How Edtech Fuels the Homeschooling Revolution with John Edelson of Time4Learning

interactive lessons. John founded time for learning in 2013 in his living room, and was president until February 2023. He also created time for writing vocabulary spelling city and science for us. Time for learning was purchased by cambium learning in 2018. Previously, John Edelson ran Argonaut games, a video game development company in London. He was the producer of the Sony PlayStation game, Kroc, Legend of the gobos, which went platinum. He also worked in Silicon Valley for SGI and the

3d Oh company. John has a profound interest in education and a deep rooted passion that motivates him to find ways to improve education, particularly through the use of technology. He holds a bachelor's degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. And after college, he spent two years in West Africa in the Peace Corps. He's the proud father of three. Let's talk to John Adelson, founder of Time4Learning, John Edelson. Welcome to Ed Tech insiders.

gombos. At the time, I moved to Florida, it was a family issue. So I was looking for a new position. And I decided that I was getting old. So I might as well do something I really cared about. Why thought games were fun. It did feel a little light to me. And I really spent a lifetime thinking about education. I grew up in one of these families where dinnertime conversation was, what did you learn in school? Why did you learn that? Why is it important?

And we talked about education, not just what we were learning, but why we were learning it. My parents were always somewhat dismissive of grades to I didn't get good ones. So then they change their tune. But it was a great focus. It was more, you know, what are you learning? And how well do you understand it? So when I was looking for something to start a naturally gifted education, it didn't seem like much fun trying to sell to

schools. So I started looking to consumer market, I had huge ambitions about what I wanted to develop, I mean, shucks, I've been in the video game industry, I've designed games and kept kids up all night playing them. I thought, if only that sort of talent and energy and tricks could be used for education, and for curriculum, we'll be on our way. So that's kind of a start. I did, as a business guy sort of look around to see if anybody

had tried this stuff before. And what I found was awful, that there'd been lots of companies. This was following the high tech boom, around at the start of the century. There are a lot of companies that started out trying to do really cool digital game based education, companies had raised 5 million $10 million in venture capital. And basically, it was a graveyard that none of these companies succeeded. There was one company that actually raised $40 million to do it was called Digital

Sesame Street. And they too, had nothing to show for it. And we're pretty much going out of business. So I decided to go about that a little bit differently. Rather than spend all my money and energy which I didn't have that much to begin with. On development, I decided first to connect with an audience and make sure I knew what the needs were. And after that, if I still felt it was necessary to circle back and do

some crazy development. So I started by licensing the best educational software I could find that was going into schools, and I licensed it for consumer use. And I started offering it, there were a bunch of people who had licensed it and they were giving their kids enrichment and remediation after school or Summer Study and

factor still there. But time for learning really grew when the homeschoolers connected with it, we were the first to come out with a really good rich media digital curriculum, which did much of the heavy lifting for parents. And the homeschoolers just loved us. So that's the start of the company. We started with pre K through third, pretty quickly, we added the rest of elementary school, middle school and high school. And that's how we brought modern homeschooling out to the market.

And I had the same insight about, hey, why can we use these amazing game mechanics to make kids love learning, and nobody could figure it out for a really long time, they just went around it around, I think your approach to see what people need is very forward thinking sort of, you know, a very good product mindset. So tell us what time for learning became, as it grew to curriculum through elementary, middle and high school, you know, how many families did it reach? How did

it grow? And you know, I know you had an acquisition in 2018. Tell us that story.

to scale. It worked well. I spent the early years as a marketeer that I learned to do digital marketing. So I learned a lot about what's called Search Engine Optimization, which is making sure that you show up at the top of the search engines with the right snippet. For the right searches. I also learned to place ads on the search engines, so pay per click, I learned to write newsletters that tugged at the heartstrings and convince people or help people understand what we can

do. I still remember the sequence of newsletters. And if you signed up, I would thank you for your interest and your faith. And say that, you know, I too am a parent, which was true. And as all parents, I can remember a number of great milestones. For my children. That was the first word they said the first time they used to potty, the first steps that they took on their own without holding on to something. And the first time I realized they were

reading a book on their own. And then I made the point that while most of those were natural processes, and it went successfully for almost all kids, learning to read is not a natural process. And it is surprisingly trouble for many, many families and for many, many kids. And that one of the root reasons for this is that people don't follow a sensible sequence on teaching kids to read. Parents get over eager, they teach them things out of sequence, and they make it more

complicated. If you stick with time for learning, we will help you as parents understand the process of learning to read what the steps are. And we will have a sequence for your children which will take them through. And generally this leads to success. And then we would go through this over the series of newsletters, but the idea was really to focus on the homeschool family. And one of our insights early on about education is that relationships matter. That's hard to incite.

