Matt Bowman on OpenEd

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Nate McClennen sits down with Matt Bowman, co-founder of Open Ed, to explore how unbundled learning and personalized education are transforming the future of learning. They discuss Open Ed’s innovative approach to blending public and private education systems, the role of competency-based learning, and how families can become education designers for their children. The conversation also dives into the impact of AI on education and how it’s driving demand for flexible, learner-centered ecosystems. Whether you’re a parent, educator, or policymaker, this episode offers actionable insights into creating personalized pathways for every learner.

Outline

• (00:00) Rethinking the System
• (03:39) Creative Learning Experiences
• (13:57) Open Ed’s Model
• (20:36) Accountability and Competency
• (27:07) Who Is Open Ed For?
• (33:41) The Future: AI, Community, and Connection

Rethinking the System

Nate McClennen: Welcome, everybody. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast, and I am Nate McClennen, your host today. I’ve been long convinced that one of the challenges with our Carnegie-structured system is that we have these courses. They’re tied to credits, tied to graduation, and tied to buildings.

Everything is tied together, and so this locks learners over the last 150 years into this prescribed journey. With sometimes a choice of learning experience around course selection when they’re in high school—for example, sometimes you have innovative teachers that are doing selection inside the classroom and maybe school selection if there are other choices in the area, whether it’s magnet or private or public charter, etc.

However, at Getting Smart, we’re continuing to advocate for unbundled systems—unbundled systems that break up all the learning into different pieces. And then the learners, with their families, are allowed to figure out how to restack those in partnership with whatever the learning organizations are in their area, to best meet the needs of every student.

Nate McClennen: And so they will still be meeting expected outcomes if they’re in the public system, but how they do it and the journey that they take will be variable for every student, ideally to increase engagement, outcomes, relevance, and ultimately the purpose of learning. But as we know, this is really hard to do in the existing system.

And so within our own learning innovation framework, we have every learning organization as a learning model—how learning is structured. And then we also talk about the learning ecosystem—where learning happens. These are two of these five core elements for us: this model and the ecosystem. So today, I’m really excited to be joined by Matt Bowman, who’s built a learning environment at the sort of the furthest transformational edge of both model and ecosystem—where learning happens and how learning happens. Matt’s the co-founder of Open Ed, which is formerly MiTek High, and has just released a great book about the journey called Open Education: How to Reimagine Learning, Ignite Curiosity, and Prepare Your Kids for Success.

Given that the world of educational choice is increasing rapidly in some states, it’s a really great time to talk to Matt about how unbundled learning has happened for many years in his organization. It is operated outside of these systems that have recently been implemented via legislative changes. And so my hope is that we see how possible innovations in learning are and how personalized learning is possible for every single student.

So, Matt, welcome. We talk a lot, but great to see you again and happy to have you on the pod. My favorite question always is your most memorable learning experience when you were a student—meaning you learned the most and you were the most engaged.

Matt Bowman: Well, I think one of the things that comes to mind is when I was in high school, our friends would always make movies about the books that we were assigned to read. I think that was one of the greatest experiences I had—to just use our creativity to come up with characters, settings, cuts, music, and edits. We learned way more making movies about the book than we ever did reading the book. And so I think that’s an example that has always stuck with me. I still have copies of those, and we sometimes get together and laugh at what we built as 15-year-olds. But it was super powerful to have some alternative medium to push our creativity to create something that was a different version of what we were assigned. And that was super fun.

Nate McClennen: So, did the teacher give you the choice, or did they say, “Okay, you all are making movies about the books?” How did that come about in that setting?

Creative Learning Experiences

Matt Bowman: I think knowing us, it was probably us asking permission. We said, “Hey, instead of a book report, can we go make a movie?” And we probably lobbied enough that we got the permission to do a movie. That was back in the ‘80s, so it was super fun to have our teachers say yes.

Nate McClennen: That’s awesome. I think in a previous podcast I talked about this, but one of my memorable moments from high school was doing a movie on mitosis and meiosis in cell division. We were all acting it out in my friend’s driveway. We were different parts of the cell and the different organelles. I have a very vivid memory. There’s no record of it—I don’t know where it is. So I’m envious that you have a record of those because I would really like to see those videos.

Matt Bowman: Like, you know, disappearing people—we would press pause, run off the screen, press pause. High tech.

