Alec Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Learners. Learners, formerly known as UXR Collective, started as a small meetup in Toronto and has become an online learning platform for researchers and designers around the world. Before Learners Alec worked in product and user research at a number of Toronto-based startups including Thalmic Labs, Finaeo, and Meta.
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Alec Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Learners. Learners, formerly known as UXR Collective, started as a small meetup in Toronto and has become an online learning platform for researchers and designers around the world. Before Learners Alec worked in product and user research at a number of Toronto-based startups including Thalmic Labs, Finaeo, and Meta.
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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 ad tech companies. Alec Levin is the co founder and CEO of learners, learners, formerly known as the UX our collective started as a small meetup in Toronto, and has become an online learning platform for researchers and designers all around the world. Before learners, Alec worked in product and user research at a number of Toronto based startups, including Thalmic Labs for Neo and meta. Alec Levin, welcome to Ed Tech insiders.
Alec Levin:Hey, Alex, good to be here. Nice to chat with you.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, great to have you here. So before we get to learners and what you're doing right now, you have such an interesting, unique path into edtech. You're really deep in UX research and actually running conferences, before sort of considering yourself an educational technologist, give us a little overview of your path, how you got into UX, how you got into conferences, and now how you're in the EdTech space.
Alec Levin:I feel like this is true for a lot of my life, but it's dancers often asked backwards, and by accident. So the story with getting into research is I was at University of Toronto, studying biology was like contemplating life, and what was going to come next. And I was probably going to have to go to grad school because I couldn't figure anything else out. But I didn't think I was mature enough already enough. And I came across a startup that became called meta, which eventually, now I know Facebook is called meta, there's a connection there, funnily enough, but doing an interesting thing for biomedical researchers, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, I didn't know that you could just start a business, I thought you had to like ask for permission or apply for a license. This is not true, apparently. So I just said, I really wanted to be involved in this. And I was trying to figure out a way to be helpful, so that two would hire me. And the only thing I could think of was to take their prototype product and just put it in front of a bunch of the people they were trying to make it for and get some feedback. That turned out to be quite helpful and brought it back to them. And basically, that was a big part of what I ended up doing for them is like random, do these projects kind of person for them. And that was kind of my introduction to UX research was just taking stuff and putting it in front of people and learning from that experience.
Alexander Sarlin:And how did you go from UX research to running these conferences in Toronto?
Alec Levin:Yeah, so that is more, at least back in those days, not so long ago, but not not so recent. There were maybe a few dozen people doing this stuff in Toronto. And almost everyone was just working on their own. There weren't a teams of people doing this. Now today, there's whole departments where companies will have 50 people doing this kind of work, or more even. But it used to be just, you know, some teams would have one and most people teams would have none. And everyone was kind of confused. Not sure if we're doing it right. Not sure if we had figured it out, or we were making a lot of mistakes. And so I ended up creating just a little meetup, so people could get together and talk and whatnot. And it really started to take off. And we were starting to get like instead of seven people, we'd have 100 people come up to it. And at some point, we decided, you know, it was nice to have these little mini talks from people in the community. But it would be even cooler, if we had people who are real experts come in from real companies like Airbnb and Facebook, and whatever. And one day, we decided to just try and do a little conference. So we did a one day conference, there was about 400 people came, you know, put it on the credit card and hoped I didn't lose my shirt, and it all worked out. And that was the beginning of, you know, kind of fascination with trying to create learning opportunities for people, the feeling of being around others, and hearing so many interesting things. And being able to create space where people were able to develop and grow was just kind of intoxicating, and a lot of fun. And so that kind of began the journey into doing that for us.
Alexander Sarlin:So what I love about this story is that, you know, UX research is a relatively new field, at least the way it's sort of defined now. And we'll get into that actually. And what you're finding is that, you know, the need for community the need to get people out of their silos to actually learn from each other, feel out what are the best practices, the emerging best practices in a totally new field, and then bring people together and define, you know, expertise. This is all such a natural, you know, evolution of how new especially tech fields emerge. But what I really like about how you did this is that it was very casual and very social. And I think that really informs what you're doing with learners as well. So you know, I hate to go all the way back But you know, for those of us who are listening to this podcast may not know exactly what UX research is. And because that was the origin of learners, can you give us a little overview of sort of how the UX research field has evolved? And what what it really is what how it became its own field of study?