Everyone in the school systems talks about how important the teacher student relationship can be. What they don't like to admit, is that often it fails to live up to that sort of relationship. Teachers are harassed teachers have lots of students, it's very, in my experience, relatively unusual for there to be a intense teacher student bond. On the other hand, everyone knows that the parent child bond is very,

very powerful. And that the parent as a teacher, is the original teacher is certainly the most impactful teacher for students. And if we empower the parents right and guide them, they can also be a fantastic coach and mentor for the

student's academic journey. And this has always been part of the time to learn the mission to recognize that we're supporting a system a family system, that not only are we serving the child with really good interactive curriculum, which allows them to learn on their own at their own pace, but also we're helping the parents support that process, understand the process and be a good coach and mentor for the children on

the process. But other aspects time for learning as we got going, we did find that there were places that we couldn't find good enough software for our members. While there was really good language arts and math software, the science and social studies software of quality was available only for middle school and high school. So one of the things that we did is we developed our own elementary science program, we called a science for us. One of our sister companies sells that

into schools. But it's the basis of our K five elementary science program. It's fantastic. It's fun, it's got all sorts of great songs, music. And most importantly, it's effective. It's built on a sophisticated instructional model. So as we know, children are not empty vessels to be stuffed full of information. They are active inquiring minds that would like to engage in building their muscle and their knowledge base.

But it's both a habit of mine and a skill set, and also information that has to be balanced. So for elementary science, we adopted the BSCS, five e instructional model, which basically is a clever way to get the kids to learn science. And the focus was on their learning, not on somebody teaching a tool. So we take them through a process as sort of the gold standard for Education and Science in Elementary school these days. First, a child will

engage some prior knowledge. So for teaching them about gravity, or friction, or the senses, I mean, the basic elementary things, we first take him through some exercises where they realize that they actually know a lot about this topic already. And this helps them connect new information, they're going to think with existing knowledge, base vital step, education, then we get them to explore some ideas that they do some exploration and some, some of that is thought experiments.

Some of them are hands on experiments, some of them that it's sort of watching other kids on the screen, go through an exploration process, but they build some theories and they explore. Then we get to the EXPLAIN process, where ideally we have the student, the learner, actually articulate what they have learned going

through the exploration. In a digital setting, we we simulate that by having other children articulated for them, although we also asked them to do it in different ways, and so on through the elaborate and then at the end, you evaluate what you've learned, sometimes this comes back as a test. But more interestingly, you want the child to, to reflect on okay, this is what I used to understand now that I've been through this, I now understand

it in a whole new way. And I love this because it helps the kids become a full participant in their education, we encourage and homeschooler generally encourage for the kids to be active, or proactive, or feel agency, there's all sorts of ways of saying it. But the kid shouldn't be sitting there and having education stuffed in them. Every lesson every year, you try and get the student to figure out where they're headed, why they're headed there, and have a real voice and what their

education should be. And we also are developing our social studies curriculum. I can go on at some length about the inquiry method we're using there, but probably move on to lists techy subjects.

doing, finding and creating when there were gaps, you know, super high quality engaging curriculum, I'm sure was really sort of very exciting for the homeschooling segment. I'd love to hear how they reacted to time for learning. And you know, you were running it independently between 2013 and 2018. How did it work during that time, and then tell us how it evolved.

to be so difficult. I had three children, all the curriculum I was using were textbooks. There's enormous work for me. The kids hated it. I hated it. We didn't know what to do. I mean, it was emotionally very gratifying. And the reviews across the web are fantastic. I of course, sort of big May. I took it as an enormous responsibility that we were leading this new movement of

modern homeschooling. During this period, homeschooling grew enormously, and I think we contributed to it that we made homeschooling much easier, in many cases more affordable. And also we made it standards based so that if the parents They might not want to be homeschooled forever, they might want to reintegrate their child into formal education. We were taking them along a path which was almost identical to what they would do in school, making it easier to switch back and

forth. And that was a new concept for homeschooling. Old Time homeschoolers once you became a homeschooler, you kind of burnt the bridge. It used to be that schools didn't like home schoolers and didn't welcome them back. And homeschoolers. Once you're a home schooler, you develop this kind of pirate alternative mentality, you tended to socialize with other homeschoolers. You tended to shop at homeschool stores and eat and homeschool restaurants.

