Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the old model, there was an annual testing procedure. There was a lot of lag and delay as you’re pointing out. With the introduction of technology, is there ongoing testing? Is the annual state-level testing all online?

Rob Waldron: In a few places, it’s online. Mostly still, it is in print. Schools have moved online during the year for the benchmark to predict the test. It’s in flux right now. The adaptivity is much more efficient on that side. I gave you that example before on the area of circle where I’m capturing four or five pieces of data on an item instead of one. >>>

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. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 1)

Rob and I discuss the evolution of personalized learning, skill gap analysis, curriculum design, and much more in this excellent interview.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Curriculum Associates.

Rob Waldron: I’m the CEO of Curriculum Associates. We’re a K-12 ed tech company. We’ve actually been in business for a long time. We became a tech company five or six years ago but we continue to have a healthy print business as well. The pencil and paper still works in education, but increasingly a majority of our business comes from technology. >>>

Why Aren’t Major Education Publishers Leaders in Innovation?

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2016: i-Human Patients, Sunnyvale, California

i-Human Patients, Inc. is a cloud-based e-learning company that is focused on rapidly developing and evaluating critical cognitive competencies in healthcare students and practitioners. Its main value proposition is that it simulates encounters with patients in order to teach users how to quickly, accurately, and cost-effectively assess and diagnose patients.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to be me about the state of the union as far as virtual reality games are concerned.

David Lord: It’s an interesting time. The promise of virtual reality is infinite and yet the delivery is still three to six months in. That three to six months was a little bit more exciting than I think anybody had anticipated. Now, we’re at a time when we can start to evaluate new games in an entirely new light. To take the leadership in virtual reality for education, you have to first use virtual reality to understand its capabilities.

Secondly, you have to understand that content will drive the adoption. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on some of these trends that you are talking about. Tell us a bit about what is in the horizon versus what is already active. You talked about personalized learning. Are products already in the market that are personalized learning games?

David Lord: I would call the products that we have today similar to personalized. They don’t necessarily have the ability to adapt in mid-motion like technology allows us to today. It really comes from the learnings that we’ve made as we converted our games to the cloud. The technology jumps that have been taking place have enabled us to have different views of data. That’s really what’s driven the technology capabilities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart (Part 1)

This discussion takes us into the realm of learning games and their future.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Jumpstart.

David Lord: I’m the CEO of JumpStart. JumpStart has been the leader in learning-based games for the past 25 years. JumpStart was founded by Bill Gross before Idealab. Our key brands are JumpStart Math Blaster and School of Dragons. We have been educating children, which is our mission, for the past 20 years.

Sramana Mitra: Children of what age do you focus on?

David Lord: We try and build products and subject matter that apply to children of all ages, but our core age range is kinder preparation to K-3. >>>