Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
How Renaissance Learning Built a Unified Edtech Ecosystem – With Eric Swanson & Storey Sitwala
Eric Swanson currently holds the position of Senior Vice President of Practice and Instructional Products at Renaissance Learning. In this capacity, he works with educators, technologists, and researchers to build best-in-class practice products and experiences that improve academic outcomes for students and educators. Working with the Renaissance Next, myON, Accelerated Reader, Lalilo, and Freckle teams, as well as our Math and Literacy product portfolios and new product ventures, Eric ensures the practice and instruction product strategy, roadmaps, and Go- to-Market activities fit within Renaissance and with our customers’ needs.
Storey Sitwala is Senior Director of Product Management at Renaissance. Throughout her career, she has focused on the challenge of how to scale insight-driven best practices for educators. She has spearheaded and developed innovative solutions across education nonprofits, school systems, and within the education technology sector, leveraging her expertise in information science, data visualization, psychology, and user experience design.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How Renaissance Next streamlines data for teachers
- The strategy behind Renaissance’s edtech acquisitions
- Personalization for students, teachers, and leaders
- Responsible AI use in education
- Why teacher autonomy stays central in AI design
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:02:04] Eric on Renaissance’s acquisitions journey
[00:09:17] What Renaissance Next is and why it matters
[00:12:42] Designing dashboards for different users
[00:20:21] What beta testing revealed about real teacher needs
[00:23:30] Balancing AI support with teacher control
[00:32:06] Partnering with core curriculum providers
[00:38:05] Renaissance’s AI ethics and governance
[00:46:28] The future: personalization and faster prototyping
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[00:00:00] Storey Sitwala: Teacher I was talking to recently and she was sharing essentially like how much her kids are vying to be in her small groups. Like they want that human connection and that's really important to the teacher and to the students. And we were talking about AI and how can AI help and support And she's like, you know what it can help do right?
Is blend all of these insights together for me so I don't have to go from report to report. To report that is time that I don't need to spend. And so that's what we're trying to do within Renaissance Next, and the experience is take some of that together, use machines, which is what they're really good at, to look at data and help synthesize it, and then put that on a page for a teacher as a recommendation.
[00:00:48] Alex Sarlin: welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all
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[00:01:28] Alex Sarlin: Eric Swanson and Storey Sitwala. Welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks for having us, Alex. It's good to be here.
[00:01:34] Storey Sitwala: Yeah, very excited to be here. Thanks.
[00:01:37] Alex Sarlin: I'm really excited to talk to both of you as well. I mean, Renaissance is a real giant and a real success story in the ed tech space for a lot of different reasons.
But one of the things that's been particularly interesting about it is that it has done a lot of acquisitions over the last few years. To expand its reach and feature set. Eric, let me start with you. Just tell us a little bit about what Renaissance is and what are some of the things that the EdTech companies that you've acquired in the last few years to sort of expand your scope.
[00:02:04] Eric Swanson: Yeah, great. It's been a fun ride. So I've been with Renaissance about seven years now. And kind of at the beginning of a pretty big acquisition spree that we've been on over the last several years. When I started seven years ago, we were just in the midst of acquiring myON, right? A really great digital reading and classroom engagement product, and then went on from there to acquire Freckle and l Lilo and Illuminate, and Schoolzilla, and Nearpod, and a whole bunch of others in the US and internationally.
It's been a fun ride. It's been a great ride, but one that's always tricky to work through, right? When you're working through different cultures and different perspectives and different solution orientation and different customer bases that have different requirements and needs. It's been fun. One of the things we really look for in acquisition and really started this acquisition spree is we felt like.
The way that we could compete in the market, the way that we could stay really competitive in meeting our customer needs was being more holistic in the solutions that we offered. Right. We started as a reading company, right? Accelerated readers. Been in the market almost 40 years. One of the products I know and love and work with that team every single day, soon thereafter came star assessments, right?
That's been the mainstay in the assessment space for so many years and decades, and really one of the leaders, if not the leader, in the interim assessment space and progress monitoring space, and it's been amazing to watch that grow, right? At the heart of who Renaissance is as a data and analytics company over the last couple of decades, right?
Leveraging that star insights and helping teachers understand what's next and what they need to do. And so as we looked at, Hey, where do we go next? Right? Where do we take this? We started looking for best in class companies and solutions. A couple of which I already named, right? To fill out that broad offering, right?
So how can we really pair. Ourselves with and alongside an educator, not replace them. Really empower them, save them time. Give them the resources that they need to be successful and frankly, the resources they need to keep their kids engaged. Right? And so we've done this right? We've done it very methodically.
Buying one or two every year for the past several years, like I said. But really taking the time to make sure that we bring the companies in, we keep the culture of those teams and team members keep the needs of the customer at heart. But it doesn't come without challenges, right? Those that have worked in acquisition know that it can take time, it can take time to blend cultures, to integrate technologies, to get those teams working together really well.
But it's been fun. That's been a good ride.
[00:04:41] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so growth by acquisition often sounds like a terrific idea. You're able to acquihire or bring in amazing functionality or bring a point solution into a suite, but so often everybody in EdTech who's been through acquisitions, there's always bumps. There's always tricks.
There's sort of different roadmaps to put together a story I'd love to ask you, just from your product lens, putting these pieces together into a holistic offering, as Eric says, is a lot easier said than done, has been successful at. Do from a product perspective to make sure that everybody is sort of aligned around that same vision of using data to improve the classroom experience, keeping teachers centered, all of the sort of core principles.
How do you make sure that all of the acquisitions and the core renaissance products like STAR all are growing in the same direction?
