Edtech Insiders

This Week in Edtech with Ben Kornell, 9/1/22

September 02, 2022 Season 3 Episode 11
Edtech Insiders
This Week in Edtech with Ben Kornell, 9/1/22
Show Notes Transcript

Guest: Ish Baid, Founder & CEO @ Virtually

Topics This Week:

  1. Duolingo Math
  2. College Enrollment Shifts
  3. Public Teacher Workforce
  4. Career Education
  5. Funding + M&A Highlights

Alexander Sarlin  0:05  
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.

Ben Kornell  0:28  
Hello, everybody, it is the beginning of September and welcome to the week in ed tech from Ed Tech insiders. I'm Ben Cornell with my co host, Alex Sarlin. Alex, we're into the school year we're into the start of college. It is all systems go. What do we have going on at Tech insiders? Well, so

Alexander Sarlin  0:47  
in the wake of all the amazing debt relief news from last week, I think now people are starting to focus on okay, what is the school you're actually going to be like? What is that tech? What can ed tech do? What about tech fatigue? What about enrollments? It's a really interesting moment where we're sort of all as a field, all of education, all of that tech, saying, you know, holding our breath a little bit and seeing what this year is actually going to bring. It's it's a pretty exciting time. Well,

Ben Kornell  1:11  
you know, that exciting time is also boosted by some big players making big moves. Earlier this summer, we saw Class Dojo going hardcore into the metaverse, and now we have another big 800 pound gorilla Duolingo. Coming into math, they've launched a math beta app, they want to be your kids math tutor. And currently they've got 50 million monthly active users. This is not some like stat on a paper that 50 people signed up. These are active users. And four or five of them were not using language app before. So these are brand new to language apps, they've converted a ton of people. And now they're really going after the other big market here, which is math tutoring. It's hard to do math tutoring. So, you know, will it live up to the hype? We don't know. But they are doing the courses at multiple levels based on age. And this is also a play for them to reach down to younger learners, because typically their users are, you know, 18 and older, this could be their breakthrough moment to add more to their growing pipeline of online learners. You've done a lot of deep diving here and Duolingo. Somebody we've been following a lot, what's your take on this?

Alexander Sarlin  2:29  
I mean, this is really interesting, because when you start looking at the articles on this, it really feels like this has been sort of a passion project for one of the Duolingo engineers who is a math person, and has been thinking about how to leverage and sort of repurpose some of Duolingo is amazing, you know, toolkits, and it's incredible reach to reach into a topic that is top of mind for so many people at all levels. And the you know, what was launched this week was the beta beta math app. And it's for third graders, they're planning on going third and fourth graders and then having an adult version for basically adults who want to brush up on their, you know, math ability or improve their math ability, maybe those people who hated math when they were kids. What's interesting about it, I mean, lots of things are interesting about it. But one thing that really stuck out to me is that Duolingo, as you said, Ben, it doesn't really focus on children, and it doesn't sell to schools or partner to schools, officially, that said, nearly half of all language classrooms in the US use Duolingo. So this is a you know, consumer product, subscription based consumer and tech product that has sort of been so impactful. And so well known that it's almost like accidentally taken over the school space. And when you think about that, and then say, okay, and now they're going into math, and it's this, you know, mobile first gamified interactive, actually very adaptive math app, the questions are generated automatically based on data. They're not it's not that it's a certain set of questions. It could be a really big deal. Nobody knows yet. It's being launched without any monetization strategy. There's no, there's no cost. It's in front of the paywall. But I think they're trying it out. And Luis von Ahn, who's the founder of Duolingo. And you know, Professor genius, always wanted to go into math on this. They've started with language, and they have many, many languages. But from the very beginning of Duolingo, he's been interested in it. That said, it's been sort of being done, I think, in a relatively low key way by this engineer Samantha Segal in inside the company. So it's a really exciting and cool combination of a massive like us 800 pound gorilla. And this incredible ad tech culture where Duolingo is famous for being able to AP test everything giving their engineers and their product people lots of leverage to be able to try things in the platform. And this is I think, something that is a it's a big bet, but it's not really a bet in terms of time. It's really like let's try it and see what happens and I could see this really sweeping through the math learning space, because it's just so popular already. And just stepping back

