The fourth and final part of the Reclaiming Educational Technology series, recorded at the University of Mary Washington after Open Education 2014.

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Hello again, my name is D’Arcy Norman and I’m thrilled to bring to you the fourth and final part of the Reclaiming Educational Technology series, which was a series of interviews recorded at the University of Mary Washington after the Open Education 2014 conference. The interviews were conducted by myself and David Kernahan and recorded by Andy Rush. This part, the topic is Higher Education and Startup Cultures, features commentary from Audrey Waters from HackEducation.com, Ben Werdmuller, co-founder of Known, and Aaron Ritchie, co-founder of Known. There’s some interesting commentary on sort of the tension between startup cultures and higher education cultures. And without further ado, part four of the Reclaiming Educational Technology Series, Higher Education and Startup Cultures. My name’s Audrey Waters. 

I’m a writer. I write about education technology. I mean, I think that, you know, this way in which innovation is talked about has become so much wrapped up in Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation story, which is very much about markets and market-driven innovation. And I’m just not sure that, particularly when we’re talking about education, that that would be a model that we would really want to think about, right? I mean, of course we want to have new ideas. is we want new ideas. I mean, that’s what education is about, right? We want to be able to expand and grow and build on each other as ideas. So that’s a form of innovation. But it doesn’t fit into this model that we have that’s very much about can you introduce a new business idea or product that somehow displaces other products on the market. I mean, I don’t think that that’s what many of us would want as a goal. I think that actually part of it is to not mimic the discussions around what startups do because I think that in some ways startups, the whole idea around the Silicon Valley startup is that they’re high risk, high growth, increasingly with a sizable cash influx with very few people, a few benefits, long work hours with a potential for outcome, and it feels like the high-risk thing is a little problematic when you’re talking about education, because I think in education, as an educator, you have a responsibility to actually not put your students at risk. You can do experiments, but even then, you have to think really carefully about what What are the ethical implications of experiments that I do? Even when I try something new in the classroom, it matters. The stakes are a lot higher and so the ability to just sort of throw out the rules and try new things and sort of embracing failure and iteration that the startup world really likes, I think that we need to be really thoughtful what it means to fail when we’re talking about other people’s children. 

We’re failing with other people’s children. My name’s Ben Werdmuller. 

I’m the co-founder and CEO of Known. 

And Known is a single website for all your content. So what we’re trying to do is empower students to actually publish all their coursework, their notes, their ideas, everything they feel comfortable with to a space that they control rather than a space that’s controlled either by administration or by some external vendor. 

So if you’re doing something good, you almost have a duty to make you sustainable so you can keep doing it. You know, there’s no point in creating an ethical piece of software that disappears after two months, right? So we have to make it a business, and we are based in Silicon Valley. We’re based in San Francisco. But we take a slightly different approach. 

We want to be completely aligned with our users. We think that gives us the best chance of success. We’re also a small team. I mean, it helps if our users are effectively co-developers. I think if you are mining people’s data or you’re running targeted advertising against them and that kind of thing, it actually pits you against your users in some ways, right? Your users partially become the product rather than actually the people you’re trying to serve. And, you know, their interests, which is really privacy, in my opinion, and, you know, their autonomy end up running against your business and there’s, you know, you end up at the very the least, or rather in the best case, finding an awkward middle ground and in the worst case somebody gets abused, and that’s not great. So what we’re trying to do is offer services that allow us to get revenue for the things that people value. So we’re working with institutions, we’re providing ways to make knowing easier. And the base known, the known profile for individuals, is totally free. Open source, a very permissive license. You can take it and do what you want to do with it. So, my name is Erin Richie, and I’m the co-founder of NONE, and I’m from San Francisco, California. I still feel like an outsider in the startup Silicon Valley culture. I moved to the area just over a year ago from Portland, Oregon, and I had been working in technology before that, and Ben had moved to the area a few years before that. But we, both of us separately, had been involved in open source before that. Both of us separately had done work in the edtech space before that, and we came into this and actually when we started NONE, we started it and joined a startup accelerator, which is a very sort of Silicon Valley thing to do, but the accelerator we were selected into is a public media accelerator, and at least at the time of its conception, it was the only public media accelerator in the world. It’s backed by the Knight Foundation and KQED, which is the NPR and PBS affiliate in the Bay Area, and PRX Public Radio Exchange, which is based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their focus is really choosing mission-driven companies in the greater media space. They have some of these ideas around the companies that they support and work with must empower media, but media is very loosely defined because they’re looking at the future of media and the future of communication. So they want to foster companies that develop platforms that help to connect users and engage people and push the boundaries of communication to sort of start to define what the media landscape might look like in the future. So all of the other companies in that program and all the companies that we’ve become really close to are very much aligned even if our businesses and our products are in completely different areas and we were originally a little concerned being an open-source based company what that would look like today but it’s actually we haven’t got any of the pushback that we thought might be hanging around there’s enough open source companies out there that are well known that people don’t see open source as a red flag anymore and that was really encouraging to us and a number of the other companies just in our accelerator are either based on an open source platform or do a lot of work with open source data and there’s other education companies in our accelerator as well so we’ve had some really nice collaboration and sharing in resources with other edtech based startups who are focused on like completely different aspects of the education space but it’s been so nice to just chat with them and share resources and share contacts and things like that. We have found that just our experience growing as a company, there are people who like to support and encourage and invest in startups in different spaces. And so EdTech is definitely its own space, just like media is its own space and a number of different industries. So we really didn’t have a lot of connections necessarily with people that covered both educational technology and we’re specifically looking at startups, but sort of over the course of the summer and meeting a lot of people that’s really broadened our network of people and we’ve gotten a lot of great advice from entrepreneurs who have worked in and invested in in the edtech space and we’ve gotten a lot of good connections with other edtech companies around the world who’ve wanted to just chat and share strategies and resources and things they’ve been working on and so many of them have been so open and willing to share their knowledge and their experiences with us. It’s been really great. We set out right from the very beginning, sort of one of our goals coming into this was we’re going to create a company and a platform. And because of where the project originally started as a hobby for both Ben and I, sort of us coming out of the indie web movement, creating something for us to have our own personal websites, to control our own data, we were building something that was sort of the opposite of selling user data or adding advertising. And the platform for us was never created for that. So when we turned it into a company, we knew that that was never going to be a component of it. And like we were a little worried at the beginning about it being open source, we weren’t really sure how people would feel about that. That’s because historically people have sort of seen users of software as the product for freemium products, and that’s not the direction that we wanted to take, and we didn’t want to take a direction where the product becomes filled with advertising in order for us to generate revenue. We started right at the very beginning talking and focusing on revenue strategies and different ways that the platform could start to make money, and I think with a lot of companies companies, the focus is so much on expanding that user base and getting it really wide that they don’t think about the monetization strategies at all until a much later point. But we started really just brainstorming in that area from the very beginning and over the course of the summer because, partially through our accelerator, because it’s based on design thinking, they have sort of three key focuses that your company has to focus on really to be successful, and it includes technology and whether you can build the platform yourself with the technology that’s out there, and it includes business sustainability and feasibility. So you have to consider how you can turn this into a sustainable company and what the revenue looks like and who’s going to pay and what they’re going to pay for, and as well as sort of desirability and the human-centered components. So those three areas are things that we focus on a great deal where other companies might just focus on the technology side and leave the other two for a much later period of time.