Week in Edtech 03/05/2024: Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus, Nvidia Reaches $2T Market Cap, Google Partners with Reddit and More! Feat. Kelly Sia of Curriculum Associates, Malia Burns and Faiza Jackson of OpenSeat and Erin Mayhood of Mentor Collective

In this episode of Week in Edtech, Alex and Ben discuss:

1. AI

• Claude 3 Opus by Anthropic 
  • Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.’s Hottest Start-Ups
• Google partners with Reddit in AI content licensing deal

2. Big Tech

• Nvidia reaches $2T market cap
  • Nvidia Hardware Is Eating the World
  • "Don't Learn to Code, But Study This Instead..." says NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

Special Guests:

• Kelly Sia, President of Curriculum Associates
• Malia Burns, CEO of OpenSeat, Faiza Jackson, Clinical Advisor of Open Seat
• Erin Mayhood CEO of Mentor Collective

Transcript

Alexander Sarlin: 0:04

Welcome to Season Eight of Edtech Insiders where we speak to educators, founders, investors, thought leaders and the industry experts who are shaping the global education technology industry. Every week, we bring you the week in edtech. important updates from the Edtech field, including news about core technologies and issues we know will influence the sector like artificial intelligence, extended reality, education, politics, and more. We also conduct in depth interviews with a wide variety of Edtech thought leaders and bring you insights and conversations from Edtech conferences all around the world. Remember to subscribe, follow and tell your ed tech friends about the podcast and to check out the Edtech Insiders substack newsletter. Thanks for being part of the Edtech Insiders community. Enjoy the show.

Ben Kornell: 0:55

Hello, everybody, it is Edtech Insiders. I'm coming to you live from South by Southwest Edu in Austin, Texas. Alex, where are you dialing in from?

Alexander Sarlin: 1:07

Right, in my regular home studio. I did not get to South by Southwest Edu this year, which was very sad. I know. And you know, I know there was a big ad tech insiders event that I missed with all sorts of Friends of the pod and all sorts of interesting people. So I want to say I am so sad not to be there. But I'm so glad that everybody's getting together and having a great time in Austin. I would love to hear about what's happening there too, Ben.

Ben Kornell: 1:32

Well, it's been a great week. And you know, everyone's talking, of course, about AI and kind of what have we learned from years zero? And what are we doing and you're one and a shift from the theoretical and the kind of toys of AI of like, Oh, look at this fun, interesting thing to practical applications. We're going to have some interviews coming from South by with folks who are at that intersection of application so on. So look for that coming up in the podcast. Speaking of what else do we have coming on the pod?

Alexander Sarlin: 2:05

Yeah, so this week, we put out a really fun interview with Max Azarov. He's a former Google pm who started a really interesting company called Nova kid. It's basically the European version of VIP kid or VIP kid. It's International English Language tutoring from all over the world, and it's really taken off really interesting. And then we're gonna have Tom Sayer, the Co founder and CEO of Ello, we've talked a lot about Ello on the podcast, they do incredibly interesting work with kids ASR. And on this very podcast later today, we have some amazing guests as well, including Kelly Sia, the brand new president of Curriculum Associates. Awesome.

Ben Kornell: 2:43

Well, we're going to dive in. If you haven't seen us at South by Southwest, please check us out at ASU GSV. We're going to be hosting our annual blowout happy hour on the water in San Diego, and that is on Monday, April 15. And we're coming to you from 530 to 7pm. So make sure you check out our newsletter for that. But let's jump into the headlines. First, let's start with AI and big tech. What's catching your attention.

Alexander Sarlin: 3:11

A few big headlines coming out of regular old AI the vast moving incredibly well invested AI world this week. First off, we saw anthropic which has not been making as many headlines recently, as you know, Gemini came out from Google. And open AI continues to make headlines with their SOAR video platform. We got to talk to Sam Altman on the podcast about that. But anthropic does not want to be left behind that is yet another group. We also saw Elon Musk suit, Sam Altman this week, I don't know if we want to talk about that. But it is, you know, drama. But we saw anthropic put out a new set of models this week that are getting very, very good benchmark review, they're basically doing really well on the benchmarks, even against GPT against GPT. So that's very exciting for them. This is a company that was a spinoff of open AI, as were several others, but it's one that is really has a lot of AI expertise and cares about education as well. So I think we should not keep our eyes off of that Opus news. Did that jump out to you to Ben? Yeah, and

Ben Kornell: 4:15

you know, also just for our listeners, it's significantly cheaper. So it's performing as good or better than GPT four Pro or Turbo. And, you know, really anthropic has made more of a play for the b2b partnerships and less of a play for a consumer path. And so most people aren't as familiar with Claude. But from a reputational standpoint, anthropic has staked itself on being the safe AI. And safety means two things one, we're going to do it in a way that this doesn't become AGI and become our overlord. But number two, we're going to create the ability to have meaningful guardrails in our system. And I think that it's becoming more and more of a selling point now that we're going Omni modal. And it's not just language, but speech and video and all these other modalities, which are harder to build guardrails on top of. So if you have your core model has built in safety and also consumption of, you know, high quality data, that's the bet that they're making. By the way, on that note, too, it's important to note that the big backer of anthropic is Amazon. So this is a way in which we've kind of said, What's Amazon doing? You know, we know what Microsoft is doing, because they're backing open AI, and we know what Google is doing, which we should talk about. But this is Amazon's play. And I think the last, we know, Facebook is doing llama, or meta is doing llama. The last person that we haven't heard from is apple. And I'm hearing rumblings in the valley, that there's something really, really big coming from Apple. And the idea is that they are going to use their hardware advantage to create fully integrated AI. And so if you're thinking about buying an iPhone, I think you should wait. Because I think one thing to know about Apple is whenever they release new stuff, they do a good job of gating it so that it's not backwards compatible with their past versions, and you have to upgrade to the new one, see reference to all the plugs that go into said devices. But there's rumblings that the AI team at Apple have had some big breakthroughs, and it's going to make Siri look like child's play. Coming back to the big news of the week from K 12 standpoint, related to AI is the Gemini controversy. I'm sure our listeners have heard about this now. But just to summarize, the programming team that was building Gemini wanted to ensure that there was no bias in the AI model. And then the result was it created bias in the AI model, kind of flipping to like recreating historical events with protagonists of color, which of course set off the kind of anti woke agenda of the right. One thing that's interesting to me is that we've known about AI bias for years, and it was often stereotyping African American Latino people. And we never heard the kind of outrage in K 12 schools that we're hearing now when it's like maybe there's a liberal agenda behind how the platforms are biased. I will just say, overall, you know, I think there's no way to eliminate bias in these platforms. But being as transparent as possible around when you request something from an AI, and you put in a prompt, you should know how your prompt is being re engineered to go into the AI or into the LLM. And so I think it's a lot of egg on the face of Google. I think it's even more challenging, because k 12 schools in particular, are in that political moment where you have to be careful about what you're using, and Does it spark a political backlash. And so now Google largest edtech company in the world, as I like, often like say, is going to be infusing their Gemini AI into all these products. And it's going to be in schools, kind of like it or not. And so how should schools think about that? How should they manage that? How should they manage any concern or backlash? And so I think this is just the beginning of the story, we're gonna have to see how they respond. But this could be a very, very big deal for AI in K 12. Well,

