Reforming America’s fractured education system will require an infusion of innovation. To cultivate a conversation about the critical challenges facing American education, Black Enterprise partnered with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to host Today’s Business Crisis: Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce, a symposium to be held May 15, 2013.
Over the past several months, Black Enterprise and The Gates Foundation have been traveling to select cities across the nation to draw upon the resources of top leaders in business, philanthropy, and education to help find solutions and resources within their communities.
Next week, we’ve selected a group of experts and entrepreneurs in the hi-tech industry who have a dedicated interest in expanding and implementing new technologies in classrooms to assist teachers, inspire students, and sustain parents.
Included among our speakers in Columbus, Ohio is Will Lucas, founder of Toledo, Ohio-based Classana. He will speak on a panel about using technology to develop new learning models to engage and improve the academic performance of K-12 students, as well as prepare them for post-secondary education. Classana is an online education discovery engine that provides users with recommendations to the next steps in their education, career, and interests based on a proprietary matching algorithm and machine learning.
We chose Lucas because of his courage to think outside of the box. While most voices in education reform focus on a diploma as the end-game goal, Lucas recognizes that matriculation isn’t for everyone and some students should focus on obtaining the marketable skills they need to be an asset to their future employers.
Lucas is on to something. More than 40% of recent U.S. college graduates are underemployed or need more training to get on a career track, according to a poll released on Tuesday by the global management consulting firm Accenture. Moreover, the survey of 1,050 workers who finished school in the past two years, and 1,010 who will receive their degree in 2013, also found that many were in jobs that didn’t require a college degree at all. This is all occurring at a time when the cost of a college education is at an all time high.
As such, Classana aims to make the process of obtaining those skills a lot easier when you’re not inside the walls of an institution of higher learning.
Leading up to the symposium next week, Lucas happily agreed to share his thoughts on the problems within our educational system, his own experiences trying to become degreed and why he believes education will become a fully entrepreneurial endeavor in the future.
What inspired you to launch Classana?
I originally started the baccalaureate program full-time just out of high school in 1999. I won’t say I hated college, but I knew immediately that it wasn’t for me. I even did well in my classes – but I felt an internal pull to just get started building my future my own way. So, I’d enroll for a semester or two here and there over a long period of time, specifically because I kept feeling external pressure to go.
In the summer of 2011, I was running another tech startup full time, and also taking 16 credit hours at The University of Toledo to finish my degree. I only had about a year left. Though I was already running my own business, I still wanted to finish my degree. A mentor of mine asked why I was in school taking so many credit hours. I said that someone had told me that people would respect me more if I had a degree, and also that I wanted to finish what I started.
He replied, ‘So when you graduate, what are you going to do, give yourself a promotion?’ That made a lot of sense to me. Then he continued, ‘I’m not telling you not to go to school, I’m just saying if you do go, then just take the classes that speak directly to what you’re trying to get better at for your business.’ That made even more sense to me.
What challenges did you run up against?
I began looking for classes in iOS development (programming for iPhone and iPad), and at the time my school didn’t have a program for that sort of training. So, I began looking for a class with at least a similar skill set. The online system used to find and register for classes was a bit unfriendly – even more so because I wasn’t following a specific program. Also, being that it was the beginning of the semester, it took me about two weeks to actually reach a professor and get some help. I thought that was a bit much. I realized that college wasn’t set up for you to ‘pick and choose’ classes, it’s set up for you to follow a prerequisite course towards a degree. That wasn’t what I was looking for.
Describe the problems in our educational system that you believe Classana can solve?
We believe education is an increasingly entrepreneurial endeavor. There’s a huge debate in our public discourse about the value of a college degree. I believe college is still worth pursuing, just the
way we do it can’t continue. Skills are much more valuable than sheepskin today. Employers want to know that you can hit the ground running on day one with a set of tools they can use to add value to their business. That is much more important than a degree to an increasing amount of employers.Steve Jobs did the commencement talk at Stanford before he passed and, in that speech, he said ‘The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.’ I think he was more prophetic in that statement than even he could’ve known. That’s what the future of education looks like… people curating their own educational experiences.
Who will Classana benefit the most and how?
The site will work for anyone at any stage of life. Our target demographic, though, are those beginning to make post-secondary decisions: high school students, and college students. Based on their interests, we are organizing the following for them: educational resources, books they should read, classes they should take, organizations they should join, events they should attend, and more that will help them, individually, get closer to their dream.
Aren’t these services that your high school or college counselor will provide?
If I went to my college adviser and said, ‘I want to be a computer programmer,’ what she’ll do is print out for me 10 academic programs that my school offers on computer programming. However, those may not be the best resources for me and, many times, there are free resources I can take advantage of 1) because she’s paid to put me in this program; and 2) she may not know Treehouse, Codecademy, or Khan Academy even exists. What we’re doing is re-imagining the college advisor.
What is unique about Classana compared to other EdTECH products?
We support traditional and non-traditional educational resources. We don’t compete against them. We’re sending them the traffic. You don’t take any classes on Classana or consume any resources. We’re going to show you where to go to get the best resources for you based on your individual tastes and goals.
What is unique about the technology behind Classana?
Classana employs a proprietary algorithm that explores your individual tastes and matches that, along with your activity, to resources that help you get better at whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.
What advice do you have for parents, teachers, students, and principles who want to implement some form of educational technology in the classroom?
The best things we can do is encourage each other to go after what it is we really want to do. With 60% of people not working in the field they studied, that tells me that we spend tons of time and money pursuing jobs we don’t want, don’t like, and can’t get. I believe the future belongs to people who can figure out a way where there traditionally hasn’t been one. The gatekeepers are gone.
I say often that the future of education isn’t a secret locked away in a box somewhere for the privileged few to know. The future of education will be what we make it. What we’ve made is an economy that seeks the entrepreneurial, dedicated, problem-solver. We need an educational system that encourages that exploration.