Lisa Jiang has a long career at the heights of edtech; she was most recently the head of Remote Learning at Facebook, after 4 years as a senior director of product at New York’s Flatiron School, a leading bootcamp provider and 6 years at Google, where she was a product manager and lead for education for Google Hangouts.
Joe Burgess was the first hire at Flatiron School and worked his way up to the VP of Education, where he led the education product and delivery teams across four disciplines both online and in Flatiron’s eight campuses.
Together, they are the co-founders of Ribbon Education, which is building software to help student-facing staff scale their impact to serve more learners and improve outcomes in adult education.
Recommended Resources
Phil Hill's blog
Michael Feldstein
Robert Ubell's books
Learners' Success Guild & blog by Ribbon Education
Lisa Jiang has a long career at the heights of edtech; she was most recently the head of Remote Learning at Facebook, after 4 years as a senior director of product at New York’s Flatiron School, a leading bootcamp provider and 6 years at Google, where she was a product manager and lead for education for Google Hangouts.
Joe Burgess was the first hire at Flatiron School and worked his way up to the VP of Education, where he led the education product and delivery teams across four disciplines both online and in Flatiron’s eight campuses.
Together, they are the co-founders of Ribbon Education, which is building software to help student-facing staff scale their impact to serve more learners and improve outcomes in adult education.
Recommended Resources
Phil Hill's blog
Michael Feldstein
Robert Ubell's books
Learners' Success Guild & blog by Ribbon Education
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. 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 ed tech companies. Lisa Jiang has a long career at the heights of edtech. She was most recently the head of remote learning at Facebook. After four years as a Senior Director of Product at New York's flat iron school, a leading bootcamp provider, and six years at Google, where she was a product manager and a lead for education for Google Hangouts. Joe Burgess was the first hire at flat iron school and worked up to the VP of education where he led education product and delivery teams across four disciplines online and in flat irons eight campuses. Together, they're the co founders of ribbon education, which is building software to help student facing staff scale their impact to serve more learners and improve outcomes in adult education. Lisa Jiang and Joe Burgess, Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Joe Burgess:Thanks for having us, Alex, and congrats on the new baby. Welcome to the club.
Alexander Sarlin:So the two of you have worked together for years at flat iron School, which is a leading technical bootcamp provider in New York. Tell us about your experience of both at flat iron and your sort of history in ed tech and how it's shaped your understanding of of the space and led you to ribbon education.
Joe Burgess:Yeah, of course. So I was the first person that joined Flatiron School. So I'll go first. And I'll hand it off to Lisa. But I joined finance school in 2013. So planet school was founded in New York 2012, I joined like, eight or nine months after they were founded as the first employee. And my job was to bring an iOS course to life. So I taught that three or four years teaching iOS programming. And then Lisa joined us when we launched our online program, and she joined as our head of product and was working on our learning platform, everything kind of digital products at Flatiron School was producing, we then we then have to work really closely initially, and then we got to go into kind of the pressure cooker that is hypergrowth. Right? Because in 2017, Flatiron School was acquired by WeWork. So if any of you have heard of WeWork, 2018, and 2019 was one of the I think some of the craziest professional careers in my life, I think probably yours as well, Lisa, Lisa is nodding. And so we got the opportunity to go from you know, a 70 person company, we got acquired about 600 people in about 18 months or so, the team went from like 20 to 130 or 140, something like that, Lisa's team got huge. And that really meant that we actually liked working together even in crazy pressure cooker where everything was breaking. And with that hypergrowth led to kind of get some inspiration points, you know, first was really just the pain, we felt the pain that of scaling online school of going from, you know, 510 teachers teaching 100 students a year to, I think we'd add teachers teaching 3000 students a year something like that. I'm not quite right on the numbers. And what that meant is all this operational need fell on the shoulders of teachers, students success professionals, it was huge. I mean, we I talked to teachers, they would say, two hours out of every day was admin work. And I kept getting kept in business pressures, we grew to figure out how can we get more efficient? How can we offer more affordable programming? You know, how do we get good graduation rates. And so we felt this pain of scaling school and really frustrated with the software that was out there during the pandemic, Lisa? I really want to work with Lisa again. You know, I think it's very rare to find someone that you're pretty aligned with and can handle and you still like each other after that pressure cooker. Right? So because we were also been known I think we have a successful relationship, working relationship, the through like the up and down and that we work stuff. And during our kind of walks during the pandemic here in Brooklyn, we saw some macro trends, which is that there was this more and more adult learners were in the space. And the big one was online learning. They're growing appeal and comfort from everyone to be an online or hybrid learning spaces. And yet the tooling was still pretty not great. My favorite stats is that there's a research study in 2021, that says 73% of students who experienced online learning in 2020, wanted there to continue to be online learning 73%, which is a crazy number, because 2020 was a challenging year. And I saw what happened in 2020. And was like, Yeah, I want more than that, I saw this huge macro trend. And we saw the fact that the edge the software available for online schools, not very good. And I'm sorry to have to build ribbon, no, like this. You had like a few other kind of thoughts.
