Welcome to Ed Tech insiders. In this podcast we talk to educators and educational technology investors, thought leaders, founders and operators about the most interesting and exciting trends in the field. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an educational technology veteran with over a decade of work at leading edtech companies. Beth Porter started her career in the mathematics classroom before moving into edtech with math soft and Pearson, where she was a VP of software product
management. She was also a VP of product at edX in the heady MOOC days of 2014 and 2015, and has consulted and taught at MIT and Boston University. Most recently, she's the co founder of two edtech companies, as may learning where she is the president and COO, and riff Analytics, which was acquired by as me learning in December 2021. As me learning offers executive education courses from top universities, including MIT, Cambridge, and Oxford, all offered with AI powered
recommendations. RIFF analytics is an analytics platform that uses voice data collected during video calls, to show how people interact, to measure engagement, and to determine the split of speakership, among other learning metrics. Beth Porter, Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Thanks for having me, Alex, I really appreciate the chance to talk about the things that I'm excited about.
Yeah. So but you've worked at some of the biggest players in in tech for years, including math, soft Pearson, and edX, you've consulted and taught at MIT. And you've moved into entrepreneurship first with as may learning and then with riff analytics, it's an amazing journey. Tell us a little bit about your your journey in the tech world, and what led you to becoming a tech entrepreneur.
I think I was always sort of an entrepreneur at heart without actually working in an entrepreneurial, you know, sort of modality like a startup. One of the things that's really fun about being an entrepreneur, and why I love working at this, you know, sort of at this breakneck speed, and sort of on the edge of things that are possible, is that it's
a very creative exercise. And I think a lot of what you think about when you think about big companies doing education is that it doesn't feel very creative, most of the time, it feels like it's kind of a procedural, and you're just turning out another book or another kind of a website, and everything starts to look very much the same, it doesn't feel
like exciting work at all. And yet, I would say that in all of the places that I had the privilege of working and I say privilege, because I found wonderful things to do at all of those places that you mentioned, that surprising amount of tolerance for my being entrepreneurial. And in a way, you kind of have to always chart your own path. In as much as you feel like the people who are around you can support that.
That doesn't mean that we didn't do much of the sort of routine, you know, day to day work of the business, which is turning out
software. And at the early days, when I worked at masks off, we were still making physical media, going to the printer with it, you know, so quaint, but in and among all of that sort of routine activity, we were also really trying to push the boundaries of creating new products, trying new business models, reaching out to our customers and having really honest conversation with them about the things they wanted us
to do. I did that, you know, when we were at Mass soft, that was early days of, you know, what is now sort of a common practice of agile, and everybody was like, What the hell is that? Why are you doing that? Why are you subjecting us to this crazy methodology. But in the end, we were just trying to push the boundaries to do a better job. And you have to do it with empathy, with honesty, you have to be transparent about your motives, you have to be willing
to try something and fail. And in all those places, I did have an environment where that was possible. And where I didn't actually have to be overly apologetic as long as I was doing it with the intent of trying to move the organization forward. So I got a chance to do that in all the places that I've
worked. And then, you know, when I left edX and I started my own consultancy, and started working with UT Austin and MIT and some other places, it was clear that they were begging for people to be entrepreneurially about the things that they were trying to do. And they couldn't always find it from within the organization and needed a catalyst from the outside. And so that was sort of how I built my reputation with those
customers. And then, you know, in the end, when I was at MIT, actually, we launched riff first riff came before me, Riff has been on the scene for longer just a slower growth trajectory for a software company than for a services company. But yeah, so so he's been in there.
So it sounds like you have been sort of privileged, like you say, to have the ability to be an intrapreneur at a number of large, interesting and tech companies. And as you struck out on your own, you saw the need for that kind of entrepreneurial thinking in every company. And that's been a great excuse slash permission function to be creative in that way.
Yeah, I mean, they're not infinitely patient, let me just be clear, they've got businesses to run, they've got bottom lines to be satisfied, and all that kind of stuff. But I think, again, if you're really working with the business goals in mind, as long as it's not just some sort of flight of fancy, then I think that most companies are willing to give you some latitude, if your motivation is to solve a bit of like a real business
problem. And that's, I think it's, I mean, it's what everybody should be paying attention to. It's just that lots of people don't.
That's good advice. For our listeners, anybody who is working within a company, if you align, you're aligned to the business goals, maybe you get some leverage to to be creative and try new things. I think that's
nice. Yeah, absolutely.
I didn't know that riff was first. That's really interesting. So let's talk a little bit about Azmi first and then riff, even if it's not in
any order you like, Alex, I don't care.
