Knewton, one of the early EdTech pioneers, made ambitious announcements about ten years ago regarding tools to serve adaptive real-time learning online .Today, lets check in on what is up currently with Knewton’s projects and ambitions, as well as those of the giant Ed resources and publishing corporation Pearson.
Knewton partnered with Pearson in 2012. Knewton founder Jose Ferreira resigned from his CEO position in 2016. Knewton today seems mostly out of K-12, and focused on adaptive learning for college curricula.
Alta is Knewton’s newest product for higher education. Alta is a complete courseware solution that combines Knewton’s expertly designed adaptive learning technology with high quality openly available content to deliver a personalized learning experience that is affordable, accessible and improves student outcomes.
All of the instructional content needed for a course — including text and video, examples and assessments — is included in each alta product. Alta is now available in multiple courses in math, statistics, economics and chemistry.
alta for Instructors | alta for Students
In 2017, Pearson announced they were “Phasing Down” their partnership with Knewton, Pearson also phased themselves down, and has been working on restructuring their business, and business models, in a process that continues today.
Pearson put the K-12 part of the company up for sale officially early this year, but as of July 18 it was still “on the market”. News of a sale since then isn’t showing up on Google, so perhaps it hasn’t happened to date. For reasons an analyst suggests below:
An investment analyst, Weisburgh—who was not part of the July 18 Pearson conference call—said “what’s sexy” to ed-tech investors now are these opportunities: “artificial intelligence; next-generation tech platforms, and blockchain.” While Pearson has some of that, “they are mostly in more boring sectors,” he said.
One comment might be that EdTech changes so quickly it’s very hard to scale up a successful business model, as generally the buyers are the huge US educational establishment. Public School purchasing, either locally, or at the state level, is a very very slow cumbersome process. By the time the contract can be signed, after having gone through various revisions and getting the bureaucracy through all its hoops, the technology has likely already moved on, and huge investments are made in platforms on their way out. Which then become barriers to the new tech solutions.
Pearson had enormous assets at one point controlling much of educational publishing, among other ventures like the Financial Times of London. Now they are trying to be “slimmed down”. If Pearson the giant with capital to burn can’t keep up with the pace of changes in EdTech, surely the state departments of education and local school districts can’t either. But then, perhaps Apple or Google or Amazon …or YouTube, Facebook et al, or some new startup… could.
In K-12, our assessment-led business is clearly moving to a world of fewer, better, smarter assessments where we can provide much more adaptive, personalized, useful feedback to teachers, parents and students, as well as to state departments of education.
We’re also making big investments in authentic assessments that know more than whether you’ve got the answer right or wrong, but why, and providing much more granular, personal and adaptive, feedback to students based on the years of data that we have, on the tens of millions of students that we’ve got.
In higher education we launched the new Revel app, and also pioneered the market in inclusive access, where we provide to students the opportunity to buy our courseware in ways that provides more affordable choice, but also better outcomes.
This is the Spotify generation. Students will pay for use. They don’t want to buy to own, and they only want to pay to use things that are directly relevant to their course and their outcomes.
“Authentic Assessment” may well be part of the current US Ed establishment’s journey to test and assess on a nationwide scale. As noted in previous post comment, perhaps BlockChain might supersede such national assessment attempts, which seem inherently problematic, to date.Even the NEA currently has their own “authentic assessment” tools, and of course they are “just” a teacher’s union, not a testing and assessment producer.
Which perhaps comments on how convoluted the politics of national assessment and testing are today. Perhaps it will all eventually come together into one consensus approach, but it seems just as likely that a completely different approach might come to pass, potentially using BlockChain?
Kidding but not kidding. Here’s a recent report on what’s up with Pearson, the former goliath of Educational “materials and resources”.
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