“Fate decides what will happen, and karma does the dirty work.” — Fiona Foerster, age 9
So the last few weeks have been pretty busy for me. The most important thing that's happened is that I've changed jobs. I had been realizing for some time that while there were many aspects of my position at the university that I liked, there were a number of ways where my specific place in it at that time wasn't a great match. So one morning a few weeks ago, I went ahead and resigned. I didn't really have a plan for after this, which a number of people close to me thought was pretty crazy, but I knew I was ready to do something a bit more entrepreneurial and that was a little more hands-on with technology.
Not long after this, I happened to visit my friend Nadeem Khan. Nadeem runs a small e-learning company that has developed a family of applications and services called UltraLearn. One part of it is a sophisticated web-based application called UltraLearn Studio that lets you take videos and put them on a timeline with PowerPoint slides, images, audio files, and quizzes to create training mashups. Another part is the UltraLearn Player, which lets anyone with a web browser watch the training mashup, take its quizzes, and so forth. Another part is a control panel where one can manage one's training mashups, set access to who can watch them, get all sorts of reports on who watched them and how well they did on the embedded quizzes, and the like. And now they're working on UltraLearn Live, a way to create a mashup from a live recording in real time rather than an existing video. It's a great set of services.
Nadeem and I had talked about UltraLearn before, and he knew that I was pretty enthusiastic about it, so when I told him that I'd resigned from the university, we quickly decided that it would be great for me to help his team promote it. We're still working out the specifics of what I'll be doing, but it will have a number of different aspects, including sales engineering, communications, professional services, and instructional design. I also expect to be attending conferences on our behalf, which is pretty exciting for me.
So this is probably the biggest life change for me since I started my doctoral program. I'm just glad that it turned out I made the right move, and that nothing happened that would have disrupted my studies.
Next up, a lawsuit gives me reason to think about what a school's Career Services department can really offer.