student-engagement
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Maggie Leen and the Education of an Education Company
A difficult chemistry class once made Maggie Leen doubt whether she belonged in college. Now the Top Hat CEO is betting that better courseware can keep the next student from asking the same question.
Ken Yanhs Keeps Returning to the Classroom
After a career spanning The Atlantic, Bain, WGBH, LEGO Education and a run of software companies, the Boston marketing executive has arrived at Element451 with a familiar brief: make complicated technology useful to people who have better things to do than decode it.
Diego Fanara Turned a Lonely University Choice Into a Global Conversation
A teenager arrived in London with rankings, brochures and too few honest answers. Diego Fanara built Unibuddy so the next student could ask someone who had actually been there.
Davina Chan Markets a Place You Have to Experience
At Hart House, the product is not one program or one room. Davina Chan's job is to make a century-old institution feel legible, useful and open to the next student walking through the door.
Will Morris
Will Morris is the founder and CEO of EdConnective, a Richmond, Virginia company that delivers one-to-one virtual instructional coaching to teachers, instructional coaches, and K-12 leaders. After a year mentoring African American freshmen in a Chicago charter school and graduate research at the University of Pennsylvania on coaching as a lever of teacher quality, he built a platform that pairs educators with coaches the way a dating site pairs partners, then feeds them timely, non-evaluative video feedback. EdConnective operates across more than a dozen states, has delivered thousands of coaching sessions, and reports double-digit gains in student engagement and mastery.
Conor Smith
Conor Smith is the CEO of Campus Connect Group, a Miami-based EdTech holding company that acquires, operates, and scales mission-critical software and services for higher education institutions. With an MBA from MIT Sloan and a background in entrepreneurship spanning Southeast Asia and North American software markets, Smith has built Campus Connect into a multi-product platform spanning financial aid, student information systems, enrollment management, and campus operations — serving colleges and universities across the United States.
Vanessa Didyk
Vanessa Roth Didyk is the CEO of ZeeMee, a social platform serving 2.6 million college-bound students across 3,000+ institutions. A serial edtech entrepreneur with 16+ years in the field, she founded Scholar's Station at UC Berkeley, sold it, built a tutoring marketplace at Rev.com, ran MathElf, then took over a struggling ZeeMee in 2018 and turned it into a top-10 App Store social networking app used by roughly 1 in 3 US college freshmen annually.