Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Expert-Led Learning Communities with Pablo Simko of Coleap
Pablo Simko is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Coleap, a marketplace of expert-designed learning communities.
Previously, he was the Chief Operating Officer at Elenas, a startup which enables Latin American women to set up online stores from the comfort of their mobile phones and has onboarded 300,000+ entrepreneurs throughout the region, and a Chief of Staff at Polymath Ventures, a startup studio for emerging markets.
Resources:
Building the Intentional University by Stephen M. Kosslyn (Editor, Contributor), Ben Nelson (Editor, Contributor), and others.
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. Pablo Simko is the CO CEO and co founder of Coleap marketplace of expert designed learning communities. Before Coleap. Pablo was the Chief Operating Officer at Elena's a startup which enables Latin American women to set up online stores from the comfort of their mobile phones and his onboarded 300,000 entrepreneurs throughout the region. He was also a chief of staff at polymath ventures, a startup studio for emerging markets. Pablo Simko, welcome to Ed Tech insiders.
Pablo Simko:Thanks for having me.
Alexander Sarlin:So probably in a couple of sentences, tell us what brought you into the education technology field? What experiences have you had in your background that led you to the idea of Coleap?
Pablo Simko:Fantastic, thanks for having me two things. One, my background. So my mom's a teacher, I've been in the education space, a long time worked in education, NGOs, when I was in the university was actually a primary school support teacher during that time. So I think that's one context. I think the other side of it is having been in technology for a very long time, we're very lucky with my co founder Thomas to build a company together in Latin America, that while not being technically an education company was a social commerce company, very much gave people the opportunity to do something they hadn't done before, which is open up an online store, and be a platform for them to run that and learn how to run an online store and make a living out of it. And if anything, the combination of believing that there's a better way of learning online, which I'm sure we're going to touch upon during this conversation. And the belief that technology can be a better way forward kind of animates my journey here, obviously. And we're going to go to in a second, a lot of beliefs that education can be improved, permeates, you know, the growth and the founding of codep. But you know, we can talk about it more in a second.
Alexander Sarlin:So let's talk about what ko leap actually is. It's seems like a fascinating platform, I've been involved with it myself, as an educator, give a little bit of an overview of ko leap and what it's actually like for learners and educators.
Pablo Simko:Absolutely, thanks, Alex. Think of codep as like a marketplace for learning communities very, very focused on professional upskilling. Now think of like learning communities as being a bit of a blend between a bootcamp MOOC and a cohort based course it's not quite any of them. I think it blends certain aspects of it. It basically is part MOOC, in the sense a lot of the content that gets consumed is like a MOOC, it's it's partly async. It's very similar to bootcamp in the sense that you have practical projects, with timeline with intensity, with a lot of even gamified approaches to it to basically combat the delayed gratification, challenge a lot of education has. And then it has some aspects of code based courses, and that a lot of the interactions between peers is live. And there's accountability and networking involved in it. And we build a marketplace partnering up with experts in an industry that design those learning communities around a number of verticals, including leadership, product, marketing, and over time, we'd like to branch out more. So I think that's a bit more about codep. And how
Alexander Sarlin:it works. Yeah, there's so much to unpack there, let me just take a moment to synopsize what I'm hearing. So the name of the company ko leap is really about taking that leap into the unknown, reconnecting with, you know, trying to sort of aim at the thing you've always wanted to be able to do, and actually having the sort of courage and belief to go for it. I love that phrase, you know, a place to reconnect with your long lost dreams. It's so poetic, but I really do think that, you know, education, that's for adult learners, that really is what it is, I mean, people have given up on the possibility that they can do certain things in their life. And then when a course or an expert or a mentor or community come along, they sort of say, who maybe I actually could do this, maybe they finally could write that novel or start that company or make a data that's a decentralized autonomous organization ready with anybody who doesn't know that acronym. It's a really exciting vision. And then the community aspect is obviously a really big part of it, you know, what COVID You know, courses, quote, unquote, are really called learning communities because they're all group bass. They're all about connecting with other people who are on sort of that same journey. And that seems like a really core idea of of what you're trying to accomplish. So let's talk about the learning communities. You know, you've run A number of learning communities at this point on a wide range of different topics you just mentioned Dows. That's one possible topic, then you've done no code tools, product management, investing, you know, Angel Investing, and really a lot of different things. What topics? Have you found work really well, in this type of learning environment where you have people who are looking to make that leap as adults with support? And with a community?
