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Harvard grad Matthew Fields finds success in online education with Stanford-backed Redbird Advanced Learning

Martin Desmarais
Harvard grad Matthew Fields finds success in online education with Stanford-backed Redbird Advanced Learning
Matthew Mugo Fields, co-founder of the Rocket Group and president of Redbird Advanced Learning. (Photo: Photo courtesy of Rocket Group)

A business he launched during his time at Harvard University has allowed Matthew Mugo Fields to fulfill a promise he made while a young immigrant student back in high school: to one day help other students better their educational opportunities, just as he was helped.

Fields left Harvard and Boston about a dozen years ago and now is a successful entrepreneur sitting on a number of education-focused ventures that have touched the lives of several hundred thousand students.

He began his foray into educational services with Rocket Learning, a tutoring company he co-founded with several others while a student at Harvard from 2000 to 2002. Rocket Learning won a Harvard Business School business plan competition, which gave the startup a boost to get going.

Rocket Learning evolved into the Rocket Group, a company with a number of different ventures under its wing focused on using technology and innovation to improve education and advance the field of online learning.

Author: Photo courtesy of Rocket GroupImage of an online tutor helping a student through GiftedandTalented.com.

Growth potential

One business is GiftedandTalented.com, a website that offers online K-12 courses, expert tutors and information and advice to help students develop as advanced leaners.

Another business is Redbird Advanced Learning, which offers digital curriculum and tutoring services to schools, teachers, parents and students. That initiative evolved out of Stanford University’s long-standing Education Program for Gifted Youth research project. Its curriculum focuses on using advanced learning technologies, graphics, games and digital learning projects to accelerate K-12 learning.

Through these ventures, Fields works with other cofounders and executives from some of the top colleges in the U.S., including Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford. He also collaborates with other businesses across the U.S. After its Boston birth, Rocket Group was headquartered in Miami. Redbird Advanced Learning is based in San Mateo, Calif., to be near its Stanford roots.

With dual Harvard master’s degrees degrees in education and business, Fields was uniquely qualified to move into the field of online learning, which is being driven in part by private businesses using technology to sell online learning services.

Fields has long seen the future of education being in online learning and using the best technology available.

“Education is ripe for transformation,” Fields said. This means more than putting computers in classrooms and giving teacher iPads — it means helping education transition to all-encompassing digital platforms. Fields believes the days of textbooks, for example, should be numbered and that no matter the subject, learning should become entirely interactive.

Digital future

While others in the education field may agree with these sentiments, for Fields, the key is supporting teachers and educators in making technology work for them and their students, which is what his businesses aim to do.

“We are helping teachers and school leaders fundamentally develop their craft,” he said. “That is the challenge but that is also the excitement.”

Fields says that Redbird Advanced Learning, with its connection to Stanford, may be the business best suited to lead the digital education revolution — largely because of the decades of research conducted by one of the world’s top academic institutions to show exactly what helps students become more advanced learners, and how technology can bolster that.

The Rocket Group was chosen by Stanford to develop a company that combines the research from its Education Program for Gifted Youth with technology services that could be made available to students around the world.

Stanford officials and Fields began talking several years ago about the project. Patrick Suppes, the late head of the Education Program for Gifted Youth, chose Fields and his company based on the work being done with online tutoring. Redbird Advanced Learning was started in June 2013 to handle the effort, with Fields as president.

“Stanford has chosen Redbird Advanced Learning, a Silicon Valley-based enterprise whose mission is to harness the power of research, technology and innovation to help students achieve their ultimate potential. With a deep history in digital learning, the innovators at Redbird bring the right combination of educational and technical expertise to complement what Stanford has established,” Charles Junkerman, Stanford Associate Provost and Dean of Continuing Studies, said in a statement.

After its launch, Redbird Advanced Learning grew quickly, harnessing the power of the Stanford name, as well as a network of schools the university already was working with.

Currently, Redbird Advanced Learning serves about 100,000 students every day in 60 school systems in the U.S. and in 24 other countries.

For Fields, that is just the tip of the iceberg.

“There are 50 million students in the U.S. There are well over 1 billion globally. We think we are just getting started,” Fields said.

Though his businesses are selling online learning services, Fields says cost is definitely a factor because the goal is to connect with as many students as possible and make it accessible to students from all economic backgrounds.

GiftedandTalented.com, for example, has access to online courses for less than $20 a month.

Fields’ passion for education stems from his own experiences as a young student growing up in Philadelphia. He came to the U.S. with his parents from Barbados when he was in the fifth grade. In Barbados he had been a strong student, but as a young immigrant in the U.S. school system, he was kept back a year and later put into a vocational track. He credits several teachers and administrators who supported him and got him into a college track. These supporters also encouraged him to go to college and even helped raise funds for him to be able to afford to attend and graduate from Morehouse College in Atlanta.

It was a debt that Fields felt like he could never repay, but these former teachers told him to someday help others in a similar way. He never forgot this duty.

“This has been a mission that I feel I inherited and I take very seriously,” Fields said. “We just now have the benefit of having many more tools that allow us to touch more lives … We have the ability to develop solutions that can have a global impact.”