

Thiel-backed Lore Bets The Newsfeed Is Education’s Future - ezdebater
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/thiel-backed-lore-bets-the-newsfeed-is-educations-future/

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tokenadult
Blackboard is indeed an bothersome program with a lot of usability problems,
so any competitor in this space has to be a good idea. The article points out
that even brick-and-mortar schools with face-to-face interaction in class
desire to increase student engagement outside of class, and student engagement
outside of class is even more important for online education. My son the
hacker has been startup-minded since before he started high school, so he was
part of the pioneer class of an online high school. It was EXTREMELY annoying
to him and to me that the online high school, when it was founded, didn't have
a pan-school way for students to maintain online conversations, nor did it
have an online communication environment for parents who lived all over the
world. That was a really bad school community-building fail. My son did get to
see both the successes and failures of a startup enterprise by attending that
school, which was the goal, and over the long haul will surely be good for his
career development, but the "sucktastic" (another parent's term) communication
with families at that school put me off from signing up any of my other
children there. I note that even our local brick-and-mortar high school in our
local public school disrict is going heavily into online communication with
families, largely through the Schoology product, and it's crazy that online
high schools (in some cases, at least) haven't been leading the way in this
regard.

