T o understand what drives Dror Ben-Naim, a 37-year-old entrepreneur, it helps to know a few of the things that annoy him. At the top of the list: boring science classes, educational technology that professors can’t tweak to their own purposes, and the difficulty that college instructors face in trying to share useful ideas about teaching.
Mr. Ben-Naim is founder of Smart Sparrow, a 50-person company based in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, that makes a user-friendly technology platform professors can use to insert interactive quizzes, visualizations, and other material into their courses and digital presentations.
He is also a prime mover behind a new venture called the Inspark Science Network, a soon-to-be-live digital system that will allow college instructors and schoolteachers to share and exchange digital tools and lessons they create.
Many publishers and ed-tech companies are creating so-called adaptive-learning products that seem to take the professor out of the mix, by using what some call “black box” algorithms that automatically guide students through a course. Mr. Ben-Naim’s ventures operate on a different philosophy. He describes it like this: “Put the power in the hands of the teachers, and good things will happen.”
Smart Sparrow also created the technology that drives two visually rich experimental courses, “Habitable Worlds” and “BioBeyond,” designed to invigorate general-education science teaching. (A third digital course in anatomy and physiology, aimed at prospective nurses, is in the works.)
Mr. Ben-Naim is an unsalaried “professor of practice” at Arizona State University’s teachers college and associate director of the university’s new Center for Education Through eXploration (known as ETX), which helped create the new courses and Inspark. ETX makes the courses available to colleges to use in whole or in part, at a nominal cost.
Inspark, which is built on the Smart Sparrow platform, is based on a similar kind of network for biomedical education that Mr. Ben-Naim previously created in Australia. Inspark has drawn $4.5-million in backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and, as of last month, a $10-million, five-year grant from NASA to promote science education in elementary and secondary schools and to the general public. “Fundamentally, what we’re trying to do is get more teachers teaching with better courseware,” says Mr. Ben-Naim.
Mr. Ben-Naim “thinks like an academic but with a very practical streak,” says George Siemens, an internationally known researcher on teaching with technology. Smart Sparrow is “one of the few platforms out there that promotes the centrality of the teacher,” says Mr. Siemens, who teaches at the University of Texas at Arlington and is part of a team of researchers that will study the impact of Inspark. The idea behind Inspark, he says, is way overdue. Professors have means to share their research, “but we really haven’t done a good job of sharing our teaching practices.”
Mr. Ben-Naim comes to this work with an eclectic pedigree and an attitude that friends and colleagues describe as “audacious” and “infectious.” Argentinian-born (his parents were working there at the time), Israeli-raised (he specialized in computer security for the Israeli air force during his compulsory military service), and Australian-educated (he received a doctorate in computer science at the University of New South Wales), he’s also known for his quirky intellectual passions.
A few years ago, for example, he became fascinated by Winston Churchill, reading his six-volume memoir of World War II. He is probably one of the few chief executives of a Silicon Valley start-up whose office walls are adorned with Churchill quotes. (Among them: “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”)
He’s a “relentlessly inquisitive guy,” says Ariel Anbar, a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State and director of ETX. The two worked closely together to create the “Habitable Worlds” and “BioBeyond” courses, and they continue to collaborate on Inspark and other projects. “Dror will have an idea,” Mr. Anbar says, “and boom, he’s off doing it.”
That describes the origins of Smart Sparrow, which has raised about $12-million in private investment and is now used to some extent on about 500 campuses. But the company didn’t just pop up fully formed. In 2004, while still a physics undergraduate, Mr. Ben-Naim was helping one of his professors by creating 3-D renderings and animations for an online course to explain the workings of a photonics lab. After months of work, the professor told him the digital tools were almost worthless because the professor himself couldn’t make changes in them without his student’s programming skills.
That put Mr. Ben-Naim on a journey that concluded with his writing a Ph.D. thesis in computer science that became the basis for Smart Sparrow. (The company name derives from his first name, which translates from the Hebrew as both “sparrow” and “freedom.”) “We’re born from the need of academics to control the experience,” he says.
Smart Sparrow sells its software directly to individual professors and departments, at prices that begin at $39 per month for up to 30 students in a class; departments and institutions that buy it on a larger scale pay higher amounts based on the number of classes and students. Professors who have used the Smart Sparrow platform, which is a bit like creating a presentation with PowerPoint but with many more interactive options, appreciate having that control. But they also note that it takes time and energy.
The product makes it easier to actually shape the course, says Richard Simpson, an associate professor of computer science at the New York Institute of Technology. But it takes time to think through what visualization or animation to bring in, what follow-up questions to include, and what prompts to offer students who still need help. He compares the effort to writing a course textbook and continues to wonder if the effort was worth it. “If Smart Sparrow doesn’t make it, I sunk a lot of work into a textbook that doesn’t exist,” he says. (Mr. Ben-Naim says about half the users of Smart Sparrow now use it on a more limited basis than Mr. Simpson does.)
For now, Mr. Simpson’s time investment is probably safe. In fact, with the launch of “BioBeyond,” Smart Sparrow is enjoying newfound attention, including some from community colleges. That’s because the Gates grant includes funds for Achieving the Dream, a community-college organization, to work with Inspark.
Inspark is run by Arizona State’s Center for Education Through eXploration and operates on the Smart Sparrow platform. In about a year, says Mr. Ben-Naim, it will have the capacity to accept and distribute outside material. That, he says, is when Smart Sparrow’s potential to change science education will really be tested.
“Creating courseware is the fun and easy part,” he says. “Actually getting it to be used at scale, that’s the hard part.”