Alec Levin:Yeah, sure, depending on who you ask will give you a different story. So if you talk to, there are people who have been doing this for 20 years that tend to have come from a human computer interaction background, or who have PhDs in like cognitive science. And from my point of view, I think that the origin of modern practice is really around this idea of startups making new software startups that are capable of iterating very, very quickly and trying to figure out how to make something good. And the canonical advice was always go talk to users and like, you know, listen to what they have to say, and try and figure it out. And so the modern UX research practice is, I think, a lot closer to that, then, you know, the academic origins of some of the methods and approaches that people kind of take. So to kind of simplify this, I imagine a lot of the people listening are more startup people, maybe investor people. One thing that I think is held true from a lot of the conversations that I've had with other startup people and investors is often we are directionally correct, about where the world is going. But way off on the details. And so you can think of the practice of UX research is as a feedback function that keeps bringing it back to the core truth. So whether that's things like how you message and position your product, what the onboarding experience is, like, what kinds of features you prioritize. The idea is, we all have a rationale for why we think things should be a certain way. And it's usually based on intuition, or sometimes just guesses. And doing UX research, which is often involves interviewing users, sometimes looking up data around product usage, sometimes around surveys, it's bringing new input into the system to help us course, correct, hopefully, very, very quickly to get to where we're trying to go as fast as possible.
Alexander Sarlin:Excellent. That was really, really terrific description, I think it'd be really helpful for anybody who isn't as familiar with the field. And I actually wanted to take a sidebar about your meta story as well, because I have happened to actually know the origin of this meta Facebook company. Why don't we just quickly talk about it? Because I think it's so interesting. Yeah.
Alec Levin:I mean, at least from what I know about it. So the startup that I first worked at was originally called Science scape. And it was a combination of science and landscape. And part of the original idea was to see the landscape of science. And anyway, eventually, they changed their name to meta, and about two or two and a half years later, they were acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is Mark Zuckerberg makes his charitable foundation thing that he runs with his wife, Priscilla Chan. And anyway, they bought it, they run it now as part of their kind of science initiative. And then somewhere along the lines, it seems like they got the rights to actually own the meta.com domain. And next thing you know, you know, meta was following me on Twitter for about five minutes before they correctly unfollowed me and, and switched all the channels over and whatnot from their Facebook.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I worked with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for a couple of years. So I worked alongside the metta team. I was so funny. Yeah, terrific group of people. And med is an amazing product. It's basically like almost like a feed for biomedical researchers so they can know exactly what's going on in the field. Keep on top of it, it's a really beautiful product. Yeah. But Facebook, then took that, that acquisition and turn the whole massive ship towards meta, obviously about the metaverse, but yeah, super, super interesting. Ya know, really is. So as a UX research expert, you know, you think about user centricity, you think about how to make products, like you said, Get the details, right. It's not just the direction but the actual details, how do users understand the product? For a lot of our listeners, a lot of entrepreneurs who run at tech startups, and they may or may not have a UX researcher on staff yet. I'm curious if you could just share some high level ideas before we I know, we haven't really talked about learners yet. But just before we get into that, just a couple of high level ideas about what it looks like to do really solid UX research, especially in the education space, how can you make your product more learner centered?
Alec Levin:Yeah, that's a really, really great question. So I mean, some general advice that's not so specific to Ed Tech would be to make sure you have time every month to watch people use your product, you will learn a lot. And a lot of the changes that you kind of makes your product sometimes have some interesting consequences and second order effects that you might not be thinking about. So make sure you make time to watch people use your product. Make sure you have some conversations every month. And I'm kind of speaking more from the founder point of view. So where you can actually talk to especially people who've worked with you for a long time, because they're going to have the context of how you started and where you're going to let you know if you're still on track. So make time for that and then a lot People say that they're kind of like data driven, right? If you're in an earlier stage, and by earlier stage, I mean, you have less than, let's say, a million people using your product. So we're definitely earlier stage by this definition. But if you're earlier stage, a lot of the things that you see in trends you see in your analytics, or in surveys that you send out, it's very easy to kind of look at that as the end of the story. But that's often just the beginning of the story. So when you see really interesting things happening, whether they're good or bad in the data that you're collecting, that's the opportunity for you and go and have more conversations, because you're going to be missing a lot of context. And so over index on conversations, use the data that you have to inform rather than to drive decision making. And so that's kind of just more general advice, I would say, in terms of like edtech, in specific, there's some stuff that you should really be thinking about, that I think is particularly challenging for edtech companies, especially for those of you that are dealing with products that are for children, you have a lot of stakeholders that interact with this product, but also in a system in a very, sometimes bizarre ways, right? So you know, you have parents, you have the child themselves, you have administrators, you have teachers, all of them have different motivations and incentives. And it's important to understand what all those interaction points are, in order to understand how to build your product effectively. So a really, really simple example of this is one of the best parts of my day is when my kid who's in daycare, they have a really, let's say, poorly designed, and not so modern looking app for keeping parents informed, let's say their messaging system is terrible. And you know, a bunch of issues with it, but they send me a picture of my kid at daycare every day. And I love that. And even though it's a giant pain in the butt, I will continue to use that app every day, as long as my kids in that daycare. And so you know, the things that you might be thinking about as being important to your students, your learners, whoever it is in the system might not necessarily be the things that matter in terms of driving behavior, and adoption. So it's really important to understand that, you know, choices people are making today, and especially those interaction points between the various players, in order to get people to behave in often a more healthy way, or a more productive way that you're looking to encourage, let's
Alexander Sarlin:say, those are fantastic points. I love your example of sending you a picture of the student, because I think that those of us in ad tech sometimes project, a lot of motivation on to our youth. Parents probably want to know their children's progress and all these charts and graphs. And they may overlook some of the true motivations and make some assumptions that don't pan out. And I love the idea of that behavior. And I think you're exactly right, the behavior may be driven by things that you don't expect if you're sort of over oriented towards a very formalist education perspective.