Alexander Sarlin: 8:44

I mean, you could almost call it like the Hamilton effect, right? It's like, you know, it's sort of swapping history around to even up the racial representation. It's very interesting. Google also mentioned, it was partnering with Reddit, this week, $60 million a year to use Reddit data to help train the model. And, you know, I think you could almost call that a counter trend, because Reddit data is certainly not known for its lack of bias. But there's all sorts of interesting stuff in Reddit in every different topic. It is very interesting. It sounds like in this moment, Google has actually stopped letting people create images of people through Gemini people at all, while it sort of fixes this issue. But I think this bias piece, it's sort of a hidden third rail of AI people use the word bias to sort of represent lots of things, but this actual sort of racial and gender bias they have actually, like showing people in representative ways that are non representative or that are sort of, you know, create issues is something that Yeah, I mean, all education is going to have to deal with I can definitely imagine a near future where, you know, the AI model itself, they're gonna have to find some balance between, you know, bias in different directions, but the users can then tailor what they're actually asking for. So if you have to say I want a picture of, you know, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but you have to, you know, let Gemini know that you want it to be historically accurate and the actual faces of the people rather than, you know, something else. Maybe that's that's how the political split will sort of pan out in schools that, you know, people in Oklahoma will do it that way. And people in Mexico might do it a different way. It's a really wacky moment, and I think we'll all have to see it coming. But

Ben Kornell: 10:27

that's the dilemma here is that sometimes when you give choice, you actually get lower utilization across the board, right. So like, you know, the classic, you know, yogurt pricing thing is, oh, strawberry yogurt should be 80 cents, and, you know, peach yogurt should be 70 cents, and everything else should be 50 cents. And the result was people confronted with choice just consumed less yogurt, we're in that moment, I think, with school districts having so much on their hands, the last thing they want to do is pick an AI model. And then on top of that, try to tune it for what the political capacity, what I would say is potential is you could see state of Florida saying we don't want Google Gemini in any of our schools. And because we want to ban any company using Gemini. And so if you're a scaled ad tech player who's using the API's on any of these MLMs, you may have to be nimble about which ones are serving up to which markets, I will also just say, you know, most of our K 12, users don't understand that many of the products that they're using that have AI are actually using multiple providers. So they might have an open AI doing some of the query or have an agent. And that's using some open AI mixed with a little bit of, you know, open source LLM mixed with something that might be cheaper or lower. And so it's like this idea that the politics could paint very black and white pictures, no pun intended here. But actually, what's under the hood is quite complex. I think that could be a really challenging space coming forward.

Alexander Sarlin: 12:10

I agree. But I don't know that maybe this is naivete, I don't see things like the state of Florida banning Gemini, because of exactly the reason you just said Gemini is going to be built into Google Classroom on every level. And if Florida tries to ban Google Classroom, you are going to have a huge issues. It will set people back years and people. So you're right. But I think there's something really important about some of these models being increasingly baked into, like you mentioned, how Apple, you know, maybe we're going to see the next generation of iPhones and MacBooks. And iPads have AI in them. And all those schools that use iPads, you know, we'll have to figure out how to deal with it. The choice issues is true. But I think what might happen is that the fringe the people who really, really, really care a lot about this stuff, which may include people like our governor of Florida, but you know, who really care about this stuff will react, the others may just have to deal because some of these, these models are baked in, and they're going to be just part of our everyday life quite soon. But all of this is hard to tell. There was a couple of interesting pieces of news. I know we're doing a lot on AI here, but from the chipmaker side this week, which I think is worth talking about. Because, you know, Nvidia has basically dominated this market and just saw their market cap pass a trillion dollars and their stock shoots through the roof because they basically you know, at this AI moment and video makes a huge percentage of the chips that are being used. And news from Nvidia this week we saw Jensen Hong, the head of Nvidia, actually, it's $2 trillion market cap. And he put out a really interesting statement about hey, given the rise of ai, ai is going to take over from coding, we do not need to study coding the way we have in the past because AI is going to make coding into natural language. That's a very controversial statement. But coming from somebody with a $2 trillion market cap who sort of helped invent the field. That is a big deal. We also saw a company called grok, which is a competitor of Nvidia start to come out and talk about this idea of speedy LP use. That's like processing units that won't work in smaller but faster ways. And we saw Masayoshi Son famous for his Softbank work, basically say he's going to build a $100 billion AI chip venture you have a lot of different people looking at Nvidia's stock price and market cap and saying, Wow, they are raking it in how can we break into that market? Will this matter? This is really the core infrastructure for all this stuff. Will this matter for Ed Tech? Eventually, it'll matter for the speed of this stuff. It'll matter for the way it's actually done. But it's a little bit inside baseball in the AI world. That said the coding thing is really interesting. How do you react to all of this chip? This chip news do you think that there's ad tech ramifications for the chip news and I'm curious about this coding statement from Jensen Hall. Yeah,

Ben Kornell: 15:01

I mean, actually, it's surprising at South by Southwest, this has been a really big topic both on the compute and what are we going to do with Compute availability? And then to this whole idea of what do we need to teach around AI, literacy, computer science? How does that need to evolve? On the first one, I would say, the overall thought is, the more compute options we have, the more supply, the better, it's going to be for everyone. And so these GPUs, which are very sophisticated, very expensive, if there's ways that we can diversify our pool of chips to have more low cost functional chips, that blend with GPUs, much like we blend the AI agents with more sophisticated and less sophisticated thing, people are excited about that. And then there's a sense of, really, it's a matter of time, like other people are getting in the game and, you know, soft bank, getting in with, you know, building a chip maker rival, you know, all of these things will level out over time, on the what should we teach? That's pretty controversial here, I would say there's three groups of people, one group of people is saying, Thanks, Jensen, but like, we haven't been teaching computer science from the get go. So it's not like we need to change anything, we're not doing it already. Well, and so I think there's a big push. Second, we are hearing people saying, Actually, computer science is a framework of thinking, much like, you might be doing a chemistry lab, the chemistry you're doing in the chemistry lab, you're not going to discover anything, but knowing that this kind of hypothesis driven methodology is a mental model or framework that you need to learn, that allows you to apply that mental model to other scientific endeavors in the future, or even non scientific things. And that is actually really more of a disciplinary approach to education. And I think the third one is, if kids and families and so on don't know, code and don't know how the AI is built, and can't access at least foundational understanding of how things have been built or work. How can you trust that there's an outcome. So those are the three modalities. And I would just say, across the board, everyone saying quite the opposite, we need to lean in on computer science, we need to lean in on AI literacy. But I do think the nuance in his statement is that maybe we need to be doing that a little bit differently, in that the emphasis may not be on, you know, core code production. And it might be more on the conceptual computer science site.

