From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was your hypothesis at this point about what was going to be the business model of your company? Did you have one?

Farnaz Ronaghi: Yes. In the beginning, there were a lot of companies who started doing MOOCs but in different flavors. There’s Coursera who seemed like it was trying to replace college education. Coursera had a lot of classes at that level but on general topics all over the place. There’s Udacity who was focusing on Computer Science education.

Our classes in the beginning were similar. Because you can’t really teach soft skills like leadership and innovation, you can’t teach it without human interaction >>>

From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start this? When did you start offering the course around which you did the first experiment?

Farnaz Ronaghi: Mid-2012.

Sramana Mitra: You said you had 30,000 people who came together.

Farnaz Ronaghi: In the first Technology Entrepreneurship class, we had 40,000 enrolments.

Sramana Mitra: What time window are we talking? How long from the time you launched this did it take for 40,000 people to come together? How did people find out about it? >>>

From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 1)

Donald Trump wants to restrict immigrants, especially those from Muslim countries, and especially from Iran. Well, read this Iranian entrepreneur’s story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and in what kind of background?

Farnaz Ronaghi: I was born in Tehran, Iran. I came to the United States for graduate school. I was accepted in Stanford University for a Master’s degree in Management Science and Engineering. That is where I met my adviser and co-founder. After that, I started my Ph.D. My work was related to the intersection of computer science and social science similar to human-computer interaction but was more focused on incentives and game theory. One of the pain points that I had >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Cheryl Vedoe, CEO of Apex Learning (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What you do forecast? Based on your experience and based on the fact that you’re immersed in this world, at what point in our evolution do we expect to see a broader and deeper penetration of online learning into the full-fledged K-12 system?

Cheryl Vedoe: I think I would really need a crystal ball to forecast when that’s going to happen, to be honest. Because I’ve been involved in education and the integration of technology and digital content into education for more than 25 years now. There have been many points along that path where many have predicted that the tipping point is here. We’ve not seen that tipping point yet. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Cheryl Vedoe, CEO of Apex Learning (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why is that, though? It makes sense to equip all schools with this ability to personalize and help teachers give this personalized guidance. Why is that movement slow?

Cheryl Vedoe: I think I can answer that, most readily, by speaking about why it was faster in the other two cases. In the case of advanced placement, what motivated the use of online courses was the very simple fact that many high schools simply were not able to provide access to advanced placement courses unless they gave students the opportunity to take them in a virtual environment. There is a very strong and compelling need to be addressed that drove that change. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Cheryl Vedoe, CEO of Apex Learning (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: My question was slightly different, though. My question is what percentage of US schools have virtual advanced placement programs?

Cheryl Vedoe: I can’t tell you that off the top of my head. That’s not a data point that we track. I can tell you that we do have thousands of students who enroll in our online AP courses every year. They come from school districts around the country. We also have students from private schools. I can’t tell you what percentage of schools that is.

Sramana Mitra: What about for the remedial programs? What percentage of schools are using virtual technologies in school? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Cheryl Vedoe, CEO of Apex Learning (Part 3)

Cheryl Vedoe: For example, in programs such as a credit recovery program, the teacher has access at his or her fingertips to data in real-time to show how every student is progressing and what their quality of work is. In our platform, teachers get alerts when there are things that they should discuss with students so that they can engage individually with students. I should also point out that I used the example of credit recovery, but our courses are used in that very same model as the curriculum for original credit in many programs as well as when the student body being served is one that has demonstrated they are not successful in that traditional classroom. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Cheryl Vedoe, CEO of Apex Learning (Part 2)

Cheryl Vedoe:What we have found in surveying students who have an unsuccessful track record is that the programs using it most successfully are actually brick-and-mortar programs where the teacher is in the classroom with the student. Very consistent with the point that you made, we find that those students who need more support and help are generally not students who will do well in a virtual environment. If you go back to the early days of Apex, we were serving advanced placement students, and exclusively virtual students.

Today, over 95% of the students we serve are actually engaging with our digital curriculum or online courses in a brick-and-mortar classroom. The reason that digital curriculum is working so well for those students is that it is through the use of digital curriculum that schools are able to provide the experience that each student needs. The challenge for a teacher in the classroom is well understood. A typical high school teacher has a class of 30 students who have different foundational skills and different abilities to move through the content. Frankly, different learning styles as well. >>>