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K12 (LRN) VCA Stocks: Misc Sectors -> Education -> Online and Misc Education

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K12 Inc. (K12) is a technology-based education company.

The Company offers curriculum and educational services created for online delivery to students in kindergarten through 12th grade, or K-12. The Company delivers its learning system to students primarily through virtual public schools. It offers virtual schools its curriculum, online learning platform and varying levels of academic and management services, which can range from targeted programs to complete turnkey solutions, under long-term contracts. All of its enrollments are served through virtual public schools, to which it provides either full turnkey solutions or limited management services. K12 offers a student account management system, teacher training programs, administrator support, and student placement support. It also sells its foreign language curriculum to third parties. In addition, Parents can purchase its curriculum and learning solutions directly to facilitate or supplement their children’s education. In July 2010, the Company acquired KC Distance Learning, Inc.

K12 International Academy is a private school that the Company operates using its curriculum. This school is accredited and enables it to deliver its learning system to students worldwide. This school is positioned as a private international school enabling students to interact with others from more than 35 countries.

K12 Curriculum

The Company’s curriculum consists of the K12 online lessons, offline learning kits and lesson guides. It has developed an extensive catalogue of courses, consisting of more than 21,000 lessons, designed to teach concepts to students from kindergarten through 12th grade. Each lesson is designed to last approximately 45 to 60 minutes, although students are able to work at their own pace. A single course generally consists of 120 to 180 individual lessons. Its online lessons are accessed through an Online School (OLS) platform. Each online lesson provides the roadmap for the entire lesson including direction to specific online and offline materials, online lesson content and a summary of the major objectives for the lesson. Most of its courses utilize a series of offline learning kits in conjunction with the online lessons to help maximize the effectiveness of its learning system.

The Company’s courses are generally paired with a lesson guide. Lesson guides work in coordination with the online lessons and include, overview information for learning coaches, lesson objectives, lesson outlines and activities, answer keys to student exercises and suggestions for explaining difficult concepts to students. From kindergarten through 8th grade, K12’s courses are categorized into seven subject areas: English and Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, History, Art Music, and World Languages. Its curriculum includes all of the courses that students need to complete their core kindergarten through 8th grade education.

Online School Platform

K12’s Online School platform is an intuitive, Web-based software platform that provides access to its online lessons, as well as its lesson planning and scheduling tools and its progress tracking tool, both of which serve a key role in assisting parents and teachers in managing each student’s progress. In a school year, a typical student will complete between 800 and 1,200 lessons across six or more subject areas. The Company’s lesson planning and scheduling tools enable teachers and parents to establish a master plan for completing these lessons. These tools are designed to update the lesson plan as a student progresses through each lesson and course.

Once a master schedule has been established, the OLS delivers lessons based upon the specified parameters. Each day, a student is initially directed to a screen listing the syllabus for that particular day and begins the school day by selecting one of the listed lessons. As each lesson is completed, the student returns to the day’s syllabus to proceed to the next subject. If a student does not complete a lesson during the session, the lesson will be rescheduled to the next day and will resume at the point where the student left off. Its progress tracking tool allows students, parents and teachers to monitor student progress. In addition, information collected by its progress tracking tool regarding student performance, attendance and other data is transferred to its management system for use in providing administrative support services. Independent third-party assessments will be used in most of its managed schools to pinpoint specific individual student strengths and weaknesses relative to state content standards at the beginning of the school year.

School Management Systems

The Student Administration Management System (SAMS) is the Company’s Student Information System. SAMS is integrated with the OLS and several other systems including its Online Enrollment System that allows parents to complete school enrollment forms online and its Order Management System (OMS) that generates orders for offline learning kits and computers to be delivered to students. SAMS houses student-specific data and is used for a variety of functions, including enrolling students in courses, assigning progress marks and grades, tracking student demographic data, and generating student transcripts.

Student Community Tools

K12 offers tools that foster communication and interaction among virtual public school students and parents. Additionally, the Company’s family directory Web-based tool enables parents of virtual public school students to organize online and offline social activities for their children. Parents can run searches based on criteria, such as their child’s location, age or interests (such as hobbies or sports) to locate and contact other parents of children with similar interests to facilitate student interaction.

The Company competes with Connections Academy, LLC; Kaplan, Inc.; KC Distance Learning Inc.; Insight Schools, Inc.; Plato Learning, Inc.; White Hat Management, LLC, National Network of Digital Schools, McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson plc and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

More Information for K12, Inc. (LRN):

Company Website - http://www.k12.com
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