Last year, SCE launched a challenge initiative to identify and partner with organizations working to increase access to the most engaging, educationally effective digital learning media, particularly for underserved populations.

We were thrilled by the response we received and were able to learn about many high-impact organizations working to increase access to quality digital learning tools. We saw some incredible proposals, but CFY’s PowerMyLearning and Ednovo’s Gooru demonstrated the greatest potential to increase the supply of high-quality digital learning media, and foster greater use of these products in environments that maximize learning.

We recently checked in with Pram from Ednovo and Elisabeth from CFY to share an update on their progress, thoughts on how the digital learning field is changing and ideas about how we can continue to develop an ecosystem that supports the development and distribution of high-quality digital learning tools.

A few moments with Prasad Ram (aka Pram), Founder, CEO and Chairman of Gooru

Tell us a bit about Gooru.

Gooru was founded in 2011 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a mission to honor the human right to education by developing innovative technology to positively impact learning. Gooru accomplishes this by delivering the best resources on the Web to teachers and students through a free search engine for learning. With over 10 million online resources and 1 million questions, Gooru makes it easy to discover topic relevant and standards-aligned K-12 content to address specific students’ needs. Teachers share lessons and homework with students through Gooru collections, playlists of videos, digital textbooks, games, and quiz questions they can customize for their class. View this video to see how Gooru works.

What challenges or gaps are you trying to address and how is Gooru impacting the digital learning space?

We all know that teachers are strapped for time. As the amount of information and access to technology increases, teachers and students are now challenged with filtering through the noise. Gooru saves teachers time by giving them personalized access to the best materials on the web, the ability to organize and remix content into playlists and share with students in class or as homework. Like familiar sites you use to find movies or shop online, Gooru learns users’ preferences and unique needs through their effort and performance on the site. Gooru can suggest to teachers the exact set of learning resources that meet individual student needs, giving them a scalable solution to differentiate the materials they share with their students.

What impact does Gooru have on how and what children are learning and how are you measuring that impact?

Gooru brings the vast content of the Web to teachers and students in a way that immediately addresses their specific needs and learning styles. Students use Gooru for independent learning or when directed by their teachers during class or through homework assignments. Diana Herrington, a veteran and honored Mathematics teacher based in Clovis, CA, used Gooru to help her students learn more efficiently, and to be able to evaluate whether material is beneficial for their learning process. Using this teaching method, Diana’s participating students saw their unit test scores increase 10-15 percentage points above those who didn’t. Diana says, “my students learned that Gooru gave them an alternative for engagement in the curriculum.”

In your opinion, what is the most exciting thing happening right now in digital learning?

It is clear that personalized learning at scale through digital learning environments has the greatest potential to produce positive learning outcomes. As personalization technology is used to extend the benefits of the Web and technology for learning we are seeing innovative approaches in traditional and non-traditional learning environments propel forward with strong momentum. This can be seen by the growing number of students who are enabled to take ownership of their education with custom learning pathways based on their interests. There is compelling research showing that students who are empowered to use resources that they learn best from and at a pace that they are most comfortable with, approach learning with greater motivation.

We are also excited to see more and more classrooms coming online with smart phones, tablets and laptops. It will take some time to have all classrooms in America technology ready, though one can feel that the digital classroom with all its great benefits for learning is within reach.

How can funders, investors, educators and consumers help to develop the innovation ecosystem needed to support the creation of high-quality, scalable digital learning tools? What barriers or gaps do you see in the field?

Teachers and students have a large number of tools and learning resources accessible to them today. These independent tools and content have been supported by funders and investors over the past decade. Teachers and students are however demanding integrated solutions — not point products. They want capabilities such as search, social, wiki, analytics, personalization and assessments to work as a tight knit solution. For education to succeed in this new technology-centric era, it requires a vibrant ecosystem of funders and companies working together to foster open systems. Funders can help by requiring their grantees to develop open solutions and content and avoid duplicative efforts by leveraging open solutions. The greatest source of friction to a world of open education is the absence of platforms that every edtech company can build upon. Similar to the iOS and Android mobile platforms, or enterprise platforms such as SAP and Oracle, education needs a platform that the world can rally around.

How do you see digital learning transforming education over the next decade?

