Since its launch about a year ago, the service, which was created by startup Grockit to enable users to curate and follow “learn boards” of videos, text and other web content focused on specific topics, has attracted about 700,000 registered users (150,000 to 200,000 are active monthly users). Each month, the company said, it receives about two million page views and has grown its traffic 30 percent week over week since its latest update last month.

But while a significant portion of its traffic goes to content relevant to K-12 teachers and students, the site is also drawing a large crowd for content unrelated to the classroom.  Co-founder Farb Nivi said that about 25 to 30 percent of the content on the site is education-related and it receives about a quarter of the total Learnist traffic. But he added that while just 6 percent of the content on the site is lifestyle-related (focusing on food, cooking, home design and other similar topics), it receives about 35 percent of the site’s traffic.

It underscores that while the site does accommodate teachers and the education-only crowd, it’s moving further away from being a typical ed tech app.

“We want to be the Instagram of knowledge-sharing,” Nivi said, adding that as it grows it plans to make it even easier for users of all types to share content and receive the bits of content most relevant to their interests, “like a smart RSS.”

Unlike a true RSS reader, the site doesn’t allow people to subscribe to blogs and news sites to get the most timely stories. But it wants to be a service that enables people to easily keep up to date on the topics they care about – from technology to art to cooking to politics – by following people and topic-focused tags. While an RSS reader only enables people to view content from sources to which they subscribe, Learnist aims to suggest and surface all kinds of crowd-sourced content that could match a user’s profile.

Now, the site has about 25 million pieces of content but, in the next twelve months, he added, Learnist plans to increase that by as much as 100 times. Last month, it removed the sign-up process, which was a big barrier to entry. Going forward, Nivi said they’re considering removing the concept of the “learn board” to simplify content sharing, as well as adding more publisher partners (now they partner with only Discovery and the BBC).

That growth could raise the amount of lower-quality content on the site. But to keep the signal to noise ratio high, the company this week added a LinkedIn-like endorsement feature to help its algorithms identify the best contributors and content and it’s playing with applying natural language processing to publisher content to help it route the best content to users.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

The campaign reached its goal of $100,000 in two hours (and doubled the goal within five hours), making it the fastest campaign to reach its goal on Indiegogo (of campaigns with a goal size greater than $20,000). Through Indiegogo, supporters could contribute at various levels for a range of perks, including early access to features and visits to NASA for a space medicine workshop. Early funders were able to pre-order a device for $149, while the amount went up to $199 for subsequent contributors. As of Friday, the campaign has raised more than $350,000 from funders in 65 countries.

While Indiegogo declined to share the average funding velocity of campaigns on its site or the last campaign to set a record of this type, back in August, The Oatmeal’s campaign for a Tesla museum grabbed headlines for raising $27,000 an hour.

Scanadu, which is participating in the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE competition, first revealed a prototype of its device six months ago. By holding the small hockey puck-shaped device to a person’s head, this slightly updated version can determine a user’s heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, respiratory rate and oxygen levels in the blood. It can then send the information to an iOS or Android smartphone, via Bluetooth.

Scanadu founder and CEO Walter de Brouwer said he believes interest in the device stems from a desire know more about our own health and the health of the people we care about.

“It’s the sense of empowerment and the sense that we are data and some how we have to measure that data,” he told me. “And if we are data, we can change because we can set goals to improve that data.”

In addition to providing market validation for the Scanadu, Indiegogo supporters will be able to offer feedback on the devices through usability studies, which the company will use as part of its submission for FDA clearance.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

But a new study released Thursday from his think tank, the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, depicts a future of education, particularly at the elementary school level, that isn’t nearly as stark as that. The paper, which refines theories on blended learning Christensen and his colleagues have laid out in the book “Disrupting Class” and other studies, introduces the idea of hybrid innovation. While Christensen’s famous theory of innovation mostly focuses on disruptive and sustaining innovations, the new paper offers the concept of the hybrid.

Often, the researchers argue, sectors experiencing disruption go through an extended phase in which old and new technology exist side by side, providing “the best of both worlds.” In education, many approaches to blended learning, which combine online instruction with traditional classroom learning, fall into this hybrid category.

“What’s clear to us from this theory is that schools will be here for the long haul,” said Michael Horn, executive director of the Institute, a co-author of the paper, as well as a co-author of “Disrupting Class.” “The future of learning is blended learning for the majority of students.”

