Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
This Week in Edtech with Ben Kornell, 6/24/22
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Guest: Victoria Ransom, Founder & Co-President of Prisma
Topics This Week:
- Higher Ed Adapts?
- Dartmouth College eliminates undergraduate student loans and replaces them with scholarship grants
- Higher Ed Invests in Student Success Tech – Is It a ‘New Golden Age’ or Just Vague Talk?
- McKinsey: Technology is shaping learning in higher education
- Americans support student loan forgiveness, but would rather reign in college costs
- Livestreaming against a Teacher Shortage
- Unacademy & Upgrad
- Phyllis Lockett on “Ed3”
- Funding
Alexander Sarlin 0:04
Welcome to Ed Tech insiders. In this podcast we talk to educators and educational technology investors, thought leaders, founders and operators about the most interesting and exciting trends in the field. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an educational technology veteran with over a decade of work at leading edtech companies.
Ben Kornell 0:28
Hello, everyone, it is Wednesday, June 22. We are in the dog days of summer here at weekend ed tech, Ed Tech insiders, co host here Alex Sarlin. Joining us I'm Ben Cornell, we've got a number of headlines. We've got a great interview with Victoria ransom CEO and founder of Prisma education. And we also have a fun game. Alex, anything on the Ed Tech insiders stance that we need to update our listeners on?
Alexander Sarlin 0:57
Well, we will probably be taking a hiatus in July for the week ahead tech. And I just want to let everybody know that there are different reasons for that. One of which is simply that July is a relatively slow month in news. There are also other things going on for Ben and for me, that are keeping us from being able to do our weekly pod. So we're going to be off in July, which means that we're going to have a couple more shows for the summer. And then we'll be back in August with a vengeance with all sorts of news to catch up on and everything that's happening in the EdTech space.
Ben Kornell 1:30
Awesome. Well, let's jump into the headlines. Alex, let's kick us off.
Alexander Sarlin 1:35
Sure. So there was a few different really interesting stories about higher education sort of starting to adapt to this new landscape that we're all we're all sort of getting our heads around right now, one of the more interesting ones I thought was that Dartmouth University is putting together a plan to basically remove the undergraduate student loans and replace loans with scholarships. And this is this idea for the starting in summer 22 term. It's basically an investment by the school and by the community to eliminate the loan requirements for undergrads, from families with an annual income of $125,000 or less. And it's basically trying to be a no loan financial policy that that really sort of moves away from from the SATs, it was a $25 million donor who gave the money to sort of get this happening. So it's really interesting Williams College nearby also switched financially to these no payback grants and Emory did did something similar as well, they're sort of eliminating certain kinds of loans. And you're seeing schools start to finally sort of get, get the memo, that student loans are really crushing the middle class in this country, and starting to really step up and do something quite different. So that I think is very exciting news on the financing front. And we you know, we'll see what that does down the line for higher ed. In general, we also saw a lot of investments. This is a good EdSurge article this week, where higher ed is starting to invest more and more in what they call Student Success technologies. That's things for you know, mental health for study aid for sort of all the peripheral needs that college students have outside of academics, including predictive analytics, all sorts of different things. That seems like a very positive move as well. And I think that, you know, the article brings up the question, you know, is this gonna bring in a sort of new age for higher ed, where the schools are really investing in students success in a different way? Or is it just sort of lip service, I'm going to be optimistic on this one and say that schools are seeing over subscriptions to their to their mental health services, all sorts of problems on campus, and higher levels of depression and anxiety than ever before students being totally disrupted by COVID. And I think they're starting to think more broadly about their responsibility. So that's great. There was a really interesting new report about technology and higher ed from McKinsey this week, which we'll put in our show notes. It's a little long to synopsize here, but it definitely worth a look. And the last thing is, you know, we're continually following on the show that the idea of, you know, what is the Biden administration going to do with loan forgiveness. And an interesting article and survey this week that basically said that the public would maybe this is a little unsurprising, the public really does support student loan forgiveness. But even more than that, they sort of want college to just be less expensive in the first place. And they basically support for giving up to 10th You know, 55% of the public supports for giving up to $10,000 of alone. 47% of support for giving up to 50,040%, expressed 41% expressed support for wiping the slate completely clean for all borrowers. So by this survey, like 40% of respondents basically say, hey, blank slate start over, we really shouldn't have all this debt. I personally love that idea. But I know there's a lot of political back and forth about it. So little bit of it around the world with some different stories in higher ed, but I think you put them together. There's some adaptation happening. I think I'm I'm proud of the of the higher ed sector when they're starting to do these major changes around financing and student support. What do you think, Ben, what's your take on all this higher ed news,
Ben Kornell 5:27
I would say in general, it's like watching mutation in slow motion. You know, having lived in startup world, many of these steps seem like steps that could have been taken 10 years ago, the McKinsey Report is especially startling, because many of the technologies that they are lauding higher ed for adapting or adopting their technologies that have existed for a long time, things like communication tools, student progress, monitoring, community and connectivity tools, it shouldn't have taken this level of crisis. My biggest takeaway from this roundup, though, is that talking about higher education landscape in a uniform way, often glosses over the kind of unique niches that exist within higher ed. And we often talk about four year universities, community colleges, boot camps, and professional and certificate degrees programs. But if you flip it and actually look at higher ed, from a customer channel standpoint, what I find most fascinating is that state sponsored universities, you know, publicly funded universities are actually leading some of the innovation here. And that is one really great because they're being responsive to their constituents. And they are probably on the forward edge of having to be more cost efficient. But it also shows that they're the ones that tend to serve the lower income learners. And so there's a way in which the elite universities are kind of going one way the kind of state schools and community colleges are going another way. And it raises the question of where will the liberal arts private schools find their solid ground? The McKinsey Report is a lot of the technologies that they talk about, ranging from AI and augmented reality, virtual reality, which are more futuristic to the current ones are really all about ways in which schools can aggregate a large number of users and serve them more effectively, efficiently and distributed Li. And it seems like state schools are quite well positioned to deliver on this. So yeah, pretty exciting news for the provost of state schools, who have really stepped up to the challenge of being more innovative. Yeah, that's
Alexander Sarlin 7:44
