Symposium⨂ EdTech "Keys to the Future" featured Macmillan Learning, DAISY Consortium, and edX
Hello everyone I m Rachel Yager Head of WebInnovationX global think tank and the W3C New York Metro Chapter Welcome to EdTechX Innovation Week today is Wednesday October 6th 2021 and we are having SymposiumX which is basically a gathering of the industry leaders in talking about how we are building the next generation of emerging technologies and standards for business innovation I invited three industry leaders to share the innovation strategy starting with Lee Rubenstein and Lee is from at VP of business development and Paul Belfanti VP product, content systems from Macmillan learning and George Kerscher CIO of Daisy Consortium so let me explain the format how we're going to do this one and a half session it's a very exciting session as you as you can see in front of you we have truly leaders in what it takes to build education technologies and what are the keys to the future as we look towards 2022 and beyond let me talk about how we're going to spend one and a half hours first each speaker will be presenting their thoughts about innovation strategy and about 15 minutes and the and about and the audience can you can click on the Q&A in the attendee hub to ask any questions that you may have and after that at about 12 noon eastern time we will be coming back together all the all the other featured speakers will be coming back together and we will be having some panel discussion so stay tuned stay tight at your seat and let us let stay through the one and half hour and it's going to be very exciting thank you now I m going to turn to Lee and I m going to stop sharing my screen yeah Great okay hang on one second and here we go thank you Rachel I assume you can see my screen and the audience can as well yes we can see yesterday terrific thank you well it's a pleasure to be with everybody today here I am a VP of business development at edX and make sure I try to figure out how we can make the slides move and me there we go it's very important for everyone to understand that at edX we started with a goal of making access to the world's top courses from the world's best universities available to anyone on the planet that wanted to take them and we did this back in 2012 we started with one course from MIT by edX's founder Anant Agarwal and at that time we figured if we could get 5 000 people to sign online for one of these brand new mooc courses massive open online courses it would be successful enough for us to invest behind and continue to do more as a nonprofit and interestingly enough after the first 48 hours or so we had 125 000 people register for the course and about 175 000 register over two weeks before the course started so we knew we were on to something this was a brand new way for us to think about reaching the masses with access to education that they would not normally have an opportunity to get and so we quickly expanded our vision and the vision was to create a world where everybody interested in learning would have an opportunity to come online and go do that they could learn for free or they could learn and get a certificate from the university or institution that they were interested in getting it from on edX and ultimately while we started with MIT and Harvard we soon had over 160 different partners creating courses on edX and what was very interesting is that we started off with a mandate to only use universities but over a couple of years we expanded the idea to include courses that would come from people that were like-minded institutions that were corporations and NGOs maybe it was the world bank or the IMF or in this case IBM and one of the very first to join was the world wide web consortium and the W3C was an amazing innovator at that time in helping us create courses that they ran on the edX platform for literally hundreds of thousands of learners that wanted to take them because those learners were interested in how do I get the skills I need to be relevant in the job market or in the job I have today it opened our eyes because some of us have had a 40-year experience developing online learning or learning through or training for corporations that were delivered across many different mediums some of them more successful than others all of them expensive time consuming and hard to distribute and here we were in a whole new world order to do that and so I tell you this by means of background as we begin to have a conversation today about what we ve learned over that time and what has the impact of cove had been and how much has the industry changed how much has the mindset of employers changed and learners and employees and those that aspire to create better lives for themselves have changed in the access points that they're using in order to get there and what does that mean in terms of the technology so in order to understand the situation I think it helps to tell you a little bit about edX for a second in terms of the numbers and what the data is right now edX has over 30 million registered learners on the platform they're taking over 110 million courses actually since we last put this slide together it's 140 million course enrollments there are about 3 600 courses there are 160 some partners and out of those people that have come and take courses and just looked and browsed for free or have decided that they wanted to register for a nominal fee for the certificate we ve issued 2.1 million certificates to date for courses completed if you could imagine what would happen in a university classroom it would literally take you centuries to reach that many people as an individual contributor so we ve got top institutions and the learners have decided that they wanted to get more than single courses their feedback was very immediate and they said I am looking to build a skill or competency why we didn't care at that point but what we did know is that the learners wanted to go beyond a single course it was more than curiosity they wanted to use technology in order to develop a competency so we structured the competence the courses into series or sequences that one could take in order to build a competency the very first one was called a micro masters the micro masters came from MIT it was their idea supply chain is something they were very famous for everybody was looking to hire people with supply chain experience people wanted to migrate up the food chain from I m just an administrator too I would like to be in supply chain it pays better there's openings at my company and so they created something called a micro masters the micro masters was 50 of the master's degree at MIT but no application fee just come and take it you take the micro masters it was a series of four courses and you pass it