SBIR Phase I: Nurturing student learning by bringing relevant academic content to the consumer

This SBIR Phase I project is aimed at developing a web-based system that enables students, educators and parents to discover standards aligned K-12 educational resources that meet the strengths, needs and passions of students. The universe of K-12 educational resources has rapidly expanded in the last few years through the abundance of education technology products (including mobile applications). Though mobile applications and online educational content have high levels of engagement with students, they are not considered as curricular learning because of their unstructured nature. In a study by the Gates foundation, 71% of high school dropouts reported lack of interest by 9th and 10th grade and the study recommends engaging learners through real-world, experiential learning. Students who drop out of school do not qualify for 90% of available jobs. The solution developed through this SBIR Phase 1 will empower students with choices and variety in content, and will be aligned to student's passion, e.g., choice of sound engineering videos and/or music-based math for an aspiring musicians. The use of such technology which is standards aligned and tuned to the student's passion is expected to improve student graduation rates and associated economic growth for the communities at large. The Phase 1 SBIR will provide a web-based system that is a first-of-its-kind integrated and personalized learning solution that can curate various types of educational resources for students and teachers and present these resources in a manner that is tuned to student's passions. It will provide school districts and families a sustainable and cost effective solution to make efficient use of limited resources and budgets to procure standards aligned content that are highly engaging to students. The resulting system will be organized as a consumer application that can facilitate the discovery of standards-aligned educational resources that work with the strength and the pace of a student, and personalize learning at the student level. This system will enable, ALL students, regardless of socioeconomic status to have access to relevant educational materials both inside and outside the classroom. An initial alpha launch, a pilot study and analytical data gathering involving teachers and students will be conducted over Phase 1 to study the efficacy of the developed solution. The goal of this research is to verify the system features, the ease of use and understand if Phase 1 activities result in a prototype that offers technical feasibility to solve the attempted problem.