This episode of edtech insiders is sponsored by magic edtech magic Ed Tech has helped the world's top educational publishers and ad tech companies build learning products and platforms that millions of learners and teachers use every day. Chances are that you're probably using a learning product that they've helped design or build. Companies like Pearson McGraw Hill, imagine learning and the American Museum of Natural History have used their help to design or build some of their
learning products. Now magic wants to bring its pedagogical and engineering expertise to make your key learning products accessible, sticky and well adopted. Check them out at Magic Ed tech.com, which is MaGIC.EdTech.com and when you get in touch tell them Ed Tech Insider sent you. Welcome to EdTech insiders where we speak with founders, operators, investors and thought leaders in the education technology industry and report on cutting edge news in this fast evolving field from around the globe.
From AI to xr to K 12 to l&d, you'll find everything you need here on edtech insiders. And if you liked the podcast, please give us a rating and a review so others can find it more easily. Marco de Rossi is the CEO and founder of we school, a leading Italian edtech startup founded in 2016. We school is an online collaborative learning platform that is designed to be easy to use. It already enables 1.7 million students and 230,000 teachers to amplify their learning experience by
leveraging digital tools. We school recently closed a 6.4 million euro series a funding round to scale their technology and enter new markets. Marco De Rossi Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you.
I'm really excited to speak to you, you are the first Italian edtech company we have talked to on this podcast in over a year and a half. So I think it's gonna be really cool to find out what that world is like you personally are a little bit of a serial entrepreneur, start by just telling our audience a little bit about yourself and how you got into edtech and became the CEO of we school.
Yes, I actually I started working at Tech without knowing that that was the name. And because of ADC wasn't existing yet, when I was 14 years old, just at the very beginning of high school, I was studying in high school with just Latin and Greek and I wanted to study programming languages, but there was nothing around. So I created a website with 2004. So five years before can Academy just enable anybody to share your own content and materials about what you're
interested into. And the philosophy was that everybody was both a teacher and the learner, a learner on a subject and maybe a teacher on the subject. So it was very student focused. That was my first ethic project. What I'm doing now is more educators focus, I really think that that's the key. And in parallel, I'm also for sure fun of web three. So I've co founded and exited the company in that industry. And by the way, maybe we can discuss this
later. I think about web three and and ad tech will have more and more to share in the years ahead.
Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And so 14 years old, there are a few of these sort of wunderkind founders in ad tech. I know that Quizlet was started by a teenager and ours was acquired by five Avila was started by a teenager. That's really cool. And I think that idea was way ahead of its time that everyone is a student of some things and a teacher of others. We're seeing that, you know, now everywhere. So tell us about the inspiration behind the school
itself. You said it focuses on educators? Where do you get the idea? And how did you get it off the ground?
Yes, the very first project was focused on students just because I was a student, I was unhappy about the school I was in and I wanted to change it. When you grow up, you understand that teachers and educators in general are not your enemy. Actually, they are the key stakeholders to change the process. And so if the thesis behind the first static project was How about using it, to teach and learn, we school is based on other thesis, which is why do we need to just use the
technology at distance. It can be used in presence and technology, it can actually help people being closer to exactly the opposite of what we feel and avert erode. For sure, around that because of COVID that technology makes us destroy human relationship and make them
cold. And so the idea was, can we create a technology where actually people learn together not around content around interaction, and where you don't feel alone in front of a screen just clicking next and next on a series of Have boring videos. And guys, it's clear even from the first internet wave elearning 1.2. As it worked, nobody likes that even the term itself is nobody wants to be connected to that. So that was the idea. We started with a platform, which is we School,
which is growing a lot. But then we realized that the technology wasn't enough to change the educational process. And I think that that's something that you probably agree with, and many of the listeners said, experience, you think that the technology is enough? But no, it's not.
The educators are a huge piece of all of it. And it sounds like there are two big realizations in here. One is that learning is really about relationship building, right? It's about interactions, it's about connecting around, you know, people rather than content. And then that technology needs to be supplemented with, I'm assuming you were gonna say educators maybe other things as well, to make sure it really hits home.
