Giant Campus Blog

Business Executives, lifelong video game designers and a consultant to President Obama inspire teens and provide actionable career steps in new online speaker series

SEATTLE — August 24, 2010 — Giant Campus, a nationally recognized leader in innovative technology, marketing and business education programs for youth and adults, today announced the availability of its interactive speaker series, Giant Campus Career Connections (http://www.giantcampuswa.com/our-programs/career-connections). The newly launched online series will enable high school students to learn firsthand how some of the leading marketing, business, and graphic and game design professionals from Burger King, Microsoft, Starbucks and T-Mobile turned a passion into a life-long successful career. This series regularly exposes Giant Campus students to real-world insight into technology, entrepreneurship and marketing that they cannot get anywhere else. Each of the speakers helped develop products and designs teens use and see every day.

The students will connect with:

• Denny Marie Post– Former Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Office at T-Mobile USA, Senior Vice President at Starbucks, Senior Vice President at Burger King, and Chief Innovation Officer at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

• Dan Price– 26 year old Founder/CEO of Gravity Payments, the largest credit card payment processing company in the Northwest. Price started Gravity while a freshman in college and was named the Entrepreneur of the Year by the SBA and President Obama for 2010. He consults with President Obama and other high-ranking officials on issues important to entrepreneurs.

• Clayton Kauzlaric– Senior Design Director at Microsoft Game Studios has worked as an artist, game designer and creative director on console and PC titles for nearly 20 years. Clayton also created the Xbox action-adventure gameVoodoo Vince.

• Chris Novak– Design Architect for Microsoft Game Studios. Over his career, Novak has designed for game franchises like Crackdown, Project Gotham Racing, NASCAR, and Knockout Kings.

• Mark Popich– As Design Director at the branding and creative agency Hornall Anderson Design Works, Popich has received numerous awards for work with companies like Eos Airlines, the Seattle SuperSonics, Microsoft, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile and HTC.

“I am excited to share my experiences with teens from all over the world that are obviously as passionate as I was about pursuing a rewarding career,” said Career Connections speaker Denny Post. “By giving them insight into my business experiences at T-Mobile, Starbucks, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, hopefully they will pick up on what worked and what didn’t and apply them as they begin their careers.”

Every month, each speaker will give a live online presentation, and conduct a question and answer session that will last a total of 45 minutes. Some talking points of the virtual chat will include:

• What steps are absolutely necessary as teens begin exploring careers
• What qualities are needed for careers in digital arts, computer science, or business and innovation
• What inspired the speakers
• Is there anything the speakers wished they knew sooner about their field

“Since teens today begin building their resume in high school, it’s important that they arm themselves with the most essential steps and skills to building careers in fields like technology and business early on,” said Giant Campus Founder and CEO Pete Findley. “Giant Campus Career Connections gives students unrivaled actionable insight into these fields while also breaking geographical barriers since it is offered exclusively online.”

I’m the Chief Financial Officer here at Giant Campus and I’m pretty passionate about changing the way middle and high school education is delivered.  I’m particularly interested in the Hybrid education model because as a father of six (yes, it’s the Brady Bunch) and a finance guy I see the lack of educational choices and how education funding continues to be cut.  I wholly appreciate the conflict created by lower school funding and the struggle by school administrators to balance the budget. But there is a better way. 

The Hybrid education model is still in its infancy but brings significant promise to traditional schools struggling with providing students relevant breadth and depth of choices in courses while facing significant funding pressure.  I define the Hybrid model as a traditional school that contains a room(s) with multiple computers connected to the internet with a teacher or teacher’s assistant monitoring students where they are afforded the opportunity to take approved online classes.  By implementing this model, students are able to choose from a wide variety of courses with highly specialized teachers that otherwise would not have been available.  Schools are able to save money by reducing headcount and instead offering online courses which generally are less. There is a better way.

I’m going to use my son’s high school as an example.  His school is in a district that is one of the better funded and higher performing districts in the state of Washington.   It’s a four year high school that has approximately 1,250 students with the usual activities ranging from drama, band and all the usual sports.  They have a reasonable technology program offering single classes in graphic arts, web design, digital photography, video/tv production and interactive media.  In languages, they offer Spanish, French and Japanese.  They also have a reasonable number of AP classes.  It’s the general store of education, a mile wide and an inch deep, in most subjects outside the core math, language arts, sciences and social studies. A student that wants a concentration in computer science or perhaps Chinese has zero options.  As a parent that believes China is going to be an economic powerhouse, I’d like my kids to learn Chinese and well…the computer science education…do I need to say more? It’s not available at his high school.  There is a better way to offer more breadth and depth in specific subjects with dynamic teachers and do it for less.

