Originally posted by Knowledgeone, reposted by Patrick Lowenthal

Connecting classrooms across the globe via the Internet has become the new pen pal program, and initiatives like Skype in the Classroom and its instant translation feature are certainly leading the way in developed countries. But what about schools in areas that don’t have access to reliable Internet or even electricity? LumenEd wants to connect students in developing countries with classrooms in the U.S. through a device called The Bright Orange Box. And you can support it via Kickstarter. Introduce your startup and give a short description of what you are doing. LumenEd is working towards overcoming infrastructural barriers to quality education in the developing world. We want to empower students, teachers and schools across the world by providing them access to digital educational resources and a platform to share their stories. Who are the founders, how did you meet, what are your different roles in the startup. How was the idea for your startup born? [caption id="attachment_10840" align="alignnone" width="474"] Top: Thomas Kreek and Prakash Paudel. Bottom: Henry Harboe, Saksham Khosla and Shiva Mandala[/caption] LumenEd was founded by five students in April 2013 at Oberlin College. Prakash, Shiva and Saksham met as freshmen at Oberlin College. Hailing from India and Nepal, where problems with education have crippled the success of each country, the three wanted to see if digital content (freely available in the U.S.) could make a difference in a low-income classroom. Bringing experience in working with under-resourced schools and communities in South Asia, their passions aligned to design an innovative solution to effective ICT use in the classroom. To design and assemble a working prototype, they reached out to Thomas Kreek, a physics major with a passion for DIY projects. Henry Harboe, a fellow student entrepreneur with an eye for design, joined the team shortly afterwards. Currently, as CEO for LumenEd, Prakash focuses on the business strategy, goals and partnerships. As Director of Business Development, Henry focuses on sales to U.S. schools and heads our marketing and branding efforts. Shiva manages our program in New Delhi with Teach for India fellows, and Thomas, our lead product engineer, is in charge of development. As Director of Business Outreach, Saksham is responsible for developing a communications strategy for media coverage. Together, they’re driven by a passion to make better learning accessible to everyone around the world. After spending countless hours taking this project off the ground over the last two years, they are personally and professionally committed to take LumenEd to the next level after graduation. What is the main problem in education that you aim to solve. The problem we are tackling is two-fold. For much of the developing world, the biggest obstacle to success is poor education. India in particular has an especially big literacy problem. The teachers in Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) schools have limited access to outside educational resources due to either a lack of funding or insufficient infrastructure. We overcome both these barriers by providing a device - the Bright Orange Box - that works in any classroom, without a financial burden on the schools. The other half of our problem is equally prevalent in developed countries as it is in the developing world. Students on both sides have a limited chance to interact with peers outside of their own classroom and culture. For K-12 students in the U.S., learning about other cultures is mostly limited to reading material online and in textbooks.Through our service, the Video Pen Pal Program, we facilitate a long-term line of communication between classrooms that has simply never been possible before. With the help of one affordable and convenient solution, classrooms can record and send videos about their stories, culture and history to any classroom, anywhere in the world. Who are your main competitors? What sets you apart from them? Our venture lies at the intersection of two existing markets: global learning and ICT solutions for low-income classrooms. The biggest player in the global learning space is ePals. ePals provides project-focused collaboration between classrooms and primarily targets high-income, internet-enabled classrooms. The only solution that reaches low-income schools is PenPal Schools, a startup that uses a web platform to facilitate written exchanges between students. Firstly, our solution operates independently of existing infrastructure, including internet. We're also the only solution that enables a video-based pen pal relationship between classrooms. Most importantly, by leveraging resources of US schools, we do all this without any financial burden on our low-income schools. Regarding EdTech solutions in developing countries, initiatives like Educomp’s Smartclass, IBM’s Kidsmart Program and One Laptop Per Child have failed to make a significant impact on learning outcomes in developing countries. Their approach involves air-dropping technology into classrooms without an emphasis on student centric pedagogies. These solutions rely on electricity and internet