Why do students cheat — and how are they getting away with it?

One unintended use for massive open online courses, dubbed “MOOCs,” is to help professors better understand the mechanics of cheating in online learning.

Bernard Bull, an assistant vice president for academics at Concordia University Wisconsin, will ask his class to cheat for the purposes of anthropological research. Students will then be asked to disclose exactly how they cheated.

The assignment is a unit in a new class, “Understanding Cheating in Online Courses,” which is offered through the Canvas MOOC platform run by Instructure, a course-management company.

This research will come in particularly handy for educators and online course providers like Instructure and Coursera. With a handful of Coursera courses recently approved for credit, the fear is that students will simply perform a Google search if they’re stumped. As the New York Times reports, the solution may be a new technology for remote proctoring, where online test takers are tracked via their keystrokes.

In the meantime, Bull hopes to dig into the psychology behind cheating and to take steps to prevent it. He embarked on a study a few years ago and found that half of all cheaters never get caught, prompting further investigation. According to Instructure, he held off on publishing this research until he could get a better handle on what motivates people to cheat.

One interesting example is a girl who claims a former boyfriend sabotaged her online test by logging in under her user name. But it was a lie — she made up the whole story in order to get a second chance at a test. Bull’s class will explore the reasons that this girl felt compelled to cheat, and whether the current education system can be adapted to prevent such behavior.

Coursera, the online course provider, is one of the fastest-growing startups that is transforming how we learn.

Today, the company announced a partnership with a fellow ed-tech startup, Chegg, and is striking deals with the largest publishers. The goal is to make it easier for students of online courses to access relevant academic content on the web.

Large publishing companies, including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley will experiment with offering Coursera students versions of their digital textbooks, delivered via Chegg’s e-Reader. Students won’t be charged to access these materials while they’re enrolled on a course.

“We recognize the importance of forging partnerships with other stakeholders in the education space,” said Daphne Koller, Coursera’s cofounder. “By collaborating with publishers, we are able to provide access to some of the world’s best resources to Coursera students.”

Every few months like clockwork, Coursera announces that more universities around the world have signed up to offer courses on its video platform. The Silicon Valley-based company recently achieved a major milestone when a handful of its courses were approved for college credit.

Coursera was formed by Stanford university professors Koller and Andrew Ng. With the technology proving to be a hit with students, the founders are currently working with California state legislators and local educators to encourage state colleges and university to give credit to online courses.

”The movement is still relatively young, but I’m pleased we’re seeing so many of the best universities committing to teach online classes” Ng told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “This proves we’re no passing fad.”

Top image via Coursera

Teacher-turned-entrepreneur Adam Bellow has launched Educlipper, a tool for kids to save and share content from the web.

Educlipper is a “virtual pinboard” of sorts — students can use it to clip news articles, YouTube videos, PowerPoint presentations, online courses, essays, or any other form of multimedia content. The idea is to curate a digital learning portfolio that you can share with peers and teachers independently of Facebook and Twitter.

Students can sign up outside of class, but thousands of teachers are already using it to augment their lesson plans. Bellow has also found that educators will share online content with one another.

Going forward, Bellow will determine how to make money by potentially selling the service, and it’s building out the functionality so students can create personal profiles. He envisions Educlipper being used more broadly by young professionals and college students, but he’s presently concerned with building a “safe environment for kids.”

Educlipper has been in private alpha for over a year, and Bellow claims that 25,000 teachers and students have already adopted it. Bellow said the idea has taken off because educators “requested it.” Prior to starting the company, he sent a survey with ideas for ed-tech tools and asked teachers to vote for the most viable.

Bellow has built a reputation for his blog Edutecher, which has spiralled into an in-depth resource for ed-tech reviews. He was inspired to launch the site after working as a technology integrationist specialist in a school district. “I’m not in this as a serial entrepreneur,” he said. “I’m trying to solve a very real pain point for teachers.”

Bellow is looking to raise a first round of funding after securing a $600,000 seed round from Learn Capital and Western Technologies, an early investor in Facebook.

In his employer’s eyes, Dan Brittingham, a dropout from the University of Michigan’s nursing school, was far more desirable hire than any Harvard grad.

Enstitute’s Dan Brittingham

Brittingham, 24, is one of eleven fellows enrolled in New York-based Enstitute, a college alternative for dropouts and a few recent grads. He was selected by Enstitute’s founders [above] from over hundreds of applicants for demonstrating critical thinking, drive, and an aptitude for entrepreneurship.

The fellows are placed in a two-year apprenticeship –most end up at tech startups. They report to a chief executive, rotate around different departments, and learn deep technical and managerial skills they would not be exposed to at college.

“These kids are hungry — it’s not like a normal intern,” said Nihil Mehta, CEO of LocalResponse, and Brittingham’s boss. “I’ve hired Harvard kids, and can tell you that the fellows have another level of commitment and no sense of entitlement.”

By his sophomore year, Brittingham had started two Internet ventures from his dorm room. When he graduates from the apprenticeship, he intends to raise funding for his third company or join a data scientist team, a job that currently commands in excess of $300,000.

Brittingham (in the blue) with his colleagues at LocalResponse.

“There is no disconnect between the learning material and how its applied,” said Brittingham, who is dipping his toe in various departments at LocalResponse and is picking up technical skills he would not have been exposed to at school.

Enstitute is one of many recent experiments designed to address the so-called technical skills gap. With most colleges failing to endow students with the skills to compete in the digital age, dropout rates are increasing. A recent study, “The American Dream 2.0,” found that 46 percent of college students fail to graduate with any credential within six years.

Enstitute’s founders at the NEXT Leader of the Future award ceremony

“I had to force my way through the system,” said Enstitute’s cofounder Kane Sarhan. He barely graduated from Pace University (he completed the requisite credits online after dropping out several times), but he excelled in two apprenticeships. By 24, he was working as a creative director at LocalResponse alongside Harvard Business School graduate Shaila Ittycheria.

Ittycheria was over $100,000 in debt, and a graduate of the Harvard Business School.

Over beers one night, the pair discussed how Ittycheria could have avoided the MBA. “Shaila got a great network from HBS, but thought she needed that stamp of approval — turns out she didn’t,” Sarhan explained. With that, the pair quit their jobs, and Enstitute was born.

‘Learn by doing’: The apprenticeship

Enstitute doesn’t really care about a fellow’s grades. And neither do dozens of New York tech companies who have agreed to mentor a fellow.

The inaugural class are working at startups like Bitly and Thrillist. They live free of charge with Ittycheria in a loft in the Financial District, and all meals are paid for. They receive a small stipend from their employers of $200 a week.

Enstitute is a nonprofit, and it’s currently raising $1 million from donors to expand the program.

The upcoming class will have even more options for apprenticeships; corporate-level executives and founders at The Muse, Tumblr, Center for Social Innovation, and NY Tech Meetup just signed on.

Kathryn Minshew, CEO of The Muse, said the mission “struck a chord.”

“The best way to learn entrepreneurship is to observe other entrepreneurs,” said Kathryn Minshew, the CEO of job search site The Muse, who is currently interviewing fellows.

It’s a far greater time commitment than taking on an intern. Minshew is expected to expose her fellow to the full scope of the business, including programming, venture capital fundraising, and business development. “So many of my rookie mistakes could have been avoided by first-hand exposure to other, more experienced technology entrepreneurs,” she explained.

In addition to the apprenticeship, the fellows attend evening events where they hear job tips from inspirational speakers and are offered a supplemental curriculum of online and offline classes. Upon graduation, the graduates receive a certification that encompasses a detailed overview of material.

If employers are looking for something more concrete, each fellow develops a digital portfolio.

Enstitute: Meet Silicon Valley

This week, Sarhan will meet with entrepreneurs and potential donors in Silicon Valley. Already, chief executives are receptive to the idea, and many are buzzing about the opportunity to mentor an apprentice.

“I have hired employees who ranged from college dropouts to Ph.Ds in computer and neurosciences,” said Manish Chandra, the CEO of fashion startup Poshmark. ”I am open to looking at students and young professionals who have demonstrated their intellect and enterprising nature through alternative programs.”

Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra is open making apprenticeships a “core part of the hiring process.”

Enstitute would consider a job at a tech startup like Poshmark or LocalResponse to be a successful outcome for any fellow.

