This article is cross-posted from edtechtimes.com, where I currently serve as editor-in-chief.

We’re really excited to introduce our new feature, EdTechKnowFiles, a series of video interviews with people who are passionate about educational technology today.

Our first interview is with Mark Taylor, CEO of Reading Plus, a company that is building a research-based “intelligent e-reader” to assist students struggling with reading efficiency.

In Part I, Mark talks about the Reading Plus product in-depth. We also get a glimpse of the product at work, modeling efficient reading for students.

In Part II, Mark talks about the importance of efficacy in ed tech, and specifically how the Reading Plus product’s research-backed techniques address efficacy concerns in the industry.

Part III gives us a closer look at Mark himself, and his family’s legacy in education and reading, which dates back to 1931.

Thank you to Mark Taylor for the interview and to John Kissell for helping to arrange the details.

Check out Reading Plus site here:

Interview conducted by Griff Resch, Video by Ryan Lee, Opening Music by Michael Boezi, Control Mouse Music.

This article is cross-posted from edtechtimes.com, where I currently serve as editor-in-chief.

TeacherGraph’s founding team: Joseph Van, Founder/CEO and Tony Le, Co-Founder

This week’s Q&A is with Tony Le, co-founder of TeacherGraph, a web-based app simplifying the communication process between parents and teachers.

ETT: What’s your elevator pitch?

TL: TeacherGraph is a cloud-based web app that simplifies parent/teacher communication by organizing important information and interactions into one, easy-to-use tool.

By consolidating all important messages, student information, and teacher interactions through TeacherGraph, parents can keep track of their child’s progress more effectively. Providing the ease of access to these key insights allow parents and teachers to have more productive conversations. Parents can stay connected anywhere by receiving real-time updates about their student through email, text, or the application itself. Additionally, parents can stay engaged by responding back to the teachers, promoting two-way conversations.

We focus on the delivery so educators can spend more time teaching, and less time sorting through technology. Teachers can send class-wide messages to parents using TeacherGraph from anywhere. By making communicating easier, our mission is to increase parent engagement, which can improve student performance significantly.

TeacherGraph provides a modern solution to an outdated process. Communication is tied back to the student.

ETT: What is your company’s core value proposition? What problem are you solving?

TL: The communication gap between parents and teachers today is not contributed by the lack of technology. The technology exists. However, modern society offers a wide range of mediums for communication. One solution to solving this problem is to organize technology versus pushing individuals to adapt new ones. Instead of teachers having to deliver messages through various ways to parents, we believe they can communicate in a clear, succinct way.

TeacherGraph allows teachers to deliver messages all in one place and determines which medium is best each parent to receive the message.

ETT: Why did you get into this? What drove you to start this?

TL: There are many issues that need to be solved in the education system. We have family and friends who are educators – many of whom complain about tedious tasks and outdated ways of communicating important information.

We believed in the power of effective communication and focused solely on that. Although schools operate like businesses, many don’t see themselves that way. Great companies have effective communication tools – we want to build the equivalent specifically for education.

ETT: What do you think are the biggest obstacles in adopting technology in the education space?

TL: For many schools, things move slowly. Whether it’s due to stagnant culture, a long decision process, or budget cuts, there seems to be many little reasons that lead to the lack of adoption of technology that could really help these schools.

ETT: What is the biggest need for your startup? (e.g. funding, development, market access, channels, publicity)

TL: Currently, development. Market access may be down the road.

ETT: What should we expect to see from you in the next twelve months? (e.g. product milestones, team size, potential growth/revenue targets)

TL: We plan to launch early in the Fall. Teachers will be able to use our Beta.

ETT: Which three startups do you follow and find interesting?

TL: Enigma.io, LearnSprout, inBloom

The EdTech Times thanks Mr. Le  for taking the time and providing us with a snapshot of TeacherGraph!  

Special thanks to Sean Duffy of the EdTech Austin Meetup Group for connecting ETT to TeacherGraph and the Austin EdTech community!

To check out TeacherGraph, visit their website:

This article is cross-posted from edtechtimes.com, where I currently serve as editor-in-chief.

London-based Edxus Group, an London-based company is planning to spend €50-60 million ($64-$77M) to acquire companies and create a “European education champion” to compete with the U.S. market, according to TechCrunch and Edxus‘s site. Edxus is headed by a former business exec of Time Warner and top members of media investment firm IBIS Capital, which released a detailed report earlier this year on the edtech industry.

According to the TechCrunch article, Edxus plans to consolidate the fragmented European e-learning market, rivaling similar U.S. edtech giants such as Pearson, Blackboard, Macmillan, Kaplan and McGraw-Hill, which top the list of acquisitive e-learning companies.

From Edxus’ site, Charles McIntyre, the chief executive of IBIS Capital, added: “The European e-Learning industry currently displays both disruptive innovation and rapid growth but it is highly fragmented and lacks a dominant player. These are all characteristics of an attractive pre-consolidation phase industry so we expect our strategy to help the marketplace as a whole meet its enormous potential.”