Pablo Simko:Great question, I would break that down into the ones like the general question of where we see that work best. And where we've actually focused A will be focusing moving forward, because I think these these are two different answers. In terms of where it works best I have to actually just use maybe, seemingly cut out one with the honest answer is, I don't think there is a better one, it's probably similar. And that's the best way to answer that is whether there would be if I asked or he asked me the question for what problem is a community best support you? Well, kind of an endless number of problems, right? Like you're doing things with others and an endless number of ways. That's one part of it. The other one is, it's a very, very flexible medium, because you're not just by virtue of it ultimately being a function, not just the content and the provider, in this case, US designing the experience, but the people around you, you can mold the experience to the specific context of that specific person assuming that that the court is indeed shares that context. Ultimately, I think the way it has panned out for us is that we are setting up through our platform and maybe to take, you know, moving away from a very abstract vision to something more concrete, like we're setting up a software that enables us and our team and our experts to think of learning as Lego blocks, and these Lego blocks can be arranged in different shapes or forms. So do you think it's a flexible medium learning community? Well, I do think that at the start, it's very, very hard to build those Lego blocks for every single type of use case. And one aspect that has particularly resonated with our learners, is everything that relates to skills that sit at the intersection of, let's say, an emotional ly challenging or emotionally charged challenge and isn't too technically demanding, so that learners can actually benefit from each other's feedback. So I'll give you an example. If we're teaching a class on machine learning, peer to peer learning alone, is very, very tough for people that are like entry level on that topic, because it's very likely are much harder, that peer will be able to support each other. And even more importantly, assess that each other's progress on machine learning. If I'm running a learning committee on writing, or on maybe managing your energy, we all kind of can intuitively judge progress, we might not be the best writers in the world, but we might, like we might be good at reading, right and enjoying good writing. And so everything that sits one on that dimension is emotionally challenging, usually lends itself well to community learning. And so I think we focused on that, which means that in practice, and we're focused at the moment on professional upskilling, you know, to maybe bring the 30,000 foot view before like we have Do we have a beachhead, and the detail is more on on professional upscaling. And we hope to cover more and more use case over time. In practice, we are focusing, I guess, in large part on
Alexander Sarlin:soft skills. Yeah, professional learning, soft skills training. And one of the big advantages of that is that it allows that peer to peer feedback to be really meaningful and valuable, even for people who are, you know, relatively new to a field or they're still sort of exploring or just breaking in. And it sounds like that emotional challenge is really a core piece of of it as well, that, you know, it has to be an environment that feels supportive, that feels builds self efficacy, you mentioned sort of that belief that you can do it. I love that you you mentioned let's get out of the abstract and get to the specific, I actually would like to even push you harder on that. Because I think for people who are listening to this and don't know what co sleep is, I still think they might not be clear, because we've been talking about in very high level terms, could you possibly just walk through the sort of day in the life of a college student and a co lead expert and sort of how they interact and sort of give our listeners a little bit more of a view of what the actual experience is like?
