You’ve spent long nights toiling over textbooks and a laptop, and you’ve finally come up with a truly stellar lecture or lesson plan. So what do you do? If Paul Edelman gets his way, you’ll take that laptop, go online, and make some money off your handiwork.
Mr. Edelman is the founder of Teachers Pay Teachers, a Web portal that bills itself as "the world’s first marketplace…where smart educators can buy and sell original course materials." The site works like "an eBay for educators," according to the Associated Press: Teachers and professors who pay an annual membership fee can post lesson plans online and set their own prices for the material.
So far the site seems to have attracted mostly schoolteachers, not professors, but Mr. Edelman hopes to increase his collegiate clientele. To do that, he will have to make the case that Teachers Pay Teachers has material that professors can’t find on free lesson-plan sites—or come up with themselves. —Brock Read
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