The Chronicle’s third annual Shark Tank: Edu Edition, held during the South by Southwest Edu conference in March, featured five people pitching ideas — some concrete, some theoretical — to improve higher education.
Two of the contestants presented plans to improve the study-abroad experience. Another proposed ways to help faculty develop teaching skills. The fourth outlined a business model that could help ease the friction students face when transferring from community colleges to four-year institutions, and the fifth offered experimental plans to use artificial intelligence and text-messaging "bots" to tackle problems in student retention.
