McGraw-Hill Education recently announced their investment in Education Design Studio, Inc., a collaborative venture started in part by Penn’s Graduate School of Education. EDSi is a $2.1 million seed fund at Penn is an incubator for education-centered startups.
“We are thrilled that McGraw-Hill Education – an established leader in the development of top-notch digital learning solutions – is offering its time and resources through this one-of-a-kind collaboration,” Bobbi Kurshan, the executive director of Academic Innovation at the GSE, said in a press release.
According to Director of Media Relations at McGraw-Hill Brian Belardi, the company hopes that their investment will help encourage innovation in education technology. As he sees it, McGraw-Hill’s investment, an undisclosed portion of the $2.1 million, will help both parties.
The company will be providing more than just funding support.
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“The startups benefit because they have access to capital and council and to all our experience [which] really helps them get off the ground,” he said. “We like it because it helps keep us on the leading edge — we know everything that’s happening out on the forefront of education technology.”
Education technology is a new field that has been pushing the boundaries of what is possible in education. In the past, there was a big movement towards ebooks and making education portable, but Belardi hopes that through EDSi, more dramatic changes can be made.
McGraw-Hill can also find new leaders and future innovators through EDSi, Belardi added.
“There are a lot of challenges in education,” he said. “They’re not going to be solved just by making backpacks lighter. We’ve been trying to find ways to make education better.”
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EDSi came from the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition, which started in 2010. The competition invites competitors from around the world to pitch their education-related business ideas.
Winners of the competition were invited to be a part of EDSi to help them further develop their ideas and make them into a reality.
In the future, Belardi is hopeful that EDSi could generate new ways to make the classroom engaging and help education impact students.
“There’s a lot of innovation happening,” he said. “It’s something that we’re tuned into and we’re investing a lot in.”
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