In particular, he said, elementary schools will increasingly adopt less disruptive styles of blended learning that rotate online learning activities into a student’s schedule but still maintain the basic structure of a traditional teacher-led classroom. For example, schools will continue to “flip” their classrooms with videos (from Khan Academy or other sources) students can watch online, but mostly rely on classroom teachers to shape the experience.

At the middle school and high school levels, where students tend to have more personalized, modular schedules, he said, the school setting will remain in place but the classroom structure will be upended. In those grades, educators will increasingly adopt more disruptive blended learning models.

For example, students looking for more advanced subjects or languages not offered at their school could supplement their in-school experience with online classes – even massive open online courses – that barely involve offline instruction.

Horn said that one of his hopes for this most recent paper is that it helps give educators some clarity around what they can and can’t do to drive innovation in their classrooms and schools.

While superintendents, principals with some autonomy and a healthy budget, as well as philanthropists may be able to introduce more disruptive online learning models into their classrooms, Horn said, the most individual teachers and those with more limited budgets could likely do is encourage hybrid approaches.

“For the first time, it gave us a much clearer idea of what people in education could or could not do to bring about this future,” he said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• How consumer media will change in 2013

To build on that base, the company on Wednesday said it had raised $500,000 from Grishin Robotics, an investment company focused on supporting personal robotics. Previously, Swivl raised about $175,000 from Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns and less than $1 million in angel funding.

Since the device’s debut, Swivl co-founder and CEO Brian Lamb said the company has shipped about 10,000 units, with uses ranging from pet monitoring to corporate videoconferencing.  But he added that 75 to 80 percent of its customers are coming from education.

“There’s a very powerful ongoing discussion about using video for [several] use cases [in education] that this plugged right into,” said Lamb. “It’s a tool to open the doors of the classroom and get people participating online.”

For teachers aiming to “flip” their classrooms with videos students can watch online or get feedback on their teaching styles from peers, the Swivl provides an easy way to self-record lectures and classes. The $199 device, which the company likens to a robotic “personal cameraman,” includes a sensor that tracks the subject’s movements, panning and turning the camera as necessary. (For more details on how it works, you can check out my colleague Kevin Tofel’s review of the first-generation Swivl.)

Already, it’s being used in 1,000 K-12 schools and 250 universities, Lamb said. With the new funding, the company plans to accelerate the production and distribution of the company’s second version of the Swivl, which includes more classroom-friendly features like iPad compatibility and a feature for attaching additional microphones to capture audio from students.

Even though it may have been unintended, Swivl’s rise in education makes sense given the surging interest in using technology to enhance and extend the classroom. In addition to the “flipped classroom” trend and growing calls for better teacher feedback systems, teachers are increasingly turning to video technology to support distance education programs and capture lectures for students to review or watch later on.

For example, companies like Torsh and Edthena provide tools for teacher observation and evaluation, while McGraw-Hill’s Tegrity and Echo360 are among those offering schools lecture-capture services.  But given its focus on developing hardware and eventually offering connected cloud services (although Lamb wouldn’t elaborate too much on that), Swivl is more of a complementary rather than competitive startup.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Since launching in 2005, the company has attracted 150,000 physicians with its free, cloud-based software for managing patient health information, scheduling, billing and other tasks. But last month, it rolled out its first consumer-facing service, a ZocDoc-like doctor appointment booking site that positions it to manage additional data about patient conditions, medications and treatment outcomes. And on Wednesday, it plans to expand its footprint even further with consumer-oriented tools that help patients track and manage their health expenses.

The electronic health record may have been its foot in the door — as founder and CEO Ryan Howard recently told VentureBeat, it’s “somewhat of a Trojan Horse.” But that’s enabling the company to build an enviable online community for physicians and patients, all with an eye on bringing some light and efficiency to the health system while amassing a valuable treasure trove of patient data. To date, the company says it manages health information for more than 62 million patients.

“Every part of health care is obfuscated,” Howard told me in a recent interview. “But we’ve just opened it up – from the administration to scheduling to the clinical data to now health spending.”

With its new health cost tracking tools, which are similar to products offered by startups like Simplee and CakeHealth, for example, PracticeFusion connects to patients’ healthcare accounts to help them better understand and manage their health finances. For example, it lets patients easily visualize their out-of-pocket expenses, costs covered by insurance and the remaining balance of their deductible.

