THE WORLD'S TOP 10 MOST
INNOVATIVE COMPANIES IN
EDUCATION
FROM TEACHING GOVERNMENT A THING OR TWO ABOUT EDUCATION
REFORM TO DEPLOYING A DATA-CENTRIC LEARNING PLATFORM THAT
EVEN A KID COULD USE, THESE ARE THE WORLD'S TOP 10 MOST
INNOVATIVE COMPANIES IN EDUCATION.
COMPILED BY S CHAKRABORTY
1. DONORSCHOOSE.ORG
For teaching government a thing or two about education
reform. Most of us can agree that the U.S. school system is a mess: State
education budgets are shrinking, while businesses' expectations for job
preparedness are ever rising. Charles Best, founder and CEO of
DonorsChoose.org, is trying to make sure teachers and students have the
resources to do their part. The crowdfunding nonprofit has raised $225
million to help more than 175,000 teachers fund more than 400,000 projects,
from securing school supplies for the semester to helping make field trips
happen. Best, formerly a public-school history teacher in the Bronx, has
managed to rein in some deep-pocketed donors and partners, including
Sheryl Sandberg, Stephen Colbert, and Google, which is helping Best use his
site in transformative ways, such as bringing AP STEM classes to more than
330 high schools and helping entrepreneurs market new educational tools
directly to classrooms. Read more >>
2. INKLING
For rewriting the book on e-books. In the rush to embrace everything
digital, many ed-tech companies forgot that people, not robots, are the end
users. Enter Inkling, producer of lushly designed educational content for
tablets and mobile phones. Last year, Inkling raised $16 million from
Sequoia, among others, and signed deals with textbook giants Pearson and
Elsevier to digitize its academic materials. It also opened its publishing
platform, Habitat, to let publishers in-house create their own masterpieces,
which founder Matt MacInnis says has helped net the company "eight
figures" in revenue. True, there are other solid digitized textbooks, but with
Inkling's multimedia featureslive Q&As, how-to videos, interactive quizzes
its prom-queen level of popularity is well deserved.
3. KAPLAN
For testing and prepping students for the new era of education. The
75-year-old industry stalwart might have started as a test-prep company, but
it continues to evolve to keep pace with students' changing learning habits
and the changing job market. It's wholly embracing and developing new
tech-centric curriculums: Last year, it launched a pilot program at its
university's School of Information Technology, which used the gamification
platform Badgeville to boost participating students' grades by 9%, graduated
the inaugural class of its Techstars-powered education startup accelerator,
launched a boot camp for aspiring Ruby on Rails web developers, andin its
most strategic, and perhaps preemptive, moveacquired Grockit, the
notable online test-prep service that recently logged on its one millionth
user.
4. GENSPACE AND BIOCURIOUS
For letting the everyman explore the hidden corners of
science. Community laboratories like Genspace, based in Brooklyn, New
York, and BioCurious, based in Sunnyvale, California, are attracting biotech
hackers interested in bridging the gulf that separates synthetic biology
researchers from, well, everyone else. For a $100 monthly membership fee
(which defrays the cost of running the lab), DIY geneticists can tinker with a
vortexer, an ultrasonic bath, and gel electrophoresis to create cool
experiments like glow-in-the-dark plants, wormlike creatures that crave
butter, and robots that can do your pipetting for you. "It is science for the
people," says Genspace cofounder and executive director Ellen Jorgensen.
5. LEARNZILLION
For understanding that teaching starts with teacher
education. Founded in 2011 by a charter school chief and a McKinsey
consultant, LearnZillion charges districts to supply teachers and students
with five-minute mini-lessons based on the Common Core State Standards
initiativedesigned to align states' curriculumsand delivered by master
teachers. Students can use LearnZillion to review class material, but equally
as important, teachers can use it to get ideas for their own classes and to
study videos to improve their teaching methods. The company has about
120,000 registered teachers (and adds 5,000 new teachers every week) and
reaches about 1.4 million students. LearnZillion, a favorite of ed-tech
enthusiast Bill Gates, has also formed alliances with Washington, D.C., and
Syracuse, New York, public school systems.
6. KNEWTON
For using data to learn the way students learn. Adaptive learning is
what good teachers have done since the dawn of time: When a student gets
a question wrong, the teacher figures out where their knowledge failed and
builds from that base. Now imagine that seemingly simple but complex
process controlled by a series of computer algorithms, and you have the
secret of Knewton, the former test-prep company that is fast achieving
dominance in the digital learning space. Knewton has signed deals with
textbook giants like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Macmillan to add an
adaptive-learning layer to their content, and the company now boasts more
than a million students from kindergarten through college as users of its
technology. Unlike regular schooling, where learning can be limited by class
size, the more Knewton users the better: When students use the platform,
Knewton collects data on their progress and uses those analytics to weed out
weaker questions in favor of stronger ones.
7. BEYOND 12
For stepping up to make sure every student gets a chance at higher
ed. While almost everyone agrees that some form of post-secondary
education is crucial, less than 10% of students from lower-income families
obtain a college degreecompared with nearly 75% of middle- and upperincome kids. However, neither high schools nor colleges seem to be able to
focus on exactly when and how lower-income students slip through the
cracks. The San Franciscobased nonprofit Beyond 12 offers an online tool
that helps high schools track what happens to their students once they doff
their mortarboards, while also providing colleges a tool to help retain
vulnerable students who are trying to beat the odds.
8. NOVA LABS
For nurturing and empowering a budding generation of
scientists. Once home to fans of famed astronomer Carl Sagan, Nova Labs
is now the go-to site for a nerd herd of thousands of U.S. high school
students. With funding from NASA and Lockheed Martinand under the
watchful eye of education director and astrophysicist Rachel ConnollyNova
Labs is mixing fascinating narratives with big data to create a new kind of
educational tool. The website, which is produced by PBS, allows curious
minds to tinker, compete, and collaborate with the same data professional
researchers use, to, say, build robots or track tropical storms. Nova wants to
make sure this new generation of scientists is ready to take on the world.
"Big data is fundamentally changing the way scientists do research," says
Connolly.
9. TWITTER
For unleashing its engineering expertise to hack together a nextgen engineering school. While the hype grows around massive open
online courses (MOOCs), Twitter University may be the tech innovation that
really breaks higher education wide open. Last year, Twitter acquired
Marakana, an open-source technical training company, to help keep their
engineers at the top of their gameand perhaps more crucially, to find an
efficient way to get their master engineers to amp up the skill level of
recruits. If it works, imagine Twitter University (or Facebook or Google
University) forming partnerships with community collegegoers to create
skilled workers, ready and able to do the job on Day One. Read more >>
10. KNOWRE
For deploying a data-centric learning platform that even a kid could
use. Adaptive-learning tools can be intimidating for younger students. But
KnowRe has developed a mathematics app that uses a fun, achievementbased, gamified interface to figure out what skills middle schoolers need to
master algebra, then uses adaptive technology to tailor lessons, practices,
and quizzes to make sure those gaps get filled in. While KnowRe is in its early
stages, it has shown significant promise, with major buzz in the ed-tech
industry: It was the winner of Google's Global K-Startup competition and has
already amassed data and feedback from more than 11,000 beta users
including students and teachers from 34 pilot schools across the United
States.
[Image:Flickr user Greater Tacoma Community Foundation]
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