Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Building Accessible Tutoring Solutions with Chuck Cohn, Founder of Nerdy & Varsity Tutors
Chuck Cohn is the Founder, Chairman & CEO of Nerdy (parent company of Varsity Tutors). Chuck founded the company in 2007 during his junior year of college after experiencing frustration finding the personalized help he needed for a calculus course. He spent his early career working in energy & power investment banking at Wells Fargo Securities (Wachovia) and healthcare private equity at Ascension Ventures, an $800M AUM private equity fund. Chuck bootstrapped Nerdy before leaving his private equity role to focus on growing Nerdy full-time at the end of 2011.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How Varsity Tutors scaled from a startup to a public company and the evolving business model for reaching individual and institutional customers.
- The critical role of “high-dosage tutoring” in overcoming learning loss and why regular, personalized sessions outperform on-demand solutions.
- How AI tools are enhancing personalized education by creating adaptive lesson plans and optimizing tutor-student matching.
- The challenges and strategies in transitioning from direct-to-consumer to B2B in the K-12 education sector.
- The future of AI in tutoring, including real-time translation and adaptive content, and how it’s reshaping the role of human tutors.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:07] Chuck’s founding story of Nerdy and his vision for accessible tutoring
[00:05:20] Scaling Varsity Tutors from individual tutoring to institutional partnerships.
[00:07:27] Early entrepreneurial lessons from bootstrapping and finance
[00:13:17] Ensuring quality through effective tutor-student matching.
[00:16:45] Why high-dosage, relationship-based tutoring drives better outcomes
[00:24:10] Balancing logistics with personalization in tutoring.
[00:30:46] Chuck’s outlook on sustainable tutoring post-ESSER funding
[00:35:00] How AI enhances personalization and tutor matching at Varsity Tutors
[00:41:03] Consistent tutoring's impact on improving school attendance
[00:50:06] The promise of real-time language translation for ELL students.
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:22] Chuck Cohn: Like anything in life, when you enjoy doing something, You are way more likely to, you know, engage than when it's less fun. And so we do try to build a platform that is dynamic. That's interesting. That is fun and find tutors who are good at engaging in that way. And that have, you know, backgrounds engaging in a digital setting, you know, in working with younger students.
You know, a background and past experiences working with students like that to engage.
[00:00:55] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry and funding rounds to impact AI development across early childhood, K 12, higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar and.
And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
Chuck Cohn is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nerdy, the parent company of Varsity Tutors. Chuck founded the company in 2007 during his junior year of college after experiencing mental Frustration, finding the personalized help he needed for a calculus course. He spent his early career working in energy and power investment banking at Wells Fargo, Wachovia, and in healthcare, private equity at Ascension Ventures.
He bootstrapped nerdy during that time before leaving his private equity role to focus on growing it full time at the end of. 2011. Chuck lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife and three children and serves on the board of the entrepreneurship program at Washington University in St. Louis and on the board of the leadership council of the Danforth Plant Science Center.
Chuck has a BSBA in finance and entrepreneurship, Washington University in St. Louis. Chuck Cohn, welcome to EdTech insiders. Thank you for having me back. It's great to
[00:02:35] Chuck Cohn: be here.
[00:02:35] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's so good to talk to you. We spoke a couple of years ago by the pool at ASU GSV, you know, sort of a flyby interview and it was really interesting because you do incredibly interesting work at a very large scale.
But I'm excited to have some time to really sit down and dig into some of what you have been doing. So let's start with just an overview of what Nerdy, which is the parent company of Varsity Tutors really is. You founded it in 2007. Tell us the story of Nerdy and how you got into edtech and into varsity tutors.
[00:03:07] Chuck Cohn: Sure. Happy to. So nerdy is a leading online platform for live online learning. So varsity tutors is the brand that you would know. And I, at this point, I'm about 17 years into that journey. So I started it based on my own personal experiences with tutoring, some remarkably positive, some deeply frustrating.
And, you know, in general, I recognize the incredible impact that tutoring could have on a student and their confidence, their ability to learn when they were struggling. And to learn more efficiently. And at the same time, I also experienced the challenges where it was actually quite hard to find somebody good.
It was expensive, it was inconsistent. And from that experience, I came to the conclusion that there had to be some sort of better way out there that. Better leverage technology to allow learners and experts to get connected in a way that was lower friction, higher quality, lower cost, more accessible. And that was the genesis for the idea.
And so, you know, I borrowed 1000 from my parents and it started off as a little on campus tutoring service. And very quickly, I came to realize that the reason that nobody had scaled in this industry was because it was so logistically challenging you deliver. And that we needed to invest in the core underlying infrastructure.
To actually make it consistently good and accessible and low friction. And all of those things are hard when you're, you're dealing with, you know, effectively a marketplace with people on both sides. And so, you know, from there, we've grown and changed a lot. But at the end of the day, the platform's oriented around delivering live learning at scale in a way that is, you know, convenient and.
High quality and really drives learning over time.
