July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Ed-tech accelerator Imagine K12 announced that it will increase its initial funding for startups from $20,000 to $100,000.

This additional funding is available from the newly established “Start Fund,” backed by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, Yahoo co-founder David Filo, Angela Filo, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, NewSchools Venture Fund, and GSV Asset Management.

Imagine K12 is focused on helping entrepreneurs develop technology for students from kindergarten to high school.

In just two years, Imagine K12 has established itself as one of the most well-respected programs in part because of its efforts to reach teachers. Thirty-nine startups have graduated from it, and these have gone on to raise approximately $30 million in funding.

Each startup accepted into the program will receive a $20,000 check from Imagine K12 and $80,000 from the Start Fund.

“The funds will give entrepreneurs enough time to get the right market fit so [they] can take root in the educational system,” said Imagine K12 founder Tim Brady by phone. ”And our startups have built products that are used in hundreds of thousands of classrooms.”

Brady claims that the accelerator’s alumni have launched products deployed by 10 percent of teachers. Some of the most well-known graduates from previous batches include behavior management software ClassDojo and open-data startup LearnSprout.

Interested in applying? Applications are now open for the official program, which begins in September in Palo Alto, Calif.

photo credit: @Photo. via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Kickboard, a web-based school analytics platform, has closed a $2 million funding deal, the startup announced today.

Kickboard allows teachers to collect, analyze, and share student information in one centralized place. This eliminates a lot of the switching between other document software, databases, and test grade collection databases. The end result is hopefully a better picture of what each student needs in terms of teaching and nurturing. A tool like this actually makes a lot of sense, especially for teachers of younger students who don’t always learn the same way and may need different teaching styles. (And as someone who grew up as an ADHD child in Tennessee, I can attest to learning a hell of a lot differently than other students.)

The startup is the latest in a growing number of companies using big data for positive change. In this case, Kickboard can help individual students as well as improve the teaching methods of an entire school by pooling data to show broad analytics. Over 200 schools across the country are currently using Kickboard’s platform.

“In a performance-based culture, it is imperative that teachers, students, and families have greater visibility into all elements of student performance so that they can take informed, decisive action and improve student outcomes,” said Kickboard founder and CEO Jennifer Medbery in a statement.

New Markets Venture Partners and Two Sigma Ventures led the funding round. The company said it plans to use the additional capital to hire more employees and increase product development. Founded in 2009, the New Orleans-based startup has raised a total of $2.8 million in funding to date.

Textbooks image via  Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Udemy, the online learning platform that offers videos and live lectures from hundreds of expert instructors, has closed its second round of venture capital funding.

The company website features over 5,000 courses on technology and business, as well as lifestyle, the arts, and sports. In the month of October alone, Udemy added 400 courses.

The courses are diverse: On Udemy, you can learn how to develop mobile applications, build pivot tables on Excel, or master the basics of photography. Simply type in a subject you’re interested in, and surf the results. As you might expect, the most popular courses are taught by renowned business leaders, such as Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer or Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

There are both free and paid courses, so teachers can earn money. In 2011, the top 10 instructors garnered $1.65 million in combined sales. Last week, the company announced that one in four of its instructors will close out the year with over $10,000.

In an interview, Udemy CEO Eren Bali said the goal is to “democratize education.” For Bali, this means enabling the top experts to teach any student anywhere in the world and reduce the price point so anyone can receive high-quality education.

Related: Read our summary of a panel where Udacity and Khan Academy’s CEOs called for disruption in higher ed.

“To do this, though, we need to be big,” said Bali. The company will use the funds to drive its marketing efforts so more instructors and students sign up. They will also use the funds to build out the course catalog to include more adult education classes as well as add accredited and certified content. To accelerate the development of the mobile product, Bali brought on a new COO and President, Dennis Yang. Previously, he was the senior vice president of operations at 4INFO and has been an executive advisor to Flipboard.

The founding team does not intend to replace higher education, but Bali hopes Udemy’s inexpensive courses will “force traditional educational institutions [to] lower their prices.” On Udemy, prices typically hover at a few hundred dollars, and most of the popular courses are free.

Bali explained that education-technology startups like Coursera and Khan Academy have stimulated investors’ interest in this space. However, Udemy is doing it a little differently by enabling anyone with expertise in a subject area to moonlight as a teacher. “In 10 years, we believe every expert in the world will be teaching online,” said Bali.

The Series B round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from Lightbank, MHS Capital, and Learn Capital, bringing the company’s total funding to $16 million.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is a guest post by professor, Reynol Junco

We’re in the middle of an Educational Technology (“ed-tech”) startup boom.

