Anne Pfennig is a well-known fixture on the Madison East campus. She has an infectious laugh and is always ready to share a joke or listen to a story. What’s not as known about Anne is that she was so shy during her school years that she wouldn’t speak with other students. During college, Anne made some scary decisions to break free of her shyness. She can now empathize with quiet students in class, but also pushes them to step out of their comfort zones. Anne has been with Globe since its beginnings in the Madison area. She joined the team in 2009 with the opening of the Madison West location. Since then, she’s been a steady presence at both the East and West campuses. Before coming to Globe, Anne racked up quite a lot of experience teaching in a variety of settings. She spent seven years teaching 6-12 grades and has also taught at a community college. Thinking about this background, Anne commented that "my favorite part of working at Globe is developing relationships with my students.  It’s so exciting to see students who value their education and put their all into succeeding. When I taught high school, I dealt with many students who did not want to be there.  I love that our motto is ‘We Care’ because it fits well with my teaching philosophy that all students deserve a chance for success." Anne earned the title of Faculty of the Quarter this term. This distinction is voted on by Globe Madison East faculty and staff. Anne said she was surprised and thrilled to be chosen. "It’s an honor to be chosen by one’s peers for an award," Anne remarked, "I know that we have many excellent teachers here, so I consider myself blessed!" Be sure to congratulate her and thank her for all her hard work. The post Meet Anne Pfennig - Faculty of the Quarter appeared first on Globe University Blog.

The minimum viable product approach to taking digital products to market presents a conundrum for anyone whether within an organisation or as an entrepreneur. The balance is between delight, a good enough product and the biggest one of them all - budget. Once you have pitched for a rough funding figure only to find that it was half of what you need, you are faced with three questions: go to market with a shoddy product, go to market late once you receive that extra funding, or don’t go to market at all. After all, we don’t usually launch products for charity’s sake. I’ve been there - we’ve all been there. But there is another way, and it’s about conceiving the minimum viable product to take to market, but before we explore that, let’s take a step back and look at product. How do you conceive a product in the first place? There are 3 core ways: Find a problem - If you can wedge yourself into someone’s life by solving a problem that they always have, you will be well on the way to creating a real need for your product. Facebook did this by remembering birthdays for you and Dropbox solved the eternal problem of the missing USB. Solve a problem- If you can understand the problem that is apparent for a particular niche and state the solution by means of a cool bit of tech, then customers will flock very quickly. Instagram’s rise was all to do with the sharing and upload of photos easily. It saved everyone time and made life easy. Create delight- All the successful games create delight (and some addition!) amongst users. Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja are the best of the new breed in this genre, but there are also games that live off the delight that other create, such as words with friends or whole new worlds such as Grand Theft Auto. That’s perhaps a simplistic approach, but there is usually more that you need to consider - such as does the benefits of solving the problem outweigh the obstacle and others such as: Is the barrier to entry low enough - will you be able to woo new users? Discovery - how will your product be found in the first place - and how will you make them take the conversion jump? How immediate and frequent is the need? Competition - what’s everyone else doing to solved the problem? And how can you garner local placement on the screen of the user? These are all important questions but what must you do with regards to take to market. In my opinion, the best possible approach is one that is focused on the minimum viable product. A minimum viable product, when talking in digital terms is a strategy for deploying a product with the minimal amount of features. The main reason to use a minimal viable product approach is to get feedback. If you use a feedback approach from real users, then the benefit is threefold: one, you are building a product users actually want; two; you have a user base of dedicated users who feel part of the product; three, by trusting a select group, you have created an underground maven marketing team of users who will want to push your product for you. On the flip side, utlising a minimum viable product strategy allows a minimum cost fail strategy. Perhaps the product is completely unviable and the product may only be of benefit to a small selection of people - or maybe it’s too early or too late to market. If you launch with a minimum viable product, you can fail at low cost and move on to your next great product and learn from the lessons of this one. Using a minimum viable product strategy, you are essentially going forward with ongoing loop approach: test - refine - test - refine. Others use the build-measure-learn loop - it all depends on what kind of product you have. Eric Ries popularised the concept of minimal viable product in his book the Lean Startup - and in it he says: "The minimum viable product lacks many features that may prove essential later on. However, in some ways, creating a MVP requires extra work: we must be able to measure its impact. For example, it is inadequate to build a prototype that is evaluated solely for internal quality by engineers and designers. We also need to get it in front of potential customers to gauge their reactions. We may even need to try selling them the prototype." It’s an important point. There is more work using MVP as an approach - but the chances of success are higher because the process of learning is happens as quickly as possible. Asking a potential target market that consists of friends and associate a select number of questions on survey monkey gives some viability but it simply doesn’t compare to the experience of a live product. Ultimately, MVP is all about the consumer. Creating an MVP strategy is creating a consumer driven strategy. If you can create a ‘deep well’ of users as Paul Graham calls it, it’s likely that those users will become your market. This strategy of focusing a product on a small number of people who need a product a lot of the time rather than a large number of users who need the product a little bit of the time garners excellent and rich feedback data. What are the extremes of an MVP? Imagine that you need funding for your product - but the concept is too difficult or too expensive to even get to prototype phase. You are left with a few choices: the explanation approach - use a video or some great marketing material to explain what you (will) do. This costs between $1000 and $10,000; the eluding approach - just create a promise of what you hope to achieve and get feedback on the concept; or go manual - trial the whole process without using technology - find customers and ask them what they want and deliver the process using a manual approach. These all seem obvious approaches, but the MVP doesn’t always work as a build, learn and grow strategy. And sometime it’s worth being traditional and spending excessive time upfront to research, plan and predict. That doesn’t mean the going with a minimal viable product removes this process, it just means there is less of a focus on this and more down a Steve Blank approach to customer acquisition.Using a minimum viable approach is a deeply strategic approach to new products. It is pre-planned with rules and guidelines and is prepared to become the best in its niche. It’s good for bootstrappers, for entrepreneurs and for product developers within large corporates - and ultimately works because it’s all about creating a problem solving product that consumers actually want. And that’s what your MVP is your MVP - your minimum viable product is your most valuable person, your secret strategy for product success. Editor’s Note: This post has first been published on Rahim’s personal blog medeleon. Picture License  Some rights reserved by freefotouk

