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GigaOm: Pearson aspires to be "Electronic Arts" of education

Pearson's Luyen Chou on turning the publishing giant into a digital media enterprise:

Speaking with me later, Chou said that to keep up with the changing environment, traditional publishers can’t just digitize the static textbooks of the past, they need to excel at producing high-quality, interactive digital learning experiences and get them into the hands of students.

“[That includes] digital studios, animators, illustrators, producers, 3-D artists – we need to build that capacity within instructional companies like Pearson and we need the whole end-to-end supply chain to the take that from the studio to the actual users,” he said. “The folks that have done that well are the EAs of the world, digital studios. That’s not a core competency for companies like Pearson.”

Given the company’s wide reach across different corners of the market, from content to testing, at the K-12 and college levels and beyond, one of Pearson’s key assets is the massive amount of data it can use to target and personalize learning for students. And Chou acknowledged that the Electronic Arts parallel wasn’t meant to imply that Pearson only needs to focus on creating high-quality content, and not on other parts of its business.

#gigaom #luyen chou #edtech

HeraldOnline: LearnLaunch Formed to Drive Greater Boston Ed Tech Innovation

Boston nonprofit to foster ed tech innovation:

LearnLaunch today announces its formation as a non-profit fostering the creation and growth of learning and education technology companies and the ed tech business cluster across New England. Founded by visionary investors and education technology leaders, LearnLaunch provides support to entrepreneurs at critical stages of their development to reach their next level of growth through access to peers, investors, mentors, and potential users.

LearnLaunch has already identified over 150 education technology and learning startups in New England. LearnLaunch also announces its first conference: “Across Boundaries: Innovation & The Future of Education.” The conference will examine the potential of technology to tangibly improve learning and education access, and explore market and investment opportunities; February 1-2, 2013, MIT Tang Center, Cambridge, MA (http://learnlaunchconference2013.eventbrite.com). The conference coincides with Digital Learning Day on February 6, 2013 and will involve teachers as both panelists and participants, as well as showcase successful instructional technology in classrooms nationwide.

#learnlaunch #MIT #Tang Center

Business Insider: Edupreneurs and Investing in Ed Tech Startups

Guest writer Emma Collins on the ed tech scene:

Venture capitalists have poured millions of dollars into education-technology startups in the past few years. Investments in online education startups having tripled in the last decade, from $146 million in 2002 to $429 million in 2011. “The investing community believes that the internet is hitting education,” says Jose Ferreira, founder of interactive-learning company Knewton, which secured a $33 million investment in 2011. At stake is both a burgeoning industry and, for millions of potential students around the globe, an opportunity for a world-class education unlike any before.

In the last two years alone, venture investments in education technology have more than doubled, from $82 million in the first quarter of 2010 to $189 million in the second quarter of 2012. While education startup investing has undoubtedly experienced a boom in the past two years, there is reason to believe the return on investment is only beginning to accrue. While Knewton has a number of different business models, including charging for access to test prep materials for standardized exams like the Law School Admission Test, most companies are still exploring methods of generating consistent revenue. Startups like Coursera, which allows users to access Ivy League lectures and coursework for free, and Udacity, which offers free courses and charges a nominal fee for testing and certification, will likely be focusing on revenue generation in the coming years as their services gain traction around the globe.

#xl #emma collins #coursera #venture capital

VentureBeat: Fingerprint Digital to launch 7 new mobile education apps for kids

Fingerprint Digital app startup releases new products:

San Francisco-based Fingerprint Digital has created a platform dubbed Fingerprint Play, launched last December. It provides access to a bunch of apps and also has a feature called Mom Comm that lets kids share their achievements with their parents. Parents can write notes, record a voice message, or send emoticons to encourage their kids. The app can also dispatch a snapshot report of a child’s progress via email or Facebook sharing. Fingerprint Play is like a TV channel for kids, only it provides apps instead.

The new apps include four new interactive books in the VeggieTales Collection, which teach kids ages three to five how to get ready for reading. The new collection includes The Goofy Gift, Thanks for the Franks, Larry’s Missing Music, and I am That Hero! (available Dec. 20).