Nate McClennen: That is awesome. All right, well, let’s talk about your really interesting career. You started in education, went into technology, and then came back to education to combine technology and ed together. You started in Washington State, I think, right out of college. So, what did you teach? And I think most importantly, I love reflecting on our early years of teaching. What did you learn in those first couple of years as you jumped into education?

Matt Bowman: Yeah, I’ve reflected a lot on that. I started teaching sixth grade in 1994. I was in a classroom up in Washington, assigned to a portable in the back, so I was all by myself teaching this group of 35 sixth graders. At the start, it was just chaos—the brand-new teacher coming in. I had all these ideals of what I wanted, and I was really looking back, trying to implement an open education framework. I look at what I was trying to accomplish then, and it matches what we’re trying to do now: give kids resources and inspire them to pursue something and learn something that they’re interested in—all within the framework of curriculum requirements or whatever. We did a lot of project-based learning.

And I’ll never forget that everyone was used to checking out their textbooks on the first day of school and getting their little stack of all their textbooks with their names in it and their numbers. I said, “We’re not going to do that. We’re just going to leave the textbooks on the shelf, and you can get them anytime you want—the open resources.” Later that day, this little 11-year-old boy comes up and says, “I really would like to have one of those books sitting in my desk. Can I just go get one and have it sit in my desk?” And I was like, “Okay.” I guess I, you know, every child’s different. That was kind of the beginning of me realizing that Matt Bowman might think something is great and exciting, but this one student wanted a set of books just in his desk that he didn’t have to worry that someone else was borrowing. They were kind of his domain for a time, and I thought that was really powerful. I learned that we really need to be adaptable to different learning styles.

We then, as a district, moved our sixth graders up to a sixth/seventh school. This was, again, in the mid-1990s, trying to innovate around the young learner. The middle school child is much different than the young high schooler or the older elementary student. There was always this forgotten child—the 10- to 14-year-old. So, we did a lot of research and opened up a sixth/seventh school. We were the most innovative, team-teaching you could think of. We were doing all kinds of integrated projects and everything. Then one of our teachers left and was replaced by a teacher in his 36th year of teaching science. He kind of just said, “I’m not going to do all that integrated stuff. I’m just going to teach my textbook model—open up the page, do the worksheets,” that kind of thing.

We were initially so concerned that he was not on board with this integrated learning model. I’ll never forget, though, that a good number of kids over the year would say, “That’s my favorite class—that science class—because I can just go, sit down, and turn the page. I know the chapter and the things that I’m supposed to do.” Whereas all these other classes had all these projects and open-endedness, which was a little bit intimidating. Again, every child’s different. Even though I love integrated, interdisciplinary, project-based learning, that might not be the right fit for every child. So, I can’t impose that. I need to listen to what the child is wanting, hearing, doing, succeeding at, and adapt. It’s not just this cool thing I force on kids.

Nate McClennen: Right, right. It’s so interesting. In our world at Getting Smart, as you know, we push this idea of what transformational models look like. How do you get to more real-world experiences, competency-based learning, and personalized learning? All those things make sense in terms of the learning sciences in general. But yet, there are times when students want a more traditional system and a more traditional approach. If they’re getting the outcomes that are expected or that they set, then that’s okay. It should be variable, right? Sometimes I love just reading a book and learning. Sometimes I love just watching a video. And sometimes I need to do it actively and hands-on. Being able to sort of pick and choose is interesting. Unfortunately, our schools don’t do that very well because they choose a model. That gets to where you are now. That was 30 years ago, and now you’re in this thing called Open Ed. You’ve been on tons of podcasts as you’ve been talking about your book and your journey. How do you describe the journey? Because it is what we were just talking about—how do you personalize for every kid? So, talk about the journey to Open Ed.

Matt Bowman: A couple of key points. One is exactly what you were saying. We often get caught up in these labels of, “Are you a public school student, a district kid, a charter school kid, a private school student, an online or virtual student, a homeschooler, a micro schooler, or a magnet school student?” There are all these labels that we sometimes think apply. But in reality, it’s all of the above. That’s what Open Education is really advocating for. We’re not saying, “Don’t do traditional public ed,” or, “Only do homeschool or micro school or private school.” We’re just saying, “You know what? Tap into everything. Mix and match the right model that fits for your children and your family’s needs and interests. Just tap into what works.” If one model works really well, go all in for it—until it doesn’t. Then realize that you can pivot and enhance and enrich other things around that.