you would get something that was a certificate that was backed by credit what did that mean it meant that if you applied to MIT they would give you 50 off the time and the cost of getting a supply chain master's degree on campus and so it was a flag and one of the first flags I think to the corporate environment that if MIT stood behind this and thought it was worth 50 of a master's degree I can be pretty confident that the people that are taking these courses are going to have the skills that they would need to be successful there that makes them an elite class first of all they showed they had the grit and rigor to find something like edX to find this type of learning to be persistent and to complete it and to pass it because it's an MIT hard master's degree a sea change started to happen at that point and one of the sea changes was employers began to think about the traditional ways they would typically interview and hire for positions and begin to assume that maybe there were alternatives coming to the forefront that would change the way they looked at hiring and promotion forever but it's a slow journey the next series was what do you do if there's a series of courses and they're not from schools that don't have master's degrees those were called professional certificate programs IBM Linux World Wide Web Consortium others have all put together professional certificate programs and then finally micro bachelors which is our newest which is I would like to create courses that one could get for credit with no application fees at a low cost that would issue a transcript immediately from the edX universities who were making courses for adults that had no college or some college no degree that needed the skills to get entry level or middle skilled jobs in the most high demand areas today so you could be a barista but if you wanted to get into cloud computing or IT services or data science you could take these series of three and four courses in order to move forwards and do that so sorry went wrong pretty cool now things were progressing and I think everything that we were doing every day was building towards what could potentially be a really different way for people to imagine their careers and education we also thought about the idea of a four-year university and we're talking about technology now so with a audience that is now entering college that was born with a mobile device in their hand the idea of a four-year university is really a 250 year old construct that doesn't necessarily match the world we live in today think of all the people that could get the education they need without having to leave home or to go to campus or to pay that tremendous cost and there's lots of reasons for them to not do that they could now participate in this great new economy as we entered the 21st century so what happened with coven kind of interesting a super double whammy the first thing was all of the schools had to go to remote so did the workplace and they had very little in terms of tools that they could use in order to continue education or to continue training and they found edX so in one month in April of 2020 we had five million new registrations on the platform that was more registrations in one month than we did in an entire year so the audience found us and we have very little money to advertise so it's not about the advertising it's about the technology and then when they came and had the experience they found that they were in a multi-dimensional adaptive learning world where they would have an interleaved learning sequence that included video but it would also include readings to include included discussion forums 40 different assessment types not your granddad's old timey online education their open response assessments and labs and tools and coding sandboxes really fascinating how many people especially when we started looking and they were unemployed were coming and looking for a new normal for themselves so we saw an uptick in learners that way it was time to begin to survey the learners and have a discussion with them about why they were doing what they were doing it's very interesting when you have a platform and you're capturing every keystroke and you're analyzing it to spend some time thinking about why people are doing what they're doing versus exactly what they're doing than trying to interpret that yourselves so we surveyed literally millions of learners in order to figure out what was going on and this is what we saw initially from that and I wanted to share with you because I think it s understanding the marketplace itself that drives the ability to create technical change that's going to serve an audience that's already there too many times we invest in tools and research and solutions that don't necessarily match with what your audience is looking for in the first place so who took what and why 25 of the people were taking it because they wanted to up skill in their current job why did they want to do that well we ve all heard a lot of the conversation about how many of jobs are going to be eliminated due to AI and robotics over the next five to six years and I think that there was some interest in inoculating themselves against being swept away in jobs that were going to no longer be required in modern work but there was another side to it too and that was that if I don't maintain my relevancy with the speed of technological change and the information that's available then somebody's going to leapfrog over me and they're going to get those skills and they're going to not have to go to a university and do it they'll be able to get them online and then they're going to be able to apply them to this job and I won't be relevant anymore and so for those of us that thought school started and ended with our four-year degree because that's the way it was for decades and decades especially for my generation then I think all of us have started to realize we need to become lifelong learners in order to maintain a relevancy but where can we go to get that so this the mooc platforms and the online learning not just from edX but from many different providers are a solution to that some of them just had more time okay and then the 16 of them were replacing schools so that was interesting but as we dug deeper into this over the last 12 months one of the things we found from them was that we had a massive number of employees coming to the platform and 50 of them were indicating they needed new skills and they were remote and there was no one to tell them what to do where to go what they should take and I think that we ve had a we ve uncovered a great hole in our employment and management system and our hr systems of not necessarily knowing where the skills gaps were and being able to point our employees