Michael Wegerbauer is the Vice President, Learning Solutions/Educational Publishing at M & R Consultants Corporation (MRCC). With 25 years of experience focused on technology in education, project management, process improvement, technology consulting, and business development, Michael spent 6+ years at UCLA developing solutions to support both administrative and educational initiatives and 12+ years at MRCC supporting learning technology, rich media, and content development.
Founded in 1996 MRCC is an accredited IT solutions company that has dedicated over 25 glorious years to supporting clients and partners across the global spectrum. They offer a vast suite of services under Learning, Publishing, Technology, and IT Staffing.
Recommended Resources
Michael Wegerbauer is the Vice President, Learning Solutions/Educational Publishing at M & R Consultants Corporation (MRCC). With 25 years of experience focused on technology in education, project management, process improvement, technology consulting, and business development, Michael spent 6+ years at UCLA developing solutions to support both administrative and educational initiatives and 12+ years at MRCC supporting learning technology, rich media, and content development.
Founded in 1996 MRCC is an accredited IT solutions company that has dedicated over 25 glorious years to supporting clients and partners across the global spectrum. They offer a vast suite of services under Learning, Publishing, Technology, and IT Staffing.
Recommended Resources
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 company. Michael Wegerbauer is the vice president of learning solutions and educational publishing at m and our consultants corporation known as Mr. Si Si. With 25 years of experience focused on tech and education, project management, process improvement tech consulting, and business development. Michael spent more than six years at UCLA developing solutions for educational initiatives and then more than 12 years at MRCC, supporting learning technology, rich media and content development. What is MRCC? You might ask? Well founded in 1996, MRCC is an accredited IT solutions company that's had over 25 years supporting clients and partners across the global spectrum, including in education, they offer a lot of different services under learning, publishing technology, and IT staffing often working with educational publishers and corporations that are creating learning experiences. Michael Wegerbauer Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Michael Wegerbauer:Hi, Alex. It's great to be here.
Alexander Sarlin:It's really great to have you. So Michael, tell us about your journey. Through the EdTech industry. You've worked to deliver learning solutions for big educational publishers like Pearson and Cengage. You've worked with enterprises and corporations, give us a little background on how you got into ed tech and what you do with MRCC.
Michael Wegerbauer:So I started my career at UCLA right out of college, I was a computer science major, but ended up out at UCLA working for the psychology department and helping to create programs for the labs and for the faculty as well as the administration. So I immediately was in edtech, straight out of college, quite a ways back. And then I left that arena for a while, still stayed in technology and came back to it with MRCC, about 15 years ago, and MRCC had gotten their start in the EdTech space. They were really a technology company. But they started working with Houghton Mifflin in the early 2000s to help create it just space.com, which was one of the first online educational platforms. And once we had finished developing that for them, they asked if we could populate that with content. And so we did at that point, we developed about two courses and 9000 assessment questions. So when I joined MRCC, they were already in that space. And I continued to help them grow that,
Alexander Sarlin:you know, it's funny, this is a area of edtech that i I'm sure our listeners are some of our listeners may not be as familiar with because it's a little bit of a behind the scenes role. So MRCC as a company might not be as familiar name, as you know, the Duolingo is and edX is that we talk about it. And that's because, you know, MRCC and other content services companies and learning solutions, companies really create learning solutions that are then published under other names, like, you know, Hmh is edu space, or Cengage is, you know, XYZ, that can be corporations, it can be publishers, but the services are a really wide range of services, and you just named creating a platform and then populating it with 200 courses and 1000s of assessments. That's just one sliver of what these content services and learning solutions companies do. So give our listeners you know, a little bit more of an overview, what is the spectrum of different services that a company like MRCC actually does in the EdTech world,
Michael Wegerbauer:it is varied. So there's so much going on in the educational publishing space in edtech. So the types of projects that we take on to support their efforts to bring content to the end learner are very varied. So we go from correlating content to state standards to accuracy, checking content with subject matter experts to authoring content to building animations to creating interactivities and templates that we can more rapidly produce lots of assets to get out to the consumer quickly. It's really, when we talked about corporate elearning. It's a little bit different. On the corporate elearning side, we're more focused on building courses. And it's pretty straightforward. It's a fairly standard process. But when we talk about educational publishing, we're talking about building interactivities, animations, authoring all types of content. So it's, it's a lot different than just a whole wide range of projects that we work on.
