Guests: David Harris, OpenStax at Rice University & Justin Weinberg, Aktiv Learning
Topics This Week:
Funding + M&A
Guests: David Harris, OpenStax at Rice University & Justin Weinberg, Aktiv Learning
Topics This Week:
Funding + M&A
Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top edtech companies. Hello, everyone, it is August 17. Welcome back to the weekend ed tech, Ben Cornell and out Sarlin here. Great to have you with us. Alex, what's our highlights for the week for Ed Tech insiders? So for Ed Tech insiders we are we have all sorts of interesting interviews coming out throughout the week later in this episode, we're going to talk to Justin Weinberg and David Harris about a really exciting partnership that involves OCR and cutting edge tech. And I think we're you know, this is sort of like a pseudo back to school episode. We're here in mid August. So let's talk about back to school. Where is the state of all of our thinking around what school is going to be like this year? How excited are people and what role could tech play? Don't you think that will be? Let's dive into the headline number one back to school, but education is in trouble. At least according to media narratives. Normally, August is the time of puff pieces around which back to school fashion is in vogue, sob story about a certain teacher and a cat that shepherds kids to school or something there. But instead, we have from political, the teacher shortage problem is bad, really bad. We have from the 74 million local school grades plummeting. Average folks do not think their local schools are good. NPR this morning, there was a story in Jackson, Mississippi, around how hard it is to be a superintendent of schools with COVID Mask mandates off and on with teacher shortage and crisis and the fact that you can't get a cafeteria worker or a bus driver to save your life. We are in full crisis mode in the education media. Is that really what's going on in education? Or is that just immediate perception? I will have to say, I feel like you know from my friends and my sources my seat on the board at in San Carlos. It's pretty credible. We are coming out of kind of year two into year three of pandemic endemic and people are struggling to see the light at the end of this tunnel. What have you been hearing? Absolutely. I mean, I think you could take the sort of macro view on this, which is that faith in a lot of institutions in America and and around the world. But I'd say especially in America has been really shaken. For many years, we've seen, you know, Congress and the presidency and police and FBI and you know, so many different sort of pillar institutions of public life start to sort of lose their luster. And I think the one that is going through the wringer right now is I would say both k 12. and higher education, sadly enough, we'll talk about both of them in this episode. But you know, having this huge school shortage, that political article says they're facing 300,000 person shortage across the country. According to the NEA report from the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt just came out, I just spoke to their Chief Research Officer and they said that basically, you know, 60% of educators think that education is not really an appealing field to be in right now. Almost 80% have teachers mental health as their top concern. They're truly concerned about each other's well being and mental health. I think, you know, there is a media narrative part of this. We see stories about crumbling schools and political fights. But I think there's also it feels like it's sort of the education Zeitgeist right now that the feeling about what the education system sort of isn't does in the US, I think, has been really shaken by the pandemic. I mean, seeing so many students of all levels have to sort of adapt to life without traditional education. Now, going back to it, I think everything sort of in question, you know what I mean? Yeah. And it used to be that lots of things were politically divisive, but education was one where we were relatively politically united. And I will also say, you know, let's not paint a rosy picture of the past, in general, you know, 20 years ago, people were saying, education is in trouble. I mean, Nation at Risk, I think was in 1980. But people always rated their local school really highly. So they said macro education system institutions are failing students, but my school is pretty good. My educators pretty good. That has fallen out According to some of this reporting, that's fallen by 20 to 30%. And among Republicans, it's fallen even further, the gap between Democrats and Republicans and their view of their local school obviously varies by region. But there's in some places a 20% difference of perception of the local school based on political persuasion. So it's something that has been coming for a long time, the teacher shortage we've covered before has been building, but it's almost kind of falling off a cliff. Now I'm actually I would be okay, if it was like, okay, k 12. We got to, you know, we've got work to do. Maybe Biden can build back better for education or something. But it seems like this is also crossed the Rubicon in higher ed, what were you paying attention to this week, on the higher ed side, there was a really interesting slew of articles, books, speeches this week, all about the value of higher ed versus the cost of it, or why higher education is, is in trouble or changing or declining. We looked at you know, the Jason WinGuard, the president of Temple University just came out with a new book all about how higher education really has to adapt, or it's going to be in enormous trouble, we saw Miguel Cardona, the Secretary of Education, give a speech about how it's just so strange that elite institutions are focusing on their ratings. While you