[HN Gopher] Launch HN: KaiPod Learning (YC S21) - A physical pla...
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Launch HN: KaiPod Learning (YC S21) - A physical place for online
schoolers
My name is Amar Kumar and I'm the founder of KaiPod Learning
(http://www.kaipodlearning.com). We provide a physical place for
middle- and high- school students who go to online school to work
on their classes, to interact with other students, and to get
support from teachers. Over the last 15 years I have been a school
teacher, a principal, and most recently the Chief Product Officer
of Pearson Online Schools. I have come to understand the
unfortunate link between residential property values and
educational outcomes. There are tens of millions of parents in poor
quality school districts who can't afford to relocate or pay for a
private school. Online learning can help solve this problem for
many kids. With public online schools, you can live anywhere and
have access to a high-quality education. For millions of kids,
online school is the best school they've ever had. They get to
study at their own pace without feeling rushed or bored, work
without distractions, and not fear bullying. However, they lack
enough opportunities to interact with other kids or get real-time
help from their teachers. In addition, parents of online students
usually have to stay home with them and support them with academic
work, something that not all parents are able to do. At Pearson,
my team supported 150,000 students who went to school completely
online before the pandemic even started. In conversations with many
families, I came to understand what brought them to our schools and
what could make their experience better. The idea to run small-
group learning pods as supplements to online school was the
highest-impact idea we studied. It was popular with parents and
students and we knew we could improve customer conversion, student
outcomes, and school retention if we did it. However, Pearson is a
curriculum company and I couldn't get this off the ground. As the
pandemic started and the floodgates opened for online schooling, I
decided to quit my job and build a startup to solve the problem.
We provide a physical place for online students to meet every day,
interact with other kids, and get support from instructors. We
match them to a learning center within 20 minutes of their home
with 8-10 other children of similar age. These students come to our
center anywhere from two to five days a week. While they are at our
centers, they are supported by a "learning coach", a former teacher
who loves working with kids (but not grading homework or creating
lesson plans!). Our coaches interact closely with the online school
teachers and create strategies on how to support each child. This
team approach is highly effective at addressing the academic,
social, and emotional needs of each child. During the day, kids
set goals for themselves; work on their online courses; take part
in enrichment activities such as art, music, and coding; and have
plenty of time for free play and independent learning. Our centers
are open until 5:30pm every day so families with working parents do
not have to worry about arranging for after-school childcare. At
the end of the day, our students go home without any homework to do
or tests to study for. All academic work happens on-site with the
support of the coach. When the family gets home, they can truly
spend time together rather than nagging kids about doing homework.
We have a video showcasing some of our students, parents, and
teachers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujx_TAUP7uw Getting
feedback from parents is really critical and I would love to get
your ideas on what makes for a great school experience for your
children. And, if you have experienced some form of remote or
online learning in the past (i.e, before or during COVID), I'd love
to hear more about what you liked about it and what could have been
better! Thank you in advance!
Author : amarkumar81
Score : 38 points
Date : 2021-08-29 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
| smeej wrote:
| It's probably worth a mention here that the pilot location is the
| greater Boston area.
|
| Given how many passionate undergraduate and graduate students are
| there, the depth of the talent pool for coaches is second to
| none!
|
| I'm not familiar enough with Massachusetts' home/online schooling
| rules to comment, but when you're ready to extend north, there
| are robust communities of non-traditionally schooling families in
| southern New Hampshire!
| amarkumar81 wrote:
| Thank you for that insight about New Hampshire!
| CityOfThrowaway wrote:
| Really cool! A lot of parents had success putting their kids into
| a learning pod during COVID and it looks like you're building
| formal structure around this type of thing.
|
| I love that you're working on it. If you can figure out how to
| make this work, the real power of the internet can be unleashed
| on education... and really just in the nick of time.
|
| Some questions for you:
|
| 1. How do you choose the pods? What happens if the kids don't
| like each other?
|
| 2. What depth is the coach supposed to be able to get into? Seems
| like a really hard job to context switch rapidly between topics
| when each kid is at a different place and doing something
| different.
|
| 3. What does the social component feel like? Are the kids mostly
| building comraderie around broader cultural topics as opposed to
| learning?
| amarkumar81 wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words and good questions!
|
| 1.) We match students to pods after a family interview and
| spending time with the students. The dimensions we use for
| matching include geography, age, online program, extra-
| curricular interests, learning personalities, and other needs
| that students may have.
|
| Despite our best efforts, we will certainly have situations
| where some kids may not like each other, but we train our
| Learning Coaches in building positive group dynamics and
| helping kids learn to work together (very much like the real
| world!).
|
| 2. We definitely don't ask our Coaches to be content experts;
| that would indeed be a really hard job as you point out.
| Instead, we ask them to be able to sit down with the student
| and figure things out using the course content. When the duo
| figures out a complex topic together, we hear from students
| that they enjoyed it a lot more (and learned more!) than
| someone just telling them how to do it. And in the situations
| where the duo can't figure it out either, the coach works with
| the online teacher to make sure the student gets the help they
| need.
|
| 3. Kids mostly build camaraderie around the enrichment
| activities we plan every day (e.g., music classes, building
| bridges with spaghetti/marshmallows) where they team up. We
| also have breaks for free play (e.g., badminton in the yard,
| Bananagrams with the Learning Coaches).