at the skills gaps in saying here's the solutions that you could undertake on your own in order to fill that gap and then you would be really super important to our organization 70 of the CEOs were telling us they were concerned about the availability of key skills at all this this ended up being part of a conversation about why we should think about reinventing higher education in other words you're paying a lot of money to take a four-year education and carrying a lot of debt and coming to my company but you don't have the skills you need to frankly be very relevant or hit the ground running and so you're not worth the money that we would need to pay you in order to help you sublimate the debt that you took on where to get that degree so that's kind of a big deal certainly it's a big deal in the student population a very big deal for those that decided college wasn't for them but now that they've been in the workforce for a couple of years for whatever life circumstances were have decided that I wish I had made other choices but there's no possible way I can leave my house my home my family and my current job to go live on campus somewhere with a bunch of rising freshmen interestingly 77 of employees were willing to retrain but one of the things that became clear to us and that they indicated was that if an employer was going to offer the opportunity and subsidize the cost of that retraining then it was going to act as an anchor to keep them in the jobs they were in or at the company they were in and there was a notoriety that had developed around especially millennials staying about two two and a half years at a job before they wanted to move on and find something more challenging we were unlocking what one of the challenges was and we were doing it kind of during covid by finding out how fast and how quickly they were migrating to take these courses and at that point 70 percent of the students that are on FedEx that we saw either had a college degree or a postgrad degree so clearly they were thinking hard about what it is they should do and how they should do it but more importantly we were thinking about the other 70 of people that didn't have college degrees what they should do and how they should go about and do it so as we look at where learners are today we see there's a demand for future proof programs this is what they're signing up for data science computer science sustainability business and leadership courses and I could tell you with I think some authority that we saw a great difference between what they enrolled in prior to covet and what they enrolled in postcode health and safety became number one obviously there were reasons around the world that people would want to take courses on how to use a ventilator 250 000 people signed up in one day for a ventilator course that Harvard put on edX that they offered for free so a little bit of an anomaly in terms of what people want to take but interestingly while the seven years before had seen a focus on technical skills all of a sudden the leaders in the companies that were doing the hiring started talking about the fact that they would like to have people that also had leadership social skills soft skills which is what they call them we ve called them human skills and power skills and the conversations that we ve had I love power skills as a term because it really is about how you can take the ideas that you've got and work to develop and move the company and the business forward it's not just about what you know technically so pre-2020 this was the world as we saw it a hundred percent on campus zero percent online and then as you look at the new normal this is what we're going to see now we went to 100 online zero percent on campus and so our prediction going forward is that the new normal will be 60 on campus 40 online that's that extends into the corporate training world as well so in the corporate training world while many trainings may have taken place in person less and less will and there's more and more outreach to be able to get the skills that you need by going to outside resources that match the learning pathways and the skills taxonomies that have been developed in the industry LinkedIn has just done edX and as has adopted mz and burning glasses 36 000 skills tagged to every single course in the platform and there's a great new way to find out what it is you need to know and how you want to get there to go do it so people generally are upskilling for career mobility that's where the technical opportunity is and when you do that you have to see what's trending what we can do with 110 million courses being taken is tell you what's trending it's critical thinking and problem solving people are trying to cope with remote work we shouldn't think about this as something that people naturally do it takes a different skill set to be self-sustaining and persistent in taking and completing a course even if there's a community around you and they want in-demand skills that are going to be transportable as they move from place to place so interestingly what did those people do over the last year 91 of them reported they took the courses and they had a positive career outcome 79 of them complete courses why is that important at a state university level the completion rate runs between 61 and 63 on average and if you were to look at a mooc platform and see how many people were taking courses they didn't take them necessarily in order to complete them but business learners did and 79 is a shockingly high number and it really speaks to I think the motivation of the people that are involved there so they're taking multiple courses they're taking courses that will take them to where they want to go and I think the fact that they now seem to be taking about two and a third courses over a year indicates that there's a pattern there so what do we have to do in terms of innovation the first one is education has to be modular think about a course as a number of modules that are stackable that get you to an end result that you want versus something that may have been prescribed previously if you sat in the classroom it also needs to be omni-channel so it's great that we have online but hybrid is probably the best answer and I m speaking more to corporates than I at I am to schools that there are some in person learning and there is some online learning and it's going to be lifelong there's no reason that people are going to stop or need to stop or should stop especially when we ve got a pace of change that's so fast when learners take and complete a course on edX they get a certificate and if it's a Harvard course they get it from Harvard it's built into the system they're now using this as the coin of the realm it's very important for people to understand