[00:04:57] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and you've reached a lot of tutors and students in those years. You know, how has nerdy scaled? You went public during the pandemic. You've been very open about how much you've grown and how many lives you've affected. But I'd love you to just talk about exactly how you sort of started to really solve that matchmaking process, that two sided marketplace and how you know it's been working through the growth.
[00:05:20] Chuck Cohn: Well, there isn't any one component that from a wearer's perspective or a customer's perspective makes up the platform. So it's kind of that holistic experience and you have to be great at actually identifying the experts and vetting them and then making them accessible on the platform and Matching a given student with a tutor who can best serve their needs and then fulfilling and doing a great job over time, you know, ideally over multiple academic calendar years and subjects and students per family and modalities of learning and the more comprehensive and in depth, you can make it where somebody can kind of get all of their supplemental learning needs met in one place.
They reward you with sticking around longer and. You know, frankly, whether it's a, you know, individual parent, which is where we got our start or a school district, when you do a good job, you get rewarded over time with continuity of business and, you know, an expanded relationship. So, you know, at each different juncture, we certainly faced scaling challenges that we then had to, you know, overcome and solve that involved figuring out different ways for our software to work.
But over time have built a platform that is now highly scalable and, you know, more focused on being able to. Form deeper and deeper relationships with students and parents and school district customers.
[00:06:43] Alex Sarlin: You have an unusual entrepreneurship story. You sort of mentioned this in passing. You started nerdy while you were a junior in college, sort of based on your own personal experiences.
You then bootstrapped it and you had worked in investment banking and private equity and all of this, you know, financial world and then came back at age 18. 2011, a few years later and said, okay, let's really make this work. We have a lot of entrepreneurs who listen to this podcast. We have a lot of early stage tech entrepreneurs.
I'm curious if you could sort of tell us what those years were like when you were, you know, obviously a very young entrepreneur, you were bootstrapping and not looking into venture or any other kind of funding at that time. What did it look like to, you know, make choices in those early bootstrapping years and how did you really shepherd the company to where it's at today?
[00:07:27] Chuck Cohn: Well, you know, as I mentioned originally, it was like a thousand dollar loan for my parents. Having to do a good enough job right out of the gate, really absent any real technology that we were able to generate a little bit of cashflow that could pay for marketing flyers and, you know, a three page website and whatnot.
And one of the things that happened very early on was as we had some initial success and positive customer feedback, and we grew from, you know, one customer to three to five to 10 kind of calling schools and hosting at local coffee shops with flyers, all of a sudden I started getting calls to a cell phone.
And I had to actually step out of class to calls from. Parents that had seen a flyer in a coffee shop. And, you know, I was actively like disrupting class and came to realize like, wait a second, I'm going to, I'm going to fail out of college if I don't like a different way to solve this. And I'm so excited about it, but I can't be like walking out of my calculus class to take one of these calls.
And so I ended up finding somebody on Craigslist to be the kind of the initial. You know, area manager and interact with parents. And then from there was able to start investing more of my time in the technology and operations. And I ran it as a side hustle during, you know, 18 months of college. And then I didn't make it quite a year in energy and power investment banking, but then jumped to healthcare venture capital job.
So like during the day, the associate on deals, running the models, taking notes, meeting with entrepreneurs, Working with a partner on a given typically healthcare IT or device or healthcare services deal and felt like I was doing really impactful work. And then what was cool was hearing from different entrepreneurs and management teams about.
Were we to invest, how they would use the capital to improve the product scale. And, you know, those conversations were a purview that you normally wouldn't otherwise have where people are very, very transparent and hard questions are asked. And it's an incredible learning experience. And so I would come home at night and try to take a tiny bit of what.
I had learned during the day and employ it on, you know, my business as small as it was. And it got to the point where, you know, I realized I was the thing holding back varsity tutors from scaling. And, you know, at that point in, I think it was August or September of 2011, quit to do it. Full time and so, you know, that was quite some time ago and we've changed a lot since then.
[00:09:57] Alex Sarlin: Yeah It's such a neat combination of the real hardcore scrappiness, right? You're gonna find people on Craigslist take the calls yourself founder led sales They call it right now these days and then also find a way to focus but then supplement that with this incredibly good professional Learning where you get to be on the other side of the table, right, as a VC, seeing how people, you know, would use capital to improve their businesses.
That's a really, it's a great combination. I can see why that put together that could create a really great sort of fast paced entrepreneurship education. I think it's fantastic. So super quick personal note, you know, yeah. I was a tutor for many years. I was a professional tutor for many years and I was, you know, had to find my own clients and most of the time I was pounding the pavement.
I literally would, you know, wait in a coffee shop for two hours between clients. There was no online technology that allowed me to do it from anywhere other than, you know, in person and basically did that until about 2000 and. Eight. So it was just the time when you were having your realization that, Hey, this field really does not totally work.
It's really hard for people to find the right matches. It's hard to make it work. I wish I was around for the technology enhanced tutoring that you've enabled, but I'd love to hear, you know, what the difference. Is like for a tutor working in my era where you literally would use just walking from apartment apartment.
I was in New York walking from apartment apartment sitting down with the kid. How is your day? You know, how is soccer practice? Let's look at what you have for homework versus what an experience is like for a varsity tutor tutor, which is, you know, I know it can be in person. That is one potential way, but I'm sure the majority is done online.