Research by GSV Advisors shows a sharp increase in investments in education companies almost doubling between 2007 and 2011 to $930 million. Data from the National Venture Capital Association shows that investment in ed-tech companies has almost tripled between 2002 and 2011.

It’s no surprise that the number of ed-tech startup companies has grown exponentially and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

The market is flooded with these startups and clearly, there is a great deal of interest from venture capital firms.

Many ed-tech startups typically build their product because one of the founders had a particular issue in college that they think can be addressed with a new technology or by building an education version of an existing technology.

For instance, a founder might think “I used to forget to bring my chemistry book to class so why don’t I develop a cool app that automatically texts students right before a class where they need a book?” (Please note that I did not base this example on a real startup; however, I wouldn’t be surprised if such a product existed). Other ed-tech startups have an idea they think should result in improved student outcomes and they run with it.

I hate to break it to you…

This may come as a surprise to ed-tech companies, but you’re not going to invent the next big thing by shooting in the dark. Without knowing the research on how students learn and develop as well as the literature on how technology affects student outcomes, the chances of your startup magically creating student success are almost nonexistent.

Indeed, it’s not the technology that generates learning, but the ways in which the technology are used.

Ed-tech startups rarely, if ever, talk with educators about designing their product. You’d be surprised at the number of emails I get asking me to comment on a product after it has been conceptualized, built, and tested. I have dubbed these messages “tell us how cool our product is” emails.

Startups in other fields don’t behave this way. Imagine a genomics startup that didn’t talk to medical researchers and/or didn’t base their products on research in the biotech field. Such a company would never exist, let alone be funded by a venture capital firm.

Yet, in this new boom investors are more than happy to fund an ed-tech startup whose employees have never bothered to read a single piece of educational research. My fellow academic rebel Audrey Watters famously commented about a $2.5 million investment in Codecademy, “Wow, bullshit badging and shitty pedagogy wins the day in ed-tech investing.”

Educators and researchers who know about how students learn know that there is nothing special about Codecademy. The flashing lights and pretty buttons fool the venture capital firms and foundations that invest in these kinds of startups. Since funders also know next to nothing about how students learn, of course these ideas sound amazing.

Where’s the data?

Lastly, there is the issue of adoption of new technologies by educational institutions. Higher education faculty and administrators are already distrustful of startups because there is inherent skepticism about for-profit ventures. Ed-Tech companies have no data showing that their product does what they say it does. Indeed, in their Unleashing the Potential of Educational Technology report the U.S.’s Council of Economic Advisers politely wrote, “It is difficult for producers of these technologies to demonstrate the effectiveness of their products.”

It’s actually not that difficult to demonstrate effectiveness, it’s just that startups have been unwilling and/or do not have the expertise to do so. Having evidence is crucial in convincing educators to adopt a new technology — don’t tell them that your new technology is effective in improving student learning, show them.

Here are some suggestions for getting it right:

1.  Collaborate with an academic when developing your product. You don’t have to have an educator or a researcher directing what you do, but at least get some input so that you know you are building a product that might have some utility.
2. Assess your outcomes. In business-speak this usually means “provide financial figures to show you are being successful;” however, what you must provide to educators are data that show that using your product does what you say it does. Did you develop an app that’s supposed to increase student lecture attendance? Then design a study with your academic collaborator to evaluate differences in attendance rates between app users and nonusers. Remember, data are the lingua franca of academic circles.
3. Refine your technology based on assessment data. This goes beyond bug fixes and UI design. In collaboration with your academic collaborator, you’ll likely discover ways to make your product more robust in doing what you want it to do. Recently, my colleagues and I published a paper showing that using Twitter to continue discussions outside of class was positively related to student engagement and learning; however, using Twitter as a back channel for in-class discussions was not. If your outcome studies don’t yield a positive effect, at least you’ll have some great data with which to refine your product.
4. Publish what you find. No matter what you believe about the current academic publishing process, the academic culture values results presented through peer-reviewed academic publications more than blog posts, presentations, and “white papers” (a phrase I absolutely despise, but that’s a topic for another day). Not only will you have clout in academic circles when you publish data, your academic collaborator will have an additional benefit of working with you (another publication) that will help them in their tenure and promotion process.
5. Learn about the culture of academia and help academia learn about the culture of startups. This will help you understand institutional resistance to new technologies in education as well as help you understand how to best approach your new academic partners.

Reynol Junco is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He researches the impact of social technologies on college students. Follow Rey on Twitter and read about his research on his blog.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and they do not reflect in any way those of the institutions to which he is affiliated.

[Top image credit: wavebreakmedia ltd/Shutterstock]