This is disintegrating through the years this mentality and it's really disappeared during the pandemic because we were all in it together. And everyone's trying to figure out what the best way to educate your child was given the really tough choices. When people talk about the numbers in homeschooling, I think when I entered the homeschooling world was maybe one and a half percent of the population was being

homeschooled. So if you talk about roughly 50 million children, or a few more than that 53 million I think is the K 12 population. That will give you a sense of the numbers. It ramped up steadily. Homeschooling has been a growth industry. I believe that at the start of 2020. So January 2020, right before the pandemic, we were up to 4%. So homeschooling was 4% of the K 12 population, which would be about 2 million students using random numbers.

The US Census on that that's based on numbers like the IES, the Department of Education is stats and other observations. At the height of the pandemic, the US Census did a series of studies. And they identified homeschoolers as 11% of the K 12 population, which are pains to distinguish that these were not remote schoolers gives them formal schools are being remote schooled. These were not kids enrolled in virtual schools. These were kids where the parents really were

homeschooling them. And they said it was up to 11% of the population. That was then now the pandemic is largely over kids are back in school to return to normalcy. No one really knows what the number is right now, I believe it's around seven or 8% of the population is still being homeschooled. But I can't cite numbers from that I just sort of look at our situation and think about our market share, and come up with this number. There is what everybody wants to hear numbers. So So there they are.

that. So the idea of making it standards based of high quality curriculum of sort of all the different areas of focus for time for learning, I'm sure resonated a lot. And there was this growth industry that then of course, spiked during the pandemic, you know, I was looking at some of the numbers from the same census, you know, numbers that you just mentioned.

And one thing that jumped out to me is that, you know, during the pandemic, a lot of you, as you say that numbers went up to 11%, on average, but they actually went up faster for black families and for Hispanic families than for other groups. And I'm curious how you saw that coming? You know, what do you attribute that to and sort of how that affected time for learnings business?

when I joined. We quickly found that there was another segment who I characterized as the accidental homeschoolers. These were people that never really intended to homeschool they wanted to put their kids in school and what they thought of as being normal, but it didn't work. Now, there's many stories of why it didn't work. Some children's had special needs. Some kids had school situations that weren't so good. A lot of

kids got bullied. Many kids were terrified by the No Child Left Behind high stakes testing, or teachers would start the school year with some of you will be in my classroom again next year you will be failures you will fail the test. So we really need to work hard and you generate enough Fear. There's some kids who are terrified and very upset. And they, you know, they have stomach problems. They don't want to go to school. And there's oodles of kids who don't fit well on an institutional

system. Kids with Tourette's kids with stutters, maybe they do, maybe they don't kids with gastrointestinal problems, do real well, school. So there's all sorts of things, plus the obvious major, special educational challenges kids with attention, challenges, kids with physical challenges, kids with reading, dyslexia challenges, and kids that are different places on the spectrum that may or may not have school systems

that treat that well. In any case, these are parents who, you know, they've often switch schools switch classrooms, tried for different combinations. And then one day, they realize they're spending their whole life trying to get their kid to fit into a system, and they just don't think it's going to work. They've heard this word homeschooling, what is it, let's give it a try. Maybe that'll be more satisfying. I remember one mom calling me. And she called the company, she wanted to speak

to the president. She was very worked up, she got me on the phone and started telling me, you know, I don't see how homeschooling is good for the country. I don't see how it's good for my child. And she talks about that at some length and find them like, ma'am, how can I help you? Why are you calling me? Oh, I need to homeschool my son. And I didn't snarkily ask, you know, feeling a little conflicted. With, you know, gosh, tell me what's going on. I'll see if I can help. And she

had another of these stories. It was very painful. She had a boy who had few emotional impulse control issues. She had been at a school meeting with her lawyer and the school lawyer and a bunch of people. And she found herself saying, you know, I'm sorry that my boy acted out and hit that other student. But I had told the teacher if she used this language with him in front of a class, you would act out and I think she did it on purpose to get him out of the classroom. I mean, it was it was

a horrible, painful story. But in any case, she came to homeschooling as a last resort. She didn't intend to homeschool. She didn't want to homeschool. But one thing that all parents have in common is they want to do the best thing they can for their child. So how could you homeschool and not make this a disaster. And this has been time for learnings mission. We're like, gosh, first of all, you're in very good company. Second of all, as you say, you're intending to just homeschool for

the rest of the semester. That's a fine intention. Of course, this summer, you can reevaluate the situation. And you might find that you want to add another year, because that tends to be what happens. And then you might add another year, here's what you're gonna find out about homeschooling. One, you do not have to be the world's expert in math, or English or science, art, you are a coach, you are a

guide. But in this day and age, there are spectacular software like time for learning, which will largely do the heavy lifting of all the lesson planning all the scheduling, provide the lessons give the child and interesting self control experience. Your job is really to wash it, they're using it taking advantage of it. And when they run into problems. That's when you get to step up and be a problem solver for your child. What does that mean?

