The Instructional Technology Council recently released a report on the trends in distance education and online learning at community colleges. Among its findings: Enrollment in distance education courses increased by over 20%, while overall community college enrollment increased by less than 2%. Clearly online learning offers many opportunities to students, teachers and academic institutions. But what are the opportunities for entrepreneurs?

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The Case for OpenCourseWare

Of course, entrepreneurs can benefit themselves from taking online classes. As Bill Gates said in a recent speech at M.I.T., he’s a “super happy user” of the university’s OpenCourseWare program, which offers free online courses, noting that he “retook physics” along with over a dozen of the other online offerings. Gates praised OpenCourseWare for offering a blend of the best of video technology, professional instruction and testing, and argued that accreditation too should be separated from place-based learning. Gates stated that “What’s been done so far has had very modest funding. This is an area we need more resources, more bright minds, and certainly one that I want to see how the foundation could make a contribution to this.”

Gates noted that work needs to be done in order to make teaching and learning online easier and that OpenCourseWare is currently highly fragmented.

Innovation and OCWSearch

Pierre Far found this fragmentation when he was looking online for a statistics course. As he browsed course catalogs and reviewed the course descriptions he found online, Far discovered that he often had to download the entire course packages and sift through the lectures before ascertaining whether or not a class contained the materials he was interested in learning.

Far created OCWSearch.com, a search engine that indexes not just course offerings, but course content. Launched two weeks ago, OCWSearch.com contains OpenCourseWare offerings from M.I.T., Stanford and Open University, and Far hopes to add the University of Massachusetts within the next day or so.

Far describes the OCWSearch engine as a “labor of love” at this stage. While Far’s work is a personal project, he worries that without any way to make money from tools like the one he’s devised, innovation in the field may be limited. Far also wonders how entrepreneurs and others who seek to add value to OCW content will fit into this system.

In an interview with Timothy Vollmer of Creative Commons, Karen Fasimpaur, creator of the Kids Open Dictionary, and co-founder of K12 Open Ed, argues that there can be sustainable business models around building open-education resources. She says, “Having worked in both commercial textbook and software publishing myself, I understand the business challenges and believe that there are exciting new business models around OER. In particular, income can be generated around customization services, professional development, and premium add-ons.”

Currently, the OpenCourseWare movement is funded in large part by large foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundations. As more and more students turn to online learning, Far and other are hoping that OpenCourseWare can be both sustainable and innovative and provide opportunities for ed-tech entrepreneurs.

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Trumba, the shared calendar and events communications software company has added the ability for users to attach “custom objects” to their Web calendars and other websites. These “objects” are in essence tables that unfold graphically, keyed to links, or can stand on their own as pages.

Trumba’s customers use the company’s software to publish interlinked calendars and provide other modular features to their websites. Clients include media companies like the New York Times and Ottaway Newspapers, academic institutions like Kansas State and Emory Universities, and groups like the City of Seattle and the New Orleans Saints.

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The custom objects advance the inherent modularity of Trumba’s offerings. From Trumba:

“To quickly grasp the idea of an Object, think of it as a table. Each record is represented by a row. Each attribute is represented by a column. Because Objects are tables, you can use them to store any collection of data that you might want to publish on your website.”

Dan Hickman, Trumba’s president, wrote us:

“Some of our competitors offer a canned venue or performer features that let you track and publish that information along with your calendar but our custom objects feature lets you create any type of content that might be associated with your events. The feature can even be used to publish a connected database of information that’s not even related to your calendar.”

Examples include attaching venue descriptions and pictures to events, to provide detailed listings of departments in a sleekly retrievable fashion and the ability to solicit and utilize user-generated content.

Disclosure: The author helped Trumba start their first blog many years ago.

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Forget losing weight or finding the perfect life partner: All we want to do is make 2010 the biggest geek-out year ever.

The ReadWriteWeb crew have collectively planned to take over the world next year by honing our nerd super-powers. From programming in Python to building AI houses, we’ve resolved to be smarter, more curious, more technical and way geekier than we were last year. Read our resolutions, and definitely let us know what you plan to do to be the best geek you can be in 2010.

