Hakan satiroglu biography of michael jackson

Hakan Satiroglu is a serial education technology entrepreneur and one of the most peripatetic and capacious thinkers I know. Born in Turkey, Hakan graduated from Boston University before launching a series of start-ups in the EdTech sector. His successful ventures have included Xplana Learning, TeachersConnect, and Mindbridge Partners, and he is a founding principal of LearnLaunch, an EdTech incubator and accelerator in Boston. (Full disclosure: I am a Senior Advisor at LearnLaunch.)

I caught up with Hakan by phone one afternoon while the buzz of the start-ups incubating in LearnLaunch’s shared space was clearly audible in the background.

What do you see as the most important trends in EdTech today?

Hakan:  I think the three key areas with the most important development today are in authentic assessment, language learning, and gaming.

Starting backwards with gaming, we’re seeing more and more how educational games can help students learn, helping them develop much more creative ways to create and problem solve while having fun.

I also think language learning is often overlooked when considering top EdTech applications, but language learning is a worldwide need, particularly for people who want to play on the global stage, for which the acquisition of English is a necessity. It also has to be considered from a resource perspective: I was talking with a friend in Turkey who was saying that so many people there want to learn English, but there are not enough resources for them to do so. How do we make that more accessible?

I also think in the US we should graduate with fluency in a foreign language. After English, the three most important languages I find most necessary in today’s world are Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic.

Also, as workforce training and skill-based learning become more important to educational outcomes, assessing people’s skills takes more center stage. One of LearnLaunch’s portfolio companies, Authess, founded by Paul Crockett formerly of Pearson and Chris Kaiser of MIT, is a great example of this.  We need to be able to identify, measure, quantify, and track in real time the skills we are hoping to impart for people to be successful in today’s world – and do it with a scalable model.

What do you consider the key skills we need to be assessing?

Hakan: Entrepreneurial skills – especially critical thinking, how to be curious, how to generate your own resources, problem-solving. As an entrepreneur, if you lack these skills, you’ll quickly find yourself in a very difficult situation. Can we teach that? How do we help students learn to tackle complex problems, break them down, and then be able to explain it clearly to others?

Even complex societal issues. Understanding how societies are managed. Unfortunately, politics is an ugly term today, but it is really about organizational management on a large scale. Helping students to see issues like Syria or other crises as a large management issue. No part of our educational system from elementary school through college teaches how to assess and hold management responsible.

What do you see as the most exciting and the most concerning trends in American education today?

Hakan: The most exciting is the shift toward more conversation about skill-based learning.  A key reason to get an education is to be able to achieve career success, but our traditional offerings no longer give us what we need to have a competitive workforce.  Shifting the paradigm toward entrepreneurial skills is a necessary and exciting development.

Scariest for me is how much a quality education costs.  It’s pretty outrageous.  I don’t know if there is a reasonable justification for why the price tag keeps going up at this rate, especially when many are not preparing people to succeed. There will be much more learning taking place outside of the traditional educational models.

Another area where we need more work is how to give our kids and young adults a global perspective so they can grow up into adulthood with the knowledge of what’s happening all around us. We can refer to it as raising Global Citizens, who can better grasp our role and responsibilities around the world. I am not sure how much of this is happening across a broad range today in our educational system.

We also need to increase our focus and support for our teachers, especially in the pre K-12 area. Our teachers are our future, and their education, financial and social support, their ongoing connectivity is extremely important. The more we invest in our teachers and their well being, the more impact we are going to see in the overall wellness of our education. This area is a big passion of mine and I’m working hard to make it happen.

I am a firm believer in harnessing the collective power of the best minds, of the people who are thinking most deeply and care most deeply about these issues, so that we can treat seemingly intractable problems as susceptible to analysis and resolution – through technology and networking to get enough people who can think philosophically about these issues, free from political agendas, to push the boulder up the hill. I’m increasingly interested in how we create mechanisms for these conversations, provide structure around them, so that we can simplify the challenges down to a level that a fifth-grader can understand, and turn the discussion toward concrete approaches that are scalable.

Having lived much of your life in both Turkey and the United States, what do you see as the key differences in educational approaches?

Hakan: Well, there are some superficial differences, certainly. In America, there is more complexity because of local, state and city control over education, whereas in Turkey, education is more centrally managed. But I really think too much emphasis is placed on differences around the globe, whereas there are far more similarities no matter where you go; support for teachers who are trying to innovate, the need for more collaborative school environments.

The same elements and skill sets are applicable to all children everywhere in the world, yet our respective approaches are very disconnected. What would it look like if educators bridged the apparent gaps to a more global conversation about these topics? Can educators play a central role in bridging the gaps between the United States and Mexico, for instance, by focusing on the fact that all of the students in both countries need the exact same set of skills to succeed today? This way we can create more collaboration among neighboring countries – then regions and eventually the entire world.

Jim Tracy is Head of School at Rocky Hill School in East Greenwich, RI