Silicon Valley holds a certain mystique among entrepreneurs and investors. More cool technology was born here, more wealth created, and more technology revolutions begun, than anywhere else on the planet. The Valley’s formula for success has been the subject of debate and business school cases for decades. It certainly helps to have excellent local universities churning out scores of engineers and entrepreneurs. It also helps that founding a company, whether it be a success or failure, is viewed as acceptable and even desirable by the community. When the folks you bump into at the local watering hole, the supermarket, and cocktail parties are all starting companies and changing the world, it feels like anyone can.
But one tech revolution that escaped the influence of Silicon Valley the first time around was education technology. Although the past is littered with efforts to make technology matter in K-12 education, few of those companies came from the Valley, and even fewer were successful. The Valley’s bold investors have generally stayed far from the space.
In the past several years, however, there has been a major realignment in the edtech world. Silicon Valley is once again leading the charge in a technology revolution, and this one might just have the greatest impact of all. Ironically, the revolution was kicked off by a hedge fund analyst in Boston, who got funding from Silicon Valley and then Bill Gates to create–not the next edtech Google–but rather, a non-profit: the Khan Academy. Nearly singlehandedly, Sal Khan made competent teaching available to any child in the world at any time. He based his new organization in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley and in the five years since there has been an explosion of edtech ideas, companies, and investment emanating from the Valley.
The idea that great education was never for the few and should always be available to all led to the creation of MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, led by Silicon Valley companies like Coursera and Udacity. New school models like Rocketship Education and Summit Public Schools bet on “blended learning” curricula that merge traditional teaching with individualized, adaptive learning technologies. More recently a tech founder from Google and Aardvark, Max Ventilla, founded a new kind of school called AltSchool to rethink how children are taught. Companies like Edmodo, ClassDojo, and Remind (formerly Remind101) are rethinking how communities of parents, teachers, and students can connect and collaborate on learning and related skills. And new classes, notably in programming and computer science, began spreading from Silicon Valley and out to the world via companies like CodeHS.