know, most people in the country are suffering, you know, and trying to pay the bills and go to get totally schools that never even make the US News and World Report. We saw, you know, polls about alarming, quote, alarming numbers of people are dubious about going to college, and really interesting, long article from John Marcus at the Hechinger Report about all of this really, really, you know, there are 4 million fewer students in college now than they were 10 years ago. Students are just consistently saying they don't know if it's worth it. They don't know, you know, fewer than one in three adults now say that a degree is worth the cost. According to Estrada Education Network. I know I'm throwing a lot of stuff into the mix. But it's just it's this flurry of deep questioning about what college is for what higher ed is about? Does it make sense to keep doing what we've been doing? As the world sort of shifts faster and faster? Well, the clear answer is no, we shouldn't keep doing what we're doing. Like, they're just doing the math is not, you know, advanced calculus here, we have treated all college and university as one thing. And the payback on it is been failing to meet the threshold for years for a number of these schools, but we kind of bought into the general idea. And you know, I remember being in the No Child Left Behind era, when you'd suggest that somebody shouldn't go to a four year college, they should go to a technical college, you know, shame on you for low expectations. But now, it's almost the opposite. Like someone who could succeed at a four year colleges thinking, hey, I'm just gonna go get my technical or my bootcamp or something like that. And I will also say, you know, friends of mine that are from a fluid backgrounds who have access to, like pretty what would still be considered really good schools are actively deferring college or deferring that choice, in large part because they don't feel like 18 year olds are really ready to maximize that investment on an 18 to 22 year old timeline. And so I think, well, that's like doom and gloom, we've kind of started the episode with raining on the parade. It also creates lots of opportunity and like some sunshine, it does it does, I have to give one quick anecdote before we move to the sunshine piece of this because, you know, you mentioned, you know, people, you know, questioning about, you know, does it make sense for 18 year olds to go to college and that way, you know, I have a recent newborn, as I've mentioned on the show a few times, and we've been starting to look at, you know, 529 college savings, and one of the ways you calculate that is by putting in putting in your, your alma mater, and then it will say, Okay, well, given the cost of that. And given the cost of inflation, here's how much you'd expect that to cost for your child in, you know, 18 years. And I don't know how much I'll show you this pen, but I put in my alma mater, I went to Cornell University grad school, I put in my alma mater, and the first thing that came up was, okay, $86,000 a year, and I was like, Oh, wow, that's a lot for, you know, even in 20 years and, and I was like, no, no, that's now that's the current price. But in 20 years, it'll be $240,000 a year for a total cost of $960,000 for a degree. And I was like, Huh, that's really an interesting fact to chew on. And I mean, when you even a biggie, I mean, that is the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life. And you know, there's a great editorial this week about just the sticker shock of college, the fact that, you know, higher ed has had this strategy for years, and they put these really high prices, and then give lots of discounts. Most people pay a fraction of that. And there's a great editorial of what we'll put it in the show notes that basically said, What a dumb strategy, all you're doing is scaring off the majority of people who would ever even consider when you see a price like that people don't even apply, they don't even think it's possible. And all you've done is sort of shut down your entire market. And that I think, leads directly to all of these ROI questions. Anyway, that's the end of the gloom part. Here's some of the sunshine. So for one thing, well, and also, by the way, doesn't include therapy bills, for going to one of those schools, and actually having to, like, recover from that afterwards. I mean, like, if the four year college experience was what it was like in the movies, it would be worth every penny, even if it's one of those party movies. But it's not even that good. If you look at the mental health crises and the number of students that are struggling socially and academically in schools, it's not like you pay the money, and then they figured out the magic solution, and you come out, wow, that was really great. It was really expensive. But man, was it worth it? Now, you know, that's a very small percentage of these schools resist accountability on any level, they literally will not allow their students to take measures of learning at the beginning and end, because they do not want to even reveal that it is possible that students don't even learn that much. Because there's, it's a really broken system. And you know, we both went to college on this podcast for sure. Exactly. White guys with privilege podcast, my God. But I just think that this higher ed world has painted itself into such a corner, where it just has to continue these the status quo that is just so absurd. That I just think it's got to be I mean, we just saw the inflation reduction at pass, and it puts a cap on insulin prices at $35 a month, I want to see a cap on higher ed prices. I mean, no degree in the world should cost more than who knows, let's say $25,000 a year, like it should just be kept pure rad Alex, I really, you know, one thing that people don't