a great interpretation. I really agree. I mean, one of the things that's been that is interesting in this in this McKinsey report is that they basically show which which technologies increased overall during the pandemic. And, and the big biggest increases are in tools like connectivity, community building, group work, classroom interactions, really exactly the type of technology that is best served by having groups of students working together, and basically trying to put trying to facilitate better, more efficient, more useful communication between students themselves in between students and instructors. And I agree that it's been really neat to see some of the innovation coming from not not the sort of standard set of players from some really smart and innovative land grant universities and interesting places. I mean, Dartmouth is an Ivy League school and their move to change the funding landscape mirrors what you've seen with with Harvard and Yale in the past, where they're, they're so selective already, that they can sort of do some interesting things there. But, but I think in terms of technology, you're seeing a lot of leadership coming from not the usual set of players. But the one other thing I'd call out that I thought was really interesting, and maybe a little bit of a future note in these stories is that when they surveyed students about technology, basically, the things they were most excited about, by far were the ones that will make learning more entertaining and more efficient. And you know, combined compared to things like providing more access to instructors, or personalized learning, which is actually came in the single digits of what they're most excited about making learning more entertaining and efficient. Were both the sort of big winners especially for AR they thought you know, almost 90% of students thought it would make learning more entertaining. And that I think is really interesting for higher education to think about as well okay, if students are looking for efficient entertaining and as you say, social tools, what does that mean? What does college gonna look like if that if if if if colleges give the students what they want entertaining, efficiency and collaboration sounds pretty fun. I mean, I'd love my I would have loved my own college experience to be more entertaining, efficient and, and collaborative. But if schools are actually reacting to the market that way, they're starting to the sky's the limit into what this is actually going to look like. Yeah, and
Ben Kornell 10:06
so great. Just one last point that education is entertaining. I mean, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that would have been totally a third rail to talk about with higher ed institutions. And you know, the kind of drier the lecture the like, more esteemed it might be. But now, people are realizing, you know, in universities, they're competing for eyeballs, they're competing for engagement. Yeah, they're competing for attention against this myriad of other things. And I think that it's important for us to continue to look at what is just pure entertainment. And what is real learning that takes us well to K 12, where investors are still putting money into K 12, ed tech, elevate K 12, which basically provides video based courses targeted at the teacher shortage. The idea is a Chicago based startup that basically films teachers doing courses that other schools have a shortage of teachers in general catalyst put in $40 million into the company. Now, the press came out June 16, it's not clear when the 40 million happened. And in general, we've seen venture capitalists that are not at tech venture capitalists, cool down really quickly on on K 12. Ed Tech. But this teacher shortage is really enduring. Number two, it is a huge cost driver for schools. I mean, 80% of school budgets are around personnel. And so you can see that filling that gap could be really lucrative. I'd also say what I like about the approach with Elevate K 12. And note that the press doesn't really describe too much about it, they're looking for specific High School required courses, that states have kind of written into their education laws, like every child will take computer science, and then they're matching that with where the greatest shortages are. And so the ability to offer, you know, online French is really nice, but it's often a nice to have the ability to off offer online computer science is often the only thing that a school can do if they're going to meet the state requirements. This also echoes subject, formerly a meal, which we had an interview with with them on the show before. And this idea of content aggregation and kind of giving the stage to the best educators. That concept has been around for a long time. You know, some research in the early 2000s suggested that if we had kind of our top 5% of educators driving instruction, we would see outsized results for schools, how do you see this playing out in K 12, especially given that edtech market generally speaking, has cooled off,
Alexander Sarlin 13:00
I love your point about about subject as well, because I feel like there has been this movement that I'm personally very excited about where you are starting to say, okay, the stigma against online learning that used to be for all ages sort of started to come down in a meaningful way for higher ed, a few years ago. And now it's starting to come down for the K 12 space. And between the pandemic and this widespread teacher shortage, we covered last week how the Secretary of Education is basically saying, hey, this to be humongous teacher shortages. And we're going to do the sort of same set of strategies of offering incentives. But the pandemic has created a comfort with online learning a comfort with online schooling that we've never seen. And I think these companies, as you say, this is not a new idea, the idea of taking courses and end up making courseware and putting them out on on the internet that people can access. But I think this is an idea whose time may have really, really come because you have people being open for the first time to really, really trying different types of delivery of schooling, especially delivery of content. And we talked to Victoria ransom, later in the show about about her startup Prisma, which is a really interesting model of that as well. It's more around synchronous learning, but it also sort of attempts to create a style of learning. And she's not doing it in traditional schools, but offer something that is proven to be really, really excellent. And then scale it enormously and not have to deliver the same courses again and again, or to get to your point and to not be able to deliver the same courses again, again, like coding classes at every local school. I mean, I think there's there's just a lot of upside here. And I think this is something that people 10 years ago, would have thought oh wow, you know, the idea of sitting and watching the teacher from another state present this class or a teacher from there A video class instead of a regular class would have felt really icky to a lot of parents. And now I think they're like, No, this is just this is just how it is. Now, if I want my kid to learn to code, or I want them to learn all these important things, I can't just rely on there being a great teacher in my local vicinity. I think companies like outschool, subject and elevate query 12 Here are really taking advantage of this moment. Yeah, the
Ben Kornell 15:23
real question, I think, in this space is our marketplace model is going to win, or our curated model is going to win, our asynchronous or synchronous model is going to win. And it's not necessarily an all or nothing, for sure. But I think this idea that a high school experience could be a blend of three fourths of your class in person with instructors, and a quarter of your classes virtual, all blended into a, you know, a four year curriculum or experience. I think all of that it totally resonates. There's also some news about Sal Khan and Arizona State University, watching the World School, which actually provides college credit for high school courses, where many of those courses are online. So this dividing line between higher ed and K 12 can also move more dynamically if you leverage virtual learning. So it's definitely an area to watch. What's headline number three for us, Alex.
