http://www.thielfellowship.org

Elevator Pitch:

• Thiel Fellowships pay young people $100,000 over two years to forgo college and to plunge into real-world projects.

Founder:

• Peter Thiel

Key ideas:

• The Thiel Fellowship (originally named “20 under 20”) is a fellowship created by Peter Thiel through the Thiel Foundation.
• Thiel Fellowships consist of separate grants of $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years old, so that they can leave the classroom and pursue other innovative work, which could involve scientific research, creating a startup, or working on a social movement.
• In addition to the financial support, Thiel Fellows are mentored by hundreds of highly accomplished entrepreneurs, scientists, investors, thinkers, and innovators of the Thiel Network.

Worth watching/reading:

• Forgoing College to Pursue Dreams (New York Times, 2012)
• Thiel Fellowship (Wikipedia)
• Apply to the Fellowship (video, Thiel Foundation)
• The World in 2050… according to the 2011 Thiel Fellows (video, Thiel Foundation)

http://www.chegg.com

Elevator Pitch:

• An online textbook rental company

Founders:

• Osamn Rashid
• Aayush Phumbhra

Key ideas:

• When it launched in 2007, Chegg quickly became known as the Netflix for textbooks. Rather than spending $100 or so on a physics or biology tome used for one semester, students turned to Chegg to rent books for as much as 80 percent off the cover price.
• Chegg was inspired by Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra’s frustration with the policies and procedures of their own university’s bookstore. 
• The name Chegg is a contraction of the words chicken and egg, based on the founders’ experience after graduating from college: they couldn’t land a job without experience, but couldn’t get experience without a job, or a chicken and egg type quandary.

Worth watching/reading:

• Chegg (Wikipedia)
• Chegg: Textbook Rental Takes Flight (HBS Case Study, 2011)
• Chegg, a College Hub. Togas Not Included (BusinessWeek, 2012)

https://www.gradeable.com

Elevator Pitch:

• Take the pain out of grading and personalize instruction.

Founders:

• Parul Singh
• Dante Cassanego

Key ideas:

• Teachers spend one-third of their time grading. We aim to change that. We know that less time on grading means more time with students.
• An app for teachers to grade student papers and track the results.
• Gradeable is a ground-breaking mobile education assistant. We empower teachers with time and insight and enable practices that increase test scores by as much as 29%.
• Our solution provides an easy workflow for scanning assessments with a mobile phone. By increasing available data, we deliver actionable recommendations for improving comprehension and powerful analytics to measure progress against standards-based goals.
• Gradeable is an essential personalized data coach for educators, filling a pressing need for targeted, insightful feedback on learning.

Worth reading/watching:

• MIT Sloan alumni, students win Startup Showdown at MIT Venture Capital Conference (MIT, 2012)
• MIT Ideas Global Challenge (2012)

http://startempathy.org/

Elevator Pitch:

• Imagine a world where every child masters empathy. Let’s do it.

Founders:

• Ashoka

Key ideas:

• Start Empathy, an initiative of Ashoka, is a community of individuals and institutions dedicated to building a future in which every child masters empathy.
• Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings and perspectives of others, and to use that understanding to guide one’s actions. Empathy is critical both to individual human development and to our collective ability to solve problems and build a stronger society.
• Ashoka’s vision is an Everyone a Changemaker™ world: one that responds quickly and effectively to social challenges, one where each individual has the freedom, confidence and societal support to address any social problem and drive change.
• Everyone a Changemaker™ begins with empathy.

Worth reading/watching:

• Videos we have made and videos we love (Start Empathy)

http://singularityu.org/

Elevator Pitch:

• How will you improve the lives of a billion people?
• Understand rapidly and advancing exponential technologies within and between science and technology fields, to address humanity’s biggest problems.

Founders:

• Ray Kurzweil
• Peter Diamandis

Key ideas:

• SingularityUniversity is an interdisciplinary university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.
• Founders Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis wanted to create an institution that not only taught the world about accelerating technologies, but found and shaped the talent that would use those technologies to improve the lives of everyone on the planet. 
• Singularity University is based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley.

Worth reading/watching:

• Singularity University Overview (Singularity University)
• The Future of the University Might Well Be Singularity University (TechCrunch, October 2011)
• Singularity University - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (PBS News Hour, April 2012)

http://www.noodle.org/

Elevator Pitch:

• Noodle Education helps you find the perfect educational opportunity, from K-12 to graduate school.
• Our mission is to make finding a great education easy and fun.