Yeah, I'm sure that you weren't going at school for the content from the textbook that was already available at home yet. It's around methodologies. So a large part of the learning, it's just unidirectional, you need to go through content. But the main failure of a learning process is actually attention. I don't pay attention. I'm bored. So we have been spending so much time in videos talking about what's the perfect content or the perfect technology, but to visit does
this matter? Somehow if people just don't pay attention, their brain switched off? So the question becomes, how can technology help you keeping the attention higher, because that's probably the most effective proxy of the learning effectiveness in general. So that's where our product philosophy start from. And that's why our clients and partners and educators say that we school is actually closer to Slack than to Moodle, just to
give a couple of examples. And that's another super exciting trend where they see I think we'll get bigger and bigger, which is the merge of part of the communication tool and educational tool. So I think the attack will be divided into areas where mandatory attackee learning where but nobody cares about that HR needs to do you need to do this mandatory
course. But unless you spend in content platform where bestie is because it's not strategic for anybody, and verification that actually work where you are engaged, you pay attention, you work in courts, it's a blended synchronous or synchronous IT staff also to build the stuff you have donated just an indicator you need to keep a team of educator you need. And this kind of experience is by far more similar to what's now slack compared to Moodle, for sure.
So let's drill in on what this feels like you're connecting educators or teachers, with users, our learners, and organizations can use we school to teach, train and manage. It's, as you say, more like Slack than Moodle. So it's super wrapped around it focused on communication. So tell us about what it's like to be in a we school. Sure, you know, implementation.
So we school is a community learning based platform. So it's a classroom collaboration tool, where we create communities. So the learning process happens around communities. And it's used by companies and various structural designers, to both engage employees where actually, this can have an impact on revenue. So we're very focused on onboarding processes, which is, which are crucial retail
training sales forces. And not just that companies are also using the tool to engage with external stakeholders that are crucial for them, like schools, universities, citizens. So we're using that to, for example, employee engagement, so very employee go to their school of very, I don't know, children, and use the technology to have an impact also on what's happening outside. And that's super interesting also to retain
talent. So great resignation, especially for young talented under 35 years old people is really related to the impact that the organization have. And in the third millennial, the best impact that an organization can have is to share the knowledge and teach to the ecosystem that company is in.
I really like that you're sort of metaphors here. And you know, thinking about just as communication technology is used inside organizations, or schools or universities to sort of keep everybody connected and engaged. And we school is a platform that's designed to keep everybody connected and engaged around learning rather than just around open communication about everything or just sort of back and forth. Its people are communicating with each other in
all sorts of ways. But pedagogy and learning science is at the center of it. So what is your business model? When we school is run by a corporation for all the reasons you just said to you know, retain employees or onboard them? I imagine that they are paying the bill. Do you also have university clients or school clients or individuals?
So the business model is very simple is a SaaS business model. So companies pay licenses have a platform for specific projects, especially the one that impacts the citizens and the schools. We also provide educational support and the content itself. For companies we just provide Instructional Design, we don't create the content itself. And you mentioned the methodologies and the pedagogy, which is really the core. And I want to give you a practical example
regarding onboarding. So everybody that tried an onboarding process in any company knows that there is this company culture section where you need to go through a slide deck, usually, or watch the recorded video. And well, nobody does that, or just the 10% 20% If you do, but it's hard to remember what you've seen, you need to do that multiple times. How about applying teach, to learn which it's not new, it's very structured, academics confirm that it worked 30 years
ago, it's nothing new. And you ask a current employee to teach company values to a newcomer, and these guys to prepare himself or herself to create a community around this to deliver the content, and you have a by far better result. So what I'm saying is that we can really create completely different kinds of engagement that makes the learning effective with these pedagogical approaches and these technologies.
Right, so what I'm hearing is, you know, by leveraging pedagogies, like Teach to learn, you're doing two things, you're engaging a deeper level of learning and a higher level of attention, because instead of just watching this and saying, I'm never going to use this, again, I don't
need to do work, you need to prepare yourself. exactly match that teach to learn about for sure. Problem Based Learning, project based learning, we are super interesting debate, especially for K 12. And University actually a bit less for companies. But the list is super long. So I wasn't a huge fan of Geography at school. But if you try to explain demography, it's asking to a student, what do you think will happen if citizens of France doubled in 10 years, and the one of Italy do less 50%?
