Malartu, My Other Project

/ Jim Luke

This is only tangentially related to economics, but I’m pretty excited about some coverage I got for my other project (besides blogging here and teaching at LCC).  If you teach in higher education yourself, you might be interested.  If so, contact me.  The article is from Converge Magazine yesterday:

Economics Professor Starts Designing Tools for Faculty That Meet Their Needs

By Tanya Roscorla
on November 21, 2011 Policy

While vendors make plenty of technology platforms and services that serve students, most of them don’t meet professors’ needs, according to the experience of Jim Luke, an economics professor from Lansing College.

They require a major time investment and make professors’ jobs harder, he said.

“Just in 10 years the amount of time and work it takes to be a good teacher has just really skyrocketed, and a good bit of it is because of the software and the systems. They are not friendly and easy to use.”

While billions of dollars pour into campus enterprise technology and services for students, few people look at the teacher’s job. And few people create tools for teachers that they need.

For these reasons, Luke decided to start a nonprofit called Malartu Inc. While projects exist in the early stages, he hopes that the tools he envisions will help professors be more productive and effective.

Please read the rest of the article here as it describes our plans for TheProfNet and Curriculum Intelligence.

2 thoughts on “Malartu, My Other Project”

  1. An interesting post.

    I’m curious about your effort to improve education through Malartu Inc.

    Though my career was spent in K-12 education information technology as opposed to higher ed, I did independently invent the electronic textbook. I did it for Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon back in the mid-1980s under the MacIntosh OS.

    If I can make a contribution to your efforts then respond to this post and we can talk further via email.

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