Disrupt Education

One year ago I wrote an article for Big Think with the title walking across campus whilst sitting on your couch in which I introduced my readers to the AnyBot, a rather exciting concept but at $10.000 / piece unfortunately also costly and probably not affordable for the average school or family. My ... Read More

It’s all but a secret these days that online education has developed itself into a hot market as founders, developers and investors get attracted to the vertical and now take it more serious than some 2 years ago.  What many people have criticized so far was a reluctance from most of the top ... Read More

This is follow-up to last week's post on crowdfunding and the opportunities it could provide for the so called teacherpreneurs. Let’s take it as an alternative to the traditional forms of funding open to educators such as see, angel or even VC funding or the various incubators dedicated to ... Read More

Online education only seems to know two markets these days. Whether you look at companies who offer solutions for individual or lifelong learners, but also in the K-12 space and higher education you’ll basically see a ton of free or very low-cost products and solutions, and then there are the ... Read More

When I started to blog about online education back in January 2009 frankly no one cared. If you take a look at the major tech blogs today you notice that this has changed quite significantly over the past six months. Education became a hot topic for a variety of reasons. One of them is that ... Read More

In today’s post I would to draw some conclusions about language learning based on two studies that reached me recently. The first study is a so-called Language Barometer language learning community busuu.com conducted amongst more than 45.000 of its users and held in March of this year ... Read More

A survey for Birmingham Science City amongst 500 15 year-olds across the UK came up with some pretty telling numbers about how technology changes society at its roots. When asked whom they ask when a particular question occurs 54% of students answered Google or other search engines. Only 26 ... Read More

I think, there is little doubt that tablet devices have drastically changed the way a growing part of the population is consuming content. My iPad has quickly become my main device for online media consumption from text to video and audio and right from the start the iPad has been hailed as the ... Read More

This week I came across an interesting study by Latitude Research via the MindShift Blog. In collaboration with LEGO® Learning Institute and Project Synthesis, Latitude asked children from across the world to write stories, imagining that a robot companion would be part of their everyday life, at ... Read More

Rumors and, according to 9to5Google, even evidence is surfacing that Google is testing out a new physical product on its campus, Google Glasses.  9to5Google already wrote about this project back in December 2011 and now claims that their tipster has seen a prototype looking like Oakley Thumps ... Read More

According to an article in today’s Irish Examiner, Martin Callinan the Garda Commissioner of Ireland aims to wipe out online bullying with a new safety campaign.  A survey conducted by the National Parents Council Primary and the National Centre for Technology in Education found that 55% of all ... Read More

Many, including myself, wondered if today’s Apple announcement would be the kiss of death for digital textbook startups like Kno, Inkling and Chegg. Now, it seems as if Apple as well as the three big publishers Pearson, MacGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt did not plan to attack the college ... Read More

Two days ago Babbel, one of the language learning communities I had previously covered here on Disrupt Education, turned 4. I remember that I found the project on Facebook, connected with one of the co-founders and got an invite to the closed beta. Back then I was still teaching languages “offline ... Read More

Crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have become a huge phenomenon in the tech & geek space in 2011. The idea behind those platforms is pretty simple. People who want to raise money for a project, product or cause set up a campaign and the community decides if they want to back ... Read More

Before every Apple event the rumor mill is turning and usually it’s all about the next iPhone, iPod, iPad - hence the next device that will just work, boom.  But this time it’s different as the rumors prior to the Apple event that’s planned to take place at the end of January in New York are ... Read More