Alexander Sarlin: 17:45

And people have been talking about this for a few years and digital promise, a really influential education nonprofit in California has been basically trying to push for this concept of computational thinking. Or sometimes they call this algorithmic thinking for quite a while. And that's really doing exactly what you said, tried to separate out the actual syntax of code those the curly brackets and the and the equal signs and all of these things with the actual underlying thinking behind what can you do with algorithms? What can you do with repeatable code snippets? How can you remix them? How can you gain more efficiency? I personally so very brief personal story here, you know, my dad was a very early computer programmer, he worked at IBM in the 60s at a time when they actually literally were like, We're gonna hand you a book. And if you can learn how to write computer code, the way we do it, you get a job, because nobody can do it. This is literally how they did it. And he was early, early coder, and early early in the computing revolution. And he, in his older years, was very strongly making the case that coding was gonna go away. He was saying, Look, you you look at the direction of all this stuff. And between AI and between the sort of, you know, Wizzy wigs, and between all the different tooling, yes, there will be some people who need to get into the coding. But realistically, the idea of needing so many coders needing so many developers, everybody being sort of understaffed in their development, and people being able to have these huge salaries. He's like, that's not going to happen in the future, because of the technology that's going to make this go away. And he had seen it happen with all those early coding languages like COBOL, and C and all these silly things that, you know, started the computing revolution, and then completely went extinct in favor of easier to use coding languages like Python. And I think, you know, maybe this is just my familiar bias here, but I tend to agree. I mean, we've had Nyan Zhi Quan yam on the podcast before and he's somebody who runs this amazing company called lutra.ai. He's made the case that it's going to lift all boats that basically as AI comes in, coders will become super coders. They'll be able to do unbelievable things, and everyone else will be able to do really cool things. And I think that's sort of the Silicon Valley stance that you're naming there. I'm not so sure are I think that AI could really legitimately start to even the playing field because the syntax is has been such a cultural bias issue for so long. I mean, you can ask a 10 year old in any school in this country, can you come up with a really cool way to solve this problem? And some will do better than others. But they all have ideas, it's totally different than being like, can you sit down and work through this totally non natural language and learn how to do it, and you don't have the tools. I mean, Bill Gates always said he had his 10,000 hours of coding. That's how he became Bill Gates, it was sitting there doing this ridiculous, frankly, thing over and over again. But it was a barrier to entry, that barrier is going away. So I'm much more bullish on what Jensen hyung is saying here, not just because of who he is, but because the idea of removing the barrier to entry to basically creating incredible technology products, I think it's gonna be a huge EvenOr in society, and especially globally, because you just really going to see people doing incredible things from their lived experience, because they understand actual problems, rather than because they happen to learn Python, you know, when they were 14, or when they were in college. I'm pretty excited about that. But who knows, it's hard to predict these huge societal changes. Yeah,

Ben Kornell: 21:18

you know, one thing that I add a micro level, by the way, just love the story. And like, this is why, you know, Ed Tech insiders, you inherit your passion for education and technology, and AI authentically, Alex. But one thing that I think we often think about in products is time to value, and also customer joy. And there's something about computer science in the past that has all been about deferred gratification, you've got to basically code code, code, code, code, code, code code, and then like some, you know, robot moves a little bit or something that thing moves, and you're like, wasn't really worth all that effort. We now have an instant gratification capability with AI, that you can do so much with relatively low lift technology skills, that I think we just need to understand how to weave that into the pedagogy so that kids are still learning some of the fundamental principles of how coding works, and how to build foundational, like code that then allows them to be more thoughtful consumers of AI generated code. And basically, one thing that we're seeing is, they're still human loop value. For all of these like GitHub AI, you know, features, you still need somebody who can have a critical lens and look at the code, and then refine it. So maybe a lot fewer people,

Alexander Sarlin: 22:47

and they might all work at Google and Trolltech. Right.

Ben Kornell: 22:50

Or it may be that there's a lot more people, but they're a lot more dispersed. So rather than technology production being concentrated, in large, vertically integrated tech companies, we actually will have localized production, like many other industries, where you, you used to need a huge room to have a computer and now there's PCs everywhere. My PC now could have my own proprietary LLM, just running on it by itself. Yes.

Alexander Sarlin: 23:18

But I think the directions we've seen so far with AI, it's been even more concentrated than anything we've ever seen before. I mean, it took many years after the internet was created for Google to take off. But we've seen almost instantly with this AI, these handful of companies, including Big incumbents, like Google and Apple, just take over I mean, and I think Nvidia is sort of like the perfect example of that they just have run the table. So Nvidia I

Ben Kornell: 23:44

think it's separate in that it's building infrastructure, whereas the software AI is different. But yeah, if you look at pricing, as an indication of market monopoly, leverage, Google pricing for Google ads on search, they're getting like 95% margin, they have huge leverage on pricing. Yep. If you look at LLM pricing, and AI pricing, just in the last, like 12 months, you've seen prices drop tremendously, like 10x. Drop to good point. And so there could be, I think we have even odds to head to a world where actually the models today that we think are so sophisticated, are essentially commoditized and they're at whatever the production cost is. And the production costs basically really has to do with the chips. So my sense is that we're actually, you know, bigger is not always better. In LLM, we've actually been surprised that some of these small labs with really specific data can actually be quite powerful, open models are going to proliferate. And these like large sophisticated models, I think, really where you create the defensibility for the These companies is actually in the use cases, not in actually the performance of the LLN. Because you're starting to get to areas where the average consumer can distinguish the performance between like a GPT, seven and a GPT, 7.5 or GPT. Eight, like, at some point, we're gonna get Assam total value. And so at least for most consumer, or, you know, most use cases, yeah,

Alexander Sarlin: 25:25

that's a great point, my instinct is still the opposite, that you're going to see a handful of companies basically running the entire infrastructure and underlying models for the world, you will see a lot of open source activity, but I don't think they'll be able to catch up with those central companies, those I mean, you see how fast they've been developing. Pretty amazing already. But yes, as in total, potentially. And then I think we're gonna see a huge amount of innovation around use cases, like you're saying, for these models, but prediction. I never make predictions, especially about the future, right? Like Yogi Berra said,

Ben Kornell: 26:01

it's really hard, by the way, just on that point, too. So these content plays where Reddit is selling content. The other big question with that is, are we going to see these recurring subscriptions for content? Or is a content licensed more like a one and done? Because like, once you train your model on the content, do you actually need to keep paying for it? I don't think so. Like how much that question now of new content, for most content providers is not enough to like, fundamentally improve the performance of the model, if you're able, in one fell swoop to do your whole entire history,

Alexander Sarlin: 26:40

it'd be proportional, like prorated, right? I mean, getting all of read cost that much and getting to 2025, as read it data costs a lot less, that's what I would get, unless you're going it's, you know, doubles a huge amount every year.

