Several months ago I met with Jeff Barr, Chief Product Evangelist for AWS, at Maggiano’s in King of Prussia. We had a great chat about AWS and how NIXTY might use it. Well, we have now finally launched and we are solidly built on top of Amazon Web Services. I wanted to highlight a few ways we leverage AWS.

NIXTY uses AWS to host all of our infrastructure;  Our application stack, consisting of MySQL, Lighttpd, Memcache, and web.py is hosted on EC2 nodes (with Linux).  S3 is used for backups and archiving.  AMIs and the robust API make scaling simple.

I imagine that many of the technical aspects are similar to how other startups use AWS. One thing that might make us a little bit different is how we use the Mechanical Turk service. Our mission is empowering education for everyone! To start, we wanted to populate NIXTY with 200+ open courses. There are just three of us running the company, and we’ve been bootstrapped since the beginning, so we didn’t have a lot of time or resources to get the job done. I posted the job on Mechanical Turk and within minutes we received several bids to help us build out the courses. To give you an example of what I mean, here is an example of a MIT open course; here is that same course in NIXTY. There was a fair amount of work done to optimize this course. Another example, we had a physics course that had a test with answers and solutions in PDF format. We wanted to provide this test in multiple choice format, so that people could simply choose the right answer. The problem was that we didn’t have any viable alternative answers (e.g., the b. c. and d. options on a multiple choice question). All we had was the right answer. Once again, we went to MTurk for the solution. We posted the exam and asked for someone with a physics background to come up with relevant alternative answers. The next day we had our test back with great alternative answers for all 10 questions.

MTurk continues to be an important service for us and will be even more so in the future. Educators have asked us for help building out their courses on NIXTY. They have the content, but they don’t have the time to build it out. No problem, we just post the job on MTurk and it gets done. Educators also often need help with research and other projects. In the future, we’ll have a teaching assistant option on NIXTY that will tie right into the MTurk service.

AWS has been a great way for us to build our startup. I highly recommend it.

We are in the process of joining the OpenCourseWare Consortium. I just had the privilege of demo’ing NIXTY for Marcela Morales, Membership Coordinator for the Consortium. She was an absolute joy to talk with and had some excellent and encouraging feedback for us. The high points include:

-We are solving a real problem that OCW publishers face. There is a tremendous amount of valuable content, but it can be challenging to organize it in a streamlined way.

-Likes the idea of building scaffolding around OCW.

-Thinks the site is very user-friendly, for both educators and students, and loves the design and logo.

-Loves the certificate feature where people can print up or save a digital version of their certificate of completion upon passing a course.

In short, Marcela made my week! She was incredibly positive and encouraging. Feels like the platform is very strong and will do a lot of good.

We are looking very forward to being active members of the OCW Consortium.

Hagel, Brown and Davidson (2010) recently published The Power of Pull.  I highly recommend the book. You can find reviews and purchase it here. The authors do a very nice job of naming and illustrating elusive concepts – ideas that are very important, but difficult to capture with words. One construct is something they call Creation Spaces. They use the concrete metaphor of fax machines to help flesh out this concept:

“What would happen if, at the same time more and more fax machines joined the network, the performance of each fax machine was also rapidly improving? We would get an amplifying effect on the first level of exponential performance. That is precisely what we see happening in emerging creation spaces: Performance is amplified not only as more participants join, but as each of them gets better faster by working effectively with other participants (p.148).”

The authors go on to discuss how we can design creation spaces. “Our research into emerging creation spaces has identified three elements that combine to set in motion the increasing-returns dynamics that make these spaces successful: participants, interactions, and environments (p. 140).

Participants:
The more people join a creation space and the more contributions they make once they’re there, the more successful the space becomes – particularly once the number of participants has reached critical mass….Start by keeping barriers to entry low…give participants real time feedback and clear performance measures they need to advance quickly within the community (p.140)…For most creation spaces, initial participation…consists of observing others…Participants can advance beyond the “lurker” stage with only small investments on their part – usually by starting to post questions and comments themselves…Over time, some participants begin to develop a reputation as the number of their contributions increases (pp. 140-141).

