This Educelerate Event was recorded on April 25th, 2013 and presented by Christopher Nyren, Founder of Educelerate.  Educelerate holds a gathering space for Ed Tech leaders in the industry with the educators and entrepreneurs who share their interests. This next episode, taken from Educelerate X, we discussed K-12 school district needs and the challenges of school district sales models with current and former buyers of educational content and technology.

Panelists included:

• Ron Huberman – former CEO/Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, President of the Chicago Transit Authority, Chief of Staff to Mayor Richard M. Daley and current co-founder of TeacherMatch
• Sharnell Jackson – former Chief eLearning Officer of Chicago Public Schools and current president of Illinois Virtual Charter @ Fox River Valley and of Data-Driven Innovations Consulting
• Henry Thiele Ed.D. – Chief Technology Officer for District 207 Maine Township High School, president of SET Connections, and an active edtech blogger.
• Phil Lacey, Ed.D. – Director of Instructional Technology Services for District 219 Niles Township Community High School, president of Illinois Computing Educators and an active Educelerant.

The panel was moderated by John Mellios, the Director of Instructional Tools and Technology at Chicago Public Schools and previous consultant with the Stupski Foundation and technical coordinator for the Oakland Unified School District.

Leave us an note at educelerate@Edreach.us

“Our online curriculum… helps students build critical career and job search skills, so that they are prepared for long term career success. PathSource.com’s students are taught to be proactive – so that life doesn’t just happen to them.”

We often talk about the Flipped Classroom here on the EdReach Network. In fact, we even have our own channel dedicated to Flipped Learning. But, instead of the flipped classroom, what if you could flip the job process? If you’re a student who has an interest in becoming a doctor, but yet, you don’t know any doctors, and you don’t know the path to getting there- where do you start? Well now, that answer seems obvious- Pathsource.com 

I had a moment to talk to Aaron Michel, CEO of Pathsource to understand his motivation for creating this platform:

“In addition to converting their MyGZpoints into discounts at local and national businesses, students participating in MyGZPoints are eligible to win scholarships and other education-focused bonuses. Students can also transfer their MyGZpoints to friends and family members..”

We know right now that there is a mad scramble to find the right ways to integrate motivation and rewards with learning. Mozilla and others are working on the OER and Badge movement. MyGZpoints uses a reward system that allows students to earn points for their grades- then redeem those points for real goods and services. MyGZpoints puts a new spin on the reward idea. Will it work? I had a moment to talk to Trevor Wilkins, Founder of myGZpoints.  Here is his story:

Of note, the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator is accepting applications through an April 14th deadline here and also hosting a livestream information session on their website tonight April 23rd at 7:00pm EST.

Their actual accelerator program will accept ten EdTech start-ups and runs from June to September 2013.  The program will be based in New York (joining Socratic Labs and the adjacent digital media accelerators Startl and DreamIt).

Now, if only there was a group working on creating EdTech accelerator efforts in Chicago and Los Angeles.

This Educelerate Event was recorded on February 21, 2013 and presented by Christopher Nyren, Founder of Educelerate.  Educelerate holds a gathering space for Ed Tech leaders in the industry with the educators and entrepreneurs who share their interests. This next episode, taken from Educelerate IX: Through all the excitement over “MOOCs”, an earlier generation of disruptive online education players has already managed to create a truly massive market in terms of both students and revenue.  This model has been termed “Schools as a Service” and has seen two particularly exciting investor exits this past year.

Panelists included:

• Craig Pines, CEO of Deltak, which supports over 100 online degree programs for partners including Purdue University, Butler University and Gonzaga University (and just sold to Wiley & Sons for $220 million).
• Steve Fireng, CEO of EmbanetCompass, which supports over 35 universities and colleges including Vanderbilt University, University of Southern California, and Boston University (and just sold to Pearson for $650 million).
• Joe Diamond, CEO and founder of All Campus, which supports over 15 online programs from not for profit universities and over 150 for-profit partners.
• Dan Briggs, CEO of Orbis Education, which supports over a half-dozen not for profit universities to expand existing healthcare degree programs in partnership with leading national hospital networks.

The event was hosted and moderated by Corey Greendale, Vice President at First Analysis, where he specializes in research and investment in education, including publishing the seminal report “School as a Service: The next big thing in the education industry.”

Leave us an note at educelerate@Edreach.us

“Angel-Ed.org enables students to connect with funding for their education debt-free, while connecting individual and corporate donors with the power players of tomorrow through crowd-funding. Want in? Sign-up for the beta or make a foundational donation!”

