Access to excellence
RICH Learning Theory was originally developed to help young children fall in love with learning through embedding core educational concepts in music and the arts. With an initial grant of $500,000 from Dr. Rich’s family foundation, 38 musicians, story-tellers, animators and educators met in Aspen, Puerto Rico, Minnesota and at the Education Development Center in Boston. Their goal: To create the scaffolding for a premier universal model preschool to meet and exceed government early learning standards and bring “access to excellence” to children around the world.
Based on the scope-and-sequence designed by these groups, 535 songs were written to embed basic reading, math, science, health, virtue and arts skills into music. Blueprints for learning games, dance, art and theater were drawn. A cartoon brand, “Skool” was created as a “Sesame Street for the Internet Age.” Talents from Hollywood to Bollywood to Nollywood (Nigeria) to multiple points in between recorded the prototype songs. With those resources in place, additional funding was raised to test and tweak the methods, models and materials in 7-week pilot projects in:
Suburban Stillwater, Minnesota
Inner-City Chennai, India
Shasemene, Ethiopia
Allendale & Salters, South Carolina (three summers)
Our original delivery system was envisioned as schools, franchises and home schools. We had the right leadership for this: Our choice for CEO, Dzana Homan, had run education, edtech and arts companies in 1850+ sites, 39 states and 60 countries. Under her leadership, franchising seemed like a logical move.
Half-way into this R&D field testing phase we came to realize the neuroscience behind RICH Learning could enrich minds well beyond preschoolers. Brains could be expanded and lives could be enhanced from the womb, throughout life, and all the way to Alzheimers units.
Then the world-wide pandemic hit, driving most meetings, socialization and education online.
Watching parents scramble for quality education alternatives shifted our thinking from atoms to bits - from physical brick-and-mortar schools to the infinite reality of Web 3.0 edtech worlds.
At the same time COVID drove education online, a number of technologies evolved and converged: AR, VR, XR (mixed reality), 5G, faster software, cheaper hardware, blockchain, NFTs, digital currency, etc.
In 2022 when Citibank projected the Metaverse to swell to 5 billion users and become an $8-13 trillion industry by 2030, RICH Learning pivoted from physical schools which could reach hundreds of children each to future online platforms that could potentially reach billions.
That’s when RICH Learning Global’s first three RICH Metaverse Worlds were conceived.