Category: Entrepreneur Bootcamp

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Jhonatan Rotberg: mobile technologies guru

While reading the posts for Week 4, I came across the profile of Jhonatan Rotbert, an intrapreneur and entrepreneur working with MIT.

He is the founder and director of MIT NextLab, one of the featured courses of MIT’s OpenCourseWare. He is a lecturer in the Engineering Systems Division at MIT, and works in partnership with industry to develop new mobile technologies that are spun off as joint MIT-Industry innovations, new open-source initiatives, or for-profit startups. He has been associated with 29 projects in 13 countries, and has received many prestigious awards.

Apart from being technologically innovative, he is also able to drive new ventures and has co-founded three startups in the financial and high tech sectors, one of which was acquired by GE in 2003. His program at MIT spun off the 2009 mobile tech runner up of MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, the 2011 winner of Harvard Business School’s Business Plan Contest (social venture track), and a funded for-profit startup currently operating in Mexico and Nicaragua. During 2010, Jhonatan served as Senior Technology Advisor to the Inter-American Development Bank’s mobile technologies incubator.

His bio is well worth a read. He clearly is a tall poppy among ed tech founders.

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Comments on Founders no 4

From blogs.ubc.ca/etec522Sept2013
Week 4: Entrepreneurial Bootcamp

sarahrowe 1:14 am on September 27, 2013

Joseph Cohen – Founder and CEO at Lore

Lore (formerly CourseKit)

Lore is a class-focused platform for academic groups. It works off a Facebook-style concept (social networking), but tailors the platform to provide students and instructors with academic support modules available on typical CMSs, such as calendars, discussion boards, file sharing, and libraries (groups of reference materials). In true collaborative spirit, anyone can create or edit a group, not just professors. The concept is mainly directed at large and small college groups (ranging from study groups to tutorials or lectures) but could also be used at the secondary school level.

Founder Joseph Cohen studied at Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania. Although background information on Cohen is limited in the online world, I’ll choose to use the team profile on lore.com as a basis for analysis. The team of Lore has a series of core values, which support disruptive change (Break Rules), the value of self-exploration (Be an Artist, Learn, Own), and the entrepreneurial spirit (Invent, Think Big, Push). No doubt that Cohen had a hand in driving the development of these values and clearly indicates an entrepreneur with the dynamic personality and great ideas needed for a successful venture. Other team members include Dan Getelman, co-founder and CTO for Lore. With his education also from UPenn, it seems that Cohen and Getelman met and developed their idea for Lore at university. No wonder the company says that “learning is about people”.
 
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Comment by Janette
 
jiorns 2:13 pm on October 3, 2013

Sarah, thanks for sharing about Lore (Coursekit) and its founder.

The use of Facebook for learning is attractive to many instructors, because it engages students. It’s easy to understand how the Professors at University of Pennsylania had the motivation to create their own social learning platform given their institution prohibited social media for learning. Joseph had the entrepreneurship (as well as intrapreneurship) to develop and market the platform for use outside the university, thus creating a new educational technology.

Lore provides a virtual platform to other educational institutions or instructors seeking social media options, or even a basic LMS. But there is no new pedagogy behind what it offers.

The benefit is the free use of the Lore platform to post course content, hold discussions, post assignments, etc.
The negative is the risk of loss of privacy and IP. The T&C on lore.com state that there is no guarantee that only those students an instructor invites to a course will access it. Setting up a private cohort does not mean the users and course content (IP) always stay private.

Lore seems to be operating as a social enterprise as I don’t see any obvious business model by which it generates income.

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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.