realize is, Soviets got a lot of things wrong, they got education really right. And they did it for everyone for free. And it was the engine that kept the Soviet Union going for so long their sciences and math and, you know, all sorts of programs that they created, you know, still have resonance in the apprenticeship models of Europe today. We in the US have missed the boat on that, you know, our free market approach has been sorting hat times 10. Exactly. It's totally run amok. So let's move to the sunshine, I extended the gloom a bit, but there's a lot of gloom. Let's talk about some of the sunshine. So one, please, a bright, exciting news this week is that, you know, we've been going back and forth about this. So student loan cancellation, but there was a nice move this week where ITT Tech, which is a very was a very large for profit college that actually, you know, basically, I think went out of business in 2016, as a result of a lot of the Obama era policies, but there was still huge amounts of student debt for people who had gone there over these years. And they canceled about $4 billion in student loan debt for graduates of ITT in dry, you know, tech, that is great news step in the right direction. It was done a little bit quietly. This was not something that was sort of front page news, Hey, student loan forgiveness, but you can tell they're taking a piecemeal approach. That's good news. But I think there's even bigger news, Ben, let's talk about this transfer credit stuff. Yeah. So outlier, is really a company to follow. And, you know, I haven't had Aaron Rasmussen on our podcast yet. We're trying everyone. But you know, what they started off with was like, Okay, how do we create accredited online courses that are in incredibly affordable and relatively modular, so that you on your own pace can kind of build up your way to a degree and they started with a partnership with Pittsburgh, and then they signed just like six months ago, a partnership with a community college network, so that you could get your bachelor's or your associate's degree through those accreditation programs. And now, boom, splash. They now have created a network of colleges and universities that essentially are allowing those credits to be transferred in and out. And so you could essentially build your four year degree equivalent with a variety of programs from a variety of universities, and then bundle them up in and under one universities brand or name, to kind of get to the finish line with your degree. It's something we've been talking about for a long time. And I know there's been a lot of work done by a lot of people just to create the idea of interchangeable credits in the first place. You'll recall that in the 1950s, that the beauty of the California State system was you could go to years of community college, and then transfer into a Cal State or UC. And so that UC system really created access for lots of people. This is a national network, and I can see it really growing and outlier on the vanguard of this, they've kind of put their stake in the sand Aaron is from masterclass, we're going to do this in really high quality way, it's going to be really compelling, and it's gonna be very, very affordable. So they've set a tone, that even if they're not the winner, I think, you know, university homegrown programs, or others who are playing in this space are going to have to think about interoperability of degree units in a way that I think is positive for the space and for the consumer. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack here. And it's really exciting. So outlier, you know, this has been their plan the whole time. And the big question is what you know, can they pull it off, because one of the accreditation system and the transfer system are one of the big mozz they're one of the things that keep higher education costing so much they restrain the ability for people to sort of transfer from community college to transfer from any from from non selective colleges to selective colleges, the accreditation system that all the regional accreditors sort of props the whole system up and makes it it's a barrier to entry for lots and lots of people. And they started with Pittsburgh, like you said, Ben, and now they're moving to having regional accreditors with the all the major accrediting bodies, that's really the move. That said, in this same story, you have, you know, the Senior Director of Communications at Berkeley saying, while we have accepted outlier credits in the past, we are not doing so going forward. I mean, it's such an ironic UC Berkeley in that system, and that Clark curse system that the whole point of the California system was about transfer, UC Berkeley says, no, no, no transfer credits, not our thing. We can't match the courses, we can guarantee their quality XYZ, you know, this is going to be a an arms race. I mean, some schools are going to accept credits at in order to build their student base and to survive, others are going to turn up their nose and say, Hey, we're going to rely on this accreditation system and not accept them. But I totally agree with you that this is a big shot into the heart of what keeps selective higher ed in the US. So elite, and so expensive, and so snooty. It's saying, hey, these classes, LR courses are about $400. They have almost the they're going for the entire first year. So intro to psych intro to statistics, Intro to astronomy, Intro to English, you know, and the idea of it should be and what they're going for is you can take your whole first year of school, you can take eight classes for three credits each and each of them is going to cost $400 And suddenly you paid $3,000 For a year of transferable credit to a school that would cost 2030 $40,000 a year. Now it's just on the school's whether they're, you know what