When it comes to teachers designing their own curricula, one entrepreneur is putting his money where is mouth is:
Teachers are selling their original lectures, course outlines and study guides to other teachers through a new Web site launched by New York entrepreneur Paul Edelman.
The site, teacherspayteachers.com, aims to be an eBay for educators. For a $29.95 yearly fee, sellers can post their work and set their prices. Buyers rate the products.
"It’s a way to pat teachers on the back, to value what they do," Edelman said. "They create the material night after night. The best way to value that is to put a price on it."
Lots of Web sites offer lesson plans that can be purchased or downloaded for free. Yet Edelman says they don’t cover a fraction of what teachers themselves have come up with. By offering them a way to make a buck, the 33-year-old former teacher says he’s found a niche.
He’s banking on it. Edelman cashed in his retirement fund and maxed his credit cards to launch the business in April. He keeps 15 percent of every sale, but he knows the only way he will really make money is by getting "teacher-authors" to pay the membership fee.
So far, he’s recruited about 80. That includes eight former state teachers of the year who got free lifetime memberships.
Recording companies spent years suing Napster and similar file-swapping services into the ground trying to squash MP3s. Then along came Apple, and three years later the record companies are still looking rather dumb. And so it is with the textbook industry. As the article points out (as I did in the link at the beginning of this post), the ever-present problems related to copyright law must be addressed. But the moral, as with the MP3 wars, is this: fighting superior technology is an exercise in futility.