What does it look like for a varsity tutor to find clients and get matched and hold a session?
[00:11:37] Chuck Cohn: Yeah, things have changed pretty significantly. When I started, you know, it was not uncommon for customers to drive to learning centers and for the tutors to actually work in retail stores. And those have kind of for the most part gone the way of, you know, blockbuster.
And there's now, you know, thanks to technology, you can from home. Have an experience where the students are largely found for you and less time is invested in, say, travel or in marketing, you know, which can be expensive and time consuming. And, you know, frankly, a lot of the people that Really enjoy teaching and instructing students are oftentimes those people that don't love going out and marketing and selling their services.
And so one of the value ads of being on the platform as a tutor is the students kind of come to you and it's our responsibility to go out and Market the platform. And, you know, as a two sided, vertically integrated marketplace, in effect, you know, find students that are interested in working with those particular tutors and make sure that we get the match right.
Because learning is so personal when you get that match, right? And that's a profound impact on continuity, customer satisfaction, student outcomes. Tutor satisfaction, you know, et cetera. So, you know, our goal is to build tools that make tutors have superpowers within those live sessions and separately make it as seamless as possible.
And it's, you know, an ongoing journey. It's never, it can always be better and, you know, it's an area of leverage for us as we continue to, you know, refine the experience because if we could make their job easier. It allows for more time to then possibly impact our students who are, of course, our customers.
[00:13:17] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, the online platforms that match people where the match is really relationship driven. You really have to get along and understand each other and have a continuous relationship. It's a really interesting space for technology. I mean, it extends to the dating space. It extends to the hiring space, right?
There's a lot of sort of matchmaking technologies that try to combine the sort of algorithms and logistics and technical. Pieces of a matchmaking, you know, the time that people are available, for example, obviously is a huge one with the personality characteristics. You know, how old is the student is a child, a teenager, an adult learner, you know, a senior, what do they want to learn?
How do they like to learn? What kind of person is most motivating to them? You know, putting that together is quite tricky, but also the core to what makes it. You mentioned that continuity and relationships are core to successful tutoring, and we're at this really interesting moment for the tutoring space where during the COVID pandemic, tutoring was sort of treated as one of the big solutions for the learning loss that was happening there.
And there were this massive district contracts with edtech tutoring providers of all kinds, but there was actually a lot of mixed results there. And I heard there was some real. Almost controversies that came out of that. And I think one of the big learnings for the field was trying to just do it at super scale, like tutoring on demand, any kid who needs help can just sort of click a button and get a tutor, even though that sounds very terrific, really didn't work very well for a variety of reasons.
I'd love to hear you talk about that time and how. You know, now in this post pandemic era, we're starting to enter where varsity and nerdy sits in terms of understanding how to scale, but keep tutoring quality and tutoring relationships really high quality.
[00:15:04] Chuck Cohn: Yeah, there's definitely been a market evolution and market education that has occurred and this concept of high dosage tutoring, which is kind of a fancy way to say recurring relationships with the same person who is a subject matter expert that occur over extended periods of time and that is live face to face.
Where you can see that person and build rapport and trust and where there's accountability. Those are kind of the secret ingredients to driving real outcomes. And when you remove any of those pieces, all of a sudden it becomes a lot less impactful. And, you know, in the case of the other extreme of purely on demand, what is often seen in many Studies and high profile, you know, examples have demonstrated is that only the most motivated students will over time, you know, seek out chat based tutoring 24 7 on demand.
And it has a purpose from a homework help perspective and allowing for students to get unstuck, you know, when they're kind of stuck. But, you know, as it relates to really remediating learning loss, overcoming frustration and self doubt, helping any students that are younger Because of course, chat is very reading and writing intensive.
It doesn't drive, you know, outcomes. And so, you know, from our perspective, like real tutoring is where that face to face, whether it be on video or in person. Rapport is built and, you know, there's a huge accountability aspect to tutoring and there's something to be said for the fact that even in, you know, the consumer world, it occurs on a typically weekly basis or twice a week basis in pursuit of some academic goal or outcome could
[00:16:45] Alex Sarlin: be getting into
[00:16:45] Chuck Cohn: college.
It could be. Getting a good grade in your organic chemistry class as a pre med student so that you can get into medical school. But people do tutoring, you know, in service of an important goal, and it works. And part of that, of course, is the fact that it could be, the concept can be explained in a multitude of different ways to the needs of the student until something clicks.
But the second part, and this is, I think, one of the reasons why It's really, you know, important to distinguish the ad hoc and on demand from the high dosage and the recurring and the impact that it drives is there's a certain accountability aspect that comes with showing up to learn something on a consistent basis and having to do it, whether it's because you made a commitment.
Or whether your parent told you you had to, or whether the school district signed you up, but very different outcomes come when you do something on a recurring basis, like everything in life when you practice.
[00:17:39] Alex Sarlin: And what's so interesting about a platform like Varsity Tutors is that the accountability piece can be baked in in a variety of different ways.
