Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates has announced that his charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is launching a $20 million grant designed to get entrepreneurs to develop new technologies to help students obtain their college degrees.

The Gates Foundation is seeking to get entrepreneurs involved in tackling the issues surrounding America’s struggling education system. The foundation has already put billions toward education-related grants, and Bill Gates was a prominent character in Waiting for Superman, a new documentary that analyzes the failures of the American education system.

The Next Generation Learning Challenges fund will be divided into grants ranging from $250,000 to $750,000, focused on technologies that emphasize blended learning models, deepen student engagement and learning through interactive application, high-quality open courseware and learning analytics for monitoring student progress.

The deadline for the program is November 17; grants will be announced in March 2011. While the Gates Foundation will provide funds for the project, the nonprofit organization EDUCAUSE will run the program. It will award grants every six to 12 months.

According to Gates, it isn’t limiting the grants to any specific type of organization. He believes that non-profits will primarily apply for grants related to blended learning models, but that he hopes there will be a mix of private companies and startups for grants related to deepening student engagement and learning.

Looking to take a free, college-level, online course? Look no farther than Einztein, a nonprofit that features more than 2,000 courses from 13 countries and across 40 categories. We spoke with Marco Masoni, its 42-year-old, Santa Monica, California-based founder.

GOOD: Prior to starting Einztein, what did you do?

Marco Masoni: While studying law, I taught in a public school in Washington, D.C., and later at a private school in LA. I taught in schools that were under-resourced and schools that were over-resourced, both at a stage when the internet was just beginning to take shape. A few years ago, after working in entertainment finance, I decided to make the permanent switch to education.

G: Why education?

MM: A couple years ago I convinced my nieces to relocate to Los Angeles from other parts of the world, thinking that California had a wonderful public education system that involved going to a good community college, and after two years transferring to one of the four-year state schools. It was a pretty good bargain for the money. Subsequently, the budget crisis has implemented cutbacks, which in the abstract might not seem like such a big deal until you have someone you love looking to transfer and being turned away from four-year schools due to reduced enrollment numbers. It got me thinking that if $40,000 a year isn’t viable and the paths are closed off to cheaper alternatives, what’s a student who wants to get a higher education supposed to do? I decided to focus on new models for education.

G: What is Einztein exactly?

MM: It's intended to serve as a sort of cloud campus, which allows people with the desire to learn to access free courses and connect with one another as they carry out their academic pursuits. It's intended to serve as a platform to enable the exploration and experimentation of new models of education. And while we're not trying to create a model that will work for everyone, I predict that we will soon get to the point where there will be ways for willing students to obtain online degrees at low or no-cost.

G: When did it launch?

MM: The site launched in March and we're still developing some important elements, including our social knowledge networking tool, which is aimed at enriching the experience of studying online.

G: What's your favorite course?

MM: Making Civics Real. The years I spent teaching and my interest in civics come together in that course, which is basically a professional development workshop for teachers of civics.

G: How do courses appear on your site?

MM: First, we review courses for quality purposes. And you'll find everything from as little as eight semester hours all the way up to 100 semester hours. The average is around 15 to 20 hours. It's entirely self-paced and 100 percent free. We do our best to screen out courses that have hidden costs. And we won't include a course that requires you to sign up.

G: Can you get credit?

MM: No, not yet. You can use the knowledge and skills that you gain from the course to help in a job, prepare for college, or supplement your coursework. That’s where Einztein is serving as a platform, and as it evolves, we're looking at ways that a student’s work can be recognized.

G: What do you see as the future of degrees from accredited institutions?

MM: At some point in the near future, I think, it's going to be less important whether a student got credit for a course through a university or through a reputable provider that may or may not be accredited. And while degrees from accredited post-secondary institutions are meaningful, it won’t be the only avenue available to students looking to get a leg up in the marketplace. Other avenues will open up.

G: Where do you see this whole movement headed?

MM: I think that the state of online course design is still incredibly primitive. We're just beginning to understand how to shape a course so that it is compelling and truly educational as opposed to being repurposed content that gets thrown up on the web so schools can generate money or market themselves. But we are still at a very early stage in terms of what the internet has to offer students who are coming at learning from a different place, whether that's because their first language is something other than, say, English, or because they have some other challenge to overcome. We've been pretty dumb about course design up until now. The internet has served our purposes for shopping, communication, news, and entertainment. But it hasn’t been used as effectively as it can be in terms of actually advancing knowledge.

India may have just introduced a new threat to both the One Laptop Per Child's $100 XO Laptop and Apple's iPad: a $35 touchscreen tablet PC capable of connecting to the Internet, video conferencing, and even drawing solar power. For a country where 600 million of its 1 billion people already own cellphones, this handheld device appears to be the next logical upgrade in connectivity for the world's largest democracy.

According to India's Human Resources Development Minister, Kapil Sibal, who unveiled the tablet today, the primary target for its initial launch is the education sector. Government officials told CNN that it wanted the country's universities fully connected, as part of its education goals, and that this device—the price of which could soon fall as low as $10—could be the key to hitting that target.