Navah offered her thoughts as to how the role of the teacher is transforming for the 21st Century:

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Eileen Murphy, the Founder of ThinkCerca.com, a learning platform dedicated to creating and sharing personalized lessons online. You can follow ThinkCerca on Twitter @thinkcerca. 

Social Entrepreneurship in education is the school reform lever we have yet to use. As a district administrator, I was amazed at how hard it was to find high-quality teaching materials, never mind the challenge of learning what others thought of them. Yet, when I began ThinkCERCA.com and looked at what other education startups were doing, I realized there was so much more out there. Products just hadn’t reached me. What a shame.

The old model—state adoption committees and the like—needs rethinking if teachers are to be accountable and promising startups in the education space are to thrive. We need a marketplace to support innovation. In the ideal digital education marketplace where teacher feedback and student outcomes would drive purchase and adoption decisions, products could be compared with some transparency.

Transparency in shopping for education products doesn’t currently exist. We can’t go to Amazon and compare, for example, the features of one product versus another and determine which solution might work best. But in an era of accountability, or better yet “ownership” of learning outcomes, we ought to have access to that information. That access shouldn’t be limited by the geographical area where a company can afford to place an account manager. After all, if teachers must take responsibility for their student outcomes, shouldn’t they also have a voice in discussions about resources?

Some people may find it too scary to think of a marketplace that could drive our children’s education. Some fear it could turn into a free for all. Unfortunately, it’s kind of a free for all already, to be honest. Go into a school. Check a kid’s backpack. If you’re in a good school, your likely to find homemade photocopies more often than textbooks, teacher-created anthologies from every class.

Teachers are entrepreneurs by nature. We build-measure-learn and test our products and services on customers every day. Yet, we can’t scale our nifty solutions. We ought to follow the models of other industries where successful entrepreneurs have been able to scale solutions that work. While that startup mentality might not translate perfectly into education or healthcare per se, there has to be a better way to help teacher entrepreneurs to reach the teachers and students who need the products. In a world that is increasingly driven by technology anyway, some experimentation is finally possible.

The new Common Core State Standards and federal accountability legislation may even provide the stabilizing forces needed to control some of the healthy chaos that is part of any shift. Perhaps one thing we can all agree on is the idea that gradualism can be at least as dangerous as experimentation, especially in districts with dropout rates over 50%.

Let’s try to build scalable products that work and lower costs for schools through this competitive marketplace. Lots of good choices must be offered to meet everyone’s needs, but more spaces for innovators and schools who are willing to partner with innovators can help tell the world what works and what doesn’t.

After 20 years in education, watching wave after wave of school reform without real technology or competition or results, I am trying something new. I think we ought to be willing to trust great teaching, encourage teacher entrepreneurs, and give consumers of education products—teachers and students—a voice.

ThinkCERCA is but one example of this kind of social entrepreneurship. We are part of the inaugural class at the Impact Engine, a business accelerator for entrepreneurs addressing a social problem. We have worked with teachers, principals, and school designers to create a product that will work for schools. There are many teachers like me who have a scalable solution that works. As we compete to make schools better, we will make each other better.

Go teacher entrepreneurs!

“We believe in super simple tech tools to enhance classroom engagement, assessment and personalization.”

Ben offered his thoughts as to how the role of the teacher is transforming for the 21st Century:

“myEdGPS empowers parents by providing access to the appropriate resources for your child, enabling you to design the best path to serve your child’s education needs. By helping you navigate the complex processes and laws governing special education, and connecting you with the right resources in your area, myEdGPS also saves you time and money.”

Adam graciously offered some insights about what he thinks the “next big thing” in education is:

At the LearnLaunch conference at MIT last weekend, I had a few moments to talk to Jean Hammond, Co-Founder of LearnLaunch, a new organization dedicated to promoting innovation in education. Their mission:

“to increase learning by providing support for the creation and growth of education technology and learning companies.”

Jean graciously offered some insights on her thoughts of education and how commerce can help education move forward:

At the LearnLaunch Conference this weekend, one of the prevailing questions around EdTech investment is how to make investors “comfortable” with EdTech startups. We’re starting to see investors become more emotionally invested in the transformative nature of what it means to “invest in education,” and we’re seeing more transparency with entrepreneurs’ business models, whereas a few years ago, there was much more risk involved. Companies like Educated Ventures (Chicago), Socratic Labs, LearnLaunch, and EdSurge are building a bridge from the investors to the innovators in the education field.

How do we continue to make investors feel confident in education? 

Chris Nyren, Educated Ventures: 

Venture investment in Education totaled a billion dollars in both ’99 and 2000… the following decade  saw just a couple of hundred million dollars invested each year, but  we are back above a billion dollars now, so the velocity of money is certainly there… especially from the successful Web 2.0 entrepreneurs and investors from the Coasts looking to “hack education”.  However, it’s a different beast than disseminating some B to C social network… In the traditional education hubs of Chicago and Baltimore/DC, however, we are seeking some education experienced talent spinning out and raising capital in a “Paypal Mafia” kind of way.

