ConnectEDU’s Director of Policy and Research Honored for Work in her Community

(Boston, MA) May 31^st, 2011 - Exemplifying our employees’ commitment to commendable community involvement, ConnectEDU’s own Dr. Stephanie Gertz, Director of Policy and Research, received a service award from the Synagogue Council today.

Stephanie and her husband, Cantor Steven Weiss of Sha’aray Shalom in Hingham, received the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts’ Community Service Award today for their leadership and involvement in a myriad of activities within the Greater Boston Jewish community. Beyond their involvement with their synagogue in Hingham, Stephanie and Steven are active with the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, Jewish Federations of North America, and numerous local and national organizations.

At ConnectEDU, Stephanie is equally committed to assisting her teammates and our customers. We’re inspired by her selflessness and share the Synagogue Council’s appreciation of a great philanthropist. Congratulations, Stephanie!

ConnectEDU sponsors TEDx Conference at Brown

TEDx speakers highlight the need for innovation in higher education.

(Boston, MA) May 9, 2011 - ConnectEDU was the proud sponsor of the first annual TEDx event at Brown University on Wednesday evening. TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) is an annual conference where presenters such as Bill Gates, Malcolm Gladwell, and Google’s Larry Page give short talks on “ideas worth spreading.” TED has spawned a global movement of independently organized conferences called TEDx events. Brown’s TEDx event focused on innovation within the higher education space. Needless to say, ConnectEDU was thrilled to support the focus of this event based on our devotion to developing technology that enables learners, educators, and employers to innovate.

One speaker, Professor Deak Nabers, touched on a theme particularly close to our mission. Professor Nabers, a Brown University English Professor, spoke about the need for longitudinal data in order to evaluate the effectiveness of college courses. Nabers stated that while he can evaluate how well a student does on the specific (and self-admittedly esoteric) items listed on his syllabus, he has no idea whether or not his class helps his students prepare for the next English class they take, let alone prepare to graduate and enter the working world. He called on Brown to help him evaluate the things “outside of his box” (his box is comprised of mid 20^th century American Literature) in order to provide him with more feedback for his teaching. While he noted that innovation is sometimes a taboo word within the bureaucratic and traditional space of academia, he urged his fellow academics to look outside their respective boxes and demand data on how their classes fit into a student’s learner lifecycle.

ConnectEDU specializes in tracking student data from high school, through college, and on to their career. ConnectEDU’s CoursEval software helps colleges like Brown create, deploy, and analyze longitudinal surveys geared to evaluate courses and faculty instruction. CoursEval also integrates into the ConnectEDU platform, so that colleges can evaluate more than just individual performance of students over the span of a course—they can evaluate beyond the span of a course.  We’re excited to work with leaders like Deak Nabers to move our mission forward and continue to support innovation in the education space.

The TEDx videos from all speakers at the Brown event will be available online soon. Click here to watch Deak Nabers and more.

A Storm Warning with Cloud Computing

Rick Blaisdell, CTO, reflects on the Amazon Cloud outage and how it relates to ConnectEDU’s Cloud preparation.

April 29, 2011 - As the CTO, it seems like I get more attention when things go wrong than when they are going well. Simply performing is always the baseline requirement.  Most of the people I interact with know I drink the Cloud Cool-Aid, and when the Amazon outages were posted, people came running from all over asking me if I was nervous that ConnectEDU is also on a Cloud.  

There are actually many Cloud providers in the market. We use NaviSite as our provider and are running on the Cisco Unified Compute System (UCS).  NaviSite is an enterprise provider, so they not only helped build our Cloud, but they also manage and monitor it.  This means we have security experts, maintenance experts and a 24/7 monitoring facility to ensure the system is secure, scalable and reliable.  