[00:05:28] Storey Sitwala: That is a great question, Alex, and as Eric mentioned, it's complicated work. So my background is, I came by way of one of those acquisitions, so I came through the Schoolzilla acquisition.
Which was a helpful start because Schoolzilla by Nature was a product that thought about how do we bring in data from different systems, so external systems into one place to turn that into actionable insights. For educators and leaders. So I already had a little bit of a head start, at least in terms of thinking about this problem space of integrating systems.
And so I was really excited to come to Renaissance and where they were at to realize there are so much rich data here, and also so many great and wonderful instructional and practice products that really have a lot to offer, but it's a slow work. So I think the first key is having a shared. Guiding strategy, what are we all working towards?
What is the vision? So once we have that strategy of, okay, we're no longer disparate parts and pieces, we are really working to create a single cohesive experience layer that gave us a lot of steam and momentum. I. And then of course the second ingredient is just listening to the teachers and leaders and users out there and trying to identify what are their pain points today with a fragmented ecosystem and what can we solve by bringing it all together.
So I think those are really the two key ingredients. And then after that, of course, there's like the real product work, which is how do you prioritize the different features, how do you build the technological infrastructure and all of that. But I really think those first two ingredients are what makes or breaks.
Success here.
[00:07:07] Alex Sarlin: How do you think about the sort of shared data layer? 'cause it feels like, as you mentioned, Zillow is a data company. Renaissance is a data company. Something like Freckle has a huge amount of student data that can be used for different things. How do you think about putting the data together in two usable formats?
[00:07:22] Storey Sitwala: Yeah. Well, I think again, you start with what are the questions that we're trying to answer? What are teachers trying to do with that data to turn it into actionable insights? So, I mean, I know it's pretty trite. There's the expression, like take the data and turn it into insights. I think it goes a little bit beyond that.
It is like I. What comes next after those insights? What is the best practice that a teacher is trying to do or that a leader is trying to do? And so if you think about teachers, right? They've got their teaching and learning cycle, planning, teaching, assessing, analyzing, and adjusting. And so it's again, connecting that.
Analysis step with the adjustment step. And so I think there's that recognition, right? So it's not just data for data's sake, it is like, how does this drive grouping, or who I'm gonna pull out into my small groups? Or how does this drive reteach for my whole class lessons? And then. When you think about that, then you step back and look at the data and say, what data do we have?
What can it say about students in this moment? Was it an interim assessment? Was it a screener? Is it practice data? And then what is the role kind of, of each of those pieces and parts in order to put together the right insights for teachers?
[00:08:31] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I love that phrase, analysis and adjustment. And I always think of actionable insights.
That's the phrase product people, including myself, always love to use. And it's like. Actions and adjustments and analysis all coming from data. It's pretty catchy. So Eric, I think that brings us to this concept that you're rolling out this really interesting meta product called Renaissance Next that actively integrates the data and the content and some of these insights, these data-driven insights that stories mentioning into a single platform, single dashboard, so that teachers and administrators can actually make sense of all of the pieces of the Renaissance ecosystem.
This feels really. Like a best practice that should have been around forever, but hasn't, and it seems like you're really doing some pioneering work here. Tell us about what Renaissance next is. Yeah. So Renaissance
[00:09:17] Eric Swanson: next is a little bit of what you described, right? Think of it as the data layer that lets teachers access disparate sources of data, right?
In a meaningful way to take action, right? So you could say it's the new homepage. You could say it's a reporting system. You could say it's a mini LMS. Frankly, at the end of the day, it's a way to help teachers take action on their data quickly and efficiently. Right? With not a huge amount of data literacy required to do that, right?
So what story was hinting at is, right. The work that we've done, our product teams, our engineering teams, our data science and learning science teams have been working really hard to understand. Alright, what are the things that we can glean from that data and what are those recommendations that we can feel really confident in putting in front of teachers and lean into that, right?
And so that was the way that we approached the development of Renaissance Next, right? How do we give teachers really actionable insights and not require them to run 3, 4, 5, 6 different assessment reports, different practice reports, go to different tools and different resources and try to understand.
Wait, this is saying one thing. This is saying another. How do I start to blend those sources of data together? Right? So that was the whole goal. On top of it, we already talked a little bit about acquisition, right? We have a lot of different learning platforms, right? So how do we ease that access, ease that insight, and let teachers focus on what they do best, which is engaging with kids, right?
There's by no means a goal of Renaissance next for teachers to go in there and spend 20, 30, 40 minutes a day. Doing action. We want them to be in there a couple minutes a day. This is the thing you pull up on your phone right before class and just double check progress of students. Double check that one kid I was worried about.
I just wanna see if they're making the progress they need and move on. This is that action oriented, but really quick action that we're really trying to do. So. It's been going great, right? We've had it out in the market for almost a year now, and we did basically an alpha and a beta for a year. We have it live for a year now.
The majority of our customers are over and using it as their homepage and as their source of, of action and empowering their teachers, and it's been great. I. That's been a great journey.
[00:11:33] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. When you mentioned it's sort of your homepage, it brings up all these metaphors to me. Like it could be like a Bloomberg terminal or your Right, right.
Maybe even way back to like your A OL homepage. That's a really dated metaphor, but it's something where it's your landing page, the place where you go, all the different insights from the assessments, recommendations for content from Nearpod and Freckle. Everything's all in one place. That's what everybody, simplicity is the name of the game.
People are. Teachers and administrators have so much to do. They do not wanna spend extra time learning data analysis to do one of their ed tech tools, of which they have several story. One of the things that's interesting about Renaissance Next, you also have different experiences for the educators and for leaders, and even for students.