Alexander Sarlin:It's really sort of the engine that drives a lot of the education publishing world there. I think people don't always realize how, you know, videos and animations and assessments and courses, full courses. And even platforms are often developed, sort of outside of the companies that have their names on the front. I know you also do accessibility checking and compliance, which is really big in K 12, you sort of create content of all kinds, including recruiting subject matter experts who are, you know, in a very wide range of different content areas. So let's talk about that. Actually, you know, how do you find subject matter experts on every different subject that under the come in and ask you to
Michael Wegerbauer:develop for, you know, I'd have to our recruiting department, they're incredible. We started off as a staffing company, mostly in technology. So we have a very strong recruiting group, very large group. But over the years, they've been able to hone their skills. When we're looking for subject matter experts, we, we deal with all types of topics, and there's all types of requirements. So they're really good at finding folks that I wouldn't even think existed to help us create some of the content for these courses.
Alexander Sarlin:It's a really important facet of online learning. So, you know, a company like MRCC, and the sort of learning solutions, content services industry as a whole, because you're creating content that is accessible directly to the end user, it really is a learning experience design, you think about a lot of the things that we all have to think about in instructional design and learning engineering and learning experience design, you're really upfront thinking about them. And one that is a sort of perennial topic, especially for online learning, is engagement. You know, we know that online learning can be very isolating, it can be impersonal, it can be alienating to people who haven't done it before. So there's real work and real thought that needs to go into online learning design. What are some of the techniques that MRCC over the years has learned and employed to create learning experiences that are really engaging for end users,
Michael Wegerbauer:as you mentioned, in some cases, we have directives, the clients will give us directives and tell us exactly how they want it done. So then we don't have to worry about too much we have some leeway, and how we can tweak things and offer suggestions to make sure that the learners get the best result. But in other cases, we're given a lot of leeway. What we really need to focus in on is the requirements, understanding the requirements that the client has, but then understanding our target audience is the most crucial point, we need to understand that target age group, we need to certainly you mentioned accessibility and inclusivity, we need to make sure that the content or that we're putting out there will the folks that are consuming, it will be able to identify well with it. So that that goes into selection of images, color schemes, that type of thing. And we've come up with different ways to allow our clients to share this information and mock ups and prototypes with the end clients so that we can get some feedback, and really put something out that's on target with that target audience.
Alexander Sarlin:That's really interesting. So you basically empower clients to be able to get direct feedback from and learners, rather than, you know, having to make assumptions really sort of bring the voice of the end learner into the conversation as you're developing.
Michael Wegerbauer:Exactly. Yes. Yeah, that's really important. I think, you know, making sure that we facilitate the creation of the content in a way that's going to be best consumed is important.
Alexander Sarlin:In this time period, where the amount of online content has gone from, you know, steal a lot to unbelievable amounts, like, you know, we see 40,000 courses on Udemy. And, you know, 10s of 1000s of courses on on corporate learning platforms, like the cornerstones of the world, you know, how do you think about, you know, building a new course that can stand out, that can sort of, you know, that can meet the needs and constraints of a client need, and certainly be accessible and inclusive, but also sort of be exciting and not feel like something that people have seen before?
Michael Wegerbauer:That's a really tough question. It's very challenging. You know, everyone's trying to stand out. The way that I think we can help folks make sure their product and content stands out is just by offering the content in ways that's easily consumable. So small snippets here of animation or interactivities. And allow the instructors because the the instructors often have the end control over what they're going to present to their classroom. So we want to make sure that it's put together in a way that those instructors can select what they think will work best for their classroom. Hmm.
Alexander Sarlin:You know, you're mentioning animations, and you know, snippets of animation snippets of video making video very, you know, very clear and interactive, or at least very salient with animations inside the video. Those are all ways that you know, we've used in online learning, there are a few different techniques acts that are sort of the little bit cutting edge techniques right now like creating, you know, custom educational games or virtual reality experiences or all of these sorts of new things. And I'm curious, you know, we've talked to entrepreneurs on this podcast that create VR or create games for learning, but they tend to be about, you know, incredibly specific topics. They're about, you know, one standard or one piece of diversity, equity and inclusion. How do you as a, you know, as a company that has to think about 200 courses at a time or whole years worth of content? How do you think about gaming or VR? Is that are they here? Are they coming? What's next for that?
