Innovations in Education

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.

Founder:

• John Katzman (founder of Princeton Review)
• Chip Paucek
• Jeremy Johnson

Key ideas:

• 2tor is the first startup of its kind to offer full degree programs online at top-tier universities. It’s also the most highly funded. As of April 2012, its total investments added up to a little under $97 million.
• Rather than point and laugh at higher education, the startup set out to partner with universities to build, administer, and market their own online degree programs, collaborating with institutions to create digital education programs that would not just be equivalent to in-classroom education, but perhaps even better.

• 2tor Raises $26M D Round To Put Online Degrees In The Same Class As Their On-Campus Rivals

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.

http://www.enstituteu.com/

Elevator Pitch:

• An apprenticeship program designed to immerse aspiring professionals in their local startup scene.
• [E]nstitute is linking young people with jobs—no college degree required.

Founders:

• Kane Sarhan
• Shaila Ittycheria

Key ideas:

• The skills necessary to succeed in today’s business climate can’t always be acquired in classrooms.
• She and Sarhan became friends and came to realize that he had gained more professional ground working closely with two startups than he ever could have as a student or an intern. “What I got from working with smart, successful people was a model education.
• Each member of this fall’s inaugural class of 15, culled from more than 500 applicants, will work full time at one of the startups, with the ability to switch to another after the first year. They also will be given writing assignments, attend lectures, and take part in weekly dinners with experts. The program will be tuition-free, covering housing and providing a small stipend.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• [E]nstitute’s Apprenticeships Give You Skills You Can’t Pick Up In A Classroom (FastCompany, 2012)

http://www.skillshare.com/

Elevator Pitch:

Skillshare is a marketplace of classes to learn anything (e.g. cooking, fashion, programming) from teachers in your community.

We are a community of learners: teachers and students fueled by common interests and driven by a passion to share real-world skills.

We want to allow people to create their own learning paths.

Founders (in 2011):

• Mike Karnjanaprakorn
• Malcolm Ong

Key ideas:

• “The people who use Skillshare are those who are passionate and curious about learning and simply don’t want to stop adding to their skillsets or banks of knowledge. Skillshare only features classes that are creative, not normally accessible (either because they don’t exist in the traditional education world or they’re just normally wildly expensive, i.e., cooking classes), and relevant to today’s needs.”
• Skillshare takes a 15 percent cut of the revenue teachers take in for their classes in exchange for the company’s hand in matchmaking students with teachers, and it just recently introduced a “schools” product to allow brands to market their own specialists as teachers for specific industry-related expertise.
• “We don’t really see ourselves as a platform. We see ourselves as a community–an alternate route to learning.”
• Vision from Union Squares Ventures and Spark Capital: “transform every community into a campus, every address into a classroom, and every neighbor into a teacher and student”.
• “If you could reinvent education for the twenty-first century what would that look like?”

Worth Reading/Watching:

• Why we are builiding SkillShare (2011)

https://p2pu.org/en/

Elevator Pitch:

Learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything

The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. P2PU - learning for everyone, by everyone about almost anything.

Founders:

• Delia Browne
• Stian Håklev

Key ideas:

• At P2PU, people work together to learn a particular topic by completing tasks, assessing individual and group work, and providing constructive feedback.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• Peer To Peer University 2010 (Vimeo)

http://schoolofeverything.com/

Elevator Pitch:

School of Everything lets you learn and teach whatever, wherever and whenever you want.

Everyone has something to learn. Everyone has something to teach.

Founders (in 2007):

• Peter Brownell
• Andy Gibson
• Mary Harrington
• Dougald Hine
• Paul Miller

Key ideas:

• Nobody likes being told what to do. School of Everything is here so you can organise your education however you please. 
• Connecting those who have something to teach with those who want to learn.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• School of Everything: eBay for knowledge (BoingBoing, 2008)

http://generalassemb.ly/

Elevator Pitch:

General Assembly is a global network of campuses for technology, design, and entrepreneurship.

We provide educational programming, space, and support to facilitate collaborative practices and learning opportunities across a community inspired by the entrepreneurial experience.