Lisa Jiang:Yeah, I think, for me, on the product side, one of the lessons that we learned at Flatiron School is there's kind of this bias that we tend to all have, as product managers and engineers, which is you want to build for the learners, that was always, you know, after all, they're the customers and it feels good to see your product out in the world, your digital product. But in my experience at Flatiron School, and then talking to a lot more folks who operate in schools, the thing that actually moves the needle, and a lot of cases around students satisfaction and outcomes is actually empowering that student facing staff and I came to appreciate that student and staff relationship so much more sometimes kind of after the fact. But in truth of the matter is most schools are way under resource in providing their staff with the right data tools to support their students, that usually becomes a really heavy manual and admin burden that's placed on the people who are uniquely actually great at building those relationships. So a big personal motivation behind building ribbon is to be more of a champion for those individuals.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, I think it's a it's a really deep insight to realize that as online learning continues to grow as it expands in sort of every arena, that the staff, especially the Student Services, people who are often very much behind the scenes in some of these companies are actually often keeping the
Joe Burgess:whole ship the linchpin. Yeah, they're the linchpin.
Alexander Sarlin:There, they're the first line of defense, they're the first line of support. They're, they're the ones who are actually noticing when when students are there or not, or if they're falling off track. At a trilogy, when we were building boot camps, we noticed pretty quickly that the positive reviews of the bootcamp were almost always directly about the instructor and the staff. Exactly. They weren't about the projects, they said this, these people really had my back, they were making to make sure I got through this program. And that's why I loved it. And you know, and they could only do that with lots of blood, sweat and tears.
Lisa Jiang:Yeah. And so we want to make sure that those those folks supporting the students have that support. And that doesn't really, that that kind of software, and that those sorts of tooling doesn't quite exist today.
Alexander Sarlin:Doesn't. So as you mentioned, Joe, you know, we're in this enormous period of expansion for online learning programs at all levels, k 12, and higher ed and adult learning, partially accelerated by the pandemic. But online learning hasn't always been been greeted with open arms. There were a lot of very polarized reactions. During the pandemic, some students loved it said, I never want to go back to a normal in person school and others said, I just dropped off the map. I didn't care anymore. Nobody was isolated and demotivated. And the difference in many cases is the support. So tell us a little bit about ribbons approach to how it supports the support staff, as you're saying, Lisa?
Joe Burgess:Yeah, so echoing what Lisa was mentioning, is, we really did believe that the key to delivering transformational outcomes online is all about that relationship between the school staff and the learner, right the student. And in a very traditional sense, that might be just a teacher to a student. In a more moderate sense. It's actually usually kind of a handful of people, right, you have a kind of a team. But all that really matters is that someone has some sort of relationship with these students. And that happens to you in person that can kind of happen naturally, because they're across the desk from you, they're in your classroom. But online, similar to if any of you were in if you're in remote work, you have to kind of schedule and put effort behind the relationship in a way you don't have to do for in person. And so that was kind of that's kind of a through line of ribbon is how to make sure that you can build those relationships with students and with learners, even at scale. And so to do that, we'll think about this in three different ways. We help you identify schools identify the learners that need support, through dashboards that bring the different various learners signals, Canvas, zoom, email, whatever, into one at risk or are on track status dashboard, as you see your whole class week over week. In class, we streamline and automate those interventions so great, someone's at risk, what do we do about it, we make it really fast to do something about it, making a book communications with your learners easy. And then finally, we allow staff to collaborate with all their colleagues. So we make sure that there's a learner profile that every staff member can access, you can see all the communications that have happened, you can see all the disparate learner signals that come in, and all the notes as well, but all in one place. So everyone's on saying everyone knows who needs the most support right now. And you get, you can kind of do that support as quickly and efficiently as possible, then they'll start to automate it as well, to get the easy stuff out of the way. Yes, fascinating. So
Alexander Sarlin:it's data driven, automated, efficient, and designed for scale. I think it sounds like you both learned from flat iron that online classes or schools can scale a lot faster than then sometimes people expect. And you just need to, you know, having all these manual processes of checking attendance manually, or checking whether people submitted their work manually, and all these different pieces just doesn't scale. So we've been puts everything together. So one of the core offerings revolves around the sort of use of data you mentioned, it can pull data from Canvas from zoom from different, you know, signals from emails, and then put them together into a dashboard or a platform where where our students, service providers can see all the signals in one place. Tell us a little bit about what what some of these signals are, and how education providers can use that data without having to learn a whole new tool.
