Venture Concept No. 2

Opportunity

The need that my business idea will address is that some college students are forced to take online courses, and also take online exams. Most students who take these online exams feel extremely uncomfortable and dread taking them. If you're apartment complex does not have optimal wi-fi connection, that could cause many problems when attempting the exam. Taking an online exam with someone on your computer screen watching your every move can become extremely nerve-wrecking. College students who take online tests via ProctorU will be the targeted potential customers of my new service. This need is created because some courses at the University of Florida, as well as other large universities, have extremely large class sizes and not enough professors to handle the overwhelming number of students. So an online class allows one professor to teach as many students as needed. Most students I have spoken to would love an alternative to ProctorU, and feel like an alternative would allow them to do better on their exams. This “window of opportunity” would be open for as long as Universities are still partnered with ProctorU.

Innovation

The service that I would be offering is an alternative to ProctorU to take exams for online courses. Basically, this service would operate just like ProctorU in the booking aspect, students would go online and book an appointment with a nearby proctor, including date, time and place. Much like the SAT or ACT, there would be a set number of exam locations and times. Students could then meet up with their proctor and take a pen and paper exam, rather than an online exam, depending on whether or not there are other students in the same city, other students would be taking the exam as well in the same place. Designated proctoring sites would be either a college campus in that city, or maybe even a high school classroom. Students have been taking pen and paper exams for their entire lives, and it is what students feel most comfortable doing. Especially once a student gets to college, and the exam material is much more difficult, it is extremely important that a students feels comfortable while taking an exam. This company would make money by partnering with large universities that have unhappy students taking online exams. It would charge a base fee per year, which would most likely be a little more costly that a partnership with ProctorU, because of the amount of proctors there must be throughout the United States. But, I feel like universities should spare no expense to have students happy because of the high price of tuition. 

Venture Concept

Most students dislike taking online exams because it makes them feel extremely uncomfortable. Myself, and many other students that I have spoken to would be more than willing to take a pen and paper exam in its place. The hardest part of starting this company would be getting universities to partner with it rather than ProctorU. I’m sure universities have multi-year deals with ProctorU already in place, so it would take a couple years for universities to be able to partner with this company. ProctorU would be my biggest competitor, and it is extremely vulnerable because most students despise taking online exams. There would be many employees, but not many full-time employees. Teachers, TAs or even some professors would sign up to proctor a specific exam and be paid per exam session that they proctor. 

3 Minor Elements

My unfair advantage would be the tremendous amount of work ethic that I would put forth to get this company going and start on the right foot. There is not much innovation for a business idea like this, the only one that I could really think of is mainly to partner with exams like SAT or ACT and have our employees proctor those exams as well. In 5 years, once this company has taken off and made millions, I would sell it and pursue my ultimate goal which is to open my own stock brokerage firm.

Summary of Feedback

I did not receive any critical feedback of my venture concept. All the comments I received agreed with my idea and stated that they would love this service as an alternative to ProctorU. One student did mention a point that I had not thought of though, she said that when she is taking online tests, sometimes her internet connection goes bad and causes problems with the test. I included that in my venture concept. The comments on my What's Next post were very similar, and liked how I wanted to eventually sell this business and pursue my dreams. 

Overall, the feedback I received did not give me anything that I could improve on in my venture concept. It just gave me more information to include on the cons of online ProctorU exams.