Michael Wegerbauer:I mean, I think they're coming. And I think it will be an incredible leap once, the ability to provide that type of learning in a mass way will will be possible. But right now, the, we're finding that everyone wants gaming, everyone wants virtual reality, but no one can afford it. It allow the tools just aren't there quite yet, in terms of virtual reality, to allow it to become universal. But I think we'll get there. And I think it's nice to be experimenting in those areas. And I think where we can, we'll try to build gaming templates, almost, so that they can be used for multiple topics. And that's, I think, the best we can do right now to keep the costs down. But provide some of that experience of game like experience.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, I mean, it makes me think of, you know, we talked to the head of pedagogy at could a number of months ago, and Kahoot is, I think, a great example of a totally content agnostic, you know, game structure. It's very simple game structure, but one that is very popular, even though it is very simple. And it feels like that's as far as we've gotten. And I think there's a lot to it, but to have, you know, deeply interact games or games that are, you know, it seems like it's a it's a cost issue is that that's what I'm hearing you say,
Michael Wegerbauer:I think it's still a cost issue? Well, I think that it all comes back to effort. So the efforts to create these types of products are still a little bit too rich for for most folks to afford, and then pass on to the end learner. I think there are ways, as I mentioned, to include gaming in a way that we can templatized and provide that and produce content and mass with those types of templates. And we've done that simple things like crossword puzzles, Dragon drops, you know, those sorts of things, that those are very simple, but we could go a level above that, and even create something that's a little bit more universal.
Alexander Sarlin:It's an exciting aspect of online learning, it feels like you have we have so many different players in the ecosystem. And, you know, companies like MRCC, that do, basically mass scale learning, you know, for specific clients, for publishers for corporations are, you know, you're at the very front lines of, you know, project management, basically being able to be like, we need a huge amount of content on a short timeframe, we need to pull the people and get it all done. And it feels like the template, you know, templated approach, you're saying, I'm sure speeds things up a lot. If we can continue as an industry to improve those templates and improve that sort of template templates, sizable models, and make it inexpensive to make a VR experience that's custom or, you know, custom games. It benefits everybody.
Michael Wegerbauer:Exactly. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:I agree. I'm excited to see that world. So we're talking a little bit of engagement. One other aspect of online learning that has been very, very, very rich vein for instructional designers is collaboration, right is social learning, learning in teams, learning with groups, getting feedback from peers, and just, you know, building relationships with either other learners or with instructors. Some of these interactions, you know, in the world are very, you know, high stakes. It's like, oh, that you're in a business school, and the three people have to come together and make a big final project. And it's graded and others are very casual. It could be, you know, forum posts, or just casual discussions. I'm curious how you at MRCC. Think about social interaction and collaboration in learning. Yeah, I
Michael Wegerbauer:agree. They're these basically two options where you're, you're collaborating within groups, or maybe possibly the entire class and it's more, it's low stakes, kind of experiential. And then they're the higher stakes where you're producing as a result of those experience you're having to deliver a or submit a business plan. For example, the way that we would come in on those types of interactions is more on developing the target for the interactions, discussion questions, targets for assignments, that type of thing, and coming up with ideas for types of discussions or questions or reports that would be that would fit facilitate, if not close people into a certain defined path, but allow them to choose that path and come up with something creative, and then leave it to the instructors for those classes to decide how they're going to execute those. And I think it comes more in the form of how do we facilitate that those interactions. And so I think that's where most folks are using the major platforms to do that type of work. But I am sure there are going to be ad tech companies that come up with new and innovative ideas for that.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, there are a bunch. And I think, you know, some of them may be bought out over time by the big platforms, others might integrate with them, a lot of them already are starting to, it's an interesting, rich experience. So I'm hearing you say that, you know, the content that drives the collaboration is sort of the mandate and the area that MRCC can really contribute a lot to the actual delivery and the choices that are made about you know, how big the groups are, how often they're they're meeting or how to, you know, whether they're graded or not, really comes down to the delivery system.
Michael Wegerbauer:Yeah, and the instructor, and the end result. So, you know, we'll provide recommendations on group size, and that, that type of thing, but it really comes down to the instructor and how they they feel the content will work best with their audience.
Alexander Sarlin:You know, have you seen over the years and increased interest in that type of social learning, and I'm thinking, especially in this sort of pandemic era, have people come? We know, from the statistics that we're facing, you know, serious isolation issues for many, many learners, especially as you know, all the schools and workplaces closed for a few years? Have you heard anything from your clients that, hey, we'd really like this to be a little bit at least a little more social than it was in the past that people don't feel like they're just, you know, alone in the world?