That's problem based learning. And you can be sure that 60 years old student would start thinking a different way and be curious about what could be the answer to this question.
Yeah, so you're raising both engagement and efficacy, right? Learning efficacy, people are engaging more, they're spending more time and as you mentioned earlier, if you're engaging, more, going deeper, and spending more time, you're very likely learning more as well. And that can be measured. Of course, you know, we school is seven years old, which is a, you know, a pretty good age for an edtech company.
As you look back, you know, you started in 2016, I believe, as you look back, what do you feel like has been the biggest achievement so far, you've obviously grown a lot. You're one of the biggest ad techs in Italy, one of the bigger ones in Europe, what has been your biggest achievement in your own eyes?
Sure. And introspectively. So it's clear that we started seven years ago, but three years ago, we were only five people. So all the growth from five to nowhere, 77 Something has actually happened in the last two years. So this is something that as an entrepreneur, I've learned and I will change in the future, if when I will find my next company. Velocity is super important. You need to risk risk means also fundraise and not being scared about losing percentage of shares of your
company. So let's just say that it's this two completely lives of the same common everything happened in the last few years and health accomplishments, you ask? Well, for sure, from a product perspective, I'm pretty proud that our now seven years old vision of what's now called by everybody chord based learning, so the fact that you can create a platform that you can use also in presence, and where it's not on demand, you need to start a specific moment
with a class. And so when we launch this, our first investor, we're against that because it was illegal in schools to bring devices. And educators weren't understanding that. So why is not on demand? Why do we need to have dates? And now it's clear to integral communities if that's the best way to engage people, because how can we discuss if I do have a course in March, and you do that in December of three years after it's clear. So that's something
we're pretty proud about? Well, for sure, proud of what we've done during the pandemic, so had more than 1.1 million of daily active users. So we basically enabled 1/3 of a current school system to do homeschooling. And last year, I'm happy with what happened in the last year, which
is finally getting global. So we realize that, how can I say that Italy is not a good fit, if you want to scale in this industry, at least, and changing the culture of a company that is local to, I wouldn't say global, let's say now European, it's not easy at all, starting from a language and it's not just about Italy, Spain, France is the same. People just want to speak their language. If you really want to bring a change, you need
to hire people. And I'm referring about sea levels with different cultures.
That's really interesting. So you say there were sort of two phases of the Wii School Story, you small, small five people keeping it going for several years and then, you know, rapid growth with funding, you know, with lots more hires and expanding your geography all at the same time. I'm Curious how you knew that was the moment it sounds like it was very much pandemic related. Tell us a little bit about how that inflection point happened.
It has been triggered for sure by the pandemics and the fundraising that we have done retrospectively, again, I was trying to always have more revenue compared to what I was spending. And this is not entirely compatible with disrupting, we've been a digital industry where you want to
disrupt things. Because by definition, if you want to push a product that is not here yet, that has no demand yet, because maybe you want to shape the behavior of demand, which is fine, because we have now phones without buttons, not because somebody asked for them. You need to burn money. So we still have a very prudent approach. But the fact of saying, Okay, let's run, let's be Let's spend, that can seem to be pretty basic for you, for the audience, wasn't super clear to me when I
was 25 years old. So this was probably the change from our financial perspective.
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think it's an interesting lesson to hear for other entrepreneurs and founders who are listening right now, you know, they're bootstrappers, like me, yeah, bootstrappers. You know, it might be very tempting to want to always say revenue positive, but there can be a big advantage and taking funding and giving away some share of the company, because you can feel you know,
that also many causes, you know, that that's part of the game.
