Compass Classroom started creating educational videos for moms and students in the summer of 2010. Although our parent company, Compass Cinema, had been creating videos for a while before that first year, we had the idea of starting a company just to cater to homeschool families after watching our own wives homeschool for a few years.
Watching them homeschool made us realize a few things:
- Moms need as much support as they can homeschooling. If one video course gives you a little more time to focus on other things, then that makes us happy.
- Some subjects are generally more difficult to teach than others. We try to make video series that cover those gaps.
- There are some great teachers out there who just do an incredible job explaining certain subjects. We look for them and get them on video.
- Videos should be educational and entertaining. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
- A lesson on video is not the same as a lecture. We approach each new series with a blank page and try to match form and content in the most pedagogically-effective way.
- Our first product was Visual Latin. We were pleasantly surprised at the positive response – it’s always nice when both moms and kids say they love what you’re doing. We followed this with Economics for Everybody, then American History, and so on from there.
In 2013, we started carrying the video products of Roman Roads Media, owned by two brothers who have been known for many years by one of the producers with Compass Cinema.
It was only in 2015 that we realized moms needed products created just for them as much as students needed educational products. As a result, we launched the first of a new series of products aimed at teaching moms more about homeschooling itself, Homeschool Made Simple.
The long-term hope of our company is that we create products that will be useful to moms, interesting to students, and glorifying to God.
soli deo gloria