Design For Edu

We’re hosting our first “Design for Edu” event on Tuesday June 9th during SF Design Week. Join us for an inside look at the opportunity to design for education. We’ll serve dinner, show examples of design challenges, and have candid Q&A featuring designers from Coursera, Khan Academy, Altschool, Medium and Inkling. Request an invitation to our private event here.

Getting education right is crucial for our future success as individuals, as a nation and as a global society. Despite recent progress, we still have many problems to solve in our education system. It’s too expensive and the results are often subpar. For example, over 40 million Americans are repaying more than $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt even though many of them feel they weren’t prepared well for employment. There’s also a growing gap between rich and poor school students who are more segregated today nationwide than the rest of the U.S. The ability to educate ourselves is so fundamental to human progress, it’s hard to think of a more meaningful opportunity that designers could work on.

We’re in a unique moment in history where there’s a growing movement of personalized education augmented by technology. With the help of the internet, distribution costs are falling and empowering students, teachers and parents to directly access knowledge and new products on an unprecedented scale worldwide. Online courses, improved communication tools and better feedback loops make tailored and cost-effective experiences possible for people in and outside of school.

For example, Khan Academy has over 23M registered learners and 430M+ views on their YouTube channel. Coursera has over 13M students enrolled in classes and partnerships with top-tier universities. This is just the tip of the iceberg but we need more designers to help create technology that actually delivers on it’s promise to enhance teaching and engage learners over the course of their lifetime.