Yeah, well, you're getting to experience both sides of it in a really deep ways, I think you'll come through this with a very, very nuanced understanding of both types of companies, which is
really interesting. I have to ask you about AI, we are in the age of AI, you have, you know, you mentioned a third of the Italian school system was working together in this cohort based model at the height of the pandemic, how have you been thinking about taking that user base, and meeting their needs even more, making the community even richer, making the relationships even deeper, making learning even more effective with machine learning or, you know, adaptive, personalized learning?
Sure, I haven't been historically a huge fan of adaptive learning. Definitely learning in a nutshell is the idea that the computer understand something about what you already know, and create a custom path for you. I think, and this is something very old, just think about Renesis learning new turn really well, 15 years ago. And I think that this was an is overrated, because there is so much to work
on the pedagogy. But the fact that I see a different order of lessons, frankly, doesn't matter at all doesn't matter a lot to the if we measure the impact of overall experience. But again, adaptive learning is really just a small part of the value that AI can bring. We are working a lot now on the smart assistant part. So how can an AI without having a full time human being tutored supports the main teacher, educator, Professor, tell you what you as an educator need to hear even very basic
things. So for example, a basic example is yes, okay, the average grade of a class is six. But it's different if it's everybody around six, or how the standard health is true. So I could code this as well, it's super easy, but LMS is not telling you this, or a more complex example, we will be able in a couple of months to predict dropouts, we will 70% correct rate after four months and a bit less correct rate after a few.
So this is a good example. So based on the behavior of users on the platform, how much we are engaged how much we chat, you can guess if we're going to believe a course soon. So there is a lot to do related to smart assistants statistics, reading what's happening. So a platform it is not just the scripting is practically telling you to educators, what to do and to decision makers, what to do as well, for example, this educator is not performing well at all.
That's powerful i The model that you're pursuing there, this idea that educators are at the heart of the system, you're using cohort based learning, it's all about, you know, connection, the AI can support by sort of, like, as you say, proactively pulling trends and data predictions out of what's happening all the back end, you know, click data and user data, is I think it'd be music to a lot of educators ears, right, because you hear educators worried about AI sort of coming in and impinging on
their work. But the flip side of it, and I think the hopeful side of it is that it takes the work they don't want to do out of their hands and says, we'll tell you if somebody's at risk of dropping out. We'll tell you, you know what your class is talking about this week and summarize it for you, like things that you can really use and just get back to the actual educating and communicating
is that yes, I did. Educators would be scattered for sure. So it will be another kind of music, especially on the last part of the schoolmaster, or the l&d department had understanding they're performing well or not. So we'll always have to Good, good, good percentage of scattered locators. Yeah, good percentage
of scared educators. That's just, I wish education was an easier field to be in so many people, you know, so many of the aspects of it, can we talk a little bit about Europe and about what's happening in Italy, I think it's so interesting in sort of preparing for this interview, you're based in Milan, Italy, amazing place, I think fashion capital of the world, all sorts
of things. But not as well known for ad tech as some of the other big European cities, Berlin has a lot of ad tech, London, one of the reports that Paris is the number one city for edtech. But I found an interesting article about the Italian ad tech scene. And I just want to drop a couple of quotes in here. And then I'd love to hear your experience on the ground. So a couple of stats. So, you know, this is often you know, this is also
somewhat pandemic related. But, you know, according to this article, you know, Italy only represented 2%, of all European edtech value, but it was the fastest growing in southern Europe. And among the fastest growing in the entire continent of Europe, it's grown 5.5x, between 2017 and 2022. And you can hear from your numbers and your number of employees that you've done that that's obviously you've experienced that the enterprise value of all
the companies grew a lot. And the top five companies represent more than a third of all of the ecosystem value. So there's a few big winners and maybe a very long tail. And of course, you are in that top five, along with companies like talent garden, and epi code. So you are obviously one of the winning companies in this nascent but fast growing scene. What does that look like from the crowd? How do you actually experience that outside of the statistics?
