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Education gets schooled by startups at the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator. I’m excited to announce the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator, powered by TechStars this morning. Kaplan will host ten companies focused on education technology and product innovation for an intensive three-month program in New York City this summer. The program will be housed just a few blocks from our TechStars NYC office in the West Village-SoHo neighborhood from June to September 2013. Mentors include Udemy CEO Eren Bali, Kaplan’s CEO Andy Rosen, Treehouse CEO Ryan Carson, General Assembly CEO Jake Schwartz, Benchprep co-founders Ashish Rangnekar and Ujjwal Gupta, Nick Ducoff (Boundless Learning), Brad Feld (Foundry Group), Sree Sreenivasan (Columbia University), Phil Weiser (Former Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation to the National Economic Council Director at the White House, Dean of CU Law School), Matthew Greenfield (Managing Director of Rethink Education), myself, and many more industry leaders in the edtech space.

Tutorspree Adds $800K From Resolute.VC & Others To Help Students Find Better Local Tutoring. Tutorspree has been quiet of late, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still plugging away on its mission to make high-quality, local tutors in any subject accessible to any student — or finding continued interest from investors along the way. According to its Form D filing with SEC, Tutorspree recently closed on a new round of financing that appears to add an additional $1.9 million to its coffers.

Co-founder Aaron Harris tells us that, in fact, the startup has closed on a new $800K in financing. According to Harris, the new round was led by Mike Hirschland at Resolute.VC and includes participation from Tutorspree’s existing investors, and will actually bring the startup’s total capital to around $1.8 million. Tutorspree raised $1 million in December 2011 from an impressive list of investors, which includes Sequoia Capital, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Thrive Capital, Paul Buchheit, Geoff Ralston, Tim Brady, Alexis Ohanian and Adam d’Angelo — to name a few.

School 2.0: teachers will be liberated from the classroom. This is a guest post by entrepreneur Miro Kazakoff Somewhere, this year, a university hired its last tenured professor. That’s because of the economic pressures on higher education. Next year, a university will hire its last faculty member expected to teach in a classroom.

And that’s because of the technological pressures on higher education. Technology won’t kill university education any more than television killed radio, but it will transform it. To understand why the future won’t kill college, it helps to remember how technology has already transformed education. Content is approaching free, and we don’t need armies of faculty to curate it In the middle ages, getting “access to content” was a physical ordeal. The first European universities were created in those same middle-ages and still act as physical repositories of knowledge. Now you can combine a course list with a couple of searches for syllabi and assemble your own do-it-yourself Biomedical Engineering curriculum at home.

Always Prepped raises $650,000 from True Ventures, angels - Washington Business Journal. Always Prepped, a startup that allows teachers to consolidate and visualize data from other e-learning platforms, has raised $650,000 in seed cash from True Ventures and angel investors. The product is aimed at K-12 teachers, and depends on the continued growth of technology in the classroom. Educators are adopting an increasing number of tools to supplement traditional learning including streaming lecture site Khan Academy and open-source grade-book Engrade. But tracking each student’s performance in each platform can quickly become unwieldy. Always Prepped pulls data from those two e-learning products (with more on the way) and displays them over a single web-based dashboard. “Really, the idea is to make the data consumable,” said Always Prepped CEO Fahad Hassan.

Both Hooman Radfar, chairman of McLean-based AddThis (formerly Clearspring) and former Blackboard executive Todd Gibby contributed to the company's seed round. Always Prepped released a beta version a few weeks ago. Khan Academy releases iPad app, mobile education is upon us | VentureBeat. Is U.S. Higher Education A Bubble Economy? (Infographic Video) Plenty of smart people seem to think there’s a bubble in higher education. And for good reason: The cost of a college education is skyrocketing and student debt is growing out of control, at the very same time that college graduates are struggling to find jobs. When they do, it’s often in positions that hardly require any of the "critical thinking" they were told a college education would teach them.

Critics might count all this as mere alarmism--but the data backing up the trends is so freakin’ crazy. Just watch this video created by Education News. So what’s going to happen in the face of all this data? The "market" for higher education simply isn’t pure enough. Thus, the colleges and lenders pushing student loans upon kids know that they can pile on crazy dollar amounts and never have that debt erased in bankruptcy court. But enough economics! [Image: Khomulo Anna/Shutterstock] At Waldorf School in Silicon Valley, Technology Can Wait.

California has some 40 Waldorf schools, giving it a disproportionate share — perhaps because the movement is growing roots here, said Lucy Wurtz, who, along with her husband, Brad, helped found the Waldorf high school in Los Altos in 2007. Mr. Wurtz is chief executive of Power Assure, which helps computer data centers reduce their energy load.

The Waldorf experience does not come cheap: annual tuition at the Silicon Valley schools is $17,750 for kindergarten through eighth grade and $24,400 for high school, though Ms. Wurtz said financial assistance was available. She says the typical Waldorf parent, who has a range of elite private and public schools to choose from, tends to be liberal and highly educated, with strong views about education; they also have a knowledge that when they are ready to teach their children about technology they have ample access and expertise at home. The students, meanwhile, say they don’t pine for technology, nor have they gone completely cold turkey. Gifted Students Deserve More Opportunities. In a country with more than 20,000 public high schools, we found just 165 of these schools, known as exam schools.

