There stands a house in Palo Alto, Calif., which until recently held 10 people in thier low- to mid-20s. Many of them had college experience, but you wouldn’t have said a college education was their primary interest. The nine-bedroom house and its residents were really no different from any other home and its inhabitants in the heart of Stanford University country.

Six of the 10 residents actually hailed from Illinois — four of them by way of the University of Illinois. They were not spending every day together at their house to take the alternative route through college. Instead, they were looking to create it.

They formed Bloc and Claco, two Silicon Valley startups aiming to overhaul the way education works, starting in kindergarten. They are part of the growing movement expanding online education, but they don’t see any of the other companies as competition — they’re going about online education in different ways.

Roshan Choxi, Hani Sharabash and Dave Paola constitute the core of Bloc, an online education platform that connects students with mentors in 12-week Web-development courses.

“Outside of a university, if you want to learn something new, your options are usually pretty limited,” said Sharabash, co-founder and December 2011 graduate of the University’s computer science program. “After you’re done with college … you don’t have the opportunities to network with other people who are interested in learning the same things as you. We see that as a problem.”

For $5,000 per course, Bloc sells the learning experience, not the educational content, said Paola, another co-founder who graduated from the University’s computer science program in May. There are free online education sites, such as Coursera and Khan Academy, that offer vast amounts of learning materials for HTML, CSS, Ruby, Javascript and more. These sites have less to offer when it come to the learning experience, however.

“They’re not really competitors, because we’re not selling our content,” Paola said. “We’re selling mentorship. We’re selling the idea that you don’t have to learn alone.”

This is where Bloc comes in and helps with the teaching. Bloc encourages its users to take advantage of these resources to enhance their learning.

Courses taught online are often thought of as inferior to in-class lectures, but the Bloc team has found a way it thinks can make online learning equally as engaging, said Choxi, CEO and co-founder of Bl and December 2010 graduate from the University’s electrical and computer engineering program.

“We’ve been inspired a lot by game mechanics in terms of how we design our curriculum,” he said.

Part of their strategy is to break free from the linear path of most schools’ curriculums, Choxi said, and instead allow students to choose their path for learning the content. This makes the 12-week courses easier to manage.

“We do make our courses pretty intense,” Sharabash said. “It’s like taking on a part-time job.”

Though students don’t earn degrees or have credentials to show off, they still attain the skill set to produce an impressive portfolio.

“In the tech space, (employers) actually don’t really look for a degree,” Choxi said. “These days, if you want to get a job (in Web development) … they’re looking more at actual code that you’ve written.”

Bloc has been successful enough that it relocated its office to San Francisco in November, just over a year from its start last October. This is “where gravity is shifting” and better recruitment opportunities lie, Sharabash said.

The co-founders are only working with Web-development courses for now because they already know the subject, Paola said. As they improve their education platform, they plan to offer courses with different subjects.

“We know what people want now,” Choxi said. “What we’re doing from here is to try and to build what we think is the most important educational network of the next century.”

Choxi said that while he was mentoring Bloc’s eight-week “boot camps” that got the startup off the ground, he found that many online education platforms see a shortage of resources as their biggest problem. So many of them strive to create an abundance of tutorials and other resources.

“It turns out that resources are not what stops people from actually learning Web development,” Choxi said. “It’s all about being connected to other people.”

The startup that once complemented Bloc in its Palo Alto home still works with Bloc in improving education. Claco, short for ClassConnect, works with teachers in kindergarten through 12th grades to help them to share and collaborate on lesson plans and other teaching materials.

“Teachers are able to create lessons, share them with other teachers, and then teachers can take pieces of lessons and build their own, create different versions for themselves and share it with all the other teachers,” said Matt Frisbie, a Ruby on Rails back-end developer for the site.

Previous iterations of Claco were met with varying levels of success, said Frisbie, the fourth UI alumnus at the Palo Alto house and a May 2012 graduate in electrical and computer engineering. Teachers latched onto the ability to share content and lessons. Claco is integrating social media into its platform so teachers can more easily share and collaborate on content. This way, they can spend less time creating and more time teaching.

Claco is the brainchild of Eric Simons, a Naperville, Ill., native. He gained fame earlier this year after he was found squatting in AOL’s Palo Alto office following his involvement with an entrepreneurship initiative. It was then that he first began working on the idea that developed into Claco.

Simons met Frisbie while staying on the UI campus during Frisbie’s junior year. He asked Frisbie to join his startup, but Frisbie was hesitant to join a startup without any capital. Frisbie took a job as a .NET developer at Allstate instead.

“Right after graduation, I got a call from him, and he said he had raised $175,000. So I pretty much called Allstate and told them I’m working for Claco,” Frisbie said. “I was on a flight out the next week.”

Though Claco and Bloc are still trying to solve the puzzle of exactly what works best for online learning, they do already know that online learning is the next big step in education.

“We have a phrase: ‘You can’t fight the zeitgeist,’” Sharabash said. “It’s coming. Education is going to change.”