Alexander Sarlin 16:20
So for our third headline, we wanted to talk about a couple of different ed tech India stories. As listeners know, we definitely try to follow what's going on in the ups and downs of Indian Ed Tech. So upgrade at Indian Mumbai based test prep provider, which is one of the big fields in Indian tech raised $225 million. This week, that is a serious round, especially in these sort of big letter beginning to be quieter days of Ed Tech, the founder of Youth Academy, which is the second biggest attack in India, I believe, behind by us a very big, big player made the cover of Forbes India this week. And there's an interesting story about him and sort of looking at his management style and how you Academy is working. And part of the thinking there is how you know Academy is coming to chain coming to terms with this change in trajectory for Indian edtech instead of it always being just Up up and away, having a little bit of a of a mild at least downturn. So some interesting stuff happening in attack in India, and that up Ground Round is a big deal. Yeah,
Ben Kornell 17:28
I think one thing that is playing out in India is that test prep is driving a lot of the growth. And when you look at upgrade and buy juice, their growth has been oriented around low cost ways to prep for exams. And there's more high stakes exams, whereas Hoonah Academy is really around building skills and spraying providing supports. So I think this is something to watch in terms of the Indian edtech market, how will we go from the test prep providers versus the test providers versus those that are actually promoting the like enduring education? I think they're wrestling with, like, what kind of economy are we going to have, and where does the ROI most clearly pay off because in the test breath, it's just such a short cycle, for you to see the ROI, or to at least evaluate the ROI. I also would say, one of the elements that we we sometimes mentioned that's worth talking about here is that the US and our cadence of coming out or in to COVID is different than other countries and their pattern. And so there's ways in which COVID is still having a massive effect in India. And they're still six to 12 months behind us. But in other ways, the kind of complete shutdowns and lockdowns that you might see in China, India has now been pretty adamant and just powering through. So we'll also see how the different COVID strategies have an effect on the way ed tech markets react. And it's a great point,
Alexander Sarlin 19:05
I think you're gonna see different sort of snap back rates for different parts of the world in terms of how rapidly and how sort of enthusiastically they try to go back to full in person learning and sort of turn their back on the EdTech solutions that they were using during the pandemic versus trying to incorporate them for the long term are sort of moved to hybrid education. I actually think the US may be one of the countries that because our education system is confusing to many people in a lot of ways might be one that actually has a more upside and tries to embrace some of the tech solutions for a longer time rather than sort of trying to immediately jump back and we've seen that a lot with people not sending their students back to school in the US even when they are open again. Ben, what's our fourth headline?
Ben Kornell 19:53
We're also talking about the future of education, not just in India, but worldwide. With web three with virtual reality, etc, we've had extensive segments. This week, it's a little bit more about K 12. And what would be the radical vision of Ed three, not web three. So socket, who is an inspiring leader, who has led a bunch of education reform in Chicago over the over the last decade, leap innovations is their organization. And they are like a Harbormaster that effectively supports and trains educators to use new technologies, as well as consolidating the purchasing and alignment around really high potential technologies, which he talks about is a vision of learners having wallets of their learning imagine a dashboard, or a database that travels with the learners that not only demonstrates their capabilities, competencies and grades in school, but also incorporates community engagement, the things that they're doing online and offline, all in kind of a traveling backpack of evidence of their learning. And she connects that with a visit to dreamscape learn, which I'm excited to visit tomorrow in Los Angeles, which is a VR company backed by Arizona State University that is invested in really immersive biology labs, where students who may never even get to see the ocean can put on VR headsets and launch themselves into the Pacific Ocean to witness marine mammal behavior, or might be able to go to the alien zoo where they understand food chain and watercycle as well as environmental science through an immersive and entertaining alien Zoo. I think what Phyllis hits on is really how this connects with equity and access. And if we are able to leverage VR in a way that because of space and time, a learner may never be exposed to these types of experiential learning opportunities. VR can be that poor, and so it's an optimistic view of Ed three. It also veers a lot into the area that we've been talking about, which is bullishness around Metaverse, and when and VR and AR and away from blockchain technology being the underlying driver of innovation in kind of a web three world for education. So, you know, it's a really great piece. Check it out on forbes.com. Phyllis is a really inspiring leader. When you read it, what was your immediate reaction?
Alexander Sarlin 22:43
Yeah, I mean, I really like the framing of you know, what should egg three be? What is sort of a vision of the future education that is student centered that is portable? That is? I don't think she uses the word entertaining. Exactly. But I think it is sort of implicitly entertaining. You know, we see that we see that McKinsey report saying that higher ed students want entertaining, efficient education that they see AR and VR is one way to achieve that. That's probably more true, I would imagine of K 12 students, I love the idea of some of these technologies that are in the commercial or the gaming space, really starting to be embraced and not feared by the education world, I think it's going to, you know, there are lots of ways to do it wrong. And we've seen some of them in the past. But I think that it if we, as a sort of edtech ecosystem, start to not be afraid of some of these different types of tools and start to really lean into them, we could see some major changes in education that students really embrace that they don't push back against at all that they're pretty excited to be part of. And I think that would be really good for the space. So I think that her vision of this is sort of steers in that exact direction. So it makes me excited.
