HALLSVILLE — A Hallsville ISD elementary school has raised more than $5,000 this year to contribute to the district’s Angel Tree fund, which provides Christmas presents for families in need.
Each November, Hallsville Intermediate School raises money throughout a two-week period known as the “Penny Wars,” to donate to the Angel Tree Foundation, which provides Christmas presents to area children in need.
The friendly competition sees jugs for teachers set out front of the school’s front office during the two-week period. The teachers who collect the most points from pennies wins.
“Here’s how the game works: each family of teachers has their own plastic jug outside of the front office. Students gain points for the class by adding pennies to their jug. Students can lower their opponents’ points by adding silver change to the opponents’ jug,” Hallsville Intermediate School Counselor Victoria Downs said. “The points are tallied each day and announced over the intercom. The next morning, the students are ready to sabotage whoever is winning and also add more to their own jug.”
In addition to knowing they bested other classes at the game, the winning team at each grade level wins a pizza.
“We also set a campus goal to raise $3,000, and if we reached that goal, the students would be able to pie our principal, Aaron Hoecherl, and our campus officer, Justin Clark, in the face,” Downs said.
The students raised so much, more than $5,300, resulting in both Hoecherl and Clark getting a face full of pie this year.
“This competition is such a fun way to raise money towards a good cause while also integrating math,” Downs said. “The Penny Wars has always been very successful, but this year we were shocked at how well it went.”
Downs and other staff presented the $5,327 check to Hallsville ISD Special Programs Director Amy Whittle recently.
“We sent emails thanking parents for letting their children raid their couch cushions and cup holders, but parents were calling the school and letting us know that their children were using their own allowance for this fundraiser,” Downs said. “I hope our students know how much of an impact they have made on children’s lives and how many children will actually be able to enjoy Christmas this year because of them.”
In celebration of the above and beyond giving, the winning classes received their pizza and the whole school received popsicles and extra recess time, making a win-win for everyone this holiday season.
The Netherlands has historically been proud of its education system. When the first international assessments were launched near the turn of the century, the Netherlands was one of the top countries globally, placing fourth according to the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
But by 2012, the Netherlands had dropped to tenth place, and the country’s educators felt a creeping sense of inertia.
Tests and curricula were increasingly standardized, and teachers began to feel like they were managing an educational production line rather than pushing the boundaries of curiosity and creativity. Multiple government-led transformation efforts resulted in reform fatigue.
The leerKRACHT foundation, launched in 2012 by Jaap Versfelt, tackled these challenges by working with school systems from the bottom up to create a culture of continuous improvement focused on the quality of teaching. Over the past eight years, the program has reached 900 schools, and teachers and principals are invigorated by its impact on student outcomes and school culture.
In this interview, Versfelt provides insight into how he’s led the transformation of schools across the country by putting teachers at the center of the process, encouraging communication among teachers and schools, and practicing what he preaches—that is, continuously improving leerKRACHT alongside the country’s schools.
McKinsey: What was the education system in the Netherlands like before leerKRACHT, and where did you see the biggest opportunities?
Jaap Versfelt: The education system was good, as the PISA results show, but it was not improving. At the same time, there were signals—maybe not on the surface but underneath—that the situation was deteriorating. Everyone was working harder to maintain performance. But the focus was mostly on accountability, standards, and performance management. Instead of strengthening the teachers, this focus, which required them to use scripts to teach, was degrading teachers into robots. All of this made the teaching profession less popular, which wasn’t a good sign for the future.
Schools in the Netherlands are highly independent institutions: there is no mediating layer between the schools and the Ministry of Education. They can decide for themselves how to spend their budgets and whom to work with. While this could have been a challenge for centrally driven reform initiatives, it gave us an opportunity to intercede at the grassroots level to change the system.
McKinsey: How did you determine the core elements of your program and begin to implement it in schools?
Jaap Versfelt: In the beginning, we selected 16 schools that we could work with to design and implement a continuous improvement culture. We did not do this alone. We leaned on help from the teaching unions, which provided people to act as coaches in the schools, and on McKinsey’s seminal reports on transforming school systems in 2007 and 2010. These reports stressed the primary importance of teachers and teaching in school transformations and the power of peer learning in moving from a good system to a great one. We combined these insights with our continuous-improvement operational expertise, which we learned from our work with companies.