Well, your child will at some point say I don't understand this lesson. I don't understand these questions. And then you get to model what to do there. Well, let's read the question again. What do you not understand? And while some children can articulate it, mostly there's like, I don't know, I just don't understand it. You can help them break it down. But eventually you get to the point of what they don't

understand. And then you go back to the lesson and say, Okay, let's go through this lesson together, and see if we can find the information that will help you think through that question. And together, you go through it. And this is what we equip the parents to do all these techniques at all. So even though they are not math whizzes, they don't necessarily know how to construct a really good essay. They can follow the basic process of coaching your

child through it. So going back to your question, what's happened with the demographics of homeschooling is it became increasingly diverse over the last decade over the last 15 years. The old demographic of a just being the Christians and the free thinkers. This group was enriched by other subgroups that wanted to homeschool. And then during the pandemic, it changed very rapidly. So that at first, the demographics of homeschooling looked exactly like the demographics of a

country. And then, in fact, African American homeschoolers are now statistically homeschooling in greater numbers proportionately than any other subgroup. And there's a few theories on this. Nobody's dug really deep into it. I always like to emphasize this. One thing about homeschooling is it works that kids do do pretty well. They do turn into self motivated learners, they are better equipped for the future.

And the people that are really struggling to do the best thing for their children and might not have the best choices of schools. they latch on to something that they control. parents really want to do the best for their child here something they control. Secondly, the what's going on in the school systems in America

today is complicated. One of the things that's going on is the culture wars, the school systems that have been an awful lot of school boards, which have screamed and yelled, and they're going to states where they started making all these rules about what the teachers can and cannot teach. No matter what side you are in the culture wars, I think everybody understands that teachers like to be respected. They think they know what the students need to

learn and how to teach it. And they resent or demoralized by what they think of his political interference in the educational process. Also, they don't like being scared. And in some states, they're now scared to admit if they're gay, they're scared that they're going to teach something, which is some parents can make a big fuss over and all sudden, they got their name in the newspaper and be up

on charges. In any case, the great resignation, which people have mostly talked about in terms of restaurants, and some other jobs, has also hit education, particularly in some states. And no matter where you are in the culture wars, you do know that if your child's had three substitutes, and we're still in October, and there's no permanent teacher, yet assigned to that classroom, it's probably not a great year for education. So you might decide to

homeschool. And then of course, there's people who don't like what's being taught in the schools, and they decide, you know, that's how they're going to teach history. I think I'll teach my child the history myself, so they can actually understand what's going on. The reality of the public school system is it's already a majority minority across the

country. I think what the school systems were teaching was pretty well adapted to the educational interests and needs of the audience and the country the way it is. But now that the politicians are getting very involved, and they're banning books, and this and that, and are accusing teachers of indoctrinating students, it's tricky to see how it all plays out.

We've talked on the podcast to a couple of different folks who have been thinking about alternative schooling and over time, and I think it's really a through line from all these conversations that the school system is sort of under pressure, but it's hasn't been under in in quite a long time, both because of this sort of culture war movement, and the teacher shortage, as you just mentioned, and the pandemic, there's just a feeling of, you know, the traditional public

school system that was sort of presumed to be at least operational and working. Alright, for a long time. A lot of people are now starting to

say, I'm just not sure. And, you know, there was an interesting survey, that the online education platform out school, which also had a, you know, a great pandemic, partially because of homeschoolers, they said that, you know, parents are increasingly concerned about the quality of education in schools, that there's a lot of the new homeschooling parents are what's driving the decision is neurodiversity, which is exactly, you know, you just mentioned ADHD, and spectrum and

some of those issues. And that that, you know, 12% of new homeschooling parents said that it was neurodiversity versus 7%. And the political split, as you have already named, changed a lot. So it went from, you know, originally, homeschoolers were primarily conservative, but just about half of new homeschoolers described themselves as progressive or liberal

politically. So you see a really large change in this homeschool population over time, and then suddenly, and journalist Greg Toppo, another friend of the podcast wrote about, he calls this sort of homeschooling 2.0. And, you know, I think for somebody who has been close to this the way you have, I think you might say, maybe it's 6.0, because this has been changing continuously for quite a long

time. But I'd love to hear you sort of project into the future, you know, are these trends going to continue to sort of push people towards alternative schooling? Or will there be a little bit of a swing back, as we sort of start to figure out how to how to get teachers back in the classroom and as some of these political culture wars maybe start to die down? Where do you see this all going?