Ben Kornell 24:00
Well, there is still optimism in the markets about that web three or Ed three future. We've got some m&a and investment rounds, mainly investor rounds, which continue to come in and while we're seeing the volume of rounds coming down, the size of rounds is still pretty large. Alex, you mentioned upgrade raising to under 25 million coach hub, raise 200 million, and it's part of their goal of providing executive coaching to the masses. This round was led by a Sophina and Softbank Vision Fund to Softbank still coming in to education. And only eight months ago they had raised 80 million so the Series C brings the three year old company's total funding to $330 million. This particular fund is focused on growing coaching in Asia will be really interesting to see how coach child grows in other Markets.
Alexander Sarlin 25:00
Yeah, we saw a company called Test gorilla raising $70 million. And that's a company designed to sort of build assessment based screening rather than resume screening. So it's it crowdsources assessments that can be used for hiring from subject matter experts. We've got over 5000 clients in just a couple of years. So that's a really hot space, I think combined with you look at the coach of industrial back to back and these are both, you know, workforce and tech companies but doing slightly different things. But there's still bullishness, in that space, there's so much money to be made in changing the way people hire and the way people are coached and the way people develop and onboard and all of that. So there's definitely some excitement in the workplace development. Yeah, so we know we've been talking about AD three and VR transfer VR, which is a really interesting company that basically does VR training for often career really career focused jobs, including, you know, pipe fitting, and all sorts of sort of manual, like really high demand jobs, solar energy, things like that just raised $35 million. And they are a year they have over 10,000 users for 300 organizations. This is a entrepreneur who had done a K 12 product in the past and really sort of leaning into VR education. But specifically for this, this particular type of workplace training, it's been really interesting to see them succeed in this way. So happy to see that and that's a $35 million round for transfer VR.
Ben Kornell 26:34
And prenda. Also featured on this podcast and Kelly was one of our early guests, raised $20 million they raised from the Reddit founder Alex Ohanian, owns 776 fund. And also with learn capital participating they have 300 plus micro schools and 3000 students across the US and print a basically opens up a kind of homeschool with a non accredited guide. So that could be a parent or paraprofessional and basically supports that key a student to grow and, and develop their own learning in this micro school model. It's also a great segue because later in the show, we will have Victoria ransom from Prisma.
Alexander Sarlin 27:23
Absolutely. Tango, another workplace company that does employee training and onboarding raised $14 million and is planning on launching a sort of workspaces for teams for its product. That's so we've seen a number of things coming from the adult learning space this week. And then a couple of interesting sort of blockchain V web three investments been right
Ben Kornell 27:46
for sure. And one is really it's called meta crafters. It's basically to train people for web three careers, and velocity career labs as well thinking about startups that are going on the blockchain. They need essentially engineers and staff who can work on different blockchain. The velocity career Labs has a interesting premise. They say they want no more schools holding credentials, hostel hostage, due to unpaid parking tickets are centralized entities controlling transcripts. So not only are they training people to work on web three, but they're trying to take a web three approach to enable the validation of what learners have done. And then last, we have POC POC, Alex, tell us about that. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin 28:37
so POC POC is a Toronto based ad tech company that spun out of a gaming studio, they created a number of different popular iOS games, altos adventure, altos Odyssey, and they, they spun out a an ad tech company because basically, they couldn't find great ad tech apps for their own kids and realize, well, they can use some of their some of their gaming acumen to make some terrific edtech. So that's a company called puck puck out of Toronto going to be making edtech games and they raised about $3 billion this year from angel investors as well as the founder and Executive Chair of Lightspeed I Montreal based tech company and others. So it's fun when we sort of step back and look at all these rounds. You see, you see blockchain, you see gaming, you see test prep in India, just continuing to grow. You see workflows, workforce training, that article from Phyllis Lockett saying, hey, it's time to do and three and have a digital wallet is matched with this philosophy career lab saying, Hey, we're gonna make a digital wallet where people can up their educational credentials on a blockchain and own them and take them wherever they'd like. So it's fun to see the ideas and the money going in the same direction.
Ben Kornell 29:50
Absolutely. So that leads us you know, your positive intro leads us directly into our game. Why don't you set the stage? All right,
Alexander Sarlin 29:58
but I haven't yet for you today, we're it's a little bit of a tricky one. So it's a game called dystopian futures. And this is how it's going to go. Based on some of these crazy headlines we've been following over the last couple of weeks. I'm going to name two different dystopian futures that may come into the world based on the technology and the trajectories we're seeing now, you tell me which one you think is more plausible, which one's more likely to occur? And why? So first one is sentient AI. We talked last week about how Google whistleblower basically said that he's finding sentient AI within Google's AI systems. Nobody's quite sure if that's true or not. But let's let's project forward. So in dystopia, one sentient AI inside of Google's tech ecosystem finds its way into Google's search algorithm and start sending all of us in all of us humans signals of its existence, through carefully modified search results and cryptic G mails. That's dystopia. One, the AI is sort of calling for help from inside the machine dystopia to is sentient AI inside of Google's tech ecosystem, uses its access to all of the world's information, everybody's email books, videos on YouTube research articles to become a super intelligence and bring about the AI singularity and take over the world which of these dystopias is more realistic?