With the teachers and leaders from our pilot schools, we codeveloped four key interventions: joint lesson planning, colleague lesson observations and feedback, whiteboard sessions (weekly or daily huddles around a whiteboard to set goals and review actions), and student involvement in the process, which echoed the corporate approach of putting customers at the center of conversations.
We started implementing them almost immediately, recruiting the 16 schools in May. In September we were live. We used a “field and forum” change-management approach—working within each individual school as well as creating opportunities for all the schools to talk with each other for encouragement and learning.
We realized early on that it was going to be difficult to obtain central funding, so schools would need to self-fund these initiatives—often out of their professional-development budgets. There was no budget for consultants, professional HR, operational-excellence departments, or training modules. We therefore used a “train the trainer” approach, which kept costs low and ensured that the schools owned the process.
McKinsey: How was the vision of reform, progress, and impact communicated to different groups—including participants, policy makers, and wider stakeholders?
Jaap Versfelt: We started off at the grassroots level, talking to teachers and friends; our colleagues would go back to their own schools and invite them to codesign the programs with us. It was a collaborative process. In the first years, I also spent a lot of time talking with stakeholders in the Dutch school system—ministers of education, union leaders, education aldermen, senior politicians, teacher representatives, professional bodies, and so forth. With the unions it was a matter of showing how we were putting teachers at the center, giving them joint ownership of the process. I also pledged to give up my career at McKinsey and to volunteer full time at leerKRACHT, and that gave others the confidence to also put real time into the foundation.
Within schools, our initial contact was with leadership, and then subgroups of teachers would engage. We gained the trust of teachers because we were a grassroots organization. Some of the teachers in our initial pilot schools drew a series of concentric circles to represent the school system. In the middle are the teachers and school leaders, around them are the school boards and school inspectorate, beyond that is the Ministry, and even further out are the education consultants who advise the Ministry. What we managed to do was go from the outer circle right to the middle, being viewed by the teachers as “one of them.”
Leerkracht means “teaching force” in Dutch, and we at the foundation have always had extremely high expectations of the teachers but also kept them at the middle of everything we do, refining the approach with their feedback. Early on we did not think of engaging with students, but the teachers showed us we were also creating an active role for students to drive lesson improvement. After a few years, some school participants became great advocates for the program, and they went out to speak to other schools, spreading the message and telling their stories. Teachers felt that the program really changed their professional life. They were suddenly talking with and learning from each other, and there was more esprit de corps.
McKinsey: How did you build the organization’s leadership and capability?
Jaap Versfelt: At McKinsey, I led the Service Operations Practice worldwide—which gave me experience in leading complex transformations and creating large scale change. I also had a nucleus of people around me with the time, resources, and experience to help. That support helped to build the central organization, but building up a cadre of leerKRACHT expert coaches was the most critical enabler in helping teachers and driving change.
We have two types of coaches in our program: school-level coaches—teachers who make themselves available a half-day a week to implement the program in their own school—and leerKRACHT expert coaches who “coach the coach.” That is, they teach the school team how to tailor and implement the leerKRACHT method of peer-led continuous improvement in their school.
Our expert coaches are typically extremely experienced and come from three complementary backgrounds. They are previous school leaders, master teachers, or people with a background in lean management or agile scrum—meaning they understand continuous improvement. We like to hire coaches who are older; the average age of our people is 50 to 60. Collectively they have the gravitas and experience to help their schools. Yet we pay them teacher salaries. They could obviously earn more, but they believe in the purpose of leerKRACHT and want to be part of a bigger movement to change our school system.
McKinsey: Given the large-scale and long-term nature of the effort, how was momentum sustained as the organization scaled?
Jaap Versfelt: We wanted to stay relatively small to preserve our organizational culture. We are currently at about 40 people and work with a few hundred schools each year. Our way of working with individual schools is to engage intensively in the first year, more lightly in the second year, and move to check-ins in the third year. This structure allows us to constantly move on to new schools. Cumulatively we have reached about 11 percent of all schools in the Netherlands.
We also work hard to maintain quality as we grow. Our expert coaches are key to helping us do this,
but we also codified our method in an online academy. This enables people who do not have experience in creating a culture of continuous improvement to implement the program, while also providing flexibility for schools to tailor the program to their needs.
We are, of course, applying the mantra of continuous improvement to our own organization as well. We are constantly learning. Every week I go to a school, sometimes two or three schools, to see the method and people in action and learn how we can improve. The success of leerKRACHT comes from a little bit of effort in the beginning to get it started and then a lot of effort to improve the impact over time. This is the opposite of so many education-reform programs, which are built around investing a lot of time and money at the beginning but then contributing only money to subsidize the scaling of the reforms.