Lisa Jiang:Sure. So as Joe mentioned, you know, we think about the product as an interconnected system with those three pillars. So data being a really core part of that, but we also want to make sure that that data is actionable. So we want to streamline and automate those interventions to act on those data insights, and then make it easier for staff to collaborate with one another. And we are building sort of that like data pillar with two core product principles in mind. So first, we think data only matters in contexts. So there are a lot of plenty of data dashboards that give a lot of details at an individual student level or a snapshot in time. And but we think it's much more useful to see how that student is doing in the context of the whole class are over a period of time. And we think that there's actually a lot more signals that go beyond what you typically get within like an LMS. System. So yes, we have integrations with LMS is like Canvas. We also think that for attendance, you know, now that classes are on Zoom, we want to make sure that that data is also readily available for staff. And then I think as we beam from the kind of the skills bootcamp space, we know that there's actually a lot of really modern edtech software out there specialized verticalized for different teaching different topics. And we want to make sure that we are kind of a place that makes those types of integrations and signals about a student readily available. So data matters in context. The other thing that like we feel really strongly about is data must be actionable. So we believe that getting that data is only part of the equation, and needs to be paired with that timely intervention. So when you notice something happening, you should be able to take an action on that right away, we think a very common first line of action is to reach out to the students. So we're really focused on making sure that we can streamline and automate the that first timely communication that you want to make with the student.
Joe Burgess:And with those interventions, there's so much good research that shows that timely interventions, put all the metrics closer to what you want them to be, right, graduation rates go up, satisfaction goes up, everything gets better when you can do timely interventions. And so that's also you know, that's why we really believe that actionable, the importance of data being actionable.
Alexander Sarlin:It's really, really interesting. So I'm hearing that, you know, the data that ribbon provides to teachers or students service providers, is contextualized, in the context of the class and the students history or what other students are doing. And it's actionable, in some cases, even automated action, so that if somebody misses class, they might get automated emails to them. Or if it's a very if it's a young child, which I know is not your your focus right now to a parent, basically saying, Hey, we noticed you weren't in class or we noticed your child wasn't in class. It's sort of streamline some of the automate some of the manual work that a student service person would have to do. I want to sort of help our listeners picture what this would look like. So what do they what are they actually looking at? If there's, you've just run a zoom class and five of your 25 students were absent? What are you looking at to see that attendance chart and how does it how is it as easy to use and actionable as possible?
Joe Burgess:So the way staff members kind of work with with ribbon is all through Google Sheets right now. So we integrate direct Gleave with Google Sheets, we are an add on to Google Sheets. The reason for that is, we did a bunch of user research. And everyone currently solves a version of the problem we're solving in Google Sheets. So that means our interface is very simple. Our interface is something you know, you already know, Google Sheets, you know how to use us. And because Google Sheets is so kind of configurable, it integrates with your reporting systems, if you do a weekly slide deck to say how the school is doing, it integrates, because it's Google Sheets. So we're an add on to Google Sheets. And the day to day of hustling uses us whether it's our at risk dashboard, through Canvas data, or Zoom attendance tracker, is they pull up this Google sheet that has the roster of students, and then you say, Hey, here's the recurring Zoom meeting for my Monday class. And you say, Run dashboard. And we then talk to zoom, we get all the data and we say, who was in class? How long were they in class for? Who was absent and who was late, late status can be configured. And then you get that in kind of a, you know, a grid, meeting over meeting who was there? And so you can see over time, if a person was absent, have they been? Are they always absent? Are they always late? Is this the first time they're absent? The first time they're absent? It's probably fine. Right? Life happens, especially with kind of non traditional adult education. And then from there, you can then start to take action. So you now see, hey, we have four people that were absent, you can filter for all the absent folks, and then hit a checkbox on the hall and sent you can then open a dialog and send an email. Right? And that's the same deal on the Canvas side as well, if at risk, right, you say you have this huge class of 200 students, and you go, Oh, my gosh, to understand what am I going to do with that it's just, you know, insurmountable. Well, if you just filter by at risk, you then get down to I don't know, hopefully, it's a small number, but 2030 students, you can do another filter, which is given, you know, the folks are not at risk now, but at risk last week, as well. Right, and then now you're down to five, and five students, you can tackle five students today, I know you can do it. And so that's it, take those five, then you take whatever interventions you do, whether it's send them an email, send them a Slack, see you next time, they're coming to an advisor, meeting, whatever it is, that's what you're doing. And all that filtering and slicing, and dicing happens in Google Sheets. So it's already an interface that our users know how to use, which is I think, is a huge benefit of the way written works.