demoralizing. They feel stupid. Often they have trouble keeping up And that that's bad for them. It's also not so good for the kids on the other side of the curve. They feel smart, they feel bored. And it makes gives them an attitude. And also, they have trouble paying attention because they're bored. And it's not particularly good for them. And then the same kids will go through, perhaps opposite reactions, when it comes to language arts, maybe different kids find it too easy, and other

kids find it too hard. But if you think hard about this, you can remember your own childhood and its impact on you. And you'll probably admit that it's lifelong. And you can also think of other kids who went through it, and had lifelong impact. This industrial system, which kind of forces some kids to feel this way, and some kids to feel that way. What's the point of

it? I mean, you switch to the old system of one room schoolhouses, where every kid proceeds at their own pace, or the modern homeschooling system, with a child in the privacy of them and a computer. If they don't get a lesson, they can watch it again, if the child feels that this lesson is a little too slow, you know, skip it speeded up, but technology and everything is there and the kids have changed. Why do we have to do this artificial impact on all those kids, it

doesn't make any sense. And this is the single biggest benefit of something like time for learning, the kids can proceed at their own pace, comfortably. They don't get this complex over whether they're going faster or slower than the other kids, no one goes up to the board and gets humiliated. I mean, we all feel that that's normal, because we went through it. But if you think hard about it, it's not healthy. It's not good for anyone in today's world is

different. That's one of the bases is of time for learning. And one of the places that we continued to innovate because at our core, we believe that the kids of today are very different than the kids that we were, I mean, ever tried watching those Disney films from 4050 years ago, which were such massive hits are were the coolest thing in every scene. In today's day and age, they are painfully slow and explicit. And the whole thing makes no sense to today's kids. These kids are different.

The educational economics are vastly different I can go on and that of course the technology is different. And most importantly, the career that the kids are going into are quite different. It's time to develop a quite a different educational system. And everyone knows this the homeschool all the people watched remote schooling over their kids shoulders. Yes, the teachers were using the technology in a system they

weren't familiar with. But beyond that, the content that many of them were teaching was insultingly low level, the parents thought they were not impressed by their glimpse of what's going on in school. Ask any group of people hey, you only got three grades. Let's talk about the American school system today. Is it excellent. Is it fine? Okay? Or is it needing improvement? And nobody says excellent, a few hands for maybe okay. And all the hands go

up on needs improvement. When you go beyond that, it's very hard to find any consensus, you certainly won't find unanimity, but even find the majority for which direction we should go more technology, less technology. It's a confused situation. At time for learning,

we have a vision of this. First of all, there's not that much confusion on elementary school, once you strip it down, almost everyone agrees on what you should learn in elementary school in science, language arts, math, like I mean, the one area of controversy might be social studies. But even there they The basics are pretty clear that everybody should learn. And using technology for this is incredibly efficient. But of course the kid should be part of a community and spend lots of

times with other kids. In homeschooling, there's one of the old jokes is what's the very hardest thing about homeschooling? Well, staying home. I mean, there are so many homeschooling get togethers and communities of every stripe and color in any community across the country. That you know those field trips and play dates and, and science days, they're fantastic. You know, go off and see this factory works for all

ages. This is great stuff. We also think that one of the mega trends in middle school and high school is people no longer believe in the liberal arts approach to education that I was brought up on that people have shifted to a far more pragmatic, hey, middle school and high school is about building your career, credentials, interests and experience. And schools have made some adaptations you now see academies inside a lot of high schools for the health are academies for for it and

robotics or graphics. What time for learning is done is added a very rich layer of electives started in middle school, where people can pursue career interests. People can build skills, a lot of people talk about they can pursue their passions. Our language, a time for learning is a little different. Some kids might have passions, but mostly kids are trying to develop passions and interests. So we think of these electives as a way to expose

them to different areas. And perhaps from that They will develop some passions, but we don't tell the kids you know, where's your passion, where's your passion, we say, you know, it's time to start developing some interests and find areas that you like and areas which are not for you. And part of that is, is learning about it.

So here's some courses in art, here's some courses in history, here's some information on what our courses might take you to in terms of career, I actually have a daughter right now who was working as a fabricator that she, she went to art school design school, and she was doing Macy's windows and fashion Rica, props all this year. In any case, it's time for the mega trends of where education is headed. We don't totally know, we do believe in student paced and student centric education.