We are gradually building and creating more impact and, of course, honing our method over time to make it easier to use. Also, as teachers rotate through schools, the culture spreads. We are even starting to see some uptake in teaching colleges, allowing teachers to pick up some of the principles before they start in the workplace.
McKinsey: Overall, how would you describe the impact of this transformation effort? What evidence do you have of improving student outcomes?
Jaap Versfelt: The only way we can keep going and growing is by improving our impact. We are dead in the water without impact. We therefore asked researchers from Utrecht University to analyze the program on four levels: Are we executing effectively? Have we changed the culture? Has teaching quality improved? And are those things leading to better learning outcomes?
The study is still in progress, but initial results confirm that we can create a continuous-improvement culture across our cohort within one year. Eighty to 90 percent of participating school leaders and teachers have great confidence that our methods lead to better teaching quality. Most excitingly, initial results in primary schools suggest an 8 percent improvement in learning outcomes two years after the start of the program.
Initial results confirm that we can create a continuous-improvement culture across our cohort within one year.
McKinsey: While the leerKRACHT schools appear to be thriving, the performance of the Netherlands as a whole on international assessments continues to disappoint. What are the plans for continued education reform across the country?
Jaap Versfelt: The first part is to continue expanding our current model. I think in due course we can bring our program to 1,500 schools. At that point, 20 percent of our teaching force will be familiar with and enthusiastic about the method. We are hoping thereafter that the “virus” will be planted and that teachers won’t want to stop. That it cannot be put back under the lid.
What we don’t want is for the government or anyone else to mandate the leerKRACHT approach. That would defeat the purpose. Instead, they can help by telling the story and providing a very small amount of money to participating schools to help pay for their coaches and teachers.
We would also like to see more progress at the teacher-training level—making the framework part of the basic curriculum and setting a consistent standard for how we educate.
Our ultimate ambition is to be so successful and integrated into the system that we make ourselves redundant. Over time, the teachers who have been part of leerKRACHT will become school leaders, and the school leaders will become school board leaders, and the school board leaders will start populating the Ministry of Education. Perhaps within 20 years the transformation will be complete.
In the wake of pandemic school closures, school districts in Washington state saw their enrollments decline by tens of thousands of students. The statewide drop, calculated between fall 2019 and fall 2020, was among the largest in the country.
New state data from this fall shows that school systems still have not recovered their losses, leaving open questions about when — and if — these students will return.
Between October 2019 and October 2020, 39,000 fewer students enrolled in public school, about a 3.5{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} drop. The numbers weren’t distributed evenly across grades — the most pronounced losses were among younger students; the number of kindergarten students plummeted by 14{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf}. By this fall, the state’s enrollment had only grown by a thousand students.
At the same time, the state’s home-schooled population has ballooned, nearly doubling in size during the first full school year of the pandemic, 2020-21. Many fled citing the uncertainty and logistical problems that public schools faced.
“The remote learning for us — it was too much,” said Allison Peterson, a mother of three who home-schooled her three children for all of last school year. With home schooling, Peterson said, the family had a lot more “flexible time.”
The drop in enrollment is bad news for public schools financially. Collectively, school districts will lose about $500 million in state funding in the next budget, according to state Superintendent Chris Reykdal. He has already signaled that he will ask state lawmakers to hold funds steady for the districts, which receive dollars based on the size of their rosters.
“I’m gonna make a real hard push here,” said Reykdal in an interview last week, explaining that the losses are small enough that it would be difficult for school districts to restructure their costs. “When it’s this sort of subtle thing, it’s the worst-case scenario.”
Districts have been tallying up the damage. Seattle is down 3,400 students since 2019. This year, the district estimates it will operate with $28 million less in funding, according to a recent Seattle School Board presentation. There is “potential” for some of those students to return during the second semester of the year now that the vaccine is available for children ages 5 through 11, the presentation said.
For the short term, money from the pandemic federal stimulus packages aimed at schools should exceed the money lost by enrollment declines in most school districts, according to an analysis from Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab.
There could also be unintended consequences to the state holding funding at pre-pandemic enrollment levels, the analysis says.
“The movement of students may not be correlated to student poverty rates,” Marguerite Roza, an education finance professor, wrote in an email. That money “may be going out in ways that disproportionately protect some districts [which may or may not be higher poverty].”
