I can give (while being far from a complete one!) to the question: How can we change education?

Education is mired in all sorts of problems. The cost of education is increasing rapidly (the total cost of a year of college at many schools now is about $50K/year) and recent evidence suggests that higher education might, for the first time ever, provide a negative ROI.

Education is a raw deal for many teachers too. Most teachers take home a small fraction of the revenue that is generated every time they teach. I saw this first-hand when I worked for Kaplan and took home about $15 in pay for every $100 in revenue that Kaplan generated from my teaching services.

What we’ve built and are taking live today is eduFire SuperPass and here’s how it works. For $29/month you receive unlimited access to any SuperPass class on eduFire. Right now there are over 80 SuperPass classes on eduFire and we expect that number to increase greatly in upcoming weeks. These are live classes with actual instructors, not simply self-paced, computer-generated classes.

We feel that eduFire SuperPass delivers its primary value on three fronts:

Convenience – In talking with students one of the primary concerns they shared with us was that taking traditional classes just didn’t work for them. Perhaps it was their busy schedule or that they were traveling all the time or any of a number of other reasons why getting in the car and driving to a building to sit in an uncomfortable chair and listen to a professor seemed so old school (no pun intended!). With eduFire, they were able to sit at home (or their office, hotel room, etc.) and learn virtually any hour of the day.

Cost – Taking a traditional language or test prep class runs hundreds or even thousands of dollars. In boom times perhaps this worked but let’s face it, these ain’t exactly boom times. Saving money is on just about everyone’s mind these days and eduFire SuperPass is a great way to do it. We wanted to price our service at a point that made world-class education accessible to as many people as possible and where you didn’t have to take on the huge burden of student debt to learn.

Quality – Of course the biggest question we get about eduFire is about the quality of the classes. After all, most people go to places like Berlitz and Kaplan and The Princeton Review because they’ve been told that these companies have the highest quality instructors. So that would seem to be a good reason to go there instead of eduFire except for the fact that eduFire also has instructors who’ve taught at places like Berlitz, Kaplan and The Princeton Review. And I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret: Not all those folks who teach at places like Berlitz, Kaplan or The Princeton Review are great teachers. At least at eduFire you’re given full access to all the feedback on the instructors (try getting that at a tradition school) and you can review a whole heckuva lot of information on them before deciding whether to take their class.

We also feel eduFire SuperPass is a great deal for teachers. As a teacher you’ll pocket the majority of the money that we collect from SuperPass subscribers. We already have teachers making $50-$100 an hour teaching on eduFire and at our current growth arc that number is likely to be $100-$300 an hour (or more!) by the end of the year. That gets us excited, not because it’s all about the money but because those types of numbers are likely to attract into teaching people who’ve never taught before. You know, the really smart kids who go off to Harvard Law or to work on Wall Street. Maybe they’ll stick around and do what I think might be the most noble thing you can do with your time. Teach.

You see, at the end of the day, it’s not all about the money for us. $29/month helps us create a sustainable company and helps our teachers make a living doing what they’re most passionate about. In our view, education is the foundation upon which the rest of society is built. And, as we’ve written about numerous times before (e.g., here, here, here & here) we think there’s a real (and massive) opportunity afoot to completely revolutionize how people around the world learn. We’re far from the only ones who are working on this. There’s a great group of companies and organizations out there who are seeing a world that doesn’t exist and asking, in the words of George Bernhard Shaw, “Why not?”

So I’ll encourage you to give SuperPass a try (we’re offering a 7 day trial for only $1 to get you kicked off). Or if you decide SuperPass isn’t right for you do me a *huge* favor and drop me a line (jon at edufire dot com) and tell me what would make SuperPass something you would sign up for. We’re just getting started here and your feedback will be invaluable in helping us create something that thousands (and ultimately millions) of people someday use and get a ton of value from.

Thanks for bearing with me here. I tend to get a little excited about this stuff.

P.S. One more thing before I forget…I’m teaching a special series of Entrepreneur Bootcamp Classes. They’re normally $20 per class but they’re included in SuperPass so those classes alone should be worth the price of your Pass. Hope to see you in class!