We know everything about what you know and how you learn best because we get so much data. And education is the highest-stakes media product in your life. It's infinitely more important than your Facebook friends' status updates or your Google search results because it's your future.
The factory model of education is a gargantuan bureaucracy. Some kids are good fits - I wasn't. The system gives you bad grades and tells you you're stupid. You don't think, 'If this kid's not a good fit, it could be the system's fault.'
Big data in education has huge potential to improve learning materials.
I spent most of my career in education and technology. I worked at Kaplan, and I was one of the first people trying to bring innovation into for-profit education.
Education is among the most important problems we face because it's the ultimate 'gateway' problem. That is, it drives virtually every global problem that we face as a species. But there's a flip-side: if we can fix education, then we'll dramatically improve the other problems, too.
Education has always produced an incredible amount of data; that's always been obvious to me. But technology had to catch up.
I started Knewton to do my bit to fix the world's education system.