We do think that there's a fair amount of fundamental foundational education that we can all agree on, and that we're all sort of experimenting and thinking about where to go with middle school and high school, but that there's a sea change and people's mentality and expectations, which the curriculum and systems haven't really caught up yet. I mean, I could grant in some places they

have. So with a common core language arts curriculum shifted from being 100% literature, and Creative Writing to being sort of half on the creative and literature side and half on expository texts, sort of words and communication, you would use in a job either following directions or communicating work

issues. So that sort of shows a trend towards more pragmatic, definitely, certainly the entry of programming, computer programming and engineering and thinking about statistics and algorithms into the curriculum. It's a step towards a more pragmatic curriculum. But then there's other areas, which are still I think, way academic. And of course, time for learning is looking at this. There's a lot of people have opened up these little pods, and there's one

room schoolhouses, right? You think building them around time for learning is fantastic. Because then when you add professional or educator staff, instead of having them try to go create curriculum or find curriculum, it's all done. And also, if you have turnover in your staff, you've got to record what the students have done because they're usually something that's time for learning, which has all the built in record keeping and grading

the technology. Because, you know, you came from, as you mentioned, the video game industry, you've mentioned you music, obviously, time for learning and your personal philosophy on education is to really leverage, you know, engaging technology for education. And one of the things that I've always wondered about when it comes to sort of the school systems is that, you know, for quite a while, it was really hard to get, you know, much tech into schools at all.

But now, you know, the schools do use a lot of technology, they you know, the number of tools that a teacher uses, I think they said average about 70 tools, tech tools, and a year, and school districts buy even more. So Tech has sort of made its way into schools. yet. I agree with you that it still doesn't feel as personalized as engaging as sort of socially impressive, as you might expect.

And you know, you mentioned early in the in the podcast that you decided early on was time for learning to go to a consumer model rather than sell to schools. I'd love to hear you talk about sort of why the increase in technology in schools has not necessarily really improved some of these core issues. And whether the sort of business model whether the procurement and the difficulty of getting school contracts for certain edtech companies plays a role in that.

illuminating thing. It's a very, you know, it's difficult selling the school systems, we tended to focus on making it available to teachers who would then sell to their schools for us and sort of the bottom up approach, which worked very, very well for our products wouldn't work for others. At one point spelling city was being unused by about 20% of the country. What I found amazing is the most obvious use of spelling city, which was to save the teacher tons of time,

would never sell a product. If you actually explained that this is a productivity tool for the teacher, saving them several hours a week, I would have thought, you know, of course, the school system would buy it. But they didn't. It turns out the school system is entirely built towards student efficacy. And, you know, it's just a funny

note. So we had to focus on how to demonstrate efficacy, which we did, we actually focused on the impact on vocabulary, we showed that the annual test, your scores on high stakes tests would improve. If we took you through a retention cycle with something like vocabulary spelling city, I think we're in for five years, maybe 10 years of really innovative software in education, I think it's gonna

revolutionize it. Why now? Well, for the last decade, all the oxygen got sucked out of the room in terms of educational software, because of one very expensive shift to the Common Core, to the very expensive shift out of flash into HTML five, and three, a somewhat limited market and for the enormous investment in security, and upgrading all the software. Interesting. So I don't think the software vendors innovated nearly as much as they should

have. But I know why. Because they had these, you know, I was one of them, we had this massive investment, you know, we only got another 18 months, and we got to move four fifths of our software still at summer software on flash. So that held us all back. Thanks to the pandemic, the schools have caught up with homeschoolers. And now one to one, computing is no longer newsworthy. It's the status quo. And the teachers and the whole infrastructure for supporting them is now in place.

That wasn't true before. And anytime you went out there trying to do something, you had to deal with the fact that, you know, you got computer centers, or you got some places that are equipped, you have other places that are against it. That's over the school system, everybody's now up in the 21st century, there's no reason to go to school and feel like you're in a museum or in a rustic cabin. You might as well use the tools that are routinely used by professionals everyplace else.

This changes the market. And the biggest thing is everybody's ready to go do something interesting in education. I like the idea that I mean, what I actually think is many of the great ideas have come out of the homeschooling world, and then be brought back into the school world, I think the homeschooling will stay ahead head, because it's just much easier for the families to innovate than it is for these massive school systems. Small school systems tend to be a little too

conservative. Some of the charter schools are very innovative, but many of them are just slavishly cutting costs and being slightly better managed in the public schools. So the real big boys there, I don't, I don't see them innovating. I think

it'll be the homeschoolers. Part of the mantra which you hear from homeschoolers all the time is you really got to educate the child you have in front of you, not the child that you were not the child, you wished you were not the simply elder sibling of the child you have in front of you, and not the child that you have in front of you last year that students centric education is a real challenge. And, you know, we're not trying to force kids to, you know, up against all sorts of impossible