So as me learning is a player in the professional development and executive education space, both in the US and in Europe. And it focuses on modern technical topics that businesses are really trying to learn, like data strategy, artificial intelligence, Blockchain cybersecurity, tell us a little bit about the need there. Why there is this pressing need to learn about these topics within businesses? And how as me addresses it.
Yeah. So the thing that we identified early on was that in a lot of ways, academia is interested, but not always capable of keeping pace with modern technologies, is that really their call to action, right, their call to action is to provide foundational academic grounding in a set of literal like principle ideas in whatever domain they happen to be in. And as things become part of the accepted, you know, grounding of any industry, then they gradually make it into the
academia. And they become a part of the curriculum. And this is a slow process, just because of the nature of academia that wants things to be proven and settled before they become a
part of the canon. And so we see a need there for pairing academic grounding, in which you really understand that there's a set of principles or pillars on which a bunch of these new technical ideas emerge, but also really pushing the industry to critically examine the new technologies that are emerging, and then try new things in the business contexts in which they are, you know, sort of have the
most usefulness. So if you look at something like AI, I mean, a lot of the sort of very fundamental questions of aI have been not totally solved, but addressed with tools and technologies and frameworks, and so forth. But if you look at adoption of AI in businesses is pretty slow. Right? So people are really trying to figure out what on earth does ai do for me? I don't know what to do with it. I understand it. Now. Maybe I don't know the math. Nobody
knows the maths. But, you know, I understand principally what it does. But how am I supposed to take that interesting idea? And how am I supposed to jam it into the thing that I do in my company, whatever that company happens to be? And what if I don't have data? What if somebody else is sitting on that data? And they're super proprietary or private about it?
How do I deal with the ethics or the privacy part of all these things, there's just so many impediments to adoption of a new technology, that we see a real opportunity there to help people get up solid footing in a set of technologies, and the business sensibility that allows them to drive a new set of activities in their company, so that that adoption is actually affected.
That is one of the biggest places of gaps in the market is actually having tactile, very activity based, project based cohort based team based all the things right, all the things that people want to be able to be thought of as doing, and have that happen in a learning program. So that's what we do and the combination of technical sensibilities, mindset shift leadership development, in you know, really practical, experiential problems that gets
solved in that context. That's that's what we're really all about is that combination and really changing how work thinks about how learning can help them.
So there's a focus on both understanding the sort of core ideas the pillars the principles behind these modern technologies, but also application and ways to incorporate and try them in a real business setting. It's not pure academic, but it's also not pure applied. It's sort of a combination, then you work with universities and executive education programs, in some cases, are also sort of trying to bridge that gap.
Yeah, I was just gonna say, and that is one of the reasons why when you look at the makeup of the of a typical course that our program that we offer, it has a university sponsor, like Oxford, or MIT or whoever. And it has, you know, sometimes as many as 50 guest speakers who come from all walks of that industry who are coming and saying, oh, okay, you now you have a sense of what this particular set of data integration strategies are data
privacy notions are. So you want to know, what does it mean, when you're faced with a GDPR? Regulation? What do you do with that? How do we deal with it practically as a business, and they talk to their own experience and expertise. And that combination is woven through the course so that you get those that counterbalance of those two perspectives all the time?
Makes sense. So it's bringing together not only universities and purchasing companies, but also a wide variety of practitioners from the field, to speak directly to that application, and how to you know how to find use cases within the business. That makes a lot of sense. So you're bringing in a lot of different perspectives into the same place so that people can sort of accelerate their usage of modern tech.
That's right. Yeah. And it's experiential, meaning that we really do. I mean, it's hands on, people got to do stuff. You're not just watching, you got to do things. It's a very intensive, these are intensive courses and programs.
