Education Technology Trends from NY Edtech Stars

Events

Education Technology Trends from NY Edtech Stars

Oct 23, 2012

CourseHorse VP Evan Fain was at last week’s star-studded NYEdTech meetup that asked the East Coast’s “EdTech Titans of Industry” for their take on upcoming trends. Here's his recap of the evening’s highlights: (You can watch a recording of the event here.)

  • Harold Levy (Palm Ventures): Perhaps the biggest driver of change will be a shift in who are the "true accreditors": organizations issuing diplomas or the folks with hiring power. Once the hiring managers of companies such as Google start valuing non-traditional education as much as a Stanford degree, things are really going to start to change, both in higher ed and even in K-12.
  • Greg Gunn (City Light Capital): Some of the most exciting work will be in understanding how the interplay between content and interpersonal and social collaboration (both in and out of the classroom) affects learning. Too many companies are focusing on doing bits of instruction; there's not enough focus on coherent learning. Teachers need to become coaches. Industry should also devote more time to programs that focus on the less sexy aspects of education, including attendance and procurement (Levy agreed and actually said this is perhaps the easiest problem to tackle out there.)
  • Laurie Racine (StartL): Teaching kids to code should be in Common Core and there should be a baseline taught beginning in kindergarten.
  • Jose Ferriera (Knewton): There’s incredible amount of data that can be captured in education in contrast to other user interactions (say, searching on Google). Education is the most inefficiently distributed social good in the world, and in the future the Internet will be dominated by education. It's all about distribution and data mining.
Learn more about EdSurge operations, ethics and policies here. Learn more about EdSurge supporters here.

More from EdSurge

Get our email newsletterSign me up
Keep up to date with our email newsletterSign me up