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MentorMob, which launches today, turns educational content on the web into step-by-step "playlists."...
The logic of MentorMob is simple enough. The site posits that there already exists out there, in the tangled and sprawling World Wide Web, the materials to constitute excellent online courses in an array of subjects. MentorMob seeks to create communities that organize all this content into a curated, directed experience. These learning “tracks” were already out there on the Internet. Only, nobody had organized these materials into a step-by-step course--until now. The site could also make money off of corporate clients who would like to use MentorMob for corporate training; it already has a few paying clients. Given that MentorMob draws its content from a wide range of sources, and mostly from non-scholarly websites, how does it remain assured of its quality? MentorMob will largely follow the Yelp and Wikipedia model of engaging an elite crop of users, for whom curating quality on MentorMob is inherently rewarding. “Structured mediated aggregation is the way most [user-content generated] sites are going.... MentorMob is built with the understanding, as many others have recognized, that not all users are alike, with some being readers, others being light contributors, and others being heavy contributors.” MentorMob goes further by developing a site which recognizes “different roles for the same contributor, in some contexts as a mentor and in another as learner." Chinosorn says he foresees a time when MentorMob branches out into more academic or traditional content. He says that the site already has a lot of professional educators who were among the private beta user base, and that his site has been used in a course at Columbia College in Chicago. “Eventually we want to be the Pandora of learning, to personalize learning. So we’d see what type of learner you actually are: We’d see you are a visual kinesthetic learner, and know you need video and Flash games to learn.” MentorMob would then optimize your very own playlist.
“We know that this isn’t better than going to college yet,” Chinosorn admits. “But this could be the beginning of something really big.”
Via susangautsch