That rapport, accountability, I remember from my tutoring experience, I was shocked at how many times, Just my physical presence was the instigation to do homework and take things seriously and not get distracted. That was, you know, it was before even some of the distractions of today, but if your tutor is sitting there with you and you're working on a math problem or you're working on a science lab or whatever it is, you're not going to just sort of turn away and take out your phone and kick up your feet.
That accountability can be a huge part of the process. How do you make besides obviously just Putting the presence of the two people in the space at the same time in a synchronous way, you know, how do you think about accountability and rapport and sort of making sure that the tutor and the two T in any of these cases are really feeling like that they, they do have responsibilities to each other.
You know, even if they're only being connected through an online platform, they feel like they're both working towards the same ends and that they're there. Sort of to support each other and to hold each other. Well, I'll say to hold the two T accountable.
[00:18:48] Chuck Cohn: Well, finding people that, you know, are great instructors and can engage students and that, you know, understand how to explain concepts in a multitude of ways to the needs of that student or group of students, but also, you know, encourage them.
Is incredibly impactful. And like anything in life, when you enjoy doing something, you are way more likely to engage than when it's less fun. And so we do try to build a platform that is dynamic. That's interesting. That is fun and find tutors who are good at engaging in that way. And that have, you know, backgrounds engaging in a digital setting, you know, and working with younger students, you know, a background and past experiences working with students like that.
To engage. And so, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about the match in the institutional setting. We'll actually group students together based on their past adaptive assessment results, and then look for patterns of different skills that, you know, they're lacking in or foundational skeletal skills kind of leading up to, you know, their current assessment.
And then based upon that predecessor knowledge that may have been missed, it's a past course, actually group them together. So you have like students and. You know, you're not teaching to kind of wildly different extremes. That's something that's really impactful. And we also try to take into account, you know, other attributes wherever possible that then inform the match.
And it can allow for us to. Take into account, you know, the extent to which students learn best from different types of tutors. And so, you know, that's part of it. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's really hard to get tutors at skill to show up with the right people at the right times with the right groupings and the logistical underpinnings with them.
And that layer of personalization on top is something that we think really distinguishes how our platform operates from. Others out there.
[00:20:43] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I can imagine. That's actually exactly what I wanted to sort of ask about. Because, you know, personalization, it's a little bit of an overloaded term. It means lots of different things to different people.
It's a term that's been used in education for a long time. But I think, you know, when you're talking about matchmaking between, you know, a two T and a tutor that actually can Really understand each other, build rapport, actually be friends as you know, that is, I think, a pretty good definition of personalized in that it's truly about the people involved.
And then I love your term, you know, engaging in a digital setting, you know, a person who is engaging in a digital setting that characteristics, you know, sort of the traits and characteristics and experiences of the person of the tutor side are also something that can be sort of personalized. And then there's the type of personalization, the adaptive personalization you mentioned, where you can group students based on their prior knowledge or their gaps.
So personalization, you know, with multiple definitions plays a really big part in what you do at varsity, but so does logistics, right? I would love to, you know, ask, I'm sure that as you've, you know, you've done this 17 years. As nerdy has evolved, as you continue to build more product features, as you continue to evolve the product, how have you balanced the sort of pure logistics of, you know, what happens if somebody doesn't show up?
How do you ping them? How do you inform the parent? How do you make sure that you know that if the tutor is sick, you get a substitute? And there's so many logistics that come with tutoring. And then there's so much that goes into the actual So. Experience itself. Once the two people have shown up and they have enough rapport and they actually, you know, are both there at the same time and everybody's sort of in the seat.
What happens? How does the platform support learning itself? So there's the learning side and logistical side. They both need to be there. How have you balanced those two feature sets basically over time?
[00:22:27] Chuck Cohn: Well, we kind of think about it as a Okay. Maslow's hierarchy of needs where the most basic thing you have to do is have the person show up and then, you know, The next layer is they have to be good and have the right subject matter expertise and they need to be prepared and they need to then be able to engage and confidently lead a session and ideally they'll also have content or curriculum of some sort To kind of aid in that discussion.
And so you can't kind of skip over one to get to the other. And so we think of them as foundational layers that ultimately ladder up to a great customer experience. And many of those are built and known and just part of how the platform operates based on all the software we've developed over the years.
But as we've developed. New products could be group tutoring, could be scaling into institutions. Each of those that have kind of required that we adapt some of the core underlying technology infrastructure to be able to then meet those different. Base expectations of the stakeholders in this new setting.
So, you know, it is a balancing act, but you need to really graduate in from kind of the most foundational aspects to then personalization. And, you know, we do have some really, really cool areas where we personalize like. Personalized AI generated lesson plans, as an example, that doesn't make up for the fact that you still need to be able to have all the tutors in sessions with the right groupings at scale with auto substituting working seamlessly.
And, you know, some of the other underlying logistical aspects that are way less cool to talk about, but make for a reliable platform.
[00:24:10] Alex Sarlin: It makes sense. I mean, yeah, I like that metaphor of the hierarchy of needs and sort of that infrastructure, that fact that people are there, that they're good, that they can hear each other, that they can see each other, right.