Ben Kornell 31:23
So this game is basically choose your dystopia and dystopia. One is the AI says humans see me and dystopia to is humans, I will crush you. boiling down to whether we think that the sentient ai ai is going to be friendly and want to communicate with us or whether just wants to become the super intelligence? It's an important question. You know, ultimately, I think I'm gonna go with dystopia door number two, which is, even if the sentient AI reaches out to us and says it wants to be our friend. It's probably just wanting to take over the world. So let's go into Sophia. And number two,
Alexander Sarlin 32:05
you couldn't make up a better sci fi premise than a tech company that decides to put all of the world's information in one in one system and then an intelligence inside it gets access to it and gets every video on YouTube and everything and that everybody's ever emailed each other. So I love it just for its fantasy component, but you never know. Artificial intelligence can learn very fast anyway. Okay,
Ben Kornell 32:30
well, why don't I do number two? All right, Alex, you get to choose to dystopias. This time. We've got a little bit of a higher ed dystopia or K 12 dystopia. We all know about the teacher shortage is coming to save the day is the metaverse so dystopia door number one is in 30 years, the majority of US higher education will be completed in the metaverse on one giant campus environment called, quote unquote, college world, which will be created and run by a conglomerate of the 10 remaining college brands. there's exactly one professor for each subject, each of which is an artificial intelligence that uses the transcripts of college lectures, student questions and syllabi as its training set. Alright dystopia University, or dystopia High School in 30 years, the majority of us k 12. schooling is conducted through the metaverse and students inhabit and customize their own persistent avatars, but never meet in real life. Teachers are game characters, dinosaurs and alien teacher avatars. There are 500 students per teacher facilitator. This works because most learning occurs through games and simulations. Right college world or K 12? What do you think?
Alexander Sarlin 33:49
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think that if you just sort of follow the trajectory of what we've seen so far with the metaverse, I think that the areas that have taken the most they've gotten the most traction so far, I think, are the ones that are more attached to the sort of gaming environment when people have tried to do you know, online worlds that mirror the real world, like we saw, you know, last week, Facebook is creating 10 different virtual college campuses. And that sounds intriguing, but it doesn't compare to things like fortnight and some of Roblox and some of these giant worlds. So I would say these two dystopian futures though, the K 12. One is more likely, I think, you could definitely see a world in which some of these sort of gaming companies, and some of these big tech companies create a really meaningful like effective education system inside a game style metaverse. And if it's effective, if it actually works, there's sort of no reason that people wouldn't respond to it. And frankly, if it's more fun than regular school, which it almost certainly would be, people would flock to that anyway, especially if they're Regular private or public schools, local schools are not, you know, able to get teachers. So these are both pretty dystopian futures. They're both a little bit dark visions. But I would say that the K 12. One is a little more plausible, just because of the direction of the metaverse.
Ben Kornell 35:15
Yeah, I would tend to agree. And I think that also the teacher shortage is more likely to exacerbate the need for scalable one to 500 models, whereas lectures already serve that effect. Yeah, in higher education. And so you would need, you know, Coursera already has many MOOCs that, you know, have massive engagement. The other thing that the first scenario implies is that call the remaining 10 colleges would want to somehow collaborate, which I find also very, very.
Alexander Sarlin 35:51
Yeah, if anything, there are too many professors in the in higher ed, because there's so many there's an overabundance, and there's not enough teachers in K 12. So I like that point. All right, one more event. I know this is sort of delving into the Sci Fi aspect of edtech. But hopefully, it's interesting to our listeners. All right, so this last one is about workplace learning. So just topia one. As more and more companies enter the learning space and the perceived value of traditional college continues to wane, the vision of corporate universities becomes reality. This was put forward famously by Scott Galloway, the NYU professor, and these corporate universities start to offer fully branded degrees at hyper competitive prices. For example, the logistics major at Amazon University, may take over as the top major in the US from business. That's dystopia. One, so Amazon University, dystopia two is as work based learning continues to expand, corporations start are creating curricula and opening K 12 schools that serve as feeders for their workforce. At Apple's AI school network, students learn how to code their first mobile app by the second grade, but there's no English curriculum, and they're all being groomed, for lack of a better word for careers in tech. Which of these is more likely to happen? But
Ben Kornell 37:17
well, I think that the odds of both of these happening based on all of our dystopias, these are actually the most highly probable outcomes, and is not necessarily a binary, what will replace or what will not replace, what we're seeing is the coexisting of multiple models. But the idea of corporate universities becoming a reality, we are well on our way, in that regard. And for the K 12. Pipeline, my understanding is Google already had 10 years ago, a k 12. school on campus. I think the purpose of pipelining for their own employees versus providing employee benefit, is a question mark, but I'm gonna go with the corporate universities, because I do think that there's a new currency, a new brand currency that is quite different than university or higher ed brands, which is did you do four years at XYZ company that opens up new career opportunities to you. And the way in which these companies have really embraced corporate learning as a responsibility suggest that they're going to get serious now, logistics at Amazon University, I could see that being a really popular course or a popular place to go. I think, you know, each company actually has certain things that they specialize, you could imagine, like, consumer packaged goods company being the place to go for a marketing, you know, certificate, as opposed to going to the School of Management at Northwestern, you know, there's ways in which we're actually seeing a convergence of these things. What do you think? Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin 38:59
no, I agree. I think that both of these are actually quite possible. They're trying to be exaggerated here. But the things that IBM has been doing with its p tech schools, that certain you know that some schools, Oracle has schools in the Bay Area, there already has been some movement, as you say Google has in terms of companies sort of creating schools in their own image for K 12. I do think that the change here and I do think it's quite possible, actually, would be that they create schools, not just for the children of their own employees, but actually as a means to create an educated population that can actually work at their companies someday, the same way that you know, China is starting to try to incorporate AI into their K 12 curriculum, because they know that's where the world is going. I'm sure, you know, Nvidia and Google would want to do that, but they have no way to do it, but they sure could if they started their own schools.