Heather Gilchrist, Socratic Labs:

Number one, we need more dialogue, and I think that’s the first step, we need more transparency. I also think that these ecosystems are encouraging because most of these ecosystems focus around connecting technologists with teachers and investors and the other stakeholders in the space as well. One thing that has prohibited us… is that for a long time nobody was really talking about teachers about stuff, and that is definitely changing.

Eileen Rudden, LearnLaunch

I think that the new flow of entrepreneurs have to demonstrate that they can build businesses. The capital will flow, if they build their business, so it takes some time….Do they have adoption? Do they have paid adoption? Do they have a sales model, as well as a product?…Now the question may be: “how big can the company get?” Maybe there should be some inventiveness in structuring deals so that investors can get their capital back within a certain period of time, if the company is successful.

Tony Wan, EdSurge 

It seems like a lot of startups on the West Coast scene are working on a more consumer-based model. There’s this hype about the freemium model (on the West Coast). That’s a signal that you care more about getting as many users as possible, so you’re putting your revenue model on hold. So the investors who are putting money into these startups, what I think that you’re essentially betting on is that the [power] is going to decentralize into the hands of the teachers in the classrooms that they’re eventually going to sell them to. Eventually, you have to turn the switch on…I think that is a very important question that I think we’ll start seeing some answers to- this year.

One of the most exciting themes at the Learnlaunch Conference, was the “mission driven” concept. Who wouldn’t want to invest in a company where the founders not only have a good business model, but they also want to “change the world?”

Education is so hot right now in the investment world. When I talk to any new company, regardless if they are “ed” based, their eyes light up like wildfire when you mention education. It seems that every company has an education strategy. And what’s the motivation behind these companies? For the majority- it’s more than money. You hear the word “mission driven” more than once. Combine the prospect of making efficiencies happen in our education system, with the freedoms and creativity that goes along with being a business owner- combines two potentially mutually beneficial ideas. It makes being an entrepreneur in this space- meaningful.

I had a chance to talk with a handful of new entrepreneurs at the LearnLaunch conference at MIT. Seth Reynolds, Partner at The Parthenon Group, offered these ideas as to what the next “big thing” in education is.

This Educelerate Event was recorded on January 22, 2013 and presented by Christopher Nyren, Founder of Educelerate.  Educelerate holds a gathering space for Ed Tech leaders in the industry with the educators and entrepreneurs who share their interests. In this next episode, taken from Educelerate VIII, we discuss how Career Colleges are taking advantage of the disruption in the education market, and how that disruption stands to change education for the long run.

Panelists included:

• J. Michael Locke, CEO of Rasmussen College. Former SVP for Collegis (acquired by SunGard in 2004) and former head of Bank of America’s education and training investment banking group.
• Chris Boehm, CFO and EVP of Corporate Development at Education Corporation of America.  Previously a Managing Director for over 10 years at Willis Stein & Partners.
• Jim Bland, HCP, one of the first private equity funds to re-enter this market with the acquisition of the Career Training Academy in February 2012.
• Jason Rosenberg, Principal at Sterling Partners, a growth oriented private equity firm with a long history of successful investing in the education sector, and recent acquiror of the Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology in January 2013.

The event was hosted and moderated by Charlie Rose, an education industry lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath in Chicago and Washington, D.C. and the former general counsel at the U.S. Department of Education.

Leave us an note at educelerate@Edreach.us

It’s tough trying to spur innovation. And it’s also got to be a challenge to integrate your product with others. Anyone who has ever worked with APIs know this. Any developer that has worked with some of Google’s limited APIs like the Google Docs API, knows this all too well.

So if you’re a company like Schoology, and you want to open up your platform to Student Information System companies- how do you motivate those companies to work with you, innovate, and more importantly- how do you ensure that those SIS company APIs are relatively easy to work with?

In this case, if you’re Schoology, you create the SIS Challenge. The SIS Challenge rewards “a bounty” of $25,000 to those school SIS system companies who are ready to make SIS work with the huge platform that is Schoology. The total bounty? $250,000 for the top 10 company APIs. For Schoology, a company with nearly 2 million users, solutions must be created so that students and teachers have one less link to go through. One less password. It’s time to integrate.