Ben Kornell: 26:52

So So then, you know, in in education, some of our content is our most valuable asset, right? So how do you think about these partnerships with AI companies? One way is you do like a big lump sum upfront, you download all my historic content. And then as I generate new content, you've got some licensure agreement, which basically incentivizes rapid production of new content, which the way to do rapid production of new content is through AI. Now you've got the snake eating the tail. Yes. So that's one way it could work. I think the other way could work is much more like brand licensing, rather than actual content licensing, which is basically like, which platforms have which relationships to which brands. And so this is going to be interesting to see how it plays out in the big space. But then you've got to think about curriculum associates, amplify Hmh Pearson, Scholastic, we're sitting on huge libraries of content. How are publishers like penguin? How are they going to monetize their content? How are they going to think about AI? Are they going to try to do a homegrown one and then fence it off? Or are they going to try to go with a big provider and feed into the LLM? These are big questions,

Alexander Sarlin: 28:14

they are a smart move for some of these content repositories would be to actually leapfrog and train an AI to create synthetic data based on what you already have. So you can then own your sort of entire library and sell it over time, rather than like you're saying, selling upfront. And then suddenly, Google has the entire Hmh library and says, use this library to continue making synthetic data. I mean, the smartest people I've talked to, in AI, in my personal opinion, have been very bullish on synthetic data, they're like, it's going to be very soon when most of the data in the world is synthetic created by AI because the amount of human created data as much as it seems like is actually very limited in an AI world. So I think that's going to happen no matter what. But who does that is the question, right? Does Google and open AI and anthropic, you know, vacuum up all the New York Times and read it and BBC and all this content? And then just start building from there? Or do those companies sort of create walls around themselves and make more branded content that actually has their own, you know, voice and specialty? It's an amazing and very interesting question, which we should keep an eye on.

Ben Kornell: 29:21

But I mean, I would just say, I think there's three factors that are going to come into how people think of it. One is, they're going to whoever their investors are, and backers are. If you sell your entire library upfront for a big dollar amount, that's pure margin, its profit. So if your private equity backed and you need cash to pay down increasingly high interest debt, you might make that decision. So actually, your cap structure and who your investors are might determine members

Alexander Sarlin: 29:55

have been suffering. So they want to do that. Yes,

Ben Kornell: 29:57

exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then Number two would be who else has been making deals, you don't want to be the last one when the music stops, where you don't have a chair to sit. And so there's a way in which like, there is a potential first mover advantage for people just locking up these deals, that's going to leave some other people out in the cold. You know, New York Times famously did a deal with open AI. What if your Wall Street Journal or what if you are Washington Post, like, the reality is that that industry should be coordinating across all of them? To negotiate with AI companies? instead? They're in like, a first mover like, you know, zero sum game situation and their somebody's going to get left without a spot. And then the third one is, how do you defend your value over time, and it really has to do with is your synthetic data versus your produced data, which is going to be better? And what's the delta? And so I do think like, people who pay reporters, they will have probably strong enough claim to say my created data is better than synthetic data. But for something like Reddit, where it's all user generated anyways, but you know, synthetic and user generated that's like, pretty similar. So,

Alexander Sarlin: 31:18

great points. I really like all of those, I'm the last thing I would say is, I think we're still living in this sort of text based AI world when we talk about, you know, New York Times content or imagining the articles. But we are very rapidly entering the video, and games and other types of AI based world. So you're gonna see companies like EA, or, you know, Paramount, or, you know, when you talk about content libraries, it's not just text, and they're going to be the next one is to face this stuff. We know, Nintendo, right. I mean, does Nintendo want to build their own AI? Or do they want to license their content to somebody else, so they can build incredible games. I mean, Nintendo is famously not going to license it. But that's probably a bad example. But Sony, all these game companies, all these app companies, all of these video companies, you know, movie studios that have been around 100 years, Criterion Collection. I mean, that's valuable data. If you're open AI, and you're Sam Altman, you're building Sora, you want access to incredibly good video of all kinds, maybe even libraries of you know, corporate training, things like that. So, I mean, it's such an exciting, very wild world, but I just encourage us to think about content beyond text, because it's coming very soon. Music, you're gonna see the music, Visual Studios virgin, selling their music content to train music models to be able to make hits. It's a really wacky time.

Ben Kornell: 32:37

Yes, I double down on what you said, mind blown on video game makers. Oh, crap, man. We're in for a wild ride. Oh, yeah. Well, of course, we're going to be watching this and bringing it to our listeners at every turn. With that, Alex, let's go to our guests.

Alexander Sarlin: 32:55

For our deep dive today, we have a very special guest, the incoming president of Curriculum Associates, a major major edtech player, Kelly Sia, welcome to the podcast.

Kelly Sia: 33:06

Thanks, Alex. Nice to be here with you.

Alexander Sarlin: 33:08

I'm really excited to talk to you. We've talked about curriculum associates many times on the podcast. So it's really a pleasure to see you, in person. For those of our listeners who may not be in the K 12 space, you know, tell us a little bit about curriculum associates what it does, and why it's so influential and widespread throughout the US.

Kelly Sia: 33:29

Yeah, sure, happy to. So curriculum associates was founded more than 50 years ago, by a small group of educators with one focus one mission, which is to make classrooms better places for teachers, as students, we really care about excellent education and equal access, whether it's quality at schools, in terms of teaching staff resources, infrastructure, we know that varies zip code, the zip code, but we believe the potential that every kid has an ability to get to grade level an ability to really great and to use education as an equalizer. So we partner with educators provide them with the tools for equitable learning practices experience for all kiddos,

Alexander Sarlin: 34:11

the sort of signature product of curriculum associates, you have a wide variety of different kinds of products, but is called iReady. And it's pretty much ubiquitous. It's in so many districts tell us about iReady. And what that sort of meant for curriculum associates.

Kelly Sia: 34:25

Yeah, I'm happy to. So first of all, we believe in the power of data. We believe that everything starts with data and assessment, and data's primary use is really to guide instruction. And of course, we know that assessment data can take so many different forms growth, lexiles, quantiles, Nords, you name it, but at the heart of it, it really reflects the assumption that all kids can get to grade level success. And so assessment data is about defining all the possibilities for kiddos. This can be true despite all background, zip codes and income levels. And so we focus on assessment for kids happens about three times A year, but it provides a full picture for student performance. And kiddos take this assessment. And we're able to get to really specific skills and domains where their students are flying, doing really well, or specific needs, whether it's in math or reading, we can get down to those really unique skill sets that they may have opportunities in. And then we leverage that to pair it like a glove with irony instruction. So using all this actual data allows for kids to have the right instruction, if they're behind, it allows them to get to grade level. At the end of the day, though, Alex, what it does is because we're able to group kids, and we know where their needs are, it can reduce complexity, it's going to save educator time, we think it's gonna have a really meaningful impact. Or sorry, about a third of the kids in the US K eight, so 13 million kids. But what I tell you is the thing I love best about it, is we're using data and reporting to save teachers time.

