Comments on Founders no 3
From blogs.ubc.ca/etec522Sept 2013
Week 4: Entrepreneurial Bootcamp
sweeze 11:40 pm on September 27, 2013
Knewton: The World’s Leading Adaptive Learning Technology Company
Knewton is only three and a half years young, but has already made an impressive impact on the adaptive learning platform market. They work with existing learning management systems to provide responsive, data driven adaptive learning environments that focus on improving their partners content, instructional design, cognitive science, and pedagogical approach. Led by a former Kaplan Executive Jose Ferreira, they have created partnerships with big market companies like Pearson, which has enabled them to
Knewton promotes a fully adaptive model that incorporates specific recommendations for each student. They have developed rigorous concept mapping that has allowed them to facilitate the best learning path, focusing on competency based learning. Because it is data science heavy I am impressed to see how much they have included the pedagogical and instructional design component. Their implementation process seems impressive, with a strong focus on involving their clients in every aspect of the creation of the product; which is highly customizable.
Their attention to detail is evident by the staff they have employed. There are a number of different disciplines working together collaboratively to develop the end product. These include: adaptive instruction analysts, design director, combined with countless software engineers and a team of data scientists. With a continual push for professional development for the entire staff as a collective, they are creating a solid foundation to build off for years to come.
Knewton has definitely found a market that is full of companies, and organizations that are itching for a product like this. Secondary and Post Secondary education is often run by heavily bureaucratic systems that require a lot of control over their courses as well as their student data. Since Knewton’s API builds into existing data systems, organizations can feel safe and secure with their data being housed on their own servers. This for me is a massive selling point, as current learning management systems on their own, often times only provide cloud based solutions. This adaptive learning platform really is truly unique.
The executive team at Knewton has strong foundations in this field, and it starts at the top down. Jose Ferreira has his MBA from Harvard and is a former executive at Kaplan, which is notorious for providing numerous forms of educational resources for any standardized tests. He continues to push new boundaries and was recently made partner at New Atlantic Ventures, which invests in both new media and SaaS companies.
It’s interesting to see him poise himself in such a position to invest in other big data companies and I feel it demonstrates a true commitment to the field, and any developments within it.
The rest of the team is comprised of a number of key figures in the world of digital technologies. Especially striking is the Chief Technology Officer, who most recently came from Paypal, where he managed the core payment and credits system. In addition to that the VP of Production has had a varied career with notable companies like Audible.com and Yahoo.
With all of these key players, this team has a high level of experience that will allow this team to be competitive in years to come.
Personally this is a company I would love to work for. They have taken their vast years of experience in other fields, and have truly created a product to be proud of. This company is at the forefront of what will be a revolutionary change in education. The fact that Pearson jumped on board in the infancy of this startup and have continued to support it for over 10 million students, indicates that they have found a unique solution to a major market gap. Big data and data science itself is still in its early stages, so to see a company that has a model that incorporates complex algorithms, large quantities of data, pedagogy, instructional design, and cognitive theory they are definitely leading their field.
Looking through some of the positions at the company, and the markets that they are targeting, this is a company that has the capacity to be around for a long time.
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Comment by Janette
jiorns 12:22 pm on October 3, 2013
Thanks for introducing Knewton (sounds like ‘Newton’) 🙂
The founder Jose Ferreira is certainly impressive and I agree that the executive team he has pooled is also impressive. Having looked at that team more closely, I think the person to watch is David Lu, Chief Operating Officer.
His executive profile reads: “He is a board advisor/angel investor to Assistly, ChatID, and several other tech startups. He has been awarded a U.S. patent for web-based content personalization.”
The trend is for adaptive, personalised learning environments and David has a patent for content personalization? I’m not sure exactly what means in terms of technology, but it would seem that he stands to become a giant.
Having just read about Knowillage.com (bought out by Desire2Learn) who specialises in adaptive, interactive personalised learning, I think Knewton is not alone in working in this field. However, if I understand correctly, Knewton doesn’t host an adaptive learning environment on its server but offers a license to other organisations/institutions to use its technology to enable their learning management systems to offer adaptive learning – “accelerated learning”. That seems a clever service.