And the concept of different dashboards for different users is not a new one. But for this type of use case where you're putting data. Together and you're putting all of these different data streams in, it does feel somewhat new. And I'd love to hear you talk through how do the needs differ for a teacher who might be, like Eric is saying, you know, on their phone, wanting to check in on progress before the day starts versus an administrator looking for aggregates and trends versus a student or parent looking for their own personal needs.
How do these needs differ and how do you design for those different types of use cases?
[00:12:42] Storey Sitwala: Yeah, it's a really great question and I feel like we are trying to take a unique stance on this, which is each of these roles is so different. But I will start with one thing that I think they do have in common. So each of them have this question of where am I now?
Where do I need to go, and then how do I get there? Like those basic questions, but they look and feel different based on the context and what you actually need to do and the steps you need to take. So as already mentioned for the teacher, that's really about how do I connect? The assessment and insights into my instructional next steps.
So I think there's research out there that says teachers are great at looking at an assessment and knowing where their kids are, but they struggle to differentiate or figure out what is the next instructional step that I need to take and what can I do? And so we're just trying to shrink down some of that process for them.
When you look at that from, well, let me add one more point on the teacher too. Teachers get into this to nurture kids. To help them learn and grow. And so of course a thing they wanna do is motivate and encourage their kids. So we make sure that that is also front and center as part of this experience. A way to pull that data into your next step might not be to reteach.
It might just be to go give a kid a high five, print out a certificate, tell them, great job. You're doing great. Keep going. Similarly, I guess on the leader side, what this looks like, and you already mentioned this, is that they are focused on how do I think about all these products and purchases I made, these programs I'm running, and how do I know how that's going?
So one is, is the implementation on its way? Are people using it? And then how do I evaluate the success of that implementation? So I think the way you look at that is high level trends, insights, data analytics, and so that's how we design for that. Similarly to the teacher experience, you wanna think about a leader's job is to motivate and inspire and to communicate to their communities, their school boards, their staff.
And so we are exploring different ways to, we've released a feature that we call shareable stories, which is essentially like a principle. Beautiful summary of how your kids are doing, what are they reading, what are they practicing? That's just a really easy way for them to get those snapshots and be able to communicate it back out to their community so you can download it as a PDF.
It's all ready to go right there for you. So those are a couple of different ways. And then of course, as you think about the student, going back to those questions of where am I? How am I doing? I think the more we can give them information about. Here's your score, here's what it means, and indicates to you, you've been practicing on these skills.
Where are you stuck? Where are you struggling? Where are you excelling at? And where can you keep going? And again, giving them ways to just understand that as well as. Get that celebration from a teacher, as I mentioned, right? So teachers can print out that certificate. And what we've heard from teachers is that they're printing those out and kids are taking those.
So going back to best practices, they're taking those certificates, they are putting them either sending home on their fridge or they're putting them in their leadership notebooks or their data notebooks. As they're thinking about really owning their own learning journeys. So it's a collaborative process again, of course, between teachers and students in terms of, this is what I've been working on.
I feel proud of my accomplishments, and let's keep going on this learning path.
[00:15:59] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Eric, I'd love to hear your take on this as well. It's so interesting to hear these different apertures students are focusing on their own progress and strengths. Teachers on the class of course, and administrators on shareable stories and sort of an entire school or entire subject.
How have you seen it, these different use cases evolve?
[00:16:16] Eric Swanson: Yeah. I'll start with the student, 'cause Ray, where story left off, right? Which is one of the things we've heard over and over that has changed in the market in the past couple of years, even. Is around student data literacy, students being involved in their own learning, students being involved in what they need to do and owning it, right?
That hasn't always been the case, right? I've been in the market for a long time, and there are many years ago, and even some customers still, some districts still, they don't want their students to see their assessment scores. They don't want them to feel like they're behind or they don't want them to talk about it.
The reality is students know if they're behind. Students know if they're ahead. Right, and so us being as transparent as humanly possible and giving them that opportunity. To lean in and own it and do the work that they need to do to get there. Uh, something we're really motivated by, we think it's a really big opportunity to help drive that student ownership of their goal planning.
[00:17:10] Alex Sarlin: And as there are more and more student facing tools, not always for first and second graders, but student facing tools in the ed tech landscape, it becomes a superpower to be able to look at your own. Progress your own pace, your own strengths, your own needs, and make sense of them and turn them into insights.
It's something that is a very transferable skill, for lack of a better word, that something that students can really own. You mentioned the beta testing that you've done with this. It's been out for a year. You said that you're getting very high usage, which is obviously the sort of on the Maslow's hierarchy of product.
Using it at all is core. It's it has to be used and then go up to how is it being used? Is it actually being delightful and loved and people getting what they want out of it? Tell us about your beta testing process. We have a lot of entrepreneur listeners who are always trying to think about how to co-design and build with the users in the room.
How did you do this type of beta testing to get to a product that has such high usage?
[00:18:00] Eric Swanson: I'll give story a ton of the credit here, right? The kind of the methodology and best practices that came over from Schoolzilla, I think really helped us understand how to take advantage of beta testing and really do AB testing.
Various versions. Do an alpha, do a beta start small. In this case, our alpha started out with only a couple of hundred customers, right? 3, 4, 500 customers that got in in the very early phases and helped us with those initial design decisions, right? And that expanded to a beta of several thousand educators, right, who got in and started seeing their real data.
And understanding what it meant for them. 'cause sometimes those early phases, right, it's not their real data or it's early mockups or early views of the world. One, it took real data in there, seeing their real kids in their context to give us, I think, the most valuable feedback in those early stages. The other one is some of the things that we thought were intuitive.