access, are prohibitively expensive, and completely alter lesson plans and the overall classroom environment. Our solution is a simple add-on, is drastically cheaper and requires no internet or electricity access. Moreover, it is focused on empowering teachers rather than replacing them, using simple videos to enhance rather than reinvent the learning experience. Finally, our business model leverage the interests of schools on both sides of the globe, and provide a desirable package that meets the both their needs and budgets. This provides a huge potential for scaling our business model through the global education market. In which markets / regions are you active. What markets / regions are next. We have currently partnered with Teach for India, an education NGO working with low-income classrooms across India, to bring our platform to 50 classrooms in New Delhi for the 2015-16 academic year. We're working with progressive, independent schools in the U.S, as well as planning pilot programs with our Bright Orange Box with NGOs like Hope for Ghana and SEED Project in Ghana and Senegal. Our growth strategy involves initially scaling our classrooms abroad through the Teach For All network, with extends to 35 countries and 11,000 schools. This will allow us to offer a diversified network of schools and add support for language programs. We also plan to scale to rural locations and government run schools. In the US, we plan to scale vertically to affordable private schools and public schools. Who is your target audience. We fulfill an international demand for global dialogue between classrooms that transcend geographic, socioeconomic and technological barriers. Initially, we are targeting 3rd-8th grade classrooms in the most progressive, independent schools in the US. Abroad, we partner with NGOs serving under-resourced classrooms, starting with Teach For India in New Delhi. In the future, we will scale through NGO networks and reaching US public schools through more affordable offerings. How do you engage with your target audience. How do you convert them into users of your product. At this early stage, we are focused on direct sales to target schools. Six schools were part of our pilot in 2014 and we currently have ten schools and $30,000 in classroom subscriptions confirmed for the 2015-16 Program. As we expand our customer base, we plan to utilize key industry channels, including schools’ associations, conferences and partnerships with NGOs, including Teach For America. What is your business model. How much does your product / service cost. American schools pay an annual subscription fee for the Pen Pal program and device sponsorship. We charge $1,200 per classroom per year for the program and $800 per unit for the device. Initially, we are targeting upper elementary and middle school classrooms in top-tier private schools If you raised funding, how much did you raise. Who are your investors. If not, are you planning to raise funding. Our immediate plans for funding our development costs involve a Kickstarter that goes live on Friday, March 27 at 9 a.m. EST. We plan to raise $40,000 over the course of a month-long campaign to help us transition our hardware to an Android platform and build a leaner, more powerful Box. This will be followed by a seed investment round in May. What are the next steps in growing your startup. Our growth strategy involves initially scaling our classrooms abroad through the Teach For All network, with extends to 35 countries and 11,000 schools. This will allow us to offer a diversified network of schools and add support for language programs. We also plan to scale to rural locations and government run schools. In the US, we plan to scale vertically to affordable private schools and public schools. Our roadmap also envisions other applications and revenue streams. We are starting with a malaria prevention initiative with USAID in Ghana this year and will be expanding our reach to other education NGOs for direct sales of our product. How can people get in touch with you. Contact: Saksham Khosla Co-Founder at LumenEd E: saksham@lumened.org M: 347.882.3468 Facebook: facebook.com/lumenedinc Twitter: @lumened LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/lumened Tumblr: blog.lumened.org Kickstarter: kickstarter.com/lumened

In episode 016 of Meet Education Project, the founder of the Relationship Economy Expedition (REX) Jerry Michalski joins the program to discuss how "consumer" is a bad word, what "unschooling" really is, and how we can move learning from scarcity to abundance. You do not want to miss this episode! Guest Bio: The connector, curator and catalyst behind REX is Jerry Michalski. He brings a hard-to-find combination of convening and big-picture skills to REX. The convening skills come from years of designing, hosting and facilitating events. Some were highly structured, like PC Forum and the Ten Year Forecast that IFTF creates every year, but most were much more loosely structured, building on Open Space, Scott Peck’scommunity-building ideas and Quaker Meeting. He also ran a podcast from 2004-2013. The spaces Jerry creates for conversations are safe yet deep. Jerry’s big-picture view was shaped through a