The Knewton Blog

Education, like many industries before it, is now having its internet moment. There are two great phases unfolding. The first is the shift to digital materials for use either in blended learning courses or as a replacement for the printed textbook. This shift is now well underway in the U.S. Before long, there will be no more printed textbooks. The second phase is the shift of part of every student’s coursework to purely online formats…. 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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This is the year of adaptive learning. Everyone is fired up about it, from Arne Duncan and Bill Gates to individual teachers and students the world over. Ironically, as the idea of adaptive learning is becoming more popularized, confusion about it is increasing exponentially. So please bear with a little introspection, but I think now is the time to clarify matters. Let me start with an analogy… In 2006, my old Harvard Business School classmate… Read more

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The edtech industry is growing rapidly, with more and more startups aimed at creating apps and software to improve educational experiences for students. But for schools with outdated, slow computers and no budget to replace them, all the software in the world won’t make a bit of difference. Enter Neverware. Neverware’s mission is to make old computers in schools run like new. How? For every school, Neverware installs a single proprietary “Juicebox” server on the… 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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Knewton Math Readiness, a web-based developmental math course built on the Knewton Adaptive Learning Platform, creates a guided, self-paced environment in which live instruction is optimized around targeted group sessions. The course presents students with personalized learning paths as it continually assesses their mathematical proficiency and adapts accordingly. Early efficacy reports reflect the success of Knewton Math Readiness at ASU. After four semesters of use with over 5,000 developmental math students at Arizona State University,… 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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A thorough and nuanced understanding of educational content is central to the Knewton approach to adaptive learning. Every time we generate a recommendation for a student in a Knewton-enhanced course, we rely not only on data about that student’s activity, but also on a comprehensive understanding of the conceptual relationships that exist among the various pieces of content within the course. The Knewton Adaptive Instruction Team works closely with subject-matter experts at our partner companies… 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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