Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I understand. One of my objectives in this interview is to find gaps in the ecosystem.

Rob Waldron: That’s a gap, right?

Sramana Mitra: Yes. Let’s switch gears and talk about the instruction. What has been the evolution? Where are we coming from? Obviously, we’re coming from textbooks and prints. Within that text space, what has been the evolution? What are the key moves and drivers?

Rob Waldron: There was a lot of junk out there in the beginning. I have an iPad. I point to the print and it’s static. I’m still reading the New York Times. I float through it and it’s just like the newspaper but I get a little less ink on my hands. The big trend is when you’re choosing each lesson based on a prior lesson, you have a bunch of things that are great. One is that it’s going to be meant for you.

The second thing is our own research. If I deploy 10,000 today and only 1,000 got mastery, I would know that my lesson isn’t good enough and I have to work on that lesson to make it better. I call this little levers. The way it used to work is that a professor at the University of Chicago would go down the block and find 50 kids in a pilot and do research for three years. If 26 kids did well, they called it a study.

They use that research and then someone at a large publishing company says, “This is a specialized research that is applicable for millions.” Now there’s the micro-research. Why is it in this lesson that we have kids rushing or kids stopping midway? We’re probably boring them. It’s not engaging. I have to go back and use measurement information to make it engaging. I am so excited for education to be able to constantly be pulling those little levers rather than some big fancy lever.

Sramana Mitra: That’s very interesting. You’re saying that all your students who are learning that particular lesson are learning off the same content, and you’re constantly getting analytics on it. You’re learning where people are stopping or getting stuck. You have people looking at that data and constantly tweaking every block of content that you have out there.

Rob Waldron: Yes, it’s very laborious. It’s not like you just go make another lesson today. You have to go through focus group testing and research. It’s incredibly expensive. At the end, I could see whether children got greater growth when I deployed new lessons. That’s a huge change. Think about how many iterations we could do.

Sramana Mitra: How many years has your digital instructional system been used?

Rob Waldron: We’re on our fifth year.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve implemented this iteration process for five years, or is this a new process?

Rob Waldron: It’s getting increasingly sophisticated but it started at a very low level of sophistication. We’re not there yet. We have information on how kids are doing in every standard, every school, and in every district. We can say, “For whatever reason, these kids are getting killed in measurement and data. Is there something going on in your school?” We’re just constantly studying.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates
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