#xl #fingerprint digital #venturebeat #mom comm #veggietales collection

Bloomberg: Education Startup Quizlet Makes the Grade Going It Alone

Quizlet bootstraps to success:

Yet unlike high-profile startups such as Inkling and Kno, which have raised tens of millions of dollars from VCs eager to cash in on the boom in smartphones and tablets in the classroom, Quizlet remains entirely bootstrapped.

“We don’t need the money right now,” said Quizlet Chief Executive Officer Dave Margulius.

He said the company is cash-flow positive and predicted that revenue would surpass $10 million in two years. Quizlet became profitable soon after it was created in 2005, according to Sutherland, who built the flash-card program for the Web and supported it by selling Google AdSense promotions that let marketers place ads on the site. As the game grew more popular and server costs rose, he raised $30,000 from friends and family and invested profits from a separate site he helped to create — an e-commerce service called Collectors Weekly — to grow the business.

#quizlet #venture capital #kno

O'Reilly Radar: The MOOC movement is not an indicator of educational evolution

Andy Oram at the O'Reilly Radar: The MOOC movement is not an indicator of educational evolution

Two more appealing trends are already big. One is DIY courses, as popularized in the book Fab by Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Media Lab. O’Reilly’s own Make projects are part of this movement. Fab courses represent the polar opposite of MOOCs in many ways. They are delivered in small settings to students whose dedication, inspiration, and talent have to match those of the teacher — the course asks a lot of everybody. But from anecdotal reports, DIY courses have been shown to be very powerful growth mechanisms in environments ranging from the top institutions (like MIT) to slums around the world. Teenagers are even learning to play with biological matter in labs such as BioCurious. Fundamentally, DIY is a way to capture the theory of learning by doing, which goes back at least to John Dewey at the turn of the 20th century. The availability of 3D makers, cheap materials, fab software, and instructions over the Internet lend the theory a new practice.

The other major trend cracking the foundations of education is peer-to-peer information exchange. This, like learning by doing, has plenty of history. The symposia of Ancient Greece (illustrated in fictional form by Plato) and the Talmudic discussions that underlay the creation of modern Judaism over 2,000 years ago show that human beings have long been used to learning from each other. Peer information exchange raged on centuries later in cafés and salons, beer halls and sewing circles. Experts were important, and everybody could recognize the arrival of a true expert, but he or she was just first among equals. A lot of students who sign up for MOOCs probably benefit from the online discussion forums as much as from the canned lectures and readings.

#mooc #o'reilly radar #education

Higher Education not what it used to be?

The Economist: American universities represent declining value for money to their students:

More debt means more risk, and graduation is far from certain; the chances of an American student completing a four-year degree within six years stand at only around 57%. This is poor by international standards: Australia and Britain, for instance, both do much better. At the same time, universities have been spending beyond their means. Many have taken on too much debt and have seen a decline in the health of their balance-sheets. Moreover, the securitisation of student loans led to a rush of unwise private lending. This, at least, has now been curbed by regulation. In 2008 private lenders disbursed $20 billion; last year they shelled out only $6 billion. Despite so many fat years, universities have done little until recently to improve the courses they offer. University spending is driven by the need to compete in university league tables that tend to rank almost everything about a university except the (hard-to-measure) quality of the graduates it produces.

#higher education #cost of tuition #tuition #college

Minecraft: Engineering School of the Future?

Changeist's Scott Smith on Minecraft as the great engineering school of the future:

But clever Minecrafters haven’t stopped with oddball buildings. Numerous solo and team efforts have constructed not only ingenious Rube Goldberg machines, but also mechanical computers based on a schematic in an MIT textbook that can do basic functions and calculations, for example. Early introduction of mechanical levers, circuits, and more recently a modification to add pistons to the game have encouraged players to build increasingly byzantine machines using the most basic of materials. Recent modifications and updates to the game, and unofficial variations created by expert players, such as Tekkit and ComputerCraft, take game functionality to a new level with industrial machines and programmable in-game computers that aren’t for entertainment as much as necessary elements to feed Minecrafters’ growing appetite for engineering. Where a weekend electronics enthusiasts or desktop manufacturing fan might run down to a Radio Shack to grab some extra circuitry for an electronics project, Minecrafters are working in cross-country or sometimes multi-country teams to build energy production systems, massive water projects or underground house-making factories in the game—partly as status symbols among other Minecrafters, and partly to push the boundaries of their own skill and the game’s capabilities.

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