That’s the big message around Open Education: simply tap into everything. Don’t let yourself be confined by a bucket or a label. That’s really liberating to families—to feel like they have that choice. Even if one particular model is the one that works, run with it. But if it doesn’t work for child number two, three, or four, switch. That leads to the other premise of Open Ed. My wife and I were raising five children, and they were all in the same household with the same rules, the same expectations, the same family dinners and cadence, job charts, and whatever. We thought they’d all be about the same because they were all in the same household. But it turns out all five are different. Each one of them learns differently, acts differently, has a different personality, and has different interests. My wife and I turned to each other and said, “Well, if all five of the kids are so different, I imagine their education journey needs to be a little bit different too.” Then we started realizing, “I guess our family’s probably not unique in that.” Looking at the system system-wide, we realized that every family has unique children. How can we expect one system to serve them all? You can’t.

So then, as a public school teacher by trade, I wanted to bring the public school system into that journey. Many of the conversations, as you know, in the open education movement exclude public ed. They kind of say, “Oh, you’re a lost cause. We really need to just leave you behind and build something new.” I said, “No, I don’t subscribe to that. I think public ed has so many resources available to bring to the family. Let’s incorporate public ed inside this movement of personalized education, open education.” That’s really where Open Ed, the company, started 17 years ago, if you can believe that, Nate. We’ve been running for 17 years. We partner with public schools—both districts and charter schools—across the country to serve families who want an a la carte model at their fingertips and don’t know how to pull that off by themselves. That’s really the value that we bring to families: helping families tap into all these resources. At the same time, we help the public school see how they can serve a family in a very a la carte model. Public schools weren’t designed to think that way. Administrators weren’t trained to do that. They need someone like us to help them bridge that world between a very standardized, test-driven approach and a more flexible, personalized approach. We just help bridge that between families and districts, and it’s been a phenomenal ride.

So that’s kind of the big message around Open Education: simply tap into everything. Don’t let yourself be confined by a bucket or a label. That’s really liberating to families—to feel like they have that choice. Even if one particular model is the one that works, run with it. But if it doesn’t work for child number two, three, or four, switch.

Matt Bowman: That leads to the other premise of Open Ed. My wife and I were raising five children, and they were all in the same household with the same rules, the same expectations, the same family dinners and cadence, job charts, and whatever. We thought they’d all be about the same because they were all in the same household. But it turns out all five are different. Each one of them learns differently, acts differently, has a different personality, and has different interests. My wife and I turned to each other and said, “Well, if all five of the kids are so different, I imagine their education journey needs to be a little bit different too.” Then we started realizing, “I guess our family’s probably not unique in that.” Looking at the system system-wide, we realized that every family has unique children. How can we expect one system to serve them all? You can’t.

So then, as a public school teacher by trade, I wanted to bring the public school system into that journey. Many of the conversations, as you know, in the open education movement exclude public ed. They kind of say, “Oh, you’re a lost cause. We really need to just leave you behind and build something new.” I said, “No, I don’t subscribe to that. I think public ed has so many resources available to bring to the family. Let’s incorporate public ed inside this movement of personalized education, open education.” That’s really where Open Ed, the company, started 17 years ago, if you can believe that, Nate. We’ve been running for 17 years. We partner with public schools—both districts and charter schools—across the country to serve families who want an a la carte model at their fingertips and don’t know how to pull that off by themselves. That’s really the value that we bring to families: helping families tap into all these resources. At the same time, we help the public school see how they can serve a family in a very a la carte model. Public schools weren’t designed to think that way. Administrators weren’t trained to do that. They need someone like us to help them bridge that world between a very standardized, test-driven approach and a more flexible, personalized approach. We just help bridge that between families and districts, and it’s been a phenomenal ride.

Open Ed’s Model

Nate McClennen: That’s really interesting, and I really appreciate the focus of that. You know, 95% of the students in the country are in the public sector in some form or another, so we have to be able to play in that space, right? Tell me a little bit about the students. Are they students that are already in the district, or is it a mix? What does it look like across your enrollees?

Matt Bowman: Almost 100% of them are new to the district. They’re either homeschooling inside that district, or they’re homeschooling, micro-schooling, or private schooling somewhere else in the state. We enroll them virtually or remotely in that partner district. For the most part, it’s not the ones who are already attending the local school. The families have already made the choice to enroll in that district, and that’s great. For the families who have opted out of the system, we go find them and say, “Hey, what can we do to bring you back into the public system and serve you with resources, teachers, technology, personalized curriculum, and resources that you might not have trying to a la carte on your own?”