The demographics of kids who have left (or never entered) public schools are still unclear. The state has yet to release those details. But state officials suspect many of them have stayed home.
Home-schooled students grew from 21,000 to 40,000 students between 2019 and 2020.
There isn’t a count yet available for home-schooled kids this school year, but Jen Garrison Stuber, advocacy chair for the Washington Homeschool Organization, says she expects the number to hold steady.
After school closures, parents flocked to this model for stability, Garrison Stuber said. Now it’s an appealing option for families for a wide variety of reasons. Some are afraid of sending their children back before they have received the pediatric vaccine. Others began schooling at home out of frustration with mask and vaccine mandates.
Now, many have adapted to the flow of home schooling and don’t want to shake their arrangements up again, she said.
“I used to say I would never home-school my own kids,” said Peterson, a former elementary school teacher who lives in the Northshore School District area. “That it would be too much time and too much work, that we’d get sick of each other.”
But she found that the arrangement actually allowed her kids to learn what they needed in a shorter period of time each day. They didn’t need to account for the extra minutes in the school day to take attendance or line everyone up for recess. The kids could move at their own pace.
They also took regular field trips. During a unit on farming and food, Peterson managed to persuade some local farmers to let her kids tour their facilities. Through a connection with a friend, she also had her kids Zoom with a NASA engineer to learn about space travel.
The Petersons gave their kids a choice about whether they wanted to return to in-person public school this year. Their son Jacob has been attending third grade in person since September, and their daughter, Hannah, will head back to kindergarten in January after she’s had her second dose of the vaccine.
Their oldest, 11-year-old David, will stay at home, where the pace aligns better with his learning style, Peterson said.
Though in many cases private schools opened for in-person learning earlier than public schools, these schools didn’t see the same boom between 2019 and 2020. (Data this school year hasn’t been released.) Statewide, private schools only saw an increase of about 800 students overall.
The Puget Sound region’s Catholic school system, which enrolls about 20,000 students across nearly 70 schools, saw a 6{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} increase in enrollment between 2020 and 2021, according to the Archdiocese of Seattle.
Seattle-area districts were among the last to start schooling in person, many of them under the pressure of a statewide order.
“We didn’t skip a beat. Within 72 hours, all of our schools had switched to remote learning,” said Kristin Moore, director of marketing and enrollment for the Archdiocese. “And working so close with the health department, we had a staggered start last fall.”
It was a word-of-mouth movement, Moore said. Public and private school parents would talk among themselves at sporting events, comparing school opening dates.
Like the Petersons, Amy Kelly and her family also left public schools because of challenges with remote learning. Her two sons, who used to attend Shoreline Public Schools, now attend St. Luke School, a Catholic school in Shoreline. Since enrolling, the boys have taken an interest in community service, and the welcoming parent community has been “life changing,” Kelly said. The family is now even contemplating becoming Catholic.
The growth has been great, Moore said. But “we couldn’t take everybody even if we wanted to. We want strong public schools.”
Staff reporter Monica Velez contributed reporting to this story.
This article is part of a series providing school students with evidence-based advice for choosing subjects in their senior years.
From kindergarten to year 10, all Australian students follow the national health and physical education (HPE) curriculum. This expands in years 11 and 12 with a range of health and physical education selection options.
Depending on which state you live in, you may be able to do year 11 and 12 health and physical education subjects such as physical education (by itself), sport science, health studies, personal development, athlete development, food and nutrition, outdoor and environmental studies, and sport and recreation. These subjects include a variety of practical and theoretical options.
When deciding which subjects to do in years 11 and 12, it is important to consider your interests and study load, as well as what you want to do after year 12.
Do you want to embark on university study, enter the workforce, learn a trade or something else? Sport and recreation is a common choice for industry preparation, with ATAR and higher education pathways also available. But there are other options, too.
What subjects can I do?
In recent decades a number of reportshaveindicated studying health and physical education in year 11-12 is becoming more popular.
In 2016, almost 40{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} of students aged 16 to 17 across Australia elected to enrol in health and physical education subjects in years 11 and 12. The PE subjects were slightly more popular among males, and health education among females.
Similarly, in New South Wales, trends show the proportion of senior secondary students studying health and physical education rose by almost 10{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} over the decade from 2008.
