Discovery Education
Paving the Path for Meaningful Instructional Content Worldwide

The pandemic and corresponding events have led the entire education sector into a bout of turmoil. It has caused immense uncertainty about how instructions should be delivered and created fatigue around switching from physical learning environments to virtual ones. A company that has handheld educators during these trying times is Discovery Education, which is driven by the mission to help deliver equitable learning experiences to students in an engaging manner. From March of 2020 to July of 2020, Discovery Education provided 15,000 new schools no-cost access to its K-12 platform while hosting over 150 free online events designed to help educators cope with the rapidly changing teaching-learning methodologies. More than 20,000 educators from 50 states of the U.S. and 17 other countries participated in these events. To continue its support for educators, Discovery Education also made 500 ready-to-use activities available at no cost to every teacher in the nation for the 2021-2022 school year.

Discovery Education is a global edtech leader whose services are used by 4.5 million educators and 45 million students in over 140 countries and territories. The Discovery Education platform was launched nearly two decades ago with the belief that digital media could serve as a powerful catalyst to engage, inspire, and educate students. Since its launch, Discovery Education’s robust collection of 200,000 multimodal content resources is designed to help bring real-world learning experiences to students. The platform has been an extensive repository of digital resources, including videos, text-based passages, interactive modules, audios, podcasts, and images. It caters to K through 12 grades with several engagement tools to put content into instructional context, including virtual field trips, ready-to-use activities, and a formative assessment tool called Quiz that can be integrated with any digital content. This state-of-the-art platform provides high-quality, standards-aligned content, ready-to-use digital lessons, and professional learning resources to meet teachers’ ever-evolving needs. “Our goal is twofold — to make the life of teachers easier with access to all necessary resources in one place and engage students in a meaningful way through our digital content,” states Scott Kinney, CEO, Discovery Education.

Along with its K-12 platform, Discovery Education offers a host of additional services, including digital Science, Math, and Social Studies textbooks, a K-5 science curriculum called Mystery Science, and Coding, STEM, and professional development services. The company recently launched an hourly professional development program to help teachers utilize digital content for the best classroom experience. Alongside its dynamic content, K-12 platform offers several tools such as Studio and Quiz and pre-packaged content called ready-to-use activities.

“We have created the toolset to allow teachers to utilize content in an instructional way. We have gone a step further and married those two together in model lessons,” mentions Kinney. Additionally, Discovery Education acts as an information hub for teachers. The company has created the Discovery Educator Network community that empowers teachers to share information with peers worldwide. “Our community allows teachers to leverage their most valuable resource, which is oftentimes the teacher next door,” adds Kinney.

Our goal is twofold — to make the life of teachers easier with access to all necessary resources in one place and engage students in a meaningful way through our digital content

Discovery Education continues to extend its functionalities to schools across the nation and has partnered with several states, including Arizona, Nevada, Delaware, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, on statewide initiatives to support their digital learning initiatives. An exciting recent inclusion to the company’s portfolio was Mystery Science, a K-5 supplemental science service that allows students to initiate a lesson with their questions. With several such expansions, Discovery Education is consistently focused on thinking about every use case and enables improved delivery of instruction across the world.

Innovation is the driving force behind Discovery Education. It continues this legacy with the augmented reality app called Sandbox AR. This app empowers students and teachers to create, share, and inhabit virtual environments. Discovery Education currently has a presence in countries worldwide with relationships with several Ministries of Education. “We want to be helpful and supportive to educators not only in the U.S. but everywhere in the world. That is part of our ambition,” concludes Kinney.