An announcement by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation last week has generated a great deal of excitement in the education world. The foundation says that they are willing to give $20 million in a new push to prepare high school students for college success. The Gates Foundation is requesting proposals for the new program called “Next Generation Learning Challenges”. According to Bill Gates, on his foundation's website:
“American education has been the best in the world, but we’re falling below our own high standards of excellence for high school and college attainment,” said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “We’re living in a tremendous age of innovation. We should harness new technologies and innovation to help all students get the education they need to succeed.”
The $20 million is up for grabs for innovations that have a technological or educational component that can be used to help prepare high school students for college. The primary things that the foundation is looking for are innovative ideas that have a ready market. The main criteria for the investment are students outcomes, financial sustainability and the amount of students served.
For example, programs like One Laptop Per Child may seem like great candidates, but the foundation is looking for “interventions rather than infrastructure.” Their point being that what you do with the laptop is more important that just having one. One of the programs that the foundation is already funding is the Open Learning Imitative at Carnegie Mellon. This is a program that uses digital tutors combined with in person learning to make tutoring more effective by accomplishing in five weeks what used to take ten weeks or more.
The Next Generation Learning Challenges promises to help educators understand the approaches that best help students succeed and why. They are hoping to challenge innovators to come up with new ideas, exchange ideas and experiences. There aim is to get educators, investors, innovators and developers to work together to collaboratively push the field of education technology forward.
It will be interesting to see what types of programs result from this campaign. Even if only a few actually end up receiving funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, I would imagine that there will be quite a few runners up who will be able to find funding elsewhere. Either way, this is exciting news for students and educators alike.
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By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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