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JOHN M. GRILLOS Director Curriki |
John Grillos has held Director, CEO, COO or senior management positions in a variety of enterprises in education and training, professional services and technology. He as been a Managing Director of four venture capital firms (and founded two of them) with combined capital under management exceeding $500 million. He has been a member of the Curriki Board of Directors since 2007. Selected highlights include:
He was a Director and, for a turnaround period, COO of CBT Systems, the world’s largest e-learning company with revenues exceeding $250 million and a NASDAQ market capitalization of $4 billion at its peak. He was a senior executive for American Management Systems (AMS), having spent the last five of his 11 years with the firm building the consulting and application systems development practice in the western US. As CEO or COO, John successfully managed several enterprise product and service company turnarounds including Tesseract Corp., SPSS, VTel, and Summit Design.
John was for 9 years a Managing Director in the venture capital division of Robertson Stephens and Company, leading fund and firm investments in such known companies as CBT systems (SmartForce), Sylvan Learning, C/Net, Calera Recognition Systems (Kurzweil), Ask Jeeves, VTel, Wine.com and Summit Design. He was also the founder and CEO of MVC Capital; a NYSE listed venture capital operating company.
John has been a director in 23 companies ranging in size from startups to major public companies. Most of the companies were venture capital backed. He was involved in the IPO of six of them. In several rapid growth and turnaround situations he played the lead role in recruiting CEOs and managing the transition process. He served as an interim CEO in four turnaround situations, and was involved in the acquisition activities of nine of the companies. John was a lead technical professional at the Institute for Computer Research at the University of Chicago. John holds and MBA from the University of Chicago and a BS from Illinois Institute of Technology.
Technology drives innovation in education – An Open and Shared Solution
The world is in the interesting position of having to provide better education relevant to the jobs of the 21st century at a cost lower than was the case before the economic melt down of 2008. Technology that allows educators to collaboratively create and distribute high-quality curricula and other learning resources is the key to solving the problem. Publishers, K-12 schools and universities, nonprofits and government organizations must evolve their business and distribution models to adapt to the resulting technology centric learning environment
Open and shared educational resources provide the fundamental basis for an online innovation that enables teachers to help every student learn. It does so by providing the tools and resources needed to improve the effectiveness of teachers; which has been shown by research to be a key to providing high quality education.
Open educational resource sites and communities, such as Curriki, play the unique role of a one-stop shop, combining a comprehensive, high-quality repository of free and shared content with collaboration tools that enable teachers to connect with better resources and other teachers. These teachers engage with open platforms and vibrant communities of like-minded professionals to redesign instruction based on rigorously evaluated, standards-aligned, free, open, and shared resources. The teachers continually improve their own practices, as well as the resources they use to help students reach high achievement.
A newer model for curricula creation is emerging that takes full advantage of social networking technologies by leveraging the collective knowledge of educators and learners. Using these technologies, new knowledge has the potential to be created, shared, and critiqued very differently than information on paper. Wikis, blogs and online communities like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and others are inspired by the power of interactivity, participation and collaboration. These new technologies have provided an extraordinary opportunity to change the curricula paradigm, and thereby to dramatically expand access to quality learning and the free exchange of knowledge (Casserly & Smith, 2006).
The ROI the open and shared education curricula and content community can generate is substantial. We estimate that the U.S. education system alone spends $12 billion to $15 billion for instructional resources each year; mostly books. By converting just 10 percent of U.S. classrooms from proprietary, static, and expensive curricula to open, dynamic, and free content, such as found on Curriki, we can save school systems $700 million annually. In addition, we believe the usage of open content will increase teacher effectiveness, which will, in turn, provide additional benefits to society. With 10 percent of teachers using open and free content each school day, student achievement will improve. For each percentage point that high school graduation rates improve, $840 million long term benefits accrue from such things as reduced crime and use of social services, and from taxes collected from productive employment.
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