Pablo Simko:So I'll start with the with the learner in general, like, as you listen to the Take your hat off, that you're listening to a lecture, right? I think that's the main different thing. We're not designing contents, we're designing experiences. And that's what we're focused on. The day would typically or week, I think more accurately, because it's the unit of learning would probably take the following three to four delta T sub milestones, there would be a bit of a content consumption at the start of a week. And you would basically understand the foundational concepts that you need to be able to complete your project on that week. So I think the first thing to know that you're completing a project that week, right and you have a bit of context, you are consuming content in a number of ways, whatever is most relevant to being able to start working on that project secondary uses actually started working on that project. The third piece is sitting down with peers and getting feedback on that project. The fourth piece is interacting with the expert on a number of different touch points. But typically, it's an Ask Me Anything through a live session. So that's where you get to, most importantly, and we don't forget that stakeholder your, throughout the week, as you build your project, probably you're interacting with people in your company, if you are, let's say, a manager in a scale up. And that means that the lines a bit blurred between it being a course or being actually a sprint item for you and your team. And I think we've had learners in the past that I've actually made that part of their sprint to basically say, Okay, this week, I want to achieve x inside the company, I want to build this roadmap for my sprint, and I'm going to do it through ko leap. And I'm just going to do it a bit faster if I do it through coding. So I think that's one way to look at it from the experts perspective. And I think that's changed over time. Like, I think that was a bit different on you, when we build that with you. But over time, I think it's been declining time commitment upfront, certainly the original creditor spent a lot of time with us to be very honest, there's also we were figuring out very transparently. But over time, I think it looks a lot like we sit down, we identify also, through research that we do inside the team, what are the topics that are most in demand, we never, and I think sometime educational platforms can fall prey to that is trying to have a solution that is in search of a problem rather than the other way around. So we start with understanding of what the learners need, and what's kind of under served in the markets will then sit down with experts. And we'll understand how they would go and approach solving that problem, we basically just interview them. And then over time, we translate that experience into a series of activities and frameworks that the learners can use. And that's how the two bits that join with each other. I'm cognizant that some people are listening to this might still find it very abstract. But I'm very happy to have
Alexander Sarlin:those really helpful. So as an expert, you're sort of either creating or curating the content for the week, you're then setting up a project with the help of the CO lead platform and sort of facilitators, and then doing a sort of an Ask me anything, or some kind of stop in live session, where you can give feedback to learners. And then from a learning perspective, they're consuming the content, doing the project, working with their peers on the project, and then attending a live session with an expert. I think that covers it pretty well. And you know, the these are cohort based courses. So they have a sort of a start and an end point, correct? That's correct. Yep. So the idea would be at the end of the cohort based course everybody in the cohort has achieved a number of different projects that may stack into one major, one major milestone sort of output, and they get a certificate, is that right? Do they get a certificate from the from the COVID platform, an expert is
Pablo Simko:often a demo day at the end as well, depending on what you're building. As I was saying, like, it's interesting, because a lot of the courses that we build end up having a dimension of soft skill embedded in it. But it doesn't mean that the output is being stronger at soft skill x. So you know, we have this really wonderful course that we were we partner up with Max, wonderful guy in the in the NOC code space. And one of the things are the outputs of that is people, often people that might have delayed building, and not really believed that they could build the MVP or no code, build it and show it to the world. And it's interesting, because that acts as a forcing function. And motivator for times. And I know we've talked about that in the past, sometimes working on your own or working on your project, discussing is easy, but building can be challenging, that acts as a way to ensure that people have a bit of accountability, just like they would have accountability that workspace. So demo days are a bit like I don't know, your company meetings or your OKR plannings, or your OKR reviews, maybe more accurately, to just public and, and we see a lot of like magic happening in those. And those ones actually, incidentally, the NOC code one for this course happening, I think, this week or next week. So we're looking forward to that one.
Alexander Sarlin:And that demo day sort of has a little bit of a shade of the bootcamp style, where you're sort of working towards something that's public that it combines soft skills and hard skills and sort of gives every learner the opportunity to showcase what they've done, which is a core tenet of project based learning, you try to end with a sort of public artifact, which helps every learner sort of build confidence alongside their actual skill set, and sort of the ability to move from the course and then go on to create, you know, to keep moving, as you say, a year if you've just built your MVP in a few weeks learned all these no code tools, you've got an enormous momentum to keep going. Is that what you see from the learners who sort of come out of the courses?