Ben Kornell  5:05  
in the macro picture. You know, our narrative around innovation in edtech generally comes from the classic, I started a company raised a couple of rounds, we went public or we were acquired or something like that. But I think a lot of people, especially product managers, and engineers, are finding really high impact by working with existing platforms that have high penetration. And they're converting that into really scalable impact on new products or new product features. What's special is Duolingo is willing to do this in a way that's humble, that's experimental, most, you know, publicly traded companies have ossified so they've still kept some of that entrepreneurial vision. And you have like a tiger team basically launching something that can be really disruptive. The other big picture thing is this convergence of b2c and b2b. Basically, every company is eventually going to be B to C to B, or B to B to C, it's really just a matter of sequencing. Because that kind of expectation on the business side is that I'm going to have consumer grade experiences. And the expectation on the consumer side is that if I use this at home, why can I use this at work. And so this might be a great way to hack some of the institutional sales that are classically long sales cycles, hard to penetrate, and so on, you kind of land one of the top 10 App Store apps of all time. And then through that channel, you launch new sub apps or products. Let's also remind our viewers that when we looked at the top 10 grossing apps last year, you know, something like half of them were language learning apps, so is language learning, like the Trojan horse to get in on what could potentially be an even bigger market, which is math remains to be seen. But it's an exciting time. From that excitement, let's go to higher ed Alex, what's going on as colleges come back to campus?

Alexander Sarlin  7:15  
Yeah, so I mean, it's been so interesting, there were a bunch of headlines this week around, you know, a lot, a lot. And we sort of picked a few that really stood out to us about sort of what it looks like for people getting back to school this year, Phil Hill, who, you know, listeners to this podcast will know we love his takes on things had some really interesting, he's sort of looked at some of the iPads data that post secondary data sources about what's been happening. And it looked like you know, in 2020, to 2021 46% of students took only online courses at the higher ed level. So that's like, pretty amazing. You think about almost half the students in the country, were only taking online courses. And now of course, we're getting to a place where people are trying to figure out their hybrid and what to do. What's also interesting about that particular report is how the biggest schools in the country, the sort of mega universities that we mentioned, sometimes the Southern New Hampshire's Western Governors, Arizona state's Grand Canyon universities are enrolling, you know, 150 to 200,000 students, they're enormous, and the vast majority are online. So we're getting to the space where online learning is becoming very normalized and very, very large, but where people still, you know, a lot of students based on their situation still want to be on a campus. And I think everybody's just keeping an eye on that. The Surgeon General, this is first breaking news, just today, Surgeon General of the US really urged colleges to up, you know, increase their investment in mental health. So that's the flip side of all of this online learning. That's the flip side of all of this, you know, chaos that we've seen in the pandemic, anxiety, depression, mental issues. And you know, more than a million students have dropped out of college since the beginning of the pandemic, and many more have chosen not to go. And you know, reports are saying three quarters of the bachelor's degree students who have considered dropping out site emotional stress as the reason they want to leave because of their emotional, you know, wellbeing. So I think college is at the same, you don't have to do two really different things at the same time. One is make sure their existing students, whether they're online or offline are feeling okay, if they're not drowning and anxiety, and then meanwhile, start to move to a world where online education is totally accepted. There are all these hybrid models. And then also think about cost because you still have incredibly expensive colleges. A report this week talked about Vermont, having the highest average tuition, and that's based on a handful of small liberal arts schools. And you have almost a $40,000 average tuition in this tiny state of Vermont. So schools are facing this trifecta of issues. You know, what is the future of online learning and adult learning? How do we take care of the mental health of our Students, and how do we start finally curbing costs. The last thing, there was a really cool article from John Marcus at the Hechinger post who's terrific on this space, talking about Maine, and how Maine just did something really interesting, it's been doing something really interesting because Maine has been facing demographic declines and college enrollment declines for a while. So they've had to strategize about how to handle a moment like this for quite a while. And what they've done is they've said, you know, in state tuition prices for people from other states, so they literally put up billboards in Massachusetts saying, Hey, you can come to Maine, for the same prices as you can go to Massachusetts, because we're matching the price or even cheaper, we'll keep it at in state tuition. They're also doing all sorts of things like turning their own students into admissions, ambassadors, and sending people out and trying to do all sorts of different kinds of recruiting tactics. And, you know, the article is about how in this world where colleges are facing all these different problems, it might be smart to look at people who have been ahead of the curve. So I know that's a little bit of a grab bag, all different ways of looking at what's going on in college. But, you know, there's also a surge in popularity of hybrid learning for people who want to study abroad. I think when you add it all up, this is a transformational moment. And I think everybody's looking at this year, maybe this in the next year and saying, how many kids are actually coming back? How many of those kids are going to get so anxious and stressed out and depressed? That they drop out? How many are going to be online? How many of those kids are going to be too anxious? What do we do to make sure people can afford college, especially when there are fewer and fewer people in the demographic, everybody in higher ed is just like has the same questions on their minds. And it's pretty exciting. I love this kind of disruptive time, the crisis is a big opportunity, I think, for people to really rethink what they're going to do. I know we got to talk K 12. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of these higher ed issues.

