Meet Valenture Institute founder Robert Paddock, on online education boom
South African entrepreneur Robert Paddock is one of the driving forces behind the Valenture Institute, a South African organisation that is radically transforming the way online education is delivered. Instead of trying to re-engineer classroom learning and teaching, the Valenture Institute has started a new model with the learner at the centre. Its digital education strategy entails "thinking outside the classroom". The Valenture Institute is a private online high school, offering a home-schooling curriculum recognised by the world's leading universities, with international GCSE and International AS-Level subjects including mathematics, English, business, physics, chemistry, biology, history and French. Paddock is the founder of another hugely successful digital education business, GetSmarter – which was snapped up by a Nasdaq-listed company, 2U. Paddock speaks to BizNews founder Alec Hogg about the disruptive education business model and how demand for Valenture Institute places is soaring. – Editor
In December last year, I last spoke with Robert Paddock, one of the co-founders of the Valenture Institute. Robert, the Valenture Institute is a global online, private high school but your history in online education goes back a lot further than that. GetSmarter, which many South Africans do know about, which you and your brother Sam built up and sold off to the Nasdaq listed 2U. I must ask you a little later about, by the way, whether we should be buying the shares. When you guys launched what seemed like a brilliant idea, what has happened during the Covid pandemic, have you found that demand for the Valenture Institute has increased?
Certainly, Alec. We launched the business in September of 2019. We had spent six months before that building up the leadership team, raising some capital and really potting the path forward for the Valenture Institutes, that we launched publicly in September of 2019. We had our inaugural cohort start with us in January of 2020 and then Covid hit in March of 2020.
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