Alexander Sarlin:I agree with that. You know, we talk in our weekend ed tech podcast very often about how Google is the really the biggest edtech company out there. And it's absolutely ubiquitous in in classrooms of all of all at all levels. So the idea and obviously, this came out of your user research, but the idea of being able to get actionable contextualized data, using interfaces and tools that you already use is is I imagine it would, it would be pretty appealing to people. So ribbons really focused on the adult learner, you know, at this moment, and it's really interesting we've seen at the higher ed level, one of the big success stories in higher ed, in recent years is the rise of what what is sometimes called the mega universities, which is a group of online colleges and education providers that serving huge numbers of often adult students with those who are over the traditional college age. These are places like Southern New Hampshire University, Western Governors, Grand Canyon, Liberty University, they each serve 100,000 students or more. So that's where they get this idea of mega University. And, you know, one thing that is common among all of these universities is they they need to invest very heavily in student services, they have very close relationships and big armies of students, service providers to make sure that their non traditional learners are actually able to accomplish what they came to accomplish online. And to keep these student bodies engaged. I'd love to hear you talk about how ribbon might be a really interesting complement to these models. And what is the relationship between ribbon and this type of adult learning model?
Joe Burgess:Yeah, as Lisa mentioned, we did a lot of user research, because we want to make sure I know this upon that. This is one that we set. And this is one that our friends, but we want to make sure it's upon that everyone had. And so we talked to I think all the universities you listed, were Director of Student Services, and you know, all over various different roles in those organizations. And what's happening is, they all have a version of this. Often, it's a little bit crude and maybe, you know, not the best experience and obviously a lot of holes to it. But they've recognized this problem at their scale, and have invested millions and millions 10s of millions of dollars and years and years and years and years. I think water To them, like over a decade into solving this problem of software. And so what were, we saw that we thought, okay, we'll let you know, how does that apply to a lot of our target, which is not always going to be the mega giant universities. But really, we think about the 100,000 students school, it's actually kind of 50 to 1000 person schools. Right. And so, the 100,000 person school is at the scale that if you punch all those together, they have enough money to spend $30 million on a custom solution. But it's still useful, even at that sub school level where you know, the English to English literature or some something is actually only teaching 1000 students or 2000 students a year. And so these things are these things have to scale to make that possible. Yet every size of school needs this software. And so we said, All right, let's make it so that everyone can be and operate at the same level of efficiency. And hopefully, actually, because we're bringing in so many different opinions and different ways are such a dedicated team on just this one problem. Let's do it better than even the largest universities. And so how cool would it be to be a school that teaches two or 3000 students a year 1000, or even 500. And to have a more scaled, more efficient Student Services team than even the biggest established players that we want to enable for our customers? And kind of how we think about where we kind of sit, I guess, in that space,
Alexander Sarlin:that's really compelling. And, you know, it's, it's interesting to hear that end make sense. I think it's validating that each of these types of universities that serving large numbers of online adult students has a solution to this. And it sounds like they have sort of bespoke solutions, maybe patchwork solutions, there's clearly no one player that they are all using, because it's sort of the group out there. It's all custom. Yeah, it's all custom. It's maybe built in house or whatever it is. The reason I mentioned them is that these are, I think, some of the schools that have waded into this complex water earlier than others. And now we're in a moment where every university and every department is suddenly saying, Oh, wow, now we have so many more online students than we used to. What are we going to do here? How do we, you know, people are disappearing, they're not showing up for class. They're not, they're not doing their homework. We don't know how to deal with this. And they have a lot less tenure than some of these big universities that have had years to think about it. Yeah. Well, so outside of the mega universities, as you mentioned, Joe, we're seeing many traditional universities or smaller universities start to sort of try some new strategies. There are a lot of reports out now about how colleges are facing declining enrollments, there are fewer high school graduates, people are questioning some of the, the ROI and and the age of university learners is tending to go up, universities are looking to attract more adult learners, they're trying to ensure they're doing they're giving students what they really need. And a lot of things are moving online, because for a variety of reasons, including the pandemic, but also just flexibility and attracting working learners. So I'd love to hear your take on student services for that, you know, large pack of universities that are changing to a sort of online first, adult first strategy.