They also encourage graduates to start their own ventures from scratch, join a large corporation (Sarhan says he’s in initial talks with some household name brands), or return to school.

One year into their apprenticeships, none of the fellows have opted to return to college or apply for grad school.

Interested in hiring an apprentice, or are you 18 to 24 and want to apply to the program? Learn more here.

The Federal Communications Commission announced today it has hired Michael Steffan as the director of digital learning. In his new role, Steffen will lead initiatives to expand access to broadband Internet in schools.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski explained, “Broadband and digital tools have game-changing potential for education.” Improving connectivity is a first step toward teachers and students taking advantage of the new education technology.

The appointment is timely given that senators, like John D. Rockefeller IV, are pushing for an extension of the 2010 E-rate program, which subsidizes Internet services for schools and libraries. The FCC believes that these institutions should offer lightning fast connections to the web.

The FCC, which is currently the largest funder of Internet Connectivity in K12 schools across America, has endorsed E-rate reforms. In January, Chairman Genachowski called for the nation’s mayors to bring one-gigabit Internet access to one community in each state by 2015.

Steffen will draw on experience bringing connectivity to America’s most remote school districts. Most recently, he served as the Chairman’s legal advisor on wireline, international, and Internet policy issues. During that time, he oversaw the creation of the Connect America Fund, a broadband infrastructure program for rural America.

The FCC has stepped up its involvement in education, but is also concerned with other sectors, including health care. Last month, the commission appointed Matthew Quinn as Director of Healthcare Initiatives. In this role, Quinn is helping to facilitate the availability of medical devices that require spectrum; and ensuring that rural hospitals and other health care facilities have required connectivity.

Top image via Shutterstock

This is a guest post by Andrew Smith Lewis, executive chairman at Cerego.

Why is it that so many people who opine on matters of education do so by espousing an “either or” position, reducing their argument to a zero sum game, thereby forcing readers to take sides?

Isn’t that the exact opposite of what education and learning are supposed to be all about?

Take, for instance, the recent Washington Post piece by Sabrina Joy Stevens, a teacher-turned-education activist based in Washington D.C, who wrote an opinion-editorial piece for the paper criticizing personalized learning tools. 

In her piece, Stevens propagates common misconceptions about personalized learning tools. But as the executive chairman of a company focused on personalized learning, who works closely with great teachers to find a balance between technology and instruction, I am compelled to point out how misguided — and misleading — her arguments are.

First of all, I take issue with her basic definition of personalized learning, which betrays a few bad assumptions. Stevens believes that personalized learning tools are nothing more than a patch for a broken education system, suggesting that the promise of personalized learning is built around a goal of “digitized, standardized learning.”

It is an error to think that personalized learning is just set of digitized practice problems. We’re not talking about old multiplication tables in newly digitized form, where students get increasingly difficult questions until they get one wrong, then get easier problems until they get them right again. Those kinds of tools are trivial, and they’re not oriented to change outcomes. Digitized drill-and-kill is not revolutionary, nor is it personalized.

The fact that any learning tool is digital is simply table stakes these days. Digital is a condition of modern living and learning — nothing more, and nothing less.

Second, true personalization is the exact opposite of standardization. True personalization accepts that we all learn differently and at different paces, and that what actually makes it into our brain can vary drastically from student to student. The desired outcomes may be standardized, but the path to that outcome, and the goal of increasing the speed and likelihood of reaching positive outcomes is precisely the goal of some of the most innovative companies leading the personalized learning charge.

But the argument that irks me most is the suggestion that personalized learning tools are trying to be a replacement for teachers.

Personalized learning tools are not replacing teachers. They don’t seek to replace personal interaction, either.  Any argument to such effect is fear-mongering fabrication.

The truth of the matter is, personalized learning tools are a way for teachers to learn more about their students, and a way for students to learn at their own pace. These tools are designed to be a powerful supplement for teachers, not a replacement. They give teachers more context, and more data upon which to make pedagogical and intervention decisions.

Embrace this idea:  humans are wonderful at certain tasks, and decidedly less than wonderful at others. The most stubborn among us may resist this truth, but the most stubborn among us have also resisted nearly every positive technological change since…forever.

Personalized learning tools are not created to subtract something from the classroom as Stevens suggests. Rather, they aspire to be additive and empowering. They free up teachers to spend more time interacting with students on an individual basis, foregoing the rote call-and-response of yore. Any honest teacher will admit that when it comes to certain aspects of her profession, she may as well be a machine, and that’s bad for everyone.

Teachers should not be charged with transferring knowledge to students in bulk, playing to the median, the mean, or in many cases the lowest common denominator. Personalized learning tools can fundamentally improve the quality of student-teacher interactions by stratifying roles and enabling more frequent, bespoke, high-intensity, and high-functioning engagement.

The role of teachers is shifting from “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.” That’s a fact. Modern, forward-thinking teachers can be more effective with their talents when they are enabled to cater to each student’s own trajectory, rather than preaching to tuned-out masses. We should be empowering students to explore self-directed learning paths. And we should enable teachers enrich that journey, helping a student move forward if and when they get stuck.

Personalized learning tools, in the hands of savvy teachers, make those teachers more effective, and improve student learning outcomes non-trivially. They build on what teachers already do best.

I will continue to fight for one of education’s biggest and most important ideas, and I know that many others will too. Substance needs to win over self-preservation and ignorance. We need to summon enough courage to recognize that attacking individual weaknesses and playing to individual strengths is nothing short of necessary.

Andrew Smith Lewis heads Cerego’s US operations and runs Cerego’s Advisory Board, which is an international group of experts and practitioners in scientific, technological, and commercial areas directly relevant to the company’s activities.

Currently based in Palo Alto, Andrew lived in Japan for 25 years and is fluent in Japanese.

Top image via Shutterstock

The founders of Silicon Valley-based accelerator Imagine K12 believe we are amid a radical transformation in education.

Rather than teaching in batches, educators are looking for ways to help individual students learn. Imagine K12 believes one of its startups will produce the next great innovation in instruction.

And if the opportunity to resolve some of the U.S. educational system’s biggest problems isn’t enough, startups in the upcoming class will receive $100,000 in initial funding (up from $20,000).

I caught up with ImagineK12′s founders Tim Brady and Geoff Ralstan in the hours prior to the announcement of the accelerator’s funding boost and the establishment of a new “Start Fund” backed by big shots like LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham.

Here’s what they had to say about the challenges of bringing disruptive new tech to American kindergartens and high schools — and how they answered one pretty big claim.

Imagine K12 founder Tim Brady

VentureBeat: Why did you decide to increase the initial investment? 

Tim Brady: We need more great hackers and entrepreneurs in the space. Now we can give them more runway so they can get the traction they need to really be attractive to seed capital investors. The funds will give entrepreneurs enough time to get the right market fit so it can take root in the educational system.

VentureBeat: The media has accused ed-tech accelerators of failing to communicate with their real customers: teachers. Do you agree? 

Brady: We take that kind of criticism extremely seriously. We haven’t heard it that often from our about our companies. We have a teacher in residence position and an educator day event. If teachers don’t like the product, they won’t download it from the Internet. We have products that are used in hundreds of thousands of classrooms, which is replacing bad software sold by big sales forces to a superintendents’ office.

VentureBeat: Charter schools have a reputation for being early adopters for tech. Is this still the case?

Imagine K12′s Geoff Ralstan is the former chief product officer for Yahoo.

Geoff Ralston: The charter schools have been great partners to sit down and talk to us. But they aren’t the only folk we are talking to, and not the only ones using our products. Even a few years ago, it was much more likely that a charter school would be more interested. But there has been a shift. Public schools are highly motivated to try new things — at least in the Bay Area.

VentureBeat: Are teachers increasingly the early adopters? 

Ralston: In the past it’s been top-down — teachers haven’t had a say in what’s being developed. But the educators are increasingly adopting these products first. So we’ve gone to great lengths to educate them on what that means. And now, 10 percent of teachers are using our startups’ products.

VentureBeat: But what these startups fail? The fallout must be far worse when it comes to ed-tech. Are teachers going to be disillusioned when startups like Alleyoop don’t deliver?

