Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Jumpstart Games CEO David Lord (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What results do you have?

David Lord: We’re in 50 to 60 schools already. We’ve got 500 classrooms. We’ve got our first efficacy report that has been peer-reviewed. We’re seeing great results – about 18% improvement in scores in standardized tests using our Jumpstart Academy math product. We’re starting with that and we’ll build the rest of the suite. On the school side, we’ll not only offer grade-based products, but we also offer single subject stack.

There will be a STEM stack with a math product. There’s computational thinking. There will be reading. You can also >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: JumpStart Games CEO David Lord (Part 1)

This conversation highlights Gamification in online learning.

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

David Lord: I’m the CEO of JumpStart Games. We build games for kids ages 3 to 13. Some of our products include JumpStart, which is our legacy brand that has been delivering early childhood learning for 25 years. School of Dragons is a science-based game based around Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon and NeoPet.

Sramana Mitra: Also set some context about how big the company is. What is the footprint? >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Steve Gross, CEO of Calvert Education (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you give me an example of the projects?

Steve Gross: An example would be developing a contraption that leverages materials that normally wouldn’t be available inside the classroom.

Sramana Mitra: But what has that got to do with online learning?

Steve Gross: There’re two things that we are talking about simultaneously. One is online learning and the other is virtual learning. There’s a huge degree of overlap there but they’re not exactly the same thing. We are digital first and everything we’re >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Steve Gross, CEO of Calvert Education (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So your primary business on the B2B side is as an online curriculum provider, effectively.

Steve Gross: That is true but I don’t think that’s the full description of it. I would say that we are a curriculum provider as well as an online program manager. What that means is we provide the curriculum and also the educational platform in which that curriculum and reporting resides. We also provide the services that are required, specifically tailored and optimized for the virtual environment, which is different from the brick and mortar environment. >>>

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 >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Steve Gross, CEO of Calvert Education (Part 1)

A very interesting discussion on the pedagogical gap in online-offline hybrid learning methodology for younger kids.

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

Steve Gross: Calvert is a very established organization. It was founded in the early 1900s. It’s probably the world’s first distance learning organization. It was founded as part of a private school in Baltimore, which is where the company is based. It is fair to say that we have been doing personalized learning genuinely since 1906. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Victoria Zambito, SVP of Content and Communications at Vector Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are you doing with your legacy courses? Are you chopping them up?

Victoria Zambito: Yes. Vector Solutions has over 6,000 courses. Actually going in and hand-chopping them up would take a lot of time. We had our development team look at our courses. They looked at the metadata inside the course and how video files were built and how slides were built. They were thinking about an automated way of decompiling the course into bits and pieces so that we can offer them up in, what >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Victoria Zambito, SVP of Content and Communications at Vector Solutions (Part 1)

Attention deficit disorder of our online universe has some direct impact on online learning. Read on for more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company Vector Solutions.

Victoria Zambito: I’m the Senior Vice President of Content and Communications at Vector Solutions. Vector Solutions provides online education and performance solution to the heroes and thought leaders who design and build our world. We are focused on three niche verticals.

In the Commercial business unit, we have design and construction and industrial market space. In the Public business unit, we focus on training firefighters, law >>>