[geekchic9]

Originally Posted by copla

First off, what are your credentials for offering this service? What is/what was your GPA, what was/is your major, what level of education are you pursuing/pursued?

Fair question. I have a BA in English from Texas Christian University with a 3.175 GPA. However, I'm not going to facilitate all of the courses--at least, I don't plan to do so. I'm trying to recruit my boyfriend to facilitate a mathematics course--he is a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics. But, he won't touch it till I've proven myself business-wise. That will take some time.

Second... if the audience is apathetic college students, why would they pay 300-2400 dollars about study skills?

Wow. Two big assumptions there. My audience is not apathetic college students. Perhaps my blog entry gave you the wrong impression....my audience is busy adults who want a Great Books education. Right now, I'm not sure what my prices will be on the other courses, but I'm thinking in the $100-200 range, not $300-2400 like you're suggesting. The study skills course is free and most likely will stay free.

Then, finally, do you know enough and are you learning enough about study skills to fill regular, useful content for the next five years? I think the free study skills resource would be a brilliant market if you are able to write it engagingly, and build up a good Google ranking, but you have to be able to fill a lot of content, moreso than your free course- because people will take your free one and not bother with the ones you have to pay for. You might get some money here and there from your pay course, but nothing consistent. Because, honestly, what college student is going to pay that amount of money, or any money, for a study skills course?

Starting with your last question, I'm giving the study skills course away for free to entice people and see if they like what they see, and more importantly, if they are committed to learning. Sign up doesn't begin for 2 weeks, and I'm going to come up with the course content for that course by then.

I completely agree that I need more courses. But I need to determine my budget first to see how much I will charge for each course, how much people will pay, how much facilitators want to earn--those issues I will discuss with my accountant this week. I also plan to talk to a lawyer about using certain books in my courses and intellectual property rights. That's an entire issue someone brought up that I did not think about immediately. I may have to use books in the public domain, at least at first, for the paid courses.

I plan to cover a lot more of the market than just study skills. Theology, Natural Sciences, Mathematics, Literature, things like that. In fact, I had an entire list of categories earlier, but my boyfriend made fun of me for the fact that no courses were listed under each category, so I took it down.

I really appreciate your questions. Perhaps I should update the site with these things so I can show that more is going on than meets the eye when you first look at my site. Thank you.