Silicon Valley behemoth Google recently showed a new interest in
online education through investment in Renaissance Learning, which provides
cloud-based educational software and other reading and assessment tools. Google
Capital, the company’s new investment arm, provided $40 million in capital for
the expansion of Renaissance products.
Google began its foray into investing in 2009 with Google Ventures, which
focuses on early-stage startups in Silicon
Valley and beyond. Google Capital, on the other hand,
will focus primarily on late-stage companies. David Lawee, the manager of
Google Capital, stated that education would remain a primary focus for the
division.
Based in Wisconsin, Renaissance has created learning software for
decades and was publicly traded until 2011, at which time a British private
equity firm purchased it. Today, the company provides cloud-based educational
software and additionally offers solutions for communication between students
and teachers both on the web and through mobile devices.
Lawee and his team targeted Renaissance because of its potential for having a
real and immediate impact on the quality of education in the United States and around the world.
Chegg for Good is a social service and charitable offshoot of the
popular online textbook rental and sales company Chegg in California.
The company regularly sets aside paid workdays for its employees to
volunteer in their communities. Chegg staff members recently worked with
the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties to
distribute food during one of the organization’s Family Harvest Days in
San Jose.
Family Harvest Days offer both high-quality food and
educational programming to low-income families with children under 18.
Volunteers at the events assist with set-up and food distribution, sign
up new participants in the Second Harvest program, and help attendees
carry food to their vehicles.
The Chegg employees were eager to
unload and distribute the fresh, frozen, and canned fruits and
vegetables, frozen turkeys, eggs, and milk that would make a big
difference in the lives of San Jose children. Second Harvest clients
joined in and helped out as volunteers before receiving their own
much-needed supplies. Without the services of Second Harvest, many
children and teens from food-insecure households would have few
nutritious meals at home.
Rick Bolander, the managing director of
Redwood City-based Gabriel Venture Partners, holds a board seat at
Chegg and other corporations that have benefited from his
entrepreneurial expertise.
A group of business leaders with connections to Silicon Valley
recently established Michigan eLab through the University of Michigan
(U-M). The project originally developed due to the fact that graduates
of the university lacked access to networking opportunities, venture
capital funds, and experienced entrepreneurial mentors.
The four
venture capitalists who jointly founded eLab now focus on coaching and
assisting these graduates in turning their university research into
functioning businesses. Of the four, three have a direct connection to
U-M. Rick Bolander, the managing partner of Gabriel Venture Partners,
graduated from the school’s electrical engineering program and went on
to earn his MBA from Harvard Business School. In addition, Doug Neal has
held high-level positions at Hewlett-Packard and other technology
firms. In 2005, he relocated to Michigan and has worked with aspiring
U-M entrepreneurs through business incubators like the university’s
Center for Entrepreneurship, where he served as managing director until
recently. Bob Stefanski received engineering and law degrees from U-M.
He has also worked with the Center for Entrepreneurship and now
practices law in Silicon Valley. The three U-M graduates are joined by
Scott Chou, a technology-focused venture capitalist and a managing
director at Gabriel Venture Partners.
To date, Michigan eLab has
received funding that includes more than $2 million from the Pure
Michigan Venture Development Fund, and it hopes to raise $40 million
from its initial round of funding. The eLab serves to connect Silicon
Valley venture capitalists with wide-ranging knowledge of the world with
high-technology start-ups and Michigan-based entrepreneurs with
promising ideas. The eLab also focuses on start-ups based on disruptive
innovations that can create new market conditions within a field. With
support from the university, it seeks to create a high-quality business
ecosystem throughout the state in the cities of Ann Arbor, Detroit,
Kalamazoo, and other metropolitan areas.
The FCC created the National Broadband Plan in 2009 to outline
targets for updating broadband infrastructure and access across all
sectors in the country. With regard to education, one of the plan's key
recommendations is to foster innovations that specifically enable
wireless connectivity for mobile devices, so that students can more
easily access the Internet at home or in school. This recommendation is
based on research showing that online learning can substantially boost
students’ achievement in reading and math, as well as motivate students
toward better overall school performance.
Five years into the
plan’s implementation, numerous innovative educational technologies are
being tested in classrooms and homes across the country. Educational
wireless provider Kajeet has developed a technology called SmartSpot,
which enables students to connect to fast 4G LTE networks using any
Wi-Fi-enabled device. Affordable for schools and families, the
technology is designed to be safe for children who go online for their
studies.
A total of 450 SmartSpot devices have been deployed to
eight schools in Detroit, Michigan, for the current school year. These
schools provide a stark example of the digital divide in America:
roughly 70 percent of these students have no Internet access at home.
This greatly limits how teachers can integrate valuable online resources
into coursework. SmartSpot will remove this restriction, thereby
providing teachers with added flexibility and motivating students toward
success in school.
Even before graduating in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in
computer engineering from the University of Michigan, Tony Fadell showed
an entrepreneurial knack as chief executive officer of Constructive
Instruments, a company that produced multimedia software for children.
Upon graduating, he followed a rapidly rising career trajectory in
disruptive consumer electronics. By the end of 2001, he had produced the
initial concept and design for the groundbreaking Apple iPod, and he
eventually became senior vice president of Apple's iPod Division.
Mr.
Fadell cofounded Nest Labs in 2010 and currently serves as chief
executive officer. His company devotes itself to reimagining mundane
household products, with the goal of improving efficiency through
elegant design. The Nest Learning Thermostat, for example, presents a
simple and sleek interface and intelligently adjusts itself according to
a homeowner's schedule.
Mr. Fadell is a proven innovator, and
his views on disruptive technology are highly sought after. In a number
of interviews and talks in recent years, he has stressed the
relationship between a disruptive technology and marketing. At the 2013
LeWeb conference, in Paris, he noted that for a disruptive technology to
be successfully pushed to market, the consumer must understand the
problem that the technology is trying to fix, and how fixing it provides
a genuine benefit. This education process should be the goal of
marketing.
Rick Bolander, who currently serves as managing partner with Bay
Area-based Gabriel Venture Partners, has worked with numerous start-up
corporations with technology-centered business models. His client list
has included Chegg, Netscaler, and Kajeet, Inc. Deeply committed to
demonstrating the positive social aspects of disruptive technology, Rick
Bolander understands the importance of STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and math) literacy for today’s students.
Recently,
many educators have focused attention on multimedia literacy, the skills
associated with understanding and manipulating virtual, aural, visual,
and physical components to express ideas and create original content.
Experts predict that these abilities, as well as the skills associated
with interactive devices such as those found in computer gaming, will
play a major role in personal and career success in coming decades.
Some
commentators in the field have even extended the concept to include
programming, the ability to create logical and comprehensive
instructions for digital technology applications, as the key “literacy”
for today’s generation. These experts believe that, just as reading and
writing defined literacy for previous generations, future generations
will consider the ability to program a primary type of literacy.
Many
of today’s young people are already learning math and logic skills
associated with programming through various in-school and
extracurricular activities. Scratch, a program conceived at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, develops the visual
programming skills needed to create animated characters and stories.
Lego’s Mindstorms kits combine the popular building set with robotics
through the use of command-box programming, and the Arduino is a simple
introduction to open-source electronics programming using a language
analogous to C++.