As a standard, virtualization platforms (Clouds) have built-in failover mechanisms, so when a blade (computer) fails, the Clouds that were running on those blades are automatically moved to another blade.  These types of failures happen more often than most people would expect, and when they do, whatever virtualization platform that is used will take care of the issue automatically. Depending on how the system is setup, the user base may never experience an outage.  This is how it’s supposed to work. However, in extenuating circumstances, if a company hasn’t put the right number of backups in place, a major failover can cause the system to go into a panic (yes, that’s the technical term). This is when things get really ugly.

So, what can a technology department do to prepare for such a disaster?  If the companies that were affected by the Amazon outage had an active live site failover at another location, they would not have experienced a loss of service.  This is not inexpensive and everyone should weigh the risks and costs of how much and what type of redundancy they require to provide the uptime expected. The Amazon incident should remind us of what can go wrong in a physical or virtualized environment, and luckily ConnectEDU has made the appropriate precautions to avoid extreme downtimes.

- Rick Blaisdell
  Chief Technology Officer

Stepping Up & Impacting the Everett Community

ConnectEDU's Employee Highlight, Frankie Nuzzo, went above and beyond to help a friend in need and inspire a community.

April 26^th, 2011  - Last month a tragic fire in Frankie’s hometown of Everett, MA left a friend and his family homeless with nowhere to go.  Not shy from stepping up for people in need, Frankie took the lead in organizing a successful 3-on-3 basketball tournament that raised over $25K.

“Managing this fundraiser was not all that dissimilar from the mindset and approach we practice at ConnectEDU. As Craig Powell likes to say, ‘There is no mission without margin.’ We push our mission of empowering students to manage their education and launch their career forward, while simultaneously innovating how we build a sustainable business,” Frankie said. “When I first heard about my friend’s family losing their home in a fire, and knowing how fragile their financial situation already was, I knew they needed help.  Help can come in many forms - some people give help through well-wishes, saying prayers, or other forms of generosity. Don’t get me wrong, these forms of charity are all great and more than appreciated, but I wanted to make a more tangible impact.

He set an ambitious goal of raising enough money for the family in need to find a new home within the month, which meant raising a lot of money, and raising it quickly. As an added challenge, the City of Everett has a median household income of under $40,000, which meant that depending on a few large donations was not an option.  Frankie needed to reach a high number of people willing to donate smaller amounts. And that’s how the soon-to-be annual Mo's 3-on-3 Tournament was born.

Frankie and his team raised $11,000 in seven days. Frankie’s efforts caught the eyes of the Boston Celtics, who recognized Frankie’s fundraising efforts by donating to the cause, bringing the total amount raised to over $25,000.

The Everett community is also supporting its high school students through the implementation of YourPlanForCollege.org, Massachusetts’ college and career readiness portal sponsored by the Executive Office of Education, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, and Massachusetts Education Finance Authority. Powered by ConnectEDU, YourPlanForCollege is an online portal designed to provide students everything they need to get ready for life after high schools.  Go to www.yourplanforcollege.org to learn more.

To read more about Frankie’s accomplishment check out this ESPN Boston article: http://sports.espn.go.com/boston/news/story?id=6397022

Summer Search and the 2011 Boston Marathon

April 18th, 2011
Posted by Erik Peterson

It’s Marathon Monday in Boston, a day that will be truly unforgettable for some 25,000 runners who will be competing in the 115^th Boston Marathon. For runners, the Boston Marathon compares with stepping onto the field at the Super Bowl, and I’m thrilled to be joining the field this year. As a member of the Entrepreneurship Program at ConnectEDU, I’m even more excited to be supporting Summer Search Boston, a unique college access organization that combines traditional college prep support with once-in-a-lifetime summer experiential learning opportunities.

Summer Search targets the most deserving students: 92% are first-generation college-bound, and their families make less than $25,000 a year on average. These students face an environment of great challenges and low expectations. Only about 60% of Boston Public High School students will graduate, while less than 20% will complete a college degree. But the students that are lucky enough to join Summer Search are given a fighting chance to break the cycle of poverty.

