Prisma has a chance...
Why this education company could be the biggest online school
The two biggest advantages Prisma has are that it entered the market now (when it’s prime for the taking) and its curriculum.
Thanks to the pandemic, most people learned that sitting on Zoom for 8 hours a day and trying to replicate the traditional classroom wasn’t the way to do it. That being said, there are still some hurdles that Prisma has to work through. For example, some people are completely turned off to the idea of what online education is because they had such a poor experience with Zoom University. How do you attract those people? Also, how do you get the people on board who aren’t used to non-traditional thinking and projects to embody learning?
Right now, there aren’t any results for how students fare in the long run by running through Prisma’s curriculum versus a traditional 4th-8th grade program. With no proof of the results, it can be difficult for parents to trust putting their kids through the program. I do think there’s enough external alignment for the company to be successful and reach a lot of people, even despite the lack of results. Who’s to say that the traditional education system is successful? The standards of what success is would have to be defined first.
Learning is at the core of Prisma. It’s not about meeting numbers to please people in government in order to get more state funding. Prisma is running a company that’s in the business of educating the leaders of the 21st century. In order to do this, they spent a great deal of time and effort hiring curriculum designers and building out the learning framework, creating themes, workshops, and Prisma LIVE.
The community and curriculum are what make Prisma hard to beat. Every person who’s there wants to be — makes all of the difference in the world. Learning has become individualized. It’s no longer about learning useless information that students don’t care about 95% of the time and will probably never use. Instead, it’s about instilling a love of learning based on what they do enjoy and creating a pace that allows the student to excel. Learning is not one-size-fits-all. Prisma understands this.
On a larger scale, this may be hard to replicate and could just lead to the problem that most public school teachers face right now in having to watch 23.3 students (US average) in a single class. Given this information, Prisma tends towards having weekly one-on-one meetings between the coach(teacher) and the student and more project-based work, rather than lectures. With this said, their system is set up in a way that students would remain engaged in the work and could be scalable, pending they get enough coaches to maintain their 12-18 students per 1 coach ratio.
If Prisma can reach more students, stay affordable, and keep the love of learning at the core of their business, they have the chance to do something big.
This is part of the myMBA program!