Ben Kornell  11:51  
Yeah, well, many of these themes are similar in K 12, where the school is now becoming an integral point of service for health services and food services and social emotional care, as well as the academic well being of the students. And higher ed even more so can actually deliver the academic components in virtual and hybrid ways. And that's going to be very native for the students who just went through COVID and are highly adapted to virtual learning combined with some in person, you know, what's really happening is the full stack education experience to use a software developer term, you know, that full stack, the stack is changing in terms of adding new things, mental health and social emotional support. But it's also shifting in that the university thought I have to own that full stack and the end, I have to be the comprehensive A to Z, not only do I have to be a world class, educational organization, I have to run dorms, I have to run food services, I have to run all these things. Well, now you might see them outsource elements of that in person and online. And I would say there's a really helpful analogy outside our space, which is hospitals, what you've seen with hospitals, when you actually walk into the hospital building on each floor, you might actually be integrating with four or five different companies that are providing that specialized service anesthesiologist, or by this company. And, you know, dialysis is from this company, and so on and so forth. And the hospital still does the heart surgery and brain surgery, because that's where the margins are. And that's also where the like most highly leveraged specialists are, that's how colleges are going to end up looking, they're going to be a point of service for a vast integrated network of service providers. And ultimately, we don't need the same kind of footprint to serve the students that we needed before. So you know, whoever figures out how to best leverage that physical campus to provide all those points of sale, and then expand that net, those nodes out there going to win. The last thing I'll say is, you know, means experiment and so on, there is this tragedy of the commons where like, each individual player starts doing that thing. And it might create the boost over a short period of time. But once everybody goes to in state tuition, universally, that's going to bring all the revenue down and the margins down and the, you know, costs can't keep up with that. So that's another like, as you look at each individual player making their optimized move, the net effect could be good for users in that, like costs go down. Or it could be bad for users in that quality and choice might go down. So you know, higher ed, which has been immune to the gravity of economics is now like, welcome to the market. And it will be interesting to watch. Um, speaking of the market, we've covered many, many times the public teacher workforce, and some of the numbers are actually becoming really, really clear. You know, teacher vacancies now have kind of settled and the number of teachers As in classroom versus those not have, you know, we've done some initial accounting of that. And there's a bunch of reports from one end of the spectrum. There's this teacher crisis. On the other end of the spectrum, this mass exodus of teachers never happened. And in the middle, I think what we're finding is the truth, which is it depends on where you live. And a couple data points that I think our listeners should know, Michigan as state, their overall enrollment has dropped by a quarter since 2020. So 25% of students not showing up to school. So what does that mean for a teacher shortage? Well, you just have way fewer students. So maybe you don't have the shortage, but that you also had this incredible loss. And in other places, there's, you know, especially lower income mega districts, where there's differentials in pay and working conditions. There's huge shortages, and then subject by subject. And you know, according to the US Department of Education, all 50 states have reported incredible shortages in at least one subject area, of course, disproportionately special education, mathematics and science. So when you think about what we just talked about, with higher ed, and schools being a, you know, increasingly important point of service, and yet, everyone is experiencing things in a quite a different way based on their geography, you know, how can technology step in and serve? How can technology not? That is the question for really the next five to 10 years. And one last thing before I get your you to weigh in on this, too, there is a palpable sense of tech fatigue, in education, where, you know, this surge in number of apps and advertising of apps. And, you know, by the way, the freemium model for good and for bad, it just bombards people with lots of apps to solve lots of discrete point things, we're getting a little bit more of a sense of this backlash against ad tech, in this context of everyone is stretched, and there's not, you know, there's pockets of feature crisis. So as you kind of look at that, you know, I'm in it every day on the school board and thinking about things from, you know, my own kids experience, what are you seeing what's standing out to you?