Founders (in 2011):

• Jake Schwartz
• Adam Pritzker
• Matthew Brimer
• Brad Hargreaves

Key ideas:

• The teachers are practitioners.
• Programs like GA offer a middle option: cheaper than a university but more structured than pure self-learning. It’s easier to teach yourself if it’s guided by some amount of personal instruction and encouraged by your peers.
• General Assembly is far more flexible than an Ivy League institution. It iterates and updates its offerings every few weeks, based on detailed student surveys. When its students said they wanted to study Android development, General Assembly ginned up a class two weeks later. A traditional college might take years to meet a new need.
• In the future of education, some General Assembly may be required.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• General Assembly Provides Entrepreneurial Skills To A Chosen Few (Fast Company, 2011)

http://www.uopeople.org/

Elevator Pitch:

University of the People (UoPeople) is the world’s first tuition-free online university dedicated to the global advancement and democratization of higher education.

Founder:

• Shai Reshef

Key ideas:

• The University uses open source materials and open educational resources, so that students are not thwarted by expensive textbooks.
• “If University of the People becomes an alternative to Harvard then I’ve missed the point…It’s better to have decent education for all than exclusive education for few.”
• With the support of academic leadership from top universities and having accepted more than 1500 students from over 130 countries to date, UoPeople is well on its way to becoming a global higher education leader.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• University of the People: Expanding the Global Reach of Higher Education (2010)

http://www.firstbook.org/

Elevator Pitch:

Access to New Books for Children in Need

First Book, a nonprofit organization, connects book publishers and community organizations to provide access to new books for children in need, addressing one of the most important factors affecting literacy: access to books.

Founder:

• Kyle Zimmer

Key ideas:

• Studies show that the single strongest indicator of a child’s future reading success is simple: the number of books in the home. Yet access to books is virtually nonexistent for children in need.
• In low-income neighborhoods, there is access to, on average, just one age-appropriate book for every 300 children, compared with 13 books for every child in middle-income families.
• More than 80% of preschool and after-school programs serving children from low-income families do not have a steady supply of books for the children they serve.
• First Book provides new books to children through eligible community organizations like preschools, day care, after-school, and tutoring/mentoring programs.
• The children take home and keep the books that they receive. 

Worth Reading/Watching:

• First Book President, Kyle Zimmer, on why reading matters

http://www.betterworldbooks.com

Elevator Pitch:

Better World Books collects and sells books online to fund literacy initiatives worldwide. 

Everytime you buy a book on BetterWorldBooks.com, we donate a book to someone in need.

Founders (in 2002):

• Xavier Helgesen
• Christopher Fuchs

Key ideas:

• Better World Books is a global bookstore that harnesses the power of capitalism to bring literacy and opportunity to people around the world.
• Collect unwanted books from colleges and libraries, sell them online and use some of the profits — donating about $7 million to date — to help more people (potential customers!) learn to read.
• With more than 8 million new and used titles in stock, we’re a self-sustaining, triple-bottom-line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all our stakeholders.
• We were founded in 2002 by friends from the University of Notre Dame who started selling textbooks online to earn some money, and ended up forming a pioneering social enterprise — a business with a mission to promote literacy.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• Who is Better World Books? (Vimeo)

http://www.floatinguniversity.com/

Elevator Pitch:

Essential knowledge from the World’s Top Educators, at a fraction of the price of traditional education.

Ivy League Education for All

Founders:

• The Floating University is a joint venture between The Jack Parker Corporation and Big Think, a knowledge forum where the world’s top experts engage the thinking public to explore the big ideas and core skills defining the 21st century.

Key ideas:

• What if the world’s best thinkers all taught at the same school?
• What if anyone can enrol in this school? From anywhere?
• We Are All Students, Whether We’re at University or at Home.
• Their courses are university level though they do not lead to recognized university credits (yet). 

Worth Reading/Watching:

• Great Big Ideas: An Entire Undergraduate Education While Standing on One Foot

http://casel.org/

Elevator Pitch:

Mission

To establish social and emotional learning as an essential part of education.

Vision

To promote children’s success in school and life.

Social and emotional learning is a process for helping children and even adults develop the fundamental skills for life effectiveness.

These are the skills we all need to handle ourselves, our relationships, and our work, effectively and ethically.

Founder:

• Linda Lantieri

Key ideas:

We envision a world where families, schools, and communities work together to promote children’s success in school and life and to support the healthy development of all children. In this vision, children and adults are engaged life-long learners who are self-aware, caring and connected to others, and responsible in their decision-making. Children and adults achieve to their fullest potential, and participate constructively in a democratic society.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• Linda Lantieri - Keynote presentations