Last night I met with the CEO of Knewton, Jose Ferreira. We met in high school, and have stayed in loose touch over the years, mainly through our shared friend Jeremy. Jose has had quite a career in education and testing.  In the ’90’s he was at Kaplan, where he led a company-wide re-engineering effort that designed the company’s courses, and became known as “The Antichrist” inside the Educational Testing Service for his code-breaking strategies.

Jose does not soft peddle or mince words, check out this quote from wired:

I helped create the current Kaplan product, said Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira. It’s just a dumb, old model. At Kaplan, you spend $1450 on a GMAT class, for instance, and the vast majority of that money is wasted. It goes to local centers, local real estate, local center staff, local teachers, local marketing, sales, shipping, printing, paper inventories in addition to the environmental cost of all that, it’s just not an efficient use of money.

In our meeting he laid out a plan to fundamentally change the way we learn. He described the companies efforts in creating the industries first Adaptive Learning Engine. The goal is not to change us/people, instead to change our lessons and what we use to learn. Personalizing materials to our personal needs. In many ways I am amazed by this effort, as I had a very difficult time with my lessons as a kid in school. I’ve since adapted, learned how to learn in my own ways. It took a lot of effort and cost me and my family a lot personally. I was that kid who always needed a little extra help. Think dyslexia.

Although Jose isn’t setting out to solve for dyslexics, I can see him certainly leveling the playing field for the great diversity of learning styles we humans have. An amazing effort, I wish him the greatest success, oh and they are hiring if you are interested!