Lisa Jiang:Yeah. And you know, like you said, Alex, like working learners are a very different breed of students, they have competing priorities on their time and their resources, education may or may not be their primary focus. So students services, and that support should look very different for them. I think students services are the true quarterbacks for the whole educational experience. But really, we think that these teams currently lacked the tooling to really take advantage of the shift to online. So in theory, being online should mean that we can actually streamline and automate much of the data gathering and communication bits that take up much of like an advisors time. Instead, I think that time can be reallocated to more high value work like building those human relationships, connecting with the learners, diagnosing the issues and really kind of problem solving with that adult learner and figuring out like, what in their life needs to be adjusted to make this kind of program and educational experience work for them. And I think that level of flexibility, that sort of like conversation and negotiation of where education fits in, is a there's a human interaction. It's a very student services role that goes beyond just thinking about the academics, the whole student, the whole learners experience.
Alexander Sarlin:I love that emphasis on keeping the relationship front and center I think one of the interesting throughlines of all of edtech is to use technology to automate the the work that is automatable that is non human, like emailing somebody when they miss class, but then what's in that email, how it's written what it's for, and you know, knowing that you have a person on the other side out of it, who really cares about you, only a human can, can do that. So I think it's a really interesting balance that you're trying to strike here where you have true relationships, people who care that you are there, but automate and use technology to give them the time to actually build those relationships rather than all of these administrative tasks. Exactly. Yeah. It's all listeners to this podcast, though, that, you know, we talk about higher education. But there's a really big growth in alternative pathways for education out there. And that's part of why higher education is sort of under fire. Brian Craig, in his book, New York Dubs, these are the sort of faster and cheaper options. In the past, this would have been played things like associate's degrees or community college that take, you know, two years rather than four. But in 2022, there's a huge variety of options. These are boot camp providers, like Flatiron School, you are both alum of and many, many other boot camp providers, online certificate programs, apprenticeship programs, we talked to multiverse on the podcast recently, public private partnerships, corporate education. I mean, there's so many different things, AWS certification, guild Education offers, you know, employees at Walmart, and Disney, you know, online degrees as part of their tuition. But then those those are, you know, students who need students support, how do you see the role of ribbon. And you know, the difference between traditional higher ed, and the Student Services need for some of these alternative pathway providers.
Joe Burgess:The one thing I mean, high level alternative pathway providers. You know, I joined one in 2013, and I rode that wave, I'm on board, I want to see all of those good education multiverse, we worked with multiverse back when they were called white hat, like, a month, I love them. But one thing that I've always wanted, like separated out a bit is there's the provider. So flutter is Google's notion of education provider. And then there's the product you're delivering. And it turns out that a traditional higher ed providers also served can deliver alternative education products. Great point, all kinds of schools do that, you know, sometimes they use tools like trilogy, to be able to provide LTO I remember, Columbia has, I think, a boot camp that's offered to trilogy, I mean, a bunch of schools do it. And so what I think is kind of more interesting, dynamic to look at is traditional, higher ed products, and alternative education products, whoever, who makes me I do care, but like, either way, it's fine in the same way that I want electric car doesn't have to be from Tesla, it could be from London. And the way that I've always kind of thought about these these products is a little back to at least said before, which is usually these alternative education products are targeting somewhat of a non traditional student. I don't know how old they are, usually adults have a routine. There's also plenty of exciting alternative education happening in K 12, happening all over the place. But it's usually a different student. As Lisa said, we're learning isn't their number one priority. And the other kind of factor that we see over and over and over at Flatiron School, is they are not sometimes they're not seasoned students. I think especially probably in the EdTech landscape, a lot of people in that tech probably are we're pretty good students and like school. But a lot of the students we saw on these alternative education products are non traditional students. Education is the number one priority. And they're just haven't been a student, they spent most of their past 510 years in a career. And when you're working in a job, it's your job to get it right. Right, no one pays, you're doing a good job, if you're getting a long day. And when you're student, it's your job to get it wrong day in day out. The second you get it right, move on to the next. Don't spend any time in the world. And once you're getting it right. And so what needs to happen is the student support needs to be focused much more on how to be a student, how to kind of normalize that emotional weight of being wrong all the time. You need to work with them to build accountability, because usually these alternative education products are much more flexible. Right? So it's not just this like boom, boom, boom, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It's, you know, get this done this month. And we all know that deadlines are great. We all know that. But I hope everyone knows deadlines are great. And it's a part of student's success to kind of deliver those deadlines help people create them for themselves helping to create a structure around their learning experience that is productive in this kind of weird education experience that either they haven't done in 1520 30 years, or doesn't look like their last educational experience and they're in high school. Every school does it differently by think those are the really framing under which students success has to change.