We envision a world where every student will have access to the highest quality of education and personalized learning is becoming widely accepted as the way forward to achieve this.  While technology is viewed as the catalyst for this shift in approach, it is clear teachers will continue to play a crucial role in facilitating an environment of autonomous and pervasive learning for students. This means a future education paradigm that extends beyond the four walls of a classroom and a learning path that is mapped based on a student’s interests and optimal pace administered by teachers through technology.

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A few moments with Elisabeth Stock, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of CFY 

Tell us a bit about PowerMyLearning.

PowerMyLearning.org is a destination for thousands of the best free online learning activities from across the web. Developed for K-12 children, and their parents and teachers, it offers an engaging way for kids to learn while having fun. PowerMyLearning makes it simple to find and use carefully curated games, videos, and simulations that have been tagged by subject, grade, individual Common Core Standard, and more.

The platform also includes powerful tools, like our Playlist feature, which lets teachers sequence activities (like songs on iTunes) and assign them so each child gets material that’s right for them. Kids can then access these Playlists anywhere, providing them with a fun educational resource to propel achievement.

The next generation PowerMyLearning will be launching in September and will include lots of great enhancements. Later this fall, the learning experience will become even more engaging, social, and personal for kids as we integrate gamification features funded by SCE.

What challenges or gaps are you trying to address and how is PowerMyLearning impacting the digital learning space?

PowerMyLearning addresses a major challenge in the digital learning space – the dizzying array of learning content available on the web that makes it hard to know what’s trusted, what’s high-quality, and what’s age-appropriate. PowerMyLearning addresses this challenge by making it easy to find and use the most engaging and effective activities available. PowerMyLearning can be used to help children learn, by enabling them to catch up if they’re falling behind, encouraging them to push ahead if they’re not challenged enough, or just empowering them to pursue a topic of interest. A team of professional educators has already vetted the content found on PowerMyLearning so kids and their families and teachers know it’s trusted.  This team has also tagged the content by subject, grade, Common Core Standard, and more, so kids and their families and teachers can easily find and use what they need.

What impact does PowerMyLearning have on how and what children are learning and how are you measuring that impact?

PowerMyLearning helps children learn and empowers them to take charge of their learning. By making available thousands of activities, PowerMyLearning enables kids to enrich their education through exploration, sparking new interests in the process. It also offers pathways for self-remediation. Kids learn in different ways and PowerMyLearning provides them the diversity to learn in a way that works for them. Kids quickly become cognizant of their academic strengths and weaknesses and know how to help themselves advance their learning.

To measure impact, we look at academic gains at partner schools using PowerMyLearning. A New York Times article highlighted the results at one school where the use of PowerMyLearning resulted in real gains, especially for the most struggling students. Kids who had previously withdrawn from studies were suddenly re-energized by the range of fun and engaging educational activities they could access and explore on their own. We also look at time on assigned versus unassigned activities. Data shows kids spend approximately half their time on PowerMyLearning using teacher-assigned activities and half exploring activities that they have found on their own.

In your opinion, what is the most exciting thing happening right now in digital learning?

The most exciting thing happening in digital learning is the explosion of content children can now access online to meet their specific learning needs. Kids can use this content to get immediate feedback on how well they understand what they are learning and to get to know themselves better as learners. They can also use this content to explore and enrich their learning. One factor that is making this happen is the transformation taking place in the K-12 education marketplace. Basically, the marketplace is undergoing the same transformation that the music industry has already experienced – evolving from offering content in large chunks (such as a comprehensive software product or “music album”) to offering content in small granular and modular chunks (such as a short learning activity or a “song”). The benefit of this shift is that small pieces of content from different publishers can be mixed and matched and mashed up with teacher self-generated content to create the best possible learning experience for each student. We see the PowerMyLearning platform as an integral part of this transformation to granular, modular content.

How can funders, investors, educators and consumers help to develop the innovation ecosystem needed to support the creation of high-quality, scalable digital learning tools? What barriers or gaps do you see in the field?

To encourage the creation of high-quality, scalable digital learning tools, we need to change the current ecosystem. Right now, small developers have no easy distribution mechanism for getting their products into the market and instead must sell their products via relationships in a fragmented marketplace. One way funders and investors could change this ecosystem it to help platforms like PowerMyLearning remove these barriers so we can have a more vibrant marketplace where small developers can thrive.

How do you see digital learning transforming education over the next decade?

