Forbes 30-Under-30 Honoree, Nic Borg, On Technology Enabled Education
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
02-10-2014
This is the tenth article in the Education Technology Innovation series, and it is fair to say that Nic Borg’s background is unlike any of the other entrepreneurs featured in the series. Like others, he comes from academe, but rather than being a former Stanford professor like Sebastian Thrun or Daphne Koller, or an MIT professor like Anant Agarwal, Borg spent seven years at Kaneland High School in Maple Park, Illinois building web-based tools and learning management solutions. The small-scale innovation that he introduced proved to be a pilot for something bigger to come.
Armed with his practical experience at a Kaneland High School, Borg co-founded Edmodo five and a half years ago. Edmodo is the largest K-12 social learning network, which provides teachers and students a safe and easy way to connect and collaborate; it has been called “the Facebook of education.” It is used heavily in the classroom, but also extends that classroom environment. The mission of the organization is to help all learners reach their full potential, and he believes that by connecting them to the resources and concepts they need, they achieve that goal. It has already had profound implications on students, teachers, parents, and content providers, as he explains herein. He was recently honored by this publication as “30 Under 30” winner.
(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Nic Borg, please visit this link. To read the prior nine articles in this series including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Why was there a need for more of a digital platform and a means of communication with students in new ways? Was there something there saw as lacking in the traditional means of educating their students that was particularly stark to you?
Nic Borg: New ideas developed so rapidly outside the classroom that to really capture students’ attention, teachers had to be just as dynamic and even have to do a bit of a catch-up. Without those tools, without simple ways to get their classrooms online, it just wasn’t possible to get the attention needed from their students to drive that learning process.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
To explore other Education Technology Innovation Series articles, please click here.
To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Nic, click here.
