The Secret to Rapid Success? Partnership
“We wouldn’t be where we are without this partnership.”
You dream of hearing these words from your clients. In any situation really, but especially when accompanied by staggering revenue increases and market appreciation for your collaboration. One of our clients made this affirmation over dinner after a recent strategy session where it was revealed that since launching their product suite on the C2C platform, revenue had more than doubled, in a timeframe of 18 months. He had considered the buy vs. build question and ultimately determined he would not have experienced this level of growth this quickly if he tried to “go it alone” because as he later put it “this kind of success is not born in a vacuum.”
Indeed, to make it in today’s edtech environment requires an understanding of not only your own core competency as a K-12 product maker, but the value that is best derived from strategic partnerships. Our client had assembled a dream team of SMEs and Curriculum Specialists to build, test, and market the prototypes for his new product. When it came to scaling the successful prototypes and meeting state and district requirements, he trusted the edtech product formula: Content + Standards + Platform = Effective Educational Tool. And to get to that end goal efficiently, he partnered with specialists in each area.
Content
To turn prototypes into a multi-level program in K-12, our client needed more SMEs, Curriculum Specialists, and Editorial Services and Support. He needed a group like Westchester Education Services, who specialize in scaling content service solutions for educational publishers and edtech producers. Westchester can outfit a product with a full suite of product development services including:
Editorial services
Content writing, including customizations and assessment development
Design services, including illustration and art and management
Translation services
Project management
Review for and creation of materials that support the whole student using Westchester’s Culturally Responsive Education rubric.
Standards
To ensure effective content alignment against required state curriculum standards, our client turned to EdGate Correlation Services. EdGate specializes not only in curriculum alignment and review, but also crosswalking content and accompanying gap analysis to determine curriculum fit across multiple states. In addition, EdGate provided a data feed of all needed state standards for the project as well as a skills library to facilitate crosswalking within the platform, both needed to power C2C’s standards-based curriculum creation process and performance reporting system. Our client could take advantage of EdGate’s:
Custom services to scale up the correlation process
ExACT platform to streamline the process of optimizing content to specific learner needs.
API technology to facilitate standards feeds directly to the platform.
Platform
Meanwhile, where would this content and standards data transform into the value-added edtech product enabling our client to meet the needs of states and districts across the country and compete against the best of the edtech products? Content2Classroom, (C2C) Evotext’s Curriculum Management System and Curriculum Delivery Platform. C2C’s Curriculum Management System puts content creators in control with:
Standards-based curriculum mapping to fuel internal and external reports;
Powerful yet intuitive course, lesson, and assessment builders with multimedia activities and dozens of interactive item types;
Back office systems to manage rolls, permissions, versioning, workflow, licenses, and customer access.
C2C’s Curriculum Management System can be used to feed content and standards data to a preexisting student and teacher platform using the C2C API library or can be paired with the configurable C2C Curriculum Delivery Platform for rapid roll out. The Delivery platform:
Offers efficient classroom, course, and assignment management and provides a branded experience for Administrators, Teachers, and Students;
Includes powerful standards and content-based reporting about performance, usage, progress, and engagement for Administrators, Teachers, and Students;
Comes pre-wired for integration with SSOs, SISs, LMSs and LTI and other best-in-class edtech tools in the ecosystem;
Meets most accessibility requirements and works on most devices.
Outcome
Leveraging the core competencies of several other businesses in the space created a path to rapid growth for our client while allowing his internal team to stay focused on their mission to create their highest value educational curriculum. Before embarking on this partnership, our client had considered building everything in-house, assuming the process would be less expensive and allow for greater retention of revenue. In the balance, he realized his output would be significantly smaller, be slower to market, and with access to fewer features. He would miss adoption opportunities due to the time, capacity, and feature constraints. Yes, he might personally hold more of his company’s revenue but his offering to the market would be significantly smaller and narrower. “This market moves too fast to go it alone. There are too many unknowns, “ he said. I couldn’t agree more. We rely on our partners to bridge the knowledge and skill gaps. Why start from scratch when you can start from experience?