side of history they want to fall on. And also it means that like a 16 year old can take credits, or it means 80 year olds can take credits to mean the kind of barrier, it's just such an artificial box that between you know, generally 18 and 23. That's when you're supposed to get that degree. You know, the other thing that's interesting about outlier too is they're not really an OPM per se, they really partner with the schools to actually you know, get those courses online and get the course right from a quality standpoint. So it the end of the day, if they're helping these universities reach a huge audience. The people who are on the right side not only stand to like survive, they stand to thrive if they're first mover's I mean it is it is a complicated calculus to see what this would mean for the bottom line for the universities because in my understanding, which I may not fully understand the model yet and we're gonna we're working on getting Aaron recipes in as well as Anjali Gupta the head of partnerships outlier on the show to explain the details for us, but you know, in my understanding, you know, outlier create like masterclass, it really creates its own courses, it finds instructors and basically has, you know, one central course so one central intro to psych class is cost $400. At least last time I checked, anybody can take it from anywhere and then those credits can be transferred. So, there is a class straight about is that taking money out of the school's pocket, and I think that's what they'd be afraid of, I still think they should do it. There's an interesting sort of strategic matrix here about who moves when. And this is why disrupted industries, it's really hard to be the incumbent, and then it because you end up giving up so much leverage in your core. You know, why did blockbuster not compete with Netflix? Or why did IBM not end up winning the computer wars? I think it's really interesting in this move. So it leverages from a tech standpoint, short form video, asynchronous and synchronous. And, you know, Aaron has been doing that with masterclass, we also had a really connected story in the kind of teen space, we saw a really important report today that talked about the use of tick tock and YouTube. It's from Pew, their research organization that's world renowned for their really incredible data. And I encourage you to go on our site and just click on the links, the graphs are incredible. But a couple things that I would highlight. One is YouTube, 95% of teenagers use YouTube. Number two, tick tock is that 67% using on a daily basis 86% of those 67% use on a daily basis. And Facebook is down in the 30s. So you know, the fact that your grandma is on Facebook, it does mean that your teenage nephew or niece is not on Facebook anymore. What's more interesting to me is some of their breakdowns in terms of who's on Tik Tok, and who's on YouTube, and what else are they on, when you are a preteen and a teen, you kind of graduate into longer form and gaming and so on. So the younger students are actually disproportionately on these short form video platforms all the time, because the other platforms that could consume their attention aren't yet available to them. So I think it's quite interesting that what we might consider to be like, somewhat dubious places for kids to hang out in, like YouTube and Tiktok. That actually is we're kind of steering them that direction, because we're withholding video games, or we're withholding other forms of longer form entertainment. And also, are we, you know, shortening attention spans, because the only place that kids really can be for a sustained period of time for entertainment are three minute clips or two minute clips. So I just think it's a fascinating thing. And, you know, the pure research is really, I think, a sign of something that's enduring in the post pandemic era. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we could do multiple episodes about about YouTube and Tiktok, and Instagram and some of these social media platforms and how they're being used for learning in these sort of oblique ways, sometimes direct ways. But my quick take is that, you know, it's really interesting how many teachers are on Tik Tok, there's a lot of tick tock education, hashtags. And we'll put a link in our show notes to some of the teachers around the country in the US for at least Who are you know, who get on tick tock as a way to engage their students to engage other students to teach and also almost just to, to personal, you know, to make themselves more accessible, they know their kids are there, as you say, you know, two thirds of all kids even more in many classrooms are using this daily. So if you want to be present in your students lives, hey, this is where the HA HA, they're on YouTube and Tiktok. The other thing is, I am still waiting to see how the EdTech world really makes the most of these social media platforms. I mean, when Facebook was dominant, we saw companies like Schoology and Edmodo come out, which are basically Facebook for schools. I mean, they looked exactly like it. And here we are, with tick tock at 67% of all kids in the YouTube hit 95%. I still haven't seen as much as you might expect, of ed tech companies building on these platforms or replicating some of the parts of the platforms that are working incredibly well or building on the audiences. There's just seems like there's a lot of there there that we haven't tapped into as an edtech. Community. I know you're all about this, but I'm curious what your take is on that real fast. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, first, let's look at how Edmodo did did not do very well, huge number of users, but hard to generate the income. Most of these platforms are ad generated revenue models. And that's a really hard model to make work in education. I think it's much more likely that we find people that can either leverage these content creator networks as channels for content, or it's actually the place where they're publishing things to get content out to people. So rather than kind of recreating a separate You know, tick tock or YouTube, I think most education companies, like mystery.org is a great example. They kind of grew all through YouTube, basically. And then were ultimately acquired and actually looks like I bought a shutdown as of yesterday. So that's kind of interesting timing. I didn't even realize that but had 10s of millions of users now just shut following as some of the social media patterns. Oh, that is another headline dropper, man, that brings us to the news of the industry, which is highlighted by a piece in TechCrunch. It's always news, when we're getting covered that us little folks in ed tech are getting covered in TechCrunch. But it was talking about why Ed Tech isn't special anymore. And that's a good thing. And the kind of takeaway from it is that generalist investors are no longer in edtech, they've kind of cut their losses, and they're back doing their thing. And whatever industries they're in, mainly focused on like web three, recovery, and all of their Bitcoin losses. And so it kind of leaves us back with the same smaller universe of Ed Tech and social impact investors. And the article kind of takes an investor lens, which says, you know, valuations and investment dollars are now imbalance again, right size, I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, it was very different and really promising to have different firms with different ideas on how you can scale game changing businesses involved in the VC space. And now that they're gone, you're back to some pretty standard prototype business models and growth strategies. So it's kind of confirmation of that. And paired with that was a most promising startups list. From Business Insider, and you never really know with Business Insider, is this, a pay to play promo kind of thing? Or Is this legit, but it seems pretty legit, where they asked investors to recommend one or two companies, and many of them recommended companies that they were following that they're not even invested in. But it just goes to show that in a downtime, sometimes that actually makes companies even more disciplined about finding product market fit. And so it highlighted some of those, you can see those in our links. So to wrap up our industry news, Alex, why don't you take us out with our funding and m&a highlights for the week? Sure. So yeah, I mean, we'll put out that promising startups list. There are some interesting companies listed there. And they they did disclose for every investor which of those companies in their portfolio and which are not. So it's an interesting list. But yeah, interesting stuff happening. So as always, we're getting a lot of our funding and m&a in collaboration with Matt tower of Ed Tech thoughts. He's our sort of friend of the pod. And he always covers us very closely. We saw, you know, fundamental VR, which is a training software using VR for surgeons, somewhat similar to also VR raised $20 million this week, you know, we've seen a lot of movement in the VR space, we're actually putting together a panel of VR companies for next month on the podcast, it's going to be really interesting, including a lot of those who have raised money this year, like Praxis labs, transfer, VR, prisms, and others. So the VR trend continues to grow. We saw a company called Creator Dow that Dow should ring a bell for people here at creator Dow raise $20 million. That's all about the ability to identify creators and sort of invest in them in various ways. I think this speaks to you know, your point, Ben about the growth of YouTube and all of these and Tik Tok and all of these creator economies, you have people who, you know, if you're a promising creator, you are somebody who's, you know, going to have a serious influence. And this is sort of building on that, we saw an interesting company called junto. I think it's pronounced gento, based in Berlin, raised $5 million. That's an upskilling platform, something like Maven, but has sort of you have synchronous classes that are cohort based, where you learn from experts in the technology industry, they you know, focus on big company experts teaching others. So we've seen a few companies in that space, but this and has an interest, it's b2b specific, and we should definitely keep an eye on there. And we just saw a Y Combinator company called sphere raised $4.3 million in edtech. And that's also about upskilling classes, but its focuses on software engineering skills, like machine learning, and data science. So a little bit in the same space as CO Ries, which we've talked about a little bit on the pod and Pluralsight and some others in that sort of space, and then to m&a. A little bit of m&a news Harver which is a hiring and Talent Management Solutions acquired biometrics, which has soft skills assessments that are game like so that's definitely a enterprise play, and Prometric acquired a company called fine tune they both do testing and assess I spent solutions in the traditional ad market. And those are both not household name companies, because they're in the assessment space, which tends to be a little more behind the scenes. But, you know, there continues to be some m&a And you know, a couple of pretty big rounds, you know, to $20 million rounds this week, better than nothing in the EdTech space, especially for quiet August. Yeah, it was a quiet August, but some meaningful rounds, not quite Adam Newman money. But we're definitely seeing the businesses that have solid, foundational economics getting funded. And so the kind of, I think, the pause that you normally would have in