They educate about 1 percent of students. Nineteen states have none. Only three big cities have more than five such schools (Los Angeles has zero). Almost all have far more qualified applicants than they can accommodate. Join Michael Barbaro and “The Daily” team as they celebrate the students and teachers finishing a year like no other with a special live event. We built a list, surveyed the principals and visited 11 schools. Critics call them elitist, but we found the opposite. That’s not so surprising. They’re safe havens, too — schools where everyone focuses on teaching and learning, not maintaining order. Many more students could benefit from schools like these — and the numbers would multiply if our education system did right by such students in the early grades. With their support for school choice, Mr.

An open letter to Peter Thiel. What surprised me was how much we agreed on. We agreed that higher education improves a person’s life-long earning potential. We agreed that, for most professions, high school is not enough. We agreed that countries we are now competing with, such as India and China, are investing heavily in educating their children in an effort to insure they have the same advantages as their American peers.

We agreed that, for a small number of genius children, such as the 24 Thiel fellows, higher education isn’t necessarily an advantage. My debate partner, Bienen, took serious issue with Murray’s claims that 4-year undergraduate degrees should be abolished and that a Liberal Arts education isn’t worthwhile. Your key issue was that education has become far too expensive — that, in the past, the cost may have been justified but is no longer. So, here is my challenge to you: Why don’t you put your money and energy behind your convictions? Tablet-type devices such as the iPad have become ubiquitous. Business - Jordan Weissmann - Why the Internet Isn't Going to End College As We Know It.

Don't believe the hype: Nobody has figured out how to replace traditional higher education yet, and they're not about to. Thomas Barrat / Flickr The idea that the Internet is about to do to college what it's done to journalism and entertainment seems to be coming dangerously close to conventional wisdom in certain elite circles. Here's blogger/economist Tyler Cowen yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival: Look at the music industry. It's been completely overturned by the Internet. It's not just the bloggers. There is no question that the web will change the way people learn. New innovations don't disrupt old industries by merely competing with them.

As George Washington University's David Karpf has noted, if the Internet is to conquer higher education, it needs to hit colleges in the pocket book. The simple truth is that nobody has figured out how to build a cheap, high-quality online university. Worse yet, these schools are expensive. Then, there's the value of campus life. Intro to AI - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence - Oct-Dec 2011. Minnesota educators learn how to use social media in school. Mahtomedi High School language arts teacher Sarah Lorntson, who uses Twitter to communicate with students, says students complain "that I don't tweet enough.

" ( Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi) Mahtomedi High School language arts teacher Sarah Lorntson reminds her students about assignment deadlines and shares writing advice even when they're not in her classroom. She takes to the social media sphere, using Twitter to capture students' attention in 140 characters or less. Lorntson said many of her students have smartphones and are constantly plugged into social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. So, it made sense for her to start tweeting, giving her another way to reach out to them. "My students' constant complaint is that I don't tweet enough," Lorntson said.

"They want more communication from us. They want that engagement. " As the use of social media explodes, school districts are grappling with if and how teachers should connect with students via online networking. The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon. This is what I see when i think about higher education in this country today: Remember the housing meltdown ?

Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. Until the easy money stopped. Can someone please explain to me how what is happening in higher education is any different ? Its far too easy to borrow money for college. We freak out about the Trillions of dollars in debt our country faces. The point of the numbers is that getting a student loan is easy. You know who knows that the money is easy better than anyone ? Why wouldn’t they act in the same manner as real estate agents acted during the housing bubble?

The President has introduced programs that try to reward schools that don’t raise tuition and costs. Except those great jobs aren’t always there. At some point potential students will realize that they can’t flip their student loans for a job in 4 years. VGo Is a Robot That Goes to School or Work for You [PICS] NEW ORLEANS — Soon your child may go to school with a robot. Meet VGo, a robotic telepresence being used in schools, healthcare, and business for videoconferencing from afar. Running on Verizon's 4G LTE network, VGo is already being used in a variety of situations -– including schools. Students who can't attend school due to an illness or handicap can instead virtually attend classes via VGo. Unlike other telepresence system where the camera is stationary, VGo is a robot on wheels allowing a student to adjust where the camera is pointed, talk to their teacher and classmates, and even hit the road for their next class. Since VGo is connected over LTE, it can maintain connectivity throughout an entire school building, without requiring the school to offer Wi-Fi throughout the every building and every classroom.

Vgo can last for a full school day without needing to be recharged, and when it comes time to plug in the robot can be docked remotely by pressing a dock button on the interface. One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education. College Degree, No Class Time Required. Top Schools from Berkeley to Yale Now Offer Free Online Courses. On average, it will cost $55,600 to attend Princeton, Penn, Michigan or Stanford next year. But now you can enroll in online courses at all four universities online for free. The universities won't just be posting lectures online like MIT's OpenCourseWare project, Yale’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.

Rather, courses will require deadlines, evaluations, discussions and, in some cases, a statement of achievement. "The technology as well as the sociology have finally matured to the point where we are ready for this," says Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, the for-profit platform classes will run on. "This is a group that didn't grow up at a time when there weren't browsers," Koller adds. Coursera grew out of an experiment in Stanford's computer science department that opened up a handful of classes to non-Stanford students via the Internet. Koller and Ng are the second pair of Stanford professors attempting to scale the idea past Stanford.