Michael Wegerbauer:I mean, I feel that way. I personal experience with my kids. I, you know, I just don't know if I've seen that demand at the institution level. But I certainly feel that would have been helpful. I, you know, most folks are, everyone's back now. And I think maybe the, the focus has gone a bit away from that now. But you know, from the remote learning standpoint, the exclusive remote learning, but it is coming back at the higher ed level and the graduate level, as well. So I think there should be a focus on figuring out ways to create a more social learning environment.
Alexander Sarlin:There's a lot of interesting possibility there. And I think it's yet to be really embraced at scale, but I'm seeing some some really interesting movement in that space. So are there trends? Are there sort of directions that you've seen over the years that your clients have sort of moved into? What if you look back over the last, you know, 15 years? What are their sort of eras of different types of online learning where you know, for three years, every client comes in asking for x, and then everybody comes in asking for y? I'm curious if you've seen trends like that, across the industry? Yeah. I mean,
Michael Wegerbauer:I think the biggest trend is towards accessibility, and followed by inclusivity. So those are the big trends that I've seen, you know, not necessarily, I mean, I guess they're technology related. But those are not necessarily focused on new areas of technology for education. But those are incredibly huge trends that we've seen, because we've been involved in making sure the content is inclusive is accessible. In terms of new technology. I think we're seeing more in the ways of including social aspects. And I think that will continue, I think, I think there's a lot of room there to improve. And I think it'll be exciting to see how that can be improved. And, and if the pressure isn't there, still, from the pandemic standpoint, where we're all remote, maybe it moves a little bit more slowly. But I think that that is an exciting area of growth. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:I definitely agree. So let's talk about accessibility and inclusion, because, you know, you're mentioning them as trends that have increased over the years, I've definitely seen that as well from from my roles in various ad tech companies. And I think many of our listeners will recognize that they're WCAG, double a compliance, you know, it's something they might not have heard very often years ago, and now it's, you know, it's on their mind a lot, or, you know, just some of the ideas of culturally responsive teaching or inclusive content. It's something that is a little bit of an unsung part of edtech. And often it sort of rides the line, if I can say so, between morality and liability, right. I mean, that you have to do to be
Michael Wegerbauer:liable. And compliance. Yeah. Yeah, to
Alexander Sarlin:be compliant. Also the right thing to do to make your content access suitable to visually impaired learners or you know, all sorts of every learner. So talk to us a little bit about your perspective on an accessibility from from MRCC, you've been at the front lines of this for a while, you know, the
Michael Wegerbauer:basics are alt text, closed captioning, those are simple must. One great benefit of all text is it makes your content more discoverable, because now all of those images that you have in your content, also have text associated with them. So it makes your content more searchable and findable. That's one side benefit. The challenge that I think we've found and where we have to be creative is we want to create great new learning experiences for mainstream, when you're doing that, you find that you may be very limited in doing that, while still trying to meet the accessibility requirements. So you need to come up with creative ways where you're going to meet those accessibility requirements, but not limit the creativity for the mainstream learner. And I don't know if that's the appropriate term. But you know, for the majority of the folks out there who can view the content who the contents audible too, you know, you want to try and get them a new creative way of viewing the content. And at the same time, make sure that nothing is being lost for the folks that may have challenges. So I think that's difficult. And it's an area where creativity is important to have.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, I'm really glad you're bringing this up. Because I think this is something that a lot of edtech companies wrestle with internally, but it's not often discussed, because it's a little bit of a strange, sensitive topic. And that, you know, I hear you even talking about it's, I want to make sure I'm using the right terms, of course, you know, it is undeniably true in many cases that sometimes there'll be ideas inside an ad tech company, oh, why don't we do this really cool thing of this new type of content, this new way of delivering and then you sort of don't always realize off the bat that that might be something that actually does not meet accessibility and compliance requirements, has all sorts of issues. And then there has to be this negotiation and this creativity that you're saying, we figure out, you know, what makes for learners who are, you know, fully abled, and for learners who have any kind of learning difference, it's a really different one. And now neurodiversity and ADHD and autism are also coming into that discussion, which is makes it yet another layer, I think, you know, it's a really important and very complex and a little, you know, loaded topic, especially when you're dealing with K 12. And you have, you know, parent groups of autistic children who are absolutely there or have, you know, visually impaired children who are ready to really, really make sure that everything is accessible as they should. Yeah, it puts think the whole industry in an interesting position. I'd love to hear you talk more about it. If you're comfortable. I know it's a little bit of a sensitive topic.