Brady: It happens — even to the larger players. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt declared bankruptcy. Of course, continuity is an issue. But we are very upfront with our teachers and our companies. We are also careful with the startups we select so we can avoid the big flameouts.

VentureBeat: And now you claim the Imagine K12 graduates have developed tech used by 10 percent of U.S. teachers. That number seems shockingly high. 

Brady: The really cool thing about our space is that teachers talk to each other. They’ll say, “This is awesome, you should try it!” The same goes with parents, and kids who view these new tools as a key part of their academic success.

VentureBeat: Yes, many of us can attest to the flaws with the current education system. We’ve all been students at some point.

Brady: Absolutely, but that doesn’t necessary make you an expert. If you understand a pain-point, it’s just the starting point. Entrepreneurs shouldn’t fall into the trap of using personal experience as a guide to evolving the product. For this reason, we’re looking for unique backgrounds — a teacher who is also a coder, for instance. That’s one of our big recent changes; we are trying to bring the hackers into the space.

VentureBeat: Is the resurgence of interest in ed-tech bringing in the “wantreprenerus”? Or is it a good thing? 

Ralston: There is a lot more capital available, that’s for sure. And capital is a natural incentive to convince more great entrepreneurs to get into the space. But we are not creating throwaway consumer internet tools here — the end goal is to create better outcomes for children around the world.

VentureBeat: How about the competition? Are there too many ed-tech accelerators?

Brady: Whether there are too few or two many accelerators, the long-term goal remains unchanged. Technology can help us with some of the biggest problems in the current system. We designed our school system in the age of the industrial revolution; we need to move to more individualized instruction.

VentureBeat: On that note, what’s the big goal? What gets you up in the morning? 

Brady: We are at the beginning of a 20-year transformational period in education. Sixty-five percent of our kids only graduate from high school and don’t get the education they ought to get. The world is going to change radically — and we get to invent the great innovation that will make that happen.

Read the full news story on Imagine K12′s new fund.

Imagine K12 meetup image via @Photo.

Pearson has acquired Learning Catalytics, a cloud-based learning assessment system developed by two Harvard professors, for an undisclosed sum.

Learning Catalytics’ tools for the interactive classroom were developed and tested at Harvard. Faculty can ask open-ended or critical thinking questions, and students answer on a tablet, laptop, or mobile device.

This helps professors determine which areas require further explanation, so they can automatically group students for more in-depth problem solving. Professors can understand students performance in real-time — even while lecturing.

The news was announced in a company blog post today, with Learning Catalytics’ Eric Mazur citing Pearson’s “global reach” as an attractive quality. According to its website, Learning Catalytics won’t be shut down — it will still be available to current and new customers.

Paul Corey, Pearson’s higher education president, said Lukoff will continue to develop the product in accordance with the company’s product roadmap. In an interview, Corey said he was impressed by Learning Catalytics’ formative assessment platforms, which are “integral to Pearson and online learning growth.”

“”We have no imminent plans to change the brand of the standalone product,” Corey confirmed. But Pearson’s MyLab and Mastering products will be enhanced by Learning Catalytics’ capabilities.

Pearson claims to be the leading learning company in the world; it’s certainly one of the largest and most powerful. But it has been accused of failing to innovate at the pace of the new crop of ed-tech startups. To stay current, the company launched an accelerator program, and makes strategic acquisitions.

The strategy doesn’t always work; as we reported, Pearson-backed Alleyoop shut down in March. 

Learning Catalytics cofounders Mazur and Gary King will continue to consult for Pearson and the third, Brian Lukoff, will join Pearson’s engineering team.

Top image // Shutterstock

Edtech startup LearnZillion just received $7 million to help teachers implement the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which define what students need to know at each grade level.

Adopted by 46 states, the Common Core State Standards communicate what students should know in subjects like mathematics, languages, and the arts. LearnZillion is a keen supporter of Common Core State Standards, and it is developing an online and offline community for teachers [above, at LearnZillion's TeachFest conference]. The website also offers a digital curriculum dubbed “By Teachers, For Teachers” as well as professional development tools for teachers, schools, and districts.

LearnZillion makes money by charging schools for access to its “premium” features, including personalized teaching insights and data analytics.

The company claims it has 120,000 registered teachers and reaches approximately 1.4 million students and claims it’s adding about 5,000 new teachers every week. In future, CEO Eric Westendorf told me that the company will release a mobile application for teachers to help them transition to the Common Core.

“Teachers are very busy so new products must save them time,” he said in an interview. “We are working hard to make sure teachers can engage without a huge up-front commitment of time [but] we need to do even better.”

Common Core Standards have been heralded by some teachers and policy makers as a means to standardize tests and boost student achievement. However, The Bookings Institute recently issued a report arguing that they will not help with student performance. The Washington Policy Center argues that this “one size fits all” approach to education will stifle innovation. But for now, it’s the accepted wisdom.

The funding was led by DCM with participation from O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, Calvert Social Investment Fund, and D.C. Community Ventures.

Pearson-backed edtech startup Alleyoop is closing down, effective March 31.

The Boston-based startup launched in February 2012 to help teens become better prepared for college, and it has grown to 100,000 users.

It’s unclear why Pearson is pulling the plug, but a spokesperson said they have been attempting to innovate in the space for years.

When it first launched, the startup was hailed by the press as the “Zynga for learning.” Alleyoop’s design is reminiscent of a game — students can sign on through Facebook Connect and then search for homework help.

“Fundamentally, we’re focused on big problem of how you help a teen take control of their future,” Alleyoop President Patrick Supanc told Mashable when the site first launched.

The plan appears to be to hand off existing users to the company’s partners. “Soon we plan to share a bundle of very special offers from our trusted learning partners to help you continue your preparation for college,” an email to the site’s users reads.

A spokesperson sent over a full statement to describe how the site will “wind down” in the coming month. Ed-tech blogger Audrey Watters tweeted the news this afternoon.

“Pearson “incubated” Alleyoop with the goal of helping teens to prepare for college and careers.  After three years of design, development, and beta testing — we’ll be closing Alleyoop on March 31. The Alleyoop team will work to facilitate a smooth transition for the online community of users and business partners as we wind down the site.

Innovation is a process of trial and error driven by rapid iteration and risk taking. Over the past few years, we’ve tried some new things and learned a lot.  We’ll build on and apply the lessons learned from Alleyoop and its talented team, such as how to engage and motivate students using adaptive learning and gaming techniques, in new ways in new ventures. From our Research and Innovation Network to our new Catalyst program for ed tech start-ups, we remain deeply invested in developing and scaling effective new models for improving achievement, access and affordability in education.”

This is a guest post by Dale Stephens, founder of the “UnCollege” movement 

At the 2007 EG Conference for youth and young adults, Kevin Kelly told the audience that 10 years ago no one would have believed the Internet was coming, least of all him.

If someone told us that we would all be connected and have access to literally all of the world’s information, we would have said that it was impossible. What I’m here to say today is that education is being transformed by technology. The future is here, but educators and deans, the ones who hold the gauntlet, are choosing not to believe it.

I run UnCollege, an organization that believes that college isn’t the only path to success. The idea was forged during my time at the Thiel Fellowship program (fellows are given $100,000 to forgo college and “make something amazing”). Of course, many people would disagree with the sentiment that I’ve created something worthwhile. In fact, critics say I’ve created something destructive. Naturally, I disagree.

Why do I believe that college is not the only path to success? It’s the technologies that we’ve grown accustomed to. But the problem is that not everyone is seeing the ramifications of what this access means.

We now live in a “connection economy.” You can access someone just by emailing them. You can connect to people through social media, and I’ve corresponded with, and have met, thought leaders through the Internet. What you’re looking at is, as Seth Godin puts it, “the connection machine.”

I’d argue that the access you get from being connected levels the playing field. Now, you can complete an internship with a Silicon Valley startup, even if you live in the middle of Idaho. Being connected means you get access to people who you normally couldn’t even shake hands with. Now, all you have to do is reach out and you’re in. I’ve gotten backed by the first investor of Facebook, launched a social organization that’s barged its way into the pages of The New York Times and CNN, and have connected with thought leaders I would have never dreamed of speaking with. How? It’s because the Internet connected me to them. Twenty years ago, who knows — if I’d dropped out of college, I may have just ended up smoking pot in my parent’s basement.