Alexander Sarlin  17:24  
I think one of my big takeaways from all the different takes of pro and con teacher shortage, some people just don't believe it's happening. And they're reporting that it's not new, it's not national, it's it's local, and the numbers are hard to find, and others are like, it is humongous. It's going to be a disaster. As you say, I think one of my big takeaways is that it's now becoming almost like a common wisdom, like a piece of folk wisdom, that there's a teacher shortage. And so some people are trying to bolster that with actual statistics and make sense of it. Others are trying to sort of debunk it. But, you know, no matter how you cut it, you know, their surveys are showing that parents are incredibly worried about it. You're seeing states that have low teacher salaries have extreme problems. So in Arizona, there's a great article in the Times this, this week about how you know, in Arizona, nearly four fifths of teaching positions had to be covered by support staff or teachers in training last year, 80% and 1/3 of positions remained vacant. And Arizona is, you know, just just as Maine is competing with Massachusetts, for students, Arizona is competing with Texas and Nevada for teachers, because Texas and Nevada are putting billboards up saying hey, come teach in our state where you're going to make more money, and they're putting things on social media, and then teachers are leaving. So I think what you're saying, Ben about the parallels is so respite on that both higher ed and K 12 schools, which really have operated outside of most normal market forces of having to be in sort of hardcore competition for talent, or having to, you know, having to think about cost structures that will will optimize their enrollment base, it's just hasn't been how they've thought about their lives and what they offer. And I think they all are suddenly thrust into this really strange world. There was one last thing is that Missouri, according to one of these articles, 25% of the districts in Missouri are going to be on a four day schedule, this fall. And that four day schedule is something that people are starting to, you know, wonder about and think about the Hechinger had a great meta analysis, basically an overview of a bunch of different studies of the four day school week, because it seemed like an increasingly common option is to just shorten the school week, which just makes it more appealing for teachers. It's also sometimes more convenient for for rural students, but maybe less for certain parents. And it basically said that, you know, the number of four day schools ICT rose by more than 600% over 20 years, but still it's risen a lot. And the early research is saying it's not you know, it's not as good you know, having less time I'm in school. It doesn't always work out for students, especially though a lot of the rural students who are there. So I think, you know, this sounds so trite, but I think it's like, the people are finally facing some different kinds of forces in education. And you feel this sort of flailing, logistical flailing of how can we fill but they talked about WARM BODIES, right? Who can teach this math class? Can the gym teacher teach it? Can the bus driver teach it? Can we steal a teacher from the next school or the next district or the next state? And I just don't think schools have have had to live in that world. And then of course, you have these surveys about teachers wanting to leave the profession, which we'll see if that actually happens. But it seems like it is, I try to look at all this with with rose colored glasses, which is rather than it being chaos, it's a really interesting rethinking of education, and people are just going to have to get really creative in their solutions. And hopefully, those creative solutions ends up end up being, you know, student positive. And I think tech could play a huge role in that. Yeah, that's my take. And so, but really quickly, one other thing that's been happening a lot this week, and we'll keep this short, but there's been some interesting headlines about career education. So, you know, there's some ideas of you know, there's this concept of academic career plans that go to students all the way as early as kindergarten in some states. And, you know, the idea of starting to think about what is the idea behind, you know, CTE they used to call a career technical education? How do we actually make that happen, where how much is too much. There was a really interesting poll that said that voters want accountability for career education programs, you have 1000s of career education programs, but many of them don't really get their graduates to the type of employment that they promise. And there's been this concept of higher ed for a while this gainful employment rule where schools have to really show that they get their students to be employed at a level that makes the education worth the money. And they're starting to rethink and rewrite the gainful employment rule, there's a draft model of it. And it's just a really interesting moment to think about, you know, as it becomes the ROI of schooling just continues to grow for parents and students and adult learners and college students. What does it actually mean? What how does the rubber meet the road? What can What must a school do to make sure that the, you know, they talked about the debt to earnings threshold, you know, where you should be earning a lot more than you owe the school? What do you think about this career education stuff?

Ben Kornell  22:32  
Well, you know, big takeaway, and you know, talking about career planning, when you're in kindergarten, talk about a really tough job, because the careers that people are going to have don't even really exist yet, you know, my son's in first grade, and you know, he's going to be working in the 2100s. Like, what careers are going to exist, then, what I really like about the things in the career, this CTE or reimagining career planning movement, is that they're often focused on competencies, not, you know, be a doctor be a lawyer, it's certainly not the socialist, like community planning of like, hey, we need this many doctors, lawyers, accountants, and so on. So therefore, here's the sorting hat. It's much more competency based. But I will say that we are having a divergent moment where coastal large cities are having a different experience than rural states, where there is a sense of if we don't grow our own, we're not going to have certain industries or skill sets, and so on. And so when you think about the employer groups that are there, when you think about the Chamber of Commerce is they're starting to look at education as a critical lever, to the, you know, health of their business being located in that state. I will say like Colorado is one of those states where they've been really clear to say it's not career versus college. It's really around preparing kids for college career and life. And they have that's kind of the birthplace of America succeeds. It's nonprofit, that's really kind of a business voice for what schools and colleges should look like. Colorado 60s started it. And so I just think that there's a way in which those states are actually quite innovative. And my hope would be that the coastal, the coastal elites, you know, the coastal cities where you know, any job could be your thing. There's almost no forward thinking about that. And they could really benefit from some of this competency based instruction. smarts, heartache. Yeah. So we always wrap up the program with some funding and m&a highlights, and I'll take the funding and outs we'll do them in a on the funding though. We want to also go a little high level CrunchBase had an article that says ed tech funding falls short plee global numbers are down about 5.4 billion going into seed and venture rounds for education and tech companies so far. And that's on track to be, you know, two thirds of the 15 point 8 billion that investors poured in in 2021. Again, this is one of those where different markets are behaving differently, we've seen an uptick in Europe, we've seen India leveling out the US is, is down, I also had a chance to talk with a couple ed tech investors. And what they were telling me is that, you know, there just haven't been a lot of great deals in the last three to six months, you know, the companies that are really, really hot and really moving well and doing well, many of them raised at the peak. And also, many of them have just gone to insiders to bridge, because they all view this as an suboptimal time to raise. So there's a little bit of a winner's curse here, where if you are raising now, it might speak to your desperation to raise money, and might actually make it just a not a great market on the supply side. Or maybe it's the demand side, I don't know which side it is. But, you know, for the ventures that are raising, there's almost a selection bias to be, you know, more problematic or have more, you know, curveballs right now. And so that's leading a lot of ad tech investors to sit on the side to still focus on their shoring up their portfolio. And I think that trend is going to continue for another six months, I think 2022 is going to be a down year. Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron, in France announced a new educational innovation fund with 500 million euros. And the idea is to grant schools more autonomy and free freedom to kind of bottoms up, grow new programs and new practices. And while I love the idea here, 500 million euros, let's create bottoms up innovation, and let's embrace this, in a country that has long been known to be very bureaucratic and slow to innovate. I think it's a great first step, I can also see that 500 million euros going out the door in a second, and not much to show for it. So it'll be interesting to see how the French edtech community builds partnerships with schools to actually provide the structure and scale needed to take these one off ideas and help them you know, seed new innovative strategies, companies, curriculum, etc. But it is a big move by France to be an innovator and continues to elevate edtech in Europe. And then the last thing I'll cover on this one is up kid raising 1.7 7 million in funding. It's a marketplace connecting childcare workers with licensed school. Part of why we're bringing it up is companies like conside and Winnie have been working on ideas around early childhood marketplaces. Wonder school is also a school hosting app. So a lot of really interesting stuff going on in the early childhood. The question really is, are there is the winner going to be a full stack provider that provides the childcare? Is it going to be a marketplace that connects people? Or will it actually be more like a platform that enables the, you know, states or individual businesses sole proprietors to thrive? It's, you know, an area that's generated a surge in investment. Now we've got some big players that are making some big moves. So watch up kid, alongside Winnie who was on our postcards from ASU GSB. And inside wonder school friends of the podcast.

