It was about time for a new KWestions talk, and what better way to start into 2012 than with one of my key issues this year: crowd-funding and its opportunities for education.
As some of you might have noticed, we have started a new series around crowd-funding in education just a few weeks ago, and you can watch the first episodes over at EDUKWEST.
I feel honored that I now had the chance to ask Slava Rubin, co-founder of crowd-funding platform IndieGoGo, a few questions.
How I first heard about Derek Muller, the creator of Veritasium was in the course of his take on education’s current fairhaired boy (not really but let’s use the metaphor), Salman Khan and the Khan Academy.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe that videos definitely have their place as a tool in education. I am a producer of educational video, Derek is one. There is no doubt that videos do their part to make explain things in a new, visual and engaging way but other tools also have their place. Salman Khan is doing a great job of breaking complex things down and to present them in an easy and digestible way.
To put Khan Academy and its founder in the place of having all the right answers to our problems and sort of being the savior of education is wrong, and the way I see it, it’s also not what he intended to do.
I did this episode of KWestions in the course of the EDUKWEST interview with Jeffrey McManus on his company CodeLesson and my general interest in the growing startup scene around educating people how to code.
As you know, instead of focusing on what a particular startup does, the KWestions format is about the bigger picture. You have probably heard me talking about the importance of education and skills for one’s career and how I see a shift regarding key qualifications needed happening right now and at an increasing pace.
As we increasingly discuss whether content itself is still what matters or if it wasn’t really context that does, I have been looking deeper into curation and its opportunities in an educational context over the past few months.
Out of that motivation I want to share this KWestions with William Mougayar today. He is the founder Eqentia, a company that built a semantic search platform for web content publishers around key features like data mining, real-time aggregation and advanced curation. As each Equentia site, public or private in the case of many companies, is being curated by one or several experts on a topic and highly customizable, the results go deeper and are in that sense more accurate or relevant if you will than the normal search results google can provide.
For this part of KWestions I had the pleasure to interview Christian Arno, the managing director of Lingo24 and his take on the future of translation online.
Compared with many other start-ups I have had the opportunity to do an interview with, Lingo24 is an old stager or maybe better a nethead as the company was founded in 2001.
Along with their official launch, I had the chance to meet with Patrick Randolph of Talkwheel for an EDUKWEST.
Talkwheel are based in SF and the platform allows its users to communicate and collaborate in a very visual way. Although not exclusively designed for education, it clearly makes sense in our context when you think of teachers maintaining thread with their students, seminar groups or student groups.
EDUKWEST on tour has always had a special feel to it and as much as I like connecting with great start-up people via Skype, I have to say that I truly enjoy visiting companies when I have the opportunity to do so.
Episode 63 is such an on tour video, I’ve met with Michel Nizon and team of Edulang at their office in Morlaix, France. Yes, innovation can happen in the most remote places and I love that this is possible thanks to working online, connecting with people and the possibility of finding customers all around the world!
I had the pleasure of interviewing LearnBoost’s founder and CEO Rafael Corrales on how came up with the initial idea and how he and his team have shaped it until it became what we see today: a nicely made gradebook with pretty design, easy to create & mangage lesson plans, functions to share student progress with the parents and the possibility to integrate with Google Apps.
LearnBoost is currently free to use and I hope you’ll get a good idea of LearnBoost’s capabilities watching our EDUKWEST but essentially you have nothing to lose, so I’d say anyone interested should definitely go and open an account!
Just a few days ago I first got in touch with Shah Ullah of the GrayMatter Foundation via Twitter and I immediately liked what these young founders are doing. I believe, innovation is not a question of age at all, it may not be the most common thing when the founders are all still in High School though.
Well, it’s maybe at this age only when you still have the outstanding enthusiasm and commitment to just launch and keep going with a project whereas later in life it naturally happens that you think more before you start.
Long story short, as a bit uncommon projects have always appealed to me and therefore I am happy that Shah agreed on doing a KWestions.
In this week’s EDUKWEST I interview Travis Millman, VP of product for EnglishCentral Inc. Although still quite concentrated on the Asian market, I think it’s a nice product worth having a look at from both teacher and student side.
