I found an article in our small Peninsula Daily News celebrating the release of a low-cost online math tutoring program, called Education Online Learning (EOL). A math tutor from the area, Andrew Martyanov, had a hand in creating the tutoring program. He answered an advertisement by John Leddo, a psychologist and artificial-intelligence researcher to design the curriculum for an individualized style of online tutoring.
The concept offers middle and high school students self-paced math tutoring for $5 per month. The tutoring technology recognizes which problems will teach the child and then matches with an effective learning style. The programs guides the student through the process of how to solve the problem, giving helpful hints without giving away the answer.
The article mentions that Leddo, a low income student who earned a scholarship to a prestigious prep school in New England, wanted to find a way to offer the kind of learning opportunities he was given to a larger group of lower income students. The math tutor, Martyanov, became a co-owner and partner in the creation of EOL. The technology and funding came together and the website was launched in September 2013.
I was unable to find the funding that became available to launch the website. The website success stories did mention a National Science Foundation grant during the research phase with the assistance of a film maker who worked on Star Wars.
I found the list of partnering firms interesting. The program seems to operate entirely online yet the partners offer services that may provide face to face support.
great catch Kris…so many aspects of this relevant to PSA moving forward. A grass roots lean startup model…
“”””””We offer the highest quality online tutoring and most advanced learning services anywhere.””””
I like “Advanced Learning Services”…. as a concept and potential name for a startup…
The role of tutor is a good place to start from when trying to envision and define what new cloud supported “teacher/ facilitator” roles might look like. Generally a tutor has been thought of as outside conventional educational systems…a third party add-on to address needs not being addressed. Probably a tutor connotes a one on one situation as well, where a learner gets highly personalized “instruction”.
A good DLE, and a good social learning construct, would incorporate some of the best practices of a “tutor” while, as this group above has, extending those practices to include cloud resources, and asynchronous “tutoring”.
Since our present educational model already includes roles for “tutors”, one could use that as a door to supply a service that kind of looked like tutoring, and thus find acceptance, with actually extended and “opened up” cloud based learning, and tutors who are not always F2F, or even in the same hemisphere. (earlier posts here on some of that already happening…tutors in Philippines helping kids learn in Houston…etc.
We should look into this more Kris. XLNT curation…