Gotcha. Quick follow up. Question on that. So it's executive education, but it's hands on, it's technical. I'm curious, who are the sort of people within companies who are actually able to get their hands dirty and work with AI strategy or blockchain or cybersecurity? Do you see a lot of C suite? business managers? Or are they the heads of the data department? Or are they strategists who tends to be most interested in this from within the company standpoint,
it's really middle management. And up, we really what we're trying to do is help people who are the ground level decision makers, I don't mean people who are like, the prac, you know, the technical practitioners, those tend not to be the people who are worried about this strategy level and the decision making set, allocate budget, or, you know, direct teams or are talking, you know, even higher up the food chain of the companies that they work in, but middle level managers, VPS, to some extent,
executives, entrepreneurs, people who are part of the sort of innovation set, all of those people are, they're not hands on keyboard, writing Java code, or trying to run Python programs to do the execution of the work, but they have a huge influence over how budgets get allocated, and how teams get allocated to
do work. And if they don't really understand how AI helps the business, then they could really poorly allocate resources and waste a lot of time and energy, instead of one of the fatal missteps, that lots of companies who are trying to let's just stay on the AI track for a second, who are trying to
implement AI. So they just hire a bunch of data scientists and they go, you know, what, go do what, so there's a lot of just ready fire aim, when people are starting out trying to implement any kind of AI, whether it's machine learning, or smart systems or something like that, and a little bit of better and understanding a little bit of strategic thinking about that with a grounded, you know, framework from which to make a strategy can really help those people make better decisions,
waste less money, waste less time, not feel like well, we tried so many things, and nothing worked. I don't know what happened, you know, we're trying to avoid that kind of thing. Help people avoid that kind of thing and, and really transform workplaces into thinking more nimbly, about how to work, how to experiment with small things, and then build from there, try not to take on giant epic life changing projects, but actually take on things that are tractable, and become successful at those and
then build from there. You know, it's little stuff like that.
The idea of hiring in data scientists or artificial intelligence experts, as a solution to the lack of strategy, I've definitely seen that in action from a lot of different perspectives. And it makes sense that it's the strategy layer that would actually be pointing them in the direction and sort of working to truly create meaningful impact. So speaking of data, I wanted to also ask about rich analytics.
rich analytics is one of a handful of really interesting companies that seek to use unstructured sources of data like data from video calls to generate insights about online learning. That's a really interesting space. I'd love to hear about how you got into that analytic space and where you see this space evolving unusual sources of data, how they improve the learning landscape.
I think one of the things it's been like Part of all online learning is just this massive, massive focus on assessment. And it's like, you know, you have all these assessment platforms and a sense, you know, everything is all about adaptive learning. And you know, if we just give you the next good question, you're really going to learn this. You know, there is a lot of science behind adaptive learning. I'm not trying to totally disparage it. But you know, there's so much else going on when you
learn. And when you're in person learning in a classroom. And the first thing you do when you learn live is you meet, you literally all show up together somewhere. And then you start to talk about what is the content? Why are you using that? What, what's the engagement model? Why are we sitting down? Why are we standing up? Why are we at this lab table? Or why are we reading
things? Or why are we at the board or even like, just as all these different nuanced ways in which the classroom has actually, in some cases evolved a lot, and in other cases, hasn't evolved at all, depending on where you are. But you know, there's this sense of community and you're there together and something's gonna happen? Well, we don't really do that in online learning, what we do is we say, well, there's a bunch of content, and you've got to learn
it. And by God, we're going to cram it down your throat as quickly as you can. And we're going to know whether we got it down your throat, by testing you endlessly. I'm being a little bit glib, but you get my point.
And so what we really got interested in is well, okay, if you wanted to create meeting spaces, and figure out what people can know from one another, because that is an interesting way to assess whether people know something, or they think they know something, then that requires meeting, like you actually have to facilitate meeting. So we started a lot of the work for riff started back at MIT in the Media Lab, and Sandy Pentland
Human Dynamics group. And the first studies, gosh, those were more than a decade ago, really, were we had people wearing physical devices on their bodies, a badge is what we call it, and it had a mic and a Bluetooth. And we had people walk around and do work together in an accelerator, or walk around and do work together in a workspace or whatever. And and then we measured who talked to who and how did they interact? And was it just me on the soliloquy, like I'm doing right
now? Or did you have a very high rate of engagement with the other person you were talking to? And so we measured all that, and started to model what it's like when people work and learn together. And as online learning became more robust, and there was more opportunities to move to those spaces for professional development, for executive learning, whatever, we thought, well, you know what, we should really move these kinds of tools online and see what we can learn
in online engagement. And that's where this that's the origin story of riff is that we were really interested in how people engage, what are the interaction dynamics look like? What does it tell us about humans, ourselves, teams, organizations, whatever. And online was obviously the next step. So riff was born out
of that. And we use passive measurement of video that just on measuring all the time, and then we use that to model conversations, and then give people immediate real time feedback about basically how they show up when they meet online.