In this 4/15/14 webinar Jenny Parks, director of the Midwestern State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement, and other experts in this field presented information for institutions navigating the complex landscape of state authorization. Topics included the history and current state of federal involvement in the process, ways to organize institutional data and oversight for state authorization, a discussion of "good faith" efforts, the facets of state authorization that will and will not be addressed by SARA (state authorization reciprocity agreement), and an update on the status of SARA across the nation. slides | slides notes | webinar archive

Larry Montgomery on FaceTime with the Economics class. Globe University-Woodbury campus economics class used FaceTime to interview Larry Montgomery who works in an oil rig in Williston, N.D. The students interviewed Montgomery about how the current economy is effecting the oil industry and how that impacts the oil workers and the surrounding area. "Interviewing Larry via FaceTime was not only a convenient method, but an effective one in order to illustrate to the students that what we are learning in the textbooks happens in real life and this interview gave the students a first-hand view of someone who is affected by the current economy, said Business Program Chair at Globe University-Woodbury, Thomas Hakko. Students interviewing Larry Montgomery. "Overall, this was an extremely beneficial way to give the students a first-hand look and learn the true value of what they study," said Hakko. Globe University and the iPad® Globe replaced dated textbooks with the interactive iPad nearly two years ago, giving students access to the most relevant industry information, eBooks and thousands of apps, including FaceTime. What is FaceTime? According to Apple, FaceTime is a video chat application that can be used across a range of platforms, and other manufacturers can leverage FaceTime’s protocol. For more information on the business programs and degrees available at Globe University & Minnesota School of Business call 877-303-6060. The post iPad’s for Interviewing: Students Gain First-Hand Knowledge via FaceTime appeared first on Globe University Blog.

Udemy, a global marketplace for online courses, has raised a $65 million Series D led by Stripes Group, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Insight Venture Partners. Stripes Group Founder and Managing Partner Ken Fox will join Udemy’s Board of Directors. The Series D comes one year after a $32 million Series C and shortly after LinkedIn’s acquisition of Udemy’s main competitor, lynda.com for $1.5 billion. This latest round brings the total funding raised by Udemy to $113 million. Udemy previously raised $32 million in May 2014, $12 million in November 2012, $3 million in October 2011, and $1 million in August 2010. Founded in 2010, Udemy was set up as an alternative to market leader lynda.com. Other than the established platform that offers mainly in-house produced content from select instructors, Udemy chose a free marketplace approach, enabling anyone to launch and sell an online course on the platform. To date, the marketplace offers 30.000 courses from 16.000 instructors with 2.000 new courses being added every month. Udemy claims to have attracted 7.000.000 learners from 190 countries, 30% of them learn on a mobile device. 50% of Udemy’s revenue is generated outside the U.S. which led to the opening of the company’s first overseas office in Dublin, Ireland, and the translation of the course catalog into seven different languages. Udemy’s top instructors managed to rake in sizeable revenue from their online courses, ranging from $500.000 to $8 million, with the top ten instructors generating over $17 million in combined revenue. Further Reading Udemy raises $65 million to continue pioneering a global marketplace and disrupt the future of education | Press Release

Click here to enlarge : Courtesy Entrepreneur.com

Students work to cut out patterns from donated t-shirts to make dog toys for the Neenah Animal Shelter. Globe University-Appleton’s Winter 2015 Global Citizenship class tested out their crafting skills while completing their Applied Learning Project for the Neenah Animal Shelter. The class made over 50 tie toys for dogs served by the organization. Globe University-Appleton’s veterinary technology program has been partnering with the shelter for several years.   Before beginning the project, the class first discussed why organizations such as the Neenah Animal Shelter are vital to the welfare of animals. Shelters rely on help from the community in the form of donations, volunteer time, and adoptions. This was part of a larger discussion about the existence and importance of non-profit organizations in our area. About the project, instructor Amanda Loewen said "Completing this applied learning project provided an opportunity for students to learn more about community needs. In addition, it allowed the class to collaborate in order to achieve a common goal." Winter 2015 Global Citizenship class show off their newly made dog toys for the Neenah Animal Shelter. The students first collected t-shirts on campus for a little over a month. They created a collection "dog house" as a class project. These activities emphasized working together as a team, creativity, and the importance of communication. The students created tie toys of all different shapes and sizes, in order to accommodate the many different shapes and sizes of dogs. The shelter was appreciative of the toys, which is a huge need! The post GU-Appleton Students Make Dog Toys for Area Shelter appeared first on Globe University Blog.

