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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Quizlet CEO Matthew Glotzbach (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where is the scalable capacity to train large numbers of retail workers to become healthcare workers? That speaks to the kind of things that you’re talking about. If there were such a transition path with proper credentialing, that would be extremely valuable under the current circumstances. 

Matthew Glotzbach: Absolutely. We see that trend of what I might call reskilling or upskilling. We’re already seeing that trend on Quizlet. It’s something that will continue to accelerate.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Quizlet CEO Matthew Glotzbach (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to rank subjects which are the biggest draws, what would those be?

Matthew Glotzbach: Over half of the college students in the US use Quizlet on a regular basis. Over two-thirds of the high school students in the US use us. We see a wide distribution of different types of uses. Language learning is still a strong category for us, but by no means is it a majority. We get used in a lot of sciences, both in the hard sciences as well as the social sciences.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Quizlet CEO Matthew Glotzbach (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What’s happening on the technology end? How are these questions generated? How is the progression being determined?

Matthew Glotzbach: Most of the interactions are with texts and images. We do a lot of natural language processing and understanding of the text. I’ll take a multiple choice question as a simple example.

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.