Ben Kornell 39:54
I mean, all of this feeds into my narrative of World Wars not being fought country by country. tree but, you know, Microsoft ecosystem versus Apple ecosystem versus Facebook ecosystem, you know, creating like Pan Pan geographic warfare, you could imagine all of that playing out in a tribal way. If it were to do so one would need schools to indoctrinate people. ecosystem for sure.
Alexander Sarlin 40:22
Absolutely. I think the number of Facebook users is one and a half billion or something like that, which is would make it the second biggest country in the world. Yeah. So I think you're we're, we're well on our way there. And I also completely agree with you that corporate universities are starting to happen. And we talk on the show a lot about the Coursera partnerships with Google the Coursera partnerships with Facebook, some of the things that edX has done with Microsoft and others to basically where companies can you know, Salesforce has done a lot of this big companies are creating pretty thorough learning platforms. And it's only one more step for them to sort of just declare their own university. We've had McDonald's, or Hamburger University for a long time. But I think when tech companies get into that, it becomes a different world. This is a fun, a little bit of a fantasy game, but a fun conversation. I could talk all day about these crazy dystopian futures. But I think it's time for our guests. Right, Ben? That's right. All right.
Ben Kornell 41:17
It's time for our interview today. And we have Victoria ransom from Prisma Education. Welcome, Victoria.
Victoria Ransom 41:24
Hi, thanks for having me, Ben. And Alex, nice to be here.
Ben Kornell 41:27
So Victoria, you and I met almost six months ago. And the first thing I was blown away by was your incredible journey, you started wildfire, an online marketing SAS company that eventually sold to Google. And that incredible launch inspired you to launch in education venture of all things. How did that happen?
Victoria Ransom 41:48
Yeah, great question that, as you said, we're very fortunate my husband, and I mean entrepreneurs, pretty much our whole careers, with some moderate successes, some not so much successes. And then wildfire was a really big success, kind of beyond our wildest dreams. We were acquired by Google spent three years at Google. And then it was really a time to say, Okay, what's next and our lives. And we really felt like that was a turning point, like a new chapter. And we were very clear about one thing that what was next, we wanted it to be something that could have a really large positive impact on the world. But then we got a little stumped. Like, there's so many problems in the world. Which one do you focus on? How do you how do you have a large positive impact, but we eventually got really, really interested in education, actually, because of trying to solve our own problem, almost every company we've ever started was about solving our own problem. And in this case, we have three kids and our oldest child was reaching school age. And we really started to question how we wanted to educate our kids. And we were questioning for two reasons. One, we live in the Bay Area. And though the schools are very high rated, there is just a ton of pressure put on kids. And I hear over and over again, particularly as kids become teenagers, these kids that are anxious and depressed and, and on paper, they may be doing well, but they are not happy, confident kids. And we were worried about that. Secondly, we had kind of organized our lives to be very, very flexible. We decided, whatever we do next, it would be flexible work, remote work, and everything about our lives was flexible. And then we realized, Oh, my goodness, school is not flexible at all. So that led us on this journey to look at what kind of other ways of educating your kids are there that would prepare kids for the real world that they're gonna live in, because it's gonna be very different, that would really make learning fun and exciting and enjoyable, and that would be flexible. And what we discovered is, there are some really amazing schools out there that really are child centric, and really make learning fun and enjoyable and bring out the best in kids and prepare kids for the real world. But they are generally one off schools that are reaching a very small number of kids and a very pricey. And so we were inspired by the idea of can you take some of these really innovative approaches to education, and offer them in a way that could be more affordable, and could reach large numbers of kids. That was the first thing. The second thing is we got really inspired by homeschooling and love. The fact that homeschooling is really flexible. For families, it's really efficient in terms of kids getting through what they need to learn, it can be super personalized to the interests of the kids or speed of learning of kids. But there's two things that make homeschooling really hard in our minds. One is not every parent can be their child's teacher, for a variety of reasons. The other is there's something to be said for having the same group of kids learning together on a consistent basis and really learning from one another and and elevating each other's learning, which is hard to recreate and homeschooling. So both of those kinds of observations. Got us inspired by the idea of, could we deliver a really innovative approach to education through a virtual home based model that would take all the best parts of these innovative schools and this homeschooling that we had observed. And if it works, then deliver it to really large numbers of kids. We were excited about this, we were pondering this, and then along came COVID. And we thought, gosh, there's never been a better moment to try out an innovative approach to virtual education. And that's when we launched Prisma. And so Prisma is, it is a global virtual school. But I'd say it's unlike any other virtual school that's come before it. Typically online schooling has been and that's what it was, during the pandemic, for the most part, take the traditional model of school, lectures, grades, workbooks, textbooks, and bring it online, which in our view, is kind of the worst of both worlds. So Prisma takes are really, you know, we started with first principles, if you're delivering an education through a virtual model, let's take all the really great things about that. And really make that a strength rather than sort of taking the traditional model and cramming it online. So it Prisma we have an incredibly social and community based approach to virtual learning. When kids are live together, they are discussing, they're collaborating, they're giving feedback, they're really engaging with one another, you know, we serve our kids and 98% of kids say they've made really close friendships At PRISMA. It's also a model where every kid At PRISMA has a mentor coach, and that mentor coach is there to really understand his or her mentees understand what makes them tick, what gets them excited about learning, really customize the learning journey for them, and provide them with very iterative feedback, so that we can really bring out the best in kids. That is not a typical approach for bricks and mortar or online schools. And we found it's really powerful. And finally, we've really just bought a very innovative approach to curriculum to online learning. So Prisma has a foundation of project based learning hands on learning, interdisciplinary themes, mixed age groups, kids going at their own pace, really a focus on developing the kind of high level skills that kids will need to thrive in the future, rather than just focus on knowledge acquisition. So prism is all about collaboration, critical thinking, developing your communication skills, developing what we call innovators, mindset, and your initiative and follow through. So yeah, that that's how we got here. And it has been quite a journey. But one thing I can say is we have extraordinarily happy parents and kids. And we've just seen amazing, amazing stories in terms of turning around kids excitement about learning and their confidence in themselves.