From Schoology’s release:

Data integration is one of the biggest challenges facing schools and districts today, and the SIS is usually the source of that challenge. Schoology is so confident in the power and extensibility of its SIS Integration Platform, that the company is willing to put its money where its mouth is. The just released SIS Integration Platform is a turnkey solution that enables the Schoology collaborative learning platform to integrate with any SIS that provides a Web API. PowerSchool, the market-leading SIS from Pearson that supports more than 10 million students globally is the first SIS that Schoology integrates with using the SIS Integration
Platform. Now is the time for other SIS vendors to take the challenge and help further the open exchange of educational data to help teachers teach better today and improve the learning lives of students.

I recently had a chance to talk with Schoology’s CEO, Jeremy Friedman. You can see Jeremy’s goal, first and foremost- is innovation:

In a perfect world- we get a combination of all kinds of players. The goal is to create an ecosystem that supports innovation. In the end, opening the API is a win-win-win. We get an integration, vendor gets $25k (and I’d argue the benefit of having an open API), and the rest of the world gets access. The goal is to solve the education data problem that we all experience when working with education technology. If this works, we’ll be one step closer.

The SIS Challenge, looks to benefit Schoology, yes. But what’s great about this challenge is that by creating this competition, Schoology spurs innovation in the student data informations systems industry that will benefit all of those companies, even their competitors. Innovators don’t look to solve only their own problems. Innovators look to solve problems that are universal. The iPhone didn’t just benefit Apple- it changed the cell phone industry altogether, most would say, for the better. The step toward making companies in this space work together, is also an innovation, and Friedman and Schoology are leading the way.

Here’s a look at Powerschool integrated with Schoology:

So: Calling Infinite Campus. Calling Skyward. Calling Follet. Calling STI-K12. Calling Progress Book and others.

Are you up to the challenge? Go to www.sischallenge.com and get your coding fingers warmed up.

This is a guest post from Jeremy Friedman. Jeremy is the Founder and CEO at Schoology.  Stay connected with Jeremy by following him on Twitter @jnfriedman or visit www.schoology.com.

Behind every successful adult there is a great teacher – probably quite a few.  Ask any adult about their favorite teacher and you’ll hear stories, heartfelt and rich in detail.  Great teachers share a lot in common with great students.  They have insatiable curiosity, a willingness to go above and beyond, and are passionate about learning.

When it comes to implementing new educational technology, however, even the best teachers and administrators can be a skeptical and hard-to-reach crowd.  Not because they don’t want to believe or are resistant to new ideas— but because they are time-short and they have been burned by products and promises that never delivered.  While the biggest barrier to technology in the classroom is often the teacher, these educators are also the most influential and important early adopters.

As the developer of a collaborative learning platform used by more than 30,000 schools and districts, we work with educators around the world at Schoology.  And when it comes to technology adoption on the front lines, we hear valid questions and reasonable doubts from teachers and administrators on a daily basis.

As educators explore new technologies and ed-tech providers search for ways to improve the teaching process, these questions must be addressed— some of the most common hurdles stemming from time, scale and support issues:

• Time-to-deploy and maintain:  Will this create more work for me?  How much time will I need to keep it up-and-running?  Educators are seeking products that they can manage with ease and don’t require endless amounts of time to maintain.  They want to be up-and-running in minutes with a user experience that is fun and intuitive—just like the popular social networking sites, applications and games that teachers and students already enjoy.

• Scale and security concerns:  Who else is using it?  I don’t want to be tied to my laptop—can I log-in from anywhere?  Is it secure?  From the instructor’s perspective, the system must be secure and comprehensive in its offerings.  Teachers must be able to access the technology anytime and from any type of device, to see immediate return and to win respect from their students.

• Support:  Will it be around in a year?  How long is work stored?  What if the site crashes?  Educators want to know that their investments in technology will pay-off and stand the test of time.  As ed-tech providers, it’s important to make sure we are reliable, accessible and always listening to our user communities to improve our products and solutions.

In addition to facing these concerns head-on, we must consider the data integration and data standardization issues that school districts face with the deployment of new technologies.  As districts collect increasing amounts of information on their students, from attendance records to test scores, they are seeking new ways to store, analyze and view this data to improve the academic performance of students and help teachers improve their processes.

By supporting initiatives like the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC), and encouraging ed-tech providers to open their APIs, we can help ease the data-related pains that schools face, fostering cross-platform integration that encourages rapid innovation and content sharing that benefits students and teachers.

For the next-generation teacher and K-12 students today, technology is everywhere, and its role in the learning lives of students will continue to explode in 2013.  I believe teacher acceptance is the gateway to technology adoption in the classroom— and we need to see more technologies that look to empower the role of the educator, by breaking down classroom walls to become part of the daily workflow of how they engage with students and drive efficiencies at every level.

