![President Obama's Final State of the Union, Jan 12, 9pm ET](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/files/tout_images/sotu2016_featured_blog.jpg)
When President Obama took office, he set a bold goal: for the US to reclaim its place as the world's leader in college completion rates, and have the world's most competitive workforce by 2020.
With this goal, the President set our sights on achieving excellence and equity for every student in America. To achieve this goal, we must vastly improve the opportunity to learn for all Americans and we must unleash technology's potential to power up the education experience and to fully support the development of our workforce.
As we search for and incentivize breakthrough innovations, we are also aware that there are policy barriers that hinder the ability to realize the full benefits of existing and emerging technologies to improve teaching and learning. These barriers may include current seat time based system of credentialing or existing textbook and educational materials adoption policies.
They may include the policies associated with funding or with broadband and Internet access both in school and out of school.
We would like you to help identify these policy barriers, as part of the Startup America Policy Challenge. Specifically, we are interested in your answers to these questions:
We want educators, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders to identify the barriers so we can make progress towards leveraging the power of technology to transform the way teachers teach and students learn.