In addition to weekly mentoring, test prep, and college counseling, Summer Search students attend two experiential learning programs during their sophomore and junior year summers. Many students attend Outward Bound leadership development trips, attend summer programs at American universities, or participate in study abroad programs around world. What does hiking and traveling have to do with closing the educational attainment gap? Ask Ron Delorme, a Summer Search alumnus who hiked the Sierra Nevada. “The first day made me want to give up,” he told the Summer Search team last week, “but it was worth it, because I did some things I never thought I could do before.” That’s exactly what striving for a college degree means for disadvantaged students: defying the expectations of a broken system that lets far too many promising individuals fall through the cracks. 

That mission lines up pretty nicely with what we strive for at ConnectEDU. In my work on the product development team at ConnectEDU, I’ve helped design and develop tools to help students reach their end goals. Students across the nation are facing unique challenges when applying to college and researching careers. Regardless of what hurdles they face, ConnectEDU is working to provide the tools they need manage their education and launch their career.

Summer Search has the results to prove the program’s efficacy: 100% of Summer Search Boston’s students graduate from high school, and 89% have completed or are persisting in their postsecondary degrees. These are extremely impressive numbers, and I feel so honored to support such a worthy cause. 

Wish me luck today as I take on the 26.2 miles from Hopkinton to Boston, and please consider supporting Summer Search’s noble mission and impressive results!

Visit my fundraising page to learn more.

It’s Time to Educate and Innovate

January 27^th, 2011 - In the first hour of President Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address over 100,000 tweets were posted, and of those tweets public education accounted for the highest percentage (report courtesy of Tweetbeat).  The 16.7%, which beat out other categories like government spending and job creation, clearly showed that fixing education is on the top of American’s lists.  Luckily, along with investing in innovation and infrastructure, education was communicated as a top priority for this administration. Funding for education reform will continue to be awarded to states through Race to the Top grants.  The grants are given to the states with the most comprehensive, innovative plans to reform not only how students are educated in science, engineering, technology and math, but also how teachers and principals are evaluated, how states plan to turn around their lowest-performing schools, and even more importantly, how states are going to use data to track and report on their progress.

Since inception, ConnectEDU has been investing in building the technology that gives states the tools for exactly what Race to the Top demands of them.  Our statewide efforts with Massachusetts, Michigan and Texas are proof that we are moving forward with this movement.  Our president had a clear message that if we don’t support innovation in our education system we will continue to fall behind.  At ConnectEDU, we're focused on supporting states in their efforts to increase students’ college and career readiness and capture more Race to the Top dollars to accelerate their plans.

Condoleezza Rice Names Current U.S. Education System as Threat to "American Dream"

November 17, 2010 - When the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State says that the number one security threat to our nation is our K-12 education system, it’s a sign that our broken education methods have finally become a serious issue. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke at a Commonwealth Institute luncheon in Boston in late October, and ConnectEDU VP Jane Swift sponsored a table for several ConnectEDU employees to attend.

Secretary Rice spoke candidly in front of hundreds of Boston business women in the audience, sharing with us that access to education changed her parents and grandparents’ lives and in turn allowed her to become the first black female National Security advisor and secretary of state. Her grandfather was able to attend college in Alabama through a Presbyterian scholarship even though he was the son of a poor African-American farmer. Her father also attended school on a parochial scholarship, and he put the highest importance on education for his daughter. Secretary Rice said that she benefited from the high expectations her parents and teachers had for her. She was the recipient of affirmative action, which she is in favor of, but she also feels that young people today have a sense of entitlement to being successful in society that can be dangerous.

Since our daily work is dedicated to reforming education through college access, it was helpful for us to hear Rice’s perspective. It is easy to think of education as only a local or national issue. I usually describe ConnectEDU’s products as helping individual student’s apply to college and helping many local counselors and state-wide school systems track student progress and identify areas to improve education.  Secretary Rice noted that the failure of our national education system could lead to an inability for our nation to compete on a global level.  Rarely do I describe our work as affecting our nation’s global competitiveness. However, Rice’s speech helped remind me that education will directly decide the success of our economy in the next fifty years.

-Mollie
Entrepreneurship Program, Class of 2010