Ended up not quite being intuitive, right? One example was just we started with these aggregate views of data, right? What's the overall situation of your classroom? What's the overall context? What's some overall things you need to be aware of? And we found pretty quickly that the educators are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I just want to see how my coach students are doing. Right? Show me the kids, right? Personalize it for me. I'm with them every single day. I wanna understand and go right to the heart of. What's this one student doing? Or what's this other student doing and how are they progressing? So one of those things that was like, oh yeah, I guess that makes sense, right after you kind of consider the emotional connection or the empathy that you have with that user persona.
But it took a little bit of that testing to really flesh that out, right? And so at that changed, I. A lot of the actual design of the homepage, right? Went from aggregate views to specific views right out of the gate so that there were one or two less clicks away from taking that action with kids. So it's been great.
It's a great way to do it, right? We're excited, we're. Starting that on the student side. Right. Just in the very early phases of doing that initial alpha testing and we're excited to see what we learn.
[00:20:00] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:20:01] Eric Swanson: Story, I'd love
[00:20:01] Alex Sarlin: to hear, you know, Eric gave you credit for the bringing this sort of beta testing procedure from Schoolzilla.
What has it looked like from your perspective about bringing the beta testers in? I'm curious if there are other insights or surprises that you had in working with these 500 and then thousands of beta testers that really changed the direction of the product.
[00:20:21] Storey Sitwala: Yeah, it's a great question. Also, I'm now going to transfer the credit to our wonderful UX research team and our UX design team.
They were huge partners along this process, and so I think that's been really helpful too. Just have that capacity and that talent. So we did a few things like we ran both the beta process, but we also ran qualitative interviews as well as we looked at that quantitative behavior data at scale once we had the beta program out there, as well as ran a can survey.
I don't know if you're familiar with that model, but it's anally. We looked for what are the delighters, what are the musts and what might not move the needle? And we found that a lot of the features ended up in the delighter category. So especially things like that superstar. I think that was just reinforcement that we weren't sure, right?
We were like, well, we're a data company, right? How much do we wanna emphasize this? And I think that was reinforcing rather than. Redirecting. So that was great. And of course, just hearing from teachers on the ground in terms of what their needs are like and reinforcing some of that. So
[00:21:27] Alex Sarlin: it's been helpful.
Yeah. I love hearing the sort of theme of the human connection that is coming out from both of you're saying, right? That superstar, that ability to give students. Certificates and highlight their achievements and sort of like, almost like an employee of the month kind of thing. A little silly way to put it, but a little bit of like giving credit and giving people real recognition makes it very human, right?
That's a very human way to deal with data, to say, look, we have all this data, and from all the data, this student has done something really amazing this month. Here's what it is. And you can give them a certificate that's gonna mean a lot to them, build their motivation, improve their engagement, and it's just a very humanizing way to do data.
And then of course, the shareable stories from the administrators I think is also a very humanizing way to be able to give administrators shareable artifacts that they can give back to their board or they can give back to anybody they want to talk to about what's happening in the school. That is a very human.
Way to present data. Which leads me to, I think my next question, which is just, it's a sort of can of worms question, but a story. Let me start with you on this one. But you've talked a lot about turning data, especially data from these different data streams into actionable insights, adjustments into things that can actually be usable and that, you know, I've seen the Renaissance Next dashboard.
It's fantastic because it's very, very action driven, like you said, Eric. It's like, here are your students, here are some things you might wanna do based on their data. Here you go. You can do them. And I can imagine that that teachers are really excited to see such actionable insights. Really excited to get very clear recommendations.
And some of that is happening through artificial intelligence, of course, because we're talking about synthesizing data. How are you balancing the ability of AI to reduce decision fatigue, to make it really easy for a teacher to say, okay, we have all of this assessment data, we have all of this content here, that there's something laid out about all these things I could do.
Go for it. Let's just do it. Versus data insights that put it back on the teacher to be like, you have all these options. You know your students best, you know the data best like ingest and think. And how do you balance the sort of ease of use of these insights versus giving the teacher autonomy and not making sure that they feel like they're just following an AI script?
An AI
[00:23:30] Storey Sitwala: robot.
[00:23:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. AI robot. Yeah.
[00:23:31] Storey Sitwala: Great question. And so I'm sure you hear this all the time, Alex, which is. AI and education should never replace the teacher, right? It is there to enhance and empower and support and accelerate the things that they do best, which is instruction. And I'm actually reminded of a teacher I was talking to recently and she was sharing essentially like how much her kids are vying to be in her small groups.
Like they want that human connection. And that's really important to the teacher and to the students. We were talking about AI and how can AI help in support? And she's like, you know what it can help do, right? Is blend all of these insights together for me so I don't have to go from report to report to report that is time that I don't need to spend.
And so that's what we're trying to do within Renaissance Next in the experience. Take some of that together, use machines, which is what they're really good at, to look at data and help synthesize it, and then put that on a page for a teacher as a recommendation. And so to your point, it is not a pathway that they have to follow.
They don't have to do it. They're recommendations for them. And in some cases, what we've heard from teachers is like, this is so great. It confirms. What other teachers and I were talking about, we thought kids were struggling with this concept that we taught yesterday, and now I can see it in the data.
This is great. Other times we've heard from teachers where they're like, you know what? The reason why I appreciate this is because I have a story in my head that I've been telling, and I am not sure if it's correct. So what AI can help with is bring forward insights that they might not otherwise have noticed and realized.
So again, I think that is one way in which we're. Using AI to accelerate that. Another way is we spend a lot of time talking about the data. Another way we're using it is in our search capabilities. So I think a number of products and applications are doing this, but we've started to integrate LLMs into our search capabilities.
