Was established on January 1, 2016, Boulder Language Technologies, Inc. officially merged with Digital Directions International, Inc., the creators of HELP Math, to launch a new company, Boulder Learning, Inc.  DDI and BLT combined complementary strengths to deploy a new generation of learning systems with intelligent virtual tutors.

DDI (est. 2000) are the creators of HELP Math which has lifetime sales of $3.5 million.  DDI has been the recipient of U.S. Department of Education funding through public private partnerships ($6.5M) that conducted government sponsored research and built on the results to develop, market and distribute a successful and effective product, HELP Math, used in schools across the US.

BLT (est. 2007) has been the recipient of $14.5M through government sponsored research and developed technologies for conversational intelligent tutors and automatic assessment systems. Virtual tutors for reading and science have been developed and rigorously evaluated in real world conditions. Several of the systems are ready for commercial development.

History
BLT was founded in 2007 by Ron Cole Ph. D and Wayne Ward Ph.D. Ron and Wayne worked together at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s developing spoken language systems under the direction of Raj Reddy. In 1998, Ron, Wayne and John Hansen established the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR) at CU Boulder, within the Institute of Cognitive Science, headed by Walter Kintsch. CSLR became the largest university research center in the US developing human language technologies and tutoring systems, with 25 research staff and students, and a budget of about $2.5 million annually from research grants. During its 10 years, CSLR conducted applied research to develop technologies for spoken dialog interaction, semantic parsing and virtual tutoring. The technologies were used to develop large scale systems for conversational interaction with virtual agents, intelligent tutors, virtual therapists and open-domain question answering systems with support from NSF, NIH, IES, ARDA, and DARPA.

Mission
Since its founding in 2007, BLT’s mission was to: 1) conduct applied research to advance the underlying technologies that enable conversational, tutorial and therapy style interactions between virtual agents and humans, and 2) develop and evaluate applications based on these technologies. BLT is an innovation center that works with leading researchers in Education, Psychology, Computer Vision and Robotics to build applications, and to evaluate them in real world environments. A particular focus of the company is tutorial applications for elementary school students.

Revenues
Since its inception (2007), BLT has operated as a research lab. It has been funded, at approximately $1.4 million annually, by research grants from the NSF, IES and private contracts, some of our research and contracts are detailed here, http://www.bltek.com/our-work/projects/. The company has been awarded 10 research grants as prime contractor, and has collaborated on 6 research projects as subcontractors. BLT completed a $2 million contract from Delta Education to develop a set of interactive tutorials to accompany the FOSS elementary science program (tutorials are available on the FOSS web site to subscribers). Total Revenues for BLT since inception are $14,124,479.

History
Prior to the merger with BLI, DDI was an educational technology pioneer and publisher of evidence-based math curricula and assessments for English Language Learners, Students with Learning Disabilities, and Struggling Learners. DDI developed programs that are Research-based, use new technologies, and are designed intentionally and specifically to raise academic achievement and make learning engaging for underserved and at-risk student populations, including English language learners (ELL, ESL), students with learning disabilities (special education, learning disabilities), and students struggling to learn math. The HELP Math web-based curriculum was the first to successfully adopt Sheltered Instruction pedagogy in an educational technology program and embeds Academic Language throughout.

Mission
DDI’s mission was to address the achievement gap by researching and developing digital programs in math and science that allowed personalized remediation for ELL and other struggling students.

Core Competencies
DDI’s prior core competencies were centered on business development (public private partnerships, sales and marketing partnerships), research and development of web based educational products (HELP Math), and project development.

Revenues
Since its’ inception (2002), DDI successfully raised $6.5M of non-dilutive grant funding through partnerships with the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and Texas Christian University and over $1.5M in private investment and sold cumulatively over $5M of HELP Math since 2009. DDI reached profitability in 2013.