In early March 2020, DreamBox Learning CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson (MBA 1990) could point proudly to the growth of the online math company. In the last nine years, since the startup pivoted from consumer sales to school licensing, some 3 million students had benefited from DreamBox's adaptive learning technology and its colorful video-game-style math lessons. Five weeks later—with an estimated 124,000 of the country’s K–12 schools closed to prevent the spread of coronavirus—the number of students using DreamBox jumped to nearly 5 million.

“We knew we would grow,” Woolley-Wilson says of her 2020 outlook. “We knew we would grow fast. But you never think you will triple your website traffic.”

For the education technology sector, the restrictions to traditional in-person schooling imposed by state stay-at-home orders presented opportunity amid countless obstacles. The sale of ed tech products has been on the rise in recent years—with an estimated $150 billion in global expenditures on digital learning in 2018, a number predicted, pre-pandemic, to double by 2025—but classroom usage has not been as robust. A 2018 report by education data company BrightBytes found that an estimated 30 percent of ed tech licenses that schools purchased were never used in the classroom, and nearly 98 percent weren’t used “intensely”—that is, students got less than 10 hours of instruction with the technology between assessments, limiting a product’s effectiveness.

When using Dreambox, first-graders can learn pattern recognition from colorful cartoon pirates, third-graders are quizzed on fractions by adorable aliens, and seventh-graders go under the sea to understand graphing. The program reshapes the lessons in real time in response to a student’s progress. The approach appears effective. A 2016 report from the Harvard University Center for Education Policy Research found that students who spent more time on DreamBox and followed its recommended curriculum saw larger and faster gains in math knowledge—as much as 7.5 percentile points on a standardized test—than those who did not. The challenge for the CEO was ramping up access to the platform as the country began to shut down while her own office was struggling with the same type of workplace disruptions all companies have faced.

DreamBox, which is based in metropolitan Seattle, the epicenter of the first-known US outbreak of COVID-19, was among the first wave of companies to transition to a fully work-from-home model. For Woolley-Wilson, keeping the DreamBox employees safe was a necessary first step in meeting the increasing demand for online educational tools.

The newly remote DreamBox team decided to shift its focus to support, providing customer service not just for the 130,000 educators who had been in their network at the start of 2020, but to thousands of new school clients. Because DreamBox also decided to reinvigorate its consumer focus, making the company’s 2,300 math lessons available for free to individuals through the end of the school year, it also fielded questions from the tens of thousands of caretakers concerned about their child’s learning needs. Within a week of launching a 90-day free trial, subscriptions grew by 3600%. In addition, the company accelerated the release of a new product, originally designed for classroom instructors and now geared to administrators. The recently debuted DreamBox Predictive Insights is a data dashboard that helps school districts—many of which cancelled assessment testing—predict year-end math proficiency and better plan for post-pandemic instruction.

Woolley-Wilson believes that ed tech products that prove to be useful during the pandemic will have a new, enlarged role to play as stay-at-home orders are lifted. Although the onus for education—and therefore, the biggest opportunity for ed tech sales—will largely shift back to the schools, she expects caretakers will remain more engaged in the process. “Blended learning”—software that supplements in-person education and can be utilized remotely—“used to be a nice-to-have,” Woolley-Wilson says. “I think it is going to be a must-have going forward. We really don’t know what school is going to look like when they go back.”

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