it every learner that takes a course and gets a certificate is posting it to their profile they're posting it to their social media site they're sending it to their employer and there's a new trend which I think is critically important for us to also be aware of is something that I ve noticed over the last few months and this is where employers have started to call companies like edX at scale and say I need to hire thousands of people I would like to mine the learners that have certificates in certain areas maybe it's java maybe it's cloud maybe it's something in business and finance data analytics is a popular one imagine just imagine a world where all of a sudden employers are not running ads online looking for people who have four-year degrees but say I would like to find people that have just this credential it's fine and one of the things that we're looking to do I think as we move to the future is to think about how we can get employers to run the test that would say I hired this person it cost me far less I had far more candidates they carried less debt when I compared their performance to those that we hired through more traditional means which includes recruiters and paying commissions etc. we found that these people performed equally well if not better than people that we traditionally brought in and by the way a lot of these people that are reorganizing their lives or their careers for their working moms or their returning to the workforce they're willing to work generally for a lot less money than a smaller portfolio of candidates that may have four-year degrees that show up whose resumes end up in the stack for evaluation so there's benefits on both sides it's a huge uplift from a low-paying hourly job great career great future build your community provide economic security to your family provide variance and diversity in the workforce and I can't tell you a single company that isn't being held accountable by their shareholders for what they're doing in diversity equity and inclusion in these days going forward and this is a way that companies can bring more people into the fold which only betters the world situation the other interesting thing about technology for global companies in this type of learning is that it doesn't matter if I don't know anything about the schools that you have available to you in argentina or in india or in canada or in the us if you've all taken and passed the same rigorous courses from the same top 200 world-ranked universities I know that you have a sense of the skills that we are probably going to need to have in our company that you've acquired on your own for a very low cost and I think that that helps us think about people in a different way than we did before depending on where they came from what school they went to this is the school for the future for all of us and these were these skills pathways are ones that we see as the most popular so some of you may be more interested in that tomorrow's workforce they're looking for these courses I m not going to spend a lot of time on that now because I m running a little short but I wanted you to be aware that these exist and this is the future of work and learning we think this is here to stay it's blended there will be continuous upskilling in alternative pathways I think the new normal is a good thing I hope that you think it's a good thing technology and the open source code that we ve put out as well as what others will be doing will greatly enhance the future and I thank you so much for letting me have some time with you and with that I ll stop sharing my screen Thank you Lee first I just want to recognize and what an honor we have today to have you your true veteran of the mooc this business model and for so many years that we are seeing it evolving until like today you know like boom you know with that pandemic you know and this explosion and so one of the question is that how do you see mooc evolve what's your what's your take on it you know what's your what's your sentiments or even your thinking your own personal feeling like you see this right from you know in the beginning in Harvard and MIT I can only imagine maybe you start with a small little room or lab to think about all this planning and then now this is it right and there's a lot of skeptics and also a lot of people naysayer right you know and also caution from the education institution but now today how do you see this evolve during all these years Lee can you mute or unmute yourself yes sorry I think there was a lot of hesitation in the beginning about this in mooc v1 where it was here to replace professors and they were going to lose their jobs and then we got to v2 and now we're in I d say v3 of this here's what's to come first all schools are going to adapt some type of online learning that is going to involve something similar to moocs and it's going to start in grade school there is no way that we can train enough teachers and educators on the most high demand emerging topics like coding that could even work at an elementary school level so this is something students are going to start to experience now and through life they're going to continue to use that and when they get to college they will no longer be subjected into this is your major you cannot take courses in the school of engineering if you're in the school of business if you're in the school of ex you will form your own curriculum the second thing that I think is going to happen is we're tied up in this concept of courses right now today but down the road think about it as being very adaptive where I go this is what I need to learn I need a module from this course and a module from that course the module from this course I m creating my own pathway based on the skills tagging that I m trying to get and I don't have to sit through 10 hours of course where if I have 10 hours of things I want from different courses to make the perfect opportunity for me to learn I think you'll see a lot more in adaptive that way and I think that you'll see the ability for people to create cohorts on the go so right now putting together a cohort in a course is possible we do it all the time there's an expense involved with that but if I wanted to form a cohort as a company I could do that if I wanted to take four or five people and say this is our particular area of interest and we want to have a discussion forum that's all our own because we're developing new transformational code in other products I think that that's going to be something that's very realistic to expect and to see that over the next five years or so another question from audience is how did you cope with this rapid growth during this pandemic you know like was there any surprises you know challenges that you can share the