10 Hottest K12 Solution Companies - 2016

Fidelis Education: Building a Personalized Relational Learning Ecosystem

Gunnar Counselman, Co-founder and CEO

Individuals, while reminiscing about the pivotal moments in their education, most often recall a key person who had made a difference by not just teaching a curriculum more efficiently but inspiring lifelong learning. “We think that relationships are absolutely essential to learning. The students learn in context of their relationships with peers, teachers, mentors, and a community of other learners,” remarks Gunnar Counselman, Co-founder and CEO, Fidelis Education. “They learn because they want to progress and form relationships with companies and societies that require expertise and credentials.” If one analyzes the most pernicious problems in education from skills gap, attrition to professional development, the inadequate learning relationships is at the root cause of everything. Fidelis, a Mountain View, CA based company has come up with a new category of learning technology, Learning Relationship Management (LRM) that gives the education institutions the ability to make sure that all students have the core relationships they need to achieve big things.

LRM is a tool to make sure that all the learners have mentors and coaches, that they belong to learning communities, have a strong purpose for their education and a clear learning pathway to pursue that purpose. “Unlike Student Information Systems (SIS) and Learning Management Systems (LMS) that ignore relationships, LRM recognizes that. At its core, learning is a fundamentally relational endeavor,” says Counselman. The company’s LRM platform offers everything for advanced learning—from personalized learning systems and unlimited digital content access to interactive student portfolios. “With LRM, we outline the 3 P’s of success viz., Purpose, People and Path. It makes students accomplish their learning goals through motivating them by a powerful purpose, so that they can have a clear pathway to reach their goals and let them have a strong people network,” states Counselman.

LRM provides 3 necessary tools such as high-touch advising CRM, competency-based Learning Management System (LMS) and community-enabled mentoring to enhance the students’ learning experience for enabling them to gain success in and outside the school.

We help to drive efficiency and standardization in schools by transforming the one-size-fits-all learning system to personalized learning system

These LRM tools make the students to choose their mentors, interact with them, and design their own learning apps and reassessments based on their learning competencies. They also enable students and teachers to collaborate on the subject data and get feedback on the tests written by them through author collaboration tools which improve the increased engagement of students in learning activities.

Fidelis LRM helps drive efficiency and standardization in schools by transforming the one-size-fits-all learning system to personalized learning system. “LRM is taking its rightful place alongside SIS and LMS as a must have technology for schools that care about outcomes, and for companies that want to partner with those schools,” says Counselman.

The company’s LRM is flexible and can be changed according to the individual learning capabilities. For instance, American Public University Systems (APUS) was in need of a personalized learning system that will meet their qualitative and quantitative needs of enhancing the student experience and driving student success. On implementing Fidelis’ LRM, it facilitated a strong connection and collaboration among teachers with each of the students to focus on their learning behavior and took the student-teacher engagement to a more personalized level. Consequently, APUS students started to excel in their field of education and gained a superior learning experience through LRM.

Moving ahead, the company is engaged at designing solutions for future educational systems. “We are identifying new solutions based on the increasing learning capabilities and ever-changing educational system and will deliver more heightened education solutions that will meet the future needs of the educational institutions,” concludes Counselman.