Yesterday, the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator, powered by TechStars, held their inaugural demo day. Demo day, the culmination of the three-month intensive mentoring process, was by all accounts a great success. As a whole, the entire first batch shows great potential, but a few startups really stand out. This is not meant to disparage or take anything away from all those startups that participated.

panOpen

panOpen, according to their Facebook page is, “A platform that promotes the widespread adoption of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Aligning the interests of faculty, students and administrators.” What exactly does that mean? Well panOpen is starting by taking on the problem of the ever increasing cost of textbooks, and incorporating some of the vast amount of online content into the equation. In the last few years, there has been a growing open-source textbook movement. panOpen is looking to build one this growth, and bring the benefits to the masses. Accordingly, they have built a platform for both the sharing and usage of these open-source texts, and also allows for the incorporation of other digital mediums, suck as videos from Khan Academy.

This is a brilliant idea. From the outside looking in, it seems as if the textbook industry is little more that a money making sham. Often the newest version of any textbook contains very little new information – perhaps a paragraph here and there – yet they can and do charge $120 for them. This is overwhelmingly true of the introductory courses, the 101’s of the world. As slightly less than half of first-time college students actually graduate within six years, these 101 textbooks are where the money is. The system is broken. I for one wish panOpen nothing but success, and hope they destroy the McGraw-Hill’s of the world.

Degreed  

Degreed has created a way to track, and quantify your entire educational history, incorporating the traditional aspects (diplomas, degrees, MBA…) and the non-traditional aspects (Lynda.com, Khan Academy, MIT Open source classes, and many more). They allow you to “jailbreak your degree.” Until now, it has been hard if not impossible to quantify and document your education as a whole; try writing that you have watched 15 TED talks, and taken 20 Lynda courses on your resume. Degreed has made it easy and practical to display your education.

Flinja

Flinja is a college-centric freelance marketplace making it insanely easy for students, staff, and faculty to hire, and be hired for hourly or task-based jobs. Think of Flinja as a sort of Elance or oDesk specifically for college communities. The logic behind the platform is that it is extremely hard for those in college or just out of college to get experience within their desired fields without accepting a soul-crushing unpaid internship.

And of course, Ranku, the Mark Cuban backed startup which we covered yesterday.