Alec Levin:Definitely. And I think this is one of the things that's been holding ed tech back for a long time, right is building software for existing structures and systems, without really thinking about how we move towards a newer or more effective, more productive, healthier way of learning things. In a more kind of like broad sense, I think it's especially difficult for engineers and product managers who have come from very large companies to really sink their teeth into, they're used to people behaving in certain ways. And that just doesn't really hold true, especially at an earlier stage. So, you know, when we think about what motivates people and the way people make choices, I think a lot of the times we think about utility, and that's certainly important, but I would say a lot off and a lot more of the reason we do things is because of how they make us feel, whether it makes us feel like we're good and moral people or good looking or really smart, all those things are just as important, sometimes more important, you know, so for me feeling close to my kid, even when they're apart is a huge driver of behavior when it comes to how I interact with my daycare, for example,
Alexander Sarlin:fantastic example, I always think of companies like Duolingo, when you having that kind of thing, you know, that's a product that really tries to combine sort of media style incentives and gamified UX with education. And I think that, you know, they do a really nice job of using some of what we've learned from non education fields, in terms of, you know, people logging in because they want to feel smart, they want to feel experienced progress, they want to feel like they're the kind of person who's learning a language on their own. And some of it does are extremely motivating, you know, ideas, so and I think some companies that don't have that sort of a little bit of that consumer perspective, sometimes over index on utility, as you say,
Alec Levin:totally. And if you're working in ed tech, odds are there are other companies out there that have already figured out like a significant portion of the mechanics and And the system's thinking around this stuff that you should be borrowing from, you know, like you said that Duolingo is a great example of that. I think, you know, anybody who's trying to work and build collaborative software, I think should probably be looking at the way Discord is used when kids play video games, right, I think that's an excellent place to look for inspiration. One of the things for us is looking at the rise of tick tock as an incredibly, you know, frankly, addictive, but effective way at transmitting information. But more importantly, helping people discover things that they might be interested in, which I think is a staggering gap in the tech space today is around content discovery or just idea discovery. It's very, very hard. So you know, we can look to existing products in different spaces where it's much more cutthroat the competition from an experiential point of view, and take what they're doing well and copy it.
Alexander Sarlin:And where the metrics are about, you know, how many times you open the app and time on task, and you know, where they're trying to build, you know, and risk of sounding terrible, as you say, addiction, they're trying to build deep, deep engagement. I know tick tock. Yeah. Almost absurd engagement numbers, people can literally not kick their eyes or put it down. Yeah. But that's what we all want for our educational experiences. If we can get there. Exactly. So one more quick question. I know, we're still have not talked about learners itself. Yet. This is so unusual. But I love your UX research background. One thing that strikes me as really interesting, you talk about small scale being less than a million users. And of course, in edtech, that's, you know, that's the vast majority of companies, million users, and Ad Tech is a lot. But I think you're making a really interesting point about how, in UX, and in a lot of the tech fields, a lot of people work in enormous companies, they work in giant social media companies, giant banking companies. And so when they talk about being data driven, like you say, they can do these quantitative experiments, lots of A B testing, lots of you know, change this tiny thing in your in your flow and see if it increases the, you know, the payment rate by 1%. But in edtech, when the numbers are so much smaller, the value of qualitative becomes totally different. I'd love to hear you talk about that a little more than I promise we'll just some actually, yeah,
