Announcing the Digital Learning Challenge Winners

We are excited to announce this year’s Digital Learning Challenge partners: CFY and Ednovo!

CFY will use the SCE Challenge grant to enhance the user experience of PowerMyLearning, its platform that aggregates the most effective digital learning activities available on the web and makes them easily accessible and usable. Ednovo will create Gooru: BLEND, which builds from Gooru’s existing education search engine to provide students with a cohesive, personalized digital learning experience.

We saw some incredible proposals, but CFY and Ednovo clearly rose to the top. Here’s a little more information on who they are and what they’re working on with our support:

• CFY has more than a decade of experience delivering educational tools and technology to underserved learners natiowide. Its PowerMyLearning project aggregates the most effective digital learning activities available on the web and makes them easily accessible, usable, and free. The Challenge project will allow CFY to enhance the user experience of PowerMyLearning, including introducing new viral marketing and engagement features and improving the platform’s look and feel. We expect this catalytic work will create a virtuous cycle of greater demand, which drives new development of digital education content and in turn more demand for PowerMyLearning.  The ultimate objective is to enable children to make greater and more effective use of high-quality digital learning activities.
• Ednovo has built Gooru, an innovative search engine for learning. The Challenge project will allow the organization to create Gooru: BLEND, which will build from Gooru’s existing platform to provide students with a cohesive, personalized digital learning experience. The project’s primary improvements will be building the infrastructure for “Collections 2.0”—curated, guided collections of digital learning resources, with quizzes that provide learning feedback in real time. In the long term, Gooru: BLEND will become a blended learning suite that is engaging, affordable (free except for the cost of the device), and relevant for students across all subjects. This project also provides funding to design and create a prototype for collections in the high-need subject area of middle-school math.

Our team had a great time reading about so many high-impact, under-the-radar organizations, and becoming acquainted with the finalists. It gave us great faith in the education sector as a whole, and in digital learning entrepreneurs in particular.

Look for another post in the coming weeks about the Challenge process and what we learned. And yes, we expect to run another Challenge in the near future.