Alexander Sarlin  28:39  
Last funding rounds we want to cover is etbu, which is an interactive simulation company that does a lot of l&d work raised a growth equity round this week and Vietnamese ed tech startup V Hawk, I am probably butchering that, but VUIH OC, just raised a $2 million pre Series A round that's an online platform out of Hanoi, Vietnam, that provides courses for elementary, middle and high school students, another great movement in the Asia market. So that brings us to our mergers and acquisitions section of the podcast. There are a couple of interesting ones this week, a company called Nasara technologies, which is a gaming and sports media company, acquired wild works kids, that's a leading us children's interactive entertainment company that's been around for almost 20 years. And this is a move by a gaming company to sort of go into educational IP they bought buying a game called Animal Jam and buying the whole company and boosted sort of gamified learning a segment of that company so in the Zara acquiring wild works, IP Animal Jam, you saw it Renaissance, which is a big big dog in education technology, acquiring illuminate, which is an assessment provider so that you know Renaissance has been aggregating buying a few different companies including Nearpod over the last few years and they're put Adding together some really solid investments into a large scale, you know, sort of one stop shop solution. And we saw a alchemy, which is a web three infrastructure developer, acquiring a chain shot, which is a software developer bootcamp. And that's, you know, those who follow the web three space, have seen that, you know, one of the things that is happening there is a lot of the web three companies are really interested in basically creating more web three people, more software engineers, more web three enthusiast, so they're doing a lot of education moves for that particular move. And that this sounds like that kind of move where change shot is a, you know, Bootcamp for what three roles and a web three developers buying them so they can offer their own education. And Achille, which makes a digital medicine video game endeavor. Our x, which is sort of a game to help children with ADHD, remember to take their prescribed medicine was really interesting project went public this week through a spec after taking 163 million in cash onto their balance sheet. And now they have $130 million market cap. So it's a small company. And it's makes a very specific product, but going public at this particular moment. So we have a really cool guest on the podcast today is vaid, the CEO of virtually, and the host of the reshaping education podcast.

Welcome to our deep dive session. We have a great guest today, ich Bade, who's the CEO and founder of virtually, which provides a student management system for course creators, and also is another podcaster runs a really cool podcast called reshaping education. Yes, welcome to the pod.

Ish Baid  31:53  
Yeah, thanks for having me. I mean, it is great to be on the other legendary podcast that I've heard of for so long. And I mean, yeah, like what you guys are doing here is incredible. I'm honestly here as a fan more than anything else.

Ben Kornell  32:05  
It's good to have you on it.