Alec Levin:sure. We can spend as much this is like my, this is my jam. I love talking about this stuff. So we can spend as much time as you want. It's a really good question. And I think, coming back to talking about human nature, this ties very directly into this, we have a fundamental comfort with numbers, when it comes to looking to make choices, whether or not those are actually helpful or reflective of reality. So zooming out and talking about, you know, how we use numbers to make choices versus how we use qualitative insights, you need to look at whatever it is you're working on, whether it's an individual feature or all the way up to an entire product, you have to look at it on a spectrum of whether or not you are trying to explore and discover or whether you're trying to optimize, right? And so if you're trying to optimize, and by optimize, I mean, you understand what is going on very, very, very, very well, like extremely well, you've probably been doing it for a decade, right? Then yeah, sure AB test can be effective. Looking just at the numbers, when you have a very clear understanding of what the interaction is and who the users are. And all that kind of that can be great. So for example, you know, if you're at Google, and you're trying to look at different types of search result pages definitely makes sense to do a lot of that kind of research. However, if you're not Google, and you're not dealing with billions of searches a day, and instead you're dealing with a few 100 people using your product, the reality is, is that you haven't really figured it out yet. And I promise you, you don't understand your users and the way they interact with your product as well as you think. And so for there, we want to almost always index on the qualitative work. So I put analytics in a bit of a different category where you actually it's reporting on what's actually happening, you know, definitely use that information, but use that to drive a conversation with people. So I can tell you from my experience, sometimes I will have interviews with individuals, and I look at their analytics. And I know they haven't used the product very much, right? And they'll tell me all kinds of interesting things, which are interesting, because there's no way they figure that out, just based on the on this based on what I'm seeing. So at the earliest stage, when you're doing exploration, if you have a product that is reporting on numbers, that should just only be used really to inform conversations with people. If you don't have a product or you're not tracking things, then you want to rely on conversations almost exclusively, because you're trying to figure out the shape of what you're building. And the details matter a lot, right? So a very, very simple example for that everyone can understand is around copy. Right? The copy on your website matters an extraordinary amount and whether or not you use one word to describe your product versus another. So for example, if I'm trying to sell an apple, right, am I selling an apple or am I selling lunch? Am I selling a health product? Right? Or am I or am I selling something that's just quick and easy, right? There's all sorts of different ways you can just position a thing. And that's going to should be informed by a lot of conversations that you have. Again, if you don't have a ton of users and you understand extremely, extremely well, those conversations should be the primary thing you should be using to inform that
Alexander Sarlin:really interesting description. And I agree. And I think that, you know, a lot of us, in product sort of follow these techniques that came from the Netflix's, or the Googles, or the, the apples of the Airbnbs. And think that everything has to be hyper quantitative and data driven. But really, for early products, or for as you say, pre products, that certain comment from a certain person or hearing from 10 different people that when they look at your site, this is what they think, is so much more informative than trying to look at a behavioral data and trying to draw extrapolate out these conclusions based on your very first few users Tony's instinctual to do that. And
Alec Levin:one thing to just add on to that is we just feel a lot more comfortable making decisions based on numbers, even if they're not well reasoned. So I believe it's called the McNamara fallacy, which is a really interesting thing that I think not enough product folks are thinking about, which is, I believe it's American general, during the war in Vietnam, he was reporting back to Congress, he says, you know, like Morris going great. Our casualty rate is like 10, to one. So you know, we're winning the war, right? But the reality is, is that the casualty rate had nothing to do with whether or not the war was being won hearts and minds are being wanted, they were being effective. So this idea that you can take a number and measure it and feel good about it, even though it doesn't actually reflect whether or not you're doing well. This is something that's kind of like a cognitive bias that we all have that we need to be very, very careful about, again, especially if you're doing something new, the numbers can be very, very misleading, right? We have to build model for how to understand those numbers. First, before we use them, and that is informed by the qualitative research that you're going to do.
Alexander Sarlin:That's a really good point. I have never heard the McNamara effect is that way, or I've never heard of the effect. So that's really interesting.
Alec Levin:I believe I got it right. I feel like I need to look it up and make sure,
Alexander Sarlin:yeah, he was the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. So it makes a lot of sense that that would be the kind of numbers they'd be looking at. Yes,
Alec Levin:yeah. Okay, I'm looking it up right now. I think I got it, right.
Alexander Sarlin:So where we left off with learners, you were doing UX research conferences in Toronto getting a lot of traction. But I don't think at that point, we would consider it an ed tech company, tell us more about how learners came to be and how you're incorporating technology into your delivery.
