How Startl Is Hacking Education From the Outside In

What would happen if you took the principles of a startup incubator like Y Combinator and applied it to improving education? A new philanthropic venture called Startl aims to find out. The non-profit startup accelerator is being backed by some of the world's best-known foundations (Gates, Hewlett, MacArthur), and has for-profit partners including IDEO, DreamIT Ventures, and investment bankers Berkeley & Noyes. Startl is entirely focused on educational entrepreneurs. Co-founder and Managing director Phoenix Wang, formerly of Accenture Consulting, iVillage, and then the Hewlett Foundation, is holding the organization's first five-day "bootcamp" for ideas in mobile learning from March 15-19. Fast Company caught up with Wang to learn more and find out what's coming next.

Anya Kamenetz: How did Startl get started?

Phoenix Wang: Startl is a group of foundations that got together 18 months ago to start thinking about the failures of a lot of interesting learning products that have had great potential but never make it to scale.

Traditional foundations like the National Science Foundation give away millions every year to support lots of innovative ideas in education, but there isn't an infrastructure that takes these ideas across the entrepreneur's "valley of death." If you look at the Internet industry there are incubation hubs, university labs, public/private partnerships--a fertile ground that supports different people at different stages for different purposes.

In education that layer doesn't exist. There's an emerging set of young players who really want to change education in fundamental ways and they have nowhere to go. It's about money, but it's also about the networks, expertise, cultivation, and insights to figure out how to be a good entrepreneur. So that's how STARTL was born.

AK: What are the most important forces for change in the education world that you see right now?

PW: Technology is one set of forces. Decreasing cost is another. There's another around participatory learning, open content, OER [open educational resources]. And it's not just these new enablers, it's that people's expectations are changing. There's a whole new generation of kids who expect I should be able to have control over how I learn, what I learn, and where I learn. I'm not just a consumer, I'm a co-creator and collaborator. I can share/mashup/remix knowledge.

AK: Where do you see the biggest market gaps in educational technology?

PW: If you look at so-called educational products, the majority are high in entertainment value and so really fall into children's media. Another category is what we call Brussels sprouts: very learning-rich, lots of drill and kill and flashcards. It's like taking your medication. And a third category is more like "edutainment" or what I call the chocolate-covered broccoli. They try to make learning fun by wrapping games or interactive activities around it, to sugarcoat things that are still pretty boring. That's the market, those are the product categories, up until a few years ago.

Today, the Internet, mobile devices, digital media, and virtual world simulations have matured to a point where there are interesting emerging markets and product categories that are not your traditional edutainment or Brussels sprouts. Those emerging markets include referenceware, simulations and virtual worlds, and mobile learning.

AK: How are the approaches taken by these new technologies different?

PW: It's not about distribution or force-feeding of content, but rather placing the learner at the center of the experience and paying close attention to the learner's needs, aspirations, and behaviors. You're leading them through a set of experiences that make it learning--rich.

For example, you might begin with building rockets in a simulation. From rockets you figure out about physics, math, coordinates, etc. It's a whole different approach enabled by technology and digital media that makes these interesting. But unfortunately the market dynamics are in a period of transition.