That’s what we do—find families around the state who want that support, that structure, that help, and bring them remotely as enrolled students into that district.

Nate McClennen: Right. So, in some ways, the model is different in terms of learning, but the structural model is no different than, say, a district that offers a statewide online school, right? They’re pulling students from around the state, and they may be students that are not enrolled elsewhere, but they jump onto an online program that either the district creates or they market out to another organization.

So, we understand the school and the model itself. I have a family. I’ve got a couple of kids. They enroll in Open Ed. What does that experience look like? Is there a central platform that they’re using? How does assessment happen? What does that look like?

Matt Bowman: The first step is they just sign on to our platform, and we’ve created kind of the world’s most rich, personalized education platform you can imagine. It helps families start with, “What do I want to accomplish this year? What are the goals of the family? What are the needs of the family? What are the interests and resources available to the family and the child?” Then, they map out a learning journey for the year.

We have staff, certified teachers in every state we operate, parent ambassadors that meet with families, tutors, and support. We have this extensive network of people available to help each family design—become the education designer. That’s really what we call those parents. They work with us, with unlimited resources available to them, to design an education plan for their child that meets their needs, meets the district’s needs that we partner with, and most importantly, meets the needs of that student.

Nate McClennen: So really thinking about where I opened with—about learning ecosystems—you basically have a marketplace that you’ve partnered with a bunch of different providers. The family themselves has a learning ecosystem realm that they can tap into and get reimbursed for. How do you make the connection to the required standards? How specific do you need to be? What does that look like in terms of the accountability side of this?

Accountability and Competency

Matt Bowman: In terms of the accountability side, we have providers that are available to everybody, regardless of whether they’re selecting additional enrichment resources. We have those providers that map to the state standards and meet that accountability requirement. Students have unlimited access to curriculum that maps to those requirements. Then, they have certified teachers and licensed teachers in that state who help them ensure that they’re meeting the objectives they want to meet. We also have state testing as a requirement in most states, unless families opt out. We facilitate that virtually, or if required physically, we rent sites around the state where students will go take the tests.

Nate McClennen: Got it. Are you running it in a competency-based way or not? I know you and I have talked before about competency-based learning and what that looks like. I think I’ve seen some earlier versions of your platform where it has that. Is that associated with Open Ed now or not?

Matt Bowman: Yeah, so we have a couple of layers of that. First, we partner with Southern New Hampshire University’s competency-based early college program. Those who want to pursue early college can start as early as ninth grade in our program and go through the competency-based program through SNHU. That program is still the world’s only fully competency-based education (CBE) model. I’ve looked at every college model out there. SNHU CBE is the only one that does it to the 10th degree. Everyone else dabbles around the edges at level one or two. SNHU CBE went all in. They’re interdisciplinary, project-based, and mastered or not yet, with blind graders who don’t even know the age of the kids.

Our kids’ projects are being evaluated against their average student, which is like a 24-year-old working professional. SNHU continuously says our students are off the charts—faster and better at getting to mastery than the working professionals. I think that’s super cool. On the competency side, we’ve kind of adopted what SNHU CBE did in terms of mastered or not yet. We really, in the structured system of a Carnegie unit, have to label that pass/fail. But for us, it’s still pass or not yet. We want to give kids the opportunities to continuously learn from what they want to learn. If they have gaps in their knowledge, let’s feed that with more resources and support.

It’s that model, but on a transcript, it really is just, for the most part, pass/fail. Unless they’re choosing a curriculum provider that issues letter grades, then we can pass that forward onto the district’s transcript system, and they’ll have a transcript with letter grades. But for most, it’s just a zero GPA, pass/fail transcript. Families are totally good with that because colleges, employers, and others really don’t care much about it. They all have pathways to get a job or get into college without having a formal transcript. That’s been the last 10 years—there’s been a lot of change in higher ed around that. Families have really been able to have the freedom of personalized education without the constraints of a formal transcript.

Shorts Content

Who Is Open Ed For?

Nate McClennen: Right, right. Yeah, we’re definitely seeing more and more flexibility, and we’re seeing more and more talk about digital wallets and how to capture something way beyond a transcript that can link into the professional world or higher education. So, I think it is coming, and I think technology is going to help us make that easier.

