Educational Software Business Plan

Third Degree I.D. is owned and operated by its founders. It is a small company with a lateral, non-hierarchical structure that cultivates mutual input and collective solutions. The company will operate with three full-time employees (also the founders) in the first year, hiring contractor and consultants as needed. As our business grows, we plan to add additional staff, as discussed below.

7.1 Personnel Plan

Third Degree I.D. will be formed with three executive partners, a Chief Executive Officer (CEO), a Chief Learning Officer (CLO), and a Chief Creative Officer (CCO). While a number of their job duties overlap, the CEO is primarily responsible for front-end consulting, planning, and project management, while the CLO and CCO are responsible for back-end product development, refinement, and implementation. The partners work together at promoting the business and managing office operations.

Susan Hines, CEO
Susan has worked in the educational sector for twenty years. She has seventeen years of teaching experience across a broad range of institutions, including public and private universities, four-year colleges, community colleges, and college-preparatory facilities. She has taught at institutions both domestic and foreign, has been a traditional tenure-track faculty member, and has served—and continues to serve—as online adjunct faculty. Susan was Assistant Professor of English and Digital Art at LaSalle University from 1998 to 2000, before taking a job as an Instructional Analyst with the e-learning company Eduprise, Inc. (now SunGuard Collegis). She was hired by the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2002 to develop its distance education curricula and continues to serve as SCAD’s Director of Instructional Design. Susan holds several degrees in English Literature: a Ph.D. from Georgia State University, an M.A. from the University of British Columbia, and a B.A. from the University of Alaska.

Mona Meyer, CLO
Mona holds a B.S. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine and an M.A. in Educational Technology from San Diego State University. She has over twelve years experience designing and developing new media learning solutions for a variety of educational institutions and publishers, including: McGraw-Hill, Jostens Learning Corporation (now CompassLearning), Leapfrog, and the Savannah College of Art and Design. Mona specializes in object-oriented instructional design solutions that promote active collaboration. As instructional design manager for McGraw-Hill New Media, Mona led the development of hundreds of titles for the K-12 market in a wide variety of subject areas and played a crucial role in the design and development of the Codie-Award-winning McGraw-Hill Learning Network (www.mhln.com), a large-scale Internet education portal that offers interactive textbooks, multi-player educational games, and a suite of web-based classroom management tools.

Daniel Stanford, CCO
Daniel holds a B.A. in Mass Communication and French from the University of Alabama and is currently completing his M.F.A. in Interactive Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. An avid linguist and the recipient of a Capstone International Scholarship for study abroad, Daniel has spent semesters in France and Germany. He began his career in media design at the University of Alabama Center for Public Television, where he collaborated with producers to promote programs and distribute supplementary educational materials via the Web. He has since served as a media designer at the BLR Agency in Birmingham, Alabama, where he contributed significantly to the Birmingham Museum of Art’s Addy-award-winning website (www.artsbma.org). Five years of diverse media design experience led Daniel to SCAD, where he has put his combination of artistic and technical skills to use in learning object programming, graphic interface development, and project management.

Future Staffing
As the client-base grows, the partners plan to hire a Technology Director who will work closely with the CLO and CCO to develop database-driven learning objects, as well as with the CEO to develop broader e-learning solutions, such as installation packages for open-source course management and learning management systems (CMS/LMS). In the first year, the partners will rely on outside consultants to provide information technology, instructional design, and media development support, as dictated by project load. As the client base grows and revenue is increasingly generated through content and technology re-licensure, the partners may add additional development staff to support project needs.