July anyways, in North a normal year, I think the pause is lifted. And we're seeing some of these rounds getting done in August. And I expect September and October, we'll see a little bit of a flurry of rounds getting done ahead of the holidays. So before we go one super quick note. So we're going to add to really interesting reports that came out this week into the show notes, they're not going to be covered, we're not going to actually talk about them. But they're definitely worth looking at, especially for sort of higher ed and or learning science nerds like us, there was a really interesting higher education equity report that came out in 2022 report has amazing statistics about all of the inequity, all of the issues with higher ed and compares the US to higher ed around the world. And over time, super interesting. And there was a really interesting report out of North Carolina State this week about what works in K 12. And it's basically a synopsis of almost 300 Different studies about teaching K 12 classes online, as done specifically during the COVID pandemic to try to support all of the K 12 schools that had to suddenly pivot. And there may be a little late to the game because you know, we're starting to go back to school, but definitely still worth a read. And it's a really interesting paper. So both of the links to those will be in the show notes. All right, but now we can go out. So we're back to school, everyone's going full gear. We hope that you're having a great week, we hope that things are going well with your education endeavor. And if you want what's going on in ed tech, you'll hear about it first here on the weekend at Tech. For our deep dive today we have a really interesting release of new news and two guests to share it with us. We have David Harris, professor at Rice University and head of the Open Stax, Oh, er network. And Justin Weinberg, the CEO of active learning, which does chemistry and math technology platform, David and Justin. Here we go. Justin Weinberg and David Harris, welcome to Tech insiders. Great to have you here. Thanks so much excited to be here today. Thanks so much, Alex. And, Dan. It's great to be here. Again, fantastic. You know, you're here with such interesting news. And it's really about the combination of open education resources with cutting edge technology. I just want to start with a sort of stage setting question, David, you've been working in the open education resources OER field for many years, give our listeners who may not be familiar with that movement, a quick overview of the power of OER. Great. OER stands for Open Education Resources. And basically like open software, it means that it carries a Creative Commons license, which gives the end user really unlimited rights to reuse it, adapt it and distribute it for free compared to all rights reserved content. And OER has really taken wrote in the higher education market. In fact, the group I walk with out of Rice University called Open Stax, we'll start close to 7 million students this year with OER. You know, it's really interesting about OER, to when it was first kind of conceptualized and pushed, you know, probably over a decade ago, there was a lot of hand wringing around, you know, content, the value of content is going to go to zero. And it's going to be all about the platform. And even the startup that I was working at at the time, that was part of our hypothesis, and we couldn't have been more wrong, the value of content has only increased. But the OER movement has really helped make high quality content available. It's still kind of important, how you package it, how have you seen the OER movement evolved from those early optimistic days to today, where it's like a practical endeavor in the hands of millions and millions of users? Yet? That's a great question in regards to the evolution of the awareness and the appreciation of the content. I think early days it was a lot about, as you mentioned, platform and taking discrete pieces, and melding them together. But I think in education people realize that students need a narrative, and they need a comprehensive set of resources. Is that follow the scope and sequence of a course. And OpenStack has kind of evolved with that. And it's why we're very excited about our partnership with active because they recognize that platform without world class content is less valuable. And it's the combination of the two that can really drive learning. That is a great segue to the announcement, which is that the top organic chemistry textbook, which has been used by Cengage Learning, John McMurray, was just given OER licensing and is now going to be distributed, not only free of charge, but also through active learning with this enormous, beautiful, interactive, mobile first tech platform. So Justin, fill us in on what is going on with this amazing or go move. Yeah, this is huge announcements. And it's going to really changed the game and all of education, publishing, and certainly in the course of organic chemistry. So as many of us know, organic chemistry is one of the most notorious courses out there for pre meds and STEM majors. You know, many students come into the course and with high attrition rates, and high DFW rates. And really something needs to be done to sort of change the game around how students are being engaged and how they move through the material. It also happens to be one of the most expensive courses out there in terms of course fees and textbook costs. And that's why this is such a big deal. John, Nick Murray's organic chemistry textbook, which has gone through nine editions and has been used by over a million students is now going to be published as a free OER through OpenStack, starting next year, in fall 2023. And we are very fortunate at active to be chosen as a technology partner for this