Michael Wegerbauer:Well, I think so. In one case, we're coming up with an immediate graphing tutorials. So how do we it's almost as though we had to create a separate product. And it wasn't that it wasn't an entirely separate product. But we had to create a separate delivery mechanism to make sure that folks who couldn't view this would understand what's happening. So it's like all text for animation. Sure, but that's not good enough, it needs to be better than that. So you need to think about how to deliver the same experience as best you can to make sure it's inclusive for everyone.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, the Center for Applied and special technologies out of Harvard has been thinking about this for many years, and they have these different models of, you know, multiple modalities and universal design for learning that has has been really at the forefront of this exact discussion. But it's still not solved. I mean, I think, you know, we can say that outright, it often creates, you know, multiple modalities sounds great. And when you can do it, it's amazing. But it often involves, you know, doubling the development time or thinking about things in a different way. And it's, it's just a really interesting topic. And I think, you know, we've seen some really interesting movement, there's a company called cluesive, that's designed specifically for visually impaired learners. It's really it's like, dedicated to that population that's doing amazing work. There's cool stuff happening in this space. But I'm glad that it's coming up, because I think this is something that I'm sure many of our listeners have experienced. And I mean, even the idea that you know, to be truly WCAG compliant, very, very few people are fully compliant, because there's so many different policies to cover all the different types of learners. Most people get to a comfortable level of compliance that works for as many people as they can. It's just a really tricky sort of moral calculus.
Michael Wegerbauer:It is hidden is for sure.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah. So speaking of multiple modalities, you know, you've mentioned you know, that MRCC and learning solution shot To create many different types of content, you know, there's text content, video content, animations, you know, all text involved in those assessments, tutorials, full courses. We know from our research and education that different people may have very different learning preferences. You know, they some people prefer to learn through visual media, some people prefer to learn hands on by doing. There's sometimes a perception that younger learners prefer, you know, video content to text content, you have this sort of stereotype that you know, younger people don't read anymore. How do you think about modalities? If you're creating a course, for an educational publisher for a certain age range? How do you balance what type of content do you want for each course? Or does your client sort of bring that into the discussion? How does that work?
Michael Wegerbauer:Often the client has thought about that and maybe run some focus groups to determine what type of elements they want to include. If they haven't, you know, certainly, we want to make sure readability is at the right level, we want to make sure that the amount of content consumed per screen, for example, might be at the right level. Alright, but almost across the board, people want quicker snippets of information that's understandable, any way you can do that visually, as opposed to through text. You know, that's definitely the more desirable way to go about it. It is a little bit more challenging to deliver content that way. But I think that's at all levels, what types of elements you include, for interactivity, those will change, you know, by grade level. And so we'll consider that when coming out with some recommendations for a course. But there are many elements that are similar. They just may be used, you know, quiz questions, discussion questions, they may be used in different ways at different levels. So a lot of the basics are still there. And what we try to do is offer a lot of different options. Because again, a lot of times the instructors, the teachers themselves, are the ones who are choosing what content they like that fits in with the style that they teach, and they'd like their learners, their kids to utilize in their classroom.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, that's really interesting. So you're mentioning sort of the relatively universal emphasis on shorter snippets of content that sort of can be relatively quickly digested, and you can sort of get the main ideas or get the information more quickly. And you know, when I hear that, I think of sort of a little bit of like, tick tock generation or the Twitter, you know, the Twitter world, like, I think our generalized media environment has also been going in that direction. YouTube videos, I think, have gotten shorter over time, I'd love to hear how you think about that sort of, you know, entertainment media, or you know, the atmosphere that your end users and learners live in, and how that might affect their understanding of online courses.
