Say Hello to the First Official Red Rover Newsletter
We’ve joked about making the tag line for Red Rover be, “Students Actually Use It!” The proof of course is in the pudding which we’ve already talked about**. We see the students as our “customer” first and the admin/staff as our “customer” second. Most higher ed software solutions seem to think the opposite. Just look […]
Marketing Red Rover with a Facebook Note
The list of schools signing up to use Red Rover is growing daily, with UCLA being the newest. A great byproduct of so many active users navigating the system is seeing the new creative ways in which admins and group leaders are marketing Red Rover. Nick Chapa, a group leader at UCLA, wrote this note […]
First Year Disorientation: Retention and Community in Higher Education, Part 1
I grew up in Minnesota and went to college at the University of Oregon. In high school, I had an incredible group of friends. I was never the cool guy per se, but I felt appreciated, influential, and comfortable. My first year in Oregon was a social mess. I was lonely and often depressed. In […]
An Open Letter to Umair Haque, Applying for Revolutionary Status
Dear Umair, Your Open Challenge was intriguing. Your manifesto required action. We would like to apply for “revolutionary” status under your definition. If you have not yet found your five projects to advise, we humbly submit ours for consideration. We are a start-up determined to organize the world’s education. The data model of education needs […]
Step 2 Red Rover Admin Set up Video Guide – Inviting Group Leaders
Setting up Red Rover for an institution is broken down into 3 steps: Step 1 – Set Up Your Personal Account** Step 2 – Invite Group Leaders** Step 3 – Invite Regular Students** We currently have around 90 schools** at various stages of setting up. Though we’ve worked hard to make sure setup is quick […]
More Assumptions and Beliefs for Red Rover
The goal with this is to state our ideas plainly. Or failing that, put out some rough drafts of thoughts to get to plain later. All of these ideas get baked into the software and strategy. With a list, our advisors and stakeholders can be clear on what they agree with and what they don’t. We can then focus the discussion and learn.
It Will Be Amazing, If People Use It . . .
I got a very straightforward question on Facebook today from a staff person at a very large school: About your software: do you have evidence that students will use it? How do you suggest schools get students to do that? (Just wondering if students would see this as one more “hoop” to jump through and […]
The Randomness of How Students Currently Meet at College
While keeping tabs on some student blogs in my RSS feed, I came across a video** about some students who met in college and started a band. What caught my eye was when one of the band members talked about how they initially met: VIDEO FILE NO LONGER AVAILABLE I think most people would agree […]
Blown Mind
I just watched a Google presentation that seemingly took place in the woods but was streaming live from Scobleizer’s cell phone. I, and 20k other people on Twitter, were invited by Scobleizer to watch the presentation live. While it happened I chatted online with a couple hundred folks about the future of the software codes, Ruby on Rails vs. Python, as seen by Google.
Google wants to host Python based applications for free. This is exciting as hosting is not cheap and we budgeted a pile of cash for hosting Red Rover. The problem is we didn’t use Python to build Red Rover. It was all done on Ruby, so we are crossing our fingers that Google will work with Ruby next.
I’m done watching for now, but it looks like it’s going to go on for a bit more. Everything about the last 10 minutes in front of my lap top is mind blowing.
Red Rover Milestones
Downloadable as a pretty .pdf here**. Or as a small picture:** The order of things might change. When we need money depends partially on how fast we develop, on how much we speak, or the timing of key employees. We might decide it makes more sense to have a paid feature extension before we go […]