Alexander Sarlin: 35:54

Yeah, and you know, so many of the things are saying, you know, keeping kids on grade level, using data to inform instruction, having that sort of assessment instruction cycle, those are ideas that are so important in edtech. And curriculum associates, as you mentioned, has been around much longer than a lot of edtech. But it is sort of defined some of that field, especially in the K 12 space, that idea of using assessment to influence instruction to keep kids on grade level. It's really amazing. And you know, one of the things that has come up a lot recently with curriculum Associates is that it's done a number of acquisitions over the last seven years acquired motion math that our friend Jacob Klein, really amazing games for math, and acquired a company called mentoring minds that does Critical Thinking it acquired a company called elevation, which is really interesting for English language learners and teachers. And most recently, it acquired soapbox labs, one of the leading tools for AI powered automatic speech recognition for children, which and we interviewed the president of soapbox labs last year. Also interesting. And you were really, you know, involved in a lot of these acquisitions as the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer of curriculum associates. Tell us a little bit about a couple of these acquisitions and what they've meant. Yeah, happy

Kelly Sia: 37:05

to tell us the most recent ones you mentioned. So box, I couldn't be more excited about bringing Martin Amelia full team on board are in Ireland, they are legit cutting edge in the AI space. So box was so cool. They've generated over 100 million learning experiences through voice engine. And we're gonna partner with them on bringing that to life, whether to assessment of products, applications, platforms, or thinking about it for early literacy, reading fluency, all kinds of applications. We know the other thing we love about this, it was so obvious because not only do we share the same company values and what we care about, we're committed to using technology to power equity inclusivity, accessibility and data privacy in the classroom. So we are so thrilled about the roadmap. We had them on site about a month ago and with the team and we're excited about the roadmap that we're developing together. I can also talk about elevation elevation has been ca partner for the last couple years. Elevation serves about little under half of the English learners in the US schools, which is about 2.3 million English learners. They have three products, an elevation platform, which basically simplifies instructional decisions to support administrators with instructional decisions. I have a strategies product, which is a scalable PL with instructional routines that help teachers practice and give them confidence around student growth. And then we do have some other things that support students. But you know, we are really proud because elevation is again, another company that joined our family, leading K 12 software, great values, and we love the ability to serve our English learners across us. Yeah,

Alexander Sarlin: 38:47

English language learning is such an important part of the education system. There's so many you said serves 50% of the English language learners in the US That's really incredible. And that's elevation ELL ovation, right English language learners ovation. And yes, the soapbox labs acquisition is incredibly interesting. You know, one thing I want to ask you about, you have been our longtime chief financial officer, and you you know, one of the things I love about edtech is it draws people from lots of different industries, you actually come from sort of manufacturing and I mean, you're a Procter and Gamble for many years, which is totally amazing. Tell us a little bit about that background and what sort of skill set and mindsets you bring from that experience? Yeah, that's

Kelly Sia: 39:27

right. So I spent nearly 20 years at p&g number of businesses brands, I started my career on the manufacturing plant floor. And looking back there are two things that are a common thread throughout my whole entire career, one solving really hard problems, and to working with outstanding people and teams to solve those problems. And I came outside of the industry, I joined ca in 2020. And I didn't even know that this supplemental market existed and that you can actually really do great things just using your business skills and working with great people and And now in my role, I'm focused on a couple of things, our customer experience, making sure that we remain customer focused thinking about the holistic customer experience and you know, inspiring delighting our customers by building confidence and capabilities. And then the second thing is obsession with talent. Ca, you probably know has been best places to work, Boston's top place to work. And I'm really proud of that to be able to work with such great people. And the company has grown. So we've grown since I've been here from 1200 employees to almost double that today include our full scope. So helping the teams build internal infrastructure process, those are the things I learned at p&g to help scale our company, which is not so exciting. But you know, I want to make sure that our employee experience is awesome. So we can retain our great employees. And we can work more seamlessly internally. And it doesn't matter, like whether our teams are the ones who are serving educators directly, or the people in our company that are serving the people. We're certainly educators. And so developing solutions and helping us grow, while at the same time making sure we have a great experience for our employees.

Alexander Sarlin: 41:06

Yeah, great talent, you've hired hundreds of people, you know, scalable processes, really thinking about this space, you're really thinking about bringing some of those mindsets about creating a amazing company culture and a very effective very large scale company culture, bringing from Procter and Gamble to Iron Mountain and now to curriculum associates. And you know, you didn't mention this, but since you've joined the company's revenue has also doubled. Not only is there many more people, but the company's revenue has doubled as the Chief Financial Officer, I'm sure that is a point of pride as well. Kelly Sia, it is such a pleasure. I imagine there may be more plans in the future. I'm not going to ask anything specific. But you know, as you think about soapbox labs, acquisition and integration, as you think about, you know, building off this growth, you know, at a high level, what might be expect going forward from curriculum associates over the next year or two?

Kelly Sia: 41:57

Yeah, that's a good question. So we continue to invest in the places that matter, we have a pretty robust product roadmap, that's an area we have historically invested pretty heavily, we'll continue and thinking about how we shape our AI strategy, both inside the company to help us be more efficient and effective and whatnot, but also outside how we can leverage AI more proactively. The other thing I'd say I'm excited about is you mentioned this, but we had a unique experience providing meaningful assessment instruction. And in the future, I think we're going to be seeing more blurring of the lines between assessment instruction and practice. That's exciting. And we're thinking about, you know, reporting and how we can get these more streamline. The other thing is the component of the teacher, right, we provide outstanding customer service for teachers were in the classroom 1000s and 1000s of times every single year. And so as we develop our plans, I just want us to be mindful, like the teacher is so important and going to play a really big role in the future. Even if you tell me all the technology in the world is going to be here. We're focused on what we can do for teachers and alleviate their pain points and help them do what they do best, which is serve kids and drive student outcomes.

Alexander Sarlin: 43:02

Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here. Kelly Sia, the president of curriculum associates serving knees had mentioned 13 million just sort of casually passing, serving 13 million students, at least in the US. We really appreciate you being here with us on Ed Tech insiders. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it. For our deep dive this week. We have Malia Burns, and Faiza Jackson from open seat, which provides mental health support for students in schools. Welcome, both of you are

Malia Burns: 43:32

so grateful to be here.

Faiza Jackson: 43:34

Thank you, Alex, I'm excited to spend time with you.

Alexander Sarlin: 43:36

Open Seat is doing something incredibly important, which is addressing so much of the stress and anxiety and depression, and all of the issues that students are seeing in school, Malia, can you tell us a little bit about what Open Seat is and how it works and how you've been growing recently,

Malia Burns: 43:53

Happy to Open Seat's, a nonprofit that started two years ago in response to the social emotional needs and mental health needs that arose really out of the pandemic and were laid bare but existed far before. And what we do is we provide a one on one social emotional coach for every student who needs it when they need it. We work with schools to provide a diverse group of coach options for students. And then they choose a provider who is resonant with them whose identities mirror their own oftentimes, and then that person that student works between four to six sessions with their coach on either addressing an issue building a skill, or working on a goal.

Alexander Sarlin: 44:39

Fantastic. And this is such a high need in schools right now you have students really wrestling with things. I know that open seat has seen a lot of growth recently and sort of entered whole new parts of the school system. What does that been like?