Moving away from traditional search, what we found is it's. I mean, this is what LLMs are good at and what are designed for. It is really great at enabling teachers to search for anything. First of all, across all the multiple products in one place, what lessons, what content do you have? What activities do you have on this topic that I'm about to teach or I'm going to teach dividing, fractions, or whatever it is, right?
All of that. Now we can pull into one place. And use an LLM to allow that search process to work more seamlessly. Not only can they search for keywords like that, they can search for things like fuzzy animals with whiskers, because it's semantic, right? It'll find those connections for you. So if you're trying to talk about different animal characteristics, you're able to pull up resources that are relevant based on that.
[00:26:10] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and you can also search based on standards, or you can search based on recommendations from. The ai, it says, oh, there people are struggling with this concept, and they can go right in and say, well, let's look at all the options for what you have for the, around that concept from all the different pieces of the Renaissance ecosystem.
It's really interesting and it does, I do feel like the teacher stays in the driver's seat, right? Between the ability to search this huge library and the ability to see all of these different. Insights raised and then do what you will with them. Take some prioritize, some probably disagree and not do some of them, but it takes work to make it feel like the AI dashboard is not just sort of telling you what to do, and it's not just saying, Hey, here's what everything you do, just, you know, click here and you're done.
Here's I. All the pieces that might support you might make it easier to not go from dashboard to dashboard to put everything together. I'm curious how you think about this, Eric. Like how are you maintaining, especially as I, AI continues to get more and more powerful, how do you maintain that balance between the ease and the automation and the synthesis with teacher autonomy and respecting the profession and making sure that teachers always feel like they are empowered and not being told what to do.
[00:27:11] Eric Swanson: And this might be a little bit of a sidestep to that, Alex, but I wanna be clear, right? So much of this is about the context of what they're trying to solve, right? And so really trying to make sure we're using that data and to contextualize it. In their day, in their week, in their year with a group of kids, with an individual, right?
It's really easy to do the set it and forget it button and let the algorithms and let the AI take over, right? What we're really trying to do, and you can see that in the design of Renaissance next, you can see that in the work that we're doing behind the scenes and how we're aligning resources and triangulating, what this means is that context, right?
Hey, you are gonna teach this this week. You might wanna worry about these few kids because they look like there's some prerequisite skills versus just saying. Hey, have the kids do this thing, right? Without any of that context, right? Hey, no, no, no. These kids need prerequisite skills. They're missing some of these key gaps.
There's a couple of focus skills we could get into a whole focus skill conversation about Renaissance, right? But a couple of focus skills that we know are critical building blocks. So why don't you work on those right now with these kids, right? So it's starting to tease in that into the design as much as possible.
One of the other things that's related to that that we're pretty excited about, we're actually doing a press release next week, is starting to work with core providers, so actually starting to bring in those connections and relevant resources. To make sure that we're giving, again, the context to what they're doing in the classroom with their core program.
Hey, you're gonna teach this this week. You might wanna rethink about reteaching this resource given in your core program, right? Because it looks like these 10 kids didn't get it. These 15 kids are okay. Everything's great, right? So starting to bring in those layers of context, layers of resources to give 'em at the right place at the right time.
[00:28:59] Alex Sarlin: That's very exciting, and I think it speaks to two trends we've already heard in this conversation. The, the humanizing, again, of data, the turning data into giving context around the data. Not just saying, okay, here's the playbook for this week. These four kids should go in this group and review, you know, obtuse angles and these three kids should do this.
It's like, I. Well, let's think about what's going on right here. The next unit is about this. We've seen this in the past. We've seen data like this, and here's why these are being recommended. And then of course that gives the teacher the context to take it offline and add their own twists or add their own interventions because they actually, I.
Understand the why behind it. So I think that's a really great trend. And then the other trend is interoperability, which I think has been coming up a lot recently in a lot of the conversations I've been having. This idea of, we know from Learn platform data that educators and students use huge amounts and administrators huge numbers of different ed tech tools.
And even when they are combined into a really powerful suite like Renaissance, there's still lots of different tools. It's core and supplemental and different tiers and tier 1, 2, 3, and. RTI stuff and there's stuff coming from, uh, I mean point solutions of all kinds. So I'm really excited to hear that not only are you combining the internal Renaissance products, but you're working with core.
Can you just tell us a little bit more about what that would look like in practice? So a teacher is about to teach. Pick a unit, pick a class, pick a unit. Let's just make it up now so you, we can about to teach the French Revolution in seventh grade. Let's make it younger, right? Second grade. And they're teaching a certain reading skill.
They're teaching about possessive nouns and they know it's coming. They have a core curriculum that they subscribe to that has a particular, you know, set of content around it. What does it look like for then going to Renaissance next and say, okay, you know exactly the core I'm using and what world I'm in.
How can I put together all of the resources and pieces and assessments to make something really superpowered?
[00:30:47] Eric Swanson: I'll let story jump into the some of the design work and how we're actually thinking about the actual user situation. What I want to say before that is. Is we at Renaissance know that this is the district's data, right?
So one, we don't ever do anything that the district isn't okay with us doing. And two, we work with over a hundred different data consumers and data providers as Renaissance, right? It's close to 200, right? Different SS companies, reporting companies and data warehouse companies and practice companies and core companies and intervention companies and MTSS, right?
Like across the board. And so we have a whole team. Is dedicated to make sure the Renaissance data goes where that district needs it is configured how they need it. It might be our products, it might be another Right. Competitor products or our partner products. Right? I say that upfront just 'cause I don't want people to hear, listen to this and be like, wait, you're just taking all the data and, and doing all these things with the answers.
Yep. But again, we're working with the district to do that one and two, we work with whoever the district wants us to, right? So if Renaissance next and Renaissance next for leaders and all these experiences are the way to go, great. We can do that, right? We have MTSS products, we have reporting products, you name it, we can support that.