But I’ve been able to marshall online resources to avoid that frightening fate. I’d argue that technology has intensified the resources we’ve grown accustomed too so much that it’d be a huge mistake not to take advantage.

Unlike college, the beautiful thing about these resources is that they’re practically free. Online courses, internships, apprenticeships, apps, videos, and essays now offer not only the latest, but the best education you can get.

If you’d like to completely recreate the college experience for the cost of free, you can just use Massive Online Open Courses (often referred to as “MOOC’s”) to replace lectures. These include Udacity, Khan Academy, and M.I.T Open Course Software. (Here’s a list of the best resources we’ve found. Not only are they free, but you can learn at your own pace. You can’t pause real professors.)

Now, we have connection. Now, we have the resources. What do colleges have? They have an arbitrary credibility marker, and besides that, they very well could be broke. But they aren’t — and it’s because we’re still buying into the big myth. Technology has, and will, change education. When you see people looking up philosophical texts on their iPhones, how can you still say that education is limited to the walls of a college?

Ten years from now, speakers will remark on how far we’ve come and how surprising this would have seemed a few short years ago. Technology will make education even more accessible and more reliable than it has today. The real question is, when will the educators in charge finally start to believe that?

Dale Stephens is the founder of UnCollege.org, author of Hacking Your Education to be published on March 5th from Penguin, and a 2011 Thiel Fellow. 

ABC keyboard image via Elnur // Shutterstock

Ed-tech entrepreneurs will be spoiled for choice when it comes to picking an accelerator or incubator program.

Education’s old guard Kaplan and Pearson unveiled their new startup programs in a bid to stay relevant. This immediately led to commentators questioning whether these companies are too “corporate” to guide startups in the right direction.

As GigaOm points out, a deluge of new ed-tech accelerators have launched in recent weeks, including Boston’s LearnLaunchX and New York’s Socratic Labs (check out EdSurge’s interactive map of ed-tech startups here). Last year, there was only one: Imagine K-12.

Pearson is channeling behemoths like SAP and Microsoft with their loyalty building startup initiatives. The company won’t take any equity, but the program’s participants will have access to product experts and tools, the opportunity to present at a demo day, and a $10,000 travel stipend.

Meanwhile, Kaplan’s accelerator follows the usual model. The test prep giant is teaming up with TechStars (which is providing $20,000 in funding to each of the founding teams in exchange for equity), and entrepreneurs will spend three months intensively working in New York City with mentors from a lineup that includes Kaplan CEO Andy Rosen, Treehouse CEO Ryan Carson, and Washington Post chairman Don Graham.

For companies like Kaplan and Pearson, this is an opportunity to be part of the future of education-technology, whether it’s developer tools, online learning initiatives, or brain training games.

“Teams aren’t limited to traditional classroom education nor K-12,” TechStars’ CEO David Cohen said in a blog post. “We’re looking for teams that are thinking outside of the box on a big scale.”

However, Dan Carroll, cofounder of ed-tech startup Clever, said he’s seen plenty of ed-tech companies “fizzle out” in recent years because they didn’t communicate well with teachers and schools.

“If education-specific accelerators follow in the path of Imagine K-12 and do a great job connecting startups with savvy pilot schools and teachers, they can add a ton of value,” said Carroll, a former teacher and alumni of elite accelerator Y Combinator. He suggests that Pearson and Kaplan use their “district sales expertise” to benefit the startup ecosystem.

At the very least, these accelerators will generate a good deal of hype around the ed-tech space. But commentators remain unconvinced that it will be generate a slew of high-quality startups led by experienced entrepreneurs. It’s worth noting that these accelerators haven’t invited teachers to come on board in any official capacity.

Faculty associate at Berkman Center for Internet and Society professor Rey Junco made the case that ed-tech founders rarely consult educators when they are designing their products for classrooms. He remarked in a recent post on VentureBeat about the failings of ed-tech startups — many of them venture-backed:

“Startups in other fields don’t behave this way. Imagine a genomics startup that didn’t talk to medical researchers and 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.”

Likewise ed-tech writer Audrey Watters has already expressed distaste about the new crop of ed-tech accelerator programs.

Kaplan and Pearson incubating edu startups. Gross.

— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) February 20, 2013

So what are your thoughts? Will these lead to a flooded market of cash flush, poor-quality startups? Or are these new accelerator programs a positive development? Leave a comment below.

Ed-tech company Kno has the support of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but it has struggled to find its niche, until today.

Kno’s CEO Osman Rashid is confident about a product that can turn a boring PDF into an interactive ebook in “minutes.”

This new publishing tool was originally called “Evolve,” but due to a potential patent issue, the company changed the name to “Advance.” Rashid said in an interview that Advance was initially built for internal use, but they started getting requests from the largest book publishers, including McGraw Hill Education and Wayside Publishing.

Publishers can submit a file to Kno, which can be updated with rich multimedia content, including videos, audio, websites, 3D objects, calculators or simulations. Publishers can add a new interactive element at anytime, then instantly push that new element to all the readers of their digital book.

Advance has a competitive edge over competitor, Apple iBooks, as it is available for iPad, Android, Windows 7 and 8. The company also competes with interactive e-book publishing platform Inkling, which recently launched its online ebook store.

Since launching in 2009, the well-funded startup has worked with about 80 publishers to bring more than 200,000 higher education and K-12 digital books across a variety of platforms, including tablet devices and smartphones.

In the early days, the founders had intended to sell mobile hardware to help students learn. But tablets came along, so Kno made the shift to digital textbooks.

Kno has raised about $70 million in funding from firms like Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel and is under pressure to produce some revenue-generating tech. Rashid said the product will be available to publishers free of charge, so it’s unclear how the company will make money in the long-term.

Image credit: patrisyu // Shutterstock

It’s almost midnight, and you’re stuck on a math problem that is due first thing in the morning.

In stressful situations like these, online tutoring startup Instaedu can help. The Silicon Valley company specializes in finding stumped students a tutor or homework assistants at any time of day or night.

When the company launched, its core innovation was the pay-by-the-minute model, and the on-demand access to tutors. But with its new features, the startup is moving into the realm of personalized learning.

The Instaedu team is honing its abilities to better match its students with tutors based on their academic needs and interests, so they’ll be tempted to set up regular sessions.

Currently, there are 1,500 tutors signed up from top colleges like Harvard and MIT, but the founders aren’t disclosing the number of registered students. Tutors are paid a fixed rate of $20 an hour (Instaedu keeps the rest), and working hours are flexible.

The tutors connect with students using video chat, text chat and document editing — it’s all online, so there are no travel costs. Alternatives include Edoboard, which provides tutors with online tools, and TutorCentral.net.

“The goal is for our students to get to know tutors better before even having that first lesson,” said Alison Johnston, Instaedu’s 25-year-old cofounder (pictured above). So the new features also make it a bit easier to schedule a regular time to meet with the best possible tutor. They include:

• Real-time messaging so a student can chat with a tutor before scheduling a lesson (this makes it easy to connect with a tutor who is currently online);
• “Smart messages” for students who need to be matched with a tutor that can help with an advanced or niche subject;
• Tutor reviews which are displayed publicly so students can browse tutor profiles.

Instaedu has raised just over $1 million in seed funding from the SocialxCapital Partnership.

In an effort to show off its array of online courses, the University of California has poured millions of dollars into promoting its UC Online system. But as the San Francisco Chronicle reports, only one person from outside the UC system has taken a class.

For its operating costs, UC Online took out a $6.9 million loan from UC. Since the earliest meetings in 2010, it has spent about $5 million, with most going to a marketing company.

Back in 2010, prestigious universities like Harvard and Stanford began to offer their most popular courses online free of charge. In subsequent years, the movement known as the Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) has caught on. In recent months, universities began to accept them as a form of college credit.

On sites like Coursera, over 700,000 users worldwide can pick and choose from hundreds of courses in the humanities and sciences from dozens of elite universities.

With all the competition in this space, it hasn’t been an easy run for UC Online, given that many of its classes cost over $1,000. The university was only able to attract one high school girl, who paid $1,400 for an online precalculus course at UC Irvine and four units of UC credit.