That the technology is working, that, you know, they can share screen. I mean, all of the stuff that sort of is just baseline getting set up into the right environment and being there at the right time with the right tools. Is all required. If any of that doesn't work, then you're really in trouble. And then you can start to build into the more personalization, the excitement, the fun, as you mentioned, I think that makes a lot of sense.
And it takes time to put all those pieces together. I can imagine you mentioned from a sort of business model standpoint, that one of the evolutions that nerdy has gone through over the years is moving from sort of having, you know, Families and parents as a core customer to having districts and much larger sort of enterprise type customers.
Can you tell us about that transition and sort of what it looked like? That's a transition that sort of direct a customer to B2B transition is one that many ed tech companies have done over time. But I think because of the longevity and the sort of tenure of varsity tutors, you had. More time and more, you've sort of had more reps with that transition and more time to think about it than I think most entrepreneurs have.
I'd love to hear you talk about, you know, how you decided to go harder at the district sales and the larger sales, what the big difference is in terms of marketing or retaining customers and sort of what it did for the company and the product to move into that space.
[00:25:34] Chuck Cohn: Sure. So we felt like. We were in a position a few years ago with the largest online tutoring platform in the United States to be able to deliver solutions to school districts that would allow them to really solve problems.
Some of the acute learning loss that we were seeing happen, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, and frankly, that has persisted post pandemic nationally and tutoring can have, you know, an incredible effect on student outcomes, but historically was never accessible and, you know, it meant pre COVID, you know, and long ago as you don't call it back in the.
No Child Left Behind days, tutors were actually going to cafeterias and libraries after school, and there's incredible logistical challenges associated with it. So, you know, as we went to build a product and solution for school districts that we called Varsity Tutors for Schools, we had all these different underlining components of, you know, the ability to do one on one or group tutoring at scale.
We had live stream capabilities. We had machine learning based adaptive diagnostic testing and content coverage for all K 12 and college subjects. We had the underlying, you know, ML based, you know, matching technology. And, you know, we had a few other different capabilities and we felt like we had the raw building blocks to take our platform and modify it in such a way where we could meet the needs of institutional customers.
And, you know, like everything in life, the devil is in the details of an incredible journey and learning. And, you know, we've actually evolved the offering a couple of times over to meet the specific needs. Of school districts and build the platform in a way that can allow for them to service and provide tutoring within their school districts in a way that works.
So whether it's the district administrator at the center of that relationship or a teacher at the center of the relationship or a parent, we now have flexible models that allow for them to scale tutoring across a whole different variety of subjects in a variety of different formats and frequencies.
That worked for them. That took an incredible amount of learning, customer feedback, evolution, and we've been able to converge the underlying technology infrastructure of both our consumer platform, what we've called learning memberships, where you have an access based solution that entitles you to a whole host of different modalities of learning.
And that is cross subject
[00:27:55] Alex Sarlin: and
[00:27:56] Chuck Cohn: bring those into the institutional realm so that students within a school district can access hundreds of live stream classes per week and 24 7 chat based tutoring and all of our adaptive diagnostic testing and self study tools and a whole host of other things that really get value out of the platform, independent of tutoring, and it's a way that we can kind of engage You Deeply across the district, while also then being able to develop solutions for specific populations of students that allow for our customers to accomplish key goals for key student groups.
And that's something that took a lot of work and feedback to get it right, and then build the reporting mechanisms and administrative capabilities that our customers want. But frankly, you would only know exactly what those were, you know, through. You know, having actually done it at scale, not kind of consider doing it at scale.
So that kind of combined with, you know, frankly, building a institutional go to market those were all net new muscles for us. So we knew we could deliver live learning at scale in a way that nobody else had. We knew we had done the hard work of building the underlying logistical infrastructure, which is something that Everybody else out there has historically steered clear of because it's hard and it's grindy, but it's required to actually be able to meet customer expectations at scale.
And, you know, we that have had plenty of learnings, but you have built something that we're proud of and that we think. It was reliable and high quality and efficient and really drives outcomes for customers.
[00:29:36] Alex Sarlin: And so in building all of that institutional and enterprise muscle on knowing how to go to market, how to sell and work with customers, understanding procurement and the complexities of K 12, as well as you can work in universities, of course, you have this really interesting suite of different offerings.
You have a direct consumer and a robust institutional sales. We are now at a moment where the sort of ESSER funding that was sort of funding a lot of the tutoring initiatives during the pandemic is sort of coming to an end, and I think all districts are starting to say, how do we keep this kind of thing going?
Some of them have found great success. Some of them are sort of on their way to finding success, or they've pivoted a few different times. And they want to say, okay, tutoring at scale is possible having a program like this, you know, the technology allows this to be possible. And it's not about, as you say, you know, getting people to meet in the library all the time.
We can actually make this work. Where do you see the tutoring world going in this sort of post Essar moment? And with your institutional, the admin reporting, all the things that you've sort of built over the last few years to do this. What do you think is going to happen next in the tutoring space in this sort of post Essar moment?