This article is cross-posted from edtechtimes.com, where I currently serve as editor-in-chief.

The Internet is abuzz with yesterday’s announcement of Georgia Tech, Udacity, and AT&T’s MOOC launch.

Here are the basics:

• Georgia Tech will offer an Online Master of Science degree in computer science (OMS CS).
• Course content will be delivered through Udacity’s platform.  Courses will appear for free on Udacity, but only Georgia Tech’s accepted students can receive credit.
• Tuition is expected to be below $7000.
• A pilot program supported by AT&T will begin in next academic year and limited to a few hundred students.

Now, the buzz:

Co-founder Sebastian Thrun, on Udacity’s blog, puts his pride into perspective:

“There are a few moments in my life I will never forget. Like the moment I proposed to my wife, Petra. Or the moment Stanley crossed the finish line in the DARPA Grand Challenge.”

Forbes describes the move as a “shock” to higher ed:

“This is the kind of disruption that the higher education industry has been expecting and experimenting with using massively open online courses (MOOCs) for free that do not lead to a degree. Georgia Tech and Udacity made a bold move with this announcement. They changed the game by offering a sought after graduate degree through online instruction for 80% less than what the existing classroom curriculum costs, and employers are waiting for such graduates with good paying jobs.”

Inside Higher Ed’s post, entitled “Massive (but not Open)”, highlights the 4 types of OMS student:

“The first of the four tracks will include traditional degree-seeking students who will be able to complete the 12-course master’s degree in roughly three years. Georgia Tech said it does not plan to lower admission standards to find 6,000 or so students for this track — a number than is 20 times larger than its current computer science master’s degree program. Instead, Georgia Tech hopes to attract more qualified applicants from across the world, including inside the military and at companies – places that harbor nontraditional students who could not previously come to a traditional campus or find the money for a full degree, on campus or online.

The second type of student will be ‘prospective degree-seeking’ students who will be admitted to the program tentatively because they will not have to take the GRE as other applicants do. If they do well in two core classes, Georgia Tech will put them on the degree track. The university expects to enroll 2,000 such students in the next three years. 

A third type of paying student will be students who can drop in to take several courses for a certificate short of a full master’s degree. Georgia Tech expects 2,000 such students.

The final type of students will resemble the students in a traditional MOOC and will be able to take the courses but will pay nothing or perhaps a small fee for a certificate of completion for a course. Tens of thousands of students would presumably sign up for these types of courses, an enrollment figure similar to existing MOOCs.”

TechCrunch has this to say:

“Again, while the idea itself isn’t new, and Udacity isn’t the first to partner with an elite graduate program to provide quality education and an actual, graduate-level degree to students online, the quality of the academic program (and presumably its content), its focus on Computer Science, combined with its relative affordability and the ability to receive credit and complete a full, graduate-level degree online, is absolutely huge.”

“If technology and online education are going to truly transform education, maintaining the status quo isn’t acceptable, especially if these automated courses replace or curb the need for real, live human teachers. So, not to be party pooper or anything, but while this program has significant implications, it’s still all about quality content/presentation, improving retention, outcomes and ye olde learning experience. Without that, scale and affordability don’t mean quite as much.”

EdSurge talks about AT&T’s statement of STEM support, saying:

“Although AT&T’s involvement seems limited to providing what the press release calls ‘generous’ support, AT&T’s chairman and CEO, Randall Stephenson was unequivocable upbeat about the program in a statement:

‘We believe that high-quality and 100 percent online degrees can be on par with degrees received in traditional on-campus settings, and that this program could be a blueprint for helping the United States address the shortage of people with STEM degrees, as well as exponentially expand access to computer science education for students around the world.’

AT&T will have to live up to that declaration by offering the first grads jobs–but at least for now that’s in the future.”

And from the educator’s mouth, Robert Talbert on his blog on Chronicle of Higher Education:

“I think here in a nutshell is why so many educators are ambivalent about MOOCs. The way Thrun puts it here, getting a good education seems to mean sitting at the feet of ‘the best professors in the world’, by whom he means professors in ‘top–10’ programs — a designation largely determined by reputation, which is in turn driven by prestige and research output. That the quality of one’s education is determined in this way is highly debatable, first and foremost because the emphasis in this formulation of education is on the professor, not on the student. This is where a lot of things in education — online and otherwise — start to go wrong.

Most of us in education also realize the fact that a good education consists not in being around smart people but in doing interesting and useful things. And in that sense a ‘top–10’ university actually might be a terrible place to get a good education. Much better would be a CS department where professors know and interact with their students and where the curriculum is structured to provide lots of hands-on work to give students transferable, useful experiences both on the theory side of CS and on the application side. Thrun writes that the tuition cost for the credit-bearing version of the Master’s degree will be for ‘support services’. At my university that’s called ‘teaching’.”

Education blogger Audrey Watters tests AT&T on Twitter, saying:

This is just the beginning of the buzz – there is certainly more to come the education technology blogosphere processes and ruminates on the groundbreaking announcement.

Read the original press release on on CNBC via PRNewswire.