Steal This Idea — Alexa English

I spend a lot of time trying to understand how kids learn English and learn how to read. I have…

Teachers Own Curriculum

This is more of a K12 trend than an idea, but a ton of ideas become possible if it is true. For decades, there has been a deep tension between ‘administrators’ (principals and central office staff) and teachers over curriculum. Politically, textbook companies like Pearson were able to…

Synchronous Online School

This is almost a category than a single idea. It’s pretty clear to me that the world of asynchronous content for learning will always be pretty mediocre and cheap or free. See Udacity or Coursera who exist only because we haven’t come up with the right way to teach online yet. I…

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 10 — India

India is a very different situation than the U.S. or China. I will be out at the…

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 1 — A Social Network for English learners

In this series, I’m going to talk about the ideas I’ve been looking for this year but haven’t found. As a serial entrepreneur, I’m quite thesis-driven in my investment. These are the companies I will…

Steal This Idea — A fully online computer science high school

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 12 — Teachers take control

I made an investment in a company called Padlet recently. If you aren’t a teacher, you have probably never heard of it. If you are a teacher, you probably have. Padlet has been growing like a week for a couple of years with…

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 11 — Home Schooling

My two main investment criteria are things that have high impact on students and things that scale. That usually means I’m looking around the edges of the existing system. Home schooling is a very interesting edge. With 2 million…

12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 7 — Live Instruction

Probably the biggest change I’m seeing is the move from asynchronous ‘dead’ content, to scheduled live teaching, to teaching-on-demand. From your phone, when you need to learn some English, click a button and you and a coach start…