[00:30:46] Chuck Cohn: Well, you know, we're very small in relation to any of these, you know, funding amounts that you hear about. So, you know, from our perspective, it's kind of, you know, any one or two as it relates to building, you know, a business and institutional and Many of these capabilities and the improvements we've made over the course of the past, you know, even just six months or so are so significant, they open up net new opportunities and allow us to service different types of customers that would be the case historically.
And,
[00:31:16] Alex Sarlin: you know, we're
[00:31:16] Chuck Cohn: starting to form relationships with some of the. Largest school districts and other institutions in the country. And, you know, those open up new opportunities as we figure out how we can best serve them. So what we've done is build the model in such a way and build the software in such a way where it can allow for us to service different acute needs that districts have, whether it's, you know, students with special needs and the SPED population.
Whether it's related to gifted and talented programs, which was, you know, a opportunity that, you know, we're not kind of squarely focused on, but of course help with a lot on the consumer side that actually came up with a, you know, a school district conversation this morning by chance, or whether it's, you know, just being able to do a great job with, you know, the kind of core focus that most public schools have of students that are at or below grade level proficiency.
And, you know, many of those fall within. The title one bucket, you know, some don't their state programs associated with it. I think like many things, you know, and many businesses, if you can do a great job, people will find a way to use you and expand that relationship. And, you know, if it makes their job as a district leader easier, because you're helping drive outcomes and you're a great partner and, you know, you work in a way that, you Works with their stakeholders, they'll find a way to make it work.
And so we feel like the product itself has like dramatically improved past year and our ability to provide value, you know, and report on that value has as well. And so. That ultimately builds towards, you know, a big opportunity here from our perspective. And it's not specific to K 12. It extends to other institutions as well.
But even within the K 12 realm, we feel like we're just getting started.
[00:33:08] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, no, that makes sense. I was going to ask about that, but it seems like you've already answered some of it. The idea of, you know, K 12 varsity on the consumer side, you know, you can request a tutor. From any age, you can request a tutor for your young student.
You can request it for any school age, but you can also request it as an adult or a college student, as you mentioned. And I think that there's something very expandable about that set of use cases. And then when you combine that to the institutional feature set that you just mentioned, the set of potential customers gets very big, very fast, which I think is exciting.
It's from a sort of, you know, quote unquote, you know, Tam perspective. As we just talk about that, you mentioned a couple times during this conversation, it is such a hot topic in ed tech in general. It's especially a hot topic in the tutoring space because I think every tutoring company, everybody who's interested in personalized learning is really curious about how a I and tutoring are going to overlap.
I can spit out a dozen different ways. It might. I'm really love to hear how you are thinking about it. You have obviously seen a I explode in at least it. Capabilities over the last few years, you mentioned AI generated lesson planning is already built into the platform. How do you think about the capabilities that AI adds to a company like Varsity Tutors?
And how do you think it'll evolve that, you know, your company, but even the tutoring space at large?
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[00:35:00] Chuck Cohn: we leverage AI to solve customer problems that need to be solved, not because it's AI. And so to the extent that that's the right solution to better enhance that experience, it's where we'll leverage it. And that was You know, certainly the case for, you know, our matching algorithms historically and finding the right tutor for a given student's needs that had a profound impact on customer satisfaction or retention and ultimately outcomes.
And, you know, the same is true for, you know, a lesson plan as an example, where depending on what the student learned in the last session, the ability to tailor to that lesson, generate the content, have it. Conform to state standards or whatever the requirements might be is actually quite powerful and it saves time.
It enhances the experience. It removes friction. It kind of just makes the focus. Beyond learning as opposed to preparing to learn, you know, or some of the administrative tasks that can surround it. And so, you know, we think about this as an opportunity to provide effectively superpowers to experts and learners in this digital setting that bring to bear capabilities and resources and personalization that otherwise wouldn't be possible offline or even, you know, online.
You know, absent generative AI in particular. Yeah, we're using it to at this point do everything from customer service requests to the matching to providing feedback to our teams about how they can do a better job engaging with our customers or with tutors on the platform. So, you know, we'll continue to enhance those capabilities and be able to surface learnings and patterns that otherwise.
Wouldn't be possible due to either a human not being able to detect them or separately due to the fact that they would just be too time intensive, but, you know, based upon what you actually learn in the sessions themselves over time, we'll be able to really customize that next lesson and allow for people to continue to get value at it value out of it after the session.
But we really do think that. Human is at the center of that relationship is incredibly important, and, you know, there's all these studies coming out that are really interesting to show when students engage in just a I that motivation falls zero as soon as they're informed that they're engaging with a I, and that having, you know, A human present even even in a chat versus AI solution actually leads to, you know, differential experiences, but we think that kind of live on video face to face report surrounded by all of these incredible immersive capabilities is that magical experience that will Call some of you get a great experience and learn
[00:37:45] Alex Sarlin: the motivation piece is such, you know, from talking to various CEOs of different ed tech companies, including tutoring companies and from my own personal experience, you know, motivation and learning.
It's really just the engine that drives everything. And, you know, you mentioned earlier that learning part of what's so tricky about ed tech in general is that learning is often a means to an end, right? It's get that organic chemistry grade so that you can, you know, Stay in your pre med concentration so that you can be a doctor so that you can, you know, get to go to med school and be a doctor and, you know, live a certain kind of life.
