Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 5)

Warren Barkley: There is a district in Washington State who have way less money than most districts. They’ve a lot of kids who are in and out of school, but every kid has a laptop in its population of 20,000. The curriculum is online for pretty much everything that they want to learn in the K-8. So if the kids miss a class because something happened with their parents, they can catch up. The way the superintendent did it there is through community. He has kids who do PR almost. They’ve parents who are massively involved. This is a district where you would not expect this type of thing to happen if you look at the demographics, yet they’re wildly successful with their technology and with their ability to affect the learning outcomes with kids.

When you talk to the superintendent, he will say that it’s all about the community. How is the community involved? I’ve seen this in other places as well and the recipe of success is community involvement. You can get to an effective use of these tools but you have to have the stakeholders signed up at the same time. To get to that for the entire ecosystem of education is probably seven years away.

Sramana Mitra: Where would you encourage entrepreneurs who are interested in working in the education domain to focus on? What kinds of problems are you seeing out there that deserve attention?

Warren Barkley: There’s a whole bunch of amazing startups happening. When I heard that question, the first thing I thought was some of the data analytics stuff. There are a couple of startups in San Francisco who are already doing the analytics around assessment. I see little tweaks of it here and there, but I don’t see anybody completely solving the problem from an education perspective. It’s kind of like a maker movement. I have three 3D printers in my office. I’ve managed to break through them somehow. There are folks out there who are building these 3D printers. Prices are now coming down to reasonable levels. None of those folks are really focused on education. They’re doing it as a side piece. If there was a company that brought everything from scanning to the making of a pedagogically focused packaged, that could take off.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Any other thoughts before we close?

Warren Barkley: When you’re building products for education, you need to be an education company building products for education. With things like consumer electronics companies trying to put things into education, you can get halfway there. Where I see technology most effective is when you have people who are very focused on what kids need and what parents and teachers need—not as a side business but as their main business. That makes a massive difference. I see that when I talk with education leaders around the country.

Sramana Mitra: Very nice talking to you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies
1 2 3 4 5