Malia Burns: 44:53

Yeah, we're really excited. We've doubled the number of schools that we're working in and we are now working in seven states. It's been really exciting for us to have schools partnering this time of the school year, you can imagine there are, it's very clear which students need additional interventions. And you've got a number of students who potentially might not be on track for graduation might not be on track for promotion, who are struggling with behaviors in their classes, who need additional supports in order to gain the social emotional skills to engage academically. So we're really excited that a number of schools have connected with us, we've hired more coaches to be able to serve them. So we're we're so excited to be able to be making new partnerships with schools. And it's so amazing to hear the relief on the school side, knowing that they are expanding the number of students that they'll be able to serve and the relief that they anticipate their teachers will have knowing that that the needs that are arising in their classrooms will be able to be met. Yeah.

Alexander Sarlin: 45:56

So you're mentioned that this is a really pressing issue right now. And some people will feel like this is really spiked, since the pandemic, all the sort of isolation, these social emotional needs. But actually, some of this has been growing for decades now. I started in the whole social media era, Faiza it tell us a little bit about some of the things you are hearing from students at schools and that the coaches are hearing in schools and how your coaches are supporting them?

Faiza Jackson: 46:21

I think you're absolutely right. This is a trend that has been going on for a number of years. And I think social media has played a really large role in that. That being said, when we think about post pandemic, and we think about the needs that we see in schools, the impact of the social isolation, and the gaps. So what I hear from school staff a lot most often is, I have a child who right now is in fourth grade. But some of their social emotional development and their skills and how they relate to others are more reflective of a second grader. And I'm not sure I'm not sure how to meet that need. I'm not sure how to help them develop. We think about it, especially when you think about academics, and you think about the school setting. We know how to remediate literacy, and early literacy, we've done that for a really long time, we know what to do when a student is behind. I think we are less knowledgeable in what to do when that gap is around the social emotional development. I think the other piece that we see that coaches are talking about, especially in our secondary and our high school students is what does it mean to be with our peers? How do we learn to talk to each other, to have healthy relationships, skills, to understand and ways to build conflict. And I think a lot of that does come out of being an isolation and then coming back together in person, it's really different, to send a message to send a text message to send a DM on Instagram, than to be in a physical space with somebody. And so that's a lot of what our coaches do as well. And what we look at the castle competencies, which are really best practice and social emotional skill development. And we have our coaches actively identify with students, what are the skills that you want to build? And how can I help you get there.

Alexander Sarlin: 48:14

It's such an interesting metaphor to sort of compare social emotional development to literacy, or academic development and the idea of kids being you know, two years behind grade level in social emotional development in social skills and the ability to connect with others. I think that resonates with a lot of us. And I'm interested in the sort of capacity building nature of what you do in open seat, you mentioned that, you know, the current staff in schools, sometimes just overwhelmed by the that scale of these problems, there's not enough time to have a lot of time with each individual student. Tell us a little bit about how you know, the schools you work with react to the enormous expansion of social emotional capacity that they get with a partnership like yours.

Faiza Jackson: 49:00

One thing that I would say about that is, when it comes to the way that we build capacity, we're very intentional with our schools. And so remember that we talked about our model is social emotional wellness coaching. Those are students that typically for schools, they identify them as what we call tier two. So they have needs, but they are not at a level of having a clinical, diagnose mental health need. And so what we really want to do is come in, build capacity, and be preventative so that they get that support that they need at the level with which they're presenting. We want that need to decrease right to the point where now we're functioning and what's what works for 80% of students and our tier one supports is enough and now the student is successful as well. Whereas what we know and what every person who's been a schoolboys clinician knows is those tier two students are the ones that we get to the least amount of time because the needs of our others are so great. For that we are spending our individualized time working one on one with them. And so then the tier two student rises up as opposed to going back down, right. And so eventually, they might have that greater need and we see them. But what open seat wants to do is to say, let's meet you where you are. And let's build your skills. So that you're getting to a place where you say, You know what I'm doing. Okay. Yeah,

Alexander Sarlin: 50:26

that focus on as you say, preventative, social, emotional wellness coaching. So that students who are not clinically diagnosed don't become clinically diagnosed or don't have exacerbated problems is so important. Lilia, I'd love to hear you talk about you mentioned this earlier about coaches that reflect the identities or share the lived experiences of some of the students in the schools that feels like a really important aspect of this as well. And I'd love to hear you talk about it.

Malia Burns: 50:55

Yeah, this is certainly a problem in the mental health, social emotional crisis, right? There's a lack of providers. And then there's an additional challenge where we do have providers, our average social worker, school counselor, is a 40 year old white woman, and we serve a diverse group of students. And we know representation matters. So for us, we have recruited an incredibly diverse group of coaches, who are diverse, racially, who are diverse, linguistically. And we're very open about the lived experiences they've had. And so for students, they can choose if part of their identity is that they have dealt with substance abuse in their lives, or they have a family member who has been incarcerated, they can choose a coach who has a similar lived experience. So they know as they're connecting with that person, that there will be some resonance there. And that's a critical part of what we do. We think that the student being empowered to choose their provider is also something that's really important. It's a privilege many adults have, but very few students do. And so we think that that's core to the empowerment that we want our students to have leaving open seat as well.

Alexander Sarlin: 52:04

I'm sure that you really hear some of the stories of this coaching, making a huge difference, you know, from students, from educators, maybe from families, I'd love to ask each of you and maybe FISA, you know, tell us, you know, obviously, without any details, right, but you know, the anecdote, I'd love to hear what this looks like in practice, and really, I'd love to hear from you as well. But what does this look like when you have this sort of preventative moment, and a coach can really make a difference in a student's life.

Faiza Jackson: 52:31

So we actually are very deliberate about collecting feedback and collecting data, right? Because we want to see progress. And that's really important. And that's what schools want to know, too, right? Is this having an impact isn't making a difference. And the first round of that feedback that we collected, I'll tell you, one of the stories that resonated the most and stuck with me, was a student's grandmother, who talked about the difference that she saw in the way that he was functioning on a daily basis, and the ways in which she realized that that positive change, and how she saw it apply to him across different settings, was because of the work that he had done with his open seat coach. And it was just a beautiful thing to read from a family member who loves this young person so much, and is saying thank you, I see that this has been so impactful.

Alexander Sarlin: 53:24

Yeah, it's beautiful. And across settings is really important. You know, you're getting coaching at school, but that doesn't mean that it only affects your life at school. Students are going through things in many different arenas. Malia, how about you what stands out to you from something you've seen in the open seat journey? Yeah,

Malia Burns: 53:41

I'll share a story that actually happened last week, and then maybe add a little cherry on top to buy the story. The first one from last week is a little bit more serious, which is actually CEO of a network called and said, she was so grateful, because one of her students who she previously had not known about and nobody on her team had known was suicidal. So part of our work is that, you know, in giving these non clinical services we do screen to ensure that students are not experiencing suicidality or feelings of self harm. And we found out over the course of our services that the student was suicidal, and were able to connect back with the school and ensure that the student was getting the crisis care that they needed. And this person, you know, called and thanked us because they, you know, would otherwise not have known that the student had this really critical need. And I think about all of these students who are flying under the radar at all of our schools that we may be missing and the potential terrible impact of that on communities. That's a serious one. I'll just add one small note to the story that Pfizer shared that was one of my favorite things that the grandma shared was that this young man now felt confident enough to start singing. And I just love that story. I mean, to be able to sing in adolescence, and to be able to perform is a wonder afford thing. And it was such a beautiful part of what his work with open seat enabled him to do. So loved that.

