The holiday period has allowed me, and probably lots of fellow educators, time to catch up on some reading and thinking. One area I have been researching quite a bit is that of online educational services. My work currently involves a lot of support for teachers and schools integrating technology as a part of a blended learning model. What I mean by this is that the school still has the traditional 5 day a week, 6 hour a day classroom learning as its core but looks to supplement this with some digital learning during the course of hte day and some tasks accessible 24/7 via a school portal or “Learning Platform”. Apart from the disappointingly common occurance of SMT members spending a lot of time trying to get staff to use the platform effectively, this form of blended or supplemented use of a virtual learning environment is not, for the most part, disruptive to what has always happened in the classroom. Part of the reason for this is that schools are not in the position to give real release time to staff to really design quality courses and learning content for students. With the best will in the world, a lot of what gets put up online is dry and lacking in all of the possiblities available via access to new media.

Perhaps it was inevitable, given the US reliance on test results via the NCLB legislation and this region’s reliance on similar high stakes testing such as the IB’s Diploma Programme, that entities would come along and do nothing but develop online courses that are highly professional, multimedia enhanced and capable of ensuring test results that are higher than for students in regular classrooms. One of these that I have been following for some time now is the Virtual High School. I have had some dealings with the VHS via Robyn Lynch of Shekou International School. I was not surprised to read of the VHS in Clayton Christensen’s latest book Disrupting Class. Interestingly, I came across a presentation by Jeffery Beard of the International Bacalaurette Organisation about widening access to the IB Diploma Programme via online delivery of content.  I have it on my “to do list” to contact Jeffrey and see if he would like to attend our conference in October and discuss this with the wider group. Given the strong shift to the IB DP course in this part of the world, it would seem a good fit for schools here.

This Tech Cruch article is very upbeat about an online test preparation startup, Knewton, that is turning a lot of heads for its model of trying to capture a big slice of the market via paying top money to expert teachers and using powerful adaptive software to tailor learning for the student.

Knewton is not the first to try to take on the traditional schools via an online model. Brightstorm, iKnow, Grockit, PrepMe and many others have tried in the same space. Knewton seems to have a bit more going for it than most, especially in the US market.

Based in New York City, Knewton raised $2.5 million last May from Accel Partners, First Round Capital, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway, and other angels. The company was very much under the radar until it showed up as a finalist for the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge last month (see video below). The company is built entirely on Amazon’s cloud computing services (EC2 for computation, S3 for storing video tutorials, and Mechanical Turk for fine-tuning its test questions). Actually, the Startup Challenge already has its winner: Yieldex. Knewton did win the popular vote, though.

The founder and CEO, Jose Ferreira, used to be an executive at Kaplan, the test prep giant. Knewton’s two chief test designers, Len Swanson and Robert McKinley, wrote the scoring algorithms for the adaptive learning tests used by, respectively, the Educational Testing Service (which administers the SAT, GRE, and AP tests) and ACT.

Adaptive learning tests are taken on computers. The questions get progressively harder or easier depending on each student’s answers. Thus, they adapt to each student’s knowledge and abilities. Knewton is taking the adaptive learning concept and applying it first to online test preparation services. It is not cheap. Right now it offers a year-long subscription to prepare for the GMAT test that costs $1,390. The company guarantees a minimum 50-point jump in a student’s test score or their money back.

Given the presence of Kaplan and many of the other test prep centres in this region, it may be able to make inroads in this lucrative area.

This is an interesting space to watch. I look forward to seeing if it starts to have an effect here.