Founder:

• John Katzman (who previously founded both The Princeton Review and 2tor)

Key ideas:

• “From the founders of the Princeton Review, we believe in giving everyone the best information about their educational opportunities.”
• Noodle has created the very first search engine of its kind, devoted solely to navigating the vast sea of educational information available online.
• Noodle’s customized search engine helps students and their families to find resources for tutors, pre-K schooling options, guidance counselors, summer camps, MBA programs, and much more. Basically, this service is revolutionizing the way we search for and locate educational opportunities suited to our needs.

Worth reading/watching:

• Princeton Review Founder Launches Noodle, A Search & Recommendation Engine For Education (Techcrunch, May 2012)
• Welcome to Noodle (YouTube, December 2011)

http://www.udemy.com/

Elevator Pitch:

• Udemy is a website that enables anyone to teach and learn online. Udemy tries to democratize online education by making it fast and easy.
• Udemy enables anyone to take and build courses online. Our goal is to disrupt and democratize education by enabling anyone to learn from the world’s experts.
• Start Learning from the World’s Top Instructors

Founders (in 2010):

• Eren Bali
• Gagan Biyani

Key ideas:

• Udemy is unique because it allows anyone to take or build an online course, not just colleges and universities. Instructors can implement videos, PowerPoints, zip files, audio files, and PDFs to create a course and share it with the world. The site offers courses on technology, business, music, art, languages, math, science, games, sports, and more.
• The basic premise is to crowdsource education. Much like blogging allows anyone to share information, Udemy allows anyone to create courses with nothing more than an internet connection. Many individuals with a desire to learn are cut out of the education system by rising tuition, housing, and commuting costs, but Udemy empowers anyone to share and learn at a more affordable rate.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• What is Udemy? (Vimeo, 2011)

http://2tor.com/

Elevator Pitch:

• 2tor partners with top-tier universities such as USC, Georgetown, UNC Chapel Hill and Washington University to deliver groundbreaking online graduate programs.
• 2tor partners with universities across the country to help them build and market their own online degree programs. The startup has created master’s degree programs for a variety of schools, including a master of arts in teaching at the University of Southern California and Georgetown University’s nursing program.

http://sapere.ebaia.com/

Elevator Pitch:

• Schools in Finland use the Sapere Method to teach children about nutrition. Children play games that involve tasting all kinds of vegetables, they help prepare meals in the mini-kitchen and they even dress up as vegetables. 

Founder:

• Jacques Puisais, a French chemist and ethnologist

Key ideas:

• Students are also encouraged to use all five senses to learn about food and food preparation. Nearly 3,500 pre-school teachers in Finland have been trained to use the Sapere Method in their day care centres. In many towns it is a part of the pre-school curriculum.
• The Sapere method, which combines knowledge and first-hand experience, is one of the best methods in preventing the development of bad eating habits, when applied to young children. 
• By its application in schools, it also has the advantage of being able to influence all children; and not only those whose parents are already involved in the struggle to be healthy, as is the case with many other methods.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• Sapere in Finland (YouTube, 2012)
• Discovering the world of food through the senses: the Sapere method as a support to nutrition and food education in day care (in Finnish, PDF)

GEN 202: Critical Analytical Thinking (CAT) 

Elevator Pitch:

• The Critical Analytical Thinking (CAT) course provides a setting for students to further develop and hone the skills needed to analyze complex issues and make forceful and well-grounded arguments. In 16-18 person sections, you will analyze, write about, and debate a set of topics that encompass the types of problems managers must confront. In doing this CAT will enhance your ability to identify critical questions when exploring challenging business issues. The emphasis will be on developing reasoned positions and making sound and compelling arguments that support those positions.

Founder:

• Stanford University – Graduate School of Business (2007) 

Key ideas:

• We help you understand what makes a strong, logical argument. Here, you practice different ways of thinking and hone your oral and written communication of analysis. You learn persuasion and criticism.
• Every MBA student takes the Critical Analytical Thinking (CAT) seminar, which focuses exclusively on building these skills. CAT transcends any discipline or function of management. CATenhances your ability to identify critical questions when exploring a new business issue, to parse issues, to develop reasoned positions, and to make compelling arguments.
• Critical Analytical Thinking (CAT) addresses issues that transcend any single discipline or function of management. In 16-person sections, you will analyze, write about, and debate fundamental issues, questions, and phenomena that arise in many forms in management. CAT will enhance your ability to identify critical questions when exploring a new business issue, to parse issues, to develop reasoned positions, and to make compelling arguments.
• The main points are to get students to understand what makes for a strong, logical argument (within a complex, sometimes ambiguous situation); to articulate these arguments orally and in writing; and to defend them logically. As part of the process the students also learn to analyze others’ arguments and to see points in common and in difference with them. Several of the CAT topics challenge the students’ notions of what principled leadership means. Real-life managerial decision-making requires choices among difficult alternatives.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• CAT at the GSB. Overview Guide and Example Assignments.