If you work in education technology, get ready. The Gates money is coming. Waves of it.
This fall the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and several partners will announce a new project aimed at harnessing technology to help prepare students for college and get them to graduation. The senior program officer leading that effort is Josh Jarrett, a former software entrepreneur with a Harvard M.B.A. who joined Gates after five years with the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. In an interview, he previewed that program and offered his take on the online-learning scene.
Q: You’ve teamed with Educause, the college IT group, to start a program called Next Gen Learning Challenges. Describe the project.
A: What we envision is a multiyear, multiwave program, where every six to 12 months we issue a new set of challenges. And we’ll issue a set of challenges this fall around shared open-core courseware, around learning analytics, around blended learning, and around new, deeper forms of learning and engagement using interactive technologies. There’s a big gap between R&D and high-impact solutions at scale. We’re trying to participate in some of the effort to help those most promising solutions get across that chasm.
To read the full, original article click on this link: How the Gates Foundation Will Spend Its Education-Technology Dollars - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Author: Marc Parry