It's, it's an incredibly interesting idea that you are not in a soliloquy, by the way you are answering your question. Very natural, I actually get get a little mini bit of analytics at the end of every podcast recording saying how what percentage of, of time was taken up by each speaker. And it reminds me a lot of what
you're saying. So some online learning platforms, especially in this age of zoom, have been starting to think about these other sources of data, like, you know, the proportion of time taken up by each speaker, or the empty space between talks, I'd love to hear a little bit more about some of the different factors that riff can pull out of a video call, and insights that might be really useful to either a teacher or a learner, especially just sort of in the in the broader context of a
world where so much learning is happening through video calls,
right? Yeah, I'll say what we do today and sort of give a hint of what we're continuing to do with all the, you know, new development. So what we do today is we take the vocal record, and we look for a few different kinds of patterns. One, we are interested in speaking time, it's certainly relevant if I speak and you speak and, you know, we have a relatively balanced conversate.
Let's say we're having a one on one and I'm your manager, and you're, I'm your instructor, or I'm one of your peers in the class, whoever I happen to be, and we have this even conversation, then we can both feel like we've got equal opportunity to speak and be heard. And the other person can also feel like they got to speak and be heard. And that balance is really important because it's part of how you know that you have been able to relate to
somebody, right? I had a meeting and we had a really good rapport, and it builds trust, even in this weird mediated environment a video right? Where you can't, you're not shouldering up against persons and you can't touch them or shake their hand or look them in the eye, you need other cues, you know, in a learning context, we really focus on teams and team development, because it's the unit of work in all companies. Lots of people work
in individual things. Of course, lots of people are focused on sort of organizational success, of course, but really, when it comes right down to it, the unit of work, right, how work gets done is in small teams. And so as you think about how to optimize the performance of not just the individual but the team, it's something that you kind of know when it's working well. And sometimes you don't know necessarily how to diagnose
when it's not working well. So we focus on that we give feedback around interpersonal dynamics, like, how many times that when you spoke, I spoke after you that volley between us? Am I speaking a lot? And are you interjecting and saying, oh, yeah, okay, that's interesting, you know, this, this really gives a good indication that you're set, you're paying attention to me, right, and I'm paying attention to you and we have a good relationship. Let's say that you and I really get
jazzed up. When we talked with one another, we're super excited about some topic, and we go back and forth. And we're super jocular with one another, we interrupt each other all the time. It's all good, right? We're very excited. Let's say we take that same dynamic, and we stick it in the middle of another meeting with other people. And then we just box everybody out, essentially, that dynamic doesn't work in that
setting. And so we we highlight all the ways in which dynamics work in some settings, and maybe not in others, where you may have a very strong rapport with some members and less of a strong rapport with others, where the injection of a person into a meeting context may be either additive, or disruptive. And so all those different dynamics are the things that we track and give people feedback
directly to them. And what we found is that with that real time feedback that's coming all the time, it increases the time to trust. And it leads to better learning outcomes, particularly with team based activities online.
That's fantastic. I love that phrase time to trust, it feels like that's a an amazing metric for online learning, for learning of any kind, you know, how long does it take to people? We trust each other? Yeah,
sometimes takes a long time. Right. So you know, this is not, these are not formulaic. This is just us trying to raise the awareness of how you appear online, give people the tools to understand it, and then the tools are, then it's in their hands to make a change. And, and that means that quieter people don't always have the burden to speak up, you know, why didn't you speak up in class, you've heard that so many times, louder. People also have
the burden to shut up. Yes. And allow the space for speaking.
I imagine that many of our listeners are very, are having flashbacks when they hear about being nominated by people or were the loudest person that you know, the hippo effect, but they call it one of the features that I have found interesting in in LMS, is that it tries to make this type of data applicable, immediately actionable, is when teachers are informed whether students are speaking or not. So you can as an instructor, you might have a sense that these three students
talk a lot. And those four students really don't talk a lot. But getting an actual dashboard in real time saying this person has not said a word and in three classes is such a useful real time feedback mechanism. I'm curious, that's some of the types of outputs you're thinking about.
You know, we haven't gone into that kind of setup yet. Right? Mostly we've been, as I said, we've been focused on teams and teams self governance, and sort of like being able to really understand whether your team is working or not. And often them in when we talk to instructors, actually, they're not so concerned, mean, they're marginally concerned about this idea that they can't know whether they've actually dominant, they've had certain students dominating and how cute
that is. The place where they actually find trouble is they say things like, Well, I'm never sure whether to do virtual online groups or group word or breakouts or whatever, because I don't know what's going on in those meetings. And like, yeah, okay, but you could, and, you know, while we're not going to violate privacy by saying, What did you hear what Alex said to
Beth in that meeting? You know, it's not that it's really a aggregate boil up metrics that let them see hey, that was a really engaged group or this was a very unengaged group and you know, sort of then have the tools for intervention.