|
| Academically, it's hard for students in the same pod to 'bond'
| since students can be in different grades (up to a 3 year age
| band in each pod), can choose which subject to work on and
| when, and can move at their own pace. Instead, students
| actually get that type of camaraderie with their online school
| classmates. Hope that made sense; but let me know if not!
| smorrow wrote:
| You don't need to "put" people places - they do that by
| themselves (and better than you can centrally plan - I know you
| don't want to hear that).
|
| You don't need to make them go on the internet either.
|
| And apparent "success", in the sense you mean it, isn't,
| either. It's just kicking the can down the road. Real progress
| would be the seemingly unproductive, a-month-for-every-year-in-
| school deschooling period like that of "the sleeping student"
| at Sudbury[1].
|
| People had the chance this year and the last[2] to let children
| be free and they blew it.
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si0PPv-7yWo&list=PLBC7021B61...
| [2] We've known since _April 2020_ that kids don 't spread it.
| Icelandic contact-tracing study.
| amarkumar81 wrote:
| I really appreciate your push for learning environments that
| don't constrain students and students can just be who they
| are. In other words, what are the absolutely minimum number
| of things that we insist on as rules, so that students feel
| the freedom to take ownership over the rest.
|
| (And thanks for sharing that Sudbury example; I had never
| seen it before but I love the message.)
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I like this idea. What do you do to get parents aware and started
| on the transition? Curious especially how to get the notice of
| parents who don't aggressively research education options as they
| would likely be the busy workers who would benefit from the 5:30
| end time.
|
| I see similarities between your model and homeschool co-ops, and
| to a lesser degree, hybrid schools. I'd considered how co-ops in
| particular could benefit from a guide or docent to help each
| student put together their mix of co-op classes and individual
| studies via book or video. Curious if you'd studied them as well.
| amarkumar81 wrote:
| Thanks so much for your questions. To get started, we are
| talking to parents who have already opted into an online school
| or even an online homeschool program. Those families have
| already made the transition to the learning model; and many of
| them are looking for greater opportunities for socialization
| and academic support. When we describe the model to them, they
| see its value pretty quickly.
|
| As you are pointing out, we do have trouble reaching the
| parents in a more traditional education who aren't actively
| seeking out alternative options. Our hope is that as we show
| the value of our model, the word will spread and more parents
| will opt in. In the meantime, we are doing whatever we can to
| lower the effort required for families to transition. Any
| suggestions are most welcome!
|
| Homeschool co-ops are an excellent comparison. For those who
| may not know what those are, a co-op is a group of
| homeschooling families who come together (often on a voluntary
| basis) to support each other with their kids' education and
| other needs (e.g., meals, childcare, etc.). They've been around
| for years and, in the pandemic, they started to get mainstream
| as 'learning pods.'
|
| In some ways, you can see us as making the concept of 'co-ops'
| more available to more people.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| My son will be ready for Kindergarten next fall. Would we be in
| your target market?
|
| If so, how would we find out which online public schools are an
| option for us? Presumably not all online public schools in the US
| would be able to get funding from SFUSD for an SF-based student?
| amarkumar81 wrote:
| Right now, we are starting with 4th to 12th graders. The reason
| for this is that online learning is a bit more self-paced at
| this age group.
|
| For kindergarten-aged students, online schools typically
| require heavy 1-on-1 support from a learning coach (typically a
| parent or guardina). Since our model typically has 8-10
| students per learning coach, we haven't figured out how to
| support younger students yet.
|
| In terms of which schools are an option, if you're in
| California, there are several options available to you to opt
| in to online schools (both public and private). The one I know
| best is called California Connections Academy
| (https://www.connectionsacademy.com/california-online-school).
| These schools are funded by the state and operate as charter
| schools.
| whoaisme wrote:
| Great, another parasite in an industry that provides nothing made
| to profit off the fear of parents. My feedback is shut down your
| business and re evaluate what you're doing with your life.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| For when you don't want to send your kid to school but still need
| to send your kid somewhere all day with a bunch of kids to be
| supervised by someone else while they do schoolwork - but without
| the disadvantage of kids their age learning the same thing!
| Amazing.
| amarkumar81 wrote:
| Thanks for your comment. COVID reminded us how important a
| school's role is in providing a safe place for students to be &
| learn (so that parents/guardians can work or otherwise support
| their households). You may have seen the data on COVID's
| disproportionate effect on women leaving the workforce to tend
| to childcare duties that would otherwise not have been present
| if schools were open.
|
| For many online school families, they have struggled with this
| for years before COVID and will continue to struggle with it
| after; we are designing this program precisely to address this
| challenge.
|
| I also wanted to address the last part of your comment: all
| kids of the same age learning the same thing is indeed a
| disadvantage of today's traditional education system. I hope
| you'll agree that there's nothing biological about 10 year olds
| needing to learn the exact same thing at the exact same time.
| Children proceed along unpredictable paths of learning at
| unpredictable paces and our jobs as educators (or in my case,
| as someone who supports educators) is to enable as much of that
| flexibility as possible for the children.
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(page generated 2021-08-29 23:00 UTC)