E-Learning
Overview
I have worked on a wide range of e-Learning / educational technology projects since I was a sophomore in college. I also co-founded a company, Interactive Constructs - ICI was bootstrapped with 2 people in 1996 and grew to 70 people with USD 10M+ revenue in 2006. We had done lots of projects/deals and worked with virtually all of the top publishers in the country - our role was to design and develop the innovative products for these publishers who then sell to K-12 and Higher Ed markets.
The following includes some highlighted projects/products:
- Scholastic
- Harcourt
- Pearson
- Lycea (our platform)
Scholastic
Our platform Lycea (still) powers many of the top Scholastic products, including the award-winning, multi-million revenue Read180 suite of apps.
Harcourt
We worked with various divisions of Harcourt on interactive websites and products (e.g. social studies) for K-12 markets. Collectively, the products we developed generated nearly 1 billion of annual hits during the peak in the 2006-2007 timeframe.
Pearson
We built some of the earliest e-Learning innovations with Pearson back in the mid-90s, including Interactive Math for Higher-Ed.
Lycea
When we first started ICI in 1996, we did pure consulting for 4 years. But it frustrated us that we were building different products for different publishers, yet the products all share so many common characteristics (e.g. things you hear often like “Learning Management System,” “Assessment Tools,” “Learning Objects.” So we went through pains during the dot-com bust era in 2000-2002 to develop Lycea - which ended up being our best decision (e.g. it helped us land multi-million deals) despite the pains (e.g. retained profits go to support the Lycea team). Lycea was very rich as a platform - we weren’t lying to customers when we said most of the features on their wish list could be supported. People talk about “Adaptive Learning” these days a lot - we’ve been doing it since 2000.
Many IT consulting companies aspire to develop their products eventually, what I can say is that it is extremely hard - but with tenacity, it is certainly possible.