Alexander Sarlin  32:06  
So let's start with virtually tell us about how you came up with the idea for it, how you sort of move through it, I think you've done yc. Give us the story of it and where you're

Ish Baid  32:14  
at. Yeah, yeah, it's funny, I guess having guest telling my story, instead of asking somebody else to tell there is but yeah, I guess with virtually I always like to start but just kind of my immigrant story, because that just has really shaped me as a human being and as a founder. And so my family immigrated to North America, I want to say it was 21 years ago at this point. And my parents, despite having great credentials, they both had master's degrees actually spent the first year in North America juggling three jobs, you know, we only had one car, we were living in the basement of somebody else's home in the suburbs of Toronto. And despite those credentials, they were actually working very low level kind of minimum wage jobs. And the only way they were able to progress in their career and get to where they are today. And they're absolutely crushing it is actually through online education. And so at the age of 16, both my mom and I taught ourselves to code code via YouTube tutorials. And that put her on the path to becoming an engineering manager at a healthcare IT company. And for me, it led me to becoming a software engineer at Facebook. And so I always had this kind of attachment to online education. And I knew that how powerful it could be. But I knew that in its current form, it could be so much more. And so you know, after a couple of years at Facebook, I just I knew, you know, the startup world was calling to me, I just knew I wanted to build something. And I wanted to give back to this kind of institution that had given me so much. And so I from 2019 onwards of basically working on this company called virtually, where our mission has really been to drastically improve online education. And you know, one of the things I was saying before we went live is with online education. One of the things that's super exciting is sometimes nothing happens for decades and decades, happens for weeks. And that's what it felt like. And we got so lucky on timing, I mean, 2019, nobody was building cohort based courses. Nobody even knew what that term was. And then suddenly, the pandemic happens, and every buddy's online and online education is the only type of education and so it created a massive, massive opportunity for us. So we've been in the space we've been iterating we've been building we've been pivoting over and over and over again, trying to find where we can add value to educators in the space. And yeah, you'd like you mentioned, we went through YC in the summer of 2020, which was the first ever remote batch and raised our seed round from Tiger global in the fall 2020 have built up a really solid team of about a 10 part time and full time employees and yeah, just enjoying the ride.

Ben Kornell  34:38  
Maybe for our listeners, it would be helpful if you could define cohort base and what's the difference between cohort based and non Cohort Based Learning and also how has that evolved, especially in terms of looking at your tool virtually, you know, I see a lot around encouraging long term engagement and lower churn, which we've talked about on podcasts lot. So can you talk a little bit about what cohort based really means and looks like?

Ish Baid  35:08  
Yeah, and just kind of a quick backstory and kind of the history of court based courses is one of the things we talked about on the reshaping education podcast is this this history of online education, specifically, the difference knowledge, education, 1.0 versus online education. 2.0. So, you know, if you like, think back to 2011, that's we've kind of we see the first movement from education, and it's kind of the MOOC movement. And everybody I think, remembers when MOOCs were all the hype, and, and people just thought it was going to completely change the world. And, you know, it was the right step at the time. And MOOCs were all about making education more accessible, getting all this information out in the world online. And that's exactly what they did. But the big missing piece, and I think this is what, you know, a lot of people have been talking about over the past few years is, you know, MOOCs had such a dismal completion rate, you know, it was less than 3% of people who started moved to actually complete them. And so around 2015, that's when we see kind of the rise of Vault MBA and some of these like New World, online education solutions that use live learning, instead of async. Learning. And now that conferencing starts to get better. And that's when we really start to see the emergence of Cohort Based Learning. And this online education 2.0, which is not about accessibility, but it's about outcomes, right? It's not enough to just have the education. But if you can't deliver an outcome, a transformation for your students, then what's the point. And so I think 2017 is a big year for cohort based learning, because that's when lambda school launches a completely online coding boot camp. And over the last five years, we've seen an emergence. So online boot camps cohort based learning, and essentially, the idea is that, you know, you, instead of going to single player mode, where you're going through curriculum on your own, you are going through other people who are in the same point in the journey as you and have a shared mission for the duration of the program. So it's actually the type of learning that we're all most familiar with, I mean, K through 12, has cohort learning. You know, I think higher ed is cohort learning. And really, core base courses is just kind of the online version of that. And it's what we're used to. But the big powerful mechanism is that it creates that accountability, you're not in it alone. And so that's kind of what we've seen. That's why there's been such a hype period, especially during COVID is people wanting to learn but didn't want to do it alone. And so court based courses have been shown to create that accountability that community and, and deliver the outcomes that we didn't see with earlier iterations of online learning.

Alexander Sarlin  37:37  
But one of the other interesting sort of dichotomies between the MOOC movement and Cohort Based is that in the MOOC movement, it was about bringing institutions online, mostly to higher ed became companies. But a lot of the cohort based courses are actually created by individuals, you know, solo practitioners, individual people who basically create courses and make them into these major learning experiences online. And I think that's, you know, I just ran my first cohort based course earlier this year, partially as an experiment to see what that was like. And it was a lot of work. It was just a lot more work than I expected. It was fascinating. I loved all the the learners, but it was a lot of work. And I'm curious if that's something you hear across the board, tell us about some of these individuals who have created these sorts of cohort based course, you know, huge businesses and how they run their courses. And what virtually does for you know, a proprietor like that.

