Edmentum's Roadmap to Results

As I write this, I’m on my way back from visiting a new district partner in central Florida who’s making changes to their online courses program. I’ve been on this kind of visit many times, and I’m still amazed at two things: 1) how busy the beginning of the school year is and 2) the district staff’s commitment to helping students succeed. There is so much to keep track of at the beginning of the year, that you could forgive them for letting a few things drop. But for those staff members, there is simply too much at stake to implement a program that doesn’t get results. That’s why I was so anxious to share our roadmap with them. The investments that make up our product roadmap all have one thing in common: they are all focused on helping Edmentum partners get results.

While most of you are just getting started on a new school year, we are wrapping up our fiscal year, which means finalizing budgets and product roadmaps for next year. We’re excited to share these plans with you as they are finalized, especially because your feedback helped us build them. At the end of my last post, I talked about Seehive, our new user feedback community. Even after only a few weeks, we’ve already gotten a tremendous response that has helped us define a product roadmap that gets you the results you’re committed to seeing.

Last week, I wrapped up our Product Vision series with a recap of how we’ve executed so far on our vision for educational technology. Now, I’m excited to kick off a new series focused on how our roadmap gets you the results you expect.

1. Common Core curriculum updates

The Common Core State Standards, along with other curriculum updates in non-CCSS states, have certainly dominated the education landscape since they were introduced. Very quickly after the Common Core State Standards were introduced, we released updates to all our products, including Plato Courseware and Study Island, to align with the new standards. Then the CCSS assessment consortia began defining assessments for the new standards, and we released new item types for the Study Island product and soon for Edmentum Assessments. Next up on the roadmap is a rewrite of our online courses, to take advantage of the lessons we have learned from the first years of Common Core implementation. Our new secondary math and English courses will take our support for CCSS to the next level, ensuring that you get the results you’re looking for.

2. Mobile

Getting results means letting students study where they want, when they want. Like a lot of students around the country, my middle school-aged daughter is participating in a 1:1 initiative using mobile technology. Just this week, she said, “Dad, does Edmentum have an app I can install on my iPad?” I was excited to tell her that not only can she can use most of Edmentum’s products (including Study Island and Reading Eggs) through a mobile browser, our roadmap also includes a Plato Courseware student app in the iTunes store in December (with Android to follow in January). I can’t wait to see the results of these initiatives at her school and others like it around the country.

3. Products that work together

One of the things that I appreciate the most about working at Edmentum is the variety of products that we offer. They’re all online, they’re all high quality, and they all produce results. And our roadmap investments will ensure that they all work together seamlessly to produce the results you’re looking for. That means that the Sensei dashboard will work with Study Island as well as Plato Courseware and Edmentum Assessments. It means that teachers will only have to login once and they’ll be able to see students’ work across multiple Edmentum products.

Stay tuned to future posts from the members of the Product Management team for detailed peeks into our roadmap and see how that roadmap can help you get the results you’re looking for.