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Release: Education Prize Partnership to Drive Innovation

January 3, 2012 - by Tom Vander Ark

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OpenEd and The Common Pool create joint venture to launch education prizes

FEDERAL WAY, WASH., – Open Education Solutions (OpenEd) and The Common Pool announced today a joint venture capability to launch a series of inducement prizes designed to accelerate innovation in education.

Tom Vander Ark, CEO of OpenEd, said “There are no silver bullets in education but targeted incentives for innovation will mobilize talent and resources to accelerate the shift to personal digital learning.”

“We’re excited about the potential of emerging capabilities,” said Jaison Morgan of The Common Pool, “but in education there are conditions that fail to align the interests of problem solvers.”  Inducement prizes are routinely used to promote private and public benefit.  Morgan added, “Our expertise is designing and delivering new incentives models that will attract fresh thinking and expanded investment towards a targeted outcome.”

The first target for the new partnership will be online assessments.  Vander Ark said, “We believe intelligent scoring of online assessments will enable better, cheaper, and faster student assessment.  Given the potential for inexpensive and accurate feedback on authentic assessments we are confident that we’ll soon see more essay questions on state tests.”

Dr. Mark Shermis, Dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron, author of Classroom Assessment in Action, and noted expert on automated scoring, will chair the Academic Advisory Board.

The joint venture will develop prizes for sponsors—typically foundations.  The joint venture will announce the first sponsored prize this month.

“Big data will revolutionize learning,” said Morgan, “and inviting the best data miners in the world to compete to build targeted solutions will quickly deliver new capabilities to schools and states.”

The Kaggle platform (www.Kaggle.com) will be used for data mining prizes.  Kaggle is the leading platform for predictive modeling competitions. The Kaggle community of data scientists comprises thousands of PhDs from quantitative fields such as computer science, statistics, econometrics, math and physics. They come from over 100 countries and 200 universities.

The partners anticipate building a new platform for design prizes and community prizes that result in a dashboard of indicators.

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 About Open Education Solutions,  www.OpenEdSolutions.com

OpenEd is a blended learning service provider. We help states, districts and school networks design schools and solutions that are innovative, personalized and deliver better results at the same or lower cost.

About The Common Pool, www.thecommonpool.com

The Common Pool designs and delivers new incentive models and reframes challenging issues, offering shared interest and investment to meet targeted needs.   The Common Pool is deeply invested in using the power of incentives to drive change for the public good.  Our strategy is to offer compelling and nontrivial financial rewards to anyone who can solve market failures.  Our methods only pay for results and offer important exposure to anyone who can deliver effective and scalable solutions.

About Kaggle, www.Kaggle.com

Kaggle is a platform for data prediction competitions that allows organizations to post their data and have it scrutinized by the world’s best data scientists. In exchange for a prize, winning competitors provide the algorithms that beat all other methods of solving a data crunching problem.