Pablo Simko:Yeah, absolutely. I think one way to think about a course is a certificates. It's the end of a journey. And that's where maybe you didn't pick up on the certificate piece like people ask for certificates and we give them but if you ask learners they and offboarding survey oftentimes they don't read Talk about that, because what happens is we care about two things. One is how much progress you've made relative to climbing that mountain. I think the other one is, I think that's maybe there's a fundamental thing about education is you never quite achieved the top of that mountain. So it's just about getting you on the way to the start of your learning journey on that topic, rather than the end journey, have it. So that's maybe why and I'll pick up on what you said about the demo day gives you confidence that you can do that. And so when you think about it is like this is the first of many demo days, it might not be called the demo day. But it's the first of many shipping or like, you know, shipping your MVP that you do shipping your product. And over time, these things add up, and they end up taking you to new heights professionally, I guess I had a
Alexander Sarlin:great experience. Just last week, I ran into one of the students in my a tech product management class on Koh leap in person at New York ed tech week. And he told me that he's in product now he's made the transition, he's doing all sorts of great things. And he was like, so excited about, you know, I think the class served as a little bit of a catalyst and a instigator for him to make that leap, which is exactly what it's for. So it was really, really exciting. You know, as an educator, that's what you always dream of feeling like you, you've made a difference for somebody. So let's talk about some of the learners in the course. So in the courses in CO lead, it's really a b2c platform for the most part, but one in which a lot of learners can get reimbursed by their employers, you mentioned that the sort of companies are part of the equation, what types of learners have you typically seen in CO lead courses? I know that you're sure based in Europe House about the demographics that you're hitting so far? And who's sort of most getting this type of learning right off the bat?
Pablo Simko:Yeah, 100%? That's a great question. In general, like, we spend the first thing here, and we continue to be like, very open to partnering up with people, outside of what I'm going to have the focus I'm going to share, but since one of our increasing promise for creators is to be able to connect them with the learners, and to do that, you know, learner aggregation, we do have a focus, and we do have a stance, at the moment, we're focused on scaleups. So tech, scaleups, and helping their I would say, mostly mid managers upskill, into new functions. There's a number of reasons for that. One is imagine that you're and many of us have gone through that you're a manager in a fast growing company, the rate at which you need to adapt, and the resources available to you, which is essentially, you know, at the start having someone that structures most of your work for you, over time having to manage yourself, manage others, that rate is very, very high, right, you have to learn things very, very fast. And so that's one reason. So it tends to be a ripe environment for these cold start problems to learning a new skill thing, the other the other reason is that top people in a company tend to have problems of skill solved through them, or lack or, you know, gaps, so rather mentorship, advisory, or simply hiring other people. Usually mid managers don't have that luxury. And yeah, that's what we do. So we focus on scaleups, I would say that many people that join us at the moment would be from European tech scaleups. So while other experts are located, but we're seeing higher and higher percentage of people beyond Europe's borders. So that will be it. We do have the ambition. At some point, I think that's really a maybe a something we'll be talking about in a second, to get to the point where we can lower the marginal costs of serving such an experience so low that we can decrease the price of the court based experience or bootcamp over, you know, we sit at the intersection of cvcs Boot Camps mooks, I think we have elements of oh, I don't think we fit squarely into any of those. But we're trying to find a way to say this is the best experience we can give for that specific use case. It doesn't need to cost 1000 bucks, but it should cost as close as possible to 100 bucks. And whether every every learning committee is going to be pressed that way is a different question. But the ability to do it is really important when it comes to our long vision of and I'm going to come back to my abstract point there are really saying, regardless of where you are, we're going to help you reconnect with that last dream. And so that's that's another part for us. So short term, scaleups, beachhead, but over time, anyone anywhere and hope I'm sure that will take us to emerging markets more and more.
Alexander Sarlin:That's very exciting to hear. And I know that sort of core to your ethos, and to your background in entrepreneurialism, you've worked in Latin America, and I know you think about that a lot there were for what it's worth, there were people from I think four different continents in the class that I taught on ko leap, and it definitely feels like there is a little bit of a global reach, you know, just because of the topics are span so many different regions. So you just mentioned that, you know, you borrow elements from bootcamps, from cohort based courses from informal learning communities from MOOCs. Tell us a little bit about you know, your take you I know you've talked about this a little bit, but, you know, looking across at these different educational delivery models that sort of have come up in the last few years, you know, Bootkit EMS intensive experiences learning communities that can be very peer to peer led. What have you sort of learned and gleaned from each that really informs how you are developing the CO lead platform? Yeah, absolutely.