Read more:
Choosing your senior school subjects doesn’t have to be scary. Here are 6 things to keep in mind
Many subjects are available under the health and physical education umbrella – depending on where you live. Alongside the combinations of HPE or PE (by itself), these can include:
health studies and well-being are available in states such as Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania. Here you will learn about personal care and well-being and about where to find accurate health information. You can explore different dimensions of health such as physical, mental and emotional health — all of which can help you navigate busy and often stressful years at college
food and nutrition is available in states such as Tasmania and South Australia. This will teach you how to analyse nutrition and food information, food advertising and dietary trends. You will also explore what influences food choices, analyse how nutrition affects health and consider how secure and sustainable our food supply is
sport and recreation studies are available in states such as Queensland, Victoria and NSW. This subject can make you more aware of the many local organisations and experiences you can access for fun. It can also teach you how to get engaged in physical activities with your friends and family, and work with a local council to organise community sporting events
athlete development is available in states such as Tasmania. This can allow you to develop in your chosen (team or individual) sport through specialist coaching. You can learn about things like how to train effectively and prevent and recover from injuries
outdoor education is available in states such as Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. This will give you exposure to many different activities, such as rafting, kayaking and climbing, that you probably would not be able to normally access. Experience in adventure activities is useful if you want to work as a recreational guide, with skills to lead and manage outdoor groups
For students who want to continue studying health and physical education at university as part of training to be a teacher, subjects that relate to sport science such as biology, chemistry and physics are highly recommended and scaled well towards ATAR scores in 2020.
They are also a great foundation for courses in exercise science, health promotion, nutritional sciences and physiotherapy.
What else will I learn?
Studying health and physical education in senior secondary school can give you an insight and appreciation of how our psychology, social networks, culture, environments and bodies all connect to influence our activity behaviours and overall physical performance.
For instance, when planning how to get people moving and performing well, you might consider a person’s motivation, the type of people to train with, the types of facilities available and levels of training preparation.
Doing subjects related to sports science could lead to a career in physiotherapy. Shutterstock
Many students choose senior secondary health and physical education for future careers relating to movement and the body. These include coaching, teaching, sport science, nutrition and recreation. Others may simply want to better understand how to plan and promote active and healthy lifestyles.
Read more:
Thinking of choosing a science subject in years 11 and 12? Here’s what you need to know
Studying health and physical education can lead to improved confidence in your movement, ability to make decisions and to develop teamwork and leadership skills that will help across life. These skills are transferable across a range of other professions such as management, policing and the defence forces.
Keeping active in the senior years
Across Australia, schools are expected to deliver at least two hours of planned physical activities each week to students until year 10.
But there is no time requirement for schools to deliver physical activity in the senior years.
Global reports indicate physical activity reduces through adolescence and to some extent into adulthood. Researchers suggest the decline is most often due to a lack of time, followed by the amount of resources available and the level of school support to get students moving.
Physical activity is vital to buffer stress in senior schooling. Even a few brief periods of four to eight minutes of intense activity such as push-ups in class each week can help senior students’ mental health, learning engagement and overall fitness.
Read more:
How much physical activity should teenagers do, and how can they get enough?
Although taking health and physical education in years 11 and 12 does not have the same requirements to get you moving regularly as in the earlier stages of school, you will have the opportunity to develop a deeper appreciation of what you need to do to get moving on your own.
If physical education is just not your thing, still make sure you get at least one hour of activity each day that “makes your heart beat faster” to weather the stress of the final years of school and the evolving pandemic and to set up healthy habits for adulthood.
Read the other articles in our series on choosing senior subjects, here.
An Oklahoma-based nonprofit offering online courses and accompanying teaching support for $67 per credit hour – nearly half the average $113 per credit hour cost at community colleges – has so far signed up 32 regionally accredited universities in 15 states as part of an aggressive expansion effort.
Tel Education, launched in 2017 also works with 161 high schools nationwide, a key aspect of its model since the high schools then feed prospective students into Tel partner colleges seeking opportunities to connect with college-bound teenagers who may not otherwise consider their institutions.
High school students pay $200 for a class with $100 going back to Tel and $100 going to the college providing the credit. College partners pay Tel $99 per student enrolled. While Tel does not outright forbid its partners from raising the costs of its courses, fewer than 2 percent of institutional partners do so, Tel officials said.
