Reinvention can be easy or difficult depending on what needs to be reinvented but no matter which path one takes, reinvention requires time, money, and lots of effort. So imagine if a startup company decides to reinvent education? But that's what AltSchool aims to do and is bent on making it come to pass.
AltSchool is a for-profit educational startup with operations in New York and the San Francisco Bay area. They offer a personalized learning plan coupled with a language program. They also plan to introduce their proprietary software to both public and private schools.
The school also adopts what they call as the experiential educational approach wherein students learn through "experience." For example, they have passion projects, where kids propose what project they want to do. Some of the proposals are simple while some are out-of-this-world yet they were not berated about it.
"We're thinking of passion projects about something I've always wanted to know about, but I kind of never got the time to figure that thing out and here's your time," said Emily Greenberg, an AltSchool teacher at one of the San Francisco locations.
The idea of starting AltSchool started when founder Max Ventilla and his wife were looking for a kindergarten school for their kids. At that time, he worked at Google in charge of personalization where they study users' browsing behavior and data. Ventilla used the same philosophy to develop AltSchool's curricula.
Based on that, students have the freedom to choose more on what they want to do at school. Teachers then create a playlist or lessons which students are responsive to. Data is collected regarding how students learn by monitoring their performance in class and how they use their computers to track their progress.
Ventilla believes that by using Google's profiling techniques, students can improve their performance more.
"The idea that, as you start to have this deep understanding of who a child is, and what a child does, you're able to start to make inferences and suggestions," he said.