That's fascinating, especially in real time when there's actually an opportunity to sort of jump in and support if you know that one group is very silent or one person has been talking the entire time. It's a great moment to to jump in and support as an instructor facilitator.
I'm a business school for free and I teach over at BU in the business school and I can tell you that it's the heart sinking sort of conversation you have about a week from the end of the term and some student comes to you confessional and says Mike team sucks, and we are not going to get our work done. You're like, Why didn't you tell me ahead of time I could have helped you.
And so a lot of that is just around trying to, again, without getting, you know, we don't want to be big brothers about this, but with, you know, with will consent of the participants and everything, just having the opportunity to give some indicators, right, some hints that maybe this team needs a little more help, this team is crushing it, they're great, but this team might need a little bit of intervention. That's really one of the things that we can we can do.
Yeah, that's a that's a fascinating focus. And it definitely resonates that that group work and breakout rooms, you know, Zoom breakout rooms, or others in the online learning context, does seem like not only a little bit of a black box, like you mentioned, for facilitators, but also a strategy that nobody quite knows how to use, you know, how often to go into groups, whether it's as valuable time or much more valuable time than then, you know, being in a lecture exam.
And I think it's very interesting to hear some more insight coming out of within those black boxes that could actually help instructional
design. Yeah. So you know, as me is about professional development within the business context, connecting University principles to businesses, and Rif is about using the data on unstructured data, especially from video calls in December 2021, as me, which we now know, is the later founded company, acquired riff analytics, putting together both of your companies,
which is super interesting. And you know, in preparing, I was thinking a little bit about the sort of synergies there, and some of my external guesses of how they might work together would be that as we could, you know, help, you could use analytics to tell if students or teams are engaged in the learning activities, if they're involved, if there's, you know, fair representation among groups, it could also potentially be used for things like for sales calls, or you know, anything that involves
unstructured data. But maybe that's just a bridge too far. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how the two companies played together? And what you see as the sort of coming synergy between them? Yeah,
in the SP context is exactly what you might imagine, which is that, you know, we are trying to affect a transformation of the workforce at scale. This is not us in boutique model, going into every company and saying, How can we help you to, you know, like, yes, we may, we may have opportunities to work in custom
programs. But really, our job is to get out there and try to reach as many people as we can, with these courses, and to scale the operation of being able to do that, while still actually having very, very high touch experiences that feel like you're learning not just the content in this sort of commoditized way, but you're learning with others, you're learning in this experiential mode, and you're really learning a new set of skills, it's not just the actual technology or
the business principles, the only way to do that is with some
automation of some kind. And so a lot of what we're doing with the RIF platform in the SME environment, is providing exactly that visibility into the cohesion of the teams, the synergies of even just the cohort, we have actually an asynchronous chat tool in riff also, which allows the whole kind of the whole community to come together and have a lot of dynamic flow of conversation around the various topics because even as we are representing a really interesting that we think, you
know, well designed curricular experience with all these cool things in it, you students come in, they have their own ideas, they have things they definitely want to talk about, they're really excited about the domains that we're representing these presenting these courses, and, but you know, sometimes they come in, they're like, you know, what I want to talk about defy, I'm really interested in that, and anybody with me, and then they spawn, you know, sort of their own group of people where
they're talking about it, and they're really good at going in back and forth. And we provide an environment for that, we can look at how active it is, we can jump in and with some of the coaches and facilitators. So all of that measurement just helps both the people who are the participants themselves in the ways that I was just describing in terms of team dynamic. And our coaches and facilitators know what's happening. What can we do to help make better things
happen? What can we do the next time to make better things happen when we run the courses again, so all that data, and all the ways in which we use it really just helped the courses get better and better and us to be able to scale more effectively?
That makes sense, if that's one of the three lines that of all of edtech, in my personal opinion is that, you know, great education is often very personal. It's relationship based. It's about really connecting with your peers and
your instructors. And yet when edtech companies have to scale, they have to do it over and over again many times and adding the set of very sophisticated database insights to the iterative process so that you try something you get really good data about whether it's working whether the students are talking to each other, whether they're building relationships, and then can iterate from there
makes a lot of sense. I think that's a really fabulous way to use education data to improve relationships as well as,
yeah, because I mean, in the end, all these people have to go back into work environments. And you know, that most work environments, the ways that you get information is because you trust somebody and you go and get it. It's not like, yeah, okay, there's hierarchies all over companies everywhere, of course, that are, you know, sort of the institutional boundaries around
which communication happens. But all the work actually gets done in a silent network of people who have established relationships with one another and trying to help figure out how to broker that and how to identify it and how to work effectively cross functionally, I mean, that's the bread and butter of a company.