For now, the health tracking tools can only be used by patients whose doctors use PracticeFusion, but Howard said the service will expand to other patients in the next quarter.

Considering that the average family spends more than $3,000 on out-of-pocket medical expenses and that medical debt has been cited as a leading cause of bankruptcy, it’s no wonder that PracticeFusion is zeroing in on health spending. For many patients, medical expenses are a big black hole and, as healthcare costs climb and employers continue to shift to high-deductible health plans, the need for more transparency and guidance around price is becoming even more needed.

Offering more tools to consumers gives PracticeFusion more opportunities to build its growing advertising business (the company, which advertises to doctors, doesn’t yet market to patients, but has indicated that it will). But, over time, the health-tracking tools could also give the company an interesting and comprehensive window on to the varying prices consumers pay for different providers and treatments.

Companies like Castlight Health and ClearCostHealth already work through employers to help patients get health care pricing information and encourage “healthcare consumerism.” But in the context of PracticeFusion’s community and appointment booking platform, pricing information could play an even bigger role in helping patients choose doctors.

Recognizing the potential sensitivity for physicians, the company doesn’t have immediate plans to display pricing information for patients. But given the need to bring more price transparency to patients, it seems to be something the company is carefully weighing.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

It’s not that I’m a big gambler (whenever I’ve ever been to Vegas, I’ve wanted to spend more time poolside than tableside), it’s just that shelling out a few bucks into a hat with the prospect of winning a mini-windfall makes me see the game in a whole different way.

Similarly, a new startup, called LifeVest, hopes that by tying employee health goals to the opportunity to win or lose cash — through what it calls a “stock market for health” — it can encourage people to see their health differently and take the necessary steps to make it better. It may not be the right solution for every company, but I think it underscores an important lesson for many employers trying to get their employees to improve their health: having skin in the game can be a powerful motivator.

In theory, we all know that being healthy is a reward in itself — in matters of our health and wellness, we always, literally, have skin in the game. But when it comes to incentivizing people to lose weight, quit smoking and lower their blood pressure, a clean bill of health often isn’t a big enough carrot and the threat of chronic disease often isn’t a severe enough stick.

Blending carrots and sticks

Facing rising health care costs, more employers have started upping the ante for employees with wellness programs that either financially reward or penalize employees depending on how active they are in improving their health. CVS, for example, recently generated a ton of buzz for its decision to penalize employees who didn’t participate in its wellness program. And UnitedHealthCare is one of an increasing number of employers that offer employees financial rewards for getting their weight down and taking healthy steps.

But LifeVest, which spun out of heathcare IT company Trizetto, offers employers a model that blends rewards and penalties.

“We’ve got this notion of a stock tied to your health, which is powerful because it does a few things,” said CEO and co-founder Jon Cooper. “It changes the way people think about their health and [for a company] … markets are effective way to optimize an incentive budget.”

To start, employers can choose to invest a minimum amount in each employee, which can depend on the demographics of their employee base and their goals. Then, each employee, as well as his family and friends, can add to the amount with their own investments. Employers can opt to match outside investments up to a certain amount.

The more employees improve their weight, blood pressure and other health indicators, the greater their earnings and the less they improve, the less they stand to get paid (and the more they lose of their own investment).

Getting an upfront commitment

A Mayo Clinic study earlier this year supported the notion that financial incentives can lead to greater weight loss. But some argue that the fear of losing money can be a more powerful incentive for action than the prospect of gaining money and others say the effects may be short-lived.

What I like about LifeVest is that it enables companies to carry a big stick while still giving employees some choice — in contrast to some penalty-based programs, like that promoted by CVS, employees that don’t want to participate aren’t forced to pay, while those that want to participate can still benefit from the “loss aversion” incentive. Sure, you might have some holdouts. But it lets the company focus on the people who are interested in making a change — and the promise of a financial prize could even be a way to get non-health-enthusiasts to the table.

Also, similar to Stickk.com, a goal-setting site launched by Yale economists, it gets people to make the all-important upfront commitment. Just like paying for a membership to a gym or subscription to the philharmonic, it gets people invested in — and therefore more likely to follow through on — the activities we would like to have done but don’t always want to actually do.

Amid the crowd of companies pitching employers with this or that approach to boosting employee health, LifeVest is a relatively small and new player — it just launched in October and recently graduated from the Tigerlabs health tech accelerator. And it doesn’t include all the health-tracking and engagement features of bigger companies like Keas or WellTok (although Cooper said it could be complementary to services like those).

