Language learning startup Voxy now offers free English lessons in a classroom at the SoHo HQ. Voxy Academy is both a research and development lab in which new products will be tested in a classic brick and mortar environment.

The Voxy team aims to explore how mobile and web-based educational technology like the Voxy applications can enhance real-word classroom mechanics and pedagogy. Voxy team members like product managers and developers will not only observe the students but also interact with them, helping them to handle new products or features. In return Voxy will get first hand feedback and user data directly from its users.

The Voxy Academy team will also work on a curriculum for English teachers, helping them to integrate Voxy’s mobile and web based products in their own classroom.

Voxy Academy is currently accepting students who are native Spanish and Portuguese speakers in New York City with a basic class on Tuesdays at 7 PM and an advanced class on Thursdays at 7 PM. Interested learners can contact classes@voxy.com.

If you want to know how it all started, below is the EDUKWEST interview Kirsten did back in October 2010, shortly after the official launch at TechCrunch Disrupt.

According to Seattle based tech blog GeekWire TeachStreet has been acquired by Amazon. It is a talent acquisition and the service will be shut down on February 15th. Team TeachStreet already joined the AmazonLocal team.

Teachers can export their data with a tool provided by TeachStreet and there is also a special FAQ for the transition.

The main reason for this acquisition seems to be the infamous Google Panda update back in February 2011 which has had a negative effect on the traffic of various companies that relied on SEO driven visitors. Apparently TechStreet never really recovered from this blow.

Dave and I talked about the issue on KWestions in March 2011 and back in January, hence right before the Panda update, I talked to Jason Calacanis whose company Mahalo has also been hit heavily by the algorithm change. Both interviews are embedded below.

I will share some personal thoughts on this on KirstenWinkler.com but I can already say that I am of course happy for Dave and the team but also pretty sad to see one of my favorite startups go. I also need to find out how the acquisition of TeachStreet might affect their Australian partner doMore.

EDUKWEST Episode #89 published: February 2nd 2012 Guest: Shmuel Meitar, Founder Time To Know

This Interview is sponsored by Einztein – The Social Learning Network Einztein is the social learning network for higher education and lifelong learners. Einztein brings the power of social networking to learning and enables anyone to create an online learning community for resource sharing, collaboration and discussion.

Time To Know was founded in 2004 by Shmuel Meitar as a philanthropic endeavor, investing $60 million of his own wealth into the startup according to TechCrunch. Today Time To Know offers a complete curriculum in math as well as language arts along with a digital platform for schools in K-12.

The holistic Time To Know way to teach has already been implemented in public schools in 150 classrooms in Israel and 120 classrooms in Texas and New York by the end of the 2010-2011 school year.

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Shmuel Meitar

For EDUKWEST episode 89 I had the privilege to learn more about Time To Know from its founder and education advocate Shmuel Meitar.

Time To Know was founded in 2004 by Shmuel Meitar as a philanthropic endeavor, investing $60 million of his own wealth into the startup according to TechCrunch. Today Time To Know offers a complete curriculum in math as well as language arts along with a digital platform for schools in K-12.

The holistic Time To Know way to teach has already been implemented in public schools in 150 classrooms in Israel and 120 classrooms in Texas and New York by the end of the 2010-2011 school year.

The objectives are to find a meaningful way to engage all three parties included in the teaching / learning process: teachers get deep knowledge about the individual performances of their students. Students get challenged according to their level and performance, so that they get positive feedback and are able to score better in assessments, but also develop a deeper understanding of concepts. Parents stay in regular contact with the class teacher and have an overview of their children’s learning curve at any time.

In our interview we also set the focus on the importance of leadership. Time To Know requests quite some commitment from the school district but also the individual schools in order to implement the curriculum and the technology platform as they are convinced that half-baked solutions of implementing technology into teaching eventually won’t result in student’s better performance.

This Interview is sponsored by Einztein – The Social Learning Network Einztein is the social learning network for higher education and lifelong learners. Einztein brings the power of social networking to learning and enables anyone to create an online learning community for resource sharing, collaboration and discussion.

Additional Links:

Acceptly, an online service that helps students to prepare for their college admission, announced a $500k seed round led by Learn Capital today.

The service is free to use and offers a structured approach to the often confusing college admission process. Students have to fulfill different tasks, earn points and badges to get closer to complete the different milestones on the road to admission. The concept is to break down the overall complicated process into smaller steps that are more easily achievable. All challenges and tasks are assigned individually and depending what will be the required next steps.

The content provided by acceptly is either generated by their team of educational experts but also comes from trustworthy external services.

Acceptly recommends to start using the service as early as two years prior to actually entering college, or as Matt Munson puts it in our interview below: the earlier the better. The funding will be used on critical hires and product expansion.

Disclaimer: Acceptly is an EDUKWEST sponsor.

KWestions Episode #28 “What is Crowd-Funding” with Slava Rubin of IndieGoGo recorded: January 27th 2012

This Interview is sponsored by Einztein – The Social Learning Network Einztein is the social learning network for higher education and lifelong learners. Einztein brings the power of social networking to learning and enables anyone to create an online learning community for resource sharing, collaboration and discussion.

Besides talking about his motivation to found a crowd-funding platform and what he saw in it, we then discuss what might be the reasons that this particular way to fund projects or raise money for products has become so popular in the past 18 months.

