Executive Summary
Company Description |
Real & Open (R & O) is a Benefit Corporation that, through its core product, Tiro, seeks to empower teachers, students, and communities to take control of the standardized testing industry. Currently, Tiro is a web-based tool to create, deploy, and analyze tests to better focus learning and evaluate the quality of assessments. Along with Tiro, we have developed a series of professional development courses to support teacher education. We are a socially-oriented organization, democratizing access to knowledge and power. We are looking to cultivate a new culture, one in which students enjoy rich learning experiences through informed, responsible, and innovative assessment practices. We want everyone to have the knowledge and power to decide how much emphasis testing receives in students' and teachers' lives. As a team of educators, technologists, and psychometricians, our success will be measured by how we empower people through our personalized support and suite of tools. |
Product Description: Tiro |
Tiro is a web-based tool to create, deploy, and analyze tests to better focus classroom education and evaluate the quality of classroom assessments. Tiro empowers everyday educators by democratizing the sciences and tools used by large-scale, high-stakes testing companies. In providing a simple analogy for perspective, Tiro leverages the most attractive features of Survey Monkey and Google Analytics in a single tool designed for education and assessment. Tiro makes assessment development, deployment and analysis available to the average person in the same way that Survey Monkey supported large-scale survey development and deployment and Google Analytics provided data for businesses to make valid decisions. |
Target Customer Description |
Real & Open distinguishes between “users” and “customers.” In the education sphere, often the users (e.g., students, parents, teachers) of the services and products do not directly purchase services and/or products. Nonetheless, they are viewed as the target consumers of the services and/or products. R & O defines customers, those who purchase the services or products, as those decision-makers at the administrative levels of K-12 institutions, postsecondary institutions, licensing agencies, credentialing programs, and corporate training. Immediately, R & O will be targeting teachers, students, and decision makers in K-12 and postsecondary institutions. |
The Future of Real & Open |
The company has a series of short- and long-term goals. In the short-term (1-5 years), Real & Open seeks to develop Tiro and build a community of teacher-evangelists. We will use Tiro to target the validation of small-scale assessments in low-stakes contexts (e.g., K-12, postsecondary classrooms). In the long-term (5-10 years), Real & Open seeks to push beyond current services and products to develop new offerings which provide validation for large scale, high-stakes assessment contexts (e.g., certification, licensing, etc.). |