At Schoology, our goal is to help educators inside the classroom and outside of the classroom to Teach Better Today.  We strive to provide a platform that can help track and improve student outcomes, manage the classroom with ease, and get everybody who is involved in a student’s education on the same page.  Over the past year we have grown tremendously, serving nearly 2 million users across the world, and adding hundreds of thousands of new users each month.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Host: Daniel Rezac

Panelists:

Eric Berger, CTO, Desmos.com: Eric started and directed the Personal Robotics Program at Stanford University and Willow Garage, creating the PR2 robot and ROS software framework, which won the 2011 ACE award for Technology in the Service of Society.

Jeremy Friedman, CEO, Schoology.com:   As CEO, Jeremy directs corporate strategy, builds strategic partnerships, and ensures the product vision and Schoology platform experience exceeds the expectations of its users – nearly one million educators, students, administrators and parents.

Sam Chaudhary, Co-Founder, ClassDojo.com: Sam Chaudhary worked as a high school teacher and then in the education arm of McKinsey & Co in London. He has a degree in Economics from the University of Cambridge.

The BETT Show runs from January 30 through February 2nd in ExCel London and is Europe’s largest education conference reaching 35,000 education professionals.  EdMix is making this available for up to 20 edtech startups through heavily subsidized exhibition pods right at the heart of the floor (reserve one at bett@edmix.com).

The conference will also feature Europe’s largest edtech pitch competition with room for 15 edtech startups to pitch their businesses and compete for a  £15,000 prize (submission deadline is January 27th).

Hope to see some of our Educelerants there!

While we tend to be humble out here in “Flyover land,” our memories run long and we would highlight our region’s 80 year history of education industry innovation spanning the advent of career and correspondence schools, the dawn of online learning (50 years ago), the creation of the very first MOOC (10 years before there was such a silly term), and the unprecendented scale built up by its “School as a Service” players today.

So, following the format of Vander Ark’s Education Week posting, here is a quick, in-process line-by-line counter (please feel free to add-on!):

Education Industry: 

• Post-Secondary: Chicago boasts 3 of the 5 largest players in post-secondary education, including DeVry, Career Education Corp, and ITT (Carmel, IN) — and its a perfect 5 out of 5, if you include the local executive presence of Apollo Group and Kaplan (which should be permissible if Vander Ark can include Pearson under New York).
• K-12: The broader Midwest boasts 2 of the largest players in K-12 education technology in Plato Learning and Renaissance Learning, not to mention Chicago’s own Edline (now Blackboard).
• SaaS: Chicago features 2 of the largest EdTech plays of the past decade in EmbanetCompass and Deltak, which both just achieved impressive exits valued at 5x revenue — and with All Campus, Orbis Education and Everspring, we are home to every one of the leading “School as a Service” players (excluding those with a “2″ in their name).
• Text Books: I have to tip my hat to New York and their range of publishers (e.g. McGraw-Hill, Scholastic, MacMillan, Wiley & Sons), but Chicago can counter with the Anglophone World’s two remaining encyclopedias Encyclopaedia Britannica and World Book, both of which are experiencing strong traction selling curriculum and research products to school districts and libraries.
• e-Texts: Rivaling both New York and the Bay Area, Chicago and the Midwest feature a diverse range of companies leading the education industry’s move to digital course materials, including BenchPrep, Courseload, EdMap and VLinks.
• Retail: Our region also features two of the largest educational retail businesses in the world in Follets and Jostens (Minneapolis).

Start-Ups:

• School as  Service: as noted above, and beyond the impressively scaled successes at EmbanetCompass and Deltak, Chicago also features dynamic new start-ups All Campus, Everspring and Orbis (Indianapolis).
• Open Learning / Badges: Chicago is the home of three of the winners from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition including our good friends at MentorMob, Youtopia and Better.at.
• K-12 EdTech: With too many to mention, we at Educelerate are particularly proud of our homegrown start-ups at eSpark Learning, Wowzers, Collaborative Learning, SchoolTown, ThinkCerca, and SkateKids.
• Coding Academies: While the Bay Area has Codecademy, Chicago has the original Code Academy, recently rebranded as Starter League.
• Tutor Marketplaces: In addition to the adjacent market leader SitterCity, Chicago also features the first and still biggest marketplace for finding tutors WyzAnt.
• Adaptive Learning: Any list of past or present EdTech entrepreneurs would be remiss in not mentioning Karan Goel, the founder of the first adaptive learning platform PrepMe, who is now hard at work on his latest venture.

