The Knewton Blog

While there has been a lot of turmoil across the K-20 education space, little has spread so rapidly as MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses). Seen as a financial saving grace for some, and the death of quality education to others, everyone is picking a side.  We want to talk with the organizations making these courses as well as the universities grappling with the daily changing landscape.  So bring your challenging ideas and let’s roll up… Read more

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Knewton welcomed five new Knerds this month. Rex Gibson is a Senior Engineer on the Analytics team. Rex is originally from Nebraska, attended Webster University in St. Louis, and has been living in New York for the past 12 years. Before joining Knewton, he was the Data Lead at opensky.com. Rex’s favorite book is Dune (“quite a remarkable insight into the world’s geopolitical landscape”). In his free time, he enjoys music — he’s a trained… Read more

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Seven new people joined the Knewton team this month. We’re excited to have them all here. Illya Bomash is a Data Analyst on the Adaptive Learning team. Illya was born in Russia but has been living in NYC for the past eight years. He went to college at Harvard, then did a Ph.D. at Weill Cornell Medical College in computational neuroscience, studying how cells in the retina represent visual inputs. In his spare time, Illya… Read more

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Students spend a lot of their day learning. They spend six or more hours in bricks-and-mortar classrooms each day, listening to teachers, talking with peers, and working with textbooks/software/technology (collectively, “materials”). Then they spend a few more hours working through materials after school. Some students learn more in the classroom environment; others learn more by using materials to teach themselves. Despite how huge and complex the education system is, students do primarily just those two… Read more

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Thanks to meetup.com, you can find a gathering to match every shade of identity, interest, career, and hobby you might have. For software engineers, there’s New York Software Engineers (1,800 members), NYC Java (2,700 members), NYC Python (nearly 3,000), Hadoop User Group (over 1,800), and New York Open Statistical Programming (2,500). Knewton has been a proud host of meetups for all these great groups. Within the tech industry alone, edtech, adtech, healthtech, cleantech, and publishing… Read more

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Education has always been resistant to change. It is such a high-stakes industry — right up there with food, shelter, and medicine in importance — that practitioners are reluctant to try unproven innovations that could possibly lower outcomes. Regardless of industry, innovation is by its nature nearly always incremental. Tectonic innovation is extremely rare. It is only by adding myriad small innovations that most industries see steady product improvement over time. But, until recently, education… Read more

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Four new Knerds joined our team in the past month. We’re excited to have them all on board. Rob Schultheis joins Knewton as a Quality Assurance Engineer. Before coming to Knewton, he hiked the Appalachian trail; before that, he consulted as a quality engineer. Originally from Miami, Rob graduated from Virginia Tech. In his free time, he enjoys yoga and cooking. His favorite book is Riddley Walker, and this is his favorite Wikipedia article. You… Read more

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Next up on our tour of the best engineering schools in the country: Cornell. We’ll be talking Knerd shop on February 5 at the Engineering & Technical Fair over at Barton Hall. Knewton software engineer, Brad Baebler will be happy to answer any questions about our Adaptive Learning Platform TM. Come by and get your Knerd shirt!

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Over the next few months, we’ll be trekking around the country to visit college engineering programs and recruit a few good Knerds. One of our first stops is Carnegie Mellon, which just happens to be the alma mater of two of Knewton’s greatest data scientists. We made a short video about how George and Jesse’s experiences in Pittsburgh helped shape their careers as Knerds. Meet Knewton software engineers in the flesh at the CMU Engineering… Read more

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In a few weeks, we’ll be at one of the most venerable seats of higher learning all the world over: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Join us as we cast our genius net at the MIT Tech Fair on Monday, February 4 at Rockwell Cage!

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