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: Victoria Zambito, SVP of Content and Communications at Vector Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are you doing with your legacy courses? Are you chopping them up?

Victoria Zambito: Yes. Vector Solutions has over 6,000 courses. Actually going in and hand-chopping them up would take a lot of time. We had our development team look at our courses. They looked at the metadata inside the course and how video files were built and how slides were built. They were thinking about an automated way of decompiling the course into bits and pieces so that we can offer them up in, what >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Victoria Zambito, SVP of Content and Communications at Vector Solutions (Part 1)

Attention deficit disorder of our online universe has some direct impact on online learning. Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company Vector Solutions.

Victoria Zambito: I’m the Senior Vice President of Content and Communications at Vector Solutions. Vector Solutions provides online education and performance solution to the heroes and thought leaders who design and build our world. We are focused on three niche verticals.

In the Commercial business unit, we have design and construction and industrial market space. In the Public business unit, we focus on training firefighters, law >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Blake Garrett, CEO of Aceable (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I think I understand what your perspective is on online education. What kind of a company are you? Are you bootstrapped?

Blake Garrett: We are funded but we use cash much more effectively than some of our competitors. I founded the company in late 2012 and I frankly didn’t have the development skills to create a product. I needed cash early on. I raised money from angel investors.

Being based in Austin, Texas, there’s a good amount of angel investors but the dollar value per angel investor is not >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Blake Garrett, CEO of Aceable (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in your space as it pertains to online education?

Blake Garrett: We are seeing this macro-trend from people moving from the classroom to online education. When we started three years ago, about 150,000 people took online driver’s education in Texas. Those numbers would be closer to 200,000 if normalized for differences in population per age. We are definitely seeing a trend where as they become more familiar with online learning and mobile-based learning, we’re seeing that market move that way.

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of the market for license training? What percentage of that market do >>>