Over at PC magazine, Tony Bradley sees applications in the corporate sector, as well:

At $35, the Indian tablet is virtually disposable--far exceeding the $100 laptop developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and used in the non-profit One Laptop One Child program. In fact, in many ways the $35 tablet also makes the $500 iPad seem significantly over-priced. ...

 

Businesses that have adopted the iPad, though, might be very interested in a touchscreen, Web-enabled tablet that can enable mobile workers to access cloud-based applications and data for less than 10 percent of the cost of the iPad.   In a cloud-based infrastructure, the device used to connect to and access information does not need the bells and whistles common on desktops and laptops. The tablet becomes a commodity, consuming less power, and delivering significant cost savings.

Leaving business aside, if the price does in fact fall to $10 per unit, does this device suddenly become the go-to for connectivity amongst schoolchildren in the developing world over the XO?  

A new dual-screen tablet from California startup Kno aims to make electronic textbooks into a viable business.

It’ll need some luck: Tech giants like Amazon and Apple haven’t yet cracked the e-textbook market, despite multiple attempts.

“If you look at why e-textbooks have failed in the last ten years, the biggest problem is the size of the screen,” says Osman Rashid, co-founder and CEO of Kno. “Textbooks won’t fit into a 10-inch or 12-inch screen so you have to scroll up and down and right and left.”

“It makes for a poor learning experience,” he says.

Kno founders say they can fix that. The device has two 14-inch LCD touchscreens that fold in like a book. The idea is to make textbook pages fit perfectly across the screen and flow from one digital page to another. Kno made its public debut at the D8 technology conference Wednesday

The tablet will be powered by an Nvidia Tegra processor. It will include a stylus for handwriting recognition, have a full browser, support Flash and offer six to eight hours of battery life. The Kno will offer 16 GB or 32 GB of storage–enough to store 10 semesters’ worth of files, documents and books, says Rashid.

But it you are thinking a lightweight, cheap, easy-to-tote machine, Kno won’t be that.

The device, scheduled for release in December, will weigh about 5.5 lbs, or as much as a full-size notebook. And while the price hasn’t been fixed, it is expected to be “under $1,000,” says the company. Compare that to a $500 iPad that weighs 1.6 lbs, or a $260 Kindle at 0.6 lbs.

Kno is still a good deal, insists Rashid.

“If you are a parent, you know your child is carrying 20 lbs to 25 lbs of textbook in their backpack. Now you can replace the entire backpack with a 5.5-pound device,” he says.

Apple’s iPad has led to renewed interest in tablets, a category that few consumers had shown much interest in. Since Apple launched the iPad in April, it has sold more than 2 million devices. The demand for tablets has spurred other companies makers including Asus, MSI, Dell and HP to create would-be iPad killers.

But tablet-like devices from startups have been disappointing so far. Despite its 12-inch screen, the JooJoo has been widely panned for not delivering the kind of zippy, delightful experience that’s made the iPad so appealing.

Kno’s closest rival, the Entourage Edge, is also disappointing. The Edge is a dual-screen device with an E-Ink screen on the left and a 10-inch LCD display on the right. But this Frankenstein-ish monster is hobbled by a slow processor and by its weight.

Kno isn’t like these other tablets, says Rashid.

“You have to put yourself in a student’s shoes and not a technologist’s shoes,” he says. “The iPad or all these other devices aren’t created from the ground up with students in mind.”

Unlike the e-books marketed for fiction and nonfiction best sellers, electronics textbooks haven’t really taken off, because students have some unique requirements.

Textbooks are better in color, since they often have illustrations and graphics to help students understand the concepts. That’s why black-and-white displays like the E Ink are extremely limiting. Most digital textbooks are distributed as PDF files, but they are not formatted perfectly, says Rashid, who also co-founded the online textbook-rental site Chegg.

“So if a professor in a class says ‘Turn to page 74 in your book,’ you don’t know if the page 74 on your PDF corresponds to the one in the physical book,” he says.

And there’s the problem of scrolling when pages don’t fit into the screen. Kno’s tests showed that about 47 percent of textbooks fit on a 12.1-inch screen. Most freshman and sophomore books didn’t fit that screen size. On a 10-inch screen, similar to what an iPad has, only 11 percent of textbooks fit.

Kno, which was started in September last year and now has about 90 employees, says it has written its own software that will “normalize” books in the PDF format. It will also add interactive elements to the books and allow students to make notes and annotate the margins of an electronic textbooks.

Similar to Amazon’s Kindle, Kno hopes to have its own bookstore.

The company has inked deals with four major textbook publishers, including McGraw Hill, Pearson and Wiley.

Kno won’t have 3G connectivity but it will be Wi-Fi capable, so users can wirelessly download textbooks on to the device. Eventually, Rashid and his team hope to add other educational services such as the ability to buy accessories like a scientific calculator or even request tutoring from a tutor.

Rashid says students are unlikely to feel any pain from the lack of 3G access in the tablet. “Students are pretty wired on campus and at home, so Wi-Fi should work well,” he says.