Giant Campus is virtually everywhere

Pete Findley saw the writing on the wall. Or rather, the pixels on the screen. After spending a decade building Giant Campus from a scrappy start-up into a nationwide network of technology summer camps for kids, the inaugural Business Plan Competition champ floated the company’s first online course in 2005. Findley (BA 1998) envisioned a giant campus for the Internet age, a virtual school majoring in technology, science, engineering, and innovation courses that are all too often unavailable to teens attending thinly populated rural schools, cash-strapped urban districts, or who are home-schooled.

It took a few years for technology to catch up. But today broadband is pervasive, Web-based education delivery is rapidly becoming mainstream, and Giant Campus is virtually everywhere. “We’ve been waiting for this time,” Findley says. “Education has evolved, and we believe that we can transform the way specialized education is delivered, particularly to high school students.”

The company offers an accredited program with an array of online elective courses in computer science, digital arts, and business innovation—plus a core curriculum of language arts, math, science, and social studies. Through Giant Campus Academy, the curriculum is available on a tuition basis to high school students around the world (and is free for students in Washington, thanks to a partnership with the state Board of Education).

By shedding the constraints of camps and classrooms, Giant Campus offers students both accessibility and affordability. And the company is rapidly becoming the essential framework for such education providers such as Kaplan, K12 and Insight, as well as other state public school districts.

“We’re basically the ‘Intel Inside’ for every online school operating today. We provide them the curriculum and, many times, the teachers,” Findley says. “In five years, I expect to see us in a lot of school districts in a lot of state systems.”