In this episode of MEP, Stephen Gilman from Maker State joins the program to discuss the maker movement, why its important, and "making" school fun.  Such a fun discussion! Guest Bio : Stephen started teaching in Harlem Middle School in 2000. He saw a lot of flaws in the public school system and decided to take it upon himself to make the changes.  After becoming a non profit after schools program administrator, he began seeing how to implement these changes outside of the public school model. For the last three years, Stephen has been creating learning environments called maker spaces where kids can take a creative idea and learn how to apply it into a real life skill. Along with founding MakerState, Stephen also founded the Carnegie Learning Center (a micro-schools incubator) and a founding teacher & dean of Bronx Collegiate (a public school grounded in Outward Bound experiential learning). His proposal for an experiential, badge and mastery-based school/learning model, "Student Union," was a finalist in the international Mozilla and MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media & Learning Competition. Stephen was recently named to the Professional Journal Committee of the Association of Teacher Educators. He is the president and founding board of UlsterCorps, a volunteer network in New York. He is also the author of Nightshade, an historical thriller set in 1702 about a conspiracy to take over the Atlantic slave trade. Stephen enjoys pottery, beekeeping, geocaching, fiction writing, social entrepreneurism, making and playing games, and creativity of all kinds. He and his seven year old Ben started MakerState together to bring their love of making and learning new things to kids everywhere. Show Notes: (02:16) Stephen’s background (07:59) Tell us about Maker State, why you started it and what you guys do. (08:54) Expeditionary learning model in a Bronx high school (10:21) Asking the Center for Creative Education to let him try out the maker space idea that he’s dabbling in with kids after school. (12:21) The MakerState Program (13:43) Teaching kids fundamental math and science principles, computer programming, and how to build computer hardware using Minecraft (17:10) Schools give you the students that they haven’t been able to help. Can you talk about the demographics and the age groups that you’re really seeing a lot of impact with? (24:52) What sort of results are you seeing? Are you seeing early results or numbers from this implementation? (27:58) How are your current public school partners responding? Do you think that we can get to a tipping point with these schools? Can we get from those early adopters to the early majority or do we have to build a completely new maker culture from scratch? (32:22) If you could have dinner with someone you admire, past or present, who would it be and why? * Ray Croc * Benjamin Franklin (36:20) How to contact and support MakerState http://www.maker-state.com/ @MakerState For more episodes featuring thought leaders in education visit MeetEducationProject.com, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and follow Nick DiNardo on Twitter.

By Angie Norbeck, Business Program Chair. Globe University Minneapolis graduate, Afton Glander, took her final master’s project to the next level when a new position was created by her employer for her based on her presentation. Afton’s project included a review of patient appointments over the course of one year at a local orthopedic clinic, research of current studies, and interviews conducted to determine the most appropriate triage method for the clinic’s 200 new patients. The organization’s leadership saw the potential that Afton and her project would provide to the clinic and a quality department was established based on the momentum created by her presentation.  Afton is now the quality coordinator, and works closely with the newly appointed quality manager to improve patient access to care while containing costs for the organization.  "I never envisioned that I would be going into quality and with the tools my instructor, Mr. John Jordan, provided to the class I am overseeing projects at work that are making an impact" said Glander.  Afton Glander Mr.Jordan adds, "The process of writing a business plan or project in the final course for our master’s students ensures they understand the impact they can have on an organization. A primary goal is to increase their ability to develop and implement concepts that balance sales and service with information technology and human resources, and to communicate with all personnel from staff to the CEO of the organization." The post Project Creates Position For Master’s Graduate appeared first on Globe University Blog.

The 2014 Blackboard update at NIU to Blackboard Learn 9.1 Service Pack 14 delivers helpful enhancements to existing tools and a few exciting new tools. For example, the new test exception feature makes it easier to adjust test settings for individual students, group management is quicker, and the inline grading side-bar is added to additional tools like blogs and discussions. The new Quick Links button makes it easier to navigate Blackboard with a screen reader, the new Achievements tool adds the ability to recognize students with badges and certificates, and the new Date Management feature helps update availability and due dates after performing a course copy. To prepare for the anticipated update, watch this preview offered 4/18/14 to learn more about these (and more!) enhancements and features. For complete details about NIU’s planned upgrade to Blackboard 9.1 Service Pack 12/14 during Summer 2014, visit niu.edu/blackboard/upgrade For archives of other online workshops offered by NIU Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center, visit our YouTube channel. Follow Jason Rhode on Twitter @jrhode