Alexander Sarlin:I love this point. And you know, there's some really interesting literature and it's older literature now about this concept of orientations for online students. There's this understanding and lots of research behind it that when people are becoming a student, as you mentioned, for the first time, in years, or or in a new context, they just don't know how to do it. There's a time management issues, there's communication issues, they there's technology issues, there's so many different things that you sort of have to learn just to get the baseline of being able to keep up with a different kind of program. So I've really liked that the way you frame it is differentiating, it's really not about the provider itself. It's, it's about the product, it's about, you know, are you signing up for a one week boot camp in person where they're going to, you know, take attendance every day, and there's all sorts of accountability for a three year online, you know, MBA, where you, you know, where all the deadlines are shifting, and you have to turn your whole life around to make it work, and you have kids and you know, jobs, it's a really very different and you're right, they're both provided by by different types of institutions. So that idea of structure and accountability, and orientation and sort of making sense of an online learning environment is so important, I really, really appreciate that answer. And it also gets
Joe Burgess:ended up being more individualized, because your students, each student looks a bit different when you're traditional. I mean, when I went to college, and I was 19, we all live within an hour of school, I went to a like a live on campus. I wasn't a commuter school, and we all kind of look similar. So I think it's easier for them to bucket people into a few buckets. Once again, alternative education and products. There's significantly more buckets under what Windows people are sitting your students are sitting in. Absolutely.
Alexander Sarlin:And it's really interesting to sort of think about this concept of timely interventions, as you mentioned earlier in that context. Because, yeah, I mean, a lot the the flexibility, the very thing that makes education appealing to working learners, as you mentioned, Lee, so they have all sorts of competing priorities is the flexibility they have, I think it's Capella University has this thing called the flex path. And it's all about how flexible how you can do it at your own piece. Of course, that's what people want. But as soon as you go to your own pace, the onus goes on the student to get things done, and they need all sorts of wraparound supports, and graduation rates and graduation rates plummet. Exactly. And and I think some of these universities who have long tenure in this, this includes, you know, Open University in the UK, or, you know, people who've done online learning for a long time, have invested ended up investing more and more and more in exactly the type of student services and custom tools that allow the relationships to be built. It's a really, really compelling. So I have to ask, you both met and worked at Flatiron School. Lisa, you also have worked in some pretty big tech companies when it comes to education. You led remote learning at Facebook slash Mehta. You've worked for years at Google, with in with the Google Hangouts product. These are two tech companies that have huge outsized influence on the ad tech space. We already mentioned that Google is arguably the biggest tech company in the world. We've recently reported on Amazon just launched an online course section of its site and has, you know, a lot of fingers in the education space in various ways. And Microsoft is a is also a sort of dark horse in the ad tech world. They obviously bought LinkedIn learning, which had bought Lynda, they have Blizzard Entertainment, which is a sort of Metaverse play and all sorts of other things. Minecraft EDU. So as a startup ribbon, looking to break into the space, but with some big tech DNA in your background, I'd love to hear you talk about sort of the advantages and disadvantages of big tech and Ed Tech starting to have some convergence.