new edition. So what that means is that active chemistry, which is our product for chemistry courses, and organic chemistry courses, will integrate both the book and its problems into our platform. And we are going to specifically combine this with some of the molecular drawing technology that we have developed over the past couple of years, called the active grid, which is something we have patented and has something that is really making molecule drawing very intuitive for students who go through these courses, as I like to talk about with with faculty and other folks in edtech. You know, students who are going through organic chemistry courses will probably do 1000 to 2000 problems every semester just as part of homework or quizzes or in class assignments. And many of those problems that they do involve drawing a set of structures or what's called the reaction mechanism. And efforts around kind of bringing that into an online format have often failed just because of the difficulty of use and the accessibility for students. This is already a very difficult course for many and technology today, it's only served to unfortunately, increase the learning barrier for students. So the technology that we developed specifically with the active grid, we're really lowering that we're having some some great impacts already. One example is that Texas a&m University, which is the largest chemistry department in the country, they've recently adopted our platform and are beginning to see the highest grades and lowest dropout rates they've seen in years. So this partnership is really going to propel that allow us to lower costs and bring higher quality education, which and many, many students across the country and the world. So we couldn't be more excited. Yeah, it's really interesting on a couple fronts, one, yay, at Tech insiders, we're breaking news. This is our first kind of breaking news report. I feel like we need to do it. But then two things that I often hear from people. One is, why aren't we doing more partnerships in education, there's one organization that either has channel or has technology or has content and another one has one of the other legs of the stool. And we ended up kind of reinventing the wheel so many times when there's others who we could partner with. So I'm really like, I did just encourage and hopefully this is the start of a wave of new partnerships that you've kicked off here. I think the second thing is the learners want more, they want more interactive, and they want more content. And if you are someone you know, was active, you're experts in the chemistry field, but I feel like a lot of people who who build content, get very worried about diluting the quality of their content by bringing in new sources of content, there's like a huge fear or concern. But if you actually do it intelligently and smartly, you can actually serve up an incredible array of choices for people in ways that still allow your native platform to act and, you know, make learning come alive. And so I just I think there's a lot of I was talking with somebody at Newsela they were talking about their new content strategy, which is really It has been all self generated. Now they're looking at content partners and partnerships. It's those types of it's that type of thinking that ultimately is going to make it way better for the end consumer. I'd love to jump in and comment on that for a second, as you initially asked the question, why hasn't more of this happened. And I think it's because of the All Rights Reserved nature of the academic market. And it's that I got to control the IP, I've got to control the means of distribution, I got to control the platform. So one of the things that we've done at Open Stax, which is very innovative, I think, is this shared customer mindset, in that we shouldn't try and control everything, because we can't do everything extraordinarily well. And so if I can bring great content to the table, and Justin can bring great technology, why don't we combine forces, so the combination is better than the sum of the parts, there's a great theory in biology called emergent properties. And I think it fits beautifully here, and you will see more of it. As the cost of technologies go up, and the content to support it goes up, it is going to be born out of necessity. Well, and also as funding rounds go down to you know, people will not have as much cash to burn. Yeah, it's like you guys have a chemical bond here. Now. You could say that there's so I think there's one question remaining, at least, but here, which is that Dr. McMurry has a top textbook in the field, which I'm sure has been very lucrative year over year for both him and for the academic publisher. Why did he make it Oh, er. And I'd love to, to hear the story about his particular decision and how you see others making that decision whether to release their content in an OER format to enable this type of partnerships. This is what I call a beautiful alignment of the stars. So organic chemistry, As Justin mentioned early on. orgo is one of the most difficult courses that a college student will take. And it's also one of the most expensive in terms of the course material costs. And John is very sensitive to that. And he has always been such a great advocate for students. Decades ago, his late son Peter was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. And he unfortunately died in 2019, and December 2019. And what John wanted to do is he really wanted to leave a legacy for his son, Peter McMurray. And he could think of no better way than taking his best selling most widely used textbook, and make it available to all students in organic chemistry. I think it's a remarkable legacy and a remarkable gesture that he's making. And I think the publisher was also very moved by this. And so that's how