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Should Professors Recruit Students To Blog For Money?

December 9th, 20067 Comments

I’ve been talking to a few of my professors about how I make money on the web. One of the my professors replied:

Ryan, I’ve been thinking about this web thing quite a bit. If I understand you properly, there is money to be made simply by accruing good, written material. Here are my initial thoughts. Each semester I have close to 120 students. One could say that this is something of a gold mine for high quantities of good content. If only there were no ethical concerns. I fear that the ethical issues are too great, though. In fact, it seems clear to me that there is a conflict of interest and that I simply cannot make money off my students. What are your thoughts? Are there ways to nuance this issue? It just seems like an awful opportunity to waste. Are there ways to generate high quantities of content, but to make it voluntary? Could a system be setup whereby students received revenue share? I don’t know the answers to these questions. Alas, I’m afraid that I do know the answers to these questions and just don’t want to admit it. But we should keep the line of communication open.

So readers of college startup, here’s the question. Can you envision any legitimate ways for reforming higher education such that 1) public, online writing is integrated into higher education and 2) students receive revenue share (as an added motivator) for doing so.

In my view, there is something to this idea. Think about it. If both the professor and the student would be rewarded for good writing and good ideas, wouldn’t we have a built in incentive for doing good, creative work (on both ends) rather than just doing what’s necessary for good grades?

Or, would we end up with a big mess?

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Should Professors Recruit Students To Blog For Money?

Levi | December 10, 2006

Why not recruit them after the class is over?

Ryan | December 10, 2006

Levi,
There are a bunch of issues.

For one, with your suggestion the ethical issue becomes: “Ah, so you structured your class in order to identify the best bloggers for your business.”

Also, there are the prospects of having them in a future class.

There’s also the fact that one of the attractive aspects of having students blog *while* in class is producing lots of content. Students are a lot more likely to write if they are required to for the class. Plus, they’ll get in the habit of blogging if they start in class.

Finally, what is the context in which you approach a student if not during a class? Do you evaluate which students to approach based on their performance in class? Do you make a blanket announcement on the last day of class?

Brian Balfour | December 10, 2006

The problem I see with this idea is that as a whole a lot of the content can make some money, but on an individual contribution level the amount that can be made is extremely small.

So this means that even if there was rev sharing an individual student who writes a few pieces is going to make next to nothing, which means there is no motivation.

Ryan | December 10, 2006

Brian,
You’re totally right. It’s the same problem with the Newsvine/Squidoo setup.

Scott | December 11, 2006

I run my own company but I’m old adsense user.

I do not time know to write but I’m still really interested by this kind of stuff. I was thinking to take students in my company to do some summer internship to write for me.

Trent | January 2, 2007

Although I agree with Brian that there’s likely very little money to be made in this situation, I still think there are other benefits. One of the problems I’ve faced in USC business classes is the disconnect between the course’s lessons and current events. Blogging immediately changes the paradigm of submitting course work from a instructor-to-student relationship to a student-to-world scenario. This means that student’s ideas are immmediately made public and can be incorporated or reviewed by one’s peers–as well experts and newbies alike the web over.

I’m working on a project trying to completely revamp the way we learn in school — and embracing a digital toolset is key!

Jez | March 3, 2007

On the whole I agree with Trent, there are a number of Universities that run successful blogs with no advertising which have very good content,
I have added my own thoughts on the matter to my own blog if your interested :-)

Share your thoughts!!!

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Should Professors Recruit Students To Blog For Money? was written by Ryan on December 9th, 2006 at 11:06 am and posted in Business Ideas, College, Education, Monetize

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