Kris Jagasia is the co-founder and CEO of Off2Class, responsible for directing company strategy and vision. He has built the commercial teams at the company including, sales, marketing and customer success.
As the son of immigrants, Kris grew up with a keen appreciation for the benefits of learning – his parents investing the lion's share of their resources in his own multilingual education. He saw the power of education to create limitless opportunities. That background would inform the founding of Off2Class and his own life choices, as he would later work to teach English to four students: his nephews living in Switzerland, and two Syrian refugees in Toronto.
Along with his co-founders, Kris led the launch of Off2Class’ initial beta to 300 teachers and, over the next nine years, grew it to a curriculum, assessment, and professional development tool used by ELL district teams across America while also being used by thousands of individual ESL teachers as part of their education infrastructure, to tutor online and in-person, in over 120 countries.
Kris is a graduate of McGill University (Bachelor of Commerce) and has been certified as a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) and is a proud testament to the Canadian newcomer dream.
Kris Jagasia is the co-founder and CEO of Off2Class, responsible for directing company strategy and vision. He has built the commercial teams at the company including, sales, marketing and customer success.
As the son of immigrants, Kris grew up with a keen appreciation for the benefits of learning – his parents investing the lion's share of their resources in his own multilingual education. He saw the power of education to create limitless opportunities. That background would inform the founding of Off2Class and his own life choices, as he would later work to teach English to four students: his nephews living in Switzerland, and two Syrian refugees in Toronto.
Along with his co-founders, Kris led the launch of Off2Class’ initial beta to 300 teachers and, over the next nine years, grew it to a curriculum, assessment, and professional development tool used by ELL district teams across America while also being used by thousands of individual ESL teachers as part of their education infrastructure, to tutor online and in-person, in over 120 countries.
Kris is a graduate of McGill University (Bachelor of Commerce) and has been certified as a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) and is a proud testament to the Canadian newcomer dream.
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 tech company. Kris Jagasia is the co founder and CEO of off to class, responsible for directing company strategy and vision. As a son of immigrants, Kris grew up with a keen appreciation for the benefits of learning. His parents have invested limited resources in his own multilingual education. He saw the power of education to create limitless opportunities, which would inform the founding of off to class, which focuses on creating high quality content and resources to save English language teachers time and to power language learning for the digital first student. After class focuses on reimagining content and tools for the needs of online teachers. Kris led the launch of off to class in 2015 to 300 teachers and since it's grown to a curriculum assessment and professional development tool used by ELL district teams across America, as well as 1000s of individual ESL teachers as part of their education infrastructure, off to class powers, online tutoring, and in person tutoring in over 120 countries. We have Kris Jagasia, from off to class, Kris, and I met at the New York ad tech week sponsored by started where he was a ed tech cup, finalist. And after class is such an interesting ad tech company. We wanted to follow up and really take some time to unpack it for our listeners, Kris Jagasia. Welcome to ad tech insiders.
Kris Jagasia:Thanks for having me, Alex, great to be here. And great to catch up again, after meeting you on the floor of ad tech week in New York.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, it was a fun event. So Chris, for those who are unfamiliar with off to class, give the elevator pitch the overview of what you do in the ESL world.
Kris Jagasia:Yeah, well, great. I'm gonna back up a second and talk about students that we serve, because I think that for a lot of the folks listening, even if you work in us K through 12, education technology, you may not actually realize that there are 5.3 million students in the US that don't speak English as their native language. And you might also not realize that that makes up 10% of all students in K through 12 schools, and it's the fastest growing student demographic. Now, these students have really suffered disproportionately during the COVID 19 pandemic. And they really risk falling further behind if they do not pick up critical language skills. But even before COVID-19, the student demographic really faced a lot of obstacles when it comes to promising careers participating in society. And generally realizing the American dream. That's what off to class does is we provide curriculum and assessments that save teachers time. And really, we work with districts across the country, to try to help them make sure that these students don't fall even further behind.
Alexander Sarlin:And part of how you do this is by connecting ESL teachers and tutors from all over the world with I need students in the US tell us about how you doing those connections?
