Gary Stairs and the E-Learning Companies that Could
Gary Stairs is no stranger to the e-learning world. But as time has gone on and technology has changed, he’s found a new area of focus for his company: mobile educational games.
Stairs is the founder and owner of two e-learning companies: Red Hot Learning and Stellar Learning Strategies. Over his years in the sector, he has learned to leverage his expertise and experience from projects with major companies to build something he believes has a real future.
“The idea behind Stellar Learning Strategies was ‘have gun, will travel,’” Stairs said.
Through talking and collaborating with international organizations in similar sectors, Stairs came to realize there was great potential in creating smartphone apps for e-learning.
“It got me thinking a little bit about mobile learning and mobile applications at an important time,” Stairs said.
“So Stellar Learning started down a road and we created an app for the Nature Trust of New Brunswick that we called Deep Map Eco. It was basically all of New Brunswick’s Nature Preserves on this one app. I initially designed it on the back of a napkin, which frankly was the beginning and end of my technology ability. “
Stairs said once the company had this work under their belt, Mercedes and Daimler AG, companies that Stairs had worked with before the recession, got back into contact with him and asked if he’d want to work with them again.
“So we brought our tiny little company, Red Hot Learning, out of the ditch and we got it building stuff for Daimler AG, which is the parent company of Mercedes globally,” Stairs said. “We were building their global IT security training, first in English, then in German, then in 19 other global languages. We went from being down and out on our knees really to having 350,000 or 330,000 people online learning about IT security from Red Hot Learning.”
After this success, the company was then commissioned by the UN Security Council’s department of Peace-Keeping Operations to create their gender equity training for 175,000 global peacekeepers.
Stairs now has a six-member team from smaller company First Mobile Education working on the development and curation of e-learning games. In cooperation with IGT Solutions, T4G and NBCC, the team is creating educational games collaboratively through support won from the New Brunswick Industry Innovation Challenge.
“The current team right now is a bit of a hybrid of technologists on one hand and classic educators on the other. But the idea that we have, the basic business idea is that we will create learning games for K-12, particularly focused on elementary and middle school,” Stairs said.
Stairs says once First Mobile became a part of the team supported by the New Brunswick Industry Innovation Challenge, all questions they might have had as a startup about not having customers or revenue were essentially answered.
“Our idea was to sell to the New Brunswick and the Atlantic departments of education and to sell to Atlantic Education International, which was basically an export arm of the department of education, and to sell to Canadian companies doing global educational business, whether through franchises or what have you,” Stairs explained.
“That’s the simple business idea so we’re working away on that. Our pledge, our commitment to the New Brunswick Industry Innovation Challenge is to come up with four games, four educational games. Those games are around topics like the environment, financial literacy, cybersecurity and, because of my own background in particular, First Nations.”
First Mobile is now working on the delivery of these games, both by developing them internally and curating them from outside sources including Engineers Canada, a group that initiated a project based around the development of a number of engineering-focused games.
“Now we’ve had this windfall of intellectual property. We’ve got these cool games. The artwork is great, the playability is great,” Stairs said.
“All of a sudden, now you can see we’ve got all this new wind in our sails. We’ve got the Innovation Challenge funding. We’ve got the dream team of game developers right now in the K-12 space. We’re exclusive in the Atlantic region.”
Stairs says he considers it important to create opportunities in Atlantic Canada— not only career opportunities to allow those who want to stay in the area to be able to, but opportunities to develop and make available New Brunswick-made educational content.
“For me, it’s important to repatriate content and to develop fresh content and to curate the best of content,” he said.
“We can’t let go of this vital sector. We’ve got to care about it, we’ve got to promote it … We’ve got some really good teachers here so part of what we do as a company is to foster and to support good teaching and we’ll continue to.”