Pablo Simko:I would say they all have their advantages and disadvantages. I probably don't need to go over each. But like, in a nutshell, the ones that are more async are more scalable, which from an affordability standpoint is very, very powerful. And I think in many use cases, especially if you go back to that framework that discovered its use case, incredibly helpful. A lot of people at the moment are like are MOOCs, MOOCs? MOOCs? No one's finishes them, but it's still very helpful. And I know you spend a lot of time being on that front, I think there's been some fantastic work done there. So that's one another spectrum. The other end is, you know, much more live, but very expensive, the hard to coordinate the hardware standardize, or to reach more people. And there you run the risk of doing something that education sometimes for privateers is going in with the ambition of leveling up opportunities, but actually not really doing that. And so I think that's just the stance. Now we look at it from first principles, and we don't really say, oh, like, Are you a CBC? Are you a MOOC we just try to do the best thing for our learners. That's why actually, the product has evolved over the first year, like I think the way it is right now, as changed last year, in terms of what we borrow from each, because that's the more practical, I guess, question, things that pertain to content consumption. It's funny, but actually, we think that MOOC approach isn't actually that bad. And for that specific part, some aspects can be done better. But it's a very effective model, I think I will just explain it through maybe an analogy, which is all of us imagine sitting in a lecture, what happens more often than not, because our average attention span is between 10 and 15 minutes, we're even the best of us struggle to get more past that stage, you sitting in lectures, one person at one speed, talking about something most likely, like, you know, median distribution, you're either too slow or too fast for you. And as time goes by, you're going to be squarely on one end or the other. So either going to be bored, or overwhelmed, almost done well, I think allow you to filter through the things that you want to that you want to skip, dive deeper into the things that you're struggling with most. And so I think there's that aspect of content consumption, we really, really believe in when it comes to actually building and doing things that require a bit this, like overcome this cold start problem. Like I don't think necessarily there's a substitute for doing it with other people, especially if it's emotionally charged. Now, it doesn't need to be live, right? It can be a sink, but it depends a bit on the situation, right. And I think one problem that we have as a space sometimes is be very, very dogmatic, right? I know that whatever course we launch is not going to be a panacea for the area. So if we build a course on Product Management for edtech, it's not going to be the only way to learn about product management, right? Tech, I'm pretty sure for some people, it's going to be better to read an article or to get one on one coaching from you. But one thing that I probably would say is that there's as long as you're clear about the educational use case, there is just probably a better way locally to do it. And what we want to do is basically just focus on that. And then the specific case of learning of again, like solving the cold start problem usually doing in groups is better than aspect. And maybe it's most similar to bootcamp is that whenever you're dealing with a delayed gratification experience, like education being one, you know, it's very different than ecommerce when the E commerce space before we my co founder and of people sold and bought shoes, you get a little adrenaline rush, you know, imagine you buy a shoe online. And then you know, we've all experienced that you buy it online, it gets there and you look at it, like what's the most impressive thing, you might even talk about it at dinner, three days later, it's cool. A year later, you've completely forgot about most likely it's in your luggage. Now. That's immediate gratification, right? Delayed gratification is a very different thing. And for that a bootcamp works very well, because it's very, it's like a game, right? It gives you small rewards for something that actually is much more delayed. And when you think about how we are wired as human beings and you know, sometimes this is how first principles from your work is just remembering that we're a bit wired like homosapiens, in eternity 1000 years ago in the savanna. And we basically try to chase the lion and save energy, we're going to optimize for for immediate gratification. And so being able to gamify with the experience at times, and it's not a panacea. But that's one aspect, or bootcamp is the experience, whether you call it CrossFit or an educational boot camp that plays well. So that's maybe how we resonate with each aspect.
