Edupreneurs and their take on learning

I had the pleasure to moderate a session at this year's edition of Online Educa Berlin on the topic of edupreneurs and their take on learning. The session was one of the longer ones - two hours - divided in two parts. First we had 9 startups present themselves in ignite-style presentations, and we followed that up with a more in depth discussion on what enterpreneurs bring to the field of education.

We had folks from the following startups: Traintool (online video role plays), PeerGrade (online peer grading for students), Proctorio (prevent online exam cheating), Notebowl (the facebook for your campus), potential.ly (increase employability), wooclap (live polling and ineractivity tool), OpenCampus (open software to build campus platforms), AlgebraKit (online automated math tutoring), iAcademy (apps for campus life).

You may have noticed that I'm a big fan of this particular learning conference as it manages to bring together communities that otherwise don't meet that much: the academics, the policy makers, the technology vendors, the consultants, the instructional designers, the corporate training world, etc. Over the past years, the voice of enterpreneurs has been added to  mix. I was wondering what the entrepreneurs are 'fixing' that they deem broken or not working well enough, what their approach is to come up with great solutions, why they have chosen this field, etc.

Here's what stood out for me:

• What are edupreneurs trying to fix? A lot has to do with student engagement and having the student/learner in mind when designing solutions. We don't learn when we are bored. BTW, one of the startups has 'don't build and LMS' on their office wall. Another topic that came up a few times was enabling teachers to focus on what they are best at. Another one focused on employability. As I wrote earlier, startups work on a very specfic and defined challenge without tackling all of education and all topics in all their glory.
• So are we in for a revolution? Contrary to what you may suspect from enterpreneurs the word disruption wasn't mentioned. I found them all to tackle their chosen issue with a lot of pragmatism wondering how to make changes for the better rather than preaching for the revolution.
• What about money? Half or more of the participating startups were at break-even or above, but funding is hard to get of course. Two testified that they started without any capital at all and build their business along the way. One remark I vividly remember is that they weren't in it for the money as they were passionate about making education better (and there are long sales cycles in the education space).
• What will the next 24 months look like? The answers to this question from the audience was revealing: none could really clearly state how the next 24 months would look like as it all depended on the feedback they would be getting from their customers. That is a very different approach from making a year long strategy based on what you think is best. I think it is at the core of what the edupreneurs bring to our field: constantly feeling the pulse of their customers and adjusting based on that feedback - including the negative.  
• Start small, learn and grow: the stories of these startups were varied but it was interesting what was NOT mentioned: none of these companies started making a fully fledged product they thought others should buy and put it in the market. They all grew organically from an early product or service and adapting it based on feedback. One even sold it before it was made.
• How do you know your solution works? Again, the answer is overwhelmingly 'because our users say so', rather than big longitudinal studies and ROI measurements.

I think there are great learnings we can take as a learning industry on how edupreneurs approach the various challenges we face. It's definitely an enrichment to our field, that thrives with its diverse audience. 

The image above was taking at the morning keynote session.