Kris Jagasia:Well, yeah, that's actually a good point. Because of where we started. We're a bootstrap company. We've been working on this for several years. And when we first started off to class, we were primarily used by tutors, global network of tutors in over 120 different countries. So these are largely tutors that are working on some of the large tutor marketplaces like prep li i talk I Verbling. But also, you know, various pursues various side hustles, a lot of them have day jobs. And so this global kind of grassroots community of ESL teachers, we never abandon them. Once we got into districts, we always kept both go to market strategies. So increasingly, over the last year, we probably all read the headlines that districts across the country are facing teacher shortages, we've actually been able to connect our district customers to folks that are already using us for our curriculum and our assessments in school districts, we've actually been able to connect those districts with tutors that work online, that are already experts in delivering lessons using off the class. So it's kind of a nice mix. And the bind between the two go to market strategies are really, you know, different subsets of customers that are really adept at using after class. I
Alexander Sarlin:find that so interesting that you sort of got a major benefit in having your hand in two different types of models and get this huge community of tutors that are qualified, you already know their ratings, you already know their qualifications and they're ready to teach not only teach ESL, but teach ESL online in a really effective way. And then suddenly, this enormous need comes from the pandemic. Tell us a little bit more about the ESL population in the US where are they in particular areas in the US? Is there? Are there states that are extremely high need? Yeah, no, that's
Kris Jagasia:a great point. So there was a study released in 2018. And I can't quote the name now. But actually, it was showing that the distribution of English language learners is very widespread across the country, where we're finding a particular a particularly strong need is in the south east, a lot of border states, Texas, of course, but even places, you know, either border states or 10, generally, border states, places like Tennessee, Mississippi, Missouri, where there's a kind of double whammy of growing our English language learner population with not really having a strong base of skills when it comes to ESL, if you think about the typical persona of someone who teaches English as a second language, a lot of teachers really got those skills by, by traveling abroad, and kind of, you know, spending the 234 years abroad in places like Japan, and Asia, and the Middle East, and really honing in on those secondary language acquisition skills. Now, for a lot of the southeastern states, they don't necessarily have a large base of teachers that have that international experience, of course, you know, they're able to tap into some local populations. But even before the pandemic, these school districts had some relatively significant challenges in finding teachers with ESL skills. So the pandemic and the bride teacher shortages that that brought on, I've just made it kind of double edged sword.
Alexander Sarlin:A lot of us outside the ELL and ESL world assume that there are sort of pockets in the country where there's huge numbers of English language learners. And I think what you're mentioning is really interesting, then instead, they're more and more widely distributed. And they're outpacing the number of qualified ELL and ESL teachers in certain areas. And that creates a real friction point. But I'm sure there are teachers who have found themselves over their careers suddenly having more and more ELL students in their districts and in their schools. And not knowing what to do with that. I'd love to ask about sort of professional development for ESL and ell. How do you ensure that your tutors and teachers are qualified? I know there's the Teasle and TOEFL and a whole world around English as a Foreign Language and English as a secondary language? How do you think about qualifications for your tutors? And how do you think I've added for in classroom teachers?
Kris Jagasia:That's, that's a great question. So if you think about off the class as a platform, we try to embed the teacher training right into the platform. So what that means is there's about 1000 lessons in our library. And when I open up one of those lessons as a teacher, and this is kind of live conversation based approach lessons, when I open up a lesson, and I get ready to animate it in front of my classroom, we've got a synchronous set of teacher notes that the teacher can actually follow in real time as they're delivering the lesson. And we really like to think that we make it much easier for educators to be great ESL teachers, if you think about what a company like Canva did for graphic design, they were able to come in and say, Hey, like kind of democratize the ability to become a great graphic designer, it doesn't mean that you don't have awesome graphic designers that use Canva, because it's a great product. But you also have a lot of budding graphic designers that found a lot of value in the product because they didn't have to shell out, you know, $400 for the Adobe Suite, we like to see it the same way that you can come into off to class as an amazing ESL teacher, and find a lot of value in the product. But you can also come in as a less experienced ESL teacher, or maybe not an ESL teacher at all, maybe a poor content teacher, and you can come in and find that kind of upskilling comfort around the product, right embedded right into the product. We also do some great things around teacher trainers, we have a service called like on demand teacher trainers, and districts were able to purchase that and we're able to provide those experts in off class as being available to the district teachers. So that's also another way where you know we can help Some of the newer teachers that might be delivering ESL lessons for the first time,
Alexander Sarlin:it's very useful. I think that you know, the ability to do that type of rapid upskilling. and professional development is in such high demand right now in districts and schools all over the world, and definitely all over the US. So that's really valuable. I want to ask a little bit about, you've been in the English as a second language, education space for quite a long time. And obviously, the pandemic was a real pivot point for education for everyone and inflection point. But I'm curious if there are trends in the ESL and ELL world that you've noticed over time, and you know, directionally things that have really started to change, whether it perhaps some involving technology, or some that are just socio demographic or anything like that. What has changed from your perspective as the CEO of after class?
