This morning in the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article titled “When ‘Uberization’ Comes to Education” has me ubernervous/uberexcited!.

If you weren’t aware of a new app called Uberstand, it’s okay, because I had never heard of it either.  According to the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Uberstand is kind of like Uber for hitchhiking lecturers.  Yep….if you have academic credentials in a specific content area you can put them up for hire on Uberstand. Employers who need someone to present a face-to-face lecture/present a workshop/ or answer a question from students in a classroom on a specific topic can go shopping through the app and find lecturers, their academic qualifications, and the ratings of prior guest lectures through the app.  Potential employers can look up guest lecturers in their area (guest lecturers are geotagged through the app….so if traveling in the area and you have your smart phone, you would show up when the employer goes shopping for academics). Of course all transactions are electronic, and Uberstand gets a percentage….but what a different educational world this is!  Conceptually it’s not that different than having a conference call and discussing who to get for guest lecturers at conferences…..it’s just that the rating may or may not be from people we know.

Here’s why I’m ubernervous…..is this kind of skipping right over Extension in terms of getting someone to answer random questions?

Here’s why I’m uberexcited…..could Extension do the same thing?  Could we offer UberExtension?  I believe we could and it would be great!!!!  We also are somewhat geotagged by accountability regions..with some of our areas of Extension being more geodependent than other topics…but regardless what if our clientele could look up and contact anyone in their area/anyone within a specific discipline within Extension?  …What an interesting concept!!!

I think instead of an uber mustache, we should have a red Herbie cowboy hat with the N on it as a logo!

Jeff A. ….I think I want to build another app!!!! 🙂