experiential-learning
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Deepak Menaria and the education of a useful mistake
In Nagpur, the founder of Lemon Ideas has spent years giving aspiring entrepreneurs room to try. His classroom can look suspiciously like a business - complete with customers, consequences and the occasional instructive blunder.
Mike Vaughan and the trouble with a perfect answer
A pole-balancing printer, two early learning businesses, and a career spent testing what people do with what they know. The Regis Company co-founder keeps returning to the same question: how does better thinking develop?
Beau Leese and the first-experience problem
Before a graduate can get a job, someone has to let them do the work. Practera co-founder Beau Leese has spent years making that first opportunity easier to organise - and harder to reserve for the well connected.
John Fillmore Is Betting the Degree Needs a Workshop
After a decade helping Chegg scale, John Fillmore returned to the oldest problem in higher education: how to make a classroom feel more like the work waiting outside it.
Jodi McPherson Is Turning the First Rung of the Career Ladder Into Paid Work
After three decades in education technology, the Work Simplr founder is rebuilding early-career experience around a practical idea: give students real projects, pay them, and make the work count.
Mitch Gordon Put Freshman Year on a Passport
A teaching job in Taiwan became a career in global education. Now Verto Education's co-founder is trying to turn a semester abroad from an elective into the opening chapter of college.
Joseph E. Aoun
Joseph E. Aoun is the seventh president of Northeastern University and the author of Robot-Proof, the book that named the AI-era reinvention of higher education. A Lebanese-born linguist trained under Noam Chomsky, he has spent nearly two decades turning a single Boston commuter campus into a 13-campus global university system spanning North America and the UK, expanding co-op placements into more than 140 countries and growing external research funding sevenfold.
Wes Sonnenreich
Wes Sonnenreich is the Co-CEO and co-founder of Practera, the experiential-learning platform that turns real industry projects into scalable, credit-bearing coursework for tens of thousands of students a year. An MIT-trained engineer who once wrote the book on network security - literally, more than one - he has spent 25-plus years building at the seam between technology and learning: from a 1990s web-metrics startup and a security consultancy to running Deloitte Australia's innovation program. Today he splits his attention between Sydney and Cambridge, Massachusetts, evangelizing a future where people learn alongside machines instead of competing with them.