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. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the old model, there was an annual testing procedure. There was a lot of lag and delay as you’re pointing out. With the introduction of technology, is there ongoing testing? Is the annual state-level testing all online?

Rob Waldron: In a few places, it’s online. Mostly still, it is in print. Schools have moved online during the year for the benchmark to predict the test. It’s in flux right now. The adaptivity is much more efficient on that side. I gave you that example before on the area of circle where I’m capturing four or five pieces of data on an item instead of one. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: From everything that I have read about Khan Academy, they are also doing a lot of test analysis and skill gap analysis. What is your analysis of their work?

Rob Waldron: I don’t analyze their work. I see it out there and my kids use it sometimes. It’s been a remarkable asset for the world to have access to that content. I don’t spend all my time analyzing the competition. What we are doing is working with educators every day. We have a long list of things that they want and we just keep making that better and better. I don’t really worry about what everyone else does. I am super focused on what the teachers and administrators want. My understanding is that they don’t think there’s anything close. Again, we don’t have time to go look at each competitor. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Rob Waldron, CEO of Curriculum Associates (Part 1)

Rob and I discuss the evolution of personalized learning, skill gap analysis, curriculum design, and much more in this excellent interview.

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

Rob Waldron: I’m the CEO of Curriculum Associates. We’re a K-12 ed tech company. We’ve actually been in business for a long time. We became a tech company five or six years ago but we continue to have a healthy print business as well. The pencil and paper still works in education, but increasingly a majority of our business comes from technology. >>>

5 Thought Leaders in Online Education

Online education and training continue to grow in popularity. It costs less for students to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees online. Employers, too, save money by arranging for employees to take training courses online and on their own time. Through the following interviews with five leaders in online education, you will find a synthesis of the various trends and opportunities that I see at this point.

• Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com – Adrian started Study.com in 2002. Read how the trends in online education have impacted the evolution of a very interesting business. Excellent story.
• Felix Odigie, CEO of Inspired eLearning – Inspired eLearning is doing something very effective in Cyber Security education. Read on to learn more.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The last question I have from a trend point of view is, are you seeing this interest in lifelong learning translating into how long people subscribe to your program?

Adrian Ridner: It shows up in two ways. One is people who subscribe for longer but move around a lot of different subject areas. They’ll look at History. Then they’ll look at Math. The other way is, they will look up what they need to learn. Sometimes, they’ll stay for a few months. They’ll leave. Three months later, you’ll see the same person resubscribe. It shows up in two ways and it is not always like you expect. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Adrian Ridner, CEO of Study.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You are expecting that somewhere in the near future, you’re going to be able to access some Federal funding to educate low-income students. You’re going to be part of the government’s resources to deal with the education of a large number of students?

Adrian Ridner: Absolutely. The pilot program is initially in the test phase. We were selected for that. Assuming there’s a monitoring agency associated with the program that’s going to look at the outcomes of the program for the students themselves, we expect that it will scale over time. There’s a lot of talk around free college and providing college access. I will say that this program is one of the first things I’ve seen where that’s doable when you look at the logistics part of it because it brings the cost of a degree to sub-$8,000 instead of $40,000. It’s the best path I’ve seen to convert some of those promises of accessibility and equal access to education into a reality. >>>