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 organizations that offer the kind of online experience that we do especially for the younger grades. We’re K-12 for sure but our historic strength is in the younger grades. There’s a real need in the education sector for strength in online learning in those primary grades.

Second is, we are specifically designed and optimized for the virtual school environment. We are especially good at enabling virtual teachers and students to succeed outside of the classroom experience. We’ve been doing that since the beginning of the organization. We’re just very focused on enabling schools, teachers, and students to teach well outside of a traditional classroom.

While this discussion is largely about online learning, I do believe, for pedagogical reasons, there’s an important role for offline learning for younger students. Other aspects of the educational experience that will always be part of the experience.

As students age, the degree to which their experience can be confined to digital becomes more and more. For younger students, there’s a degree of both online and offline learning that is critical for educational reasons. We strongly abide by that and expect to continue to.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your business is direct B2C versus selling to other charter schools?

Steve Gross: The business is roughly split amongst home school B2C and schools.

Sramana Mitra: Could you pinpoint that with a different metrics? How many schools use your online platform?

Steve Gross: We have several hundred schools around the world the use the Calvert platform.

Sramana Mitra: When they use your online platform, are they using it for all their students?

Steve Gross: The answer to that is it varies. It varies in the United States and in countries around the world. Our learning platform and curriculum is broadly applicable to a wide diversity of students.

Sramana Mitra: Are you enabling an entire school’s process of are we talking about just a select set of students that are being offered your platform to learn on? Then my follow-on question would be what is the motivation? What is the segment of students that are being offered your curriculum?

Steve Gross: It does vary. In many, if not most cases, we are offered as the sole online curriculum by those schools.

Sramana Mitra: In those cases, you are the online curriculum provider for their entire school.

Steve Gross: Right.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the hundreds of school that you are working with fall in that category?

Steve Gross: A majority.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Steve Gross, CEO of Calvert Education
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