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The editor-in-chief himself, Mr. Richard MacManus, is known for his fascination with machine-to-machine communication via the Internet of Things. This year promises to be an interesting one at the MacManus residence if Richard’s resolutions hold true.

“One of my goals for 2010,” he said, “is to experiment with Internet of Things in my own house and life, using tools like Pachube and sensors. We’ll see how that goes…”

We wish you lots of luck, boss! If all goes well, you’ll be a prime candidate for the first episode of Geek Cribs, and we’ll all be very, very jealous.

Our own ReadWriteStart warrior, Dana Oshiro, is going to be a busy bee this year.

“I’m finding that the coolest ideas come out of academic institutions and enthusiast groups before they’re ever thought of as business-related products. In 2010 I plan on attending more hackathons, dev camps and emerging tech conferences like SIGGRAPH.”

In addition to all that conference-hopping, Dana’s going to be doing some web work of her own. “Honestly, I need to revamp my personal website Villagers With Pitchforks. I haven’t changed the design in years.”

Alex Williams, our resident enterprise expert, is also known in certain circles as an experienced podcasting pro. His resolution is something the ReadWriteWeb team would all love to see happen.

He told us that he wants to use 2010 to “make an informative and entertaining podcast for ReadWriteWeb Enterprise that is lively, smart and fun.”

What do our friendly readers think? Would you like to listen to awesome news about what companies and people are moving and shaking in the world of enterprise technology? What folks do you most want Alex to talk to, and what topics would you find most interesting? And where would you be most likely to listen to a RWW podcast? At your laptop, in your car, while walking your dogs? Let us know in the comments!

Our newest startup blogger, Chris Cameron, said he wants to use 2010 to press the flesh and put faces with names, so to speak.

“Since I’m the new kid on the block and fresh out of J-school with my M.M.C., my new year’s resolution is to get acquainted with as many people as possible in the web/tech/startup industry and develop a healthy amount of sources.”

As seasoned journos, it’s our sworn duty to protect cub reporters from no-account rabble rousers, so we asked Chris who he specifically wanted to meet this year. He replied, “I’d love to develop some contacts from the bastions of the Web (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Digg, etc.).”

You’re in good company, kid. We’d like to meet those guys, too. Just kidding! As a RWW blogger, you’re sure to have Kevin Rose and Biz Stone on speed dial in no time. We wish you luck.

Another ReadWriteNoob is Abraham Hyatt, our intrepid Production Editor. He’s got a full slate of resolutions this year.

He told us he wants to have more one-on-one time with “the bloggers I read every day, the people whose tweets I look forward to, the friends who surprise me with what they post.”

He also said he’s going to start paying attention to things outside the tech sphere and his geographical scene. “I want to change the fact that I have no idea what’s changing in journalism in China.”

And finally, Abraham let us in on how he’s keeping his finger on the pulse of technology. “I want to learn from my 5-year-old niece as she begins using the Web. I just hooked her up with her first kids browser and the way she interacts with the Web will be a hint of what’s to come for all of us online in the next decade.”

Add in learning how to code and blogging more, two of his other resolutions, and Abraham’s got a full dance card for the rest of the year!

As for me, I plan to learn Python this year. I’ve realized in 2009 that it’s harder to be a tech writer when you don’t have a hacker-esque depth of understanding about APIs and web apps. After talking to Leah Culver, Mark Jeffrey and a bunch of other really smart programmers, I think Python is a great place to start learning about programming languages. So this year, I’m tackling a 900-page O’Reilly book, and I’m not giving up until I have a working web app of my own! Next up, Haskell.

Via Twitter, we heard from a few of our friends, including entrepreneur Renato Valdés Olmos, who pointed us to this pretty web app for those without resolutions who yearn to start small. And everyone’s favorite O.G (that’s “original geek” in these parts), Chris Pirillo, just couldn’t resist the opportunity to get sassy. “My geekiest new year’s resolution,” he said, “is 2560×1600.”

So, what great and glorious plans have you got for 2010? Will you be hacking your way to entrepreneurial greatness by starting your own web company? Will you be building hardware? Are you resolving to start a new career path, go to a new conference or meet a lifelong tech hero?

Let us know your resolutions in the comments!

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