In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Coursera founder Andrew Ng said their approach worked because they took the time to “build up communities around the courses.” He explained, “Too often, universities had been putting up videos on the web and hoping for the best.”

UC has achieved better results with its student population. Seventeen hundreed UC students are taking 14 classes that launched last year. Keith Williams, the interim director for UC Online, told the San Francisco Chronicle that these courses were developed by the faculty and had undergone rigorous peer review.

Funding for public schools is in short supply. To ensure that the project doesn’t circle the drain, Gov. Jerry Brown — a Democrat who’s had to aggressively cut California’s budget due to multibillion dollar shortfalls – got involved with the UC Online project. He invited popular MOOC provider Udacity to show UC how it’s done.

During a visit in November, Brown made a comparison to the U.S. Postal Service, “a venerable institution being upended by digital change.”

This is a guest post by Dale Stephens, founder of the “UnCollege” movement 

When I look back at my education, I am struck by how little I was taught. This is the opposite experience of Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who dismissed the idea of self-directed education, in the article, “Education is the work of teachers, not hackers.“

My experience is fairly unique — I left school at the age of twelve — but I’m not the only 20-something to forgo traditional higher-education. One need only look at the rise of massive open online courses (MOOC) over the course of the past year. Stanford’s experiment in the Fall of 2011 gave birth to two companies: Udacity and Coursera. Not be outdone, Harvard and MIT created Edx, a partnership to bring online learning to millions of people. Other universities across the country and around the world are following suit.

Wieseltier argues that this is merely “information”, meaning that the course isn’t accredited and there’s no physical forum for discussion and debate. This is true, but once the Ivy League relinquishes its hold on information, anything is possible. And people are already doing amazing things after completing free, online courses — this African teen built his own DJ set using knowledge he learned online.

This is just one example of what can happen once you set content free. The impact will be even more powerful once we unbundle the other parts of school that are currently packed together — namely the community and accreditation.

Learning communities outside school are already being created. Around the world, there are more than 1,200 “Hackerspaces” that have created in the last four years, places where people come together to work on projects and share knowledge. Companies like General Assembly and TechShop are creating real-world spaces for people to learn in formal environments outside school.

The prestige of a college degree — that guarantee of a job if you spend four years in lectures — is a fallacy. Wieseltier would point out that the BLS statistics show that college graduates are less likely to be unemployed than those without degree. That is true, for those over twenty-five.

For those under twenty-five with college degree, 22.5 precent are unemployed and another 22 percent are working jobs that don’t require their degree. In other words, even if you go to college, odds are that only 50 percent of the time your degree will yield you a job. Even if you get employed, you’ll likely be saddled with $27,000 in debt.

The picture of youth in America is not pretty. We need to make some changes when it comes to education. Wieseltier critiques my book, Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will as a “campaign against allegedly useless study”. I believe I am on a crusade for honest, rational thinking.

The problem is not that people are reading useless books, but rather that they are doing so without thinking, and doing so while spending exorbitant amounts of money. If you think about education as an investment, which I feel we must do in this economy, then how can you justify spending four years and $100,000 to end up right where you started?

If you’re looking for a return on investment (and to learn skills that are required in today’s job market), some startups may have the answer. DevBootCamp, for example, offers a 10-week apprenticeship-like training program for people who want to be professional software developers. 88 percent of their graduates have job offers starting at an average of $79,000 a year after their program. The program costs $12,200. That is a much better investment than college.

The ways that I describe technology impacting education are not far-flung hypothetical scenarios. They are happening right now. Hundreds of thousands of people are taking university courses on the internet. Those people are using sites like Meetup.com to form real-world study ground and exchanging knowledge. They are finding mentors. They are building online portfolios to showcase their work. They are using sites like StackExchange to connect that work to the needs of employers.

I don’t wish universities to disappear, but if academics like Wieseltier don’t take note of the rapid changes in education, they will soon be out of jobs. And that, I think we can all agree, would be a tragedy.

Dale Stephens is the founder of UnCollege.org, author of Hacking Your Education to be published on March 5th from Penguin, and 2011 Thiel Fellow. 

Image credit: jocic // Shutterstock 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Our memories are seemingly random. Why do we retain certain facts and not others?

For centuries, neuroscientists and academics have struggled to pinpoint the “optimal moment of review,” the moment in which we’re most likely to memorize information. As it turns out, the best time to review a fact is the second or two before we’re bound to forget it.

The problem is that calculating this moment for a vast stream of information that we encounter at different times is impossible for the human brain. But a computer can do it.

Launching in beta to consumers today, Cerego is a memory management company that spun out of a privately-funded think tank. The cloud-based technology was developed over the course of a decade by a team of neuroscientists and tech entrepreneurs with a mission to improve the efficiency of the human learning process.

“Our system speaks to the semantic memory: how to store information and take it out,” said Andrew Smith Lewis, Cerego co-founder and executive chairman, in a phone interview. “We can figure out precisely what you know and don’t know.”

Lewis said the long-term goal is for the technology to be ubiquitously used in school and our professional lives, and it’s available to consumers for free. To that end, Cerego competes with Mindsnacks, a San Francisco-based company that makes popular mobile learning games.

The system works by constantly measuring your memory on factual items from French verbs to art history. It will predict your optimal review time with each item, and the system improves as you use it.

The company has received a total of $28 million in funding from private individuals. Advisors include Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy and Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab.

Cerego has been in business since 2000. With today’s beta launch, its founders are positioning it as an ed-tech company — it’s a business-to-consumer play. However, thus far, they have received the bulk of their revenues from businesses. In Japan, businesses have been using an earlier version of the technology for years to help employees learn English. Yahoo Japan is a partner, and Softbank is the largest client, with 20,000 employees on-boarded to the system.

Cerego makes money by charging corporate users for access to its tool, which is effective for the purposes of professional development. Lewis said the company is experimenting with new revenue models like a subscription-based system (users will be charged to access premium “power-content” on the site), and by inviting third party publishers to contribute to Cerego’s database for a small fee.

Keen to pick up a new skill?  Click here for immediate beta access, then sign in with Facebook or Twitter, and sample some of these cool courses:

• Wine Tasting Terminology: http://cerego.com/goals/720304
• American Sign Language: http://cerego.com/goals/719993
• Espresso Brewing Terminology: http://cerego.com/goals/720258
• Brain Anatomy: http://cerego.com/goals/720155

Check out the video on how it works here.

Brain image via VLADGRIN // Shutterstock

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.

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This is a guest post by entrepreneur Miro Kazakoff

Somewhere, this year, a university hired its last tenured professor. That’s because of the economic pressures on higher education. Next year, a university will hire its last faculty member expected to teach in a classroom. And that’s because of the technological pressures on higher education.

Technology won’t kill university education any more than television killed radio, but it will transform it. While your kids will still go to college, and it will still cost a fortune, their study time will look radically different than it does today. Even though our university classroom teachers may be replaced with robots, websites or direct-to-brain Ethernet jacks, on-campus higher education will still have a place that no Massive Open Online Course will supplant in our lifetime.

To understand why the future won’t kill college, it helps to remember how technology has already transformed education.

Content is approaching free, and we don’t need armies of faculty to curate it

In the middle ages, getting “access to content” was a physical ordeal. Books had to be copied by hand and gathering knowledge required physically getting your hands on one of those precious tomes. Then came the printing press, broadcast media, and then the Internet. With each wave, creating and distributing content has gotten cheaper and more democratic.

The first European universities were created in those same middle-ages and still act as physical repositories of knowledge. I remember a time when even a textbook was hard to get your hands on outside of a University Bookstore. One way professors contributed to learning was simply to curate their syllabi and point students at the right books. There was no path to one of those syllabi with out buying a semester of tuition.

Now you can combine a course list with a couple of searches for syllabi and assemble your own do-it-yourself Biomedical Engineering curriculum at home.

Teaching is quickly following content towards free

The signs came slowly at first: mail order classes that moved to email, YouTube videos of every cooking technique imaginable, community college and online schools experimenting with distance learning for busy professionals.

Then Bill Gates wrangled a Ted Talk for an unlikely YouTube star and the power of education technology to transform the classroom was on the lips of every venture capitalist I know. Salman Khan’s short math videos were already getting millions of hits, and since then the pace of growth in the ed-tech space has been exploding.

