Thank you for taking the time to analyze the research behind Learning Upgrade’s courses. You are correct that we need more studies to confirm the effectiveness of our courses. You end with “Why not do the work to show it? Fund trials handled by independent research teams.”

So, to shed light on this situation, I will address why we don’t have more independent research, such as controlled studies, addressing the effectiveness of our courses.

Learning Upgrade is a private, family-owned business. We are not venture funded or public. There are basically three sources we could tap to fund trials:

Federal funding: we have spent quite a bit of time trying to find and apply for NIH and DofEd funding, to no avail. Their grants tend to go to the close circle of friends of the funding staff of these agencies. Evaluators tend to frown on resources like ours, which use songs, video and games. Our courses are too unconventional.

University funding: Researchers at universities want to work on their own projects. They have little interest in confirming the work of a private firm. Unless we go to them with large amounts of our own funding, they are not interested.

Our own funding: We are financed solely by the sales of our courses. If we spent the large amount of money (typically in the hundreds of thousands of dollars) to do a controlled study large enough for validity, something else would suffer. Namely, we wouldn’t have the funds to create MORE innovative online courses.

The primary goal of our organization is to help struggling students make learning breakthroughs in reading and math. We want to help each student find success. And, we want to help the millions of students who are struggling through scalable, practical solutions that work in the real world.

Thus, we are faced with a dilemma. Should we create more innovative courses, to address perhaps writing or algebra? These courses would help many more struggling students reach their full potential. Teachers and parents ask, beg, and even plead for us to produce new courses to meet their needs almost every day.

Or should we self-fund expensive research into our existing courses, which are already used successfully by over 1,000 schools worldwide, with over 55,000 students?

Perhaps you can suggest a solution. It’s not as easy as the simple statement “Fund trials handled by independent research teams.” Perhaps this works for resources created either by large corporations or taxpayer-funded universities, but not for small private organizations.

I leave you with this thought: What if the next great learning breakthrough comes from a small independent group? Perhaps teachers, perhaps working “open source” for free in their spare time, or perhaps self-funded like Learning Upgrade?

Will the world pass on this breakthrough, even though they “Teach Effectively”, just because they do not have access to taxpayer or corporate money to fund research acceptable to academics?

Best wishes and again thank you taking the time to look at our research.

Vinod Lobo, CEO, Learning Upgrade http://www.learningupgrade.com