Online learning company Knewtonwants to bring new technology to an industry that is often slow to make changes: education. Knewton has raised $33 million in Series D financing led by Founders Fund and strategic investor Pearson. Existing investors also participated including Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital. Knewton’s Adaptive Learning Platform takes educational content and makes lessons and learning materials that are customized to individual students. The company already has customers at colleges such as Arizona State University, Penn State University, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Mount St. Mary’s University and Washington State University, as well as the Education Management Corporation. In terms of growth, Knewton is also planning to begin offering its service to K-12 schools as well. It also plans to expand to publishers–where Pearson should be helpful–so that Knewton could aggregate a publisher’s educational content, such as a book, and essentially create an online lesson plan and curriculum that can dynamically change based on individual students’ learning styles. Because Knewton’s technology can adapt to individual students, the service will soon, in 2012, add features like the ability to know how a student best learns. For example: whether a student learns math better visually through video, or chemistry better through graphs, or whether a certain time of day is better for certain students. This knowledge than then be transferred to subsequent courses so that the next course can be more attuned to a student. “I believe education is about to change as much as in Gutenberg’s time,” says Jose Ferreira, the company’s founder and CEO and a former Kaplan executive and former venture capitalist at New Atlantic Ventures. “Education hasn’t had a lot of change or innovation in its history.” In its work with colleges, Knewton provides learning materials for professors in individual classes. Colleges can choose whether to make Knewton a mandatory part of the class or an optional tool. Knewton can also be used in online-only courses. But Ferreira believes Knewton will be used in “blended learning,” which combines real-life professors with online tools such as Knewton. The company also offers its service outside of the classroom for students to learn on their own.
