A Q&A With Jose Ferreira, Founder And CEO Of Knewton
Join our live discussion on Monday, November 25th at 11:00 a.m. (ET) on what big data and analytics mean for the future of higher education.
Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton,will answer your questions live on Monday, November 25th at 11 a.m. ET. Submit your questions now!
Can you imagine 100% of the people on the planet graduating high school nearly for free?
What do personalization, customization, big data and analytics mean for the future of education?
Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton, is uniquely positioned to answer these questions. His technology platform, which was named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2012, powers content created by the largest education companies on the planet, from K-12 through college level. The system is capable of analyzing millions of data points on each student as they move through content tagged at the concept level. Courses powered by Knewton's technology have shown higher pass rates, and have students completing material more quickly with better motivation.
If you have questions about the impact of big data on education, come talk with us.
Submit your questions now by using the "Make a comment" box below!
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Jose, I want to start with a quote that appeared in Fast Company in 2009 : "The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros," says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, "is the biggest virgin forest out there."
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That sounds like something I would say!
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Can you expand on what you meant by that, and how far along do you think we are in the process?
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So -- every "media" or "information" industry is transformed by the Internet
The last two are going now, video and education -
The media component of bricks and mortar industries goes too -- witness online travel, online real estate, etc.
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Now education won't go entirely, the way the yellow pages did, but it's so big that even a fraction of it going will change the world
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What does that partial transformation look like, in your opinion?
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95% of materials (textbooks, software, etc used for classes, tutoring, corp training...) will be purely online in 5-10 years. That's a $200B global industry. And people predict that 50% of higher ed and 25% of K-12 will eventually be purely online classes. If so, that would create a new, $3 trillion or so industry
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so that is an awfully big virgin forest -- bigger than the rest of the Internet combined
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In terms of revenues flowing, user hours logged, and bandwidth required, it will be bigger than the rest combined
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More importantly, as a tool for good, it has awesome potential
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That's pretty mindblowing to contemplate. What does it mean for learners?
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Here's my piece (which includes Knewton) from back in 2009.
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Knewton was also named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2012.
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A few things. The Internet really does only two things: distribution and data mining (which, depending on the industry involved, can yield highly personalized products that are much more valuable to users). On the distribution side: expect to see a decade-long movement promulgating tablet/device-based learning all over the world. The best teachers in the world available to EVERYONE for the first time -- it is this idea that has people so excited about Khan Academy (an archived version of this) and MOOCs (a live version of this). In the rich nations these will usually be supplementary and will sometimes be replacement products. In the developing world -- or any places with very bad schools or no schools at all -- these will be mostly replacement products.
On the data-mining side, it turns out that education materials are extremely data-minable -- much more so than any consumer web industry. Which means we're entering an era when every student gets a unique experience each day based on exactly what she knows and how she learns it best. -
Well, and that brings us directly to what Knewton does. : ) Can you describe the technology?
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While we wait for Jose’s response, here’s a video on the Knewton adaptive learning platform:by Miles Kohrman via YouTube 11/25/2013 4:19:22 PM
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We are an infrastructure platform that content owners -- whether individual teachers or giant textbook companies or anybody in between -- can use to add very deep data mining and data-driven personalization to their content. For students using Knewton-powered products, we can tell what they know and don't know and where the critical gaps are in their concept profile that will hold them back. So if next Thursday they're going to struggle with a particular concept because they never learned some of the building block concepts from last month or last year at a high enough proficiency, we know that. Rather than let them get to next Thursday, fail, and have no one ever figure it out, we know in advance and we don't let them fail. We seamlessly blend in some of that prior content to get them ready.
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Or, if a student is advanced, we can get them some more challenging material so they don't get bored and stay engaged. If it happens that you learn something best a particular way -- maybe you learn math better in the mornings, or science best in 24 minute bite sizes, or Civil War concepts best with a bunch of easy practice questions -- if that kind of thing is ever true of you for any concept or subject matter, Knewton knows it and that's how you can get it.
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Can you talk about the initial math courses you created, for example, and the kind of results you're getting?
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We work mostly with big publishers as of now -- Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Macmillan, Cambridge University Press, etc. We have just launched a closed beta version of our platform for teachers. That open "anyone can use it" platform that's now in beta will launch next summer with tons of pre-loaded content anyone can use for free, and all the functionality of Knewton
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Question: one of the big struggles I have observed is getting instructors of varying ages and tech literacy to adopt, implement and effectively use learning platforms for their content. How does Knewton plan to teach the teachers when they haven't had access to the insight data mining can deliver?
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How do you think Big Data will appeal to university administrators and faculty members?
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How does Knewton integrate with, or reduce the need for the standardized testing that seems to rule to day in some states, in many places thanks to your partner Pearson?
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Dear Jose,
Facinating platform you have created. I'm curious to know if you are considering doing anything in relation to group work / study groups? As far as I understand your technology focuses on the individual student's learning experience. -
Do you have a formal vision statement? If so, can you share it? Thank you!
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What type of information do you anticipate opening up via your API? Will students be able to link their learning profiles to external services?
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I agree that the internet will disrupt educational practice, but I'm more interested lately in thinking about what the internet won't disrupt. I work at a community college, and our students are still quite drawn to both on-campus courses and in-person support. They need it. I would revise the Fast Company quotation and say that information can be reduced to ones and zeroes. But can education be reduced to ones and zeroes? Isn't that an overstatement?
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Hi Jose, John from GradFly here. How do you see online education impacting the way we measure student and teacher performance?