 Investors and Bankers

• Venture Capital: Chicago-based funds have completed over 15 venture investments in the education market and represent over $1.5bn in combined assets under management.  Leading players include OCA, First Analysis, MK Capital, Chrysalis (Louisville, KY) and Baird Ventures.
• Private Equity: Chicago and Midwest funds  have completed over 30 private equity investments in the education market and represent over $8.5bn in assets under management.  While Vander Ark cited NY’s well-experienced vocational college investors at Quad Partners, I would counter that no geography features more such experienced investors as right here with Sterling, Riverside, Chicago Growth, HCP, Prairie, Prospect, Concentric, and many more.
• Angels: With several generations of education industry entrepreneurial success, Chicago boasts several skilled angel investors including one of the industry’s forefathers Jack Larson (founder of Career Education and current angel investor in 2U, Straighterline, and Triumph Education), Bob King (founder / investor of NetG, Collegis, Deltak, and Rasmussen College), Michael Markovitz (founder of Argosy Education and current investor in All Campus, etc.).
• Bulge Bracket Bankers: Chicago features Wall Street’s leading industry bankers Adam Nordin and Jason Williams at Barclays as well as  much of the teams at Baird, BMO and Credit Suisse.
• Boutiques: While I am more than a little biased, we at Educated Ventures have had some strong client successes since our founding at the start of the year.

Foundations: Chicago and the Great Lakes feature the following foundations with education focused missions:

• Joyce Foundation: teacher quality, early reading, innovation
• Kresge Foundation: pathways to and through college, strengthening education, higher education productivity
• Lumina Foundation: college participation and graduation
• MacArthur Foundation: digital media & learning, and more
• Susan Crown Exchange: digital learning, including gaps in resources, information and infrastructure
• Wallace Foundation: school leadership, after school, summer and extended time learning and arts education

There is no question that New York and Boston feature several large, legacy publishing businesses, some of which have still managed to stave off bankruptcy.  But while Chicago’s EdTech scene does not receive the same media attention, we are solving very real issues of educational access while gaining real scale.  And with Educelerate, we hope to play a part in the further growth of this entrepreneurial education ecosystem.

Oh, and by the way, that very first MOOC mentioned above was UNext, a venture that over 1998 to 2001 raised upwards of $150 million from Michael Milken and Larry Ellison to create online courses with such leading global institutions as Stanford University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the London School of Economics.  While the venture was perhaps ahead of its time, it did help to further seed the local market with entrepreneurs, managers and technology.

Note, Educated Ventures, and its related entities Educated Advisors and Educated Capital, have several current and pending clients and investments amongst the above cited companies.

“The app store contains over 100,000 educational apps. Here at eSpark, we’ve identified the very best of these apps, narrowing to approximately 750 unique apps that appear in our curriculum. From there, we refine even further, identifying particular sets of 8-10 apps that meet individual student needs.”

One term that we often hear in education is “Online Learning Environment” or “Personal Learning Environment.” Some companies have made it their niche to be the PLE for the laptop-based Web, but what about the iPad? iPad management for school districts and students is really a mess (especially young students). Espark innovates iPad classroom deployment by being the classroom portal on the iPad, utilizing teacher and student data to create a one-stop-shop for apps, assessment, and achievement.

This Educelerate Event was recorded on November 13, 2012 and presented by Christopher Nyren, Founder of Educelerate.  Educelerate holds a gathering space for Ed Tech leaders in the industry with the educators and entrepreneurs who share their interests. In this next episode, taken from Educelerate VI, we discuss how research evolves into startups, and see how education companies have benefitted from having really good data.

Panelists included:

Alan Aldworth: cofounder and Chairman of SKO Learning, the producer of SkateKids, a set of games aimed at building reading skills that were designed based on research by Jack Naglieri, a cognitive and educational psychologist at George Mason University.

Eileen Murphy: founder of Think Cerca, a set of curriculum and tools to teach the critical thinking and literacy skills that are essential to the Common Core State Standards based upon her book “360 Degrees of Text” (NCTE, 2011) and her work as Director of Curriculum and Instruction for over 100 CPS schools where she worked closely with principals and district leaders.

Andy Morrison: former CEO and co-founder of Cognitive Concepts (acquired by Houghton Mifflin), a provider of literacy programs to struggling and at-risk students including Earobics, a research driven multisensory learning solution.

Adam Lupu: Learning Architect with The Starter League and Director of Learning and Development at Global Playground (and one of our first Educelerants!).

Our moderators:

David Halsted: the Director of Online and Blended Learning in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. David is a former software engineer, architect and team leader and holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Amy Scatliff: a learning consultant and resource specialist for working adults with a Master’s of Social Science from the University of Amsterdam and a doctoral degree in Educational Leadership and Change from Fielding Graduate University.