Yeah. So it's part of the the transfer of going from a course back to a company and being able to actually use what you've learned, I just want to also unpack the term you mentioned in there about defy which stands for decentralized finance. It's about cryptocurrency. And it's a very hot topic amongst, among some groups all over the world right now, I wanted to look back even a little further in your career, because you've done such interesting things in education.
You spent five years at Pearson, the med mega education publisher, actually,
ever while
yours appears in the back end, these publisher, you mentioned how Pearson despite having something of a reputation as a little bit of an incumbent in the EdTech space, a company has been around forever, it's sort of slow moving acquires things, that's a little bit of a, it has a little bit of reputation that way, but in the past, it's also played a really important role as a
hotbed of innovation. So I'd love to hear more about about your experience at Pearson and what you've learned and what when you and other Pearson alumni have gone off to do after leaving.
Oh, my so many of my colleagues at Pearson during that time have done startups. So I just want to say that, you know, despite the fact that it does, I don't think I'll speak
an untruth here. It does have a reputation that it has lived up to, to some degree that it is slow moving, that it is methodical that it is plotting all those things, I think nobody could look at it objectively from the outside and disagree with but you know, within each individual part of the organization, there are there is a lot of inventive creative activity that's happening all the time. It just doesn't always
surface, right. So many of the people that I worked with, particularly in the days after the acquisition of EA College, we were really trying to take ownership over our technical sort of future after an era of unprecedented acquisition of new
assets. And within my they were still acquiring new technical assets during the time that I was there, but trying to build up more internal muscle for being able to have technical assets of their own, and have all of those things speak more effectively to one another and not just say, well, mass, build something and science, build something in biology, build something in English, build something and so and so both of you had incredible silo ice patient, that is not a word, but
I'm going to use it anyway, silos. But everybody wanted to try to do something digital, but our group actually was the group that sounds like an impossible task. And it kind of was was to try to bring that all together and have some kind of centralized services that not everybody needs to make their own identity management system.
That's insane. So you know, we try to bring together mobile services and identity management, access management, all the things that really part of the centralized sort of function of delivering large scale, like 50 million plus learners large scale instructional programs online, bring those into a central group, build out more of a at that time, we were actually sort of experimenting with trying to have like an internal open
source group, right. So that if you wanted to participate in using the mobile services or the identity services, you could get them from the internal group, but you could also contribute to them, right? So instead of building your own, you say, Okay, well, this is an open source group in here. Go ahead, build on top of what we've already got us governance, the governance model, and so forth.
So we were just really spawning that and creating it when I then you know, moved on to to edX, but that creative spirit was there the whole time that I was there, and, but it was born out of wanting to have more control over the technology, too, serve learners better, and not have to buy everything, but to build it.
So it sounds like what you're saying is that in large edtech companies like Pearson, there is a lot of interesting action happening within different departments. There's innovation, there's new ideas being made, but sometimes the trickiest part is actually weaving them together into a coherent strategy and sharing resources sharing technology that definitely resonates with my experience as well and I imagine it would with others, listening to the podcast.
Yeah. And it was the thing that was interesting about it is that lots of programs didn't quite make it. And some were definitely not
successful. But if you look on balance at the number of different assets out there in the world that have Pearson on them, say whatever you will about their licensing, or how much they charge for books or anything like that, they are still in the business of serving learners, and making sure that they have good digital experiences, but just think that sometimes they've been more successful than at other times, and it will, I will simply say that at the time that I was there, we were very learner
focused, we were very instructor focused, and we were really trying to change how programs got delivered in higher ed. I will simply say this about Pearson, though, they still have
breath. Right, they're still they're not as nimble as the creative people inside of the company would have you believe that they should be, because they're still hampered by their own sort of hierarchy and decision making that doesn't look at all the stuff that's happening inside of the actual small working groups of the
teams. And so a better connectedness of the active work of the teams with leadership that would really be changed the way that Pearson is able to operate it, they didn't really ever quite get that right, in my opinion.
