2026 Eddy Awards: Innovator of the Year - Daniel J. Lowe. Daniel J. Lowe is the 2026 Innovator of the Year. The Eddy Awards, presented by OpenEd and Outschool, recognize the people and resources advancing open and alternative education. The Innovator of the Year award honors someone who has created something new that meaningfully improves the homeschool experience for families beyond their own. Seven seperate families nominated this man. They all said some version of the same thing: he built a tool that changed how OpenEd, Inc. do school. One family put it simply: "We were ready to give up on homeschooling until Daniel created this." The tool. Daniel built Course Tracker, a free tool that homeschool families use to organize and track their children's education. It helps parents manage courses, assignments, grades, and progress across the sprawl of curricula, co-ops, and self-directed learning that makes up a homeschool life. He built it because his family needed it. Then he gave it away. No premium tier. No paywall. No monetization. Just a tool the community needed, built by someone who understood the problem because he lived it. That's why seven families wrote his name on a nomination form - not because of a marketing campaign or a viral post, but because the tool quietly solved a real problem. The story behind it. Daniel and his wife homeschool six kids across multiple curricula. The question that kept coming up: how much work does each child need to finish each week to actually finish the school year on time? His brother's advice - the same advice most homeschool families get - was to just do what you can and let unfinished work carry over. That approach put his wife on the edge of quitting. She didn't know when enough was enough for the day. She worried the kids were falling behind. The uncertainty was wearing them out. So Daniel built a spreadsheet. It tracked each child's curriculum and auto-adjusted week by week - if a child got ahead, the workload spread out; if they fell behind, it redistributed. Then he and his brother turned it into a simple website so it could be used from a phone during a real school day. Kids could log in, pick their subject, track their points, and submit work for approval. The rule was simple: hit your daily goal before 3 p.m. and video games are fair game. The stress disappeared when the work was gamified. That was 2018. They've finished their curriculum in the last week of the school year every year since. In Daniel's words. "I am thrilled that the Homeschool CourseTracker is being recognized for its role in enhancing the 'self-paced,' 'parent-defined' homeschooling learning experience. This recognition strengthens my commitment to helping parents be confident and successful in managing their children's homeschool experience." Charlie Deist Charlie Deist (aka "the OpenEd newsletter guy") is the editor of OpenEd Daily and Head of Content at OpenEd, where he curates compelling thoughts, trends, and tools for parents rethinking education. When he's not writing or wrangling content calendars, he's tending to a small homestead in rural Northern California, where he lives with his wife, four kids, and a rotating cast of cows, pigs, and chickens. Most of his best ideas come while hauling feed buckets or chasing animals that found a new way to escape. Join 20,000+ families receiving curated content to support personalized learning, every school day.

Outschool x MDRS: bringing space science to life for learners. Outschool has partnered with the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) to deliver an unforgettable Mars live event for families - connecting kids with the kind of hands-on exploration and real scientific thinking that fuels future innovators. Learn more: https://outschool.com/articles/mars-live-event