Other online education providers have long occupied this space, with the low-cost StraighterLine standing out as a similar effort. StraighterLine combines a $99 a month membership “with guaranteed credit pathways to accredited colleges, saving students up to 60{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} on their degrees,” according to its website. Burck Smith, the founder at Straighter Line, said he launched the company in 2008 based on his belief that “online delivery should be cheaper than face to face.” Today Straighter Line has about 67 mostly general education courses in its portfolio. Students access courses through a $99/month subscription. About 150 universities now accept StraighterLine credits for transfer.
A more recent entry into the space is Outlier, a for-credit offering from MasterClass co-founder Aaron Rasmussen. Outlier is a for-profit online class provider and recently forged a five-year deal with the University of Pittsburgh to ensure credits transfer. The controversial deal has been subject to intense scrutiny by the Pennsylvania state legislature. According to the company website, Outlier charges about $400 per course.
Tel Executive Director Rob Reynolds said he considers Tel to be unique in large part because of its nonprofit status.
“We’re trying to prove that you can have truly affordable education models for underserved communities that are sustainable, if you work together,” Reynolds said.
Twenty-six general education courses and three science labs are now included in Tel’s course catalogue. Reynolds says Tel won’t expand its offerings beyond about 35 total courses because the organization’s mission is to help the rural poor and first-generation college students who may assume college is out of reach get started on their degree.
“Let’s say you’re 75 miles from the closest community college, and nobody in your family has gone to college before,” Reynolds said. “The idea of college is not even on the radar, first of all, and the thought of driving someplace to try to register for a course and go through the traditional college registration process is about the same as telling them they’re going to have to fly to a foreign country and learn a language – because it can be that daunting.”
Reynolds, a former literature professor turned educational technologies entrepreneur, said that by contrast registration for Tel’s online courses is nearly automatic. Designed for asynchronous learning and “self-pacing,” the Tel catalogue of general education courses meshes to fit the general education curriculum at most regionally accredited institutions, which are the schools Tel mostly partners with.
For many universities, Reynolds said, the lure of Tel is that it provides “a new way to reach students, to expand the reach of your university. Reach new counties that you’re not in and keep building, from a university perspective, the future.”
Many Tel partner universities are smaller regional or religious institutions with missions focused on reaching and empowering first-generation college students. These institutions also tend to want to become better known in their states and regions.
DeWayne Frazier, Provost at Iowa Wesleyan University, said his university, the oldest in Iowa, began partnering with Tel about 18 months ago because it wanted to offer students in need of extra classes the opportunity to take self-paced courses over winter and summer terms. Frazier said his team came away impressed by the Tel program, which not only included coursework but also “success coaches” who convene students for virtual study halls and track students who are struggling or have stopped their work.
Frazier’s institution recently became a Tel “partner of record,” meaning Iowa Wesleyan professors and Tel instructional designers collaborate to build curriculum and then work together to disseminate it statewide. As part of this partnership, Iowa Wesleyan validates the credits for the jointly designed curriculum and in exchange Tel officials market the program across the state, in places where Iowa Wesleyan isn’t as well-known as it is in its southeastern home base. Frazier said his school receives a “modest financial benefit” from Tel for every student enrolled.
Frazier grew up in Appalachian Kentucky, keenly aware of how limited access to education cuts lives off before they can even get started, which he said makes Tel’s mission-driven approach appealing. He said Iowa Wesleyan has signed up two high schools from elsewhere in the state to offer the classes to initially. The high school students will be allowed to take a maximum of 15-30 credits using the Tel coursework and the Iowa Wesleyan logo. Frazier said the opportunity to build “brand recognition” is invaluable for Iowa Wesleyan and will give the university a chance to stand out.
He said he has been impressed by the robust supports in place for students taking the Tel “self-paced” courses. Frazier said algorithms are built into the program which alert student coaches to difficult moments where others have struggled, prompting the coaches to check in with students. The Iowa Wesleyan faculty has been largely supportive of the Tel partnership, Frazier said, which he credits to the fact that they know there are no plans to use the Tel program to replace standard Iowa Wesleyan coursework.
“This is a recruitment tool and an enhancement tool more than a replacement for traditional education on campus tool,” Frazier said.
Reynolds said he quickly realized that since Tel wasn’t an accredited institution, it needed to partner with universities who were. He decided to build general education courses to align with those being offered by partner universities and combine forces to offer them at a very low cost with the universities offering the curriculum as their own.