On the core side, you know, to answer your specific question, I don't know, star if you wanna jump into some of the work we've done on the scope and sequence work and how we think about that design playing into the overall next experience.
[00:32:06] Storey Sitwala: My entry point into this is we've been talking a lot about insights and how do we help increase educators efficiency in getting to those insights.
I think the flip side of that is the instructional action, right? Teachers are not, they didn't sign up to be analysts and look at data all day long, right? They signed up to teach. So how do we help them as they're going in? As you said, it's unit one, it's maybe it's understanding fractions or multiplication.
Right? So what we're doing with the core publisher partners is we're. Working really closely with them on getting in essentially their scope and sequence, their table of contents, their units behind the scenes we're aligning our skills. I think this is where the secret sauce comes in and the real special magic comes, which is actually just a lot of hard work.
So there is a little bit of AI magic in there, but also it's takes some content experts on both sides of the house to look at it and say. Well, when you say this skill or this standard and your content looks like this, is that the same as what we think on the Renaissance alignment? Okay, that was like a little bit in the weeds, but if we go back to the user experience, once you click on that unit, what the teacher will see is kind of three things.
First of all, for my whole class, my whole class instruction on this unit, who's ready for that instruction, and that information is coming from the Renaissance data and the Renaissance assessments. And then what you'll see are. Connections to those resources. So we'll link you right out an LTI launch or just an SSO flow into the publisher platform so that you can go right into those resources right there.
And of course, we'll also be layering on some of Renaissance's supplemental resources as well. So. Of course I'm gonna go teach my whole class, but kids need more at baths with this. So what additional practice do you have? What Nearpod lessons might I wanna use for a pre-teach of this topic or a reteach?
So we've got that there for whole class. And then we also have two other tabs. The the other two experiences that we thought about, were pulling students for prerequisite scale practice. So not only are you not, here's the. Students who are ready for whole class, who might need some additional pre-teaching, who's struggling with this.
And again, pulling that data and those insights in, as well as connecting, again, back out to the core publisher resources to help align up some of those concepts as in the way that they've been taught via core. And then similarly on the enrichment side, it's that same question of who, who might be ready to go a little bit deeper, a little bit farther on these concepts.
[00:34:31] Eric Swanson: And the one thing I wanted to say, Alex, quickly is, the silly way I think about it in my head is a lot of how we started down the road of Renaissance next was giving teachers the ability to react. What is happening, right? The way that we think about the core publisher program and some of these additional connections is to be.
Proactive in terms of what they need to do in a given period of time. Right? So you have both of those ways of working and two entry points into that experience. Hey, I need some kids. I need, I'm worried about, I need to do something about it. Great. You have that ability to do that or. I need to step back and think about my week, what's going on?
Like how do I need to think about this? How do I need to approach this? And so you do have a couple of different ways, whether it's a skill, whether it's a standard, whether it's a different concept that you wanna approach it, and you have those, those flex points.
[00:35:18] Alex Sarlin: I like that distinction between reactive and proactive.
And I particularly, you know, when you say story that. Where are the resources that teach this content in the way that the core teaches it? I feel like that is something that would resonate with a lot of educators who use lots of different tools. It's like, technically, maybe you know that this supplemental over here is of the same topic as this core piece that you just taught, but when you actually get into the weeds of it, it's not always taught in the same way.
It might not use the same vocabulary, it might not use the same metaphors, it might not use the same. Algorithms and processes. That idea of that hard work that you're saying to, to align, sometimes people call it crosswalk. There's all sorts of different metaphors here. To put the pieces together behind the scenes is hugely powerful, and I frankly think this is a superpower of ai, even though I know that as you mentioned, it's not just done automatically from ai, but the same way that AI can do the, the translation crosswalk behind the scenes for language adaptation, or they can change the reading level of text.
You know, these are some of the very early. Important capabilities of AI we've been covering on the shows that have been happening for years now. We're starting to get to this sophisticated use case of how do you align educational and instructional resources behind the scenes so that all the different libraries of content and assessments and all the different pieces you have access to can actually speak the same language.
It's actually really, really. Not a small thing at all. I'm sure it's hard to do, but it's incredibly powerful if you can get it right, because there's a lot of content out there now. There's a lot of great content out there now, but putting it together at the right time for the right people, proactively, to your point, it has taken a huge amount of work historically, and it's just something that teachers often don't have time to do.
They just don't. And so the ability for Renaissance next and to piece this all together with 200 data providers. So it's really quite amazing. One of the things that Renaissance is also trying to do, you've mentioned, you know, keeping the teachers in the driver's seat. You've mentioned being really respectful of data, that it's not, you know, that the goal is not just to vacuum up data and use it, it's to give the districts and the schools the ability to combine data streams to, to really benefit students.
You've been a leader in responsible ai. You've earned the Ede AI certification. We, we talked to Carl Rectus on this podcast a lot. He runs this industry side of the Ede AI certification. You know, as you are building AI into these product suites, how do you really keep that ethical, responsible lens? You obviously, you've both talked about it with a lot of clarity and a lot of conviction.
When you're in the weeds, when you're actually, you know, doing product features and beta testing and rolling out new pieces, how do you make sure that you're always using AI in a way that is gonna be supportive for your educators, supportive for your district, supportive for your many, many customers, and is never just sort of AI because it's for its own sake, or ai because it's.
Fancy way to do, get something done. I'm sorry, lemme start with you.
[00:38:05] Storey Sitwala: Sure. Yeah. It's a great question and one that I like you, I'm very excited about the potential for ai. I think, you know, it can help tremendously, but to your point, we have to be really, really thoughtful. So I feel like what we've done as a balance between fast and slow, so we recognize that the technology is here.
