The education system is starting to see real growth and impact on outcomes from technology adoption in the classroom. High utilization of technology outside of the classroom, education is playing catch up but we are starting to see improvements, however incremental. Personalized learning, regardless of the definition is growing in demand, with a greater acceptance that scale is impossible without the assistance of technology. Most new educational programs, offer some form of personalized learning to drive better outcomes for students and empower educators.
It has been an incredible for one such company called Fishtree, an education platform that is helping educators find the best possible resources, automatically aligned to the standards or outcomes they are teaching, while also offering the opportunity to give each student an individual learning path or just more personalized, real-time support in terms of resources.
Fishtree does not look to replace the educator, but empower them in a whole new way. The scale is unmatched, and it does this by working with partners such as Learning Management Systems and content publishers.
Expansion Of An Idea To Business
Scaling personalized learning was considered by the founders to be one of the world’s greatest problems, not just for our classrooms, our students need to be accommodated based on their individual needs, they needed to be better prepared for the work place and the cost of doing so needed to come down, with current systems having massive inefficiencies.
In 2012, Fishtree was originated by CEO Terry Nealon and CTO Jim Butler. Both were senior executives in the edtech and publishing industries and felt the need to address that scale problem, using better technology, machine learning and more possibilities in terms of user experiences and integration with other systems. In 2014, Fishtree had capped the SIIA NextGen Most Disruptive and Overall Mobile Award.
In 2015, Fishtree Inc, announced the raise of $3 million in venture capital funding to expand the business in the U.S. education marketplace. Fishtree has partnered with Instructure, HP, Blackboard, proven out the model is districts in the US, as well as some leading higher education institutions. With financial investment and collaboration, Fishtree then announced a deal with Jefferson Education that helped them to expand the research and data so as to build further efficacy data around the solution.
Throughout the journey, they came across many challenges while positioning the business in this noisy market. Many solutions claim to be personalized or adaptive, some actually benefitting from that noise. Another challenge they faced was in ensuring world class implementation, Fishtree had to work with district and institution leaders to align with their vision, empowering local sponsors and honoring a commitment of over-serving the customers.
Out of the Box Services By Fishtree
At the initial phase of the company, Fishtree saw the need to address a major challenge in curating resources and aligning them with outcomes such as standards, competencies or outcomes. This was an unmet need in the industry and with personalized learning in the growth phase, this solution is in great demand in education institutions, with publishers looking to align to different standards and learning environments looking to offer dynamic content experiences that can be personalized. Fishtree platform is still the easiest to integrate as it has the most dynamic content environment, and very importantly it is uncomplicated to use.
Fishtree is also used by the teachers and school administrators to automate curriculum planning and management tasks such as authoring lessons and courses, recording grades, finding teaching resources, personalized learning, and tracking student trends.
Adept Leaders Of Fishtree
Since 1998, Terry worked in the software industry, education since 2005 and holds the responsibility of CEO at Fishtree. He has worked in remote South African communities and school in the year of 2005. Terry lived with a Sotho family. He contributed to sports and educational programs for HIV awareness in four remote communities. Terry then returned to head International operations with Riverdeep Interactive and post-merger with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as Executive Vice President, he delivered the company its fastest-growing division.
Future Steps by
An interesting trend for Fishtree is the need for all sectors to align learning and resources with an outcome.In K-12, publishers need to align with multiple sets of standards, in Higher Education, it might be competencies or just course outcomes. In the corporate space, the demand for role-based learning, aligning to skills in the work place means fishtree has a unique position in beaing able to align all resources to the skills of the job, on the fly.
The goal was to build a platform that would understand the broader need of each individual student but importantly help instructors to find the best combination of resources, aligned to standards or competencies or skills, as well as individual profiles. Fishtree will continue to innovate and execute positively for the market.