Michael Wegerbauer:In terms of length, I mean, we used to say a 20 minute course was a good length for it. And I'm talking corporate learning, as opposed to educational learning was a good length. And I think that's true a 15 to 20 minute course is still a target. I think most companies out there put out hour long courses, and they lose folks to the tap through tap through tap through, I think it's still the target to have smaller chunks and allow people to consume more quickly, I think we're all impatient. These days, we all heal even you know, I'm not a young pup. And familiar with texting. Now, it's just everyone wants things immediately and don't seem to want to spend as much time. So our animations, we want those to be one to two minutes, max. And prior, we were developing five to seven minute animations. And that's just too long. Folks don't have the attention span, or they can, but they would prefer not to. So if we're going to grab them, then we really need to grab them in a shorter period of time, get the information across, but then provide resources for more in depth learning for them to fall back to if they want to continue.
Alexander Sarlin:Those are really valuable insights. So chunking into shorter pieces, providing opportunities for deep dives, but keeping the sort of main, the main path consisting of relatively short experiences. And even that idea, you know, corporate learning, an hour long corporate learning class is just too long now. And you're going to bore people, you're going to get them into that click through mode that I think we many people, many of our listeners have been in that for various times in their lives. It makes a lot of threads. It's an interesting moment. And I think, you know, there's a, I think healthy tension between wanting to do things really quickly on both the teaching and learning side in cases and actually having them work. You know, you actually retain the information and can do something different at the end of the class. And, you know, it makes me think of one thing that is really I think relatively unique to learning solutions and content services companies like MRCC, which is You have, you know, client based project. So a client will come in and say I need x number of videos or courses or animations or content elements. And here's the sort of cost of that. And I'm sure there's some leeway in different ways. But you basically have to maximize educational quality with a fixed labor, you know, fixed cost of production and labor. Right? I would love to hear I think this is relevant to so many people, how you think about that, you know, where can you reduce costs of creation without reducing quality?
Michael Wegerbauer:So yeah, it's challenging, but the best way we can do that is by developing a process. So a very easy to follow structured process that allows us to put out content quickly, and with a checklist so that we can check it and make sure that it's delivered with high quality. So the less rework we have to do, the better. So if we can create a construct that will allow us to try to think so we do solution videos. So we have a structure for those solution videos, where we have an intro, solve the problem, wrap it up, summarize, that's done in the US, goes offshore to our India teams to check for accuracy and clean up the audio, video, that sort of thing. And then is closed captioned and delivered right to the production server. So we've just created a very honed process where we know what resources are required onshore, what are required offshore. And, you know, a lot of our work is done offshore in India. And that is one way that we reduce the costs, and most educational publishers are, are working with companies like ours that have large production facilities offshore.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, it's really interesting because Indian Ed Tech is now starting to generate these sort of multinational companies. Whereas in the past, they were only places for, you know, high quality but inexpensive labor, it's a really interesting moment. I think for countries like India, if you're an ad tech person in India, you can have incredible impact by working to be a quality assurance person or accuracy, or a subject matter expert for the Pearson's and engages, which are then using the MRCC to generate all their, or you can go off and try to do an Indian ad tech play and work with a big user of Vedanta, it's a really interesting moment for that world. But it makes sense. You're talking about specialized labor processes that keep things streamlined. And it's, I can imagine you after years of work in this space, and these different elements, this probably pretty clear processes for many of the different elements that make up online learning experiences. Yeah, and
Michael Wegerbauer:each one's a little bit unique. But we know how to set up the process and incorporate that uniqueness into the process. So it's, yeah, we've become very familiar with setting that up.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. That's a really interesting comments. So you know, the process is relatively standardized, but you can incorporate some, you know, bespoke some uniqueness into it. I'm curious, if you have an example of that, I think it'd be really interesting.
Michael Wegerbauer:Well, I'll say that almost all of our projects have some type of unique flavor to them. Some tasks that we're not doing another project that we have to understand and incorporate. So it's not reinventing anything. But our process, we try to understand what the client's process is, because they've tested this out often internally, we need to adapt that to our process, or adapt our process to theirs. But then at the same time, we need to find ways where we can find efficiencies. So when we're doing that, we will typically, in a creative environment will come up with a mock up or prototype, if it's not very creative, if it's more direct content population, then we'll understand their process and run through a pilot to understand how it flows. And then as we do that, you know, we're checking to make sure and get feedback from the client to make sure we're on track what we've missed what looks good. And then we'll hone that process down until you've nailed it, document it, then train the resources to follow that process. So there's definitely no one set process that typically works for any other project. It's always got to have a tweak or some new understanding, because of what you know, the systems we have to access the guidelines that need to be followed for that particular project.