Leave us an note at educelerate@Edreach.us

“We believe that great teaching should be available to every student. Pan Am Education uses video-conference and online tools to make quality teachers available to any student in the world at any time. Our programs and services enable the best teachers to deliver world-class content at a significant value. We make high quality education accessible and available to all.”

The Online Education offerings are currently in flux. Blackboard.com’s founders just left the company.  Educators and companies are leveraging third party tools to try to bring together an experience for students online that delivers online courses in an innovative way. One such company, PanAmEducation.com has put all of these pieces together- to offer English courses online to students in America and abroad, at a fraction of what school districts currently pay for similar services. Is this the future of Online Education?

J

We have an exciting and experienced panel of experts lined up from GameDesk, Greendot Public Schools and Pearson Education to discuss the latest use of social media and its impact on education, both inside and outside of the classroom.  Thank you to Cynthia Lieberman of CyberWise for assembling and moderating this panel of speakers.

Panelists include:

Melissa Jun Rowley: Representative from GameDesk, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Incentivize

Jay R. Aguda: Instructional Tech Coordinator, Green Dot Public Schools

Laura Coaty, Director Market Research & Development, Pearson Education

“Teachers have complete control on ClassBadges. Each badge can be customized to meet the specific needs of each school or classroom. With hundreds of beautifully designed badges to choose from, every teacher can create an experience unique to their classroom.”

What if we lived in a world without grades? What if, instead of grades, students were able to earn badges for their achievements? As President and Co-Founder, James Sanders asks, “what does our current grading system mean to a student? Grades are not tangible.” Well, Classbadges.com is his answer. Now, educators can have a one-stop shop to create, engage, and offer their students a place for tangible achievements. The badge movement was our topic at Educelerate III, and it looks like Classbadges is ready to get this party started.

You can find Classbadges.com on AngelList .

Following OpenEnglish’s landmark $43 million raise this summer and other recent raises by Busuu, LearnShip, Voxy and our friends from Educelerate LA BrainRush, PanAm has now firmly announced itself in the rapidly growing market for online language learning.  And unique from these other B2C plays, PanAm has distinguished itself by a highly international and B2B path to market.  The  company boasts a distribution network reaching over 5 million students in 10 countries, including through UpLanguage in Brazil, iPlaed in Latin America, Qooco in China, TALL (BYU) and ETS in the US.

Indeed, this B2B differentiation provides a potentially fascinating diversification path for PanAm to leverage its underlying Teacher Management System and initial language learning clients to become a broader instructional outsourcing company.  Notwithstanding the notable exit for offshore tutoring play TutorVista with Pearson, there has still yet to emerge the first truly scaled outsourced instruction / tutoring platform (though we continue to track the strong traction of our friends at Presence Learning in the K-12 markets).

The transaction also possess an interesting back story in the changing of hands between notable Valley of the Sun investors (as alluded to in EdSurge).  With the Najafi family taking over for the Quayle family, who each represent rather opposing sides of the political spectrum, this also adds a fun side note in this political season.

“[T]he first-ever online professional network exclusively for educators. On Tioki, educators are equipped with the right tools to build their online brand, and the right network to expand their influence.”

Do you think that our current social and professional networks do enough for teachers? Are you an educator who just hasn’t found the right “space” online- (maybe you don’t blog, or aren’t really into that “Twitter” thing).  Today I got a chance to speak with Pete Walton, the Growth Director for tioki.com, and he makes the case that our current networks don’t do enough to bring educators together- that tioki is the place where parents, teachers, and students alike- will go to learn about you, the educator.

You can find Tioki.com on AngelList .

Hot on the heels of last week’s $220 million acquisition of Deltak.edu by John Wiley & Sons and just a few months after the latest massive raise by 2tor, All Campus is announcing its first round of institutional capital and spin-off from Alloy Education.

All of these deal data points reflect the underlying move of not-for-profit colleges and universities online and prospective online students’ newfound awareness of the distinction between these schools and the various online proprietary schools.  Indeed, upwards of 500 traditional schools have now moved online and recent data from EduVentures suggests not-for-profits (private and public) now capture a majority of the online education market, with for-profits’ share declining to less than 40%.

I have written previously on the broader market opportunity on my website and aside from my involvement with All Campus, I have also assisted Orbis Education in their recent raise from LLR Partners.  All Campus operates in the same online partnership services space, or what some have termed School as a Service, but with a differentiated model from Deltak.edu, 2tor, Embanet and Academic Partnerships.

Two years ago, All Campus noted that while these legacy players work with perhaps 100 not-for-profit colleges and universities, there are another 400 such schools that have moved online on their own, taking advantage of new open source and SaaS based solutions that have lowered the cost and complexity of online learning.  However, while these schools now have solutions for online instruction and scheduling, they still lack the expertise and funding to recruit and enroll meaningful numbers of online students.  As All Campus’ founder Joe Diamond observed, “you now have 500 stores open for business, but the challenge remains in getting consumers in the door.”