I think full online schools are wonderful for some students.  They offer a great breadth and depth of classes.  However, most students need and want the socialization of a traditional high school.  My kids fall into that bucket.  The hybrid model offers a student both. It’s a better way.

I will assume for argument sake that 75% of the 500 high schools in Washington and in the country don’t go as wide or as deep as my son’s high school because they are smaller and don’t have the same financial support. This applies to both public and private schools.  Those students are further disadvantaged because they don’t have the same opportunity. Rural students find themselves captured in that ugly cycle of minimal opportunity.  Parents who actively take part in their child’s education may supplement or educate at home to make up for the deficiencies but that is limited.  In Washington, there is an alternative if your school doesn’t employ the Hybrid model yet.  Students can drop a class at their resident school and enroll in a Giant Campus course taught by a world class teacher.  Its part of the public school system so it’s free and the credits are transferable to your student’s transcript.   There is one catch.  Your school district can be more interested in protecting its valuable funding and deny your child the choice to take these great courses even though it’s in the student’s best interest.  Check out our classes and if you find them compelling, ask your counselor if they will let your student take a class through an inter-district agreement. 

I encourage you to push your school administration to adopt the hybrid model. You’ll find that the quality of education will improve, kids will be more engaged in classes they enjoy and the school will save money by reducing teacher headcount.

A special report from Education Week was recently published in April, 2010 backing up blended or hybrid learning is proving to be effective because it plays to students’ strengths and weaknesses. Districts and states are embracing online learning. And as one educator puts it “There are so many technology resources out there, why wouldn’t you want your students to gain access to them?”
You can read more about how e-learning is making a difference here: www.edweek.org/go/elearningp

The US Dept of Education is seeking change in today’s education system. With the “Race to the Top” program, the department is asking states to commit to closing historic achievement gaps, getting more students into college, and preparing students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy.

A recent article in the Washington Post calls on online learning as tool to help spearhead that change:

“How do we know online education will work? Well, for one thing, it already does. Full-time virtual charter schools are operating in dozens of states. The Florida Virtual School, which offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system, has 100,000 students. Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years. The program is one of the largest in the country. Kids who enroll in Advanced Placement courses — 39 percent of whom are minority students — score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for public school students.

In his book on online education, “Disrupting Class,” Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen estimates that half of all high school courses in the United States will be consumed over the Internet by 2019. But we have a long way to go to reach 50 percent. Seventeen percent of high school students nationwide took an online course for school last year; another 12 percent took a class for self-study. Many of these students, along with younger kids taking online classes, might be considered homeschooled, though that very concept is changing as they sign up with virtual schools connected to state systems.”

You can read the full article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/26/AR2010032602224.html?hpid%3Dsec-tech%26sid%3DST201003http://www.http://www.washingtonpost.com:80/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/registration/register

Ever played Bejeweled, Tetris, Snake, or Frogger online? Check out our video for our Online Game Design course (this course has been named a 2010 CODiE award finalist) and see what it takes to develop  these type of games.

Interested in flash animation? Check out our video….

I just read a great article in Forbes on the effectiveness of online learning and use of technology curriculum in the classroom.  Features nice highlights of our industry friends K12 Inc. and Apex Learning.

My favorite exerp from the article: “The “guide on the side” model takes off a lot of the pressure on teachers in terms of lesson plan design and content delivery. If they act as classroom supervisors rather than domain experts, allowing technology to play the latter role, the likelihood of children learning better even from teachers who do not have the appropriate background is considerably higher.

Maybe President Obama needs to mandate the use of a certified online curriculum for all public schools to give America’s K-12 kids a chance to become competitive in the 21st century!

Great article by Sramana Mitra over at Forbes!  Here’s a link to the full article:  http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/online-education-innovation-intelligent-technology-mitra.html

I recently just read Bill Gates’ 2010 Annual Letter that was posted on the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation website. Within it, Bill Gates mentions how online learning can change the landscape in which education is being taught and presented to students.

“We need to bring together the video and interactive pieces for K–12 and college courses. We should focus on having at least one great course online for each subject rather than lots of mediocre courses. Once we have this material in place, it can be used in many different ways. A teacher can watch and learn how to make a subject more interesting. A teacher can assign subsets of the material to students who are behind and finding something difficult. A teacher can suggest online material to a student who is ahead and wants to learn more. A teacher can assign an interactive session to diagnose where a student is weak and make sure they get practice on the areas that are difficult for them. Self-motivated students can take entire courses on their own. If they want to prove they learned the material to help qualify for a job, a trusted accreditation service independent from any school should be able to verify their abilities.”

Read the full letter here: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/2010/Pages/bill-gates-annual-letter.aspx