Are you particularly good at something and want to tell the world just how to do it? Or do you work at a company looking to setup some free online courses but don't know where to start? If so, you might want to check out Neulio. Neulio, an Orlando, Florida based startup, recently launched to offer a free platform for anyone looking to create an online course to educate via distance learning.
Created as part of the University of Central Florida Incubator Program and leveraging 37signals' "software as a service" approach Neulio enables users to easily create and share video or audio instructional course content. Neulio is opened to anyone who is willing to educate on any variety of course subjects. With Neulio users can create lessons within a course and maintain a course flow via quizzes or password gates, to keep viewers or listeners from jumping ahead.
I got a chance to chat with Neulio founder George Colombo recently and he explained how the idea of creating Neulio stemmed from assisting an educational institution with setting up distance learning programs. George realized that there was not an ideal platform for hosting course content with limited overhead. He acknowledged that there are companies addressing the online educational space but they offer a great deal of overhead while not delivering an easy use system for online courses (cough cough BlackBoard).
Aside from the online version, the self-funded startup is also looking to offer companies a private label corporate training solution. By doing so companies can easily create online training courses.
I think Neulio is a great idea and it will be interesting to see this bootstrapping startup mature. I may even need to launch a few online courses myself. Let me know what you might be interested in learning about and I'd be happy to launch some courses. It is not clear yet if course producers will be offered a revenue share in exchange for solid course material but it definitely could act as a motivating factor for anyone on the fence about creating an online course.