Now we’re seeing some big bets on how we can leverage technology to distribute classroom teaching in the same massive way the Internet distributes other content. The $37 million poured into Massive Online Open Courses like Coursera, and Udacity, as well as the non-profit collaboration of Harvard and MIT on edX may or may not mean that big money will be made, but it does mean that a bunch of smart people are going to be working on cracking the code to delivering better teaching online to more people at lower cost.

History provides a pretty reliable guide that cheaper access to better information that helps people improve their economic outlook in life is likely to have widespread appeal.

Universities have changed focus before

Delivering content, even via exceptional teaching, has never been all (or even most) of a university’s value proposition. No university cites its mission as: “efficiently transmitting knowledge to barely post-pubescent walking balls of hormones with ferocious intellects.” Universities seem themselves as creating people and citizens.

They provide students a social environment to form connections with other students. The bonds formed between students are part of what makes a university education so valuable and are hard to replicate online.

Delivering experiences has become a larger focus of schools. You see this as graduate MBA programs shift away from classroom teaching. Top schools like Harvard Business School, MIT and Wharton have moved their curriculum towards personalized coaching, group projects and experiential learning that overlaps the classroom and the outside world. That’s what has kept these programs relevant (or at least desirable) long after anyone can buy an HBS case study online, and that’s what will we’ll see filter down to the undergrad level.

So, the new job of universities will be the same as the old job: to primarily credential students rather than just teach them. Teaching won’t die, it will just morph into individualized instruction and experiences that prepare students for the world. Professors will become coaches and gateways to those experiences. And that great teaching you heard about on the campus tour? Forget about it. You can get it cheaper online.

 Miro Kazakoff is the CEO of Testive, a Techstars education technology company focused on adaptive technologies and personalized learning.

Their test prep tool, SAT Habit, generates customized student plans that help students improve their SAT scores faster. He lectures at MIT Sloan School of Management where he received his MBA.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Troy Williams, President of Macmillan New Ventures

The past five years have seen a tremendous boom in education technology (“ed-tech”) startups that are pushing the boundaries of online and hybrid content delivery and learning experiences.

Unsurprisingly, investments in education technology have more than quadrupled from the time I founded my first edtech startup in 1998.

The result has been the emergence of a new teaching model, one that shifts content delivery beyond the walls of the classroom. We’re seeing big advances in adaptive learning platforms from established players like Knewton and upstarts like Brainscape and Cerego; YouTube and Sal Kahn are looking for ways to produce more instructional videos; and online course builders like Udacity, Coursera, and Peer2Peer University are democratizing instruction by way of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs).

The development of online, offline and hybrid learning environments, along with the spread of the flipped-classroom model, all fueled by the tremendous growth in ed-tech dedicated capital forces us to reevaluate student and instructor interactions when they are physically in the classroom.

The question now is: Considering all the recent advancements that push learning outside classrooms, what new innovations are being developed to help teachers engage students from within classrooms?

Embedding real-time data into the classroom

While the flipped-classroom has its advantages, it requires knowledge of what students have learned or accomplished in their time outside of class.

A common solution is to give a quick poll or quiz at the beginning of class to focus students’ attention on the material at hand and provide teachers with a sense of what the class understands, instantly, before in-class activity begins.

Devices take this one step further. Student Response Systems encourage engagement and provide instant feedback about learning and understanding. Instructors can ask a question at any time during a presentation or activity and students now have the ability to key in their response. Results can then quickly be displayed immediately to the instructor or the entire class.

Classic examples of these systems are Turning Technologies and Promethean ActiveExpression2, while newer companies like Class Dojo and Clever are doing some innovative work to make it easier to share data and record real-time feedback.

Devices and response systems are just one application of real time data applied in classroom. For example, a statistics class at UCLA used a response system to create an active learning environment by turning student responses into a data set for students to experience statistical concepts of distribution and variability. Real time data created in classroom, in this case, made the lesson more tangible for students while providing detailed engagement data back to the instructor.

New devices in the classroom give both student and instructor data to enrich the activity at hand. As devices permeate the classroom, students are primed to having more meaningful peer-to-peer interactions.

Classroom devices encourage peer learning

Teachers that leverage new classroom devices, such as an iPad or other tablets, can foster greater student-to-student interactions. These devices can be shared and passed around the classroom easily—they don’t require a keyboard or mouse ‘driver’ and keep students focused on the discussion and not the device itself.

We know that active inquiry, authentic debates and peer conversations are some of the best drivers for increasing student understanding. Even though hybrid and online learning environments do their best to build peer interaction and learning, nothing can quite replace the benefits of having students collaborating in a room together.

For example, question and answer services like Piazza allow both students and instructors to ask and answer questions, capturing and preserving the buzz around an in-class activity on smartphones and tablets. Digital textbooks from Inkling now can let students share notes and highlights from within their experience, and polling students [there’s a drafting bust here] during a lesson can serve as a jumping off point for small group debates or prompt discussions.

A summer program in North Carolina aimed at preventing student drop out is a standout example I’ve seen recently. Administrators equipped students with tablets and video production apps and tasked the students with creating a visual story over seven weeks. Devices combined with innovative curriculum help students improve their writing skills and reduces the risk of students leaving the program. Check out students using ShowMe to create lessons to share with their peers, or Storyrobe to create digital stories.

In addition to driving peer interactions and learning, devices can be used to virtualize activities and simulate demonstrations.

Simulations and interactive demonstrations can help

Typically, physical in-classroom demonstrations are too cost- and time-intensive to happen very often. Alternatively, many computer based simulations relegate students to a keyboard, mouse and screen, limiting peer interaction.

However, devices like 3D projectors and motion capture technology are becoming more widely assessable and can bring simulations and demonstrations to life by making them interactive and accessible to the entire class. For example, instructors can use 3D projectors to demonstrate a biology lesson by explaining anatomical structures and demonstrate physiological functions of organs, such as the heart. Students and instructors can revolve the image of the organ and expose cross sections to reveal different blood flows.

Probably the most well known example of these technologies becoming mainstream is the Xbox Kinect. Real Illusion’s iClone is used by teachers and students to simulate scientific principles like planetary motion, physics and machinery dynamics.

In another example, a teacher could set up an intentionally incorrect simulation of a chemical, mechanical, or biological process and ask students to manipulate it with their hands (using motion capture devices) until they corrected the error.

One high school in Cardiff, Wales has students use motion capture to conduct a virtual orchestra by waving a conductor’s baton, and learn foreign languages by moving parts of the body. Not only are the concepts brought to life in front of the entire class, but students can use the devices to put their skills to practice in a way that engages tactile and visual learners.

3D motion and video capture can also change the way distance learning is delivered and experienced. Check out this video of students attending a 3D virtual class where they can control their virtual images with gestures and their natural body motion.

How can we maximise classroom interaction?

Today’s classrooms are becoming truly interactive; in fact, they’re keeping pace right alongside the shift toward the flipped classroom. The list of examples goes on—and I encourage you to include other strategies in the comments.

Of course, none of this works without teachers, nor do these examples replace good teaching. But as it turns out, teachers aren’t as averse to using digital devices like tablets, clickers, and smartphones as you might think.

But this is more than just a “back to the classroom” call.

It’s about addressing the opportunities of the physical classroom and taking advantage of the invaluable time students and teachers have together. Imagine how powerful this can be: Empowering our students when they are in and out of the classroom to accelerate learning. We need is both of these learning models to address the real-world needs of our students and schools.

Troy Williams is President of Macmillan New Ventures, where he is responsible for identifying emerging technologies and trends that will have a major impact on student performance and outcomes. From 1998 to 2007, Troy was President and CEO of Questia Media, Inc., an early online electronic book offering that he founded and sold to Cengage Learning. 

Troy is an adjunct professor at NYU, where he teaches the capstone thesis course on starting new businesses in the Masters of Publishing program. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He currently resides in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Top image courtesy of Kiselev Andrey Valerevich, Shutterstock

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]

A new nonprofit search engine dubbed “Gooru“ announced today an ambitious plan to bring personalized learning to K12 education.

Gooru, a Silicon Valley company, was founded by Yahoo India’s former CTO (think education-focused Google without the ads). It is teaming up with Silverback Learning, a Boise, Idaho-based tech startup founded by teachers, to identify students’ needs and offer them relevant online learning materials.