Alec Levin:Sure, learners isn't COVID, baby. So you know, we are running these events. And you know, again, if you come back to why the meetup was started, and why that conference was started, it was just what's the next step and helping people grow and learn. And you know, we didn't get into that stuff to be in the catering business, it just happened to be the thing that we thought was going to be effective. And then when COVID came around, and kind of squashed our big annual conference that we were doing, you know, we had a an important choice, which was whether or not we wanted to continue, or cancel or reschedule or do nothing. And we decided to try and make it put it online, but make a show of it. And like we hired a producer. And we pre recorded all these talks, and we professionally edited them. And then the other thing that we did was because we weren't paying for catering and venues anymore, we dropped our prices pretty dramatically. And something really interesting happened, which was one a lot of people learned a lot and digital kind of delivery of that content was effective for for a lot of people. But more importantly was a lot of people that we never would have met showed up, obviously online. And I remember there was a squad of about 50 people in the Philippines that stayed up to watch it live all night with the Americans and the Canadians and all the other folks on on our timezone. And then went to work the next day. And that was very inspiring to us. And you know, I reached out to talk to them doing qualitative research. And one of the things that we heard a lot was, this was the first time in their life that they had been able to participate in a learning event, or a learning experience. And that was hard to hear. And so for us, you know, it made us reflect on Well, what are the things that we have been creating? Well, we've been doing these conferences, they're very expensive, right? Nevermind, the ticket, there's the flights and the hotels, some people can't get visas. And whatever it is we've been doing, we've we've started to really realize how many people that wanted to participate could not afford to do so. And that kind of became the genesis for what we started to try to do with learners, which was to ask the question of like, how there are people out there who want to develop themselves and achieve a lot more in their careers, who currently are gated by not knowing enough things. They don't necessarily know what those things are, but they know that they want to grow and whatnot. And so that kind of started for us with building a web app to do long form content. We experimented with all sorts of different ways of doing long form content, including being able to record content anywhere in the world and edit it very affordably which was which was neat, but that eventually led us to messing around with some short form content, which is what we're primarily
Alexander Sarlin:doing today. You know, you are one of a number of guests we've had on the podcast, who have basically been forced into doing online delivery by the COVID. World in this crazy pandemic we've all been living through, and then found some of the, as you say, some of the the pros and cons, but especially the pro of online education, which is the incredible reach and access by lowering the price. By making it online, you got access to learners all over the world who maybe never would have been able to come in person. And I, you know, I can't tell you how many times we have heard some version of that from different people on the pod. But that's a great thing. And I think that's one of the biggest strengths of, of online delivery totally. On video and all of that. I want to ask about the other side, which is interesting, you know, an in person conference has some benefits, especially for learners and workers who are sometimes siloed, as you said, that UX researchers often are. And so how do you keep the sort of human connection and community spirit in learners that was in the in person get togethers? How do you keep that feeling of wow, I'm meeting interesting people, I feel like I'm part of a community. I don't feel as alone. You mentioned this 50 people from the Philippines, maybe all coming in together. So that might have helped. But I'm curious how you've addressed that so far, and what you're planning on doing in the future?
Alec Levin:I mean, I think first, it's important to acknowledge, like, we did not fully appreciate this, I think when we started but the absolutely foundational role that you know, whether you want to call it community or pure networks, or whatever plays in people's growth and development, it's enormous, even just helping people stay committed and stay connected. And, you know, this is one of the I think the hardest things that has not yet been solved, I think we have our way of starting to try and poke at it a bit. But this is definitely one of the hardest things to work on. And I think we're just getting started with that. So from our point of view, with the mobile app that we've been developing, one of the things we're trying to do is allow people to kind of interact directly with senior talent at elite tech companies who everyone wants to learn from. So to kind of take a step back in terms of what our mobile app is all about is, you know, to be brief imagine, like tick tock, but it's got learning content on it instead. And so there's things about it, that function a little bit different than tic tac, but the idea of a daily feed of content that is discovery oriented, is basically what we're building. And so, you know, the key thing that we're trying to do is stems from this realization, we had that the best teachers, and many of the best teachers in the world are not teachers, they are people who are craftspeople who work at really neat companies doing really hard things. They just don't have time. And so one of the things that we've been working on for the last two and a half years is how do we develop an experience and system and processes in order to unlock that supply of new teachers, because, you know, I can tell from my own personal experience, I've learned so, so much from just conversations with people doing really neat things. And we want to open that up to more people. So instead of me being only one person that gets to learn from them, we want a lot more people to be able to learn from their insights. So that's one of the things that we've been focused on and to talk to get your point around community. One of the things that we're launching soon is the ability to ask our content creators questions. So you could be a junior UX designer in Manila, let's say, and be able to reach out to a head of design at say, Dropbox and say, Hey, I'm going into some design interviews, what are some red flags I should look out for from the hiring manager, be able to get a video response that then everyone else gets to watch, too. So it's the opportunity to kind of learn together to comment on on stuff together, but also to interact directly with these people who, you know, they're just like a nice looking photo on LinkedIn most of the time, but to actually have a it's not quite a conversation, but it's getting there.
