August 21, 2012

The Next Big Thing . . .

Aug. 21, 2012 at 10:18 AM | By Stephen Smith | Comment Count

At Hobsons, our mission is to maximize student success and institutional effectiveness to create the world changers of tomorrow. In the primary and secondary education space, we’ve been working over the past eighteen months to broaden our response to this mission – by aligning our traditional strength with Naviance in college and career readiness with the core business of the schools and districts we serve: teaching and learning. We describe this goal as “connecting learning and life.”

In just the past year, we’ve taken several important steps toward achieving this goal:

We acquired PrepMe, which provides an adaptive learning platform and high-quality test preparation for the PSAT, SAT, and ACT.
We began offering Total Reader, a third-party product that gives students an easy way to assess their reading comprehension using Lexile.
We launched a college and career readiness curriculum and consulting service based on the University of Minnesota's Ramp Up to Readiness framework.
We formed a partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse to update college matriculation, persistence, and degree attainment data for our member schools' alumni within Naviance automatically.

Our goal of connecting learning to life is a lofty one, but it’s a natural extension of the work we are already doing. This spring, I visited two schools in India where I was inspired by interactions I had with educators and students who themselves are working toward a similar objective – though in a very different environment from the one in which many of us work each day. To share our vision in more detail, we put together this video based on a talk I gave in Bangalore:

Already, we serve more than 5 million students globally across nearly 6,000 K-12 schools in 90 countries. But we can do more. As a company, as members of the education community, our mission extends well beyond the products and services we sell. We live into our mission every day through the people we serve and the lives we impact. Whether it’s helping students plan their academic future, helping institutions better manage their workflow, or partnering with organizations like Plan International to improve education in some of the world’s most impoverished regions.

This October, at the NACAC Conference in Denver, we’ll be partnering with Denver Kids, Inc. – an organization that supports Denver Public School (DPS) students who face the personal challenges of higher risk environments – to provide school school supplies to those students in need. We ask that you visit us at NACAC and join us in this cause. Together, we can create the world changers of tomorrow.