Alexander Sarlin: 55:07

Yeah, powerful stories. And I think one thing the pandemic really did for a lot of us in education is opened our eyes to the wide variety of services that schools really provide. It's not just academic, and it's certainly not just daycare, but it's also you know, nutrition. It's also peer guidance. It's also collaboration, it's also a safe place to be I mean, the list goes on and on and on. And I think one of the things that's really jumped out is this social emotional need, like you mentioned, FISA, you know, what do peers give us? What does it give a student to be in a school with other people physically, not just on a zoom or through some kind of mediation? It's really powerful. I think, you know, open seat and other wellness solutions have really been a silver lining, to this really dark period where we sort of all realized, hey, schools do a lot for people and missing school for a couple of years, sets them back a lot, not just academically, but also socially. So let's talk about the future of open seat. You mentioned earlier, you've expanded, doubled the number of schools recently, what's next?

Malia Burns: 56:13

Well, we're really excited to continue to grow. We're hoping to be in 25 schools at the beginning of next year, which we're so excited for. And we look to expand the number of students that we serve within those schools. So we'll be serving 1000s of students next year, which we're really excited about. And we look to grow in more schools across the country. We predominantly started our work in charter schools, we're excited to expand to district schools as well, and to continue to expand our reach. And then we're excited to continue to partner with other organizations that are providing similar services to schools so that we can continue to make our services even more compelling to them. Fantastic.

Alexander Sarlin: 56:55

And as if people listening to this are feeling inspired and saying, Oh, I know, a school or a district that could really use this type of service, where can they find open seat online?

Faiza Jackson: 57:06

They can certainly find us at our website openseat.me They are also welcome to connect with us on LinkedIn, they could look up Malia Burns, Faiza Jackson, and we'd be so happy to learn more about them, and to see if we can be supportive on their journey and supportive to their students and families.

Alexander Sarlin: 57:24

Wonderful. openseat.me Thank you both so much for being here with us on Edtech Insiders, Malia Burns and Faiza Jackson of Open Seat. We have a very special guest for weekend edtech this week, the brand new CEO, former chief product officer now CEO of mentor collective, which supports university students. Welcome Erin Mayhood.

Erin Mayhood: 57:49

Thank you so much for having me here today.

Alexander Sarlin: 57:51

I'm really excited. You know, mentor collective does some really interesting work. And I don't think it's an organization that enough people know about, can you give a little bit of an overview of what mentor Collective is and the impact it has in university settings? Absolutely.

Erin Mayhood: 58:06

And thank you, and we are hoping that more people know about us soon. So first, I always have to start with the mission, I'm a very mission oriented person and mentor Collective is all about empowering all people to realize their full potential. We're a company that recognizes challenges faced in promoting student success, we know that we have retention and persistence concerns, students are finishing their starting, we have an increasing number of mental health wellness challenges. And we work with campuses to create vibrant communities, online campuses, or in person campuses. So we're supporting students, not only from the achievement perspective, because by the time let's be honest, by the time you see an attendance pattern or a class grade, the student might be in a position where they're, they're really not able to continue. So we do this right now through offering mentorship programs, and really their mentorship initiatives. We do everything for the campus from designing the initiative that they need, defining the outcomes and goals that they're after, which are usually let's increase sense of belonging. Let's increase academic self efficacy, let's increase a career decision self efficacy, we recruit train the mentors, we engage the mentees and the mentors keep them going in their relationship. We have a matching survey that has over 80 points, so lived experience of factors into who you get matched with. And we refer to campus resources and we provide metrics and insights to the school on how things are going and how engagement is going.

Alexander Sarlin: 59:44

It's such important work. I think a lot of people outside of the higher education space. I think that you know, once students get to college, hey, they're in there moving. It's great, but really only the very, you know, elite colleges have incredibly high graduation rates. You work In a wide variety of different schools, but it includes community and technical colleges, which often have very low retention rates, you work with first year students with online learners with transfer students with underserved students. There are so many populations and so many environments that actually have very serious retention issues, very low sense of belonging, students don't know what to do when they get to college. So tell us a little bit about what you've seen working with different types of organizations and different types of students?

Erin Mayhood: 1:00:29

That's a great question. Because every student is coming in to their school or their training or their learning environment, with a different set of experiences and a different lived experience. And you don't know that when they're coming in, you might not have a good a good picture of that. And so part of getting to know that is getting to know your student. And so if you think about it, who are students most likely to talk to, right? We know from endless data and surveys across the country that really 65% of students at least 65% are going to talk to friends, before they talk to an advisor or faculty member. So how are you going to know what's happening there? So we we run assessments, sense of belonging assessments, self efficacy assessments as part of the program, we encourage relationships and have the mentors report if there are major blockers to the students on this journey. And what we find is through the power of connection and great relationships is that you can really dramatically increase sense of belonging on your campus, and the encouragement increases in other self efficacy, etc. Now, something that you mentioned, not all campuses have a retention problem. Absolutely true. But almost all campuses have an issue that could present a blocker to a student. So while some of say the Ivy League colleges, maybe they're not having issues with belonging, you have a lot of students who are maybe not first gen students, you have a lot of students with high achieving parents, those students tend to enter with low academic self efficacy scores, am I going to live up to the pressure? Am I going to be like I'm second generation can I do everything that I saw before me seems similar issues, you still need somebody by your side to help you through that. But of course, sense of belonging is really where a lot of the country as talking right now, because that dramatically impacts your retention rates. And being paired with somebody who maybe looks like you, who has had a shared life experience, or a person that isn't, you know, a student who is particularly worried to ask the hierarchy or an administrator for help, they're going to open up to appear nine times out of 10. more quickly, you're

Alexander Sarlin: 1:02:50

mentioning some concepts that I happen to really love. I did my master's thesis on self efficacy and Bender, and I love these things, it strikes me that it's possible that some of our listeners may not be as familiar with phrases like sense of belonging, and self efficacy. I know one of the drivers of self efficacy is what they call vicarious experience. It's exactly what you're talking about seeing other people like you succeed, but maybe we can zoom out and just talk a little bit about because, you know, for people that don't know these phrases, you're saying, hey, it's not just about academics, it's about belonging, and self efficacy. What do those mean in the context of a college student?