Alexander Sarlin:That's such a great answer. And I think you've pulled together a lot of different ideas into one product, which is really exciting. I remember years ago that the psychologist Robert Sapolsky, who writes about stress and motivation in different ways, and he's found on the web, Stanford psychologist had this talk about how when the chance of something happening when you believe that the chance of something happening is 5050. That's sort of the optimal moment where you have to really decide whether to sort of go for it or not. If it's much lower, you sort of the lions getting away. If it's much higher, it actually sometimes feels too easy, and it's not as motivating. It's sort of like, maybe I'll just wait till next time, but if it's a half, it's a 5050 chance of them Have something happening, you actually feel the most excited about making it work. I always thought that always stuck with me because it's such an interesting sort of tweak, you know, evolutionary piece of how we're motivated, you have to sort of optimize for when to spend energy on something. And it just reminds me a lot of what you're saying, you know, when How do you know when you're ready to take that leap? Well, maybe you're seeing others try to take the same leap, maybe you feel like you have a good chance of getting through, but maybe it's not going to be easy. And you're using all these different models of learning that are out there to sort of get to that emotional state where people are actually excited to learn and don't feel like it's as much of a chore as we all often do. You know, we've talked a little bit about asynchronous and synchronous models, but I'd love to hear you talk about this, because I think this is actually one of the biggest tensions in online learning is, you know, as you mentioned, you know, asynchronous materials are less personal, the demand more motivation, they need a lot of structure. And you know, if they're boring or too long, people will just tune out. But synchronous learning, even though it's very, can be very engaging is expensive and hard to deliver it. Sometimes it burns out instructors or facilitators, and sometimes it's just very expensive for the end learner, and then they, and then it's closed off to most people. I know, You've thought a lot about this at ko leap. And you know, without going too deep into all the different sort of tests and changes you've done, what is your sort of top line understanding of what works best in asynchronous delivery? And what works best in synchronous delivery?
Pablo Simko:Absolutely. I think I'll share what has been a general like the general patterns of learning. One aspect I mentioned, the async learning is that for content consumption, probably be the analogy I used before, is what we believe is winning the day and will win the day, we believe it's not just better for the learner, it's also better for the expert, because people it's funny, interesting, like, people don't necessarily like giving the lectures themselves. So now I'm turning it around, you're in the audience, you're a bit bored, but the person who's repeating the same lecture all the time. And thinking back also, my mom is a teacher. So naturally, the favorite part of their experience. So that's kind of one thing, I think it's important to consider both right? If you believe that one of the bottlenecks in quality education is also quality teachers and quality teaching. That's one aspect. Whereas life better, usually, when there's a high chance that you're going to put continuing something off. By virtue of doing it alone, it's much easier if I tell you come here for an hour, let's do it. And then once we're all done, we'll get on with our days, then, in that hour, it's 7pm is the end of the day, you're, you know, have people waiting at home, you're most likely to just say, Okay, let's do it later. And then one day becomes three days becomes becomes never. So I think that's the two analogies that I would use. And we're very happy to go more into detail. But we try to blend that. And I think there's a lot of love principles underpinning each of those buckets,
Alexander Sarlin:I think that's a great point, I hear sort of accountability in there, you know, synchronous learning is a great way to sort of build accountability, it's like, be here at a certain time, everybody else will be here, or the instructor will be here or, you know, facilitator will be here. And that gives you a sort of forcing function to actually show up, get something done. And I love how you keep going back to the emotional charge, I think this is something that is so under represented in a lot of instructional design and education is that learning is emotional, it is scary. It is anxiety producing, it can be thrilling, it can be competitive, there's so much emotion that goes with, you know, people stepping out of their comfort zone and being ignorant or not ready for something, it's hard. We do it very infrequently in our normal lives. And I really admire how Colleen thinks about, you know, the emotional charge and the procrastination, that underlies everything in you know, everything and learning. I just want to ask you one more question because I think it's such an important part of what you're, you're doing a co lead. I know that Colleen, you know, takes instructional design and learning science seriously, you build it into your platform, you have a lot of training for people, you know, experts coming onto the platform, you have, you know, on staff, experts, true experts who can really make that project based learning methodology work. I'm an instructional designer by training. I love that world. Have you found that sort of the quality of learning design or, you know, the fact that there are instructional designers on staff, it has been a differentiator for a platform like ko leap against other CBCs or other boot camps. And, you know, for those listening, do you feel like, you know, instructional design quality is something that really can make a difference in in a company success.
