Ben Blair

History: Founders of Newlane University, Ben Blair and Josh Stanley, studied education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In addition to their studies, they have each taught and worked in online and higher education for over a decade. Ben Blair holds a PhD from Columbia University in Philosophy and Education. Josh Stanley is ABD in Instructional Design from Columbia University, and holds Masters degrees in Mass Communication and Digital Media Studies from the University of Denver. Newlane started as an effort to build a platform that would simplify and improve curriculum and curriculum development, and apply some of the powerful ideas, values, and trends in online technology (e.g., crowd-sourcing, content-ranking, micro-payments, etc.) to education, and leverage the abundant instructional resources available today. The founders created the platform for Newlane because it was a tool that they wanted to use. With their background in online and higher ed, they saw the need for something that would not only cut down on the time it took to design course content, but also improve the quality.