Alexander Sarlin:That's really interesting. So it almost sounds like there's a process for understanding how to adapt processes to the unique characteristics of each project. And thank you so you can do that rapidly. Yeah. And then have some bespoke, you know, work depending on what the content is the systems, you know, what platforms also I'm sure there's a lot of variability in that. Yeah, really, really interesting. So one fun question because, you know, I think MRCC is the type of company that I would imagine many of our listeners, it just hasn't been on their radar because you don't get a ton of TechCrunch articles or, you know, things that are sort of like big trumpet. If you sort of wanted to get a message out to the ad tech world about, you know, one thing you want them to understand about MRCC. And all the amazing work you do, that they probably don't hear elsewhere, what would you tell them? What do you think that the ad tech world needs to know about learning solutions, you know, slash content services companies like your own?
Michael Wegerbauer:Well, I think the thing that's unique about MRCC is that we really are a technology company that got involved in education, educational publishing, and online content. And why that's important is because we understand what's possible from a technology standpoint. So it allows us to have that leg up in terms of how we approach putting together an asset or content or platform, that's going to make sense from a technology standpoint. And over the years, we've come to know the educational publishing and online learning environment very well. So the two coupled together, really give us a leg up having smees work with our technology folks, work with our instructional designers work with our animators, all as a team. That's something that I think's unique. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:that's really interesting. And I love that emphasis on the technology side of it, that it's not about data entry, and filling in a spreadsheet with questions. It's really about technological solutions that actually leverage the tech in the most robust and effective ways. I think that's a powerful message for those in the education, publishing or corporate world. So we wrap up every interview with two questions. And the first is, what do you see as one of the most exciting trends in the EdTech? world right now, from your perspective? What is rising? What should our listeners keep an eye on?
Michael Wegerbauer:Well, it's probably something most folks have heard of already, but chat GPD. The it's an extremely interesting area of focus, you know, this technology. It's exciting. It's interesting. It was talking to a colleague about it, it sounds similar to the lisp programs that we developed when we were back in college, many, many years ago, where you've got a psychologist and you ask questions, and it responds back. But it's stronger than that. Because of course, there's a lot more resources out there for jet GPT to go out and comb through and, and come back. It's just very interesting. I asked it to put together a white paper on a particular topic, it came back with a very logical white paper wasn't in great depth, but at least was well organized, well written and logical. So it's interesting, you know, that can. There's certainly the concerns about copyright and that type of thing when it comes back with that information, that that could help accelerate the production of some types of content. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:it's certainly on everybody's mind in the tech world right now. And we had an interview a few weeks ago with a startup founder called Professor Jim, his entire company is about being able to take text content and turn it through purely through AI into video content with a free, you maybe know about that. It's really interesting. Wow. And I think that's, I mean, with slides that are auto generated with an avatar that delivers the material, it's some pretty wild stuff. And I think we're just at the beginning of that sort of content revolution, that generative AI is bringing so 100% with you there, and what is a resource, yet what is a book or a blog or newsletter that you would recommend for somebody who wants to learn more about any of the topics we discussed today?
Michael Wegerbauer:I have one, a friend of mine wrote a book, and it's called your kids going to be okay. This is by Michael Delmon. And you know, it's all about executive function and your child's needs in the age of attention. So when we're talking about, you know, the attention span and the challenges that we face, particularly going through the pandemic, there were a lot of folks that are more social and didn't cope well, and the completely online learning environment, and others that the online learning environment was perfect for. But anyways, this is one resource that I think is interesting, your kids going to be okay, we'll make it through this. There's a lot of folks out there struggling, you know, through that period, that folks were in critical learning points in their lives, and it didn't go well in all areas. So, you know, I think that's a good resource for folks. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:that's a message I think a lot of parents and educators need to hear right now. It's a crazy time. So as always, we will put a link to your kid's gonna be okay by Michael Dolman in the show notes for this episode. If you want to is rapidly through there. Of course, you can also use Google or any other service to find it asking, but it might tell you, it's in love with you. And I'm just so thank you so much. My coworker Bauer, this has been a really interesting, deep dive into a part of the tech landscape that I think more people really need to know about. It's a really interesting part of the world. VP at MRCC. Thanks so much for being here with me on at Tech insiders.
Michael Wegerbauer:Thank you, Alex. It
Alexander Sarlin:was a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech 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 Ad Tech Insider, subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.