we were able to come to this agreement and innovate with us, because they've already demonstrated a great ability to do that over the last 10 years. on a macro level, though, we do see this as a seminal moment. Because increasingly, as the use of OER has become more mainstream, we are increasingly hearing from authors who were published before wanting to open up their materials. So I think this will be a growing trend, because they see that being OER now can actually also make you a best selling author. And that's really exciting. I think that proposition will come true. When we talk to faculty all across the country, ranging from community colleges to the ivy League's the number one thing on their mind is certainly how we can reduce the costs for our students taking these courses. But in a way that maintains or, more importantly increases the quality of the learning experience. And OER is is a is a big driver of that, of course. So there are many faculty who have OER in their minds, they want to make that switch, they're in the process of making that switch. Sometimes it's that technology component, that right technology component that's going to be there to support them in that journey. That is the key. So again, that's another reason why partnerships with Open Stax and active is just so vital to supporting us totally fascinating to hear this discussion. And it feels like in some ways, this is the dawn of a new era of collaboration of technology and content coming together. What excites you most about the future, you know, as you look forward five years, 10 years, especially across higher ed and in these specific subject areas where we know traditionally underserved students have struggled. So if we look out five years, I think there's an enormous possibility against the backdrop of a system that is under great pressure. It's no secret that higher education is struggling right now struggling with not only enrollments, but they're also struggling with value and relevancy. And this is a Big, big challenge. And it mixed in all of that is this notion of academic integrity. So what is this type of relationship or this type of partnership and opening up of great content and marrying it to platforms? How does it start to tackle some of those key issues? Well, first, let's look at the value. Anyone who's showing a path in STEM knows that you have to become scientifically literate to be successful, so that content is still enormously valuable. However, we all recognize that students are acquiring that knowledge in different ways. And to increase the value we have to leverage that content with emerging adaptive, advanced technologies like active, Justin talked about his molecular drawing tool, that is an example of how we can leverage technology to help a skill the students need to develop. The second key component to this is making resources available to a much larger swath of the population, that may be learning in unconventional forums. Not every student's going to be sitting in a classroom. And by openly licensing material, we make it accessible to all those different venues of acquiring content. And so we might stimulate a student who hadn't been thinking about science before, to then pursue a path to science. I think that's very exciting. And then the third point, we talked about the academic integrity notion of this, and this is why I think a program like Active is so important, because it dynamically generates questions for students. It also allows the faculty to produce more higher level questions that the students can't just go and search the answer. So it requires more critical thinking. And critical thinking questions are the great antidote on academic integrity. So those three things that actually give me a lot of hope, around this type of partnership, we increase relevancy, we increase breadth of audience, and then we can really tackle the value of education. It's just a marvelous opportunity for everyone involved. Yeah, and everything that David just said is 100%. True. And just to add on to that, beyond the the obvious impact, so you know, together, we are going to save students literally millions of dollars per year in their education for the foreseeable future. But you know, like we talked about, we do think that this is going to open up additional OER titles coming to market, you know, previous authors coming to folks like Open Stax, and others who are great publishers, or OER. But also it's just really bring to the forefront of new thinking around content and technology. You know, unfortunately, so many efforts around technology today, I've just been really an afterthought around something to supplement the textbook. But today, as we see it, and as David and others certainly see it, there really needs to be that direct marriage between great content and great technology, not letting things be an afterthought, but really being at the forefront. So I think that is a huge benefit that we're going to see in chemistry, we're already doing it in math, and certainly other disciplines in the future. So I think it's that really mindset shift around how technology can really enhance the teaching and learning experience by not just kind of letting textbook take full center of everything is really, really important. It's a really exciting and I definitely agree, I think the future is going to be all about these partnerships about cost controls about keeping Relevance Making the highest quality content available to the largest group of people with the best technology and it seems like you are at the forefront of that movement. This is Justin Weinberg from active learning. David Harris from Bryce University and Open Stax, thank you so much for your time. Thank you really excited to see this happen. Thanks a lot. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.