Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sari Factor, CEO of Edgenuity (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I get all these things that you’re saying. Let’s say there’s a rural school that can afford to manage the core and in the edges; they can’t afford that many languages or higher level mathematics and sciences. My question is how much does it cost them to include that in their curriculum? Given that they cannot afford teachers, can they afford to layer you guys into the mix? If they do, the existing teachers who are teaching the core, can they then supervise the learning of those accelerated courses?

Sari Factor: Some can and some can’t. It depends on the certification requirements in a given state. Back to your original question, what we’re finding is indeed some schools are interested in using us to augment their staff. If they do not have somebody who’s qualified to supervise a course, we can do it through distance learning.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sari Factor, CEO of Edgenuity (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Your system maintains the personalized skill gap data for every student that is on your platform?

Sari Factor: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: Can different teachers, as they progress through the grade, access that data?

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sari Factor, CEO of Edgenuity (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: They are using online curriculum but there’s a teacher who’s telling them, “You take this course. Do this exercise.”

Sari Factor: Absolutely. The system is telling the student how much they need to accomplish each day, but a teacher is always monitoring that. We offer adjunct teachers as well. We provide that service. That’s a very small part of our business but one that is growing and we think will continue to grow. There’s always the supervision of a teacher.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sari Factor, CEO of Edgenuity (Part 2)

Sari Factor: It’s also an excellent solution for acceleration. We have situations where students in middle school might be ready for geometry, which is typically taught in the 10^th grade. But there is no Geometry curriculum or teacher at the middle school level. They might take a course from a high school teacher administering the course from the high school campus, but they would be studying the curriculum appropriate for high school mathematics while they are still in middle school. We see both ends of the spectrum – the low-level and high-level kids.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Sari Factor, CEO of Edgenuity (Part 1)

K-12 has been a challenge for EdTech companies to build businesses in. Typically, buying cycles tend to be very long. See where Edgenuity is getting traction, and what trends are emerging in the space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you as well as to your company.

Sari Factor: After a short career in teaching back in 1980, I joined a company to explore technology in education. It was the first electronic publishing division of a major US publisher. I thought technology was going to change the world. I was this young green thing right out of teaching. Here I am many years later and I’m still trying to get technology to change K-12 education.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: They’re used to texting non-stop. One form of social interaction could be just having an instant messenger and they’re doing their group study that way. There’s one other thought that comes to my mind in relation to the media industries parallel that we touched upon earlier. There is this whole thing happening in the online media world right now that has come to be known as content marketing. Media companies are imploding left and right. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It starts to get very tricky because we also have weekly roundtables, which are live sessions where people are gathering from all over the world. They are networking. It’s like a class. There’s instructors and students. There’s networking and relationship-building. All of that phenomenon can, to a degree at least, be simulated online. In fact, now we’re doing it across global boundaries, which you cannot do in physical settings.

Peter Hirst: That, in fact, is what we’re doing in these avatar-based virtual classrooms. We’re really creating an emotionally-engaging environment where people can get together in that way. I have been talking to some of the other folks at MITx and edX. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Peter Hirst, Executive Director of Executive Education, MIT Sloan School of Management (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That’s a big value proposition that is still part of society. When we were in university and college, there were certain social relationships that formed that ended up being valuable social relationships. A lot of people’s closest friendships get formed earlier in life and a lot of it is college friendships. These are not easy to quantify. >>>