My Week In Review: from Beijing to Berlin
As many of you know, I’ve been spending some time traveling outside of America. In fact, I’ve flown around the world one-and-a-half times in the past last six weeks.
The reason? As the CEO of Excelerators, a leading provider of in-person educational experiences at home and abroad, I’m excited about a fundamental shift in education.
All is not well in the world of online learning. While online-and-distance education continues to expand, educators in many countries are beginning to realize the significant limitations of learning without the benefit of face-to-face interaction between instructors and students.
We are detecting the emergence of a growing hunger for affordable in-person learning and travel opportunities.
As a natural extension of the work I have done with Excelorators over the past six years, I’m excited to be launching ODEM.IO, a decentralized education marketplace and platform to deliver in-person, custom education and travel programs for students and executives worldwide.
On the ODEM platform, anyone can list, discover, and book unique accredited education experiences around the world.
We’ve taken a lot of what we have learned at Excelorators and incorporated them into this new model where buyers and suppliers in the education industry can transact through a single platform and have direct and trusted access to education programs and providers.
We think of the model in its delivery as similar to Airbnb in how it successfully connects customers to vendors. A key difference is that we’re using a completely decentralized blockchain-based technology platform and leveraging smart contracts to ensure complete transparency, trust and seamless payments options among all parties.
I’m looking forward to sharing more of our progress in the coming months as we grow our ODEM.IO team, bring on early adopters from our existing customer base and share the early release of technology that we believe will be a game changer in how in-person education is created, delivered and experienced.
Fasten your seatbelts. It’s time for takeoff.
Rich
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