Pablo Simko:100% I think two things that come to mind. The first one is, for me, in a company, everyone plays a hugely important role, but there's some unsung stars and I think usually it's the learning design team. It's a bits the the role is probably the one of a chef in a restaurant, especially a restaurant is trying to deliver incredible experience. You can't do anything without chef and So I think they're the real stars. And they're certainly more the stars than I am for sure. We'll say how do we think about that? Well, the truth is, is just like a great restaurant, just bring great people in. And I think you happen to know both of them. But we have two people leading this that are doing an incredible job. And I think beyond being incredibly good at what they do, also incredibly kind and thoughtful people. And these people IDT Parikh and Jesse Silverberg. I think, actually, they will be incredible to have a new podcast. They were they have both incredible thoughts, backgrounds, both in industry and beyond. And yeah, we're very lucky to have them there. So my short answer is, bring some great people in. And if your question is, does instructional design learning design make a difference? I would say very much. So if you care about the outcome of your learners, which hopefully everyone does, then instructional design will be I will say, especially in a case, where you're trying to build an experience that is truly tailored to your learner, then thinking about what that is, is really important, the same role that a product manager I think, ultimately has in a, in a product matures. You I know, You've played both roles and engagements, they must be similarities, I would presume, and I don't think they're that far off ultimately,
Alexander Sarlin:exactly. Right. I've done both roles in a couple of different companies, a number of different companies. And I always think there's a lot of overlap. I love that Chef metaphor, I've never heard that one before. And I think that's really telling it's true. I mean, when you're designing an online, or you know, educational experience of any kind online or offline, having people who can, you know, help structure the experience so that it optimizes for learner outcomes. And just to push you a step further, also optimizes for what the teachers or educators are trying to accomplish and how much time they have and what they're willing to do, it makes the entire experience so much richer, you know, I personally had a great experience working with your instructional designers. As an educator, I'm usually on the other side of that, that conversation. But I remember back in my Coursera days, working with a lot of online, basically, professors who were teaching online for often the first time, and that, you know, I think that being nice, and being able to sort of work with subject matter experts is a core competency of instructional design, because people just like learners, educators who are doing something new are in an emotionally fragile state, too. They don't know how it's going to be accepted. They don't know if it's going to work. They don't know if they're going to look foolish or, you know, have questions that they can answer. So I think that kind of empathy is, is really core. And of course, it makes me happy to hear that instructional design is a differentiator. I've seen it too many companies that instructional designers and learning scientists are sometimes the first people to be, you know, called when the company needs to let people go, because they get just sometimes hard to articulate their value. And that is really a shame. It's like letting the chef go in a restaurant. It's can't do that very much good work without your chef.
Pablo Simko:No, it's impressive. Yeah, I think I think if you believe that education is about creating spirit, magical experiences, just like food and can serve food that isn't as Okay, right. What if you're trying to create magical experiences, then I think the, one of the key stars of the show has to be the instructional design team.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, well, that you're speaking my language for sure there, Pablo, you know, I am such a fan of CO leave, you know, you know, we've worked together a little bit in the past, I think it is such an interesting and rich product. You also have embedded video, you have embedded community, you have peer to peer learning, you know, features in there, I think, you know, it's hard to sort of go through all the different pieces of the platform, but want to finish up by asking you the core questions of every guest, because I know you'll have really interesting answers. As an observer of this space, especially somebody has sort of been between the the cohort based course world, the boot camp world, the community based world, what do you see as the most exciting trend in the EdTech landscape right now? And you know, where is this all going? All these different learning models? What should listeners keep an eye on about where this whole space is moving?
