4 ed-tech ideas face The Chronicle’s version of ‘Shark Tank’ — from chronicle.com by Goldie Blumenstyk
Excerpt:
Four innovators with four very different ideas for improving higher education brought their pitches to The Chronicle’s second-annual Shark Tank: Edu Edition during the South by Southwest Edu conference in March.
They included a professor with technology that turns students into moving elements of classroom visualizations, an entrepreneur whose company aims to ease the process of hiring adjunct instructors, a nonprofit organization supporting working-adult students as they pursue competency-based degrees, and a consulting organization proposing the establishment of a new kind of educational advisers, supported with federal dollars, to help students navigate an increasingly “unbundled” education system.
Also see:
What Compels People to Pursue Radical Innovations in Education — from etale.org by Bernard Bull
Excerpt:
What compels people to pursue more radical innovations in education? It has now been almost two decades since I started to more seriously and systematically study innovations in education and innovative learning organizations. Many of the musings about that show up in the chapters of my book on Missional Moonshots (not to mention the many articles on this blog), but since my exploration started, I can’t think of a single day that has passed without some thought experiment or reflection about educational innovation. In that sense, it has become a consuming passion for me because I see educational innovation as an important social good, and I have immense respect for those who tap into the courage, creativity and hard work necessary to pursue revolutionary or radical innovations in education.
As such, I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about what compels people to pursue such innovations. What is it that happens inside or outside of people that draws, drives or inspires them to get off the paved roads of legacy education models and frameworks and do the hard work of helping to create completely new roadways? Under what conditions is this more likely to happen for a person? While some of this has to do with how people are wired (both genetically wired and wired through a longstanding set of life experiences), there are other aspects at work as well. That is what leads me to start to put into words some of what I’ve seen. Amid many observations, conversations, formal and informal interviews, and my study of educational innovators and entrepreneurs, the following six consistently show up as conditions that often catapult people into trying something more radical in the education space.