Alexander Sarlin:I love that. I mean, I think that you're honing in on some really interesting points about how online learning and community work, which is that, you know, the expertise is very widely distributed. And the number of people who actually have the ability and interest in sort of sitting down and making long formal classes or teaching at a university or, you know, retiring from their job, and then going to teach at a university is so limited compared to all of the people who are actively tackling interesting problems at any given moment. So the ability to connect them all together and allow anybody to share their expertise, but then to match with others, you know, who actually could use it expertise is I think it's a theme that we're seeing in a lot of really interesting and tech products right now. Actually, you know, we've talked about Facebook a little bit, but Facebook has recently launched the ability to sort of teach classes on Facebook. And the whole thinking behind that is that everybody can be a teacher, you know, it can teach something. So how do you make it as easy as possible to bring somebody into to teach? I love how you're thinking about, you know, tick tock short form videos and lowering the barrier to becoming an actual, you know, educator or quote, unquote, and sharing your expertise? Because I think those kind of informal networks are hugely powerful.
Alec Levin:Yeah, to build on that point a little bit, I think one of the questions that we've asked a lot is why courses? Right? It feels like that's our default to a lot of stuff, right. And if you look at a lot of that new ed tech players that have raised a bunch of money, it's different, you know, iterations on the idea, of course, we've had these things for a long time. And I think one of the things, an important question for everybody to kind of ask themselves is, when you pick a shape of the content creation, right, it locks you into being able to create certain types of content, but it also blocks you from being able to create other types of content, right. So for example, a lot of the stuff that gets shared on our platform, whether it's been longer form, or short form, is stuff that could never be taught in a course, because it doesn't fit, right doesn't mean it's not valuable, it's still really valuable. It just doesn't fit as a course. And so, you know, one of the things that I think are important, and I hope a lot of other edtech folks are thinking about is how do we open up new media, or new formats for us to be thinking about? And what are the different things that we could teach and talk about through those formats that we can't do right now? You know, one of the core things to unlocking our supply of creators, none of our creators make courses, right? But a lot of them are willing to do what we do, right, which is the short form stuff. Well, why is that, right? And I think a big part of it, again, is shorter form content, you don't have to worry about editing stuff. So it's easier to create, you have to worry about distribution, because we already have a bunch of users who are excited to learn from them. And you don't even have to come up with your own ideas that people are asking you questions, right. And so it takes something that is a huge amount of work, like creating a course, and instead gives you the opportunity to help others with something much smaller.
Alexander Sarlin:It's truly interesting point. And I think one that shows that you're thinking about the future of edtech in a way that I think is really powerful. Because I agree. I mean, you look at the schools and masterclasses and all of these companies that have sort of come out to, you know, allow more people to teach or people who are non traditional teachers, they do often structure them as courses, here's my master on this, here's my course on that. Here's my even like a seminar or webinar, but you look at the most popular types of media content. The two that jumped to mind to me for whatever it's worth are, you know, the Tick Tock dances, which are like, oh, yeah, incredibly viral. And that style of cooking tutorial that got very popular, this sort of overhead view, show somebody, you know, a 32nd video that shows you how to do a recipe really, really quickly and clearly. Not that that's what you're doing with learners. But it's a different, it's the
Alec Levin:exact same insight, right. And so, you know, just like you're saying, so I think part of it. So there's kind of two things that I think are pretty endemic problems in the EdTech space, from my point of view. And again, keep in mind, like, part of the reason I think we were exposed to this was, you know, we were trying to look for learning opportunities for an extremely niche audience that really had very little to go with, right. So you know, this idea of creating your own and creating those own opportunities. And years ago, we even did a course as well. And we learned a lot from that. This is what's driven us is our own creativity and trying to solve this problem kind of from first principles. So one of the problems is definitely like we were just talking about, it's like the delivery, right? How are we delivering information from one place to many other people, right. And so we talked about that, you know, there's platforms that are new, that are doing an incredible job, like tick tock, for example, and you don't do it exactly the same way. Of course, right? A 32nd recipe tutorial is not going to work for teaching, you know, whatever it is you want to teach, you have to think about how it's going to be different to but the fundamental of like the short form mobile video, it works super well, for shorter content, and we should do more of that. So that's one thing. But I think the second thing, and I think this one has been far more insidious, and I've seen, you know, it really makes my blood boil a little bit when I think about the ramifications of it is the lack of discovery opportunities in learning. It infuriates me because, you know, I was in a position early on in my career where I almost took out a very large loan to go to a coding boot camp. Yeah, right. And I don't know how far back that would have sent me. But it was a very significant amount of money for me at the time, and I didn't have the cash. I was considering borrowing. It was only because a friend of mine who was an engineer, who told me I would suck at it, and I'm not that type of person. If you talk me out of it, he's like, look, these other things. Sure. But this is not for you. Right. So anyway, I didn't do it, thankfully. But you know, in my neck of the woods, there are boot camps that will charge you 30 $40,000 and tell you that you can be a data scientist in three months, like, I'm sorry, you can't be in anything in three months. Right? So why are these business models working? Right? And I think it's because we have it when you're selling education as a product, your by definition, your customers are naive, right? They're buying learning. They're buying insights, right? So by definition, again, they're not in a position to evaluate their options. From a place of knowledge, right, they are ended up having to make choices based on whatever signals the potential service providers are willing to put out there. So if they are saying you can get a job in three months as a data scientist, right, that's the information they're using to make that decision to often take out that giant loan and take that program. And I think it's insidious, I think it's really nasty. And one of the ways that we can solve this is by creating discovery opportunities for people so they can understand more about what's going on. And that's one of the things that, you know, I hope, short form content, whether it's learners or other platforms can really help with because even just getting some hearing on a somewhat regular basis from people who are senior and experienced in the field will start to give you some ideas of where you might want to ask questions, what good even looks like whether or not this is something that you even want to pursue. And until we have that people are going to continue to mortgage their futures to take programs with schools that are not outcome driven, and cannot fulfill the promises they are making to a lot of young people.
