UPenn and Milken Institute

InnovaScapes Institute had the good fortune (me, actually) to be a raconteur for the U Penn Education Business Plan competition today and tomorrow.   This is the wind-up of 220 business plans submitted for consideration for several funding prizes for education ventures.  Ten fledgling companies talked today, for a panel of judges, in front of perhaps thirty erstwhile funders and a few successful entrepreneurs.

The ideas were solid, some even inspired from my standpoint, and the presenters were enthusiastic if not always polished.  Of the ten, I would say five have a good chance of possible traction and scaling.

Betsy Corcoran (EdSurge) was the emcee for the day, and Bobbi Kurshan was the driving force for the GSE (Grad School of Education) at Penn.  Gregory Milken from the Milken Foundation funded two prizes, and several other prizes will be announced tomorrow as well.

The themes would not surprise anyone in terms of needs for students, faculty, or administrators, but the implementations might.  Proprietary algorithms for automatically determining a Student Risk Factor for OnLine course completion, developed by an ex-employee of a For-Profit School that had its Accreditation challenged due to high drop-out rates, is one of my favorites.

This is a huge challenge to For-Profit administrators, partially because they often dredge the bottom of the barrel to grab new students, students whose motivation, competence, or life situation might be at best tenuous.  I asked them if they had an approach for predictive success for the admissions office, and the knowing smile said a lot.

Another skirts the question of accreditation, offering instead a smorgasbord approach to selecting courses from a variety of places to learn job skills that fit an industry -- arguing that content aggregators, content providers, and career search platforms all have a narrow slice compared to this student-focused perspective developed with key employers of a region or topical area.

A third believes in Narrative, and building a great documentary film around it, as the ideal Learning Experience, but finds that Film Producers are needed to transmit the requisite skills compared to most teachers -- the proposal includes a way to build Film Producer Kits, to get more folk engaged.  Hummn...

The entire day was spent without anyone really addressing whether or how MOOCs might affect the education space, which is SHARP contrast to last week's equivalent New School Ventures conference in San Francisco, hosted by Joanne Weiss from Washington DC

Does make you wonder if the West Coast and the East Coast read different messages...