Over the next decade, we see digital learning transforming education by enabling teachers to fully personalize the learning experience for their students and also enabling kids to drive their own learning at their own pace. We believe that it’s essential to propel both a personalized instruction cycle and a student-driven learning cycle in an integrated manner. If we can do this, we can improve academic achievement nationwide and better prepare kids for college.

The Challenge didn’t start with a Challenge. It began with a question: Why isn’t the best stuff getting to the most kids? And by “stuff,” we meant “digital learning media.”

During late 2011 and early 2012, our staff and board talked through this problem with our partners and advisors. At one point, it was “building the School in the Cloud.” At another, it was “creating the systems integrator for digital learning.” We thought someone should build The Platform for digital learning, but we knew it wouldn’t be us. As with everything SCE does, we were looking for a high-leverage way to address a multibillion-dollar problem.

We settled on an idea, inspired by our board member Paul Jansen, an expert on prizes and innovation. Why not just put up a vision of what we think should exist, and let the experts in the field tell us how they’d build it? That became the Digital Learning Challenge.

The Knight Foundation and Gates Foundation are two of many organizations using similar methods, with great success. There would be two key differences from what we’d seen before:

1. We were more specific about the world we wanted to create
2. We were more focused on system-level change than the success of individual projects.

We were thrilled to receive nearly 100 letters of inquiry in response to our Request for LOIs. Our first-round screening process focused on five core criteria (rating each on a 1-to-10 scale):

• Vision: Does this project offer a compelling vision for changing the field?
• Strategy: Does the LOI describe a realistic plan for achieving its goals?
• Organization: Is this organization capable of executing successfully on this strategy?
• Alignment: Is this project aligned with SCE’s Challenge focus?
• Accountability: Will we be able to measure the project’s success?

About a dozen rose to the surface for our review team. After discussions with our board, we solicited detailed proposals from five organizations that seemed most aligned with SCE’s goals and our capacity to be strong partners. From that group, we worked with our advisors to select CFY and Ednovo as our two key partners (see earlier announcement).

Here are 5 things we learned about our field during the process:

1. The field is smarter than we are. That there is wisdom in crowds—and in unexpected places—is no secret. But after nearly three years of deep exploration in the education technology sector, we were still surprised to surface dozens of great ideas and great projects we had never heard of.
2. SCE is a little different. We thought our goals and our process were ambitious, but straightforward. Yet throughout the process, we heard feedback that we were doing something unlike our grantmaker peers. The downside was that we received some blank stares (or their digital equivalent) when we described the Challenge externally. The upside is that many of the field’s most forward-thinking leaders really got what we were doing, and became passionate about spreading the word.
3. Everyone thinks they’re the platform. We know that there won’t be one platform for accessing digital learning product, but we do expect major consolidation around how children (and the schools, programs, and people that serve them) access digital learning media. It seems there are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who disagree with us. We’d love to be proven wrong.
4. People still love school. Edtech boosters seem to fit into two categories. Those who see kids playing videogames all the time, and say, “Hey, let’s bring videogames into school, and make education more like a videogame.” And then those who see kids playing videogames all the time, and say, “Wow, that’s a lot of kid time. Maybe we should get them to play different games, or better harvest the learning that’s happening in the games that exist.” From the looks of what we saw during the Challenge process, most people are still stuck in the former category, and (more disappointing, at least to us) trying to slot technology into traditional school paradigms instead of rethinking new models of blended learning.
5. Content has a long way to go. We read a lot of strong proposals from content developers. But most of them focused on the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic), not on more complex Deeper Learning skills or social-emotional skills. And the products themselves weren’t pushing the boundaries of technology: we saw zero alternate reality games, only a few virtual worlds, and a surprisingly small number of tablet apps. One of our next big post-Challenge initiatives is aimed at helping developers and entrepreneurs create path-breaking learning products. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading. We’re so glad the selection process went as well as it did, and we welcome feedback as we look to try it again.

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.

SCE was one of a group of foundations that supported a new National Research Council report called: “Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21^st Century.” The report was a rigorous, research-guided attempt to clear up what we mean by terms like “21^st century skills” and “deeper learning”—with an eye toward actionable ideas that educators and others can employ to help children learn.

You can read the full report here and a brief summary here.

We believe this work is an important step forward toward giving children an education that matters. But we want to hear what you think. So we invite you to take a look, read up, and let us know. What’s missing? What did the researchers miss? What else would you want to know? How can we make it more useful to people in the field? Comment here, or reach out to us at info@scefdn.comfdn.org.