For who doesn't know the context, I think it's useful to also talk about digital industry in general, because there are features and dynamics that are specific to attack and others that are more related to digital in general, the startup ecosystem in Italy is pretty weak, because the startup ecosystem is around the flywheel between the sides of the market that should buy your products, the talent, how much it's easy to find talent, and
the capital. Starting from the venture capital area, we have only really a few venture capitals, but more than 50 million to investor, I would say not more than six or so things are improving a lot. Also, thanks to the state that has launched a pretty big fund. But that's the situation. From a talent perspective, we have pretty bad statistics and enrolling to university and studying STEM related subjects
computer engineering design. So it's not the best country to hire the kind of capabilities that you need to run a digital startup. And well, the size of market addressable market really depends. Let's talk about education, but it's pretty small, we are 60 60 million people. And so if you want to do something big, you want to you want larger markets, ad tech, so ad tech in Europe, or in Europe, we speak all different languages. And this doesn't help
for sure. We don't have the large venture capitals held by pension funds, for example, that vary in the States. And in Italy, the public education system is super strong, and they just pay the teachers. And there is no culture not not, there is no culture. I'm talking about the feminist of investing more money in online services, tutoring services. So the feminists tend to finger it is
fine. But if they pay the textbooks that are requested to be bought, and we are among the best spenders in textbooks in Europe, so 1/10 Of all the textbooks in Europe are more, it's actually more, it's 600 million out of 4 billion of textbooks in Europe are spent in Italy. But that's it when nobody's spending money to do math courses certification. The private industry is a body of education is super small. Everything, as I mentioned, is
connected. So as an investor, I wouldn't like to invest money in an industry where there is no uninteresting addressable market. So that's one reason. And that's why if a company that you've mentioned the giant attack are all to the gas, focusing a lot on growing abroad, because there is like a cap.
We've talked on the podcast in our sections, sort of editorial sections about exactly what you're saying that one of the sort of biases against some European ed tech is that there are all these built in barriers, because you have the small segmented addressable markets. And it sounds like there's even additional barriers in Italy in terms of the perception of technology versus traditional textbook learning. And you know, the hiring base that was a really thorough and
interesting overview. So let's talk about the globalization or you know, Europeanisation the spread. It's a pity because the Europeans invented education. And now we're lagging so much. Yeah. The first college in the world was what Oxford right I think is what no I know that Italy has some incredibly, incredibly old universities as well, I should look them up. But it is a shame that said, you know, I think Europe still does a lot of things really well, I'm a big fan of the European ITT
Tech system. You mentioned something really interesting before, if you were to start over, you would make sure that your C suite had people from multiple cultures within Europe to avoid sort of being to Italy focused. Tell us a little bit about that, and how you've learned that, and what you are doing to sort of break through and change not only languages, but also the cultures and educational systems that are in different countries all around Italy,
having different cultures is crucial, first of all, to attract talent. So top talent, nobody wants to join a local company. But the real top talent. Secondly, of course, is needed from an operational perspective to be effective with clients, because you tend to be very narrowed and focused and adaptive only two kinds of client that represents the culture that you express. From a financial perspective, I've been
seeing a new trend. So after the capital markets, well, what happened what happened in February 2022. And all the valuation went down, and it became super hard to fundraise. The fact of being European base is for also you as investors pretty interesting just because we can, we are not in we weren't in that salary bubble where US was in, we're just able to do free X with the same amount of money, but that could be fundraising in us. So I had very recent conversation with venture
capital. And they were, of course, super interested in our achievements. But they were shocked by the ratio between our achievement and how much we had spent because we had fundraise 6.5 million, but actually spent just a couple. So we have grown to 70 people, we've just a couple of million. And that's pretty well, rare in us, of course, for me is Mizzou
completely impossible. So what I'm saying is that it's not just about a diverse culture to be more effective and attract talent, the globalization of capitals is changing as well.
And this will have an impact, I think, in the, in the long term after COVID, where if you are a great designer, you can just do that from I had a colleague from Nigeria, a great designer, he is working with us salaries, and we cannot ignore this because this is already changing how much money intrapreneurs need to start a company, and in general, the geographical location of talent and companies.