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Comments on Founders no 2

From blogs.ubc.ca/etec522Sept2013
Week 4: Entrepreneurial Bootcamp

tclee1 2:54 pm on September 29, 2013

Paul Gollash, Founder &CEO at Voxy

Company
Voxy Corporation was founded at the beginning of 2010 by Paul Gollash. Since then the company has achieved great heights, transforming from a small start-up into a company that currently offers its service to more than 2.5 million users, while also getting voted as the best tech company to work for in 2012 and rated the No. 1 education iTunes app in 23 countries.
Voxy is an educational based company that focuses upon its online interactive language learning programs which features its intriguing curriculum in a very real life context. A major target audience of the company sets upon teaching English as a second language to people of Portuguese and Spanish descent although it expands its target later. Their success comes predominately from the company’s ability to cater to students in the new technological world. The use and integration of internet and mobile technology along with a very clear and well defined educational curriculums based on solid researches in second language learning and cognitive science, and live tutoring sessions have made it much easier for students to personalize the learning experience and for the teachers to accurately classify the student’s level of competency. For instance, functions include proficiency tests of every level to see the improvement of the student so that teachers can promptly adjust the curriculum accordingly. This was the underlying reason behind the ascent and success of Voxy, one of the first movers for language education in the technological world that is also worth the attention.

Biography
Paul Gollash who graduated from the University of Chicago-Booth school of business, Dartmouth College has fourteen years of business experience as an entrepreneur and an investor. He is indeed a man of many talents even before establishing Voxy. The path began in Madrid and Chile where he launched a new retail business for GM Europe and began an import/export business respectively. These experiences really made him learn the most essential skill of any entrepreneur or sales. His exposure to these different countries also prompted him to develop a lifelong passion for “travel and language education.”
It was his management consultant experience at Booz Allen that despite the long hours and difficult work, allowed him the ability to do heavy data-analysis. Finally, he became a venture investor for Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, which was also the team that created Virgin Mobile. It was really from this experience where Gollash learned two important lessons: “attack big markets” and “dedicating yourself to something you are truly passionate.” This ultimately led him to establish the venture-funded education technology company called Voxy.

Reflection
As a teacher of second language and a person who has also been in the business market, I know that one of the hardest things to do in educational learning is keeping the competency of the teachers and ensuring the quality of the curriculum consistently. This is the part that requires the most delicate care as it is what will establish the kind of learning environment the students will be learning in and benefit from. This kind of management is very hard to do and that’s why I am very impressed with what Voxy has done, especially seeing that it has already obtained 2.5 million learners worldwide.
Personally, before I took the MET Program, I was a firm believer that only in the F2F learning environment could students learn the most. Now, I am more inclined to believe that an online environment also functions and works effectively and efficiently for second language learning students. Otherwise, how could have it been able to use 3 years to expand to such a big market. I have witnessed that in certain Asian countries inefficiency is all that can be said about second language learning. Despite spending endless hours learning English during school and even after class in learning centers, very little can be done to advance their English proficiency. Most are only good at grammar and vocabulary through forced memorization and drills and are unable to apply anything in real life due to the lack of authentic and personalized pedagogy and the lack of qualified native speaking teachers. That’s a perfect example of the wrong resources was being utilized. Thus, what Voxy has done is truly a major breakthrough especially among foreign formal school systems. Interesting context-based learning that uses real world settings, frequent opportunities of exposure to the language through internet or mobile tools, and clear classifications of assessment levels of the students really allow the professional educators to provide the most effective way of teaching. Certainly this will provide a strong supporting platform for people who want to learn even if they don’t have direct access to the learning environment as long as they have the internet. If there is ever the chance to contribute my knowledge of the Asian market, I would be thrilled to share my understanding and knowledge of it.

References:
1) support@voxy.com. NY. Retrieved from http://voxy.com/
2) Teachthought. (2013). 30 Of The Top Education Startups Of 2012. Retrieved from http://www.teachthought.com/technology/30-of-the-top-education-startups-of-2012/
3) Linkedin corporation. (2013). Paul Gollash’s Overview. Retrieved from http://www.linkedin.com/in/pgollash

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Comment by Janette

jiorns 11:45 am on October 3, 2013

As a qualified ESL teacher of adult learners, I was interested to read about Paul Gollash and Voxy Corporation. There are many positives about the technology-mediated language learning product of Voxy. Not only is the offer of self-paced online learning, but also private, personalised (online) tutoring.