Let's go fast and try to learn what the best applications are, but let's not go crazy and suddenly only have an interface that is a check bot that teachers are talking to, right? Like that's not where we wanted to go. So as Eric already mentioned earlier, we thought about what were some of the problems that it could solve, and then how do we implement that?
Like I said, with search in our leader experience, we have a feature called Explain It that we just released, which is again, like you have metrics and data on the page. For some of the more complicated metrics, we have a metric called student growth percentile, which is essentially a nationally normed growth percentile measure.
But we know that leaders are super busy and kind of struggled to be like, okay, that's a mouthful. What does student growth percentile mean? And so we're using AI to explain the data and to go look at the data. It's all. There is no student identifiers underneath that. So it's aggregated up, but it's picking out those top trends for the leader.
And we'll say, okay, here are the three trends. Focus on middle schools because that is not where growth is not happening. At the same rate here. And then also we'll provide a couple of focus tips and so. How did we think about like safety around that? We went through a lot of prompt training. We installed a number of guardrails.
We did a bake off between different AI tools, and that was on the development side and the product side. And we also have what we call an aid committee internally. That's our governance committee, which essentially all the AI innovation goes through and we have a review process to make sure, did you consider X, Y, Z?
What safety and protocols did you put into place? And, and so I think those are a couple of ways in which, you know, we're trying to be as thoughtful as we can about this.
[00:40:05] Alex Sarlin: What does AIDS stand for as that AI development?
[00:40:08] Storey Sitwala: Accelerating innovation by design, or innovation in design or something like that.
[00:40:13] Alex Sarlin: Love it. Eric, I'd love to hear your take on this as well. I, that, that was a terrific answer, and it seems like you're being very thoughtful in terms of the processes about how to get this done in a way that benefits your users, but is also you're never over your
[00:40:25] Eric Swanson: skis. I think the one thing that I just want to double down on, and, and you've probably heard this over and over and over, is we really want to make sure a human is in the loop in any of these situations and that there's full transparency about what's happening behind the scenes.
Right? And so as we really think about. Hey, we don't want to just create something that the student is gonna interact with without a teacher being completely involved in its creation and review and publishing or at the district level, right? And so that's just, that's the general philosophy that we've taken as an organization and that's put us in a situation where, hey, maybe we are.
Behind in some features, but we feel like we owe our customers in the market a very slow, methodical approach to this because we, we see situations where people are going really fast and loose, and I don't think it's great for, you know, the market or for students and, and communities in certain cases. So transparency is one piece, right.
Data security has been one of those other ones We've really, really, really focused on SOC two compliance and a whole bunch of other, you know, standard compliance situations that we've gone across, both in US international, making sure that all the data and the models and the way that we're, we're looking at this stuff.
Is as secure as humanly possible, right? And, and really trying to be a leader in that. And then story talked about the other one, right? Making sure that we have our aid committee involved, which is a cross-functional group of leaders that looks at every innovation and basically tries to poke holes at it, right?
Like that's really what's happening at the end of the day. And to make sure that we're all good from a technology and a product and a marketing and a legal perspective. So there's really that oversight and evaluation that we, we fall back on. So, a little bit of a formal answer, but I think it's important to talk about all those pieces, right?
That. Going very slow, being very methodical, making sure that the entire organization is brought into these different enhancements. So
[00:42:12] Alex Sarlin: yeah. And some of your products are about content, they're about Renaissance content, surfacing it through search, for example. And some of it is about student data and aggregating it and anonymizing it and making sure it's used properly.
So those are very, very different use cases for ai and it makes sense to, to have to review them, you know, differently. Yeah.
[00:42:28] Eric Swanson: We have use cases across the board, right? So we do, you know, everything from speech recognition and oral fluency within our l Lilo product to creating quizzes and questions on, in the Nearpod platform to creating playlists within our vocabulary platform to really drive student engagement, right?
So there's, you know, over a dozen different ways that our customer facing products have started to engage and leverage ai, but we really are trying to do it in the right way. In the right speed. Really trying to focus on those like story said, right, the really critical user needs and not just sprinkling a bunch of AI features out there, right?
Because it's really easy to do, right? You can make cool stuff and bots and tools and resources and insights really quickly, but without that proper validation, without that proper value connection, you kind of muddle the message and you muddle the impact to our, to our educator partners.
[00:43:22] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent.
I'm so glad you mentioned vocabulary. I was going to ask about it, but I wasn't sure I was a. Tried to sort of mentally 'cause vocabulary was acquired by Nearpod and I remember thinking about vocabulary early on in the, in this sort of AI era because vocabulary really interesting product. I'm sure you could explain it better than I can, but it's really about engaging students with popular music, you know, and basically putting instructional content to music, which is something that is traditionally was, took a very special kind of skill and a very special kind of musical and pedagogical expertise.
And it's something that AI can do really, really well. So I remember thinking, oh, wow, vocabulary and that approach to sort of, uh, combining high interest media with instructional content is in a new, a new world right now. And, uh, vocabulary is a really interesting use case for it. I'm curious what you've seen.
[00:44:10] Eric Swanson: We love vocabulary, right? It, I say this not lightly, but it's our most loved product, right? From an NPS score perspective, right? Like it is at the top. Always right. There's that and l Lilo are the two that are always at the top, but people love game based learning and yeah, it just allows students to engage authentically, right, in their learning journey, to be a creator, to be a part of that.
And it's such a fun product, right? There's so much. High engagement video and resource first ability to, uh, kind of be introduced to a topic and, and think through something and work through something that really gets kids just connect with it. They love it. It really does unlock that. The comprehension through vocabulary acquisition, right, that we're, we're excited about.
