It’s Day 1 of Ed Startup 101, an open online course in education entrepreneurship being offered by David Wiley, Richard Culatta, Todd Manwaring, and Aaron Miller.

I’m pleased to see this class happen as the gulf between educators (theorists, researchers, and practitioners) and entrepreneurs (founders and developers at companies big and small) can be pretty vast. Add politicians, lobbyists, investors, parents, publishers, and students to the mix and you’ll find plenty more gulfs, along with lots of currents flowing in different directions. And unfortunately, a lot of those currents flow away from education theory, away from education history, and away from education research.

A MOOC of the connectivist sort, Ed Startup 101 operates on a distributed model, with participants’ work remaining their own, occuring on their own blogs and syndicated via RSS onto the course website. That’s quite different than the recent spate of MOOC startups that try to contain everything — lecture videos, assignments, quizzes, and discussion forums — within a learning management system. (See what I mean about gulfs?)

As such, the emphasis seems to be on community — the community of learners as well as the “experts” that have been gathered to facilitate the weekly conversations.

It’s “community” too that I talk about in my “intro” video, embedded below.