So really interesting, rundown, I didn't expect you to go in that direction. But it makes so much sense that you can do more with less capital if the talent is less expensive. And then by expanding your geography, especially because Italy is right in the Mediterranean sort of touches, you know, the whole Middle East of Northern Africa. And of course, you can go up into Europe, you have a lot of different labor pools to tap into. It makes sense that you
can do more with less. And that is something I actually haven't heard said about European tech companies. But it seems very clear, it seems very obvious as soon as you say it, but I have never thought about it that way. So what is your perspective on the future of European edtech? Sometimes it's seen as this
rocket ship. And it's really you know, the some of the unicorns over the last few years have come out of Europe, sometimes it's seen as fragmented, as we just mentioned, and having a lot of local markets and that don't always connect, where do you think it's all going? And what do you think your role with we school can do and sort of paving a path to success in the market.
I'm super, of course, optimistic on my company. But frankly, so I'm a European romantic from this perspective. So I'm in love with Europe, I will stay here. But I don't think we will manage to as Europe to have the focus and invest. But we would need to do what for example, China is done. Seven years ago, with a so called Sputnik moment, a moment of AI China were very light. But when AlphaGo was defeated by well AlphaGo won, and on the champion of go play the Chinese
Go player. And so we should do something similar, hundreds of billions dedicated to attack at the European level. But look at about what's happening. We haven't yet managed to elect a prime minister of Europe. We have countries that wants to go out from Europe and did that. So this will not happen, frankly.
So you're pessimistic because of the political landscape? Yes,
the kind of stuff that should happen, needs to be done at European level, each country's too small to do it. And it's not just about attack, the European government has no power enough and delegation of power from the Member State. To do that. We have been working a lot now with Commissioner gabrial So we are regional representative working with the Commissioner of Education to push the European
ad tech ecosystem. I've worked a lot with then the education responsibility is at the county level, as always, well sorry about the economics degree me It's so it's all about incentive. Wherever I know enough incentive to make AI investment that you know The China did seven years ago to try to catch up. So we will be pushed between super two strong poles, which are areas which is
China and us. And it's really like that, because if you see globally, the top at tech companies are mainly part of virtue blocks.
Do you think that the evolution of AI, especially in the realm of instant translation, might accelerate the ability for individual ad text within European countries to spread across Europe?
Yes, but No, now we need to wait for human to machine technologies. So that while I speak in Italia, you understand me in English and vice versa, right, we evolved the layer of translation done by the technology. But and this will not happen in the next 15 years. So that's
interesting. And especially because your cohort based and synchronous, and it's all about real time learning. So it's different than translating a reading or, you know, a
tech stock video asset. Really interesting. That's a commodity already. Yeah,
which is already commoditized. I want to ask one more question about this, because this is such an interesting and hyper informed perspective about it, when you say that Europe is, you know, between China and America, and that the only way that it could really play on the world stage is by working collectively, but it's not incentivized to do so.
I want to dig into that incentive, because my understanding is that that is the whole point of the European Union in the first place, was basically to be able to have to do exactly that, to have a major block of population and money that goes beyond any individual country and can compete with the biggest countries in the world. So why in education, is there no incentive, you would think that Europe doesn't want to be outpaced in by America or China
in education or AI? Why don't they want to invest in this.
So they would need to move from Rome to Brazil, the responsibility of education. So also the Recovery Fund, which is the big European plan to fight with, and after COVID, to help the states to catch up, there is a lot of money on education, but they are managed by the states and the state will be set will not accept this delegation of power, because politicians would lose votes were very focused. So in Italy, the Italian school system
is the main employer. And so the fact of delegating the control of the main employer, which is the employer of teachers, is a suicide, nobody will ever do it. And also, I know that in the States was consistent is different from state to state, of course, but you have a common culture that is probably a bit more stronger compared to the diversity that you could see between the Finnish school system and the Italian one. I don't think this we're going to happen in this days,
and years. So it sounds like the lack of incentive is at the country level, not at the European continent level.
I'm sure the commission of commission would like to take more responsibility and power.
Right? Yeah, we do sometimes face some similar issues between state and federal education in the US. But at this point, US states have pretty different cultures than each other, but probably not as different as, as Italy and Finland, as you say. So you know, you're obviously have a lot of predictions about the
future. I'm curious how you see the global ad tech field evolving over the next few years, you know, what are some trends that you see coming, that you think are going to change things you've mentioned web three, very, some foreshadowing, tell us about what you see coming?
