Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Explain to me what you organization looks like to be able to do something like this. This is not something you can do with technology. You’re going to have to analyze everything. Perhaps you can analyze and pinpoint to some extent using technology, but somebody has to go through it manually and look at the content, and figure out what to change.

Rob Waldron: It takes hundreds of people if you’re going to do it on our scale. We have, what would look like, a normal agile development process with developers and QA. We have an operations group to make sure that the system is humming all the time. The school bandwidth is quite low so we have to do a lot of heavy lifting on our end.

We have a whole product group. In many tech companies, product groups would be smaller than in our industry because we have to have people who are writing items. Those items have to be reviewed by psychometricians for validity. We have designers and artists doing artworks and stories. We have educators to make sure that we’re using the latest pedagogical trends to teach particular standards or skills.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to play out this process over a decade, is that sufficient time to fine-tune the content and take it through enough iterations to get to, let’s call it, a common core that is really solid and sound?

Rob Waldron: Hopefully, it won’t take that long.

Sramana Mitra: What is your estimate of how long it will take?

Rob Waldron: It will never be over. It will never end. It’s like medicine. It’s constantly thinking about the human body and improving what we can do to support the human body and learn from it.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t agree with that. The human body is a much more complex system. There’s a lot more stuff that’s undiscovered and undealt with. There’s a lot of diseases for which we haven’t found cures for. Algebra, geometry, english grammar – these are not open-ended problems. These are finite and deterministic.

Rob Waldron: First of all, is Algebra the right thing to learn to make a 21st century learner? That’s one thing. What are the set of skills that are needed to be functional in this century? If this child who was not exposed to good teaching and lacked nutrition from three to four years of age that impacted brain development is is in a room full of forty instead of a room full of 10, what are we doing with that? It’s much more complicated. If they were to capture and get mastery, how long does that retain and what does that do for them as a citizen when they’re 22?

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates
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