Thought Leaders in Online Education: Quizlet CEO Matthew Glotzbach (Part 1)

Quizlet is a user-generated and AI-augmented study guide platform that has scaled exponentially.

Read on to understand more about this newly-minted Unicorn.

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

Startup Ideas for the Post Covid World: K-12 Education

In the Spring of 2020, parents of young children have suddenly woken up to a world where kids have to be homeschooled. They are supposedly guided by the teachers. These teachers have no experience of teaching online, and are thus learners themselves of a new education paradigm. They are scrambling to make things flow without losing the limited attention of the youngsters that are already difficult to command in normal times. 

The key issue I observe is that the teaching tools are not designed for this usage model.

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491st Roundtable Recording on June 25, 2020: With Deborah Quazzo, GSV Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Roundtable Recap: June 25 – Spotlight on Funding for Online Education Startups

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner at GSV Ventures, a fund focused on Online Education ventures. This is a very good discussion on patterns of success and failure in the sector, and what investors are gravitating towards.

Teenager Startups

As for entrepreneur pitches, this week we had Sulay Shah from Toronto, Canada, pitching an online education platform for teenage entrepreneurs.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Stephen Spahn, Dwight Schools Group (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see white spaces? I’ll give you an example. One of the things we’re learning in this COVID world is that at the elementary school level, distance learning is performing poorly. Clearly that is something that needs work. It needs to be thought through.

The other thing that I’m observing is that for a while as distance learning progresses, we said that we’re going from a sage-on-stage model to guide-on-side model. This expression has been used widely. People from edX, Coursera, and Khan Academy use this metaphor.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Stephen Spahn, Dwight Schools Group (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the level of adoption and penetration into this particular marketplace? How big is the market? How many kinds in that age group are there in America? What percentage of that have you been able to crack?

Stephen Spahn: What you really have is quite a large market which would include students with special interests. You also have students who have been ill and are at home. You have homeschooling.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Stephen Spahn, Dwight Schools Group (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What do they pay? What is the pricing of this program?

Stephen Spahn: It depends. It’s fairly flexible in terms of what parents can afford so that you can have parents paying more or less depending upon their circumstances. We have our own internal guideline so that if a person is very talented and can afford very little, we try to make sure that we can make a place for them.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Stephen Spahn, Dwight Schools Group (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I understand your positioning. It sounds like you are taking these areas where you have quite gifted people pursuing a certain track. You’re giving them a more well-rounded education. How does a program for a dancer differ from that of a basketball player for example?

Stephen Spahn: They have the same base program. They have a playlist that they can do projects around their area of interest. If you’re a tennis player, you might want to study the physics of it. If you’re a dancer or a musician, you’re going to study the implications of sound and how it’s carried.