Running Online Middle And High Schools: Caprice Young, CEO of KC Distance Learning (Part 6)

SM: Let’s talk about the final piece of your business, the curriculum licensing.

CY: With Aventa we offer anything we do in our private and public offerings on an à la carte basis. We offer it with or without teachers. Our customers are school districts, charter schools, and some online schools.

SM: What is the difference between the public school program and the Aventa program?

CY: Very little. The only real difference is that we are in charge of running the whole school in our public school program.

SM: How does your business split up among the various business units?

CY: Aventa accounts for half of our business and the other two units each account for 25%. We have 153,000 enrollments overall. We are roughly a $58 million company. We are a wholly-owned subsidiary of Knowledge Universe.

SM: Are there plans to take the company on its own?

CY: Not at the moment, but never say never.

SM: How many teachers do you have? What is a typical profile of one of your teachers?

CY: We have about 400. About a third of them are part time. Our teachers are awesome. We work hard on teacher retention because kids tend to follow the teachers. A lot of them are people who get excited about new technologies. They really value the ability to interact with technology and bring that into the context of teaching.

A lot of our teachers have a one-on-one methodology. They strongly believe that it makes sense for students to acquire as much content as they can on their own and that it is their responsibility to teach the student how to use and apply that content. They serve as a learner coach rather than a content deliverer.

SM: How many students does a teacher have at one time?

CY: It varies substantially. A foreign language teacher can have as few as 40 to 80 students. Other teachers can have up to 250 students. Subject matter really influences that.

SM: You have said that students acquire content and teachers show them how to apply it. Do you ever have times when students and teachers assemble at the same time in a group setting?

CY: They do. Most of our courses include sessions similar to WebEx. Students will make presentations to each other or have conversations which are graded. Teachers will use that time to teach concepts that students need to learn or catch them up on concepts that they did not quite get the first time. Teachers also interact real time through phone, chat, and email. In some of our programs the kids get together with the teachers face to face. Often kids will get together on their own to do projects face to face or even to have a party like a prom. We have even had virtual proms.

A lot of our clients are now using our online tools in traditional classroom environments. In New York City we have more than 50 high schools that use our curriculum in labs or in the classroom to help students catch up on topics. We have an algebra credit recovery where students can take pre-exams for each chapter. If they pass out of the chapter, then they can skip to the next chapter. They are finding that the number of students who pass algebra a second time have a much higher pass rate if they take our algebra course in between.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Running Online Middle And High Schools: Caprice Young, CEO of KC Distance Learning
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