Ok, listen up you entrepreneurial types! This thread has given me a business idea that I will never implement myself, and so I hereby offer it up to the CC community. The need is to facilitate teachers getting some compensation for writing LORs, and here are the specifics:
- a website, e.g. "MyLOR.com" (I haven't checked whether this specific name is available or not), is used to screen LOR requests.
- the website allows the creation of free, secure and confidential student accounts.
- each student account can create a “cheat sheet” of their EC’s, courses, leadership, passions, commitment to causes, etc.
- each student account can create LOR requests directed to specific teachers. These requests would include the classes taken, grades received and any notable class accomplishments.
- the website allows the creation of secure instructor accounts to receive the student LOR requests.
- the instructor accounts will offer a wide variety of options for preprocessing the provided "cheat sheets" and student data into LOR templates according to instructor preferences. Various syntactic and semantic checks are also provided (e.g. 'You say Brenda is 'best ever', but you previously said Susie was 'best ever'. Are you sure?".)
- when LOR requests are submitted, a window pops up reminding the students that teachers are not paid to write LORs and to offer the option of including a "thank you gift". If this option is selected, a list of instructor pre-selected gifts of varying values is displayed. If any of these are selected, a separate merchant account window opens to process the payment information.
- the website will periodically query the instructor as to whether the LOR has been submitted. The "pings" will become progressively more frequent and urgent as the submission deadline approaches.
- Once the LOR is submitted, the student account will received notification.
In practice, the teacher will ask students to use MyLOR.com for LOR requests and for any LOR-related communications. If asked about the “gift”, the instructor should say that that message is from the website, not them, and can be ignored. The student benefit of receiving an automatic notification when the LOR has been submitted by the instructor should be emphasized.
Revenue for the website owners can be generated by a variety of mechanisms common to e-commerce, such as charging a fee for the instructor accounts, adding small surcharges for the gifts, selling ads on the website, or some combination of these.
Anyway, that’s my idea. Maybe something like “Evite”, but specifically for LORs.