Jose is the founder and C.E.O. of Knewton. He graduated from Carleton College with a BA in Philosophy and received his MBA from Harvard Business School. Before founding Knewton, Jose worked as a Kaplan executive, derivatives trader, venture capitalist, and strategist for John Kerry's presidential campaign. Follow Jose on Twitter @Knewton_Jose.
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… READ MORE
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… READ MORE
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… READ MORE
Education and edtech are proving big draws at this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, with nearly a dozen panels and related events. I’ve been lobbying for this kind of commitment to education here since I started coming to Davos three years ago, but this is the first year I’ve… READ MORE
Edtech is booming. In the past decade, VC investments in edtech have tripled from $146 million in 2002 to $429 million in 2011, according to the National Venture Capital Association. VentureBeat says that the market size for U.S. education could reach $1.2 trillion by 2015. If this were any other information technology… READ MORE
Lately there’s been a ton of press around massive open online courses. MOOCs are a “tsunami,” a “seismic shift“; the New York Times says 2012 is the “year of the MOOC.” People are right to be excited. But why? Much of the recent coverage focuses on numbers: the dozens of top-shelf… READ MORE
In case you haven’t heard, the Federal Government, led by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the U.S. Department of Education, is extremely serious about getting digital textbooks in every U.S. child’s hands within five years. I’m in Washington, DC today to attend the Digital Textbooks Initiative Meeting, and they’ve… READ MORE
A couple of years ago, some of my Upper West Side colleagues at Knewton began bringing me cookies from a place called Levain Bakery. They’re very good. I’m an avid baker, so I was pretty curious about them. And I love cookies! So I recently thought I’d try to make some… READ MORE
This post originally appeared on the World Economic Forum blog. I started Knewton to do my bit to fix the world’s education system. Education is among the most important problems we face, because it’s the ultimate “gateway” problem. That is, it drives virtually every global problem that we face as a species…. READ MORE
The San Francisco Bay Area has more VC firms and dollars invested than all East Coast cities combined. But the NY scene has recently been getting uppity. Chris Dixon wrote a story, the NY Times wrote a story, now Silicon Alley Insider. I tweeted that it was all embarrassing provincialism…. READ MORE