Joe and his team focus on this end of the student value-chain and as such, their school clients are able to retain nearly twice the level of partnership economics.

All Campus was incubated within Alloy Education, a company with over twenty-five years of expertise in advising over 500 traditional schools around traditional marketing for traditional students.  Now as a standalone company, All Campus will continue to focus on online marketing for non-tradition students.  And with this funding, they can continue to expand their more targeted and equitable partnership model from its initial base of six not-for-profit clients.

The company raised approximately $6 million from a group of investors led by the New York-based growth equity fund Noson Lawen Partners and including Dr. Michael Markovitz, the founder of Argosy Education (and a panelist at our second Educelerate event!).  His unique insights into this dynamic market are informed by a 30 year career as an education entrepreneur.   It is also expected that the partners at Noson Lawen will bring their deep experience within the media industry to bear on the All Campus business and financial model.

Indeed, while All Campus has proven its ability to work with institutions that have already moved online on their own, it will be interesting to see if they can work with the several thousand schools that are still navigating their (shrinking) options in terms of LMS and SIS solutions.  It will also be interesting to note what happens as the contracts of the legacy players come due and their school partners see the superior economics available through this more targeted offering.

Note Bene: the author has an investment in All Campus.

This Educelerate Event was recorded on September 20, 2012 and hosted by Christopher Nyren, Founder of Educelerate.  Educelerate holds a gathering space for Ed Tech leaders in the industry with the educators and entrepreneurs who share their interests. In this next episode, taken from Educelerate IV: On the Digitization of Textbooks, we feature four leaders in the field of textbooks and e-learning.

Panelists included:

• BenchPrep.com- Co-founder and COO, Ujjwal Gupta
• Ed Map- founder and CEO, Dr. Michael (“Max”) Mark
• Courseload- co-founder and CEO Michael (“Mickey”) Levitan
• Encyclopaedia Britannica – Greg Healy, Chief Product Officer

Leave us an note at educelerate@Edreach.us

Still using a Texas Instruments calculator? For the love of all that’s holy, please put that thing away. There’s something leaner, smarter, and can take math and turn it into an art form. It’s called Desmos.com, and Google Ventures just gave them a whole bunch of funding.

Getting the endorsement from Google, should help Desmos add new staff, and grow their online math community to the mainstream. Could we see a new Google App in the future? Well, that we can only speculate on. Here’s the news straight from Eli Luberoff,  CEO of Desmos:

“People have been clamoring for an alternative to outdated, overpriced graphing technology. At Desmos, we believe that everyone deserves access to the best educational technology available, and that given the right environment and the right tools, all students can understand — and even enjoy — math.”

Rich Miner, Google Ventures  Partner, put out a statement about their involvement with Desmos.

“Today technology is rapidly redefining traditional education. Math is a subject area where we lose many of our students and our competitive edge.  If math can come to life, as Desmos is doing, we can build a generation of students that is engaged and deeply interested in the areas of math and science.  We are excited to be working with Desmos as they scale their operations to have an impact on students around the world.”

Desmos started out as an online whiteboard tool back when it launched at TechCrunch Disrupt back in May of 2011 . However, seeing that classroom whiteboards are dying a slow death, taken over by Apple TVs and iPads , Desmos pivoted to become probably the most useful online math tool around. Take it from an actual educator, Luke Walsh, a mathematics instructor at Catawba Valley Community College in North Carolina, who uses Desmos for project-based learning and discovery for his classes.  Walsh comments:

 “The iPod revolutionized the way people listen to music and Desmos is revolutionizing the way people visualize mathematics.  As soon as students begin typing, mathematics is displayed to them in color, and they quickly become engaged by amazing features, such as dynamic sliders and points of interest. Desmos soars past the definition of a graphing calculator.”

Seriously though, can’t you see Desmos filling in perfectly right next to Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Forms, etc.? Seems only natural, however, they could have bigger goals…

Welcome to Educelerate! This is the first episode of Educelerate, a gathering place for Ed Tech leaders in the industry with the educators who support their organizations. In this first episode, taken from the Educelerate III event from August 16, 2012, we feature four leaders in the field of credentialing, or as we like to call it now: badges.

Panelists included:

• Simeon Schnapper: founder of Youtopia.com

• Charles Perry: Marketing Coordinator, MentorMob

• Jeff Dunn: Education Technology R&D, DeVry

• An-Me Chung: Associate Director of Education, MacArthur Foundation

Leave us an note at educelerate@Edreach.us