Ish Baid  38:30  
Yeah, absolutely. And so I think this was one of the big kind of ideas, that immersion thing in 2020 was this idea is that, you know, anybody can be a teacher online. It's a very kind of romanticization of, I guess, this this comment, like of democratizing education. And, and we thought we should see this big disruption with creators screening for these courses. And we definitely saw a little bit of a hype period, but it's cooled off for a few reasons. So let's first talk about like the leaders in the space. So I think who you were talking about Alex? So I think there's a few key leaders who really inspired this movement, which is, obviously I think, Thiago forte with building second brain, David Carell, his business partner rite of passage, Elliot bill with part time YouTuber Academy, and now, now there's hundreds and hundreds more of these courses. And I think one of the things that we saw initially when we were working with course creators was that actually, a lot of them did not continue to create cohort based courses. They maybe ran, you know, one cohort or two cohort, but fundamentally didn't get out of it what they had hoped. So a lot of the creators that were coming to us, they were looking for another revenue stream. So a lot of creators, they monetize in different ways through ad revenue through Patreon merge, and they were hoping with core base courses that they could just tack on another revenue stream. But turns out that's actually not the case. You know, and traditionally, you know, people assume that, you know, the async courses, which really took off, you know, in the mid 2010s. You know, you could just create another company and run that same playbook. With chord based courses, and the reason that didn't pan out, is because there were some assumptions that we were wrong about. One which that creators would make for great teachers. Some do. Right Elliott doll. You know, Thiago forte are examples of that. But not all creators want to be teachers. And so we actually saw the creators that we were working with, we're actually creating not so great courses, because they just like you said, it's a lot of work and they weren't willing to put in the time. And turns out actually async courses, like, really fall into their zone of genius, they already are so great at creating content. async courses are actually just longer form versions of content. And so where we're actually seeing the traction for cohort based courses, and Cohort Based Learning has, at least from our perspective, has been less with creators, and more with actual education businesses. So a lot of programs, I think a boot camps are great example, boot camps have really leverage core learning and shown that the model really works there. We're seeing a lot of organizations that are doing it in the b2b capacity and creating these core based learning platforms and selling it directly to learning l&d departments and higher ed, I think some of the players that have emerged, there have been like skillful motor learning, the company called sphere, and even guild education, right, you know, is notoriously successful in this space. And so I think where virtually really fits into all of this is that, you know, when we realized that the market just wasn't there for working with creators, we started focusing exclusively on education businesses. And what we do is we realize that when you move to an online medium, so much is lost in that relationship between you and your student. And so we wanted to help educators get that back. The problem is, all that data is completely scattered across dozens of different tools. And so with virtually, we enable educators to see where learners are on their journey, and we integrate with all the tools that their learners by using Slack zoom, circle, the yellow, whatever LMS they're using. And we bring that all that data together to give kind of a holistic picture of where that student is who's engaged, who's not. And that allows you to give support to the students that need it the most,

Ben Kornell  42:06  
it's so interesting to hear the evolution as you frame it up, because it's definitely something we've been seeing in K 12, higher ed, and so on. And, you know, that relational connection between the teacher and the student is kind of foundational to even how we think about education, transforming the life of a learner, and so on. On the business model side, you know, Alex and I are trying to look forward and like what's coming next. And it'd be interesting to get your view on that. One of our past guests said, you know, it's the dirty little secret in education is that most businesses in education are services business, not technology businesses. And when we think about the async, part of the appeal, was infinite scale, you know, a one on one course at Harvard could now be viewed by millions of people. And you know, that access bridge that you talked about, but from a cohort base completion and outcomes model, it's actually like highly personalized and very heavy in terms of the human being needing to drive that engagement. How do you see business models evolving? And where do you think online learning 3.0 is headed?

Ish Baid  43:17  
Yeah, that's so funny. You mentioned that, I think it is a really interesting kind of paradigm. We're seeing the shift right now. You know, I think with any major trend, I think there's like this hype period, where we think that it's going to take over in a big way. And then you obviously have, like the skeptics who think it's not going to take off at all. And the reality is, tends to be somewhere in the middle, right, which is like, look, there's a good use case for this. But it doesn't apply to everything. And so I think that applies to MOOCs, like, you know, MOOCs haven't completely gone away. They still exist, and they have a use case they serve their purpose. And I think same with cohort based learning and online and acing most courses, right. Like, I think when it comes to learning, I think fundamentally, learning is all about accountability. How do you create accountability, and there's all these different mechanism for creating accountability. And I think people are realizing that court based learning is just one mechanism. But it's not the only, you know, and you're seeing these amazing creators create all these new types of learning experience. I love what ship 30 is doing. They have a membership model, we're seeing a lot of court based courses, and creators move to a membership model, because actually, courts are really hard to run as a creator, because you put all this effort into recruiting this cohort of students, and then went to cohort is over. You've lost that relationship, and you have to rebuild it from scratch with a new cohort. And so it's, you know, you don't have that recurring revenue stream. And so actually, the trend we're seeing is actually cohorts as ramps to online communities. And so that I think is a more interesting model where, essentially, you have this cohort where you you create this accountability people start at the same point, but it's an on ramp to a larger community. have lifelong learners about this topic or niche. And so I think community based learning is the one that we see a lot of right now. There's a lot of great stuff happening around gamification. I think even with async, I think there's ways to make async work with a community, right? You can pair, we're seeing like a company like outlier, which has async cohorts, but paired with the Slack community. Right. So I think at the end of the day, it's we're gonna see just a huge diversification of education, where we're gonna have all these companies come out, and maybe you'll have cohort based learning, maybe it'll be gamified model, maybe it'll be a community model. But it'll be up to the educators decide which mechanisms they actually want to use to drive accountability.