Kris Jagasia:That's such an interesting question, Alex, I would say, well, a couple of themes, the enduring value of the teacher in language acquisition is kind of a trend I've seen tested over time, when we started off to class, a lot of people were wondering whether that was such a good idea to build a product around teachers. And you know, through and through, you know, despite the rise of Duolingo, despite the impeding Rise, Rise of AI, I think at the basement, the hallway of innovators down at the New York ed tech week, there was several companies that were pushing like an an AI focused Direct Student app for learning a language. I think what we've seen is that, you know, throughout the pandemic, and this post pandemic world, teachers are still playing a critical role in secondary language acquisition, especially for older students. So I think that's an interesting kind of, you know, theme or trend that I've seen kind of last over the last couple of years. But I'm also seeing like a real need for elasticity, in what it means to be a teacher what it means to be a English as a Second Language teacher, there was an interesting kind of presentation at ad tech week, around upskilling, around the latency of the higher education system, to really provide credentials that link to jobs. And I think one of the presenters there was a superintendent from from New Jersey, and he was saying, you know, listen, we need to make it easy for folks that he employs at relatively low income brackets in the teaching industry, to add credentials to add new bullets on their CV, in a cost effective manner, without having to go through a 12 month Teasle program, or a you know, a two year master's in English language development program. I really like that I think there's a really, really big opportunity to upskill teachers, upskill educators with new bullets on their TV, and new offerings that they can then take to new employment, and ultimately to students. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:that's great. Lastly, I totally agree, and I think that world is that world of teacher professional development continues to evolve, and hopefully evolving in that direction of faster, cheaper, more, you know, immediately useful, professional development. You know, I'm sure we have listeners to this podcast, who are either educators in the classroom now who are existing ESL, or ELL teachers, tell us a little bit about the rise of the some people call the teacher printer, where you sort of can take your education skills and apply them, you know, not only inside the classroom, but also outside the classroom, such as, for example, you know, remote ELL teaching for a place that you don't live, what would you recommend to educators who are looking to sort of dip their toes or try, you know, extending their skill set outside of their daily classroom use,
Kris Jagasia:I would highly recommend it, I think it's, you know, looking at, you know, 2022 2023 and beyond, it's always a great idea to have multiple income streams. And I think that that might be a trend that we really learned in the pandemic, is that, you know, the availability, and the ability really, to teach online is significant. And, you know, kind of looping into that, that idea of the teacher, when you're learning language online, it's still incredibly important to have a teacher, even if that means in a video conference lesson, and so I would encourage any educator, not even an educator with a background in English language development, but anybody who wants to do great work and who's interested in you know, having a side income stream to you know, check out off the class, set up a free account, and you'll basically immediately get invited to our Facebook group. And there's a huge community there of season teacher printers that you can ask questions to. And you know, like, like all teachers, like all subsets of teachers and educators, they're often so willing to help out and jump in on things. So yeah, just jump in, don't think about it too much, and get started.
Alexander Sarlin:I think that's great advice to all educators out there, jump in, pursue those multiple income streams side hustles. And you heard it here, you know, the dual lingos and babbles and bosses and all of the online apps aren't getting students all the way they need to go, you need a good educator to actually get people over the hump in English language learning, and there are more and more students who need it. Thank you so much, Chris is really I'm glad we had some time to catch up and really talk about after class. It's a really interesting, really interesting edtech play and product and thanks for being here with me at Tech insiders.
Kris Jagasia:Thanks so much for having me. Take care Alex.
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.