challenges. We're trying to educate them along modern understanding of what that means don't damage them, build them grow them, bullying, and harassment is not education. Turns out, that's not the way kids should be taught. Although implicitly at all the school systems were built along those lines, we now realize that doesn't make any sense. And we're explicit about it. homeschoolers are pretty good at this. I think the schools are Circle round and do it. So I see all sorts of innovations. Along

the tech line. There's some trends that are really obvious. So when computers get really, really powerful network, it gets really really dependable AI, which has been around for 50 years and didn't have much to show for it until the last year. Hit a golden age. My phone now knows who I am I can talk to and I don't want to say her name because she'll start playing music for me. household devices and they understand my voice. They now can simulate Vic and write paragraphs, essays,

haikus. We've all seen chatty btw. And I mean, these are amazing tools. It's good again, going to change our world. It's going to change the educational needs. And all the smart people are going to use this for education, although we're not quite sure how. But I suspect it will first be done by the homeschoolers. I want to

community? Which will then, you know, move into the school system? You've mentioned a couple right there. But where would you put your chips down on the next big thing to go through that process.

seems impossible. But in fact, given a little motivation, and most of us have it, you can learn everything. I think of one family, one of the children was really into bees. And so the family basically just studied bees. They learned art, they learned science, they learned math, they learned economics, beekeepers, they traveled, they learn to read, they read, they wrote books, from anything, you can pretty much learn everything you need to I don't want to say the curriculum is totally

irrelevant. But in terms of the balance between student interest, and a disciplined systematic curriculum, I think there's a lot of room to shift from discipline curriculum towards student driven education. Parents find this over and over again, with homeschooling, when the kid shows a glimmer of interest. This is a gift, this is something you run with. This is not something you don't have time for. schools get it mostly wrong, that it's they are so institutional, they have so much

responsibility. And the volumes are so high, there's no real structure to it. Now, don't be too hard on schools. I mean, if you interview the kids and ask them about their high school, they will generally say it's a little irrelevant to their interests. They're just biding their time they're building credentials or playing the game. There's all this cynical stuff. But if you just ask them a different question, you get this

blast of enthusiasm. Well, you know, isn't there anything you like about your school, and pretty soon, they're telling you about the woodworking program, or the theater program, or the sports program or the theater program, and the kids are deep into it, and they've made huge lifelong friends. And they've developed all sorts of skills and learned all sorts of stuff. So it's not like schools are unaware of how important student

interest is. It's just that they balance it in this odd thing between core curriculum supplementary and extracurricular. I think those are sort of okay, definitions, but we can do, we can do better. And that's where I take the homeschooling is going ahead.

didn't say this either. But you know, that I think some of these, you know, AI tools enable that, in a way we've sort of never seen then they enable both students and educators to personalize materials rather than having a set curriculum, they can say, hey, for this kid, they love bees, I'm gonna make every math problem without bees.

And I can do that, because I have this sort of AI teaching assistant in my holster, just want to add that in as an interesting sort of tech enhanced interest based learning and personalized learning. I think

anybody does anymore. We got calculators on our phones, you know, I just have to say out loud what I want to know right now and and she will answer me, the only point of teaching long multiplication is really to reinforce place value and some of the underlying mathematical concepts. So yes, it's quite a different world and knowledge is quite different. Now. It's such

a commodity. I think the case study and integrated thinking that you see in fancy business programs and law programs, and we're beginning to see a lot of it in education, the gizmos from explore learning, which focus on real problem solving is a fantastic example of where I think education and middle and high school and really college should go up. We have to rethink it because the world's changed the institutional structure in place which has to be changed as

massive. The homeschooling trend is real and if you Looking at homeschooling as as a college trend, as an microcredentials, people are interested more in what you'd have to do rather than the diploma you have. There's a huge emphasis on, you know, skills as needed in these boot camps in general assembly. All of this is, I think, an extension of the homeschooling students centric trend, adapted to the capabilities and career needs of where we're headed. So time for learning sees a big

future and all this. I know you wanted to cover the the business story, so I'll tell it real quick. When I started time for learning fact was I had a bit of a cushion. I've been working for 20 some odd years, I've been part of three IPOs. To put it bluntly, I was five, six years ahead, you could say that was retirement money saved up, I was in my mid 40s. But I said okay, let's give this a try. So I started a company, and I sort of