EnglishCentral consists of three main areas, one is to watch authentic videos dealing with different topics such as politics or entertainment. Second is to learn all relevant vocabulary, also structured according to topics for instance introductions or culture. The third element is to learn to speak or more specifically how to pronounce words.
Looking from a student perspective, I like that it’s pretty customizable and that I don’t have to watch this or that video but define my fields of interest and thus get only relevant lessons for me.
As part two of my series portraying translation businesses on the Internet I did a KWestions with Jani Penttinen of Xiha. You might remember this name from an EDUKWEST we did several months ago but this time it was all about his latest venture PremiumFanpage where he is also CEO.
The original idea of PremiumFanpage is to give businesses the opportunity to connect with their fans or also users in general in any language.
There is always a multitude of reasons why I enjoy talking with him [Koichi], not only that he appeared in one of the very first episodes (EDUKWEST #4) and gave me some credit sort of ex ante the interview concept had proven itself to be more than just a flash in the pan but also as our online careers (if you want to call it like that) began approximately the same time and if you have a closer look and compare you’ll find quite some parallels.
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Besides knowing that he wants to disrupt (no, I don’t think that the term is overused when talking about some people at least) the Japanese textbook industry, I was also keen on hearing his reasons to quit live teaching. I’ve my own reasons for that but seeing him doing the same at again almost the same point was quite interesting.
Yesterday, I nosed into the translator business a little deeper. In my teaching career this has never been an interesting field to me as I basically thought being a native German speaker was simply not sufficient to be a good translator.
My few experiences with translating documents from French or English into German seemed to prove me right as I had the impression that this was a pretty lengthy and tedious process. On the other hand, it made me increasingly curious what translators like about their work and business and why translating or interpreting is not a boring job for them at all.
I’m particularly happy to share the newest EDUKWEST with you all today as it covers a new new trend that is manifesting itself in online education. What we got out as one of the important results of that recent busuu study is the motivation why people want to invest time and effort in learning a language and that is for travel.
TripLingo is one of the first startups of this new wave of language learning and traveling. TripLingo is based of the initial idea of founder and CEO Jesse Maddox back in the days he was traveling and working in Asia and was then shaped at Startup Weekend Atlanta where he also found his team.
When I hear of interesting new initiatives with something educational to them I always like to let you know about on KWestions.
After just finishing an interesting EDUKWEST with InternMatch I was happy to hear that they continue innovating and have another way to bring value to their users. This time, Nathan Parcells co-founder and CMO tells us about an exciting new project called ‘Find your Focus’ which spreads beyond their website or even social media but brings a real life experience in form of meet-ups and speeches to college and university students.
When I was looking for a new headset and was asking for recommendations around my friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter I got contacted by Tim Ridgway, VP of Marketing at Califone about their newly launched, washable (!) USB headset. He then also asked me, if he could send one to me.
Of course I needed to find out more about this generous guy and his company and so I learned that Califone have been a manufacturer of audio devices and also audio visual tools dedicated to education since 1947!
Needless to say that I had to get Tim for a KWestions about Califone.
For this final part of KWestions around flashcard learning, feature or product I invited Andrew Cohen, the founder and CEO of Brainscape on the show.
Brainscape have a scientific approach to the usage of flashcards for learning. The company have already rolled out French and Spanish learning apps for the iPhone, iPod touch and also iPad called Vocab Genius and Vocab Junkie. Don’t miss on trying these out as they’re currently available for free!
In part three of this mini series about flashcards and the question if they are an actual product or “just” a feature in the framework of a bigger picture I talked with Ali Yildirim, one of the three co-founders of CoboCards.
CoboCards is a German based startup and I already had the pleasure of interviewing Tamim Swaid, another co-founder of CoboCards for EDUKWEST.
In part 2 of my KWestions series with startups in the flashcard learning space I covered a service called Memrise.
Memrise is a UK-based startup which has a clear focus on a more scientific approach of helping people to learn, or as they say on their website
At Memrise, we’re integrating everything we know about the art and science of memory to help you learn faster.
Over the past months I got in contact with more and more startups in the flashcard learning and spaced repetition vertical.
As I don’t believe this to be a mere coincidence, I thought it would be interesting to do a little series of interviews with some of those companies giving their opinion on a the space in general and why it is such an interesting one to many companies.
