What I Am Up To

After five years building Zeal, we had a profitable business serving about 50,000 students. The only problem was that beyond some very leading edge schools, no one saw the need for a tutoring system that could diagnose student misconceptions and give small tutoring doses to help them. Despite spending a lot…

5 differences between consumer and institutional edtech

We have had a couple of institutional edtech exits in the last month — engrade and area9. Institutional edtech companies are ones whose customers are the insitution — teachers, schools, districts, etc. consumer edtech companies make…

Why Homeschooling is important…

I’ve been watching the homeschooling space for years. About 2 million children in the U.S. (3%) are…

Five reasons I’m optimistic about the next 20 years in education

Minimum Viable Instruction

At Zeal, we are pretty big believers in the lean startup approach. The fundamental thesis is that you are constantly doing just enough engineering work in order to understand what your customer needs, by doing small experiments and analyzing the results. You are building the…

Thesis — Synchronous College

I remember when MOOCs came out. I took one long sigh and hunkered down for a decade of student misery. Let’s unpack that. The compelling thing about MOOCs is that they require almost no behavior change from professors. They sit up there lecturing but now someone has a video…

The MOOC I would build

Here are some pretty rough ideas of how we could make MOOCs a lot better. I’m thinking about the way I would combine what I know works in education — coaching and interactivity — with what scales in education — static content and student to student learning.

What if our schools were run by AirBnB

OK, the title is a little provocative, but after spending almost 20 years in the school system, I think we need to get off of our high horse. In the name of student safety and privacy, we are willing to run our school systems like factories from the turn of the…

The new vocationalism

In the past 30 years, “vocationalism” became a dirty word in education, especially among those of us serving low income students. VocEd meant a two-tiered system in high school with a few kids getting ready for college and the rest stuck in shop class, getting ready for something “less.”

How to make US colleges free

Bernie Sanders made a lot of waves by advocating for free college for all. He was quickly shouted down as a radical and socialist (both of which are true). But it got me thinking, why not?