cool thing about this platform is that it was built to scale so it was only a matter of cost of adding more servers in order to go do that we already had 40 million people using the platform at any given time so I think that we did not suffer through a challenge like that if anything the challenge has been in trying to employ enough people to deal with the expansion so we need to I like to say eat our own dog food other people find that repulsive but there we need to create our own curriculum of what it would take to be a great engineer in our business make it available and then hire the people with that certificate I got to find the time to go do it you tie in this notion about the mindset of the employers in this whole equation right how do you see that was it a surprise to you or that was part of the business plan that you have all along it was a surprise it was always part of the dream that employers would recognize that we were reinventing higher education as educators and that the idea of a four-year degree was an outmoded concept maybe you should take one year on campus then a year an internship and then do something whatever there's a lot of different ways to look at it the fact that they came to this realization so quickly as it became harder and harder to find people to employ was amazingly interesting and now they were using it as a way to retain employees in jobs that the employees didn't want in the first place which is this is the most interesting there's two really interesting things if I have a second I ll tell you if you'll allow me to tell you about them the first one was we know you don't want to be an amazon truck driver but we need truck drivers and if you'll join us we will subsidize the courses online that you need in order to get the job you want here or somewhere else if we can get two years out of you instead of one and a quarter that's a massive savings and major retailers whether it's Walmart or Starbucks or amazon have gone down this route and found it to be successful and that it really works the other thing that's really interesting as part of the way to attract employees is that they say if you're going to exit here then we are going to provide you access to education that will allow you to get the job you really want somewhere else and it's not because they're letting them go though in some cases it has been related to that we have many corporations that have bought millions of dollars worth of access for learners who are departing employees and it I think builds good will it provides them with an opportunity never thought I d see that not in a million years but it's happening so quickly it's really I think one of the major goals we ve got and that's to include people that don't have college degrees or couldn't afford to go get them so that they can enter the workforce if they've got the grit desire time and opportunity to take the courses and the topics that are interesting to them that employers want to hire from zip recruiters elsewhere in the world are also running programs to figure out what you need on your resume and refer them to online courses that would allow you to make twenty thousand dollars more if you had this certificate or credential based on what they're being asked by employers thank you lee this is really I don't think we can get all this insights from anyone else from you right right from you know you have been there right from the beginning so thank you so much can you can I now ask Lee to stay and for the panel discussion later Paul can you mute yourself and share your camera and thank you Lee for the presentation and now I m welcome Paul Belfanti from Macmillan learning Hi everyone can you see my screen okay yes okay so I m Paul Belfanti I m VP products of content systems for Macmillan learning and I m going to be talking about the future trends in EdTech from the perspective of an educational publisher so a lot of these trends were already in motion before covid but obviously covet really accelerated them from a customer focus I mean of course we're always looking to meet the customer where they are but because of covid we really amp that up there were a lot of instructors who may not have actually adopted our digital products maybe they were just using a print product we offered our digital products to them got with a you know significant human investment from our specialists and our customer service folks you know got them helped us to set up their courses and do all that and as a result not only did we generate some good will but coming out of you know the intensity of the first wave of the pandemic and that transition there are a lot more instructors that are now comfortable with technology or see the value of where it can play in a in a blended course so we are focusing on courseware of course and that means ease of use in a large degree we want to be able to have an intuitive way of creating a course sometimes we'll provide a standard template with a pre-built course that then the instructor can modify or they can start from scratch but in order to do that we got to make sure that all the resources and content that we provide are easy to find organized in an intuitive way and that you know creating activities assigning them creating your calendar syncing to gradebook all that stuff is as straightforward and as user-friendly as possible and of course we got to enable customization we feel very strongly about the quality of the content and the resources that we provide in our courses but of course instructors have their own good content that they're going to want to incorporate and there's third-party content that they may want to integrate as well and so to make that very possible very easy to do is key to making the whole system work and of course we want to prioritize student engagement as well where we're having more contact you know traditionally publishers went through the gatekeeper of the instructor the or the department to adopt products and the student was just you know kind of a pass through on the other side but we're engaging with students directly more and more and we want to make sure that we're creating an immersive experience that's really engaging for them on a number of ways and we ve got data that shows that when we do reach the right level of engagement when students are completing assignments and doing you know the kind of activities that we ve designed to optimize their learning experience their grades improve and it also can be a real leveler of you know for students that are coming into the education system the higher education system for the first time as opposed to you know traditional students that have a a history in their families and are well prepared for college the resources in these courses can level that up it