But I think its approach to incentivizing employees makes it an interesting company to watch — I don’t have any skin in this particular game, but you can be sure I’ll be paying attention.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Since launching in 2008, the adaptive learning company, which takes a data-driven approach to personalizing learning, has partnered with less than a handful of other publishers, including Pearson, Wiley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Its latest partnership shows that its not only making headway in the domestic K-12 and higher education markets, but that it’s extending its reach overseas and among markets that have been slower to go digital.

“Today, ELT [English Language Teaching] is all offline,” said David Liu, Knewton’s COO. “[Macmillian is] creating content for the digital experience from scratch — not only the educational content, but the assessment content.”

Over time, Liu said, the partnership will extend to other Macmillan content, not just that for ELT. But, to start, Macmillan will build on Knewton’s adaptive learning platform to provide personalized grammar and vocabulary lessons, exam reviews and other kinds of content to ELT classrooms, as well as individuals, across 120 countries.

In the increasingly hot adaptive learning space, Knewton isn’t the only game in town. Dreambox Learning, McGraw-Hill and Cerego are a few other companies pitching various approaches to customized digital learning experiences for K-12 students, colleges and individual learners.

While Knewton offers some evidence of its success – in a 2011 program of 2,000 remedial math students at Arizona State University, the company said, withdrawal rates dropped by 56 percent and pass rates climbed 11 percent – it’s still early days for adaptive learning and some learning experts say more proof is still needed.  Still, Knewton is growing steadily. By the end of last year, the company, which has raised $54 million, reached about 500,000 and it expects to reach 5 million students by the end of this year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

In contrast to startups like ZocDoc or HealthTap, which help patients find any doctor available in their area or online, ConsultingMD bills itself as service that offers access to only the doctors in the top echelon of the medical world. These physicians – who encompass the one percent of their profession – tend to be the chiefs or chairmen of the department, with publications in the top medical journals, the company says.

“The core problem is that in the highly elite world of academic specialists… access to these people is difficult [and] patients don’t know how to find them in the first place,” said CEO and co-founder Owen Tripp, who was previously COO and co-founder of Reputation.com. The company’s other co-founder is Dr. Lawrence Hofman, chief of interventional radiology at Stanford Hospital.

Through the site, patients in need of second opinion spend a few minutes describing their case, disclosing where they’ve already received care and authorizing ConsultingMD to access their medical history. Then the startup digitizes and indexes the relevant medical records (an often frustrating and dragged-out process for patients) and delivers it to the appropriate specialist on ConsultingMD.

While it can take the company an average of seven or eight days to aggregate all the records, once the doctor receives the information, Tripp said, they the doctor  can turn around a second opinion in an average of 48 hours.

For individuals coming to the site, the pricing is steep, emphasizing ConsultingMD’s positioning as an elite service – the company’s website says a second opinion costs $3,750. But the company believes its bigger opportunity is by offering the service to employers looking for a way to help their employees get better outcomes (and therefore boost productivity and lower costs).

For an additional $200, the company will also locate and schedule a priority appointment with a top specialist in a patient’s area, as well as deliver all of the necessary medical records.

For doctors, the site offers a chance to interact with other top-tier medical professionals (doctors are only admitted to the site by peer recommendation), see more cases that match their research interests and, of course, earn a little more cash. For patients, the opportunity to reach the one or two leading experts in a given field may be attractive — especially in very specific or rare medical situations. But even though the company says that outcomes for elite doctors differ substantially from outcomes for less pedigreed professionals, it’s unclear that the research backs that up.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 11 steps for scaling a startup
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity

Over the past few years, the San Jose, Calif.-based life sciences venture capital firm has co-invested with accredited individual investors on a handful of deals.  On Friday, the firm went one big step further with the launch of VentureHealth, an equity crowdfunding site for biomedical technology companies.

As report after report has shown, venture capital funding for life sciences companies has been on the decline. This week, for example, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) revealed that venture funding in the life sciences sector dropped 14 percent in the first quarter of this year.

VentureHealth wants to give health startups — both early, but particularly later stage — a new option for raising funding, while embracing a model that enables doctors, health care professionals and others with sufficient means to support companies addressing issues they care about.

“The life sciences venture industry has been shrinking – there’s less capital available for really exciting companies,” said InCube managing director and VentureHealth co-founder Andrew Farquharson. “To the extent that we can mobilize capital into companies that need it, we’re meeting our mission.”

