Behrman House, a publisher of textbooks and digital learning materials for Jewish schools in North America is partnering with Israel’s Center for Educational Technology (CET) to create jLearningLabs, a new development laboratory that will create educational technology for the Jewish community. These materials will be designed for schools, students, teachers, and adults to help them explore Jewish learning and practice anywhere, anytime, in formats and venues they prefer.
jLearningLabs will develop digital technology from mobile apps and desktop applications to games and other software. After a start-up period financed with seed capital, jLearningLabs will become a self-sustaining organization tasked with developing successive generations of educational technology. jLearningLabs will initiate, structure, and guide new technologies as they are created, prototyped, and fine-tuned. Once they prove viable, these projects will transition from an incubator/development phase into mainstream commercial availability in the educational market, and the resulting revenue stream will support future digital ventures.
“jLearningLabs will create a new breed of digital content that brings Jewish language, culture, and real-time experiences to life for our educational community and beyond,” said David Behrman, president of Behrman House. “The beauty of jLearningLabs is that it will ultimately become an independent, enduring development enterprise that will apply commercial principles to assessing the viability of digital projects and will develop educational technology for our community in an economically self-sustaining manner.”
Behrman House and CET began working together in 2012 to create content for the Behrman House Online Learning Center (OLC). The OLC is a first-of-its-kind online educational platform and library available to Jewish schools in North America, giving students and educator’s access to both companies’ vast repository of educational offerings.
Tel Aviv-based CET is the largest textbook publisher and developer of advanced communication technologies for schools and the broader community in Israel. Its materials are used by 75 percent of the Israel school population each year, and many of its products have been adopted by the Israeli Ministry of Education. In 2012, CET successfully launched an Israeli education technology incubator called “MindCET” and is applying its learning from that experience to help shape jLearningLabs.
“Our organizations share a commitment to advancing Jewish education and fostering an authentic Jewish experience within the North American educational community,” said CET CEO Gila Ben-Har. “jLearningLabs will provide a means for people of all ages to explore and develop an understanding of Judaism that makes a meaningful contribution to the way they conduct their lives.”
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