As I am so immersed in the startup side of things, it was particularly interesting for me to get the Higher Education perspective on online learning / programs from someone who has spent her entire career at university.

Therefore my questions center around the initial motivation to decide and do a LLM program completely online, the benefits the faculties sees in doing so also not neglecting the challenges they and their partner for this program, 2tor, are faced with.

It is nice to see all the numerous and exciting initiatives that are taking off right now when Higher Ed or Academia itself are still frequently described as being somewhat backward oriented and inflexible.

If you’re also interested in learning more about what 2tor does, there are two interviews I did with Jeremy Johnson, 2tor’s CMO and Chip Paucek, 2tor’s CEO in the past months. Both talks focus on the company’s mission to change Higher Education in general as well as on of the specific programs in particular.

ENT is brought to you by Mingoville Fun Clock. - Mingoville Fun Clock is an educational game that will teach you kid to tell time. Fun Clock is created by the award winning educational company Mingoville and available for Android and iOS devices. Visit mingovillefunclock.com and follow them on Twitter @Mingoville.

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He shares some insights with us on how he had the idea of building these apps for toddlers which is based on his personal experiences with learning English as a second language and some those of some of his family members.

We then have a look into how Go Go Mongo’s users had received the first app which eventually led to a pivot and whether this was the right decision to make.

As Ahmed has organized quite some Startup Weekend events and more recently also the first Startup Weekend edu I asked him for his opinion on how these events can be beneficial for educators to go to and the importance to get them more involved in future events.

the last part of our talk is dedicated to the future of education and learning and how he imagines things are going to evolve.

This Interview is sponsored by udemy - Udemy enables anyone to take and build courses online. Their goal is to disrupt and democratize education by enabling anyone to learn from the world’s experts. Visit udemy.com and follow them on Twitter @udemy.

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I had the chance for a quick talk with Chip Paucek, the company’s CEO and also one of the co-founders.

2tor made two big announcements recently. One of which is a new collaboration with UNC Chapel Hill bringing their Master of Public Administration online. This partnership makes it the 5th graduate program for the education startup,the program is named MPA@UNC.

The other subject of our talk is 2tor’s recently announced series D funding round of a whopping $26 million. Chip tells me that all former investors are on board for this round as well and explains why it costs a lot of money to bring these top-tier graduate programs online.

Finally, we get a clue that a 6th program will soon be announced from 2tor and of course, I had to ask about his opinion on the Minerva University project that people rave about for a few days now.

This Interview is sponsored by AcademicPub – Your Book Your Way AcademicPub allows you to take content from their copyright cleared library of over 125 publishers, your files or anything on the web, and create custom course packs that are perfect, for you. Visit them today at academicpub.com and follow @AcademicPub on Twitter.

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I sat down (virtually as most of the time) with Jay Chakrapani, the VP and general manager of McGraw-Hill Higher Education’s digital group.

It may be a little surprising as I mostly interview start-up people and what probably first comes to mind when thinking of McGraw-Hill is that they are one of the biggest education publishers – not really a start-up.

That’s what makes it even more interesting to me! Finding out in a talk how a traditional and established company makes the transition into a digital education company.

The first thing I ask Jay is to define adaptive learning and what it means to McGraw-Hill – beyond all the buzz it’s getting right now. I then ask about the work and importance of his digital division within the company’s overall strategy as currently they not very prominent when one visits their website.

The second part of our talk is dedicated to e-textbooks, still relatively high prices and the future. Does Jay see the future of McGraw-Hill’s e-textbooks on (other people’s) platforms or is it likely that at one point they’ll go for their own solution as I suggested for Pearson in an article on Big Think? Well, listen to his insightful answers and you might know a little more about McGraw-Hill beyond being the big publisher by the end of the EDUKWEST interview.

As always thanks for listening and for your valuable feedback. “Likes” and “shares” will help us spread the word about EDUKWEST if you find our content valuable, of course.

This Interview is sponsored by AcademicPub – Your Book Your Way AcademicPub allows you to take content from their copyright cleared library of over 125 publishers, your files or anything on the web, and create custom course packs that are perfect, for you. Visit them today at academicpub.com and follow @AcademicPub on Twitter.

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Shmuel Meitar

For EDUKWEST episode 89 I had the privilege to learn more about Time To Know from its founder and education advocate Shmuel Meitar.

