How Age of Learning is helping families adjust to virtual learning

Sunil Gunderia, Chief Strategy Officer at Age of Learning, joined Yahoo Finance's Jen Rogers, Myles Udland, Dan Roberts, and Melody Hahm to discuss how the company is helping families adjust to virtual learning amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: Of course, with everybody at home, our kids are also at home trying to figure out how they can finish off the school year and maybe think about what remote learning for a longer period of time could look like. Joining us now to discuss all things remote learning is Sunil Gunderia. He's the chief strategy officer at the Age of Learning.

So Sunil, I guess let's just start with a little bit about Age of Learning where you guys fit into, I guess, the rapidly evolving kind of ed tech stack. I mean, a lot of classrooms have become more technologically advanced in the last 10 or 15 years, certainly, since any of us were in school. But, you know, things have really gone into hyperdrive here in the last two months.

SUNIL GUNDERIA: They have indeed. Thank you for having me on the show. At Age of Learning, our mission has been focused for the last 13 years. And we've been doing online education for a long time on helping children everywhere achieve academic success and develop a true love for learning.

As a company, we're best known for ABC Mouse, which is a online resource for young learners that was designed by educators and has proven to be effective in helping kids learn. And over the last 10 years, we've had about well over 20 million kids learning on or have learned on our platform, ABC Mouse.

MYLES UDLAND: And so, Sunil, I guess the difference between trying to use this and learn this at home versus have your teacher work with you in the classroom. That's basically, I think, the biggest change right now that students are facing, because it's not like, people are using pencils and notebooks only in classrooms, right? I think a lot of people get that wrong. A modern classroom has a lot of tech in it.

What have you guys seen in terms of the changing behavior of your teachers and your students just in the last two months? And do you think some of these changes we're seeing right now are indeed going to be permanent? Or are we just thinking that way because we're all so worked up about what all that's happened here?

SUNIL GUNDERIA: Yeah, that the immediate change with beginning really all started with the beginning of school closures where we started getting some early reaches out to us from educators at the beginning of March when we saw certain schools starting to close. And we quickly reacted to that by recognizing there is going to be a need for quality proven resources that could help with distance learning and offered all of our products-- ABC Mouse, Adventure Academy, which is online MMO, as well as our reading product, ReadingIQ free to educators to give to their students in classrooms.

And we had 80,000 educators reach out to us within the course of the last six weeks to use digital resource that could help the kids learn independently, as well as help the teachers as they dealt with young learners in classrooms.

JENNIFER ROGERS: So we've been using the Adventure Academy. I have a couple questions for you. How do you balance my desire for a kid to learn and their desire to have fun, right? So I want them to just be thrilled and know this map. And then I look over. And Rach, she'll be wandering.

She loves walking around the grounds, like they just like wandering around. It's this beautiful kind of park like setting. How do you balance that, because you want to keep the kids interested. But they need to learn. How do you I think you're doing at that?

SUNIL GUNDERIA: Yeah, sure. With Adventure Academy, in particular, we've designed this system and carefully balanced it. Now, we're at a core. We're an education company. And to level up in Adventure Academy, your child has to complete learning activities. So to gain reputation and to gain skills, they'll need to learn.

And the learning they'll do there is something that will draw their interest. There's a lot of choice. We offer kids a lot of agency in terms of what they want to learn. And it's really important to motivate the kids in terms of how they learn. And that's how we handle it in Adventure Academy.

MELODY HAHM: Hey, Sunil, Melody here. I think one thing that has become very clear is the-- the existing disparity and the chasm between people who do actually have high speed internet, who can dabble in these sorts of things. And they're looking for more opportunities to really pursue fun education.

But there's still a huge swath of the country that doesn't have broadband. And I've been hearing from teacher friends of mine whose kids have to go to their grandparents to use internet for 30 minutes at a time before they have to go back home. How are you approaching this problem? Do you have other resources available for kids who, perhaps, do not have internet readily available?

SUNIL GUNDERIA: You know, it's really unfortunate in terms of this disparity in access. And we're hearing from teachers, as well as parents that are being affected by this. And I think from a policy perspective and as we look at infrastructure spend-- potential infrastructure post this crisis, I think, you know, ensuring that bandwidth and devices are available to learners is going to be critical.

We're in an online world. And there's so much good we can drive in terms of outcomes with online education. I think it's really quite critical that we address the disparity in access.

MYLES UDLAND: And then I guess, Sunil, just to finish this way, do you believe that there's going to be a permanent change in how we think about education, whether it's more split days or whether it's-- I don't know what the options could be but that the school system we had and assumed would be in place indefinitely is not going to come back on the other side of that. Or do you think that maybe next school year starts in a weird way? But by next spring, we're still looking at something that resembles the normal world circa 2018 or 2019.

SUNIL GUNDERIA: You know, I think we have to look at this and build on this crisis to really look at what we need to deliver from an educational outcome perspective. It's unfortunate that even post the crisis or pre the crisis, you know, 2/3 of our kids are not achieving proficiency in either math or reading skills.

So business as usual wasn't working before. So relooking at it in terms of how technology can be used in classrooms-- out of classrooms to ensure kids are getting what they need and really achieving what they're capable of achieving is something that we just really need to look at holistically in terms of how we improve our educational outcomes for all of our kids.

MYLES UDLAND: All right, Sunil Gunderia is the chief strategy officer at the Age of Learning. Thanks so much for joining us. Talk to you soon.

SUNIL GUNDERIA: Thank you.