Perspective from edtech company expanding from Silicon Valley to Research Triangle.

GUEST COLUMN | by Jennifer Gu

When we founded our company in 1998, we had a simple mission: to solve real-world problems in education with the best technology possible. Today, we are doing just that, having built one of the industry’s most popular and most immersive online learning experiences. Recently, we’ve taken a big step forward by opening our first office on the East Coast, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Our products, which today include offerings in Math and English Language Arts (Science and Social Studies just launched on November 15), deliver an immersive learning experience that sparks curiosity and builds confidence. With over 5,000 skills, we’ve created what we believe is the most comprehensive educational technology product available, with engaging content covering preschool to precalculus, grammar to geometry. This content, carefully crafted by

We are looking for experienced engineers and curriculum designers who share our passion for helping schools teach and students learn.

teams of Ph.D.s, teachers, and technologists, helps students master rigorous material through our adaptive technology and strategically mapped progressions that build fluency.

A Workable Approach

This approach works. Today, one in 10 students in the U.S. uses our products and more than 20 billion questions have been asked and answered around the world on our platform. This also means that we’ve grown rapidly since we started. Our headquarters in Silicon Valley holds more than 200 employees – from content creators to sales and engineering staff and everything in between. Now, it’s time to expand.

While we’ve achieved much over the last 17 years, there’s still much for us to do. Gaining a foothold in Raleigh-Durham is an important part of that. With thousands of teachers and schools and hundreds of thousands of students on the East Coast using our technology, it’s important that we have sales, marketing, and customer support on the ground to help serve them better.

A Shared Passion

Additionally, Raleigh’s position in the Research Triangle gives us access to world-class talent. We feel strongly that this new office location will help us recruit the high-quality team members we need to effectively expand and solidify our East Coast presence. Our new office is already 20-strong in the areas of sales, curriculum development, and customer support, and we are actively hiring more. We are looking for experienced engineers and curriculum designers who share our passion for helping schools teach and students learn.

But more than expanding our operations, we are continuing to expand our content and add new product features to enhance the learning experience we provide for teachers and students. In just the past six months, we added English Language Arts content for grades 11 and 12 to our platform, created a new version of our iPad app with handwriting recognition, and launched analytics to make it easy and fun for teachers to discover new insights into student and classroom performance. And, we added two entirely new subjects—science and social studies.

We hope this has given you a taste of what we are all about—we’re thrilled about our new office and the opportunities we now have to better support your teaching, whether you’re based on the East Coast or elsewhere around the country. We invite you to visit us and try us out for free, or to share your feedback with us.

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Jennifer Gu is Executive Vice President of IXL Learning. Jennifer joined IXL from Oracle, where she was a senior development manager. At IXL, she oversees day-to-day operations and has been instrumental in developing the company’s products and formulating its sales and marketing strategies. She has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, a master’s in computer science from Stanford, and a joint MBA from UC Berkeley and Columbia.