I would mention a couple of already happening and a couple of more recent and new. The old one weather continuing and changing a lot, I think are unschooling so the fact of losing this idea that there is the first part of your life where you learn, and then the second one, you work, and a lot still needs to be done, because that's what still happening the majority of cases,
but it's happening. And the second is the death of, of courses, the content of courses, which is a playlist of content, it will really and it's reaching to an experience. So we are so pre programmed about thinking about courses, but we cannot see that but we're dying. The new trends while for sure, we're free in the sense that blockchain are by nature, but tool that will be used in in 10 years, by educators to say what they want to say about learners.
These are the credentials, the certificates, there is no meaning. And if we talk about companies, schools, universities same, I will just send you a badge that everybody can see and build stuff upon. So if you have a lot of good feedback from your employer, your school, your university, you will probably get a lot cheaper loan because everything is public and they will be able through the FBI to build complex solution around your educational credentials.
And the second is of course, AI but I want to be a bit more specific. I think that human beings will continue to create the structural design experience and to run the experience so they will be very be replaced, AI will play a major role in creating the content. And of course, advising the educator in reading what's happening as we were discussing before. So these are the two things that the human being will continue to do and the tool that AI will, will do on his behalf.
All the music to all the instructional designers listening to this to their ears, because that would make a job that is safe from the AI. Really interesting. You know, I've never heard anybody put it that way, the idea of like the death of courses, it's a very catchy and interesting, interesting way to put it. But it's true. I mean, just the concept of a course just like the concept of, you know, a credit hour or some of the other things we've inherited from many years ago, it could be
antiquated. And I think we've all used that metaphor for online courses, obviously. But maybe in the future, the concept of a playlist based course really, or maybe even in the present, it's already moving away in favor of tick tock style learning or live Cohort Based Learning or, you know, learning that works on a platform that acts like Slack, like you've been talking about for Wii school, it's very interesting to think about, I'm sure our listeners are intrigued by that
idea. And what is a resource that you would recommend? Yeah, we've had talked about a lot of great stuff today, if our listeners wanted to go deeper in anything, we've talked about what is a resource that you might not have heard of that you would recommend?
One thing that I've always found super difficult to do is to rely on research. So as an intrapreneur, you want to see what the research is doing to to create new products. But we don't have the time and frankly, relying on a single paper is a suicide, I would probably mention the the new version of the book visible learning, which is an aggregation of meta researches. So it's 2000, I guess, or 3000 meter researches, each of them compares multiple papers. And this is really crucial for
edtech intrapreneurs. Because it's a way to get value finally, from research, but diversifying the risk. And having a very aggregated view, which has value way that entrepreneurs can approach research, I think,
awesome suggestion that is one of my favorite books as well as nobody's ever suggested it is by John Hattie, the New Zealand based educator. And it was one of my favorite books in my instructional design career as well, for exactly the reasons you just named. It takes 1000s of papers, and 1000s of meta analysis of these papers and drills them down into what works and what doesn't work. So what So, exactly, so what what can
you do with it? I remember one thing that stood out to me about his book is The he talked about the sort of Outward Bound programs, the outdoor programs, being one of the most effective learning methods in the world when you're actually like learning to mountain climb or learning to be out in the woods
and orienteer. And he explains exactly why you know, instructors model if the stakes are high, everybody's engaged, if you are not paying attention, when somebody shows you how to repel down a mountain, you're you're in trouble. And it was really interesting. And he said, you know, if we could harness some of the learning that happens in these outdoor programs in other contexts, we'd be powerful. I've always been looking for an opportunity to do that awesome recommendation.
That's visible learning by John Hattie. We will put that link to that book in the show notes. As always, you obviously have your economics, your demographics, your instructional design, and your CEO chops on full display today. There's been a really, really interesting conversation. Thanks so much for being here with us marco de Rossi, CEO of we school.
Thanks for having me.
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