Dive Brief:
- The educational nonprofit Sesame Workshop, which created Sesame Street, will partner with IBM Watson to help develop ed tech that may include "personalized learning" features in apps and interactive toys to gather and analyze data about what pre-K students are learning and how.
- Sesame Workshop already offers mobile games, story apps, e-books and digital Family Toolkits, and the new collaboration is meant to deepen the organization's reach of digital devices and platforms.
- "Context exploration" may be one focus of the partnership, which would enable educators to learn when a child has mastered a subject or needs help, then automatically assist, TechCrunch reports.
Dive Insight:
The collaboration is explicit about preschoolers' privacy, and data gathering and the technologies developed by IBM Watson and Sesame Workshop will require parents to opt-in before their children can participate or use any of the ed-tech platforms or devices.
Experiments like AltSchool are currently experimenting with data mining related to learning in real time, sparking debate and dialogue over the use of analytics and privacy in the classroom.
This is far from the first time that Sesame Workshop has engaged in a collaboration to deepen learning for young children. In February 2016, the company Speakaboos added 10 Sesame Street music videos to its platform to support early literacy. The nonprofit has also teamed up with 14 collaborators, including Exceptional Minds, for a program called Sesame Street and Autism: See Amazing in All Children, which created media content for autistic learners. In 2014, Sesame Workshop worked with ToyTalk, a speech recognition company, to research how best to advance preschool literacy using conversational technology.