Video: ‘We Have More Data about Our Students Than Any Company Has about Anything’

Published March 19, 2014

Learning company Knewton joined the White House’s education “datapalooza” in 2012 and showed what may be the future of education: Software that intimately maps your brain and habits. 

“We literally know everything about what you know and how you learn best, everything,” said Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira. “Because we have five orders more magnitude of data about you than Google has. We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anything, and it’s not even close.”

Knewton, in a partnership with the world’s biggest education company, Pearson, runs online classes that are tagged down to the sentence by learning concept, and can predict users’ success rates and automatically write them tailored “textbooks” heavy with videos and images. 

Soon, the software may be able to tell students what breakfast they should eat each day after finding out which one is correlated with faster learning, he said. It knows what times of day, what kind of content, and what way of presenting the material works best for each student, he said. Soon, he predicted, hundreds of millions of students will use this software, which started in college classes and is moving now into K-12.