In 2001 Curt Allen co-founded Agilix Labs, a worldwide leader in delivering mobile learning solutions to education markets.
As President and CEO, Allen oversees all sales, marketing, software development and services provided by the company. He is directly responsible for building strategic partnerships with Intel, Microsoft, and FranklinCovey, and led the effort to raise more than $4.5M in strategic capital from Intel Capital, vSpring and Ash Capital. Allen’s forte is in building world-class teams and empowering them to achieve.
Q: How did you become involved in the education market?
I got started in the education market while attending college and realizing that the methods of instruction hadn’t changed much in several hundred years. I wanted to use technology to help improve teaching and learning.
Q: Can you describe your average day at the office?
I spend most of my time traveling to meet with educational leaders, schools, partners, publishers and others who can help transform learning; my time in the office is spent working with our team to develop and deliver great eLearning solutions.
Q: We understand you will be making announcements at the 28th Annual National Educational Computing Conference. What are you planning to talk about?
Agilix is making two announcements during the conference. The first is a new product, which we have developed for EPIC Learning Systems — a complete K-12 instructional management system. It will be delivered this upcoming school term as part of their solution to help high school students prepare for college. We feel we’ve developed a revolutionary system that takes 1:1 initiatives and e-learning to a whole new level.
Q: What makes the Agilix solution for EPIC Learning Systems unique?
By combining Agilix instructional management system with the EPIC Learning Systems curriculum and a fully functional laptop that students can take home, you have the solution that is poised to make an immediate impact. In fact, we’ve already seen dramatic results from the pilots held this year. EPIC Learning Systems has a curriculum of 32 highly engaging, rich-media e-learning “courses” that not only meet all state standards, but also give students practical preparation to enter college and the workplace. School districts utilizing the EPIC system are seeing students achieve greater results; teachers are reducing class preparation time by 85 percent and test grading time by 90 percent.
Q: You mentioned a second announcement. What can you tell us about that?
Sure, Agilix is also introducing a new collaborative learning community website at NECC, which is currently code named BrainHoney. With BrainHoney, we’ve harnessed the power of social networking and applied it to a learning-related community of online users. We have a powerful, yet simple rich-media authoring tool that enables anyone to create and share learning content. There’s no charge for users to create learning materials, or to view content. Essentially, BrainHoney is all about user contributed content and enabling the community to teach one another. In addition, Agilix is sharing an ESL learning program as maiden content for the website.
Q: Can K-12 schools take advantage of BrainHoney?
Absolutely – Agilix’s BrainHoney provides an ideal toolset for teachers to gather and share curriculum. They can see what other teachers are doing for different age groups and a wide range of subjects. At the same time, students can participate by shaping the course of the learning content. We believe that by giving students the opportunity to instruct each other, everyone will learn more in the process.
Q: How do you ensure that the quality of the BrainHoney content is valuable and useful? YouTube, for example, has some valuable videos, but much of it has no real redeeming value for schools.
Agilix didn’t originally design BrainHoney for schools, but rather as an open learning community for the world. Like YouTube, we anticipate that there will be learning content that is valuable for schools and some that’s not applicable for them. On the other hand, the EPIC Learning System, was specifically developed as an innovative solution for schools.
Q: What are your favorite activities outside of work?
The best part of my life is spent spending time with my wife and children. They are the reason for everything I do.
Q: Where would you most like to retire?
If I ever retire, I’d like to spend some time with my family on the North Shore of Oahu.
