Risks and Challenges

I believe the greatest hurdle is going to be awareness and adoption.

The technology for this type of concept has been created before with the likes of Airbnb.com and EventBrite.com.

The technological model exists.

But the concept is new. So educating people of how Demass Learning works and having a market that is open to this and aware of it is going to be crucial.

A more liberal city with a large enough population we think is going to be key in getting buy-in. That’s why we are interested in Portland, Oregon or Seattle initially.

We also are not sure how receptive people will be with teaching classes within their homes. That is the primary vision: small groups getting together learning about a specific topic. This will keep the cost down and make Demass Learning the disruptive technology within education. If you don’t have to pay for classrooms you have instantly drastically cut the cost of education.

But if people aren’t open to that then we are going to need to look at places such as churches and libraries to host groups. These locations will likely charge. Although the cost will not be as much as a traditional school, it will still add to the cost. These costs are going to have to be passed on to the students. That’s going to begin to cause a divide that already exists in education: people with money can afford education. People without money can’t. We want to avoid this as much as possible.

It’s also our hope that many classes for k-12 aged students will be offered free of charge. We have a concept of parents offering classes to small groups within their living rooms for free. Their child is included which gives them some additional exposure to other kids. And other children get to benefit from that. (Demass Learning will facilitate any free class free of charge through the system.)

It’s unclear whether that will happen or not.

We are going to spend time talking to people about these concepts: offering free classes to k-12 students and offering classes within their homes.

We hope that people are interested in those ideas. But we aren’t totally sure.

Most of the revenue of Demass Learning is likely going to come from adult learners. These classes would be run by people in areas of specialization. These classes would likely be paid classes… although they certainly could be free if the instructor felt that was beneficial for them.

We also plan on having a very prominent review program of instructors. These user generated reviews will be crucial in determining the quality of the instructors.

We are also considering a review system of students over 18. If a class is highly sought after the instructor would have the opportunity of choosing which students get to take the class. This aspect is still in consideration.

We feel very strongly that the current education system is in need of drastic change. Demass Learning provides a potential solution for the needs of today. We mostly have to make sure people know about it. That’s going to be a major component of our initial push.