I think it's a burden that many larger or older companies deal with. And maybe Pearson, in particular, for a variety of reasons, I wanted to quickly dig down on one interesting fact that I noticed on the SP site, which is that every site says that the you know, the SP classes have a 30x completion rate over standard MOOCs. There has been a long back and forth discussion about MOOC completion and how to read
it. But it struck me as interesting because you were an early VP of product at edX right in the middle of the workspace in 2014. So I'd love to just hear your thoughts about abrupt completion rates and about how MOOC providers might compare to more cohort based or intensive course offerings.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I was right in the thick of things with edX from from 2014. And, you know, one of the things about MOOCs is that the goals are very different in a MOOC than in one of our high touch experiences. What we're interested in doing it as me is creating groups of people who experience in education, you know, experience learning
together, right? It's a cohort model, we're really tying outcomes to their ability not just to encounter the material and learn from it, but to learn from each other, and to work in both the larger cross functional cohort space, but also within the small teams, as I've described, MOOCs aren't really that's not their MO, what they're really trying to no pun intended. But what they're trying to do there is there's just trying to get out content
to the masses. And I think one of the problems with that is that there's just no incentive at all to finish anything. And in fact, I think many defenders of MOOC say, there's no intention for people to finish anything. Like, okay, cool. But you know, what we really want to try to affect his actual change in the way that people learn and
work together. And this is not a MOOC was never set up or intended to operate that ways for individuals to learn from a set of high quality materials, and to be able to do it at their own pace on on their own terms. And if you look at that is great in some ways, because it means that, you know, the instructor can be amplified or can be magnified by just availability. On the other hand, it's not really going to change much,
right? So it's not going to have the transformative effect, that you know, more of a workforce oriented, collaboratively oriented, cohort oriented experience is going to happen. We are really all about that transformation and change, we are less about like, hey, let's reach everybody on the planet.
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I definitely agree that more intensive group based learning, especially in a work context, has a very different purpose than, than the original, you know, MOOCs have just spread the word all over the over the world and, you know, give people access to inside those classrooms. There's lots of different, they've been hot takes for almost 10 straight years about no completion. So
it's interesting to note. So there are a number of different edtech companies that along with as me are seeking to transform the corporate learning world, which was once really reliant on in person trainings. And that's just really gone by the wayside more and more. So companies like emeritus learning gets smarter, as well as MOOC providers like edX and Coursera. Do so by working with with top
universities. She's sort of bring the you know, print Suppose and Business School and executive education offerings inside companies, and some others, companies like LinkedIn learning or go one in Australia, Cornerstone ondemand Pluralsight sort of have a different model, they're often about getting practitioners to offer video
courses. And they don't go into the sort of indepth principles that you mentioned and sort of talk about the why, I'd love to hear your take on the difference between these two models of corporate learning and how you see this evolving in the future.
I think that I would put the latter category they describe, you know, this is maybe a disparaging term, but I'm going to use it anyway, I think that that come those commodity learning experiences, they just don't really do anything. I think that a lot of companies think of education as a checkbox item, right? Well, gotta offer education, I guess we'll sign up for a subscription to LinkedIn learning, and then everybody can get educated, but, you know, they just don't do
anything. I mean, it's fine. And the person who's very self motivated and happy to just go and watch endless videos about this data, the other topic is totally fine. And that's great, ready resource. And honestly, I just don't see it as much of an evolution over just YouTube, except it has less crap in it. So to me, that just they don't do much, right, they aren't really there to change anything, or to help the company, learn
about how to learn. And in the times that we're in, there is if there's no other skill that you give to your employees, they should learn how to learn new skills, because whether they do it at your company, they do it someplace else, the pace of change, particularly in technical topics is just happening so quickly. And it's
accelerating, right? Literally, it is accelerating, that you have to learn how to learn, it is one of the most important skills that you can give your employee and you don't learn how to learn from watching videos on LinkedIn. I'm sorry, it just doesn't happen. And so while you might get into the practice, like doing sit ups or something, of, Oh, I'm gonna watch a video every day, and then I'll learn
some things, that's fine. But it doesn't really have a transformative effect on maybe anybody except you and maybe not even you. Right. So that model just to me doesn't, it doesn't transform anything anywhere, for anyone. Sorry, does. That's, and it is borne out by by science. And by learning, you know, learning scientists who can tell you exactly how learning
happens. Learning happens in small groups, learning happens through interaction, learning happens through your ability to demonstrate what you learn by either applying it or by telling somebody else that is the you know, sort of principal tenant of teaching and learning is that I learned something today, yay, let me tell you about the thing I learned and help you that actually helps me almost more than enough to write I submit my learning by telling you about it, whatever the thing is,
right? That's how I know that I've known something because I could convey it to somebody else. So all of that interaction, that human interaction is the thing that those other that other model is all about. And that human dimension is the thing that really changes it from being just a bunch of really solid content to being a learning experience. It's not a learning experience, until you're actually demonstrating and practicing the learning in some way, in a meaningful way.