dozen years as a technology industry analyst, after a few years with real corporate jobs at Mobil Oil and Price Waterhouse(before each was merged and renamed), but all strongly shaped by a dip into the brisk and fast-moving waters of systems thinking with Russ Ackoff at the Wharton School. Stepping out of the technology bubble in 1998 to consult, Jerry began to see larger shifts at work. Combining his dislike of the word "consumer" with insights gleaned from disciplines ranging from media to education and government, Jerry realized in the early 2000s that we - all of us - are exiting the consumer mass-market economy and entering the Relationship Economy. He sees his life purpose as assuring that this process takes 30 years instead of 300. Definitely take the time to watch Jerry’s inspiring TEDx talk here: Social Media: Linkedin Twitter: @jerrymichalski Jerry’s Brain - You HAVE to check this out.  So cool. If you could have dinner with one person you admire, who would it be and why? Jerry has hundreds of influencer’s on his brain, but he also mentioned an "antihero"Edward Bernays. For more episodes featuring thought leaders in education visit MeetEducationProject.com, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and follow Nick DiNardo on Twitter. Picture License  Some rights reserved by munnecket

As previously shared, the 11th annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education was recently released. The infographic below by Pearson summarizes the key findings available in the full report. Click image above to enlarge or download PDF version here

Big data has been the story of the past year. Nearly every industry sector has been hit by the urge to quantify, measure, and analyze, and they are using that information to improve their products and services, which in turn is improving our lives on both the micro and macro scales. (Can you even remember what shopping was like before personalized product recommendations?) For a variety of reasons, education has been slow to the party. There have been difficulties surrounding what data to collect, how to collect those data, and what they might mean.As well, there have been concerns about privacy, especially as it involves students in elementary and secondary schools. But, big data is finally coming to education, thanks in part to educational technology companies like Knewton, which uses analytics to personalize educational experiences for individual learners, and to massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are free courses available from many of the top schools in the world. MOOCs have been able to supply huge amounts of data because they have attracted a huge following: more than 10 million students globally have enrolled in the courses. The question, of course, has been what to do with all of the data. Over the past few months, results of various studies have been released, from MOOCs and other sources, providing insights into how people learn. Some of the findings reinforce things we already knew, while others are quite surprising and are already transforming approaches to education both online and in the classroom. Here are some of the main things we’ve learned so far. Long lectures don’t work. The hour-long lecture that has been the staple of higher education for decades has taken a beating from big data. Research from MOOC provider edX has identified the ideal length of a video lecture to be between 6 and 9 minutes, after which learner engagement falls off sharply. This finding is having major implications in both college and corporate classrooms. The best predictor of future course behavior is past course behavior. In 2010, President Obama set a goal of 60% college completion in the United States by 2020. To meet this goal, many colleges and universities now offer courses and even full degree programs online. However, while online learning offers many advantages over traditional formats, one problem that has arisen is that students are more likely to drop out of online courses. One study of more than 50,000 students in community colleges found that the completion rate for online courses was 8% lower than for traditional courses. Data from MOOCs suggest that one way to boost completion rates is to increase engagement early in the course. The researchers found that students who were more engaged at the beginning of a course were more likely to finish, regardless of their stated intentions or motivations. Even in online courses, offline support is essential. The rise of online education has generated something of a heated debate over how effectively students can learn from a computer. Proponents generally focus on the convenience and cost savings associated with online learning, while opponents argue that an online learning environment can never replace a face-to-face one. Studies of the effectiveness of online education have shown mostly positive, but still mixed, results. Data from MOOCs suggests that the difference may have to do with the level of offline support online learners receive: after analyzing 230 million interactions from a single course, researchers from MIT and Harvard found that the single most important predictor of student success was whether students