Learn more about out SCE’s partnership with Common Sense Media: a system that rates the learning potential of digital media products http://www.commonsensemedia.org/learning-ratings

The astonishing amount of time children spend engaged with digital media led CSM to create this resource and uncover the most engaging learning-based games, apps, websites and more. CSM uses its depth of educational and technological expertise to help more than 100 million American families take advantage of the right kind of digital media products.

To read more about SCE’s partnership with Common Sense, click here. Read what these articles have to say about CSM: Education Week here. The Huffington Post here. Yahoo here. And Lifetime Moms here.

Welcome to the fourth in a series on why the digital learning media market is broken. (For an introduction, and links to the rest of the posts, click here.) Today, we’re talking about testing and evaluation—what, in theory, people and organizations would use to find out whether children are actually learning something (or more things) by using digital tools.

Resource gaps: The folks with the money, from foundations to venture capitalists to the federal government, fail to invest enough to properly ascertain whether projects and products actually teach and engage children. The buyers lack the resources to test the quality of digital learning products—reflecting an underutilization of the billions of dollars[i] spent by school districts on computers and technology infrastructure. There’s a lot to be culled from the results of the data systems investments spurred by Race to the Top. But in most states, that’s just not yet happening in a way that’s useful.

Information gaps: There is a paucity of rigorous research evaluating the efficacy of digital learning products.[ii] There is no consensus on which aspects of these tools are worth testing. Several magazines, websites, and industry organizations rate or review digital media, but the rubrics and methods vary drastically, and are seldom based on the learning value of the products. Government agencies with the power to be arbiters of quality are just beginning to think about these problems in a serious way.

Infrastructure gaps: With so many players, the market for ratings/certification of high-quality products is fragmented, with no universally accepted system. Although several organizations offer valuable services to test the learning value of specific products, the costs are often too high for start-up companies (or even established firms), and most are geared toward the traditional K-12 “ed tech” market. The establishment of Common Core Standards will be useful here—once you have a common standard of “what is to be learned,” it’s much easier to ask “does this product help children learn it?” But the Standards leave much to be desired on complex skills like systems thinking, and are extremely weak on important social-emotional skills like resilience, persistence, and empathy.

Misaligned incentives: Because the sector lacks a common quality standard, much less a trustmark like the Good Housekeeping Seal, many purchasing decisions are made based on marketing muscle and sales relationships, not on what works. So businesses have little incentive to pay to rigorously test whether their products are effective for learning.

It’s hard to write about this without mentioning that SCE and our partners are about to launch a major project focused on addressing these issues, but this series is focused on what’s wrong. We’ll get to how to capitalize on what’s right soon enough.

Disagree? Find us on Twitter or reach out via our site. We’re a learning foundation and we believe in iterative knowledge and action. Everything we know (or think we know) we know because people like you have told us.

Welcome to the third in a series on why the digital learning media market is broken. (For an introduction, and links to the rest of the posts, click here.) Today, we’re looking at design and development—the process by which ideas and research about digital learning become actual digital learning objects.

Resource gaps: If you’re reading this, you already know that investment in learning technologies is escalating, reaching well into the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Unfortunately, investors are relatively risk-averse, and most capital is deployed to conservative, sustaining innovations, such as skill-and-drill software that mimics traditional school activities. Few investors seem interested in technologies that capitalize on the unique qualities of interactive media: personalized software that adapts to the learner; participatory products that encourage children to collaborate and create; highly engaging, immersive games and simulations that encourage and reward persistence and exploration (including entertainment media products not originally intended for educational use). Even fewer spend money on technologies that offer opportunities to engage in and practice Deeper Learning and 21st Century Skills such as problem solving, creativity, persistence, and collaboration. Essentially, most of the folks with money are using 21st century tools to make 19th century education faster and cheaper. A similar pattern of risk-averse behavior exists in both the foundation and public sectors. [i]

Information gaps: As we noted in a previous post, there’s little knowledge transfer between academia and industry. Many new investors, especially venture capital firms, entering the sector lack the experience to know what they don’t know—especially about how children learn. Many are experts in consumer entertainment technology who know only the education system that they (and perhaps their children) lived through. While this isn’t a terrible thing, we’re already seeing the creation of successful, profitable “education” companies whose products do not actually help children learn anything useful. For those who value rigor, there is a dearth of publicly available knowledge about design practices for digital learning products. The few places where this knowledge does exist are too nascent, academic, or insular to provide accessible, actionable information.

