Dear Reimaginers,

There are only two weeks to go until the 2017 Reimagine Education competition closes, and the hundreds of applications we have received this year are transferred to our cohort of 200 expert judges for review. We’ve been delighted to receive strong applications from both higher education departments and exciting ed tech startups alike. The university application cohort currently includes MIT, Stanford, UCLA, National University of Singapore, the Universities of Warwick, Glasgow, Michigan, and Exeter; and the University of Sydney – to name but a few.

There’s still time to tell the world about your educational innovation, though! Our submissions window will remain open until 31^st July 2017 at 23:59 GMT, and we would be glad to hear from anyone at K12 level or above whose work is reimagining education for learners worldwide.

As we’ve seen our conversations around the future of teaching and learning progress – a conversation now three years old and counting – we’ve noted that student-centered learning is a recurring theme, with the need to place the learner at the center of the education process iterated and reiterated numerous times by both speakers and applicants.

One group acutely aware of what students want is, of course, students themselves. It is no accident that last year’s winner, Peter Bryant of the London School of Economics, submitted a project (Learners as Producers @ LSE) that emphasized the need to turn students into co-creators of (as opposed to receivers of) knowledge.

As a consequence, we are pleased to announce that we have added a new award category to this year’s portfolio: Student-Led Innovation. This new award recognizes that students should be drivers of educational change as much as educators or administrators, and will be awarded to the project that:

• Improves learning outcomes, teaching delivery, or employability outcomes, and;
• Is a pedagogical innovation led primarily by learners.

Students seeking to apply to this award category can do so at www.Reimagine-Education.com.

Our leading content piece this edition focuses on a similar theme. Written by our partner Robyn D. Shulman of EdNews Daily, it examines propitious means by which educators can try to encourage youth entrepreneurship in an often-formulaic education system. Like Robyn, we recognize the urgent need to develop pedagogies that foster the soft skills (creativity, divergent thinking, individualism) that are conducive to successful entrepreneurship.

Robyn continues to work tirelessly to share valuable, relevant content at the intersection of education and innovation to a global audience, and we are pleased to see that those in the sector have recognized as much. We’re proud to announce that EdNews Daily have recently forged a new partnership with TeacherCoach, a Learning Engagement System and Teacher Development platform integrating insights from educational psychology and technology. More information inside.

Our success story for this edition is Green Shoots Education, a South African Education NGO that was shortlisted for the 2016 Reimagine Education Awards Hybrid Learning category. Green Shoots’ work involves improving South African Mathematics education through an approach that integrates real-time learning analytics, a virtual learning environment for parents and guardians, and data-driven insights.

Reimagine Education isn’t the only competition encouraging, acknowledging, and rewarding educational improvement. Our partners at the Penn Graduate School of Education are running their own initiative, the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition (EBPC). Aimed at entrepreneurs in the early stages of ideation or product/service development it will open for applications on August 1, 2017. More information about the competition, and how to apply, can be found here.

The Penn Graduate School of Education are also valued contributors to this year’s Reimagine Education Steering Committee, who are overseeing the construction of this year’s conference agenda. We’re very excited to announce that a number of prestigious speakers have confirmed their participation for 2017’s edition, including those at the forefront of innovation at Google, IBM, and MIT.

We will continue working to ensure that this year’s conference is an unmissable event for anyone who is concerned with, or who is driving, educational innovation – and invite all readers to book their place before our Early Bird Discount window ends – also on the 31^st July.

Keep innovating!

Jack Moran
Editor
Reimagine Education Newsletter