can close those gaps in a meaningful way and because of the data that we're able to collect from these platforms we can create reports and insights we can we can show the effectiveness of using the courses and the materials we can show performance data to instructors both on an individual student level and a more macro level and not just on the basis of how students are doing around a particular assignment or group of assignments but even in a more macro level to around let's say all assignments that are associated with a particular learning objective and by doing so we can also create recommendations when we see certain trends coming back from that data we can point instructors to resources within the course they can help them close the gaps that are being exposed by some of the data that we're seeing and another you know key part is that commitment to diversity equity and inclusion and I don't mean in a gratuitous way I mean in a meaningful way there's a real commitment that has to be made to make sure that the content that students are engaging with are reflective of the kind of diversity that that exists in the in the student population and that includes accessibility it's an important aspect of it makes actually the performance of online courses better for everyone and of course you want to make sure that everyone who wants to learn has the ability to learn from a more internal facing focus it means that we need to go about creating and delivering our content and our products in a and our services in a different way in a more holistic way you know the tradition in a higher ed publishing has been a pretty linear one you think in terms of ink on paper you make a book you might digitize that book into an eBook and then enhance it and distribute it within the courseware etc. etc. but that's not the way to really go about creating a holistic experience so you want to create a collaborative environment where the different people contributors authors who are creating instructional material assessment interactives rich media all the different components can work together can see what each other is doing can communicate with each other so that it's being built up in as a as a whole strategy not in this kind of sequential handoff and I I ll do my part you'll do your part and we ll stitch it together down the line we want to be more agile and innovative in our product development take a take on a test and learn culture which means we want to be able to put together a new idea package it within our courseware environment and present it to our customers get their feedback rinse and repeat until we feel like we ve got something that s going to be meaningful and have traction in the market as opposed to saying mocking something up in a PowerPoint or a word document say this is what it's going to look like when we get to the courseware that s not a meaningful way to get feedback all this means digital first approach right you want to center around an online structured authoring environment where there's that immediacy of content creation where people can review comment make corrections directly you can take a single source multi-output approach meaning you have one source of truth that can carry information for multiple outputs whether it's print whether it's digital eBook etc. profile different things you know have a have a static image that's going to go into a print product but maybe substitute that for a video if it's going into digital and then you can filter those things out to say if it's going to this target I want this stuff and I don't want that stuff but that common information that exists across all the different permutations is in one place so if you need to make a correction if you want to update make a change you do it in one place and you push it out to all the different permutations continuous improvement is a key way to think of the future where we might change our approach to let's say the instructional content so we make it so that it has a longer shelf life so to speak where the information is more is less likely to change over a period of time but then other information that is more variable that we'll be wanting to refresh is on the online component so you can update it you can refresh it economic data for example or health data covert is a great example right if you had a print book that it was published right before covid and you couldn't revise it for another two or three years that wasn't going to be a very relevant product pretty quickly and we want to have that data driven approach both internally as well as providing those capabilities to our customers so as we're thinking about how we want to improve our products over time we want to know you know of the stuff that we ve delivered how has it been received what's been assigned by professors have students completed the assignments how did they perform on those assignments what do we need to look at you know was it at the right level that we tagged it for if people are interested in something let's make more of that let's improve that if nobody is paying any attention to something we have to understand why and maybe do less of that content management strategies and knowledge management strategies I ll talk about a little bit more later but again a different approach from some of the traditions of the print legacy where things were organized in files structures based on individual titles or product families you need to take a more generic approach so that things can be discovered and related to each other so that you can pull together new configurations of things in in new structures and leveraging new technologies like artificial intelligence and natural language processing to automate some content classification you know crawl your content so you can map it to learning objectives or subject taxonomy terms and so forth again to make it more powerful to connect things and find and use them so from a technology perspective we're talking about digital transformation obviously and this is an industry that that has been has a long legacy of not being that digitally oriented even though we ve been working in a digital format for years but you need to think about much more of an ecosystem approach systems as opposed to tools there's a lot of components that that go into what makes up the content creation systems that were individual built for purpose tools that had to operate on their own but then they were part of something that you would then hand off to somebody else to do their thing etc. etc. now these things need to be much