The key to Voxy’s success in my view is its focus on contextualising its curriculum to Central and South American markets. One of the challenges for English language teaching and learning is having content that is contextualised to the culture of the learner. I experienced this when teaching in China and Oman. International curriculum (British or North American publications) didn’t always work.
So, Voxy has achieved competitive advantage by “knowing its market” and “developing curriculum for the market”.

Voxy’s website refers to technology-mediated learning. Its website shows photos of learners in classroom settings. So it makes me query whether the 2.6 million users are individual buyers (consumers), or a mix of individual consumers and student cohorts in educational institutions (consumers and organizational buyers)?

I read in an Ambient Insights market analysis report of educational technology for language learning that English language teachers are in short supply relative to global demand, and that this is one of the drivers for digital language learning platforms. Voxy is well timed to benefit from any shortage of instructors in the local market, and already uses online tutors to provide a tutoring service.

I recall that when I investigated employment in Central and South America, the salary for teaching was low by comparison with other markets. It was a factor in my decision not to work in that region. Should institutions in that part of the world be finding it hard to attract qualified ESL teachers (not suggesting they don’t; it’s just hypothetical based on my experience), then Voxy would be well placed to provide the alternative.

I do wonder about the type of accreditation that a learner receives from Voxy. TESOL testing is a service it offers, but there are other tests recognised in English language learning such as IELTS and TOEIC. There may be limitiations in the “usefulness” of the language level attained through Voxy, if it doesn’t meet the requirements for, say, acceptance into a university outside the region.

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Comments on Founders no 1

From blogs.ubc.ca/etec522Sept2013
Week 4: Entrepreneurial bootcamp

dchrisman 11:07 pm on September 29, 2013

John Baker, President and CEO of Desire 2 Learn

Desire to Learn founder, President and CEO John Baker started the company in 1999. Desire to Learn has since grown immensely as a company, and distributes new and innovative platform for education worldwide. They provided the LMS that my school board currently uses for both e-learning courses, as well as blended learning programs. They will also help to create programs to meet the needs of the customer, and also sell to Fortune 100 Companies as well.
Baker started this company when he was only 22 years old, and still attending school. His educational background is in System Design Engineering, and in Management. From this background, it seems that he has unique abilities to be both an entrepreneur, and a CEO. This has been further proven by several entrepreneur awards that he has received, and that his company was recently named one of the best small and medium companies to work for, demonstrating his ability to lead a successful team, as well as keep them motivated.
As for Baker’s motivation for his company, he has a strong belief in using technology to improve society, as well as supporting other young entrepreneurs. This can be seen from his personal life, and the many different boards he sits on. He also uses both business and personal funds to help support those entrepreneurs who are also trying to use technology for societal good. This makes him and his business also really show how important that double bottom line is.
Baker’s leadership team is also filled with successful individuals who have a strong background in business and education. Several of his top team have gone back to colleges and universities to teach in their perspective field, which also gives them a unique view of what educators would want in their LMS programs. Although their backgrounds are varied, many also have strong backgrounds in successfully running businesses, including several major companies. I believe that since Baker started his company so young, that it is important that he also has some more seasoned veterans on the board.
When looking at the backgrounds of this successful team, I feel I am far from ready to start my own venture. I do not feel as though I have the connections to make a strong enough team to run a successful business, and I feel as though my own personal understanding of business is not yet where it would need to be. Although I do feel as though I have more business knowledge that many entrepreneurs, I do not feel confident in my own knowledge yet, or in my ideas, especially when seeing how varied these background are.

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Comment by Janette

jiorns 10:39 am on October 3, 2013

D2L is an impressive company, and the founder and CEO John Baker a very inspirational person.
Apart from the background and qualities of John Baker mentioned in the leading post, I think he must also be the epitamy of a lifelong learner – moving his own knowledge forward all the time to be able to compete in the educational technology market and have an informed vision of what to do next.