So application and metacognition, right, where it you have to do it. And then you have to think about how you're learning. And I love the point about how an in person class through as me is actually helping people understand how to learn new topics and where to go, and how to make sense of them and how to work with others to to to actually figure out how to apply them. That's a fascinating is a really interesting way to approach it.
So we're almost at our time, and I wanted to end this podcast was the two questions we ask every guest. And it's been a really interesting discussion, and I could talk for hours about your last answer. I totally agree about how learning works. But the first question is, what is the most exciting trend you see in the EdTech landscape right now that our listeners should keep an eye on?
Yeah, I think game based learning is really interesting. It's been a topic of much discussion for kids, right? Kids love games, let's do
games game game game. I remember having this great discussion with my kids, the dining room table once where my son had recently, or my daughter had recently had something where the teacher tried to take math and turn it into a game and it was clear that the teacher hadn't really thought through how to gamify something effectively, or that serious games are different than is different than
gamification. And it had been sort of it was a week, sadly, so sort of a week effort attempts to get the kids to feel like oh, we can totally do math. Yay. And my daughter's like, I hate it when they did she's you'd have to know my daughter's know how hilarious is she? I hate it when they try to make things fun in school. If I was cracking up, and my son just looked at me like, What is wrong with you? I would be so excited if every single day I went into school and all they did was games, that
would be awesome. So I think you're sort of like, that's the fundamental mapped divide in learning about games, right? It's like, represented by the two opinions of my kids. And, and I think that long has been the first model, which is that it's like a slap sum game stuff on top of and truly, it'll make learning more fun. And really, what we should be aiming toward is intentional. Real games like games that are serious that we're gaming makes sense. And it's not just badges or
something, or whatever. It's like games, real simulations, deep games, things where you have to work collaboratively, where you have this interplay between like, when you lead, and when you follow, there's a deep communication layer, the problems are complex. I mean, I think all of that, if you think about the games that are your favorite games with others, they all have those elements to them. And they are ways to learn new
skills. And I'm really excited about all the possibility of doing that, not just with kids, but actually doing it with adults, where we sort of like, you know, we get dampened in our lives. And we're like, oh,
nothing's fun anymore. But you know what I mean, and there's no reason at all not to bring games back into or bring games into a professional learning environments, and they can excite people, and they can just invite a different and totally new way to think about and learn skills, and particularly for the interpersonal stuff that we care about. We think it's a really exciting space, and we're going to keep paying attention to it and introducing products where that's an element of what we do.
Yeah,
yeah, that that space is getting to some really interesting insights. After years of sort of false starts and trying different things. I think game based learning is really starting to hit its its true stride. Now, I'm excited to see that too. And what is one book or blog or twitter feed that you would recommend for somebody who wants to just go deeper on either the topics we discussed today or something of deep interest to you?
Yeah, there's one really good one for some of the people who are listening to they probably know who this is Ryan Craig, he writes a gap letter. It's just one of my all time favorite things I get to read, every time it comes into my mailbox, I stop everything. And I read it. He's just so insightful. And he has so many interesting variety of perspectives on a variety of
topics. So he's not just sort of like pounding the drum on one thing, you know, he's looking at education, he's looking at it professional development, he's looking across the spectrum of sort of the political, the technical, the, you know, all the things, and I really just enjoy, and they're in depth pieces. This is not just sort of, like surface level crap. You know, it's like, really, he's really trying to probe the topic. And so I appreciate his
insights every, every month. And then another person I recently discovered is this. He's this this kind of crazy guy is David Rosenthal. He writes a blog. It's sort of his own personal sort of take on everything I just recently read one of his blog posts from from earlier this month, February, when he talks about going and speaking as a guest speaker in Stanford's double E three AP course. And you think well, what does that have to do with a well he talks about cryptocurrencies and
blockchain. And I found that entry to be just fascinating. And he just sort of cuts it all to the quack and makes it so easy to understand what all the consternation and kerfluffle is about crypto and why it's just worthy of examination, even if you're not a crypto investor, which I'm not, but it just felt like he really just gets right down to it. And to me, anybody who can just get right to the point quickly, and like makes you feel like oh, I really learned something from reading
that. He does it.
Great suggestions. As always, we will put links to both of those. I am a big Brian kg fan as well in our show notes for this episode. You can find them there. Thank you so much for your time, Beth Porter from SP learning and riff analytics. Thanks, Alex. Thanks for listening to this episode of the EdTech insiders podcast. If you liked the episode, remember to subscribe on Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get
your podcasts. And if you're listening on Apple, please leave a rating and review so others can find the podcast. For more ed tech insiders content subscribe to the Ed Tech insiders newsletter at edtech insiders.substack.com