Lisa Jiang:Yeah, you're so right, Alex, and you know, certainly big tech. And the companies that I've been involved in definitely want to be in education. I think the advantages of them being in this space is, you know, they can devote a lot of resources and direct a lot of talented people to tackling real problems in education. I think I'm optimistic that they have people and are devoting resources to solving those in a real substantial way. Another I think a real advantage, which we talked about earlier is the usability, the ease of use, they are building and able to build a consumer grade product that comes with a lot of familiarity and comfort to using those products. And so when they build in this space, that means that adoption can be better. And you know, if it is a truly useful tool, like some of the Google products that I used to work with, like they are truly beneficial. You have faster learning curves and easier adoption paths to getting real bad. value out of them. Of course, there are disadvantages. Often these companies go into the education space, intentionally as a loss leader, you know, you see this model over and over again, they provide a free offering, because they see value in getting a certain type of user onto the platform early. And they kind of kick the can down the road of like, how will they monetize? I think they have a number of ideas in mind. But the main thing that I would emphasize there is that makes it really hard for a tech upstart to really compete, you know, it's really hard to compete with free. And so what happens is like when you build something, and it's not free, and you're charging for it, but there is this alternative that's free. This is that advises people to get into space, right. And so over time, that could result in a less innovation in the space. And that would be a disappointing outcome. If folks were not tackling these bigger issues in different ways.
Alexander Sarlin:That's a terrific answer. Really, really thoughtful. You mentioned how ribbon is at least starting in a place where it's connecting big tech players like zoom and Canvas and which is made by Instructure and Google Sheets, and taking the the sort of very wide adoption of these types of tools, and then building really specialized and very, very useful tooling on top of them. I'd love to hear you talk about how that dynamic works. Do you think that's a strategy that could be pursued by other startups where they actually can build on top of zoom, we've seen things like class technologies do that build using the install base of these massive consumer grade products, but then using them for very specialized education use cases?
Lisa Jiang:I think so. I mean, our DNA and the kind of first iteration of our product is really with that in mind, we want to be where the teachers and staff already are. And if that is enabling them, to save time, get more of that mindshare, back to doing their core job. I think that's a great thing. I think like our focus is really like, Where does the value live. And if it is, on top of being part of some of these big platforms, I think that's okay.
Joe Burgess:Whenever you're a young company, you're always limited by how much engineering effort and how much effort you can put into the product. And you're limited by distribution, right, that's your two things is developing a better product and distribution. And so it building on top of an existing thing like Google Sheets, you can kind of outsource the areas where you're not innovating to someone else that builds familiarity, which is amazing. That means our users can use our software faster, and on the distribution side, but building on top of a thing that already has distribution via zoom marketplace or Google Apps Marketplace, you then solve some of your distribution problems. So just as a business, it's also kind of a compelling option. Yeah.
Alexander Sarlin:And maybe in an ideal world, it also sort of flips, that loss leader issue that you are mentioning, Lee so that, you know, Google Offers classrooms and so much of its suite for free, it gets huge adoption, they don't really do get a whole lot of money out of it, although they do it at times. But it also ideally allows the whole ecosystem of apps and startups to to be able to then have a channel into the education system, which is sometimes hard to break into. So it's an interesting and complex ecosystem. I've always fascinated by how all the different players work in this and even why you want. So why all these big tech companies are have their eye on schools and education, but they certainly do. And we're seeing it more and more. Absolutely. So you know, ribbon education just is a really exciting project. And I think any listeners who are listening today who have any relationship to student services, that could be universities, that could be alternative providers, even individual course providers, I really recommend that they check it out. And we're gonna put all the links to the ribbon site, as well as the blog and other resources in the show notes. I wish we had more time. But to wrap up the interview today, you know, we always ask what is the most exciting trend that you see in the tech landscape right now you both keep your eye really close to it, that you think our listeners should keep an eye on.
Joe Burgess:Mine is really about the rise of alternative education. Where we are now is honestly kind of where I thought we'd be in 2016 2017. I was eager, but it turns out it took longer, right and the pandemic probably also accelerated things, which is the demand for traditional education is starting to falter and decrease for the right what I actually believe is that the demand for adult education has not gone down. It's just that some traditional providers aren't delivering the right product. And so with that comes a lot of innovation and excitement. And I'm really thrilled to see what happens when students are considering things besides traditional four year degree readings are two year degrees, and your micro credential, you went through the list all the different options, other ways that you can kind of continue your learning. I think we're finally starting to see a little bit of that tipping point happened.
Alexander Sarlin:Agreed it is really exciting. How about you, Lisa, what is a trend that you think that our listeners should keep an eye on?
