I attended the NEST 2011 Conference at the University of Pennsylvania last week.  Sponsored by Penn’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) (of which I am a graduate), the conference attempts to match education entrepreneurs with investors, educators, and a policy maker or two.  The two day event included a business plan competition sponsored by Penn GSE and the Milken Family Foundation as well as the Startl Prize for Open Educational Resources in partnership with the Hewlett Foundation.  The latter award is for the “best business plan that leverages openly licensed content to change the paradigm around the production, delivery, sharing, and experience of learning.”

Penn GSE’s Vice Dean, Douglas Lynch, has built a NEST community of approximately 130 people who are committed to encouraging and/or supporting ed entrepreneurs.  Members of the community volunteer as judges for the business plan competition and enjoy meeting like-minded individuals at the conference.   Day one of the conference revolved around presentations by teams from the finalists for the business plan competition.  Alexandre Scialom won a prize for his startup company, theCourseBook.  TheCourseBook.com is a website that lists courses for adult learners and rates them, similar to Yelp.  While the beta prototype for the company is currently limited to a few cities in California, its goal is to widen its span nationally.  The second day of the conference was more interactive with the members of NEST.  After a short talk from Andy Porter, Dean of Penn GSE, members of the group participated in discussions about research and its importance to the education entrepreneurs/business community as well as other topics such as national regulations, for-profit and non-profit ventures, etc.

I congratulate Andy Porter, Doug Lynch and the rest of the team at Penn GSE for sponsoring the NEST conference and initiative.  When a graduate school at one of America’s great research universities can arrange a connection with entrepreneurs, investors, educators, and policy makers, hopefully better communications and understanding at a national level will be a result.

Articles about transformations in higher education are being published daily, it seems.    Many of them focus on affordability and the fact that the increasing costs in higher education in the United States cannot continue to exceed inflation or the increase in earning power of Americans.  Very few of these articles, however, offer solutions or examples of solutions to the high cost conundrum.

In the September issue of Fast Company Magazine, Anya Kamenetz writes an interesting article entitled “How Web-Savvy Edupunks are Transforming American Higher Education.”  She begins the article by discussing how the internet and various applications or sites such as Google, YouTube Edu, iTunesU, Wikipedia, and Facebook have changed the way all of us share information.

Yet while colleges like MIT have placed all of their coursework online for free, an MIT degree costs about $189,000.  She cites Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at the University of Mary Washington as stating, “Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies.”  According to Kamenetz, Groom coined the term “edupunk” to describe the high-tech do-it-yourself education.

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