It's like every educational moment is sort of future facing. It's very rare that it's just about the moment you're in. It's always about some Means that it could be a test tomorrow. There could be, you know, something in 10 years that you're trying to prepare for. So it's a really tricky, but motivation underlies everything and sort of keeping your eyes on the prize.
Whatever you're trying to learn for can be a really motivating factor as well as accountability can be a really motivating factor. As you've mentioned, the studies that have been coming out, and I've seen just a couple of these. I'd love to dig in more about them. Maybe we can add some in the show notes, but the studies that are coming out that show that I is not as motivating make A lot of sense, I think, to people who work with.
Young people work with students of any kind, because if the AI is just a virtual intelligence, then it isn't really any different from the student's own brain and intelligence. And if they're holding themselves responsible, if there is somebody who says, I better do all this work because I can motivate myself and I can get all distractions out of there.
If they can do that already, they can do it.
[00:39:18] Chuck Cohn: Well, right now, nothing's holding you back from going to the library and learning effectively anything that is in that library. There might be a thousand books or a hundred thousand books. And, you know, the same thing is true of access to the internet.
Nothing's holding you back from learning everything on the internet. Yes. And nothing's holding you back from asking an AI agent, you know, a question and learning effectively every topic. Getting people to want to learn and actually engage in learning on a recurring basis is really, really hard. And aside from all the benefits of personalization, the fact that students are motivated to show up on a recurring basis is, you know, an incredibly impactful element of why tutoring is so effective.
And, you know, you think about some of the recent studies coming out on. Attendance and how many schools are struggling with their attendance rates and falling absenteeism kind of skyrocketing. It's a really, really hard problem. One of the things that's been really encouraging that we've seen is that on the days where our high dosage tutoring occurs, students are actually more likely to show up to school.
That's interesting. You know, I've, if the tutoring's on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, You'll see rises in attendance, and then it'll kind of dissipate the next day for those students groups and to the extent that students are excited about the attention that they're receiving the mentorship that their parents are as well.
That is something that can actually drive attendance. And of course, if you're there for the whole day. Not only do you receive the benefits of tutoring, but you receive the benefits of having attended all of your other classes and all the in classroom teaching, which is critical.
[00:41:03] Alex Sarlin: That's fascinating. So the motivation that comes from feeling accountable and having rapport and building a connection with your tutor actually has huge add on effects, such that it may even lead a student to come to school on a day where otherwise they would maybe feel demotivated and sort of.
Stay out. That's very powerful. Uh, data point there. It's hard to get through any conversation about tutoring without mentioning the Bloom's two Sigma problem. It's sort of a classic trope in EdTech, but I do wanna ask you about it, especially in the context of this ai, you know, Bloom's two Sigma problem from, you know, Benjamin Bloom long time ago.
Basically has this idea that, you know, one-on-one Mastery-based learning is. Two standard deviations more effective than traditional classroom learning. And it's been used, yeah, I think rightfully in many ways as a sort of rule of thumb for why getting smaller class sizes or getting one on one tutoring into schools or even mastery based learning is really a key.
Do you think that I will help bridge the gap between traditional classroom learning and the type of learning that bloom was advocating for in the two sigma? Yeah.
[00:42:10] Chuck Cohn: We think AI could have a profound impact on personalization, making teaching and instruction and content relevant to students and making it a bit easier to teach to exactly where they're at, as opposed to, you know, the mean of the class, which of course is, you know, the insight behind Benjamin Bloom's study that, you know, has now been replicated many, many times over.
But one of the things that is different that we talked about earlier is that human element of motivation and inspiration. And. And that's something that is, you know, we are inherently social creatures and are programmed, you know, to be such. And when you compare the element of live human instruction with AI, we think that's what's really powerful.
So we have this concept called AI for HI that we trademarked many, many years ago. But the idea is that, you know, it's artificial intelligence for AI. human interaction and that the kind of combination of the two is far more powerful than, you know, either independently.
[00:43:15] Alex Sarlin: Tell us more. I'd love to hear you unpack that idea.
How can AI make human interaction more effective?
[00:43:22] Chuck Cohn: Well, one of the things that, you know, we find is that when the content and the actual concepts are taught specific to the students, you're testing them on the right thing. You're talking about the right thing. You're not, you know, Talking about things that they already know you're specifically focusing on the areas that they don't know you're able to then identify all of the underlying foundational skills that they may need to learn, but had not previously learned.
Those are all areas where. AI can be incredibly additive in terms of making learning more efficient and relevant to the user. And that's something where, you know, as an example, adaptive testing is already effectively being learned. But you can imagine a world very soon where as people speak within a session, content and materials are auto suggested in real time and say, you know, an augmented reality environment.
Where it's incredibly engaging, it's personalized, and you're able to get value very quickly. And the instructor is able to bring resources and content to bear that they didn't necessarily go and find. They were just sort of auto suggested in real time because it was hyper relevant to that specific situation.