[00:44:56] Alex Sarlin: I personally love that combination of media materials and, and high interest types of learning that just catches students' attention and motivation and then combining it with instructional content, it can be so powerful. So we're coming on the end of our time. We've talked about a lot here. It's, I, I think you're doing incredibly interesting work.
So let me start with you story. What is the most exciting trend that you see? In the EdTech landscape from your particular, uh, vantage point at Schoolzilla coming to Renaissance that you think our listeners should keep an eye on. And I, I'd ask you to be really out there here, like what's something that you think is coming that you don't yet hear people talking about?
[00:45:29] Storey Sitwala: That is a great question. Now you're really challenging me here. I think there's two things, and you've probably heard this already a lot since you are a fan of ai, and I'm gonna continue on this ai. Track, but to me it's more, a little bit more about our internal velocity and how we think about what we're able to do for users and teachers.
The change that has just happened, I would say in the last few months, around the types of tooling that are now out there for prototyping, like moving, the prototyping, the design and ideation process closer to development. Is huge. Like it's, it's wild. I can go in there and go into an interface and say, here's a dream I've been having about some feature, or not just, I've been having, teachers have been telling us about this feature that they want, and you can take that from an idea inwards into code in seconds.
Now of course, we still have to go through that whole process and put into production and do all the stuff around it, but it definitely shrinks down what we're able to do so much faster.
[00:46:28] Alex Sarlin: Any tools you wanna highlight here? Is it like Figma or lovable or Right? Are there particular ones that you love?
[00:46:34] Storey Sitwala: So I've been playing with V zero and it's incredible
[00:46:37] Alex Sarlin: V zero.
Absolutely. That's a great one. And the ability to prototype that quickly changes what UX is. You can put working prototypes of 20 different things in front of people, whereas you could have done too in the past. So really, really, really good point. How about you? Eric, what is a trend that you see that you feel like, you know, you don't hear everybody talking about yet, but you're like, something's coming here.
[00:46:57] Eric Swanson: Yeah, I'll, I'll go back to, you know, kinda the educational side of the house, which is, I've been deep in that triangulation of differentiation, individualization, and personalization for basically my whole career. Right? Differentiation, right. Group learning, individualization, meeting an individual needs.
Personalization though meeting their interests and where they can really come and connect and find resources that are relevant to how they view the world and how they wanna think about things and the things they want to, you know, ponder. Right? And so I do see us right at the precipice of quite a bit of personalization.
I. Coming in with ai, with some of the tools, with some of the learning platforms. There's so many neat companies out there. I won't pick one or two, but I mean, just being able to put students in their own homework, right? Put their interests in their own homework, right? If a kid loves baseball, let the examples be about baseball or dance or whatever that happens to be, right?
To be able to create that emotional connection. Because oftentimes with those students who are just a little further behind or a little discouraged, right? It just takes a little bit of showing them relevance or showing them how it connects to their daily life that can get them excited. So that's one of those things that like it's gonna blow up in the next couple of years.
Like, that seems inevitable to me. Now, how do we balance that and make sure that students are getting their healthy dose of vegetables along the way without turning it completely? You know, their own interest, right. That, that's gonna be a trick. But I'm very, very interested in how that unfolds.
[00:48:30] Alex Sarlin: I mean, I, I think AI is good at cooking the chocolate in the broccoli, let's put it that way.
I can imagine a world coming to your point about personalization, where there's, you know, consistent pulse checks with schools about what kids love. You know, you get surveys over the summer and like you say, okay, what are the top. Music artists, they listed too. What are the top sports? What are the top TV shows?
What are the top, what anything? And then, you know, by the time the school year starts, the teachers can have all of this personalized material. They can have material for groups. And then of course you can continue, you know, kids don't stay on the same things for that long, right? So when something new comes out, and I.
November and everybody's obsessed with it. How does the school adapt to it? It's such an interesting idea that interests and schooling can actually dovetail in a way that only the most psychologically sophisticated teachers have been able to, you know, make it relevant or interest based for many kids, and I think it's gonna become the norm.
I agree with you. It's really, really interesting.
[00:49:21] Eric Swanson: Yeah. One of the, the other ones we're starting to bring into the next journey, right? To go back to next, is some of those non-academic. Feedback loops, right? So student wellbeing and, and understanding where students are in their learning journey. That goes beyond just knowledge, right?
Peer knowledge. And so how do we start to weave that in? So when you think about maybe the new three things, right? Your academic progress, your wellbeing, and your personal interests, and how do we kind of weave those three things together? It could be a pretty cool future.
[00:49:49] Storey Sitwala: I think we should also need to not just think about personalization of students, but imagine personalization, true personalization for the teacher.
We're all human, right? We all have very different attitudes and motivations and working styles. Like I wanna read my stuff in the morning, or I. Plan out my entire week. So how do we consider some of those different habits and practices?
[00:50:09] Alex Sarlin: And it feels like Renaissance Next is perfectly positioned for that because you're already giving each teacher dedicated feeds of insights and obviously the feedback of what they're using, what they're liking, what they're rejecting, what they wanna do more of.
Can create exactly that kind of personalized experience. It's really exciting to hear. Thank you so much. This has been a really, really interesting conversation. Eric Swanson is a senior Vice President of Practice and instructional products at Renaissance Learning Story said Walla is senior Director of Product Management at Renaissance Learning.
They have acquired all sorts of amazing tools such as La Lilo, and Freckle, and Accelerated Reader, and Nearpod, and Vocabulary and Mayon, and are putting them all together into Renaissance. Next. Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. Thanks, Alex. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders.
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