more connected if you want to have that holistic collaborative experience that I was talking about these things need to be integrated and as a result you can find yourself with franken systems where you have all these individual components some built-in house some acquired some partnered that are are kind of bolted together now but because they of the different architectures and structures and so forth and the different ages of the software there can be friction as content passes from one part to another that can introduce errors or delays and so forth so you need to take a real look at what you've got and say you know can we can we remediate some of these things do we have to replace some of these things how close can we get to you know kind of a common architecture and code base where things can flow as fluidly as possible and you really really need to rethink your workflows everything I ve talked about so far right you can't say that we're going to produce new products and deliver them to our customers and test and learn and be agile by using the same workflows that we ve had traditionally so and if you do introduce new technology without redesigning those workflows you're going to spend a lot of money on that technology and you're not going to get anything from it and you're going to wonder why you know you're just not as productive or you're not as agile or innovative as you intended to be well it's because you didn't redesign the workflow to take advantage of that technology and I ll talk about that a little bit more in terms of how that workflow design actually should drive a lot of the decisions on how that technology is brought online and recognize that as publishers you're in the software business now income paper is not the mindset that you should go in on it can still be the output print is not going away anytime soon but it it s one it's one component of that larger ecosystem and experience and it's becoming increasingly more of a secondary or complementary component to you know a more holistic a more rich experience that can be delivered in an online course and you want to be able to have that continuous improvement that I talked about before you want to be able to be more efficient and faster to market and just realize that the same kind of practices in terms of standards in terms of the ability to make changes so you don't have to review everything a million times you know can allow you to do things that that we didn't do before the standards and best practices this is all built on starts with I think the semantic structures whether it's an xml or an xhtml structure you want to define your content in terms of what are its key elements how they fit together what are the reading orders the sequences and do all that independent of presentation right they're style sheets they re cascading style sheets for digital there's style sheets in in design or whatever for prints that will take care of that presentation layer but you want to have a detailed breakdown and knowledge of how your content is put together so that you can manipulate it you can grab certain things you can transform it in in innovative ways without doing a lot of manual intervention I talked about the holistic approach I won't cover that ground again but the metadata factor is I think a really key thing you need a knowledge management strategy and you need a governance structure around that and what I mean by that is you really need to take the time to understand what is it that you want to do with your content what does your customers want to do either content how do they want to acquire it how do they want to search for it how do they want to organize it and therefore how do you want to organize it how do you want to be able to find it and connect it to other content that you've got as you're planning and building and developing new new products and as a result of that you define content models that basically identify what are the key essential elements of metadata that you need to add to all your content and your assets that help to discover it to help to connect it to something else a lot of the systems that exist now in in the publishing world is for people to more easily find something that they already know is there and what we need is to be able to find things that we don't know are there and then and then finding that one connect to something else that s like it and the other thing that's like that or a little bit different but hey I didn't even know that existed I could be really interested in that I could really use that for something and I didn't even know it existed before tying things to learning objectives to topic terms etc. you know enhances all that ability to expand the view and make connections between things that they create much richer relationships and experiences and using those analytics as a result that you can pull that data together you can you can parse it in ways that give you much more power and the ability to make decisions based on empirical data and not just anecdote and again accessibility is a key component you want to build in that alt text do it as part of your front-end workflow not as a post process define that reading order through your semantic markup have mathml embedded sometimes with complicated equations you have to present it more as a graphic but you want that mathml in the background so that screen readers can still describe it to somebody with a vision impairment etc and a lot of it really of course comes down to people the technology challenges are there but usually digital transformation lives and dies on the basis of the people and the ability to execute a change management strategy so starting with leadership you need to really present that vision for the future make it a compelling vision one that's inspiring you lay out a strategy for how you're going to get there communicate that strategy early and repeat it often and make it a shared journey make don't make it feel like there's a top down this is leadership telling everybody what they're going to do bring them into it make them part of the decision making how are we going to go on that journey create that resilience within your company because you know parts of that journey are going to be difficult and setting the context is really important right it's been a very disruptive time in the educational publishing markets over the last couple of years several years we need to be able to adapt and produce new ways of delivering our content and deliver new content and services and if people don't realize that they need to really understand that it's a matter of survival and that the ability to be much more agile and do that continuous improvement is key to that you want to be able to respond quickly to your customer needs and it's not all just you know if we don't do this we will die there's opportunities for growth if you can execute this kind of a strategy you can reach markets that you didn't reach before there are customers that you may