Interactions:
Unleashing increasing returns in a creation space requires two forms of interactions to evolve simultaneously – team interactions and looser interactions across a broader range of participants. Either of these in isolation is helpful, but combining the two is essential to driving increasing returns (p. 141).

Environments:
…First, the creation space must be designed to foster the formation of teams and interactions within each of the teams. Second, it must be designed to encourage the formation of robust and diverse peer-to-peer networks that expand knowledge-sharing and knowledge creation activities across teams. Third, it must be designed to reach beyond the creation space and engage a braoder set of participants in the products of the creations space…(p. 143).

This book has helped us put words to what we are building in NIXTY. NIXTY, ultimately, is a creation space.

We decided to push our launch back towards the end of this week, early next week, so that we could get add a few additional innovative features. It’ll make collaboration much better! Look for more from us in a few days.

We’ve been building strong relationships with several groups. I’m particularly excited about a recent development with Teachers without Borders. They’ll be using NIXTY to provide their Certificate of Teaching Mastery. I’m thrilled that NIXTY will be a part of supporting this great organization.

Usability testing…we’ve been doing a ton of it here at NIXTY. It is the summer and we live in Virginia Beach, so we are fortunate to have a lot of company. Everyone who stops by gets to do some NIXTY testing with me next to them with a notebook observing their every move. The latest candidate has been my mother-in-law. Amazing to me how much I learn every time I do this.

We’ve also used feedbackarmy.com (just kind of a layer over Mechanical Turk), but still helpful.

Steve Blank has probably been the most essential resource here. His book walks you though it step-by-step. I highly recommend it.

We have been working very hard on NIXTY and are getting ready to open the doors. Sign up for our beta to be a part of our initial launch. Some quick updates:

-200+ free courses from the top universities on the planet

-Facebook Open Authorization - translation: Can sign into NIXTY with your facebook name and password; You can also ‘like’ our courses, much like you ‘like’ photos or comments on Facebook

-Certificates - teachers and/or organizations can now define passing critera (70%) and allow students to print-up course certificates and/or store them to their ePortfolios

-Karma Points - comments and posts can be voted up or down; each person’s comments and posts are cataloged in one place (much like Hacker News), so other people can get a quick view of their overall contributions and reputation.

Just a quick note of thanks to our recent MBA (William and Mary) intern, Tiffany Bregovi.

Tiffany worked with us on creating a social media marketing campaign for charter schools. She jumped right in and created a thoughtful, comprehensive, and practical paper that will be essential in helping us serve charter schools.

Tiffany, thank you for all of your help! You are an excellent team member and we wish you the best in your future endeavors!

New book by Anya Kamenetz on open education. You can find the book here.

Interesting conversation over on Michael Feldstein’s blog here and David Wiley’s blog here.

The benefits of Nixty align with the needs of charter schools on several levels. Some of the major issues surrounding charter schools are funding, parental involvement, facilities, and hiring capacity.

Funding

Because Nixty is such a low-cost provider of learning management systems compared to competitors, using Nixty can contribute straight to the bottom line of a charter school where funding is limited and sometimes difficult to secure.

Parental Involvement

Using Nixty can encourage parents’ involvement in education by allowing parental access to a student’s learning management system account. Parents can track lesson progress, view test scores and communicate with the teacher through the learning management system.

Facilities

Using virtual space like a Nixty learning management system means less physical space is needed for materials like textbooks and workbooks, as well as supplies like binders and notebooks. This translates to fewer yearly costs for replenishing those materials and supplies…and more efficient allocation of funding.

Hiring Capacity

Creating a lesson rich with video and reading assignments, interactive discussions, and quizzes & tests in a Nixty learning management system means that students can spend more time learning on their own, in an environment carefully structured by their teacher. And open courseware can provide supplemental lessons for instructors who may be filling in subject gaps in the curriculum.

Charter schools can use Nixty to:

• Easily create online courses
• Support residential courses with Web-based tools
• Create a digital repository for course materials
• Communicate via an email/internal messaging system
• Facilitate discussion through chat rooms and message boards
• Automate the design, administration, and scoring of tests
• Exchange assignments via a digital drop-box
• Streamline the enrollment process with batch imports for students, faculty, and courses
• Provide students with their own Website to organize, store, and submit their work