Monarch Teaching Technologies’ autism education software is already in several of the nation’s largest school districts, but the company is still looking to more than triple its customer base within the next year.
CEO Terry Murphy says 2012 could be a “big year” for the Cleveland-area company, as it’s closing in on “major partnerships” with “big names” in the educational software and hardware industry that could help the company expand its markets.
The company has customers for its VizZle (it stands for “visual learning”) software in 24 states, with active pilots in 12 more. About 2,000 teachers and parents are using the software now, but Murphy’s goal is for that number to stand at at least 7,000 by the end of 2012. Its major customers include three of the nation’s largest school districts: Los Angeles, New York and Miami.
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Last month, the company released an iPad app of VizZle, which fueled more interest that should lead to increased adoption of the software.
As the name implies, the key to VizZle is that it presents lessons to students visually, which contrasts with traditional education’s more auditory approach. Autistic children tend to be visual learners and often struggle to grasp information when it comes to them through the spoken word, said Murphy, who has a brother with autism.
“This was born out of a need for a more a practical and effective means of teaching autistic children,” he said. “Nothing existed within the marketplace that made it easy for teachers to communicate and teach visually.”
VizZle, which operates on software as a service (SAAS) architecture, allows teachers to create their own lessons using its templates and multimedia resources. So, for example, a teacher could create his own workbook of matching activities for a student who was struggling to learn the proper names of various shapes.
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Each lesson a user creates is stored on Monarch’s servers and available for other users to download, so in a sense Monarch is outsourcing a portion of its product development to its customers for free.
The company got its start as a collaboration between the Monarch Center for Autism in the Cleveland area and Children’s Hospital Boston. It’s raised about $4.5 million in equity over its lifetime from about 35 investors, including Cleveland venture group Glengary and RMS Management, which is connected to the families behind real estate development company Forest City Enterprises.
If current trends hold, Monarch will continue to see a surge in demand for its autism education software. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 1 percent of children across the country have some form of autism — a staggering 20 times the prevailing figure in the 1980s, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The sharp rise in autism cases has stirred fears of an epidemic and mobilized researchers to figure out what causes the brain disorder and why it appears to be affecting so many more children.