spent it. What that meant is I spent no time writing business plans other than for my own use, I never went to a Venture Capital office, I never, you know, pitched it to the pitch fest or anything. All I did is talk to my customers, work on my software, work on our marketing, try and connect with them. I spent years answering the phone myself when customers called up. Usually there had some question about the software building or something. But I would interview them at the end of the

conversation. Gosh, man, I'm not only answering the phone today, but I run the company, would you answer a few questions for me? Why did you decide to homeschool? What are your kids? Like? What have you learned? What software did you start with? What curriculum did you start with? What do you like about it built long, deep relationships that have profound understanding, I spoke to 1000s of moms, few dozen grandmothers, and maybe a dozen dads. And the demographics on that haven't

changed very much. But their voices rang through our ears. And this is really in the DNA of time for learning that we try and stay very close to the customer. And one of the things is unlike schools where there's a huge gap between the buyers and the users. One thing about a homeschool family is if they don't like you, they they all know about it, kids complain to Mom, mom complains to us, we try and keep this very close loop so

that we're always improving. We had a great time running as an independent company, I did it for 15 years. At some point, I started getting old and thought, Okay, I gotta I can't do this forever. I'm not really headed towards a family business. So I took some private equity. And they quickly merged me in with cambium learning, which has been a fantastic experience. It's it's, I think, the highest quality of edtech companies, fantastic in house resources, which we're harnessing to

enhance our curriculum. It's been a fantastic experience. And it brought me full circle because I am both a lover of the technology and content, deepened education, but also have an MBA my background, and it was kind of fun to run the whole business cycle.

interesting company. And I wish we had more time, so many of the points that you're making about I love the point about home speed and alternative credentials, and micro credentialing is an extension of homeschool and for for the college age audience that is fascinating. I could talk about that all day with you. But we tend to wrap up the podcast with

one question. And I'm so curious what you say to this, which is, you obviously have been in this space a long time, and you've learned an enormous amount from your customers directly. But you also have a very, you know, high level sense of all of these different things happening education, how they interact. What would you recommend for our listeners who are all trying to build that exact sense of, of understanding of the entire ecosystem? What resources would you recommend that they look at?

And this could be, you know, newsletters, podcasts, books, anything Twitter feeds, people, you know, what would you recommend somebody do if they are trying to build the kind of understanding that you have built around this world?

learning to read. I mean, I somehow thought that because I started time for learning and quickly studied everything about the science of reading and got way ahead on it that maybe they had done the same thing. But one of my Quick Insights is they had no concept of phonemic awareness phonological skills Is decoding and all the steps towards learning to read that just bringing that out to them was a

really good step. So I built a thing called the reading skills pyramid, which was the basis for a lot of our marketing early on, where we can make in five or 10 minutes a mom understand the sequence of steps that most kids go through learning to read. And why you have to do this before that, if a kid doesn't understand that words are made out of sounds, and sounds represented by letters, and might spend a lot of time trying to learn the letters, but it doesn't make any sense tool.

Words, you know, rat hat fat, they gotta gotta become aware of what phonemes are. And they are assembled to make words interchangeable parts. So my advice is go talk to the customers. I mean, same thing with spelling sitting when I was building it, I would go off to the schools. And I remember one teacher saying, you know, the real thing we do with our spelling lists, is I use it for the basis for writing. I've every kid write a sentence every week, with every word on their

list. Like, oh, isn't that a little boring? Just writing sentences? Just Oh, no, I change it every week, so that it matches what the lesson is. So if this week, we're doing questions, interrogatory sentences, they all have to write a question with their spelling word. The next week, we might be doing, you know, punctuation and commas. So I want them all to write a sentence that requires a comma

with their sentences. Well, two weeks later, I said, Hey, take a look at this version of spelling city, and exactly what you'd asked what was there plus, I had taken a whole bunch of instructional materials from time for writing one of our

products and put it there. So if a kid needed to know what an interrogatory sentence or an exclamation or a question or a topic sentence, this was a big one, write a topic sentence, using each word on your vocabulary list, as if you were going to tell them about something. And be careful because I'm gonna pick one of them to make you write a paragraph on it. Right? The next week, you know, write the introductory sentence to a story

using each sentence. So the way elementary school teachers who are very savvy and have learned to efficiently integrate all their lessons so they can get it done. We went and built into software. And that's one of the things that I addressed. There's a lot of wisdom in the classrooms, harnessing that, and then applying it with the new tools is where I see a lot of Ed Tech, get ahead. And that's what I urge people to do. Don't, don't just listen to the echo chamber, vague ideas from these

things. Also go out harness some original ideas, and build something novel and useful.

starting to go. John Edelson of Time4Learning, which is part of cambium thank you so much for being here with us on Ed Tech insiders.