Alexander Sarlin:Really deep and profound insights there. I have never thought of that sort of connection of if when you're selling education, your customers are, by definition unlearned, a naive, but I think that's really true. And that information asymmetry problem you're talking about is core to I think a lot of what we've seen in the education landscape for many decades. Yeah, and all of education sales, you know, do this, and you have this promise of an outcome. And whether it's a promise or a sort of vague hand wave, it's all dependent on somebody not having the full understanding of the landscape, which, by definition,
Alec Levin:yeah. In other industries, we regulate these things. And we put restrictions on them, whether it's payday loans, or whether it's who even knows what, but this is just not an area of focus for people to talk about how these institutions work in our communities and how they affect people. What are the results, rather than what are the intentions?
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, I think the slightly good news there is that I think there has been a movement over the last decade or so to start looking at, you know, outcomes as a core measure, you've seen, you know, gainful employment laws for certain kinds of colleges, you've seen for profit college chains shut down, because they are taking all that debt and can't fulfill it. But I think there's a long way to go. And if you start thinking about, you know, all of the different education options a student has, and how many of them sort of depend on certain levels of naivete, it's a good rallying call. I want to ask you one more question about learners. We've talked a lot about UX research, but learners is expanding its domains beyond UX research, it's also including design and product management, other relatively, you know, changing nascent field that are want to go into, but they don't know where to start. How did you choose to expand fields? And do you plan to continue to expand?
Alec Levin:Yeah, that's the whole. So in terms of how we think about content, I think we've got this one area that we've been kind of neck deep in for a long time. And, you know, the challenges around learning there are particularly painful, because there's so few options out there. But you know, there's more and more It's coming. But this is where we've started. And I think the way we're going to think about expanding is by going into like adjacent fields. So who are the people that a researcher touches a lot? Right? You know, and then a lot of design a lot of product management, okay, well, like who does the product manager touch a lot and expand that way, because one of the bizarre things that we've noticed a lot is, you know, when we run a UX Research Conference, only UX researchers show up for the most part. Well, that's kind of interesting, because, you know, when we think about what makes us effective at accomplishing what we need to accomplish at our work, of course, we need to be good at our own craft. But we also need to really understand the crafts of the people we work most with, because we have to collaborate with them a lot, right. And so I think this is an area again, more broadly, that I hope we see a lot of change in which is, we should want product managers to go and spend time learning about design, we should want designers to learn more about content. And we should want you know, UX researchers to learn more about finance. And so you know, as we hopefully are able to expand, we're able to serve more and more content that is not just obviously we want a good chunk of it to be within the craft that you happen to be in but to be able to serve from outside the craft to,
Alexander Sarlin:in my role as a product manager and instructional designer, I have found UX research and UX design partners to be the most valuable partners, you know, very consistently. And I, it's one of my favorite parts of the job is actually, you know, when you get to sit down and interview users, and I couldn't agree more that I think, you know, in this new tech world, we sort of want to specialize and the job market tends to want us to specialize because yeah, that's true. Yeah. But I mean, you're somebody who's done UX research and product in your career, and I think that there's so much overlap, there's so much shared knowledge and skills. So the adjacency system makes a lot of sense. And I think that even that feeds into your goal of helping people discover what they like, I'm sure you'd have people coming from a UX Research Lens, and then saying, hey, actually, some of this UX design is really interesting. Or maybe it's product, or maybe it's, you know, you sort of follow that adjacency and discover what your career actually would be, which is the exact opposite of diving deep on some of these, you know, super specialized bootcamps. It's an interesting philosophy.