Time To Know was founded in 2004 by Shmuel Meitar as a philanthropic endeavor, investing $60 million of his own wealth into the startup according to TechCrunch. Today Time To Know offers a complete curriculum in math as well as language arts along with a digital platform for schools in K-12.

The holistic Time To Know way to teach has already been implemented in public schools in 150 classrooms in Israel and 120 classrooms in Texas and New York by the end of the 2010-2011 school year.

The objectives are to find a meaningful way to engage all three parties included in the teaching / learning process: teachers get deep knowledge about the individual performances of their students. Students get challenged according to their level and performance, so that they get positive feedback and are able to score better in assessments, but also develop a deeper understanding of concepts. Parents stay in regular contact with the class teacher and have an overview of their children’s learning curve at any time.

In our interview we also set the focus on the importance of leadership. Time To Know requests quite some commitment from the school district but also the individual schools in order to implement the curriculum and the technology platform as they are convinced that half-baked solutions of implementing technology into teaching eventually won’t result in student’s better performance.

This Interview is sponsored by Einztein – The Social Learning Network Einztein is the social learning network for higher education and lifelong learners. Einztein brings the power of social networking to learning and enables anyone to create an online learning community for resource sharing, collaboration and discussion.

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Brennan Knotts

KinderTown first got my attention when our own Alicia Chang told me about them and suggested why not to have a talk with them. As she is EDUKWEST’s expert for early childhood education, I was of course interested to have a chat.

So this holiday season I sat down with Brennan Knotts, COO of KinderTown to learn more about what they do.

As mentioned above, KinderTown targets early learners or probably better put their parents. The startup wants to become the destination site where busy parents go when they’re looking for recommendations and educational or learning apps for their kids. The target group are young learns aged 3 to 6.

But KinderTown doesn’t only want to be an app store for early childhood learning. As we all know, due to the immense numbers of apps available curation becomes increasingly important. In our interview Brennan talks more about how KinderTown reviews, evaluates and what points play a role during the approval process of each app before it gets a recommendation from them.

If you’re a parent or an app developer for young learners you should be aware that KinderTown for now only accept and recommend apps for iphone, iPod touch and iPad. Talking price points, the vast majority of apps I have seen on their website cost between $0.99-$2.99.

This Interview is sponsored by Airy Labs – Game On Airy Labs is creating the next generation of social learning games for kids. We build mobile and tablet games, browser-based social games, and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), all with a core educational mission to teach kids the things they need to be successful in their lives.

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Jeremy Johnson

In this most recent episode of EDUKWEST I had the chance to talk with Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and CMO of 2tor to learn more about the company.

2tor may be a familiar name to many of you, even if you only remembered the name for the headlines the company made this year when they announced a their big round of funding in March. 2tor raised a series C round of $32.5 million which sums up to a total of $65 million for the company.

That in itself is pretty remarkable for a company in online education, I was however more interested to hear how they actually make use of all that money.

2tor target the Higher Education market, they partner with graduate programs and provide the institutions with the necessary technology that those are able to bring their teaching online.

As I learned 2tor are rigorous in their selection progress of potential partner institutions. The aim is, of course to keep the quality as high as possible and make the online experience at least as good if not better than the offline experience according to Jeremy.

So far, they have only committed to a handful of programs, with the objective to have one program in each vertical. Currently, the work together notably with USC on their Masters of Teaching program, Georgetown on a nursery program and UNC-Chapel Hill on a MBA program.
We can expect that the process will speed up in 2012 though now the first programs are running successfully.

The platform itself contains both synchronous and asynchronous elements, such as materials available on it, video content but also possibilities for peer interaction and and iPad app.

This Interview is sponsored by Acceptly – College Prep Done Right Acceptly is making it easier for students everywhere to get accepted to college. Increase your chances through step-by-step guidance and secrets for overcoming the admissions process. Try it for free today.

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Richard Fielding

It was once again time for an EDUKWEST on tour. I like this format a lot as these interviews have their own dynamics and thus a slightly different feeling or atmosphere for me as the interviewer as well as the interviewee, I’m sure.

I met with Richard Fielding of PrepMyFuture. The startup was also declared the winner of my last TWiSTParis meetup with Jason Calacanis. TWiSTParis focuses more on the business side of things, but it might be interesting to one or the other of you.