VentureHealth isn’t the first attempt at bringing crowdfunding to health care. MedStartr and Health Tech Hatch offer entrepreneurs a platform for raising relatively small amounts of seed capital without giving up equity. And last week HeathFundr launched an equity crowdfunding site targeting medical device and other health entrepreneurs looking for Series A-range funding.

But unlike HealthFundr, CircleUp and other equity crowdfunding sites that have recently emerged, VentureHealth doesn’t offer securities through a registered broker dealer. Instead of taking a commission on each transaction, it’s compensated through a combination of fees and carried interest, which is a percentage of the profits earned by investors when a company is sold or experiences another kind of liquidity event. While the amount can vary, the company said it will tend to be about 20 percent.

That’s a decent-sized payout, but Farquharson said its model means that VentureHealth only wins when its investors win so it’s extra incentivized to find the best deals.

Over the past decade or so, Farquharson and his co-founder Mir Imran, a medical inventor who holds more than 200 patents, have invested in a range of companies, from BodyMedia, a wearable technology company recently sold to Jawbone to epilepsy treatment company Neurolink. Given their track record and experience, he believes VentureHealth could give interested investors a well-curated selection of deals and entrepreneurs the extra support they may need.

For now, Farquharson said, they interact with every accredited investor on the site but, when it’s implemented, the JOBS Act will enable VentureHealth to reach a broader pool of investors and expand its options.

The site currently has no active deals listed, but Farquharson estimates that it could offer five or six deals over the next 10 months. Once VentureHealth scales sufficiently, InCube plans so spin it off as a standalone company.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Last fall, the company, which has partnered with several leading universities for online masters degree programs that feature small classes and live instruction, announced a new for-credit online program for undergraduates called Semester Online. But three of the 10 schools that had originally committed to the program have since backed out.

Last month, Duke revealed that it was withdrawing from the program after a faculty vote against the program. And, according to Inside Higher Ed, Vanderbilt and University of Rochester have also pulled out as of Friday, with Wake Forest sitting on the fence.

“Each school has their own process for evaluating these opportunities,” 2U’s SVP of communications Chance Patterson told GigaOM, adding that the company is moving ahead with its plans to launch the program this fall with the remaining schools, including Northwestern, Emory and Brandeis. 2U also said that Boston College has since joined the consortium and that it’s in talks with 20 other schools.

At Duke, faculty concerns over the lack of administrator transparency related to the 2U deal, as well as unease with awarding school credit to students not admitted to the college, apparently led to the withdrawal.

Other issues led Vanderbilt and University of Rochester to back away from the 2U consortium. While several schools work with different online learning companies, University of Rochester reportedly chose Coursera over 2U because of the MOOC provider’s ability to reach a larger audience. Vanderbilt raised the issue of cost; while efforts like the MOOCs try to provide educational experiences at a lower price, 2U’s program costs the same as an on-campus for-credit program. Vanderbilt, as well as Duke, still maintain partnerships with Coursera for non-credit-granting courses.

The decisions to back away from 2U come after faculty resistance to online learning programs at other institutions. Earlier this month, San Jose State University professors refused to teach an edX course on justice developed by a Harvard University professor, arguing that MOOCs come at “great peril” to the country’s university system.  And in April, faculty at Amherst College voted to reject a partnership with edX, citing similar concerns about the effects of MOOCs on U.S. universities.

2U’s model, which focuses on small class sizes, live instruction and real teacher-student interaction, exists in stark contrast to the mega-sized virtual classrooms created by the MOOC providers. But it’s still bringing a new and different instructional approach to slow-moving academia. Even though one could argue that 2U’s flavor of online education isn’t as disruptive as MOOCs — like traditional college courses, it promotes teacher-student relationships, live classes and paid courses — it’s still causing some faculty to wonder about its long-term impact on their institutions and employment prospects. For example, the New York Times reported that some Duke professors were concerned that it might eventually cause the university to offer fewer courses and hire fewer professors.

Ultimately, these on-campus debates emphasize that transitioning to online learning isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Faculty and administrators raising concerns aren’t rejecting online learning wholesale, they’re trying to determine the approaches that work best for their students, missions and economic needs. As MOOC providers and other online learning companies make bigger headway, we’ll inevitably see more of these tussles — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Disrupting the university: near-term opportunities in the digital-learning market
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them