Facebook is building education software that it plans to give away to any school that wants it

mark zuckerberg

(Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

Facebook has built a tool to help schools adopt a system of personalized learning that it wants to give to any public school that wants it for free, the company announced Thursday.

Facebook developed the tool — called the Personalized Learning Plan — in partnership with Summit Public Schools, which have notably high college-acceptance rates thanks to a special approach to learning that emphasizes letting students move at their own pace.

Instead of spending classroom time for lectures, Summit schools deliver all content and assignments online.

Class time is then dedicated to teacher-led, real-world projects and student collaboration. Teachers also encourage students to understand all their work in the context of larger, long-term goals, and work with them to plan and track their course-work as a path towards those goals.

The partnership between Summit and Facebook blossomed after Priscilla Chan, wife of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, toured a Summit school in Sunnyvale. She found the effectiveness of its methods inspiring, and encouraged her husband to check it out too.

Zuckberg, impressed, offered to donate to the school, but Summit CEO Diane Tavenner said that help building new software would be even better, The Verge reports.

The technology Summit was using to distribute lessons and plot student ambitions got the job done, but Tavenner knew there was opportunity for improvement, so Facebook sicced a dedicated team of engineers on the problem.

Here's how a new personalized learning plan might look to an individual student:

Facebook Summit

(Facebook)

This year, Facebook is supporting Summit as it partners with other public schools in a pilot program testing out the new technology, with plans to use feedback from the test to eventually make the tool available to any school in the US.

Google has a similar, though more generalized, initiative called Google Classroom, where it offers teachers free tools for managing assignemnts and giving students feedback.

The software won't require a Facebook account to join, and the company promises that the team working with Summit operates independently from the rest of the company.

"This is personal for those of us working on the team here at Facebook," the company writes in its blog post. "Through our kids, our families and the teachers in our lives, we’ve seen that there’s an opportunity to help apply our skills to the future of education, and we all wanted to find a way to help make an impact by doing what we do best — building software."

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