worked offline with someone else. It didn’t matter if that "someone else" was an expert in the subject or just another student in the class—the important thing was getting help offline. Not all big data comes from massive courses. In education, big data can even be derived from analyzing everything from institutional variables to the learning activities of individual students. The potential here includes helping teachers identify when students are having problems, personalizing lessons so that each student gets the information he or she needs and is ready for, and tracking learners’ journeys through courses in order to better guide those journeys. Even in individual schools and classrooms, the results are significant. The implementation of a data analytics system at Arizona State University resulted in a 10% increase in passing rates and a 50% decrease in dropout rates. In Delaware, using big data analytics to personalize education for individual students has led to 10% increases in both reading and math proficiency. Big data is still very new to education, and there remains a lot to be revealed about how people learn, which will lead to improved education at all levels and in all formats. But there is no doubt that education is in the middle of a major transformation, with technology and big data leading the way. Picture License  Some rights reserved by torkildr

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to meet, pitch, get rejected, and accepted by lots of investors. After building two companies that were venture and angel backed in aggregate of millions of dollars and then being a part of another that raised tens of millions in additional capital, I learned a lot about the world of venture capitalists. My latest position as head of B.D. at Alma has me reaching out to even more VC’s, many who I know, and others who I’ve never met before as we, like all companies, evaluate our funding options. Over the last few weeks I’ve had a lot of time to dig into my old relationships with investors, explore new ones, and think through how I would approach my next round of funding (for my next startup) whenever that may be. I recorded the data of 263 firms in a Google spreadsheet and the following is what I discovered. Some of the information below represents general themes I noticed and while a few bullets represent hard data. American Venture Capital is run by white guys. Of the 263 firms I looked into, I recorded 1 firm with a Black founder, 7 with female founders (one of which was based in London), 3 Indians, and 2 Asians. That’s 13 out of 263 firms that were started by someone who wasn’t a white male. That’s only 4.9% of the funds. This blew my mind. Now this doesn’t mean that the firm doesn’t have female/minority partners or employees, I’m simply counting the funds that had females/minorities listed as founders. Wouldn’t it be great to know if the venture firm you’re reaching out to lists how much money they invest? $100K, $1M, $10? What I discovered is that most funds do not list how much they invest — very few actually tell entrepreneurs what their funding range is. I find this odd, but at the same time self serving for VC’s, who want to "know" everyone — even if they know that the amount of money the entrepreneur is seeking at the time is too little or too much. Much respect to the firms who provide that clarity. Most of venture capital is still focused on web or software products. 95% to be exact by my count. There were several that listed industry specific challenges they wanted solved, but you can count the number of funds out there on one hand who will do hardware (for example) only investments. Every fund website is basically the same with five key links. And when you click on them, they all look the same. I might of seen five or six sites out of over two hundred and fifty that were different. The five links you are sure to find are: Contact, Blog, Portfolio, Partners, and About. VC Tip: Would love for you to list all the investments that didn’t work out. If you want to be bold — you would be the first to do so. As an entrepreneur, I would probably want your money more than anyone else’s if a fund admitted how difficult their jobs were and that not every bet is a home-run. A lot of times the math doesn’t add up. I noticed several funds who had less than $25M raised pitching themselves as growth equity, while $75M+ funds said they did seed investments. How can you invest $100K — $250K in seed deals and deploy enough capital in a year? You can’t! The same is true for smaller funds who want to jump in on bigger rounds. Unless the focus of your fund is to invest in 5 companies, you simply don’t have enough capital to lead growth or Series A rounds. Most websites have a section (about us usually) in which they explain how they are "different" from other firms. Ironically, they all say the exact same thing. One firm provided their term sheet online! I found this to be both good and bad. Good in the sense that you know exactly what you can expect. However it’s bad in the sense that every entrepreneur is different and you get bucketed with one group of people. Everyone, and I mean everyone offers "the best" mentorship to help you grow your company. I think as an entrepreneur this would have been easier to accept or understand if they validated the specific type of mentorship they offer from their portfolio of founders directly. I don’t simply mean testimonials but rather a specific way a VC helped that founder in growing their company — very specific. Almost every fund says they invest in "founders first" — but I’ve found this to be completely untrue. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been rejected based solely on an executive summary or pitch deck without the VC even meeting me. The sentiment "founders first" is probably also true for everyone — if — and only if they have a prior, long lasting relationship with the entrepreneur. I can respect that. At the end of the day, a VC is an investor - and nothing — not even founders — come before the metrics or opportunity of the business. Sorry fellow entrepreneurs, if you don’t have relationships with VC’s, you better have baller metrics. In fairness to my VC friends, many of them have invested in founders without any business model or metric before simply based on knowing that entrepreneur. Don’t mistake this misnomer on their site for their lack of willingness to take a risk. Is it me — or perhaps it’s the 263 firms I looked at, but I swear they all showcased generally the same wins. Which if you’re a numbers guy, should scare the hell out of you about the VC model. Half the firms listed, "Google, Facebook, Uber, Dropbox" (insert top 10 companies in the valley) as wins. There was effectively no diversity — which had me thinking about how broken the VC model might be if everyone is sharing from the same pot of gold. Where’s the diversity in wins? I read a great article by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures which touched on this topic dubbed "Dragons and Unicorns" in the VC world. Here’s a link:http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club/ Not one firm lists their losses. I can understand this, sorta. They all talk about their risk tolerance and willingness to bet on "crazy ideas that change the world" — well, that means you have to bet on 50 that fail before you find one that makes it. Tell us about all of your investments — and why they busted out so we can learn. It isn’t a badge of shame — to me it’s a badge of honor. I found several firms that specify an industry or sector they "focus" on — but the portfolio companies listed don’t always match that criteria. Sometimes, it’s the complete opposite. I have a lot of friends who are investors, and many more who are entrepreneurs. My objective in writing this post was two fold. First and foremost, I’m an entrepreneur and my passion sides with my fellow entrepreneurs. As such, I hope this post provides a bit more clarity on some basic questions I get asked on a weekly basis from aspiring entrepreneurs about the VC world. My second objective is to provide my investor friends with a "different look" at the world they live in. Perhaps most of this information is obvious, but I have a lot of investor friends who are represented on my list (safe to say nearly 100 firms/partners) that are constantly looking to improve their funds, brands, and the quality of entrepreneurs they meet with. As an entrepreneur who’s gone back to the well a couple times, with the aspiration of building another company or two, my hope is that this post provides some insight they wouldn’t otherwise get in an unbiased way. I am not currently CEO, I no longer represent any fund, and my current company Alma is to date entirely founder funded. Since graduating college, this is the first time I am not represented by any fund so it provides me this unique ability to provide completely unbiased thoughts on the venture capital world from an entrepreneurs perspective. I hope my fellow entrepreneurs and investors see this as a small opportunity to get better. We need to be able to answer a lot more fundamental questions about our businesses as entrepreneurs before seeking capital. Investors can do a better job of telling us what they would truly like to see before getting pitched with a bit more specificity. It will create a more efficient process that should drastically improve the quality of companies in the long run. Picture License  Some rights reserved by HowardLake

On episode 017 of MEP, teacher and founder of Organized Binder, Mitch Weathers, joins the program to talk about teaching character over content and why an Organized Binder is so beneficial to educators as well as students. Don’t miss it! Guest Bio: Mitch’s background couldn’t be summed up better than it was on Jessie Arora’s EdCrunch blog, as part of her TeacherPreneur series for EdSurge. I have included a link here for the skinny on Mitch! Social: Organizedbinder.com Facebook @organizedbinder Email:  mitch@organizedbinder.com Shout outs: Paul Tough and his work on How Children Succeed Lisa Delpit and her work Dinner Date: Paolo Freire - His seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a great influence on Mitch and his mission in education For more episodes featuring thought leaders in education visit MeetEducationProject.com, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and follow Nick DiNardo on Twitter.