Alec Levin:Yeah. Well, we'll see how it plays out, won't we?
Alexander Sarlin:Well, so, no, interesting. I'm really having fun with this conversation. I'd love to keep it going. But we're just about out of time for today. And I wanted to ask you that the two questions we end our interviews with, I'm really curious about your answers. First is, you know, what is the most exciting trends that you've seen in your time at learners in the last six months in the tech landscape that you think that our listeners might want to keep an eye on?
Alec Levin:I think one thing that it sounds a little sad, but I think is exciting, is there's been a major, I think erosion of trust between a lot of people and the institutions that we've used to rely on for learning. I think a lot of you know, historic institutions, whether they're colleges and universities or other learning programs, I think they've been promising a lot and not delivering very much. And I think people are starting to wake up to the fact that you can't just take it for granted, even if it looks really nice on your LinkedIn, or they give you a very fancy diploma or degree doesn't necessarily translate into their own personal and professional goals. And I think that's exciting, because now people are going to have to start thinking for themselves about what it is that they want, and what is an actual way that they can get it. And I think this will create a lot of really amazing opportunities for people who are starting new types of learning programs. So a couple friends of mine who run a thing called colab. Basically, they want to help people become product managers, designers and engineers and their entire program, they believe the only way you can do that is by actually trying to build a product, right? So they have an eight week long program, and they're awesome, you should check them out a thing is joined collab.io is you can for a pretty affordable rate, spend two months in a team that they put together for you where you're gonna get to collaborate with at least two engineers on every team, there's two engineers, one product manager, one designer, and you will learn a lot. And then you have to ship it to you have to actually put it out there, get some users that kind of thing. And I think that that's, that's an A great example of people going back to first principles, and what does it actually take to have the skills to do this work. And I'm excited to see a lot more of that, you know, this erosion of trust will lead to a lot more opportunities, I hoped for other people who really care about the outcomes and helping the people that they want to serve. So that I think is a really good thing. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:I mean, that is, it's not a downer. You know, it's interesting, I love that you preface that with, you know, this is a little bit of a harsh thing, but actually think that when that trust erodes, and when that sort of like obviousness of what your learning path, you know, should look like, quote, unquote, starts to fade away. And people start to say, well, maybe I shouldn't just do exactly what you know, is expected, or what my parents told me are what my friends say. And you say they have to start thinking for themselves. I think it has a benefit for the learners and for the learning institutions. I think we're starting to see a moment where people are saying, wait a second, you know, we can't just put out the same brochure we've always put out put up the same website and expect to fill.
Alec Levin:How about that? Yeah, exactly. It's
Alexander Sarlin:time to try something new. So yeah, experiential learning, like you mentioned with colab, and all sorts of, you know, ways to bring more value and more return on investment. I think that's healthy for the space. Yeah, I agree. I think it'll be good. And what is one book or newsletter, blog, Twitter feed any kind of resource, maybe it's a short video to your point that you would recommend for someone who wants to dive deeper into some of the many topics we've discussed today? Oh, man.
Alec Levin:This one's a bit controversial, but I'll explain why I like it. Because not everybody likes the content itself. But there's a book by a Stanford Hoover Institute economist whose name is Thomas soul that I recommend, especially researchers read called economic facts and fallacies. The reason I recommend it is because what he does is take the exact same data and datasets that people use to come to certain conclusions about, you know, how the economy is doing and who's doing well and who's doing not well. And he comes to the exact opposite conclusions by analyzing it in a different way. And so one of the things that I think I talked to, I think this is good for founders and investors, certainly, but I think also especially researchers, is you need to be able to like, look at whatever it is from a number of different angles to come to what is the most reasonable perspective about what's going on in reality, and I think that, you know, reading a book like that can help you look at A lot of the things that I certainly think your thought were true before reading it and explaining them in a different way and analyzing it from a different lens. And all of a sudden, you realize there's a lot more gray in the world that you might have thought. So that's one that I really like.
Alexander Sarlin:That's excellent. So we will put a link to that book economic facts and fallacies by Thomas Sol of Stanford in the show notes for this episode, so you can access it. Of course, you can also use the show notes to find learners, we'll put a link to colab and everything else that was mentioned here, Alec Levin, so interesting to talk to you. Your perspective on on all of this learning, and I think your transition into Ed Tech has given you a enormously powerful and profound perspective. So really appreciate
Alec Levin:appreciate that. Well, I look forward to catching up with you again soon, Alex.
Alexander Sarlin: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 ed tech insiders content subscribe to the Ed Tech insiders newsletter at edtech insiders.substack.com