Just one more question along the logistics of it. Are the families and students choosing courses, or are they choosing units within the course? How are they mixing and matching? And then do you have to translate that into “the student passed sixth grade English,” or are they choosing sixth grade English and then choosing a set of curricula associated with that? What’s the order of operations for a family?

Matt Bowman: Yeah, they’re choosing the curriculum provider. Usually, they’re choosing courses that they want to take for the year, and then that course appears on their district transcript as math, English, 10th grade, or whatever.

Nate McClennen: Right, right.

Matt Bowman: Then we can tailor underneath that and add more curriculum options or go out into the community and get resources there to kind of mix and match into that English 10 slot.

Nate McClennen: Right, right. Building the broader learning ecosystem along the way. Yeah. So, is the goal to then—it feels like you’re in how many states now? Ten to 12 states?

Matt Bowman: Yeah, yeah. Our team has grown from two to 10 just this year.

Nate McClennen: So, is the ultimate goal to get to all 50 states so every student has the option and every family has the option of this in the country? Is that the long-term strategy for you?

Matt Bowman: Yes, with the note that some states just truly aren’t even opening up education at all yet. Some states still have such closed enrollment laws and closed choice laws and are kind of doubling down against it. So, maybe 50 might be too much of a grand jury goal. But definitely, I see 35 to 40 states that are on the potential list that we can reach in the next few years.

Nate McClennen: And how does that align with—so, as you know, there’s a lot of ESA work going on in about 20-plus states now. Is this intersecting with it? Is it a play against—not a play against it, but is it a way to say, “Hey, public schools, you can actually play in this game as well and start offering these more a la carte-type experiences that families want without them removing themselves and taking money from the ESA perspective?” What’s your thought on that?

Matt Bowman: Yeah, no, we’ve looked at that and analyzed it and workshopped it for a couple of years now, ever since the big wave of 2023 for the ESAs. We definitely see it as both.

Nate McClennen: Yeah.

Matt Bowman: This idea that open education is not just one or the other bucket. In states that have an ESA, typically there’s some enrollment cap or funding cap. So invariably, kids who want it can’t get it. Even in Texas, a billion-dollar ESA still won’t serve all the demand. So, it’s an “and.” We participate in both. In states that have ESAs, we run our district model, and we also have a private accredited online school that is approved and participates in the ESA side.

Nate McClennen: Ah, I see, I see. So, you could do both. It’s a both/and type situation. Gotcha. Is the private school a newer program of Open Ed, or is that in response to the ESA world?

Matt Bowman: It’s in response to the ESA world. We just launched it. Our first cohort started a week ago.

Nate McClennen: Got it. Is that also called Open Ed, or does it have another name?

Matt Bowman: We launched Open Ed Academy as an online private school to serve in the ESA markets, adopting the same mentality that our Open Ed program has run for 17 years, which is to embrace what kids are already doing in the market, in the community, and in their homes. See if our teachers and accreditors can grant credit for that toward an accredited diploma if that’s what the family wants. It’s really mixing all those worlds together.

We’re really excited about this. The price is as low as you can imagine. It’s $2,900 per year for an accredited private school for K-8. Then it goes up to, I think, $3,500 for high school. Even for our early college program, it’s only $5,000 a year, and you can get your associate and bachelor’s degree if you want.

Nate McClennen: Right, right. Super low cost. Well, that should open up a lot of options for people. I love the idea that you’re playing in both sectors—public and private.

The Future: AI, Community, and Connection

Nate McClennen: So, as we close here, I want to ask the question I’m sure everybody else has asked you: What’s AI going to do to this model? How are you thinking about it strategically? Or are you saying, “No, we’ve got a model that works without it”? What’s your thought there?

Matt Bowman: A couple of things here. First, AI is actually driving demand in our program because the fear that the promise of a standardized curriculum with a standardized diploma, going to a standardized college, and getting a standard job—that promise is gone. The AI fear of what it will disrupt in the future has made people step back and say, “If that linear path is no longer a secure and verified promise, I need to step back and ask, what is learning? What does my child need to learn?” AI has blown that so wide open that it’s caused more and more families to say, “Okay, if that standard path might not serve in the future, what will?” That’s what we love—parents just asking that question.

At a technical level, AI is also becoming a resource that families can tap into among everything else available. It can help design questions, assessments, curriculum ideas, or unit lessons that they want to do on a topic their kid is interested in. It unlocks the old box of curriculum designers, teachers, or assessment builders. It is an asset to families like never before.

