Teacherpreneurs and education reform

“For me, when I read that article [in Good magazine], it was truly fascinating that there weren’t a lot of teachers really leading the charge in how we change education. There are a lot of entrepreneurs like myself thinking about how you can change that, but I’m not going to be the expert on teaching, nor will I ever be an expert on how you can change K through 12 or higher education,” said Karnjanaprakorn. “But I think if you have teachers thinking entrepreneurially, we can really, really change education for the better.” Richard Grigonis is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s The State of Now project.

In the very foreseeable future, teachers will be able to upload their own videos to the Khan Academy, but also be able to create their own “knowledge maps” or repositories of content for their classes, using videos – within or outside of the Khan Academy – and all of Khan’s analytics, and reporting tools, in order to customize their own curricula.

Khan describes it this way:

“In the first iteration, let’s say you teach gender studies at U.C. Berkeley. You could put up your own videos, exercises, and everything you want for the class. Plus, you could leverage all the tools we have – a dashboard, analytics, reporting tools – and you could create your own island for your own class.”

For the disruptive education startups, forget about selling to the public school districts. Take your products to the entrepreneurial schools—private schools, virtual schools, charter schools, home school networks or even directly to the students. These schools and organizations only exist by convincing parents to enroll their children—they are hungry for ways to improve.

Finally, if you are up to the challenge, figure out ways to improve access to high quality teachers. In a country where it is almost impossible to fire bad teachers, the teacher quality gap in the United States is a major problem. According to Eric Hanushek at Stanford University a good teacher averages 1.5 years of learning gains from their students while a bad teacher averages just 0.5 year gains. In other words, a good teacher gives a 1 year learning advantage for their students compared to bad teachers. Now multiply those results over several years.

Skillshare isn’t just about tutorials, but monetizing the teaching of skills. It aspires to become a portal where people actually learn useful stuff thru classes, a model that should destroy any misconceptions—it’s certainly not the second coming of About.com or Howstuffworks.

There is a big opportunity for startups to disrupt an established market. There is huge potential for this space to be shaken up over the next few years through the innovative application of technology, whether that be social gaming, social mobile or cloud technology, and it will be start-ups that will lead this if they can get the support they require.