Pablo Simko:Yeah, a great question. And I'll mention one that stands out. I think there's plenty if use a decade timeframe, because I think that that answer will be different. I wonder if or I hope that we're entering a defining decade for lifelong learning in two respects. Think the first one is maybe overcoming this Prussian tradition of Content First approach to learning is very, very, very far away from what how people actually learn, right? It's very interesting. If you compare how the engagement on courses to when asking people on your end, at the end of your career, what do you learn, most people tell you at my job, these two things don't really fully add up. I think we're going to move away from content as a space and move towards practice. And even I would say learner first experiences and with practice community feedback being an important part of many learning experiences, even today, courses or platforms that aren't really chord based courses or, you know, project based courses. I think It will be similar to, you know, and I'm willing to venture that, that it will just blend and be part of most most educational platforms, I think the community will become bigger. And the second aspect is, I just think there's going to be a lot more of a habit of continuous learning in every person's life. I think one of the reasons we exist and one of the reasons a lot of professional upskilling is is becoming bigger is the half life of a skill is going down significantly. I think an analogy that I like to use, my parents worked in marketing their whole life, if they were in the 80s, you know, and they work in advertising. Specifically, if you were designing billboards, you could safely assume that two decades from now your billboard skills will still be relevant. If you're a marketer today, magazine 2010. Like that the half life of your skill is significantly shorter. I mean, maybe you're optimizing your very strong at Google. But today there's an I'm not even talking about Metis product. I know this Tik Tok the snapshot, there's so many different things going on. And who knows what's gonna happen next 10 years, continuous, upscaling is going to be a third one. I think the the third piece that's related to that is actually giving even completely different trends, that I think there's going to be a big shift from what is today known as gaming, or what is today known as entertainment, towards education. Because one of the things that people want to accelerate their careers accelerate their lives, a lot of media and gaming companies have that attention. They're able to engage people in a way that many education providers can't do. And so think there's going to be a bit of a blend or merging of these two industries and they're not going to look especially education. I don't think it's going to look that far off from the gaming in the in the media industry. might be wrong on all three of them. But that's what I see happening.
Alexander Sarlin:And other fascinating trends. I when I saw Microsoft purchase Blizzard Entertainment recently, that was my first thought I said, Hey, I think this is a gaming and an education play. At the same time. I think they're going to use that engine for education. And for web three education or Metaverse, education. Very, very interesting. Great trends, really, really, I think very spot on. And what is one resource that you would recommend for somebody who wants to learn more about any of the topics we talked about today? Book, blog, Twitter feed anything?
Pablo Simko:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in general, obviously, feel free to check us out at coding bootcamp, if you want more information. That's the simple one. If you want to know more about Cody, I think in general, I don't have a single resource. I was thinking about that question coming in. I don't think there's one that university will be applicable. I remember reading and I'm probably gonna butcher the name it might be from I put in the show in the show links designing the the future of higher education. It's a book about the Minerva, Minerva schools, right. And I remember reading that at a time. That was, I think, very synergetic. With my career, I was thinking about what to do next. And it gave me a lot of confidence that taking a leap away from quite literally from educational, traditional education model was something that was not just possible was grounded in research. And so more than anything more than like, that definitive resource, it got me it was almost like a portal to get me deeper into that space, and got me very, like much deeper into the literature and the way that like research actually, in sorry, learning actually happens. This is very contextual, I might have been another book. So that's one that comes to mind, I will say that, for me, the best educational resource that one can find this just allocate a bit of time, every, every month, every day, ideally, to just exploring exploring one's curiosity, the single biggest resource that I believe people have when it comes to education is not really out there on the web, it's in your own self. And it's about maintaining that fire, that continuous desire to learn. And you know, you were mentioning earlier, there's nothing more beautiful. That's where you're interesting than seeing the light in someone's eye, like gets it. And I think maintaining that is really important. And I think that's often it's more important to just have space to explore your curiosity without any structured curriculum than anything else. And yeah, I would probably point people towards that tried out for a bit of time, many of the people that will be listening to that will probably already be doing that, because we're all deep in the EdTech space. But I find that the best the best resource time rather than actual content. So I'm giving you a bit of a left, left answer, but that's that's probably mine. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:look inward. Find your truth inside yourself. I think that's great. We will put links to covid.com, of course, and building the intentional university is that is the book you're referring to right? The Ben Nelson Steven costs on the medical project.
Pablo Simko:So to the authors for butchering that name. Yeah.
Alexander Sarlin:We'll put links to that. And then of course, no link will get you to explore your own self. But I love that idea. And I think, you know, a third line of this whole conversation has been how much learning is really about introspection. It's about understanding oneself taking that leap, getting out of the comfort zone, finding others who can help you and mentor you or can work as peers alongside Your personal journey and I think that's a real, you know, it's not about a content first. I think it's a really amazing vision of education. Pablo Simcoe, thank you so much for being here with us today on edtech insiders.
Pablo Simko:Thanks for having me.
Alexander Sarlin: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 EdTech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.