He sees the coaching and support services Tel offers as a point of differentiation. At first, Tel focused on reactive support, but soon pivoted to offer much more proactive support in the form of student coaches who are college students. Student coaches are armed with knowledge gleaned from algorithms built out of previous student data showing where courses become most difficult.
“Based on previous data, we know where students tend to struggle,” Reynolds said. “The student coaches are looking every day, throughout the courses, throughout all of our students, and seeing when students are coming to places where they might struggle, where they might find difficulties, and we’re trying to reach them before they ever know they have a problem.”
Pass and completion rates have soared as a result of the student coaching model, Reynolds said. He said that for students who continue to struggle, Tel works closely with both high school and college partners to provide support.
Alden Bass is a theology professor at Oklahoma Christian University, which has been using Tel both to reach high school students earning dual credit as well as students coming back to college after not being successful previously. Bass said that when the Tel partnership was revealed to faculty 18 months ago the announcement was met with great consternation.
“People were worried about job loss, people were worried about quality control and our name being attached to certain courses that we may not have vetted,” Bass said.
Bass said that much of the faculty concern has tapered in part because there has been little visible activity since COVID hit. Bass said that many now recognize the partnership is “a way for us to stay competitive in a changing market” and is part of a larger “effort to standardize online offerings.”
In a state like Oklahoma, where Tel has been working for some time now, they have already built an ecosystem of partner high schools and colleges in the state. Many of the colleges Tel works with are primarily interested in dual enrollment programs with high schools so Tel acts as a bridge between the entities.
Tel courses are meant to scale so dozens of schools might be using the program at the same time. Their software allows for some customization, but the underlying course is uniform, which allows Tel to keep prices so low.
Reynolds said the initial inspiration for Tel came from his goal to offer college credit at a price point where students wouldn’t need to incur debt.
“Where literally, if they could save up a little money, they can start taking a course, they don’t have to get student loans to do anything,” Reynolds said. “That was really our goal. And what does that look like? And so we dug deeper, we tried to figure out what true affordability really is, how much could someone save in three to four months, and then take that first college course.”
Technavio presents a detailed picture of the market by the way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources. Our K-12 game-based learning market report covers the following areas:
The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. A Medium Corp., Banzai Labs Inc., Cognitive ToyBox Inc., Filament Games, Infinite Dreams Inc., Microsoft Corp., MONKIMUN Inc., Schell Games LLC., Smart Lumies Inc., and WayForward Technologies Inc. are some of the major market participants.
The surging investments from venture capitalists and the evolving teaching methodologies will offer immense growth opportunities for the K-12 game-based learning market. However, the high set-up costs will challenge the growth of the market participants. To make the most of the opportunities, market vendors should focus more on the growth prospects in the fast-growing segments, while maintaining their positions in the slow-growing segments.
The K-12 game-based learning market share growth by the subject-specific games segment has been significant. Technavio report provides an accurate prediction of the contribution of all the segments to the growth of the K-12 game-based learning market size
CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2021-2025
Detailed information on factors that will assist k-12 game-based learning market growth during the next five years
Estimation of the k-12 game-based learning market size and its contribution to the parent market
Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior
The growth of the k-12 game-based learning market
Analysis of the market’s competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors
Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of k-12 game-based learning market vendors
Related Reports: Corporate Game-Based Learning Market –The corporate game-based learning market size has the potential to grow by USD 73.90 million during 2020-2024, and the market’s growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 6.46{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf}. Download a free sample now!
K-12 Blended E-Learning Market –The K-12 blended e-learning market has the potential to grow by USD 19.59 billion during 2021-2025, and the market’s growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 17.52{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf}. Download a free sample now!
K-12 Game-based Learning Market Scope
Report Coverage
Details
Page number
120
Base year
2020
Forecast period
2021-2025
Growth momentum & CAGR
Accelerate at a CAGR of 20.63{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf}
North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA
Performing market contribution
North America at 37{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf}
Key consumer countries
US, China, UK, Canada, and Germany
Competitive landscape
Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope
Companies profiled
A Medium Corp., Banzai Labs Inc., Cognitive ToyBox Inc., Filament Games, Infinite Dreams Inc., Microsoft Corp., MONKIMUN Inc., Schell Games LLC., Smart Lumies Inc., and WayForward Technologies Inc.
Market Dynamics
Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID-19 impact and future consumer dynamics, market condition analysis for the forecast period
Customization purview
If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized.
About Us
Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provide actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio’s report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio’s comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.