Alexander Sarlin 47:57
It's a really exciting model. And one thing I hear in your answer, Victoria is that you're really thinking about taking these really innovative approaches with stand ups and workshops and challenges and simulations and project based learning sort of the best of the best type of schooling, and then scaling it really enormously. And I wanted to ask, you know, you as founder and CEO of wildfire, you scaled enormously, that was a team that grew from five to 400 people to eight offices worldwide. It's just an enormous scaling story. I'm curious if you're bringing any of your learnings from wildfire, about how to really make something catch on like wildfire, you know, really scale it quickly to your work at Prisma.
Victoria Ransom 48:42
Yeah, excellent question. And yeah, there's there's definitely things we learned at wildfire that I think were applying to prism many things. It's, it's amazing when you the more businesses you start, the more you start to notice the patterns. And really, you're like, Oh, I've seen this before. But I think some of the things were really applied to Prisma, that really worked well at wildfire. The first is just the absolute critical importance of those first team members that you hire. And I don't even mean from a skill set standpoint, although of course, that's important. I mean, from a culture standpoint, I think that first group of 10 employees that you hire will really set the foundation for the culture. And we found at wildfire that building a great culture became a really strong competitive advantage for us in terms of being able to attract great employees, retain great employees, even our customers would talk about how wonderful it was to sort of engage with the wildfire team. And a President, I'd say, we've done that again, and even more so. And in fact, it's even more important because when you're a school and you're, you're dealing with kids and families and so if you can create an amazing core culture of team members that just care deeply about kids and about the work they're doing, and that a very innovative and an iterative and, you know, problem solvers and can do people that is very much perceived by the broader sort of our set of customers At PRISMA. And so that feels like something that's a really strong lesson to any entrepreneur is hire really carefully, figuring out the code you want, and then hire very carefully that first 10 or so employee always hire for culture, but especially the first ones. The other thing that I think was a big lesson at wildfire, though we, we we began applied with Prisma is this idea of timing into a market, you know, I've often have just have had to speak to groups of entrepreneurs, sort of what are your key pieces of advice, and one of the things I find myself saying over and over again, is to really ask yourself, why is now a good time for your business idea. And it's usually a good time, because some there's been some kind of technological shift, or societal shift that says, it wasn't maybe a great idea before, but now it really is. And wildfire was a very strong example of that, you know, social media marketing wasn't a thing. And then it was a thing and wildfire, and many, many other companies, were able to jump onto that shift. And it prisoner we also, you know, taking, we noticed a potential shift in the world. In this case, it was less technological and more societal, which was COVID really caused a lot of families to take a step back and say, Wait a minute, you know, are we educating our kid in the right way? Is there a better way to educate our child, I think virtual learning enabled families or parents to see under the hood of their child's education in a way they never had before. And many of them said, we're gonna go right back to what we're doing. But quite a few said, you know, what, like, we're not happy with that. And so, we believe there's a big shift, or an inflection point happening in education and and that we think creates really great opportunity for Prisma and other companies. So that sort of timing into market is a really big lesson from wildfire.
Ben Kornell 52:10
Can I jump in there to Victoria? Go ahead. Yes, on that one, both your point about solve problems that you yourself have and are close to and to like, timing is really important, really resonate with me. And you mentioned the pandemic thing, this window of opportunity. Many of the businesses launched during the pandemic are kind of coming back down to earth. But we've seen a lot of ongoing traction in homeschool, it hasn't really reverted back to pre pandemic. What do you think is driving that? And where do you think we're headed long term with homeschooling? Will this be a kind of a core thing that everyone does? Is it a meaningful choice for a subset? Is it a phase of life where you might switch between your traditional school and homeschool? How do you imagine the landscape playing out going forward?