D2L has recently acquired a company, Knowillage. See http://desire2learn.com/
It takes D2L’s business into a different field, but it is a related field, and one that is emerging in learning technology – personalised learning environments.
While learning is often structured on a LMS (course and program structure), personal learning environments are not so structured. Knowillage is about adaptive content and quizzes, with analytics embedded that can directing a student’s learning according to their performance.
This type of personal learning environment enables “accelerated learning”. Smart stuff. http://knowillage.com/

D2L is a company to watch, for sure.

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CEO/Founder of ALISON

From blogs.ubc.ca/etec522Sept2013
Week 4: Entrepreneur Bootcamp
 

Post by jiorns 1:23 am on September 27, 2013

CEO/Founder of ALISON

Mike Feerick is the quintessential entrepreneur. He is US-born, lives in West Ireland, and has a string of successful Internet technology start-ups to his name. In April 2007 Mike founded ALISON, an online platform providing free certified education and workplace training skills to adults. He has been leading the enterprise through rapid growth ever since.

Value proposition

The value proposition of ALISON is the provision of free courses for adults anywhere in the world. Mike states, “At ALISON, we believe certifiable, standards-based learning can be made available for every subject, for free, online, especially for marginalized people in the developing and the developed worlds”.

Mike regards the venture as a social enterprise and one that supports the UN Declaration on Human Rights: everyone is entitled to education.

Products

Courses are interactive multimedia Certificate and Diploma courses accessible on mobile and other devices. There are currently 58 publishers sponsoring ‘free to learner’ courses. ALISON claims to offer 500 free courses and support more than 2 million learners in 200 countries.

Recognition

Due to its innovation, and Mike Feerick’s leadership capabilities, the company has received both the UNESCO Award for Innovation in ICT in Education in 2010 and the World Summit for Education Award ‘for outstanding quality and exceptional impact on education through innovation’ in 2013. It has also recently received a WISE Award in Qatar.

Company structure

I cannot identify if ALISON is a for-profit or not-for-profit venture. This doesn’t appear to be public information.

Business model

The company earns revenue from ‘parchments’ (certificates of completion), website advertising fees, and fees charged for ALISON’s course management software which enables course publishers to manage and track progress of enrolled students.

Founder/CEO credentials

Mike Feerick is a highly regarded entrepreneur who both conceived the idea of ALISON and championed the start-up and growth of the enterprise. Before founding ALISON, Mike had founded other technology start-ups including JFAX, YAC, Advance Learning and TVC Media. He has the credentials of successfully leading several companies through inception, growth and sale.

Mike is also currently a director of the University of Limmerick Foundation, a member of both the Global Irish Economic Forum and the Clinton Global Initiative, and is also a frequent guest speaker. In the past, he has been a chairperson of other academic and social organisations in Ireland.

His entrepreneurship and services to education have been internationally recognised. In January 2011, he received a UNESCO Diploma prize for services to innovation in online workplace education and in 2010, he was awarded an Ashoka Fellow for dedication to social entrepreneurship in education.

Mike holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BBS from the University of Limerick. His full biography is available on Bloomberg, together with his photo.

Team/Board Credentials

The only information I can find about members of ALISON other than Mike are the profiles of marketing and public relations professionals on LinkedIn. There are regular posts about ALISON on social media, indicating that the promotion of ALISON is being well managed. Mike’s profile appears regularly, together with videos of his speaking appearances.

Connect/Follow the enterprises’s LinkedIn Group
 
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Further comment by jiorns 1:30 am on September 27, 2013
I have provided a link to a photo on ALISON’s website rather than copied a photo from the website as due respect for copyright.
 
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Comment by davidp 3:48 am on September 27, 2013

I think you’ve hit on something that is important to consider when you note that Mike Feerick is a highly regarded entrepreneur, and as noted, is a serial entrepreneur with a number of successes (and possibly a failure or two) among his experiences.

