Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: JumpStart Games CEO David Lord (Part 1)

This conversation highlights Gamification in online learning.

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

David Lord: I’m the CEO of JumpStart Games. We build games for kids ages 3 to 13. Some of our products include JumpStart, which is our legacy brand that has been delivering early childhood learning for 25 years. School of Dragons is a science-based game based around Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon and NeoPet.

Sramana Mitra: Also set some context about how big the company is. What is the footprint? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Steve Gross, CEO of Calvert Education (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you give me an example of the projects?

Steve Gross: An example would be developing a contraption that leverages materials that normally wouldn’t be available inside the classroom.

Sramana Mitra: But what has that got to do with online learning?

Steve Gross: There’re two things that we are talking about simultaneously. One is online learning and the other is virtual learning. There’s a huge degree of overlap there but they’re not exactly the same thing. We are digital first and everything we’re >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Steve Gross, CEO of Calvert Education (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So your primary business on the B2B side is as an online curriculum provider, effectively.

Steve Gross: That is true but I don’t think that’s the full description of it. I would say that we are a curriculum provider as well as an online program manager. What that means is we provide the curriculum and also the educational platform in which that curriculum and reporting resides. We also provide the services that are required, specifically tailored and optimized for the virtual environment, which is different from the brick and mortar environment. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Steve Gross, CEO of Calvert Education (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the motivation for private schools to use your digital platform?

Steve Gross: A couple of things. We have history on the home school side. Most traditional home schoolers home school their children from grade K through 8. That makes sense. It’s easier to teach third-grade math as opposed to 11th grade Chemistry. Historically, that’s where our focus has been.

As we moved beyond home schools into virtual schools, we retain that historic strength. There’s not a lot of different >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Steve Gross, CEO of Calvert Education (Part 1)

A very interesting discussion on the pedagogical gap in online-offline hybrid learning methodology for younger kids.

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

Steve Gross: Calvert is a very established organization. It was founded in the early 1900s. It’s probably the world’s first distance learning organization. It was founded as part of a private school in Baltimore, which is where the company is based. It is fair to say that we have been doing personalized learning genuinely since 1906. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Those are very different level questions. One question is about personalized learning. What you’re saying is that different types of personalization  are necessary in this process. You’re saying that that is going to be a longer process just because the levels of personalization and the variations are a lot more complicated than just having to cover the most common cases.

The other question of what does a mid-21st century citizen need in terms of education, that’s a much bigger philosophical question.

Rob Waldron: The reason that it feels like it won’t end is there will be societal expectations on our schools for certain ages. Once we figure out what those expectations are and if we agree about them, we’re going to have to provide tools and materials in order to drive learning for children. I think those things will always be moving. >>>

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 >>>

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. >>>