Education 2020 misleads customers with false information about the company. The website claims that their teachers are content area experts with Master's Degrees. However, the majority of the employees are young people in their early to mid twenties with barely a bachelor's degree (some do not even have that). There are two curriculum managers that oversee all curriculum areas - even in areas that they are not educated for, much less an expert in.
As a result, a lot of the content in the courses is inaccurate. The biggest department in the company is "customer support" - the sole purpose of which is to correct all of the mistakes in the content that is reported by the teachers using the product in their schools. E2020 hires "contract teachers" to write and film courses - but there is no system to supervise or determine if the material and lectures are accurate and correct because they do not employ content area experts (as they claim they do). Customer support specialists receive hundreds of emails and phone calls on a daily basis to correct mistakes in the curriculum content in all course areas. If asked, they will also tell you that they plan on refilming many of the courses and correcting the content - but without curriculum specialists in place how do they plan on accomplishing this? They hire young people with no experience and education to write the curriculum and then hire more mature looking people as contract workers to film the actual lectures - thus providing their customers with false and misleading information about the courses. The "quality assurance" checks consists of a "click-thru" checklist. Employees are only asked to click thru the buttons to make sure that they work. Content is never checked. Often math teachers will QA history classes and vice versa.
As a young company they are also often playing "catch up" with their own technology. The release new "updates" about once or twice a month. Some of these updates are improvements suggested by clients. However, the majority of them are "fixes" for things that are constantly going wrong. It can be very frustrating for a teacher to be in a classroom with students and be reliant upon a product to work and the product fails. Videos often freeze, pages don't open and students can often easily figure out ways to manipulate the computer data and complicate the program. If the high school students can figure out how to do that - then why can't the technical hot shots at E2020 figure it out first to prevent it from happening? Because they are so busy trying to fix mistakes that they don't have time to create a quality product in the first place.
This company does not focus on providing quality education for their clients or students - they only focus on making a buck. Same old corporate America. Although the philosophy behind this company is sound - the actual implementation is flawed -so the product (curriculum content and technology) is bad. Buyer beware. The sales people may be slick - but take it from an insider who used to work there - what you see is not always what you get.
BTW - I am not a disgruntled ex-employee. I am, however, a veteran educator (with a Master's and many years of experience) that cares about the quality and value of education for students. I think that there are educational institutions looking for the best way they can serve their student's educational needs, especially credit recovery, and I am just offering my opinion that E2020 does not provide the best product for that purpose. I would encourage you to research further. I would suggest asking some of the schools that have actually used this product about their experiences. But ask the teachers in the classroom - the ones that use it every day - they are the ones who know about content and technology problems. It also bothers me that they advertise themselves one way (content area experts with Master's Degrees) - but in reality are the exact opposite. To me, that is very dishonest, and if that is how the business is run then how can you expect the product itself to be true? The only way you would know the truth about their employees is to hear from one who was there because the sales people and company heads are not going to - they are in it to make money not educate students.
This reports reflects my personal experience with E2020. Please use discretion when making your online education decisions and again I urge you to research further before making your decision to purchase this or any other online education product.
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