Disruptive influences in class; US technologists believe they are on the brink of an educational revolution

June 3, 2014 3:44 pm

Disruptive influences in class

By Sarah Mishkin

As an engineer at Google, Max Ventilla built products used by millions every day. Now he wants to use the lessons he learnt there to revolutionise one of the few fields technology has yet to disrupt: primary school.

He and his team of technologists and teachers at the start-up, AltSchool, are trying out their theories on how to use modern tech to improve schools and encourage new ones, in a one-room schoolhouse tuck­ed away in San Francisco’s relatively unfashionable Dogpatch neighbourhood.

Inside, 14 students between five and 10 sit on a small carpet. Many sit still, some fidget, one has pink hair. A girl wearing a San Francisco Giants baseball shirt is presenting a film about their classroom, which she made on her iPad. The teacher, Carolyn Wilson, suggests that she edit out the shots that have her thumb in them and then upload the film to the classroom’s online message board so others can post comments.

Soon, the younger students head off for a lesson, while the older ones grab a laptop, tablet or book to work on their project for the day.

The idea for AltSchool came to Mr Ventilla, who helped build the Goog­le+ social network, when he was trying to get his own daughter into pre-school. Competition for slots at good schools was intense, and he disliked the idea that his child getting a place meant boxing out someone else’s.

Among technology companies, scaling up to accommodate growing numbers of users is everything. Demand for good education is booming across the world. Why, he wondered, were elite education institutions, such as the Ivy League university he attend­ed, priding themselves on their traditions? “One thing I was struck by is how much pride my alma maters take in how little they’ve changed.”

So last year he left Google to found AltSchool, his third start-up. He and oth­er early employees re­cruit­ed enough teachers and students to open the Dogpatch school within a few months of launch.

From about 20 pupils now, AltSchool plans to open several new schoolrooms later this year, which would bring the number of students in the network to hundreds by the year end. Tuition at $19,100 a year is steep, if cheaper than some US private schools, and some students are subsidised. The start-up is pursuing certification as a B Corp, a type of socially responsible for-profit company.

Fuelling that ambition is a $33m round of venture capital raised this year from investors including Founders Fund, a team of prominent venture capitalists that in­c­ludes Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. Mr Thiel has made headlines for offering promising young people $100,000 to pursue entrepreneurship in lieu of university, and the fund is known for taking creative bets.

Not as easy as ABC . .

Technologists have tried for years to help improve education but with little success.

“Many times in the past people have said there is going to be a revolution [and] none of those pronouncements ended up being true,” said Microsoft founder Bill Gates, now a leading edtech investor through his foundation, in a recent speech.

What has now changed, some argue, is that software is more sophisticated and can be integrated into students’ work better than ever before, thanks to tablets and smartphones. The advent of social networking also means teachers can connect with each other to improve their own skills and share the coursework many develop on their own.

Part of what drives those in edtech is the conviction that somehow there is a way to harness technology to improve classrooms in similar ways to how it has changed nearly every other field, says Louise Rogers, chief executive of TSL, a UK-based company that runs a big teacher-networking platform. “I am optimistic, but we haven’t cracked it yet,” she says.

AltSchool is alone among Silicon Valley start-ups in opening its own elementary school, but its hope that technology can improve educational outcomes is shared by many. Funding for educational tech hit a record high in the first quarter of 2014, when investors put $559m into 103 deals, according to researcher CB Insights. Although a small sum compared to the venture capital being invested in other tech sectors, it indicates that this year could easily top 2013, when investors put $1.25bn into nearly 400 edtech companies over the year.

Many of those new companies are hoping, say education professionals, not just to turn a profit, but to disprove a longstanding academic theory that education is largely immune to the technology-driven productivity gains achieved in other industries.

“Education is a teacher, a blackboard, a piece of chalk and the discourse that goes on in the classroom,” says Thomas Dee, a Stanford professor of education. Technologists, he says, have long struggled to figure out what role technology could have in improving on those basic ingredients.

Earlier efforts to put computers and educational software in classrooms taught children how to use computers but “frankly produced disappointing results” in terms of improving students’ overall schooling, he says.

AltSchool and other experimental schools are rolling out projects that use new software and hardware such as cheap tablet computers to personalise each student’s curriculum, by giving teachers greater ability to track students working on different lessons or supplementary work based on their interests and strengths. Among them is Summit, a chain of experimental publicly funded, privately run schools in northern California.

“The whole promise of this software is it can deliver a much more personalised experience for kids so you can meet them where they’re at,” says Tyler Bosmeny, co-founder of Clever, a start-up that makes software to help schools manage apps that help students learn maths and foreign languages, among other subjects. Of a recent trip to a Summit school, he says: “It’s very weird to walk into a classroom where every kid is learning something different at that moment.”

Technology, Mr Ventilla adds, lets the school collect real-time data on what teaching methods are working, or not, helping teachers in different classes adapt how they teach and work with students based on system-wide feedback and lesson ideas from other instructors. “That strikes at the heart of how you create something that has economies of scale,” he says.

The hope, says Slade Maurer, AltSchool director of classroom technology, is that engineers can build systems that can make better use of a teacher’s time. “Carolyn has 30 years of teaching experience, but how do we make Carolyn scale?” he says, referring to the lead teacher at the Dogpatch school.

O n the more experimental end, Mr Maurer’s team is developing wearables and camera monitoring technology that can – with students’ and parents’ consent – track and record how students move round the classroom and what exactly they are learning. Collecting masses of data and processing them intelligently, as he and Mr Ventilla did at Google, could yield useful insights for teachers. “What if we’re trying to analyse vocabulary development? Wouldn’t it be cool if I could just transcribe every word they say?” says Mr Maurer. “One of the ap­proaches is to capture everything and correlate it with other data.”

For now, that technology is still under development, and the students in the Dogpatch classroom are scattered around the classroom, each absorbed in a book or working on their Samsung laptops or iPad minis.

Two girls sit in a corner, one paging through a big book of photographs and taking notes, the other clicking through a Spanish-language learning app on her tablet. The two pause for a minute to tap on the tablet together. Asked the name of the app they are playing with, one girl is indignant.

“I’m just helping her make it bigger,” she says. “I’m not playing.”