Ben Kornell  45:43  
Yeah, such a great point. And two things that resonate with me on that one, it's up for the educator to decide based on what they believe, but also, like you said, their skill, like, maybe I'm an acing creator, maybe I'm best as a cohort creator, maybe something else. And then also students are all different. Some, you know, we're generalizing, we're saying the average student doesn't complete X, Y, or Z. But as somebody who's always believed in personalized learning at different phases in one's life, or given one's like learning profile, you know, each learner can kind of decide what I'm interested in, in the 3.0 space is, could we actually have an assessment framework that is almost like a universal access assessment framework, that people can kind of chart their own journey. But then there's like a common set of measures or, you know, competencies that you could demonstrate to get that kind of cumulative degree, even if you're piecing together those things. Again, this is been thought of for like 20 or 30 years. And maybe it's a bridge too far. But if you imagine some sort of like comprehensive and equitable assessment mechanism, then you could actually really open the gates and say, Hey, any kind of learning can work so long as you build up towards this defined assessment or accountability system?

Ish Baid  47:09  
Yeah, that would be revolutionary. It'll, it'll be interesting to see how I guess this progresses. But I think your point about learners all being kind of different, I think that there's a really good point there. So at least for us, we've seen, I mean, it really feels like a gold rush moment, right now in education, because for the longest time, you know, we all talk about K through 12 being broken and higher ed, but adult learning has been one of the most underserved spaces for the past, you know, 100 years. And it's actually kind of sad, because the people adults are actually the people who need this education the most, whether that's single moms, that's high school, dropouts, just having accessible education can be life changing for them,

Ben Kornell  47:46  
and also the information that they need to do the next job didn't exist when they were in high school. So exactly need the just

Ish Baid  47:53  
changes every ability. Now, yeah, we say this a lot as well, which is, you know, one four year degree is no longer enough education for the entirety of your career. And so we live in a world where you have to upskill and rescale to progress in your career, which means that now people like like the gold rush, people are going out and realizing they have the option to create these online learning experiences for adults, people, industry experts, not professors, not academics, have the ability to go out and teach what they're the best at. And these are, these are teachers, right? These are people who are deeply passionate about teaching. So learning from industry extra, that's gonna be a big one, continuous learning, I think that's gonna be a big one. The biggest thing to identify, though, is the rescaling versus upskilling, right? Because the rescaling space is like a traditional boot camp where it's like a full time, you're completely changing career paths. You know, coding boot camps are notorious for these types of programs. But they're very intensive, they tend to be nine months long, and you have to pause everything you're doing. Whereas upskilling is something that's really taken off right now where it's, you know, maybe six weeks to six months, very kind of lightweight, cohort based courses that fit into your life nights and weekends and help you learn just small skills that help you accelerate in your existing path.

Alexander Sarlin  49:06  
There's so much to chew on here, we've got to bring you back for a longer session, because there's like a million directions to go in here. It's very exciting. For our listeners who may not be as familiar with the cohort based course space, we'll put links to almost everything that is mentioned in the show notes. Thiago forte, and David pearl. It's a whole world that is we don't talk about very much actually on this podcast. But I think it's worth paying attention to because it's one of the harbingers of the future of education, which I think will be a hybrid of sync and async. Like, you know, that's just me. It's been awesome to have you here. We'll definitely bring you back and looking forward to coming on reshaping education Sunday as well. We'd love to talk to you there.

Ish Baid  49:43  
Thanks so much for having me. This was a blast guys.

Alexander Sarlin  49:46  
Well, it's been a really big week in ed tech. We're seeing back to college career technical education, teacher shortage debates, and Duolingo breaking into the math world, as well as a number of different funding announcements. including in France, and some funding and m&a all around Renaissance buying, illuminate and some other things. Thank you so much for being here with us at Tech insiders. And remember if it happens in ed tech, you'll hear about it here. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the Ed Tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.