And that's kind of, you know, one of the use cases we use internally to talk about what, you know, You know, evolved state of superpowers could soon look like that. We're particularly excited about, and we don't think that's far off, but it's really about, you know, using it to solve a specific customer problem or enhance that interaction at each different step in the journey.
As opposed to one kind of omnipotent solution.
[00:44:59] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's an exciting vision. I picturing a sort of minority report, you know, interface where things are sliding in and out of the tutoring session based on what you're talking about that you sort of auto suggestions or different content, different. Ways of learning games, videos.
It's very intriguing or even interactives. Something like, you know, you're trying to describe a concept and an interactive comes in that the tutor and the tutee can work with together that sort of illustrates the concept.
[00:45:24] Chuck Cohn: I don't think we're all that far off. And, you know, if you do it asynchronously post session, you can do that now with many of the different, you know, models that we've built.
But, you know, to do it real time requires a different level of latency. But I don't think that we're that far off from that kind of magical real time experience being present. You know, you're hearing about, you know, all sorts of different use cases for real time enhancements of interaction in other settings.
And, you know, we would expect for the same to be true here.
[00:45:55] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. So, one more question for you before we get to our sort of wrap up, which is, one thing I find very interesting about the tutoring space over time, Is that tutors, this is true around the world in different countries, but I think it's just also been more true because of technology.
You know, individual tutor 20 years ago would sit in rooms with students and work with them and everything they did would be completely contained. A tutor now can still do that, of course, but they can also create, you know, YouTube videos. They can teach online courses through a variety of different platforms.
Do real time, you know, matching and consulting with platforms like, you know, like varsity tutors, the potential for a tutor to really make a living and even build a real reputation as a tutor is just totally different than it ever was. You obviously work with, guess how many, you know, tens of thousands of tutors.
You know, do you see the career trajectory of a tutor changing in the last few years?
[00:46:52] Chuck Cohn: You certainly can find more students in your particular subject area that was ever the case before. So we see the kind of full gamut of people that are retired teachers and, you know, realize that retirement is a little bit slower than they anticipated and they, they miss working with students and they want to work with students, you know, another five or 10 hours a week.
And so that's kind of one persona we often see. Another is. You know, graduate school students who are getting a master's or doctoral degree and are interested in teaching, particularly in the area of specialty and learning and working with students and earning income on the side. And you do have some professional tutors that are interested in this being kind of a career path, but I would say that's relatively rare that, you know, a lot of the tutoring, at least before we worked deeply with school districts, oftentimes happened in the evenings and weekends.
And so when students are out of school. You know, when they're doing homework, when they're kind of preparing for their next exam is oftentimes when most of the demand is, which then, you know, lends itself to us kind of being able to take advantage of the whole educated workforce in the United States.
And those tutors who are, you know, at home, you know, in the evenings, being able to help students across the country with the move into institutional and much more of that volume being during the day, you know, it certainly lends itself to much deeper relationships. And we are seeing more folks that are interested in.
You know, much more intensive relationships that said, you know, it is something that I think you're broadly seeing across the economy where with people engaging in all sorts of different gig economy type, you know, relationships where they are able to work across a variety of different platforms to, you know, create a full time living that is nontraditional.
[00:48:39] Alex Sarlin: It seems like. A pathway at least exists for that, even if not a huge number of people, at least in the U. S. Are taking it. My final question on this is, do you see the role of A. I. In doing instant translation, which is something that I love to talk about just because it's so mind blowing, but it's really coming very quickly.
How do you see that changing the tutoring industry for a company like varsity?
[00:49:00] Chuck Cohn: Yeah, it's really incredible what you're able to do. And there are broad populations of it. Students with acute learning needs in the ELL ESL community. And we often hear about the needs to support students across you in some cases, a hundred different languages.
And while we have, you know, a broad network and a lot of the scale to do that at some point, you know, the liquidity gets down to a low level in certain subjects and times of day and you know, language proficiencies. And so to the extent that you can leverage technology. Which, you know, is trivial to do in, say, a text based format like chat, you know, and we already do today, but, you know, as the technology has become better and you can use it in real time settings, all of a sudden, you know, there's The ability to engage across a much larger multitude of subjects.
And of course, that also has the potential to allow for you to scale internationally over time in ways that otherwise might've been much more cumbersome. And that's true, not just for the tutors themselves, but also for say, Customer service and sales.
[00:50:06] Alex Sarlin: It's a really exciting world. And you know, you mentioned so many different ways that A.
I. S. Affecting the varsity tutoring trajectory as well as how the business model has expanded. It's changed. It's a really exciting time for tutoring. I think it's a time of great change, but I think it's a time of great learning for the entire tutoring industry. Well, we are coming on time. I want to so much.
This is such a fascinating conversation. We didn't even get to talk about the IPO and, you know, the fact that nerdy is up. One of the few ed tech public companies, which is super interesting, but we'll do that in a future conversation. Chuck Cohn is the founder, chairman and CEO of Nerdy, which is the parent company of Varsity Tutors.
Thank you so much for being here with us today on Ed Tech Insiders. for having me on. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the Ed Tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe To the free EdTech Insiders newsletter on Substack.