Lisa Jiang:Yeah, I mean, it's been really fascinating, I'm sure for you to Alex, the past couple weeks with a disruption in the OPM business. So, you know, between the two new business model changes, and the University of Arizona's acquisition of zavio. I think we're just really actually seeing the beginnings of kind of the unbundling of OPM services, which I'm keeping a close eye on, because I think it does create a lot of new opportunities for both ad tech startups as well as traditional universities and colleges to think through, you know, where did they sit in that? unbundling?
Alexander Sarlin:That's a terrific point, I think you know, that that whole space has sort of changed so much that the models that we used to see in OPM, where it's like, you have a partnership, lots of money up front, it's going to take years to recoup, the OPM partner does everything, all the marketing, all the instructional design, and it's this sort of like two giants coming together, it just feels like those days are kind of over or they're just about to be over,
Joe Burgess:the opening face is definitely gonna look very different in five years, two years even maybe
Alexander Sarlin:agreed. And what is one resource can be a book, a blog, a Twitter feed that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into the topics we discussed today?
Lisa Jiang:Yeah, I'm a huge fan of Phil Hill and Michael Phelps See, which I know, Alex, you follow them as well, I just appreciate how deep they go in their analysis, and really hold at tech companies and universities accountable. And so I definitely follow those too, for a lot of my news sources,
Joe Burgess:I also follow Phil, and Michael, you know, get all the newsletters and all the various workplaces that are writing, but I want I really like reading this Robert Blue Bell thing of saying fasting correctly. And he's the ex vice president online learning for NYU engineering school. And he says two books. They're both collections of essays, which is really digestible. I can read, you know, one little essay in 20 minutes, and then put it down and go on with my day, instead of a big, big, long, giant, multi chapter book. And then also, it's kind of a weird one. And have you ever heard of it, but they they're talking to the folks from there, and we're doing initial stuff and a lot of things, they're trying to bring a lot of the same relationship focus getting out of lectures and into small workshops and one on ones, but there's focused on K 12, I think a lot of what they're doing actually does apply to have the adult online learning space, even if you do have to do some translation between how they convey and how it works for adults. And then, of course, you know, I can't, I can't leave this section without talking about us, we have. One thing that Lisa and I were always frustrated with in 2018 2017, was that I felt like we're recreating the wheel every day, like someone else must have figured out a better way to survey students and get better NPS results or CSAT, or whatever. And there was nothing there bill for adult learners, especially online adult learners, right, we do research on how to manage a classroom, and they would talk about 10 different spelling exercises for 10 year olds, right. And so we built what we wish we had. So we've built, we have a blog on our website, or learner success blog, which is focused on resources for those in the online adult learning space, especially alternative education. And then we also have a community called the learner success guild. And it's community. It's about operators in the alternative education space, and member alternative education products that can work for traditional school, that's fine, as long as the product they're delivering is alternative is an alternate education product. And in there, we do kind of private events. We have a mailing list where people can ask questions, you know, one person was asking, Hey, how have you guys, our zoom prices are getting really expensive. They're trying to bill us for this other thing? How have you handled that? And someone else responded said, Hey, here's how we handled that. And it's great just to talk to like minded people who are all solving similar problems. Since our blog and learner success skill are two resources, I think, are great, are building as best we can. We're open for more feedback and better ways to build it. And it's been a it's so far I think, actually been my favorite part has been the learner success skill. Because they just get to build something that we wish we get to build something that we wish we had, at least as we've been spearheading that,
Alexander Sarlin:that's fantastic. And I will testify that throughout my career, the Student Success professionals are some of the most not only the nicest, but some of the most creative, thoughtful, relationship oriented, helpful people you'll ever meet. And I think a community of them would be about the best place to be online. So I will definitely The link to the learner success blog and the guild, run by ribbon education, anybody in that space or if you know anybody in that space, please please pile in because I think that's a it's an under. It's an amazing group that does not get enough chance to share ideas.
Joe Burgess:Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Lisa.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, of course. Lisa John and Joe Burgess. This has been an awesome conversation. I love this focus on student success, bringing the keeping the humanity in the adult learning online space, but automating the tasks is really exciting. Thank you so much for being here with me at edtech insiders.
Lisa Jiang:Thank you for having us.
Alexander Sarlin:Thanks for listening to this episode of the EdTech 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 ad tech insiders content subscribe to the Ed Tech insiders newsletter at edtech insiders.substack.com