Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: From everything that I have read about Khan Academy, they are also doing a lot of test analysis and skill gap analysis. What is your analysis of their work?

Rob Waldron: I don’t analyze their work. I see it out there and my kids use it sometimes. It’s been a remarkable asset for the world to have access to that content. I don’t spend all my time analyzing the competition. What we are doing is working with educators every day. We have a long list of things that they want and we just keep making that better and better. I don’t really worry about what everyone else does. I am super focused on what the teachers and administrators want. My understanding is that they don’t think there’s anything close. Again, we don’t have time to go look at each competitor.

Sramana Mitra: You don’t have a choice but to look at each competitor. Let me put the question differently. Whom do you see in deals when you are trying to sell to schools?

Rob Waldron: There’s an older school company called Northwest Educational and then sometimes, there’s a much older one called Scantron. We see Renaissance Learning. That’s on the assessment side. On the instruction side, there’s a whole lot of companies. There’s the people at Pearson and McGraw-Hill who make more traditional forms of instruction. There’s companies like Imagine Learning that make just instructions.

Sramana Mitra: Your pitch to these school districts is that you do assessments and instruction together. That’s your differentiation?

Rob Waldron: On the product side, that’s the differentiation. What we’re most known for is service. I have some districts where we have people who are full-time embedded in that district. The service includes different things: not just the professional development of training folks on how to use it but also the monitoring of usage everyday. Instead of having an 800 number for a help desk, you’re calling a woman named Kate. You have her cellphone number. We have a very deep service component. Increasingly, we’ll be a service-based business. People think we have the best product but after a year, the thing they talk most about is our service.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to probe on the trend side. It seems like there are two things that we need to trace a bit of what has gone on historically and where these two lines of thought are going. One is on the assessment side two is on the instruction side. From an ed tech point of view, what has been the evolution of the assessment side of the industry and what has been the evolution of the instruction of the industry?

Rob Waldron: One the assessment side, there’s a print-based instrument called MKAS. You take the MKAS and people would prep for the MKAS because there’s so much political pressure to do well. These are tests where everybody gets the same questions no matter who they are. People are prepping to make sure that their kids do well on those tests. Otherwise, communities get upset that their students’ test scores are not as strong as other community’s. The superintendent may get fired if they don’t do well.

It’s very odd because you would take that test in April but the district would not get the results back until August when none of the kids are in the classroom anymore. The biggest change is not just doing it with technology, but also being adaptive. Every kid’s items are going up or down based on how hard they are. That change has started to hit the state tests themselves. The level of information that schools have has completely changed. Sometimes, they’re not ready for it when you have this data all the time rather than once a year.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates
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