check out www.nixty.com -- we are dreaming too (and building)!

looks good. keep it up man. whatever to help people get a decent education.

Thanks! I appreciate the encouragement.

IIT - most selective school on the planet. Much more competitive than Harvard.

Your comment inspired me to do some research, and the first page I found was this one: http://www.kamalsinha.com/iit/acceptance-rate.html

Given your comparison to Harvard, I thought you might be interested in this paragraph:

>While it seems true that admission rate at IITs is less than even the most selective US school like the CalTech, it does not mean IIT recruits students of higher caliber. In a country like the USA, educational resources were well developed and the enrollment capacity for engineering majors is kept about the same as the number of seniors intending to enter those programs, if not more. It means less desparation. Moreover, there are lot of top-notch schools schools of about equal caliber which decreases their selectivity figures. My guess is that the top 50 engineering schools in the USA exceed IITs in almost all respect and another 100 or so other schools are not far behind.

glen is probably referring to the ratio of the number of successful applicants to the total number of applicants - which is about 1% ( about a decade and half ago, maybe even less now).

I don't know whether it makes any sense to compare the calibre of students coming from colleges in different countries with vastly different cultures in the absence of results from common tests.

However, these people are definitely among the best from a populous country where education has a status closer to religion and is also a ticket to earn legal income disproportionate to efforts expended.

Yes, I knew that's what he was referring to. But the comparison to Harvard was obviously intended to imply something more, thus my quote.

Josh, I'd love to talk more with you about what you are doing. I think what we have overlapping objectives. Please email me at glen at nixty dot com.

This can be a beast, but Porter's work on 5 forces is really illuminating. If you do the hard work, you'll have a really good understanding of where your business fits in the larger context.

Awesome! Great work. I'll read it daily and link to it on our blog! Thank you!

Fantastic. And make sure you take the time to give yourself some credit and submit your posts too, so that people discover what you've written...

How long will it be until recommendations from trusted others and work examples are accepted as better predictors of competency and success over degrees from elite schools?

I love that some fields have already overcome this bias. I'm also glad that our globalized world is quickly making this more and more of a reality.

Exactly...my startup has some funding from a great seed program to work on this. Any suggestions on what a great social recruiting web app would look like?

Thanks, this service seems to be more for one time projects then for recruiting though. Is there anyone trying to replace/supplant resumes (not just upload them, like LinkedIn)?

We are in the form of eportfolios.

I'm using rent-a-coder to develop an iPhone app for an automatic thought record -- a tool that clinicians use to help people challenge irrational thoughts with evidence and rational thoughts. I put the bid out at $300 just to see what happened. I had 3 bids and ended up choosing one w/60+ reviews and a 9.7 (out of 10 rate) for $250. Feel free to email me with any questions. I'd be happy to share the project plan they developed.

Were you happy with the result?

It isn't done yet, but they've been keeping me up to date and very professional. It should be done in the next 7-10 days.

This is pretty remarkable. We have use MTurk to help develop educational content and have thought about using virtual TAs to help w/research and tutoring, but not for actual grading. To me, that feels a bit like a stretch. However, on the other hand, if you've got qualified people that can do a better job than you can do as a professor, then you may actually be doing your students a service by using this platform.

Educational services are quickly becoming a global market. Quick example. Our CTO was less of a believer in the power of MTurk. We (www.nixty.com) were converting a physics course from MIT. The tests were in PDF form. (a. problems; b. solutions). We wanted them to be in multiple choice form. No one on the team had the capability to create relevant multiple choice responses. We created a HIT on MTurk. A guy from Bangalore signed up for the HIT. He had a Master's in Science and had taught Physics earlier in his career. He banged out the multiple choice responses in a day. We had them cross-checked and they were solid. Pretty cool, right?

Great resource.