A Is For Adaptive

Personalized learning is poised to transform education. Can it enrich students and investors at the same time?

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Photo-Illustration by Alexander Crispin for TIME

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knewton's Downtown Manhattan office has all the hallmarks of a well-funded start-up: beer is on tap, dinner is ordered in nightly, and a third of the space is given over to a lounge area with overstuffed leather chairs and a ping-pong table. (Knewton regularly hosts friendly matches against other tech companies.) Only 25 of the about 110 full-time employees are former schoolteachers. "We're trying to build a very big data-infrastructure platform with very cutting-edge stuff," Ferreira says. "We need really top data scientists, statisticians and programmers." Ferreira doesn't have an office; he sits instead at the end of a row of desks housing the marketing team. On a recent visit he was wearing cargo pants and a loose fleece pullover, blending in among his casually dressed charges (some of whom were wearing T-shirts reading KNERD, which the company has embraced as a term for employees and fellow travelers).

Ferreira, 44, might be king of the Knerds now, but long before he memorized the dictionary because he was bored in college, he was a kid who got bad grades in school. He says he always had a sense that his performance had more to do with the way subjects were taught than with his intelligence. "I always blamed the system for my repeated failures," he says. "Some kids just through sheer luck happen to be better fits for that system, and other kids like me and millions of others are not."

In the early 1990s, Ferreira joined Kaplan Inc.'s standardized-test-prep division. After being promoted to product director for Kaplan's GRE line, he led the development of a system to personalize content on the basis of student-performance data. While the technology of the time couldn't support the product, one of his former bosses there says it was the "alpha version" of a system that later became a central Kaplan offering. Feeling restless, Ferreira left for business school at Harvard, followed by a stint at Goldman Sachs and a failed start-up, DizzyCity, which he describes as a proto Google Street View. After that flopped, Ferreira returned to Kaplan in 2002, this time tasked with revising the CPA-prep business, then left two years later to work for the presidential campaign of his uncle John Kerry.

Technology finally caught up to Ferreira's adaptive-learning vision, and he launched Knewton in January 2008 to capitalize on it. His goal was for Knewton to be not a test-prep company or an appmaker but an adaptive-learning platform powering those products. But nobody was buying. "No one believed in adaptive learning or thought it would work. It sounded like space talk," he says. So Ferreira and what was then a three-person team built a math course to prove their concept. It caught the attention of administrators at Arizona State University, who incorporated Knewton's product into a redesigned remedial-math curriculum for incoming freshmen in summer 2011. The effect was notable: one year after the overhaul, more students passed the course (75%, up from 64% the year before) and fewer dropped out (7%, down from 15% the previous year).

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