Doug Dohring announces the establishment of The Age of Learning Foundation at the Education World Forum in London, 2020
Doug Dohring
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Age of Learning, and Chairman, Age of Learning Foundation
Doug Dohring founded and led three successful companies as Chairman and CEO over the past several decades—in the fields of consumer research, consumer internet, and education. Following the success of his research company, in the early days of the internet he led the company NeoPets, Inc., in the creation of one of the most popular websites in the world as a safe haven for kids online, registering more than 140 million accounts globally over five years.
In 2007, Doug founded the education technology company Age of Learning, leading a team in the creation and development of its flagship product ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy, as well as many other highly effective education resources that have touched the lives of more than 50 million children.
Doug Dohring announces the establishment of The Age of Learning Foundation at the Education World Forum in London, 2020
Doug Dohring founded and led three successful companies as Chairman and CEO over the past several decades—in the fields of consumer research, consumer internet, and education. Following the success of his research company, in the early days of the internet he led the company NeoPets, Inc., in the creation of one of the most popular websites in the world as a safe haven for kids online, registering more than 140 million accounts globally over five years.
In 2007, Doug founded the education technology company Age of Learning, leading a team in the creation and development of its flagship product ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy, as well as many other highly effective education resources that have touched the lives of more than 50 million children.
Under Doug’s leadership, these brands and products have earned praise, awards, and recognition from families, educators, and the EdTech industry:
Doug Dohring and Age of Learning
In 2007, Doug Dohring founded Age of Learning, a Los Angeles-based company whose mission is to help children everywhere build a strong foundation for academic success and inspire a lifelong love of learning.
In November 2010, the company launched the world’s most comprehensive online early learning resource, ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy. ABCmouse is now the leading digital education brand for young children in the United States.
One of the world’s foremost education technology companies, Age of Learning blends education best practices, innovative technology, and insightful creativity, resulting in engaging, effective educational experiences that Bring Learning to Life®. Its research-based digital education programs have proven efficacy in increasing children’s learning gains, with content developed by education experts and produced by some of the industry’s most talented creative and technology teams.
“We are extremely fortunate to have investors who understand the value of our mission—building a strong educational foundation for children everywhere.” —Doug Dohring
In June of 2021, Age of Learning announced a raise of $300 million led by TPG, the largest single raise by a U.S. edTech company to date. “This funding enables us to increase our investments in bold and innovative programs and reach even more kids and families, which is vital now more than ever,” said Doug Dohring.
Bringing Learning To Life®
ABCmouse is the flagship product of Age of Learning (Doug Dohring featured in 2013 photo above).
ABCmouse
ABCmouse Early Learning Academy has earned critical and popular acclaim since Age of Learning announced its launch in November of 2010, including the Teacher’s Choice Award, The Parent’s Choice Gold Award, two EdTech Awards, and the NAPPA award. At the time, Doug Dohring noted, “After more than three years in development and extensive website testing with more than 10,000 families, we have been extremely pleased with the positive response from parents and educators to our site content and delivery systems.“
The ABCmouse educator-designed curriculum offers more than 11,000 learning activities for preschool through 2nd grade learners, including reading and writing, mathematics, science, health, social studies, art, and music.
The efficacy of ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy has been validated in multiple large-scale studies, including gold-standard randomized control trials, which have shown that ABCmouse accelerates learning and helps children make significant gains in reading and math.
Children learn with ABCmouse in homes, classrooms, libraries, and community centers. Not long after its initial launch, Age of Learning began to offer the ABCmouse curriculum at no cost to teachers, libraries, Head Start programs, public housing authorities, and in after-school programs in the United States. More than half a million teachers have used ABCmouse at no cost in their classrooms.
Adventure Academy
“The basic concept of Adventure Academy is to extend the early learning experience of ABCmouse into an MMO platform, encouraging and celebrating learning in a highly engaging interactive environment.” —Doug Dohring
In 2019, Doug Dohring and the Age of Learning team launched Adventure Academy, the world’s first AAA massively multiplayer online (MMO) game offering standards-aligned upper elementary school curriculum. With thousands of engaging learning activities—including hours of original animated and live-action video content as well as interactive learning activities, games, books, quests, and more—Adventure Academy is a fun and safe virtual environment that builds essential knowledge in language arts, math, science, and social studies.
Among the awards earned to date by Adventure Academy are two Gold Stevie from the American Business Awards, a Tech Edvocate Award in the Best Gamification App category, the EdTech Cool Tool award, the Mom’s Choice Gold Award, and a NAPPA award.
ABCmouse English
“Proficiency in English opens doors of opportunity for children around the world. Our objective with ABCmouse English is to offer a learning resource that children can engage with while still very young, taking advantage of their natural language learning capacity during this period of very rapid development.” —Doug Dohring
Following the successful launch of ABCmouse, Doug Dohring began to assemble an experienced team of language learning experts to develop an English-learning online curriculum for the international market based on the ABCmouse model.
ABCmouse English is designed for children between the ages of 3 and 8, teaching English as a second language in the same natural sequence as children learn their native language: listening and understanding, speaking, phonics and reading, and writing. Speech recognition technology is incorporated into the product, prompting children to record their voices as they become confident and proficient in speaking English words, phrases, and sentences. The immediate feedback provided by the system helps children develop excellent English pronunciation and supports comprehensive vocabulary acquisition.
The Age of Learning Foundation
“It’s both a personal and professional goal of mine to help educate children in the world furthest from opportunity, and the Age of Learning Foundation is going to make a big difference in the lives of millions of kids and families.” —Doug Dohring
In 2020 at the Education World Forum in London, Doug Dohring announced the launch of the Age of Learning Foundation, which he leads as Chairman. The Age of Learning Foundation is a nonprofit organization with the mission to fundamentally improve the educational opportunities of children in low and lower-middle income countries and communities worldwide. Both directly and in partnership with governments and NGOs—including UNICEF and UNESCO, as a member of their Global Education Coalition—the Foundation strives to help families and educators ensure that even the most disadvantaged children are able to build a strong educational foundation and take advantage of opportunities for personal development.
NeoPets
Doug Dohring founded NeoPets, Inc., in February 2000. Under his leadership, neopets.com grew to become one of the top-ranked online youth communities in the world, with more than 140 million accounts created by its users globally. The site generated more than 8 billion pageviews per month in 11 languages. Its monthly pageviews per active user and time spent per active user made neopets.com one of the stickiest sites in the world.
In 2001, Doug was named one of the top 100 Marketers of the Year by Advertising Age.
Doug Dohring served as Chairman and CEO of NeoPets, Inc., from its inception through its successful $160 million sale to Viacom in June of 2005. He continued to serve as CEO through September 2006 at the request of Viacom management to complete a successful transition to a new management team. Doug Dohring and NeoPets were the subject of a Harvard Business School Case Study.
The Dohring Company
In 1986, Doug Dohring founded The Dohring Company, which within five years became a top-60 market research firm in the United States.
In 1998, with the internet growing rapidly, Doug secured and launched OpinionSurveys.com, which he grew into a multimillion-member online market research panel. In 2004, OpinionSurveys.com was acquired by Greenfield Online, a NASDAQ-listed public company and one of the largest market research firms in the country at the time (later acquired by Microsoft).
The Age of Learning Headquarters is in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, California, where Doug Dohring resides with his wife, Laurie. Doug and Laurie have five grown children, including two sets of identical twins, and four grandchildren.