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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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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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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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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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 seen it happen (there were no panels on education in the last two years). This new focus is reflective of a much larger trend. In… Read more

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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 vertical market, the issue of incorporation status would be no issue at all. But education is held to a different standard. A higher standard, many… Read more

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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 universities putting their professors online through Coursera, the 160,000 students who enrolled in Udacity’s Artificial Intelligence course, the 100,000+ students who signed up for Harvard’s first edX courses…. Read more

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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 brought together an extraordinary group for this meeting, including school districts, publishers, device manufacturers, and eLearning start-ups. It’s an honor to be here. Other attendees… Read more

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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 Levain-style cookies at home. But it turns out that they don’t publish their recipes, and it’s like some kind of state secret. It turns out,… Read more

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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. But there’s a flip-side: if we can fix education, then we’ll dramatically improve the other problems, too. So in fact, I started Knewton not just… Read more

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