Check out VentureBeat’s new education channel

We’re launching a new channel on VentureBeat today, focused on education technology.

We have been planning this launch for quite some time. Ed-tech is one of the fastest-growing areas of technology investment right now, and it’s an area where companies as diverse as Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy are making bold attempts to reconfigure the landscape of education.

According to a February 2013 report from London-based investment bank IBIS Capital reported in the Washington Post, the value of the global education market is $4.4 trillion, with e-learning, at 27 percent, representing the fastest-growing segment.

There’s little doubt about the potential for technology to have a transformative effect on education from the K-12 through college and postgraduate levels. But what’s the right path forward? Nobody knows for certain, and there are certain to be many failures as well as many successes along the way. Criticisms leveled at Udacity, for instance, illustrate how challenging it can be for tech startups — even those headed by brilliant Stanford professors — to get the formula exactly right.

And yet there’s a vast amount of innovation happening in this field, and there’s a vast amount of potential for education technology to make real and lasting changes in the way we teach and learn.

VentureBeat has been covering ed-tech companies in great detail for much of 2013, led by the reporting work of reporters Jolie O’Dell, Christina Farr, and Rebecca Grant. Turning this coverage into a channel of its own will help us focus on this exciting market even more, and will make it easier for you, our readers, to find these stories.

Here are some of the highlights of our coverage so far.

• Teachers start 25 state petitions to add computer science to grad requirements
• Facebook founder is now helping bring high-speed Internet to public schools
• Meet Bo and Yana – the cute robots that can teach your toddler to code
• How data is driving the biggest revolution in education since the Middle Ages 
• How these college dropouts beat Harvard grads in the competition for jobs
• The President’s ‘gaming guy’ tells us that educational games fascinate Obama
• How Jordan’s Queen plans to ‘democratize access’ to education

For additional stories, visit our Education channel. Please let us know what you think of our coverage — and let us know at tips@venturebeat.com if you have stories you think we should be covering.