Infrastructure gaps: Digital learning start-ups, for-profit or nonprofit, can turn to only a handful of incubators and service providers as they build their products. Most of the conferences where they might network and learn are either too conservative, or not market-oriented enough to be relevant to creating actual products.

Misaligned incentives: America’s assessment system and our education system are both years behind the skills that children must learn to succeed. Consequently, investors and entrepreneurs have an easier time validating the profit potential of (and making money from) less-than-innovative tools. Education companies lack incentives to invest much in high-risk product development, or to seek out and share knowledge about new learning approaches and goals. The same is true of entertainment companies, which bet on massive entertainment profits, not the uncertain potential of learning media.[ii] None of these companies has much of an incentive to design software or services with children from low-income families as the target audience, because there are more lucrative consumers and families with the money and the interest in products that sound like they will help their children gain an educational edge. The most talented entertainment media developers and education curriculum designers face considerable financial risk, and limited chance of upside, if they opt to leave stable jobs to join digital learning start-ups. Amongst digital learning creators, there exists a vague and minimal merit system: While there are several award programs for digital learning media projects, compensation is insufficient to spur consistent and extraordinary innovation.

Disagree? Find us on Twitter or reach out via our site. We’re a learning foundation and we believe in iterative knowledge and action. Everything we know (or think we know), we know because people like you have told us.

Welcome to the second in a series on why the digital learning media market is broken. (For an introduction, and the rest of the posts, click here.)

Resource gaps: Research is actually one of the few somewhat bright spots in the digital learning field. The MacArthur Foundation—along with Hewlett, Gates, and a handful of others—have invested tens of millions of dollars on academic research here during the past few years. Partly because of their advocacy and field-building, the DL hype has reached Washington, leading to hundreds of millions in government funding in the past few years, and major corporations from Disney to Dell are spending millions more. Researchers can also draw on significant progress during the past decade in relevant disciplines like learning sciences, cognitive science, computer science, education, child development, and neuroscience.

However, the field remains nascent, and so does funding and other resources. More than 40 years after The Oregon Trail was developed at Carleton College, there are still barely a dozen full-fledged university departments or centers dedicated to digital learning research,[i] and few tenure-track positions devoted to researching digital media and learning. Spending in education research in general lags that in others sectors, and education technology is no exception. Even tenured professors tell us they’re finding it difficult to attract grants from the government, foundations, or companies.

Information gaps: The relatively young field and small funding pool—along with fast, continuous changes in technology use—create a situation where even experts do not yet fully grasp how, when, whether, and why digital learning works. This is no surprise given the funding deficiencies, but it’s a massive problem that hasn’t been solved, and given the speed of innovation it seems like a tough challenge.

Infrastructure gaps: Some of the most valuable (and most often overlooked) work by MacArthur in this area has been its grantmaking in field-building, working to create the academic infrastructure for digital learning—conferences, online forums and offline communities, and dedicated laboratories. But all of these structures, no matter who has funded them, remain immature.[ii] This means there are too few connections or technology transfer points between academia and industry, with some notable exceptions. Researchers find it difficult to persuade existing businesses[iii] to use discoveries in building products, and seldom have the skills (or support) to realize research findings in either commercial or nonprofit products. And, of course, not every researcher wants to collaborate with industry. The knowledge transfer and partnership difficulties run the other way as well—digital media companies (from Zynga to Disney) collect vast troves of data and knowledge that are inaccessible to the academic community.

Misaligned Incentives: Commercial efforts are competitive and proprietary; hence, important results derived from corporate research are closely held. Tenure-track academic researchers are rewarded more for publishing papers than for transforming pioneering research into real-world application, or sharing theories about research failures. Despite the growth of interdisciplinary research, many academics are still incented to compete with other disciplines rather than collaborate. What’s more, the natural speed of academia is slower than that of industry—the pressures push professors toward accuracy and deliberation. The same is true of the incentives for young researchers to specialize in very niche areas. None of these is necessarily bad, but it does mean there are many, many researchers examining the effects of broadcast television on children, and comparatively few examining, for example, mobile apps.

That’s it for now…up next: Design & Development.

Disagree? Find us on Twitter or reach out via our site. We’re a learning foundation and we believe in iterative knowledge and action. Everything we know (or think we know) we know because people like you have told us.