10 Hottest K-12 Solution Companies - 2018

RANDA Solutions: Enhancing Teacher Effectiveness

Marty Reed, Founder and CEO

Educational technology has come a long way over the last half-century. Major technological innovations have helped re-shape the modern classroom experience. Further, combining advanced technologies like AR and VR with classroom instructions has given students the opportunity to improve their cognitive and creative skills. While a lot has been done to enhance a student’s classroom experience, there has been a limited focus toward architecting technology solutions that augment educators’ teaching skills. Early to realize this gap, RANDA Solutions has developed comprehensive solutions to increase teacher effectiveness in classrooms. RANDA’s teacher-centric solution utilizes student data to derive intelligence and constantly evaluate an educator’s performance and teaching methods.

Marty Reed, founder and CEO of RANDA Solutions, says, “Our solutions are developed by educators for educators.” The company seeks to transform the educational experience by offering instructors with timely, accurate, and useful education intelligence, helping them drive better student outcomes. RANDA acquires, manages, and utilizes student data to provide administrators and teachers education intelligence on student demographics, reports on students’ summative and formative assessments, and their growth to help instructors get real-time insights and provide a better learning experience. Apart from that, RANDA also generates continuous and comprehensive teacher evaluation reports to determine teacher effectiveness and performance.

When it comes to tracking teacher performance, Reed mentions, “Visibility and transparency in the evaluation process are two key factors that ensure its success.” Many states employ black box systems where teachers only receive a performance report mentioning their grade, for instance ‘A,’ with no description of the attributes. More so, these reports are usually generated every 30 to 90 days. RANDA helps accelerate this existing practice with their in-depth and real-time performance measuring solutions for teachers.

Our core DNA is solving complex operational processes that are sometimes out of technology’s reach

Catering primarily to large educational institutions at the state level, RANDA has been able to uniquely position themselves in the higher education space owing to the ease with which its solutions can be scaled. Reed says, “While numerous edtech companies are offering innovative solutions to school districts, most of them lack the caliber to scale their solution to support the administrative processes of state-level institutions. Complicating things even further are the constant teacher and student migrations occurring across districts that have to be constantly monitored and updated.” Presently, RANDA’s avant-garde solutions support a network of 12,000 school districts, 700,000 teachers, and 5 million students.

Automating paper-based teacher licensing processes is another momentous leap achieved by RANDA. To elucidate the paper-based process, Reed narrates that when a prospective teacher applies for a state license, it has to go through tedious paperwork, which is then aggregated and validated by the state. The entire process can take up to 30 days to complete. Remediating this setback through complete workflow automation, RANDA allows states to validate a teacher’s license within an hour or two.

“Our core DNA is solving complex operational processes that are sometimes out of technology’s reach,” says Reed. Moving ahead, RANDA intends to roll out fund management initiatives for educational institutes. By employing fund management solutions, institutions would be able to better govern the allocation of federal and state mandated funds to improve the quality of education. From a business perspective, RANDA expects to sign agreements with three more state schools in the coming months. That being said, Reed also affirms that without a shared vision across the education fraternity, no radical transformation is possible. Therefore, RANDA is committed to keeping their interactions open with subject matter experts and academia alike to understand the burgeoning needs, technological setbacks, and functional gaps in order to strategize for better student outcomes in the future.