And then, going back to your very first question about learning experiences, I learned a ton when I was making movies as a kid. AI is a creator. You can use it to develop movies, clips, podcasts, audio, and music. It creates so many things, and then the creativity of humans comes in as you connect the dots on all those tools. That’s where I see it as super interesting. It just creates so many assets for kids to plug and play, to make something unique, interesting, and entertaining, and to demonstrate what they’ve learned. That process is what we all want kids to go through. That’s the process of learning.

Nate McClennen: It’s a super exciting time. I think this idea of co-working and co-designing with AI agents and partners is really interesting—how do we allow those tools to do what they do best, which is surveying a vast amount of material and knowledge, and then allow us to continue to create and work toward solving big problems and challenges that are of interest to us?

Matt Bowman: Real quick—Sunday dinner at the Bowmans’ is often around technology and education, right? One Sunday, our daughter-in-law said something like, “With social media over the past 20 years, we’ve loaded the world’s problems onto teenagers’ shoulders.” Like, they weren’t ready for that. Social media brought the problems of the world to every kid, whereas it used to just be the problems of the community. That was a little more bearable than carrying the whole world’s problems.

Then she pointed out that with AI, which can create such fake impersonations of everything—from news to movies to whatever—we won’t know what’s real. She made this point: Maybe that will turn us all back to our communities again.

Nate McClennen: Ah, I love it.

Matt Bowman: I thought that was a beautiful vision of where AI could go. If AI becomes just too much—if you can’t tell what’s real, it’s too weird all over the world—let’s just turn back to our neighborhoods and communities and solve problems and make our lives better in the places where we live.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly singing my song. We’ve been thinking a lot about that, and that’s one of my core hypotheses—that ultimately, connection will become the most important thing. It’ll be connection between people, even this—what we’re doing right here. It may be hard to detect if you’re an AI or if I’m an AI within five years. I think that’s going to be really difficult. So, it is going to be human-to-human connection, in person, talking about what we can do to make our community better. What’s the common good in our place? That’s manageable. I do think that might be a positive side of AI because the rest, we may not actually know is true. More and more content out there is being produced by AI.

Matt Bowman: Exactly.

Nate McClennen: Matt, super excited to hear about what you’re doing. I love the journey you’ve been on and the ability to really allow students and families to choose things that they think will be most engaging and most appropriate for their students while staying inside the public system.

A couple of conclusions on my end—just some nuggets of wisdom that I thought you shared—are: Don’t get caught up in labels for students. Don’t think, “I’m a public school student,” or, “I’m a private school student,” or, “I’m a public charter student,” or, “I’m a magnet student.” Really, we should be thinking about, “I’m a student who’s a learner, and that learning can happen anywhere.”

Second, don’t exclude public ed from this process. The world of media wants us to choose sides, and I think you’re making a very distinct decision about, “No, you don’t have to choose sides. You can do this in the public sector or the private sector. Open Ed is for everybody.”

Personalized learning is truly possible. This idea that we’ve been chasing this in classrooms and schools and adding technology—you’re really taking it down to, “Hey, let’s build our own thing. If we can build our own thing and it further engages and allows our students to thrive, that’s pretty amazing.”

I love the reflection questions that you ask parents to think about: What is learning? In the face of massive disruption with AI and other big changes, what will the future look like, and how do we best set up our young people and children for that?

Thanks, Matt. I appreciate all the thoughts, and I recommend anybody who’s interested in this world to contact Matt or pick up his book and give it a read. It’s a really good one to give a different sense of what the world could be in learning. Thanks.

Matt Bowman: Thanks, Nate.

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Guest Bio

Matt Bowman

Matt Bowman is an innovator in education and technology and is deeply dedicated to transforming the way children learn. He and his wife, Amy, founded OpenEd together, and the Bowmans have spent over three decades championing personalized education, combining cutting-edge technology with an entrepreneurial spirit to help students thrive in a rapidly changing world. Matt and Amy focus every day on empowering young learners by offering them the tools and flexibility to pursue their passions and develop the skills necessary for future success.

A former sixth-grade teacher and tech executive, Matt has been at the forefront of online education since the 1990s. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in education, and is an alumnus of Stanford’s Executive Business Management program. In addition to his professional accomplishments, Matt has been a speaker and panelist at numerous educational and technology conferences. His insights into the future of education have been sought after by educators and industry leaders alike.

Links

• Watch the full video here
• LinkedIn
• Matt Bowman’s Books
• OpenEd