Back to school

No, not for another PhD.

Earlier this month, I said farewell to my fantastic colleagues of the past four years at Grockit to venture into the unknown: the future of the university. If you were to design a brand new world-class university today, what would it look like? What looks the same as the best of traditional universities and what is unrecognizably different? What counts? Who counts? Next week, I’ll be joining the Minerva Project to help build a new university based on an unusual set of answers to these questions. The Minerva Project aims to create a university without a central/physical campus that will offer a rigorous undergraduate education to top students around the world (and more). I’ll be focused on designing and building the web-based environment to support this type of learning. (Engineers: Sound interesting? We’re hiring!)

It was a pleasure working with Farb, Roy, and the intrepid team at Grockit over the past several years. I’m happy to be staying involved as an advisor.

During my bit of downtime, I’ve been building a set of new Popcorn-powered learning tools using a grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation (thanks to Philipp Schmidt at P2PU!). Follow @aribadernatal on Twitter for updates on this project.

Finally, I’ll be co-chairing (with Lewis Johnson) the Industry and Innovation track at the 2013 AI in Education conference. If you’re at a education technology startup and doing cutting-edge work in adaptive instruction, adaptive assessment, personalization, or other applications of AI in education, let me know and I’ll keep you in the loop about how to participate.