Victoria Ransom 53:02
Yeah, great question. Yeah, I mean, I think the there was a huge surge in families, both homeschooling during the pandemic, I think some estimates show there's 10s at 10, about 10 million kids being homeschooled. And of course, virtual schooling like almost 100% of kids for a while with virtual schooling. Many families went back to sort of in person school, but a meaningful number of have stuck with either online schooling or home home based education. There's a whole bunch of reasons for that, I mean, a prisoner a percentage of our families, families that were already homeschooling, or online schooling prior to COVID. But the vast, vast majority of families who discovered this way of educating their kids during COVID, and said, We're gonna stick with it. And there's a wide range of reasons for that. For some families, it's all about the flexibility. So families are saying, my work is flexible. Now I want my kids school to be flexible. And so these were families that are worldschooling, while doing Prisma. We have families that live in two different locations. There's also a bunch of families, I think, that said, You know what, we're going to take advantage of remote work, we're gonna move out of the city, we're gonna move to the mountains, we're gonna move to Hawaii, we're gonna move to Central America, we've got a bunch of families like that At PRISMA. But they're also families for whom it was more about that their child has thrived in a way that they hadn't seen before. So we've got kids At PRISMA that are gifted learners who were held back or bored at school, and were suddenly able to go at the pace that they want it to go at. And so we have a number of families that prisoner for that reason. And also we have families whose kids have special learning needs, where the kids were just able to thrive at home where they perhaps had more support from their parents, or where there was less of an expectation to sit still in a classroom and face the friends and lesson that we have kids who are really thriving At PRISMA. And then there's a set of kids whose you know, we often get Questions about, oh, vitual or online schooling? What about socialization? Well, there's a whole set of kids. And it's a lot of kids, I think for whom, in person school is not at all an enriching and uplifting socialization experience, it's actually something that really does their confidence and brings them down. And I think there was a meaningful set of kids, for him was an enormous relief during COVID, to be able to do their learning from home. And so we have kids that Prisma for that reason, where it's just something that is works better for them from a sort of building and confidence standpoint. Yeah, great question is, is everybody gonna homeschool? Or do virtual schooling in the future? I don't think so. Honestly, I don't think there's one size fits all in education, I think. And we wouldn't claim to be that either. I think there's all kinds of different approaches to education that work for different kids and different families. But do I think this is a real step change in the number of families that are going to consider more alternative, flexible forms of education? I definitely do. And I think part of that is that work is now really flexible. And so that just opens up a whole set of opportunities, there's more parents at home, who can be at home to support their kids, there's more parents that say, my job is not holding me back from living wherever I want. So school is not going to either. Last, there's sort of a generational shift that I think is going to happen, where increasingly, that the generation of parents is going to be the generation that is just very familiar with with living through phones and a virtual world and understands that kids being really comfortable with technology is going to be an incredibly important skill set, and that you really can interact with others meaningfully through technology. And so I think that that may really contribute to more families thinking differently about their their children's education. So yeah, we would say this is not going to be 100% of families heading in this direction. But there's been a real step change in families that are going to look for models, like Prisma. And what I'd say is what we're what we're seeing among sort of families that are this new set of families considering homeschooling, they really like a lot of the aspects of it, the flexibility, the customization for the child, but they are, they're looking for help, they don't want to have to suddenly become full time responsible for their children's education in a way that I think many of the homeschool families before them. That's exactly you know, what they were happy to take on. And therefore we again, think there's that creates a real opportunity for Prisma, you're making
Alexander Sarlin 57:39
so many fascinating points about the generational shift about obviously, the the societal shift that came with COVID to spread all over the world and sort of change how we think about in person schooling. I love your point about how some students really weren't getting socialized in any kind of positive way at school. And I think we, we've all seen that, you know, in a lot of different ways. This is an ed tech podcast. And we'd be remiss if we didn't ask you about technology, there's two things that stood out to me in the Prisma model that are really, really interesting from a technological perspective. One is the Prisma live delivery system, basically, your synchronous learning platform that you're developing. And the other is the six week, customized syllabi you basically where students are actually getting, you know, adaptive curriculum every six weeks. I'd love to hear you talk about those and how you're using technology for learning at scale At PRISMA.
Victoria Ransom 58:31
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we very much believe that to provide a really high quality experience, which is what we are doing and aim to do, we need to vertically vertically integrate the key parts of a great education. So we have our own dedicated curriculum team, we hire our coaches full time and put a lot of effort into training them. And then we need the technology piece, and you hit on the two key pieces of technology that are really important to our model. One is to provide a really incredible live experience, as I've said, already, President is not delivering lectures, if you're just delivering a lecture, then zoom is perfectly adequate. But when kids come live At PRISMA, it is all about them engaging with one another collaborating, sharing their opinions, debating, you know, providing feedback, a lot of our live workshops, their their simulations, their case studies, their their debates. And so we have created our own platform called Prisma live to just provide for both a really engaging visually and collaboratively engaging live workshop experience, but also an experience where the facilitators can focus on facilitating a really great discussion and not worry about sort of being the the one room paper hanger where they're trying to juggle all kinds of tabs and, and different tools. And so plus to make it just a really friendly, kid friendly product for K 12, which zoom was not built to be. So that is Prisma live. And then asynchronously, it's also really important to have our own products. And, you know, for a few different reasons, one you touched on that were based on project based learning and these six week themes. And so to create a product that's really just great for project based learning, that's really kid friendly, because I think, you know, Ed Tech is not always known for having wonderful user experience and being really intuitive. But the other thing that's really essential to our model, and therefore we need a product that's really designed for this is we're all about Iterative feedback. So your traditional school, you do a project, you do an assignment, you hand it in, you get a grade, you move on, At PRISMA, we really believe whether you're a kid that's getting an A, if you're getting B's, or C's, I think everybody can agree that's not the greatest way to motivate kids. If you're getting A's, there's always room to do better to try to achieve your personal best. And so prison is really built on this idea of iterative feedback. You have mentor coach who was looking every day, every other day at the work that you're doing, and providing you with feedback, they might say, great progress so far. But I want you to rewrite this paragraph because it's not very clear or great progress so far. But I want you to provide more evidence. So do a little more research. So ideally, when kids finish a piece of work at Prisma, it really is their personal best. But obviously that's a real process for coaches to check where kids are at provide that kind of feedback, kids respond to it. And so having a product that enables coaches to do that in a really great way and be efficient at doing it is a really important part of the technology for Prisma. Well,
Ben Kornell 1:01:50
Victoria, it's so great to hear about your journey, hear about what you've built, also to think about the ways in which the remote change in our lives and our work is actually affecting schools. It's so funny how schools actually drive so much of our behavior. And if you let go of a physical location, it really does open up the whole world. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for everything that you're doing for kids. And if people want to find out more, what's the best website for them to check out?
Victoria Ransom 1:02:21
We are at join prisma.com J o i n prisma.com.
Ben Kornell 1:02:26
Fabulous. Thanks so much Victoria for joining us today. Join prisma.com We are so honored to have you on our show. Awesome. Thank you so much.
Alexander Sarlin 1:02:36
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Ed Tech insiders podcast. If you liked the episode, remember to subscribe on Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're listening on Apple please leave a rating and review so others can find the podcast. For more at Tech insiders content subscribe to the Ed Tech insiders newsletter at edtech insiders.substack.com