PrepMyFuture are a startup on online Math education and have built an online platform in order to prepare for the GMAT standardized test.

The aim is of course to provide the students with an experience at least as good as working offline with a tutor.

Besides obvious advantages like learning from the convenience of your home without paying large amounts of money for a private GMAT tutor, the prepmyfuture platform adapts to the individual students knowledge and learning progress. Since the popularity of Khan Academy adaptive learning is of course on everyone’s lips, but I am convinced that done the right way and not only used to market a product, it can help students a great deal when preparing for tests, especially when they decide to prepare themselves without the assistance of a teacher and thus have to analyze their performance data themselves.

Richard also kindly provided me with a screencast of how the product works, so that you get a good idea of the overall look and feel.

Generally speaking, test prep has been one of the more interesting trends in the non-institutional learning space for me to portray in 2011. This is for various points: the technology is now ready, there is a market for it and people are willing to pay money for these services. Thus I’m almost sure that it’s one of the trends that will not only survive but flourish next year with more companies popping up and exploring the different opportunities in that market as well as different ways to teach it in an asynchronous way on the Internet.

This Interview is sponsored by Hello-Hello – Language on the Go! Hello-Hello couples social networking with language learning allowing users to interact with native speakers around the world directly from their mobile devices. Courses in 11 different languages available for the iPad, iPhone and Android deviceshave been developed in collaboration with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

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Gian Marco Masoni

EDUKWEST episode 85 is the recording of my talk with GM Masoni, co-founder and CEO of knowledge exchange and microblogging platform Einztein.

On Einztein anyone can learn about a topic of their choice and interest and also teach other members what you know.

Two concepts come together on Einztein:

a) learning takes place in an informal way, this is probably also the reason why the individual topics are called projects. As we know from different studies, informal learning takes by far the bigger part, as it stands for 80% of the overall amount of learning whereas only 20% are done in classrooms.

b) learn from and together with your peers is a proven concept that we also frequently see in language exchange communities or the PLN (personal learning networks) that are particularly popular amongst educators.

When one creates an account on Einztein the learner also creates a personal learning profile in which all courses they have taken are documented which shows their expertise to potential employers for instance. So all of that is eventually going to lead to the development of a huge database profiling each learner and we might see a first example of the knowledge graph I’ve talked about quite a bit myself .

Now, we still have to see how far Einztein want to go or how open they intend to build the platform in the future but Gian Marco told me already that they’re thinking in the direction of having an API, so that everybody could dock to it when it would make sense.

The Einztein platform is currently still in beta but everybody interested can sign-up for an account and it looks like there are already quite some courses to take or maybe you’re interested in teaching others a topic you’re passionate about.

This Interview is sponsored by Acceptly – College Prep Done Right Acceptly is making it easier for students everywhere to get accepted to college. Increase your chances through step-by-step guidance and secrets for overcoming the admissions process. Try it for free today.

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Henry Reich

This week’s EDUKWEST interview is the recording of my conversation with Henry Reich about how to become successful with educational content on YouTube.

Henry is the creator of Minutephysics which is, not much surprise when you take the name, a channel about Physics that contains short videos answering all sorts of questions around the subject in approximately one minute each.

By the time we spoke, Minutephysics had more than 2 million uploaded video views and more than 40.000 subscribers.

Those are pretty big numbers, particularly compared to other Youtube channels with educational content and as Henry also works for another very big YouTube partner, Freddie Wong with his channel FreddieW, I was of course interested in hearing his thoughts on how to build your following on YouTube and how to get views on your videos.

Moreover, I was curious to learn how to make something educational interesting for the YouTube audience, so that they want to consume the videos as much as any other entertaining (cat) video on the platform.

Henry shares his conceptual work on each Minutephysics video, for instance techniques and how many hours of work go into each 1-min-video from the storyboard over filming until the editing process.

Last but not least, we also talk technical equipment, software and budget to start filming videos on a more professional level. Taking Henry’s answers, I can tell you that it’s more about the skills than having a big budget to spend.

I highly recommend this interview to everybody who is in video production him- or herself, for education or not, and wants to get some insights and easy to replicate hands-on advice from a YouTube pro.

This Interview is sponsored by TeachStreet – Learn Something New

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EDUKWEST #84 with Henry Reich of Minute Physics

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