The Supercool Team celebrated Christmas at a Samoan Gospel Church dancing & singing and then went to the city to invite some homeless people to dinner! We hope you enjoy the holidays and wish everyone a Merry Xmas and a happy New Year!

A tutoring school is tangible business case. You prepare them for the exam and they give you money. It is a huge market and most likely everybody who is reading this post was a tutor or/and used tutoring in the past. Typically tutoring is rather low paid with the exception of test prep for important & expensive tests like GMAT, SAT or GRE. A number of companies such as Kaplan, WizIQ or Grockit are tackling especially this market offline or online and are very profitable businesses.  

Therefore it is not surprising to see that a chunk of the schools that were launched on Supercool School during the last two weeks are tutoring schools for various niche markets.

Heiko Spiegler - a German Student - started one of those tutoring schools called "Nachhilfeschule" which means "tutoring school" in German. In the best lean startup fashion - he setup a quick site with Wordpress and an application form with google forms and started sending out emails. He sells complete test prep packages for the German high-school finals that determine your chances for scholarships and good universities. The prices for a package are ca. €120 and for private lessons are around €15. A pricing that is 75% cheaper than what students would have to pay for professional tutoring.

Following a short interview with Heiko Spiegler the founder of  "Nachhilfeschule".

Why did you decide to start your tutoring School with Supercool School?

Our school the "Nachhilfeschule" was born out of "misery". While my fellow students and I prepared for our exams - we spent hours on the phone to help one another. We spent a lot of money, constantly missed each other, some people had to answer the same questions many times, we were not able to exchange material and couldn't talk in groups. We moved to Skype which was an improvement - but not enough. What we needed was a virtual classroom, a whiteboard to brainstorm, audio/video chat, etc. Something that allows us to learn together just like in a real room. We started using Supercool School and were really happy with it. Thats how we got the idea of starting "Nachhilfeschule". We will start offering test-prep for the German high school finals and are very excited about it. The first track starts on the 1st of February 2010 ;)

What are you current challenges?

Our goal is to maximize the individual success of each student for the high school finals. We want to expand from there step by step. Our goal is to build a school for teenagers from all around the world.

We see huge potential for our School. The technology of Supercool School gives young teachers like myself a way to leverage our skills and passion for teaching without the borders of traditional education institutions. I want to prepare students for life and Supercool School gives me an opportunity to do so very effectively. I can blend traditional teaching, self paced learning and social peer to peer learning in order to achieve the best results.   

Do you have a team of people you operate with?

Currently we are 5 aspiring teachers from University of Education in Heidelberg, Karlsruhe and from the University of Mannheim. We shared the responsibilities for different areas and everybody is giving 200%. I am really proud of team. 

Whats the revenue that you expect?

Our goal is to get 150 high school students into the test prep program that starts in February. For every student we estimated an average revenue of 200€ (ca. 300$). Although revenue is important - we really want to have a positive impact on people's lives and have fun with our School. Thats why we love the informal components of Supercool School.

Anything else you would like to share with us :)?

If you know a high school student from Germany who is in her/his final year - please let her/him know about Nachhilfeschule. We appreciate every help we can get to make this an awesome school. All information to sign up you can find at www.abiturnachhilfe.net. If you have questions send me an email to sekretariat@abiturnachhilfe.net. Hello and Greetings to the whole Supercool School Team. You are onto something grand - keep it up!

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We are interested in hearing your opinion on this use case of Supercool School and on other use cases that you find promising. Feel free to comment on this post or to participate in the "Schools for the World" voting.

cheers, Bjoern

Bjoern and I had the privilege to attend the TEDx Silicon Valley conference last Saturday and it was simply an amazing event with brilliant talks, beautiful art & music and an amazing crowd of people. There was just too much good information and inspiration in order to summarize all of it but I still wanted to share some of the top ideas worth spreading from the event for those who couldn't be there...

Here are our top 6 ideas worth spreading from the TEDxSV event:

1. Samasource - Computer based microwork for the poor. A way to end poverty in the digital age.
2. Pinkarmy.org - Open source personal drug development for cancer - A complete revolution in how we develop drugs and potentially the way to cure cancer.
3. GAFFTA - Social consciousness through digital culture - A next generation arts foundation that uses open source and digital media to raise awareness and educate people.
4. Dosomething.org - Empowering teenagers to get socially involved via the web and become Doers!
5. Project Alcatraz - A corporate program in Venezuela that gives gang members work and a real alternative to crime.
6. Youth Speaks - A national program to empower youth through the power of the spoken word.

You can watch the amazing talks of the founders of these projects and many more here.

One of the things that we loved at TEDxSV was the fact that they brought together passionate people from the arts, design, music, non profit and business sector to allow people to share information and inspiration with each other. The bigger the variety within the group the more there is to learn - also one of the core believes here at Supercool School and why we are passionate about empowering people to create their next generation online schools and teach/study from each other over the web!

I hope we'll see you at the next TED event!

Much power to you!

Steli