I then asked Slava for some hands-on advice what I need to do and what steps to take in order to set up a successful campaign for an educational product/project on IndieGogo, and what differentiates the most successful campaigns from the not so successful ones.

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IndieGoGo

It was about time for a new KWestions talk, and what better way to start into 2012 than with one of my key issues this year: crowd-funding and its opportunities for education.

As some of you might have noticed, we have started a new series around crowd-funding in education just a few weeks ago, and you can watch the first episodes here at EDUKWEST.

I feel honored that I now had the chance to ask Slava Rubin, co-founder of crowd-funding platform IndieGoGo, a few questions.

This Interview is sponsored by Einztein – The Social Learning Network Einztein is the social learning network for higher education and lifelong learners. Einztein brings the power of social networking to learning and enables anyone to create an online learning community for resource sharing, collaboration and discussion.

Besides talking about his motivation to found a crowd-funding platform and what he saw in it, we then discuss what might be the reasons that this particular way to fund projects or raise money for products has become so popular in the past 18 months.

I then asked Slava for some hands-on advice what I need to do and what steps to take in order to set up a successful campaign for an educational product/project on IndieGogo, and what differentiates the most successful campaigns from the not so successful ones.

Having an international audience, I think IndieGoGo is probably the most beneficial platform as they accept international projects and also people without a US bank account can pledge money. With 4% IndieGoGo’s transaction fee is also lower compared with other crowd-funding platforms.

The third and last point is that you can also get the money from your campaign even if you didn’t meet your initial goal.

review:ed Episode #13 “Hidden Bombs” recorded: January 27th 2012

	This Interview is sponsored by Acceptly – College Prep Done Right Acceptly is making it easier for students everywhere to get accepted to college. Increase your chances through step-by-step guidance and secrets for overcoming the admissions process. Try it for free today.
	This Interview is sponsored by Einztein – The Social Learning Network Einztein is the social learning network for higher education and lifelong learners. Einztein brings the power of social networking to learning and enables anyone to create an online learning community for resource sharing, collaboration and discussion.

Show Notes

• [00:57] Classroom 2.0 launches call for authors and participants in the new Classroom 2.0 book
• [11:09] Thank you to our sponsor Acceptly – College Prep Done Right
• [11:46] Udemy launched The Faculty Project – Interview with Tim Parks & Gagan Biyani
• [32:36] Thank you to our sponsor Einztein – The Social Learning Community
• [33:21] Ed Bott of ZDNet on the iBook Author EULA

Kirsten & Christopher

In this episode of review:ed Christopher sums his interview with Richard Byrne and Steve Hargadon about their upcoming book, we invited Tim Parks and Gagan Biyani to talk about the Faculty Project and Ed Bott of ZDNet to dig deeper into the iBook Author EULA.

	This Interview is sponsored by Acceptly – College Prep Done Right Acceptly is making it easier for students everywhere to get accepted to college. Increase your chances through step-by-step guidance and secrets for overcoming the admissions process. Try it for free today.
	This Interview is sponsored by Einztein – The Social Learning Network Einztein is the social learning network for higher education and lifelong learners. Einztein brings the power of social networking to learning and enables anyone to create an online learning community for resource sharing, collaboration and discussion.

Show Notes

• [00:57] Classroom 2.0 launches call for authors and participants in the new Classroom 2.0 book
• [11:09] Thank you to our sponsor Acceptly – College Prep Done Right
• [11:46] Udemy launched The Faculty Project – Interview with Tim Parks & Gagan Biyani
• [32:36] Thank you to our sponsor Einztein – The Social Learning Community
• [33:21] Ed Bott of ZDNet on the iBook Author EULA

If you followed Gagan Biyani’s appearances on different news shows lately, you might have noticed a new mantra for udemy’s mission. “We believe that in three to five years the best education will come from the web.”

This is, of course, an adapted quote of Bill Gates from his appearance at Techonomy in August 2010 that made some waves in the online education community. I also wrote about it, of course. In return udemy is also mentioned in the annual letter of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But today’s launch of The Faculty Project is a more precise implementation of Bill Gate’s vision

“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world.”

The Faculty Project which is built on top of udemy’s infrastructure delivers college courses from leading U.S. professors for free. Other than the already freely available courses that were the basis for curation projects like Academic Earth or udemy Academic, the courses of The Faculty Project are all newly created for this project and uploaded during the spring semester 2012.

The participating professors come from leading universities such as Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Vassar, Duke, Northwestern or the University of Virginia. All teaching members of The Faculty Project have received awards for teaching excellence or have garnered “Outstanding Professor of the Year” awards at their institutions and participate in the project without pay.

The list of courses reaches from Business Strategy to Ancient Greek Religion and The Cognitive Science of Mindfulness. All courses are on demand and feature video lectures, downloadable PDFs, presentations and other material. Each course also has a discussion board to ask questions and to interact with other learners and the professor.

For the participating professors the most important part of the project seems to be the potential reach of their courses, enabling a bigger audience to learn.

“I’m eager to tailor and extend essential management lessons through this online teaching platform, bringing knowledge to a global, diverse audience.” Gad Allon, Kellogg School of Management

“This project creates an incredible and unprecedented opportunity to share lessons that empower and inspire people to improve their lives and change their worlds.” Glenn Katz, Stanford University

“I am looking forward to taking the next step in open digital learning, bringing together the best possibilities of the classroom with the best possibilities of digital resources, and making the latest results available to the greatest number.” Pamela Crossley, Dartmouth College