CURMUDGUCATION: Knewton, A Big Name in Ed Tech, Bites The Dust

CURMUDGUCATION: Knewton, A Big Name in Ed Tech, Bites The Dust

Knewton, A Big Name in Ed Tech, Bites The Dust

Adaptive learning. Computer-enhanced psychometrics. Personalized learning via computer. Knewton was going to do it all. Now it's being sold for parts.

Knewton started in 2008, launched by Jose Ferreira. By 2012, Ferreira led the ed tech pack in overpromising that sounded both improbable and creepy. In a Forbes interview piece, Ferreira described Knewton as "what could become the world’s most valuable repository of the ways people learn." Knewton could make this claim because it "builds its software into online classes that watch students’ every move: scores, speed, accuracy, delays, keystrokes, click-streams and drop-offs." How does this work?

Students go at their own pace, and the software continuously adapts to challenge and cajole them to learn based on their individual learning style. As individual students are correlated to the behaviors of thousands of other students, Knewton can make between 5 million and 10 million refinements to its data model every day. 

This guy.

You will be unsurprised to learn that founder/CEO Ferreira has no real background in education. He has a BA from Carleton College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He worked for Kaplan for a few years, then went into the money biz, first as a derivatives trader for Goldman Sachs and later working venture capital for Draper Atlantic. In between he was strategist for the John Kerry campaign; that may be because he's John Kerry's nephew. From venture capital, it was a quick step to Knewton.

It raises one question that I don't have an answer for. Ferreira obviously had nothing to do with the actual creation of the software that was Knewton's heart and soul. Whose work was Knewton? A puzzle for another day.

Ferreira had a gift for the colorful claim. In the Forbes article, we find the suggestion that "it will CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Knewton, A Big Name in Ed Tech, Bites The Dust