Erin Mayhood: 1:03:26

So for a college student, I mean, not to be overly dramatic, but it really does mean everything right? You're going through a period of time that is new to you, it's a new part of a journey. Do you feel like you belong there? It is literally as as it sounds, do you belong in this class? Do you belong on this campus? Can you achieve the things the academics that have been put before you and we all know you know, we, we've used different terms over over the years for this, like even in the work environment, when you have something like imposter syndrome, this dramatically impacts how you're going to perform. And as soon as a student gets rattled, they might be more likely to drop out. Now this becomes more dramatic if let's say that you're an underrepresented minority on campus, or if you're a first generation student, because you're not people at home, maybe are not encouraging you. So where is your support system? Who are you talking to around the kitchen table about what the experiences or the trouble that you're having in class, and I think of things like recently, that Chronicle of Higher Education was featuring UC Riverside which is just best in class for working students access programming for their students, and a simple quote a student who was pursuing a STEM career who said I was anxious about taking chemistry, but my mentor calmed me down and reminded me of all the help I would get peer mentors are like Friends, you can always ask them about where to get services on campus. And so when you think about that, think about the I belong here, I'm not the only one having this problem, I can do it or that school has spent millions of dollars building out these support services in that particular mentee was encouraged to use them. This is a great way for schools to really drive and see the impact on these investments that they're making for students.

Alexander Sarlin: 1:05:27

I couldn't agree more, these things are so important, and they're sometimes a little bit hard to put your finger on unless you have a definition like that, unless you have you know, assessments, obviously, you're able to assess people's sense of belonging and academic self efficacy. But when that's not part of the conversation, people don't even know what they're really doing. And you've seen, you know, very concrete results, we've seen 8% increased sense of belonging across all students, and that that varies, it's even higher for our historically underserved students. It's higher for male students, which I find very interesting. You know, one of the things we've talked about on the podcast is we've seen this huge demographic shift in higher ed, where female students are now the majority at every level of higher education almost all the way up with some exception of certain, I think PhD programs. But medical students have been dropping out at much higher rates, it's been really hard for them. I'd love to hear their starkly underserved story. But I'd also love to hear the male students story just to talk about that that often. Yeah,

Erin Mayhood: 1:06:19

absolutely. And you can see big differences in the data between males and females where men might come in, they might start school, feeling a little stronger than women when they're starting school. But something happens along the way, or that first experience, and how do I deal with that experience doesn't always become clear. Now, whether or not culturally as well, there's something that is different in the way maybe we're raising men, I don't know all the reasons behind but help seeking behavior, not as common with a lot of men. In fact, it can be seen asking for help or needing to use a resource might be really looked down upon by a lot of the male students that we have in our program. And so again, matching them with somebody who can maybe break down those barriers for them, helps them along their journey. So for us again, you know, you can never know 100% What's going on in a person's life, but we are seeing some really, really great results working with men just in terms of the language, the type of support and the match that we give.

Alexander Sarlin: 1:07:26

Yeah, I mean, there's the old stereotype about men not wanting to ask for directions, because it can be admission, or, and there's lots of sociological data about men not having close friends, especially adult men. So I think the idea of having a peer mentor who you can go to who can normalize some of these things must be incredibly impactful. So you know, you come to the CEO role from the Chief Product Officer role. And you know, what's fun about product roles is that you get to really look in detail about, you know, it makes a difference. And I'm curious if you've seen, you know, you've been doing this work for a while, have you've seen any sort of inflection points or had any realizations, you've always had good results? But have there been any moments that have really surprised you? In terms of what works?

Erin Mayhood: 1:08:09

Yes, absolutely. And this is a pretty big aha moment internally, for us at mentor collective. I don't know that we have a lot of arguments against mentorship, right? Relationships, check the box, positive influence, everybody's looking for it. We see outcomes go up when you connect to humans, and they encourage each other. That's fantastic. The game changer for our outcomes that dramatically changed a couple years ago, is when we started exposing insights from the relationship to the institution. So an example of that this was very dramatic during COVID. Let's imagine a student was experiencing food insecurity, giving the mentor the ability to flag that their mentee was experiencing food insecurity. And for the workflow from our system to get that into the hands of the right administrator, the school can jump into action. And so mentorship itself is an intervention that works. But when you have the power and funding of an organizational body paired alongside of that, that's when the outcomes really, really grow exponentially. So you can see this in the movement of higher education right now, if you think of the changes that we're seeing in communities of practice for advising. As an example, imagine, when data like mentor collectives data, student voice data gets into those practices, how much more student centered we can be and how we can unblock the very real blockers that many students are facing to achieving success.

Alexander Sarlin: 1:09:50

I think that feeds into the insight you mentioned earlier about, you know, students are much more likely to talk to other students or their peer mentors about what's going on. and then go to sort of official authorities right now. But if the official authorities have much more than they can actually do, they have, as you mentioned, the funding the services, the programs, all sorts of option, professional training. So there's a really interesting combination there between having, you know, students be able to talk to one another, but then the results of those talks be able to actually influence policy of your institutional level, I can definitely understand that. One of the other really interesting things that had been relevant to the higher ed world that we talked about a lot on the podcast is how, you know, increasingly, over the last few years, students are saying that they're coming to college for very specific reasons. And the specific reasons are usually to get a good job just move up in social mobility. But often schools don't recognize that or at least don't officially recognize that they offer all sorts of things. But they don't necessarily offer a lot of career guidance or career readiness. Some do it more than others. Of course, mentor collective I think has moved into career readiness, or it's something that you also offer in conjunction with what you do. Can you tell us about that, and how you help schools support career readiness? Yes,

Erin Mayhood: 1:11:03

thank you for that. And I want to acknowledge and congratulate all of the schools around the country, who are starting to talk about career readiness and what your degree can do for you, even during the admissions process. So that's fantastic. So for us how we think about it is, let's get that student started and get them feeling like they belong and get them going. And then let's support them in finding who they want to be and how they want to get there. Your mentor doesn't always have to stay up here, you can have an alumni mentor or a workforce mentor, we start matching you with the people who are going to expose you to experiences and opportunities in ways that you need to experience all at the same time of being referred to encourage to leverage your career center, leverage the internships and apprenticeships that are happening through your school. Again, throughout the program. The mentees report what their goals are and our program, the mentors report. Oh, thematically, my mentees looking for an internship, schools can see which students are struggling to find those things throughout the program. Those referrals and references and engagement with those offices start increasing. And that is proven by our campuses over and over again, that utilization of those career oriented support services that you have in place will increase via the mentorship because the students will become more open about what they're after referrals will happen. And you can have external mentors.

Alexander Sarlin: 1:12:36

Yeah, it's such important work. And I really admire how Mentor Collective is sort of going right at some of the major issues that we know to be happening in the higher education environment, but often just aren't sort of talked about it that much, which is, you know, that gap between career readiness and what you often hear when you get to a campus that it's like, it's English major, or business major, or that you just don't even know where to go. And this idea of having all these resources available, but still students feel very isolated. They feel there's mental health crises, there's dropout rates, there's a lack of sense of belonging. So it's so important, you know, the work you're doing to really close those gaps. Thank you so much for being here with us. This is Erin Mayhood, the new CEO, former CEO, which I've always happy about I love when product people become CEOs, and named CEO of Mentor Collective solving serious issues in the higher education environment. Thanks so much for being here with us on Edtech Insiders.

Erin Mayhood: 1:13:32

Thank you so much.

Alexander Sarlin: 1:13:34

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