Every day I drive my daughter to high school. As we get closer to the parking lot, I have to be mindful of all of the teenagers wandering in and out of the road like dazed cattle. I also have to brave a four-way stop sign, where I am often the only adult at the wheel of any of the four cars waiting their turn. That stop sign is an every man for himself, Lord of the Flies experience on wheels. I drive a Smart Car, and there have been times where I was glad to make it out alive. A high school parking lot is like an episode of the television show Wipeout waiting to happen, except there are cars involved, and people could actually die. My own daughter doesn’t drive yet, but as intelligent as she is, the occasional lapses in common sense and basic self-preservation that I see in the parking lot still occur at home. All of this tells me that the idea that most kids are fully ready to be valuable contributors to the economy straight out of high school, without any further education or development of their critical thinking skills, is just not true. However, the looming expense for my daughter’s education also tells me that I really want the disruption that is supposed to occur in higher education to come fast, but common sense tells me that it won’t come via the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) everyone is talking about. Nothing is Free I am a believer in the value of higher education. I’ve written about it here, here, and here. However, the idea that the benefit of a degree has to come at the cost that colleges charge is crazy. Higher education is ripe for disruption, and the disruptive force I read about most are MOOCs. A few weekends ago I watched the CEO of EdX, Anant Agarwal, on CNN talking about how disruptive MOOCs are to higher education, and the staggering number of students enrolling in the courses. EdX is a joint venture between Harvard and MIT, who both provide course content and allow the public to enroll, for free. Coursera, the other large MOOC provider, offers courses from many universities, including some of those prestigious schools in the nation. While I don’t have any personal experience with EdX, I did attend a class offered through the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School—again, for free. It was a great experience, and I recommend it as a good source of professional development. But while the course was free to me, it certainly wasn’t free for the University of Virginia, which speaks to the fundamental problem of MOOCs as a major source of disruption: Without the current model, and the revenue it produces, it would be impossible for a school to offer these courses. Stated differently, nothing is really free. A Strategy for Preservation, not Disruption The higher education industry, particularly the business model of higher education, is under attack in the media on an almost daily basis. As a trade association executive, one of the things I have learned a little bit about is how to strategize and respond to attacks on an industry level. One of those strategies is to develop a response that fundamentally changes nothing, while selling it to the public as groundbreaking. I don’t think Coursera or EdX, or participating schools have done that intentionally, but I think MOOCs as they currently exist have the same effect. One counter argument to that could be that once employers accept 120 credit hours of MOOC courses as the equivalent to a degree, it will be disruptive. When that happens, the incentive for colleges to provide course content for free will completely disappear. All of this aside, I think MOOCs are a great resource for professional development, but they will not fundamentally disrupt higher education. We need to keep looking for what will, and create alternatives other than unleashing teenagers on the world or sending them off to accumulate an unsustainable debt load. Picture License  Some rights reserved by cogdogblog

The U.S. Department of Justice and MOOC platform edX announced the settlement over allegations that the courses hosted on edX were not accessible to students with disabilities. The lawsuit with filed in February by the National Association of the Deaf, accusing Harvard and MIT to provide no or only inaccurate captions in the lecture videos hosted by edX. Under the four-year-agreement, edX has to modify its website and mobile applications to meet industry accessibility standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Though the agreement does not explicitly address the creators of course content, edX will provide content creators with best practices, guidance and the necessary tools to develop accessible content. The settlement does not carry a fine. Further Reading U.S. Dept. of Justice announces settlement with online course provider edX | Reuters EdX to provide expanded website and platform features for learners with disabilities | edX

Tutoring marketplace TakeLessons has partnered with Amazon to provide tutors for its newly launched Amazon Home Services platform. TakeLessons started as a music-centric tutoring marketplace in 2006. The San Diego-based startup has since raised nearly $19 million in venture capital and started to expand into other verticals like online tutoring and language lessons. To boost the expansion TakeLessons acquired its competitor Betterfly in February 2014 to add its user base of tutors to their offering. According to the company, language lessons have grown 25% month-over-month for the past twelve months. Through the partnership with Amazon, TakeLessons’ tutors are searchable through the new Amazon Home Services portal which launched in late March, currently covering Seattle, New York City and Los Angeles. Amazon users can simply book individual lessons or packages through their Amazon account, and also leave reviews and ratings like they would on other purchases. The tutoring market heated up last year with longtime rivals TakeLessons and WyzAnt raising sizeable VC rounds and acquiring smaller competitors. Tutoring marketplace WyzAnt, founded in 2005, raised a $21,5 million round in December 2013 and subsequently acquired its competitor Tutorspree in January 2014. Further Reading TakeLessons Teams Up with Amazon to Pioneer On-Demand Service Commerce | Press Release TakeLessons Continues Expansion into Language Lessons, Critical Job Skills | Press Release Related Links HEDLINE: TakeLessons acquires Betterfly TeachStreet v2.0? Amazon to launch Local Services Marketplace Links amazon.com/services