Silverback is the developer of Mileposts, a cloud-based management system that allows teachers and administrators to organize and access student data. It will integrate with Gooru’s search engine to pinpoint the educational areas where students are struggling, and suggest the most appropriate free learning materials.

“Teachers are focused on maximizing student education in the classroom, and therefore are commonly time-challenged to search for and select the best matched educational materials for each and every student based on their individually assessed needs,” said CEO Prasad Ram, who relocated to Palo Alto, Calif. to develop the company.

Prior to founding Gooru, Ram worked in senior-level research roles at Yahoo, Google, and Xerox Parc.

“Now more than ever, the educational industry is in need of knowledge and talent to innovate and create new technologies,” Silverback CEO Jim Lewis told VentureBeat.

What’s particularly interesting is that through Gooru, students and teachers can access resources that are aligned with Common Core State Standards, the initiative to bring diverse state-by-state curricula into alignment by 2014/15.

Gooru is still in beta and currently focuses on online resources for learning, such as teacher videos, digital textbooks, quizzes, and games. Its search engine taps into the growing proliferation of digital learning resources (primarily 5th-12th grade math, science, and social science topics). In the future, it will expand to K12 reading, language arts, and additional subjects.

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The days of chalkboards and workbooks may soon be a relic of times past. Teachers these days can supplement their curricula with interactive software and proctor tests without making hundreds of paper copies.

While new technology may enhance the learning process for students, it can be challenging for instructors to implement, which is why education startup Clever has raised $3 million to make this process easier.

Clever’s technology integrates data held in Student Information Systems (SIS) into educational software. If students use the internet to complete assignments or execute projects, teachers need this online activity to connect with overall tracking of their performance. This can be time-consuming and confusing for educators not trained in IT, which is where Clever comes in.

Founder Dan Carroll experienced this frustration first hand while working as the director of technology for a school district. He saw that educational software made things more complicated for teachers and set out with his two former Harvard classmates Tyler Bosmeny and Rafael Garcia to address this.

“One of the biggest changes in education is blended learning,” said Bosmeny. “There is so much innovation happening in software helping kids learn and boosting test scores, but when software isn’t integrated, data becomes siloed and out of date. We realized there was a data problem to helping schools fully use this software, and by making it faster and easier, we are transforming education.”

Clever works with developers of online learning applications so by the time the software arrives in schools, “it just works.” The information coming from these programs automatically updates student data, so teachers don’t have to. Since founding Clever in April and participated in the Y Combinator accelerator program, Clever has established partnerships with 40 ed tech companies, including DreamBox, Scientific Learning and MasteryConnect. Through these deals, the benefit of this technology reaches 2,000 schools and 650,000 students.

Bosmeny said that going through Y Combinator encouraged the team to iterate their product quickly and often, and to not only attract the attention of top tier investors, but also of influencers in the online learning space. A number of Y Combinator partners personally invested in this $3 million round, as well as SV Angel, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, Google Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mitch Kapor, and Ashton Kutcher. From the education world, John Katzman of the Princeton Review and 2tor, founder of Chegg Aayush Phumbhra, and Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis also provided support.

The funding will go towards growing the scale of the company and the number of partnerships so that one day, Bosmeny said, all education software will plug into Clever.

Busuu, a startup with a free tool for you to master a new language, has pulled in about $5 million in its first round funding.

The company describes itself as a “social network for language learning” — it offers free and paid-for audio-visual courses in 12 languages, including Spanish and French. There is a free web version, as well as a well-designed mobile and tablet application.

What’s unique about this technology is that every user is a both tutor and a tutee. Using the video tool, anyone can converse with a native speaker, and practice their budding language skills. The company competes with a variety of online language learning tools that help users circumvent the textbook — popular choices are Mango Languages, TellMeMore (which caters to business users) and Living Language.

It makes money through its business English and Spanish courses that helps employees learn typical phrases used in professional situations. The startup plans to release more of these business language courses in the coming months.

The company is showing signs of impressive growth — it has more than 25 million users in over 200 countries and is gaining 40,000 new members per day. It is relocating from Madrid to London as it scales up its operations.

It will use the funding to invest in building out its core product, and to hire more people.

Brent Hoberman, Lastminute.com’s cofounder, will join the board of advisors. “We are looking forward to supporting the company in its future growth plans and shaking up the global language learning market,” said the travel entrepreneur in a statement.

The series A round was led by PROfounders Capital with participation from angel investors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Ah, the university campus. Tree-lined pathways, library stacks filled with students toiling away at antique wooden desks, the chimes of the bell tower. Internet degrees may not replicate these sensory experiences, but education technology company 2tor is putting top-tier graduate programs online.

Today, this hot startup is announcing the second iteration of its mobile app exclusively on VentureBeat. The new app offers an updated design and user interface, as well as more features to help students get the most out of their education.

2tor partners with elite universities to bring their advanced degree programs to the web. The company supplies academic departments with technology, tools, expertise, manpower, and money so they can offer the same quality of education to enrolled students working remotely. On average, 2tor spends $10 million per program. The online version involves live, weekly face-to-face classroom sessions as well as access to collaborative documents, participation in groups, academic notifications, and learning management systems.

“We choose our partners carefully and make it clear that both parties have to be all in,” said CTO James Kenigsberg. “We are mutually exclusive with these schools and won’t do another MBA or another nursing degree with anyone else. We spend every penny to make this amazing, and they hold nothing back. Professors don’t feel like they have to hold on to their secrets, the faculty become the stars of the show and demonstrate what makes their program the best out there.”

The platform is available for the Masters of Arts in Teaching from the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, Masters of Social Work from the USC’s School of Social Work, Masters in Nursing from Georgetown University’s School of Nursing & Health Studies, and Masters of Business Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

This semester, it added two new degree programs — Masters of Public Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Government, and Master of Laws (LL.M.) from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law.

Universities benefit not only from enhanced academic offerings but also from the ability to expand their programs to a larger number of students. Qualified students around the world can have greater access to advanced education. Before 2tor, the two USC programs had 70 graduates. Now after two years using the platform, there are 2,500 across 40 countries, and the rankings have improved as well.

The mobile presence offers more opportunities to track student progress. According to the company’s data regarding mobile usage, participating students are highly active. For example, over half of the MBA students at UNC regularly use 2tor’s iOS app to connect with professors, engage with the curriculum, set reminders for due dates, and monitor their grades.

Graduate students can learn and stay on top of their studies from anywhere. If only this option was available for me back when I was braving the brutal Ithaca winters.

2tor was started in 2010 by John Katzman, founder of The Princeton Review. It has raised over $96 million in venture capital and is headquartered in Landover, MD, with 400 employees nationwide.

Ed-tech is on fire! Desire2Learn, a startup that has bootstrapped for over a decade, has raised its first round of venture capital funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and OMERS Ventures, the venture arm of one of Canada’s largest pension fund managers.

The startup hails from Waterloo, Ontario, the birthplace of Research In Motion (RIM). With this announcement, the region is hitting the headlines for far more than its gadgets — according to Thompson Reuters, this is the largest ever investment in a Canadian software company.

Desire2learn (“D2L”), which specializes in cloud-based teaching tools, plans to use the funding to hire more staff and step up its marketing efforts. Since it launched in 2009, it has expanded to 700 customers and 8 million students, according to John Baker, Desire2Learn’s founder and chief executive officer.

In an interview with Reuters, Baker stressed that the company has been profitable for years, and had already approved plans to fill 170 open positions before the financing deal was completed.

“We have built a high-growth profitable organization over the years and we want to continue to see that continuing to grow,” he said.

NEA, the Menlo Park-based firm that specializes in early stage information technology companies, has bet big on education technology. In recent months, the venture firm recently poured millions into fast-growing online education site, Coursera, and educational social network, Edmodo. It recently raised a $2.6 billion fund, one of the biggest in venture capital history.

NEA partner Jon Sakoda said in a statement that with its software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, Desire2Learn is uniquely suited to meet the needs of the largest educational institutions in the world. ”As the $1 trillion-plus education market shifts from older legacy products to best-of-breed cloud solutions,” Sakoda said, “Desire2Learn is the clear market leader.”

