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Jeremy Johnson Embraces Innovation & Disrupts Higher Education with 2tor

Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and CMO of 2tor, began his talk at the Education & Entrepreneurs Summit by pulling up an image of a fortune cookie. Inside, the slip of paper read, “May you live in interesting times.” Often referred to as the Chinese curse, Johnson used it to describe the education field instead.

“We’re living in the most interesting time,” Johnson said, claiming that we’re seeing more innovation in the classroom now than we’ve seen in the past 200 years.

Johnson was one of the three keynote speakers at yesterday’s first EdTechup Conference. Speaking on behalf of 2tor, an education technology company that partners with elite universities, such as Georgetown, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and University of Southern California to deliver rigorous, selective programs online to students from around the world, he proved how one can easily disrupt the higher ed market right now.

The second image Johnson pulled up was of a college lecture hall. In it, 95 percent of the students were seen on their laptops. Now, whether they were taking notes or chatting with friends on Facebook, we’ll never know, but what we do know is that students are more engaged with their laptops today than they are with their professors. How is that then different from online learning? The answer? It’s not.

“Ten percent of marriages now start online,” Johnson said. “You can build relationships there.”

Professors have told Johnson they often feel more connected to the students in their online class than to those in their physical class. During an online class, when a student leaves their computer, you see an empty chair. There’s no “hiding in the back of the classroom” when you’re online. As Johnson said, “Everyone is front and center on the Internet.” Students are more apt to pay attention to their teachers, when they’re face-to-face with them on their computer. Johnson realized that, and took advantage of the market.

“Education is one of the last industries to be disrupted by the Internet,” Johnson said, as he pulled up images of books and movies. Why go to Barnes and Noble now when we have Amazon? Why go to Blockbuster when, instead, there’s Netflix? Had those companies changed with the times sooner, they could have been preserved. Education is next on the chopping block, and Johnson claimed that those “who embrace technology and change are going to have an oversized advantage.”

Prior to yesterday’s conference, Marissa Lowman, the founder of EdTechup, said, “I think the education industry, as a whole, is very fragmented. If entrepreneurs and educators collaborated more, I think it would spur more innovation in education, as well as help entrepreneurs start companies that are both sustainable and scalable since they’d be catering to the market from the beginning.”

Johnson’s company is the perfect example of that. With 2tor, he’s trying to fix a fragmented market, which is crucial when you take into account the end user of education products: children. Those using these new classroom tools are the world’s future, and if we’re not innovating now, it’s soon going to be too late.

“We need to view all of this as an opportunity,” Johnson said. “We’re about to experience the renaissance of education.”

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2011/12/11/jeremy-johnson-embraces-innovation-disrupts-hi...