This type of profile insures that a product champion can see a market, explain a solution clearly, assemble a team that can add agility to establishing a market presence, and demonstrate a revenue stream early that can sustain the venture.

I think this analysis clearly illustrates the advantage of having multiple experiences and the knowledge of what to do. Many successful ventures do in fact stem from multiple previous venture experiences, either as part of team, or as lead player. It all counts and helps downstream.
 
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naomi 6:24 am on September 30, 2013

I researched a bit further online and discovered it is a for profit company. I think that it should also be mentioned that ALISON is a unique take on the MOOC. Unlike other MOOCs, it’s courses are vocationally focused, and not associated with universities. Courses can be created and provided by outside companies such as Microsoft and Google, so their product is really their learning platform and certificates. Quite an ingenious and novel idea to have someone else do the bulk of the learning design so your income can go into business growth and platform development.
One critique for potential market success is recognition of certification. Yes, learners have to score over 80 percent, and complete all courses to get a certificate, but if I were to put it on my resume, it would have little value as few people have heard of ALISON, unless the certificate mentioned the course provider – this then would have some cachet. OF course, this is purely a North American perspective. I know from some of my students that in their countries, the more certificates you have the better. The institution doesn’t always matter.
 
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sylvainm 9:15 am on September 30, 2013

I like your comment Naomi. I think that MOOCs have the potential to diminish the power of post secondary education in sanctioning students learning. In many industries, what matters is not the marks you had in school, but what you are actually able to do. There is also an advantage for corporations to provide courses in that they know what is going on in their own industry and can tailor their courses to fit their needs. Another advantage is that through their courses, they can identify and recruit individuals who have the qualities they are looking for in employees.
There is also the possibility that professionals get certified through an entry exam into the profession rather than the completion of a degree. Respective professional associations would determine whether you qualify as an engineer or a teacher rather than take your degree from any university at face value.
I think that ventures such as ALLISON are the starting point of what could lead to profound transformations in the instructional market space.
 
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jiorns 1:26 pm on October 3, 2013

Thanks for an interesting reflection. Vocational education is a huge market and ALISON stands to disrupt the Voc Ed market in the same way MOOCs are disrupting Higher Ed.

I read in an Ambient Insight market analysis that apprenticeships (one area of Voc Ed) are moving online, which is interesting. I wonder how much of the learning that occurs in apprenticeships can go online, and whether we are really talking about blended learning models?

ALISON is certainly tapping into the huge market for lifelong learning and courses may be acceptable to employers, or at least acceptable if the content provider is recognizable and credible. A perception of credibility will be unique to each individual.

It seems likely that free ALISON courseware can save corporate training departments a lot of money, and in that vein, some of the for-fee content providers to corporations could lose some market share to ALISON.

Similarly, free ALISON courseware could complement (and become part of a blended learning solution) for vocational education providers, thus easing their development budgets.

In countries where national competency standards and frameworks for training delivery and accreditation exist for Voc Ed, there would be a bit of work to match the competencies acquired through ALISON to the competency framework of a local market. It remains to be seen whether institutions would go those hard yards. If there is a match between ALISON course content and a learning outcome and performance standard for an accredited national competency, then bingo! Free content.

As the poster above has said, post secondary education as a whole is getting a shake up with the emergence of free, open content. ALISON has taken a left field to MOOCs by virtue of its target audience, but ultimately the two types of open learning platforms may converge.
 
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jldr 9:46 am on September 30, 2013

This is a very unique perspective that I had not considered before. Thanks!
 
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mb585 12:39 pm on September 30, 2013

Interesting ideas. It is amazing how many courses they offer. I am a big supporter of ‘free’ global education. It reminds me of how public education began and people didn’t entirely support it. They needed their children to help out at home not be in school. However, it ultimately was successful and changed the world. I feel like the internet and free online education might have a similarly world changing effect. It’s exciting!

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