Still, the startup faces strong competition from Blackboard Inc., an educational tools provider which sold to private investment group, Providence Equity Partners for $1.64 billion. In 2009, the companies resolved a heated three-and-a-half year legal suit over an e-learning patent. Moodle, an open source competitor, launched in 2002, claims to serve over 50 million users.

Read more here about the next multibillion dollar ed-tech company. 

Its headquarters will remain in Canada, but Desire2Learn has already extended its suite of tools to schools and colleges across the U.S..

E-Learning Image via Shutterstock

Hallway, a startup created by high-school students for high-school students, is launching to the public today with seed funding from Fortify.vc.

The founders view their technology as the next logical step in education, and this summer, they’ve been testing the private beta at schools across the Greater Washington region.

Hallway is a website where students submit questions about subjects, such as algebra or political science, that their peers can answer. The site uses a Reddit-style system to rate the most useful questions and answers, which then rise to the top.

The idea for the website originated when 17-year-old cofounder Sean McElrath created Facebook groups so students could chat about specific assignments. In just one of these groups, membership soared to more than 300 students and a single question garnered hundreds of responses.

McElrath said teenage founders have a competitive edge. “Every day we get to talk to students and get their feedback on how they’re using and what they like and don’t like about Hallway,” he told me. “That kind of perspective is rare in business and we don’t take it for granted.”

This summer, McElrath and his team shared office space at the Fort, a co-working spot in D.C. that is manned by Fortify.vc, an early stage investment fund. The Fort requires you to be 18 or older to have a key, so each morning, they would pop open their laptops and wait for the adults to arrive.

“Most of our days over the summer started with the team coding in the building’s stairwell,” said McElrath.

The rising seniors behind Hallway (McElrath, Cyrus Malekpour, Michael Chan, Darren Bolduc, Dennis Lysenko, and Allison Chou) met at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a selective public magnet school in Alexandra, Va.

To recruit this all-star team of “hackers, hustlers, and designers”, McElrath said he started an after-school club for students with business ideas, known as Invent Team. At the club, they connected with alumni and the wider entrepreneurial community in D.C., including mentor (and now cofounder) Evan Burfield, chairman of StartupDC, and Jonathon Perrelli, founding partner and seed-stage investor at Fortify.vc.

Read more about DC’s budding startup scene.

Hallway isn’t the first ed-tech startup to focus on community-building and homework help for students. Lore, a competitor, recently launched its own educational social network, and Edmodo recently pulled in $25 million in funding to bring social media to classrooms. However, the vast majority of competing sites begin by targeting college students — K-12 is merely an afterthought.

Hallway is available for free and connects with Facebook’s Open Graph, so students can answer questions posed by teens across the world.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Grockit has made a name for itself when it comes to social learning for online test preparation, but with Learnist the company is looking beyond just helping you with the SATs: Now you can learn almost anything with lessons prepared by teachers and experts using online media.

After launching Learnist on the web back in May for beta testers, today Grockit is releasing free Learnist iPhone and iPad apps, which will make the social learning service just about anywhere.

“I’ve been thinking in the past 12 months or so that everything you wanted to learn is online now,” Grockit founder and chief product officer Farbood Nivi told VentureBeat in an interview last week. “The problem now is how do you make sense of the endless amount of video content online.”

He’s aiming to solve that problem with Learnist, which at first glance looks a lot like like a Pinterest for online learning. The Learnist website shares Pinterest’s square image board design, but instead of a collection of your favorite LOLcats, you’re presented with an array of lessons across topics like technology, food and drinks, and education. About 50 percent of the site’s content is education (including all of Grockit’s test prep curriculum), while the other half consists of more informal how-to guides.

“Almost every single one of our boards is better and more engaging than any textbook out there,” Nivi said. While textbooks can only devote a few pages to a particular lesson, Learnist lessons have no page limit, and they can include just about any piece of media floating around the web.

Learnist is fun to explore on the web, but it’s even more engrossing on the iPad and iPhone. Much like Wikipedia, it’s easier to sit back, relax, and fall down a rabbit hole of lessons. In addition to just viewing lessons, the apps let you build your own and share lessons with others.

Nivi says Learnist is solving five problems of social learning: It’s curating content, so it’s far easier to find lessons than just searching on Google; since most lessons are created by experts and teachers, they know how to sequence content to make learning easier; it lets you create a learning map, which helps to coordinate exactly how you approach a topic; it offers assessments, to make sure you truly understand the material; and the site lets you social around any piece of information.

Since launching in May, Learnist has around 1,000 people who can create content, and they’ve added more than 20,000 different learning objects to the site. Nivi says a “small army” of teachers also created learning boards for all 7th to 12th grade core subjects. It’ll be interesting to see if teachers actually start recommending Learnist to their students for studying (and perhaps even having students create lesson boards of their own).

“Learnist is so much more the vision I had for social learning than test prep was,” Nivi said. “When we started [Grockit], it wasn’t possible to do Learnist … the tech wasn’t there, the content, computing power, net speed … none of those things were there. It’s only been in the past year that we’ve seen more [of those capabilities].”

San Francisco-based Grockit has raised around $25 million in funding so far from Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, Integral Capital Partners, and others.

Inspired by Khan Academy, the next wave of education technology startups are seeing opportunity in video.

At Y Combinator’s Demo Day today, two of the most seasoned entrepreneurs who presented were Ariel Braunstein, a member of the founding team behind Flip video cameras, and Scott Kabat, a marketing executive. “Video will do well in education,” Braunstein explained to the crowd of investors. “We can build a business out of it.”

Their new project, Knowmia, lets students watch thousands of educational videos to supplement traditional learning in the classroom.

We covered the company’s launch last week. Read more about Knowmia, a crowdsourced education service.

Scott Kabat, Knowmia’s cofounder at the YC Demo Day

Knowmia is taking a page out of Khan Academy’s book by offering video lectures, but embraces a more diverse range of subjects. Featured lessons on the website’s homepage include a run-down of the electoral college system and the basics of micro-evolution. Similar to Codecademy and Hacker School, Knowmia encourages its users to develop skills in mobile design, programming, and web development.

The site launched last week, and Braunstein reeled off some impressive figures to demonstrate signs of traction: The site has a growing library of 7,000 lessons from 900 teachers. At this early stage, Knowmia is experiencing 26 percent growth week over week.

Knowmia is geared toward high school kids, but Kabat told me at Demo Day that they plan to expand to K-12 education.

The startup AfterCollege is relaunching with a new matching algorithm to help seniors at 2,300 colleges and universities find the perfect entry-level job or internship. The company claims its technology was developed for graduating students to stand out in this fiercely competitive job market.

The new website is far more technical than the original, which was a simple online job board for college students that competed with sites like Indeed and CollegeBuilder. With its relaunch, the site is rebranding itself as a “LinkedIn for college students,” and users are encouraged to build out their professional profiles.

AfterCollege has a tough road ahead if it aims to take on LinkedIn and career networking startups like BranchOut that have spent years developing a presence at college campuses and marketing to students.

Most interesting is the built-in job search tools (a resume and cover-letter builder) and the patented-machine learning technology that matches seniors and recent grads with opportunities, based on their skill-sets, personal and academic interests.

The algorithm works by inputting a user’s academic affiliations (school, educational program, department, groups) and searching the database for relevant opportunities. AfterCollege has been around since 1999 and has been used by 3 million students, so it has access to a wealth of insider information.

For instance, the algorithm would know if the computer science department at San Francisco State has a different focus than the program at Stanford University. At Stanford, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) might be a strong interest for many students, while at SF State, students are skilled at Java or social applications — useful information for engineering recruiters and tech companies.

“The algorithm is also smart enough to distinguish between different programs that may be perceived to be similar,” explained AfterCollege CEO and founder Roberto Angulo. He started the company as a junior at Stanford. In 13 years, AfterCollege has connected students with some half a million jobs and internships.

AfterCollege also optimizes chances for student applicants as they can view jobs that graduates with similar skill-sets have succeeded in landing.

AfterCollege’s algorithm is a useful tool for employers, who fear they’ll miss out on the best candidates. No doubt, this will be a major money-making opportunity for AfterCollege; the site will likely begin selling targeted advertising to employers.

The startup raised its most recent round of funding in 2011, a sub-million-dollar sum from Flywheel Ventures.

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