be able to tap into that just weren't there before so it's a way of increasing your revenue not just being able to sustain your business that exists today and the way to I think go about that most effectively internally you can't bring everybody along there's going to be skeptics there's going to be doubters people with anxiety they're not all going to get on board at the same time and spending time trying to get everybody going in the right direction at the same time is not very efficient so find your thought leaders find those early adopter types you know when you when you deliver that vision find the people who said great why didn't we do this five years ago and put them front and center put them in charge of initiatives or pilots or whatever give them a high profile and then put the resources behind them to make sure that they're successful the skeptics will fall in line afterwards nothing succeeds like success and lay the groundwork with the standards that I talked about before model those workflows walk the walk before the technology is in place how are we going to work differently when that new technology comes on board and that that accomplishes two things it gets you prepared so when that technology is there people can step into it more elegantly but at the same time going through that process you develop the requirements that that technology needs to meet and in the process of that you're involving the staff and the solution you're getting them invested so that the success of that implementation is increased there are risks from a change management perspective if you don't have that clear vision you're gonna have a really hard time succeeding if there isn't a lack if there's a lack of urgency if you're not telling people look we're going to do this and we ve got to do it quickly this is not nibbling around the edges incremental improvement we ve got to move fast to get where we need to go if the commitment from leadership if there's like a big announcement and then you don't hear from leadership again for a while people will lose interest they'll say they're not really into this so I m not going to get myself in invested and the next layer below the senior leadership is actually really important to make sure that they're bought into that vision they understand the strategy and how they interpret how they're going to implement that strategy within their functional area is consistent because otherwise if there's different ways that people have interpreted how to implement that strategy you could have a lot of people going about solving those problems in good faith but actually going in different directions that are going to cause real problems in terms of how you bring it all together and from an hr perspective you need to make sure you don't allow the fud factor to fester fudd stands for fear uncertainty and doubt and you need to be able to you know monitor the zeitgeist of the organization and make sure that there's positive reinforcement there are tangible examples of the progress that you're making so that people's anxieties and insecurities don't start taking over and you lose you lose buy-in and it's really important to take a look at your overall organizational structure you can't do all these things that I ve been talking about with people who are in the same roles within the same structure in the organization as exists today you need new skills obviously and that could be up training existing staff to gain new skills or enhance their skills and to hire skills that you don't have and then think about cross-functional teams in terms of the traditional kind of silos of editorial production technology etc. and think more in terms of cross-functional teams where you have those different skill sets and perspectives that are coming together on a regular basis from beginning of the project to the end of the project and working together to solve those problems and bring their different skills and experiences to bear throughout and get rid of that old I ve done my part I m handing it off to you my work here is done let me know how it comes out and I think that this quote that I came across a few years ago really just sums it all up perfectly successful digital transformation relies on more than the right technology it requires the right culture the right people and the right processes to support them it must be a company journey that involves upskilling and changing employee mindsets adapting structures and ways of working and creating teams that can take advantage of new technologies and if we have time I ll be happy to take any questions very interesting presentation Paul I just want to share with the audience that Paul is truly a perfectionist we practice now this the delivery of this presentation and he give no chance to any failure in terms of the system approach of delivering it and the reason why I say it's a compliment to you because I truly think that that is very important aspect to need through others digital transformation right to be really hand tight on all the different steps so the first question to you is that during this digital transformation model that you outline which is terrific you know it's a very strategic approach what your personal you know take on the barrier and challenges that you need to address right in your own organization and in your or in your customer organization I missed the word you use the what kind of challenges like bearers or challenge you need to address any barriers well there are many I mean I think you know especially in the in the publishing industry you've got people who tend to be to stay in that industry for a long time you've got people who are there for 10 15 25 years and who have built their reputations and their expertise around older ways of working and mindsets that think you know ink on paper two-page spread and it's very hard to change that into you know the ways that we have to be thinking about that sort of thing today so like I said breaking down those silos thinking in terms of what the team is in that more sort of cross-functional way I think the ideal way to come up with a new product is you know have an editorial person a development person a designer a ux or an instructional designer involved a you know a coder a developer who's all working together from the beginning and throughout the project to say what do we need because otherwise you come up with these ideas and if you haven't had somebody from the technical side involved and contributing ideas and you know then then you present here's what you want you to do and they're like well you know that's going to be really difficult to do whereas if they were involved from the beginning they're like okay I understand what you want to do here there's a different way of going about it I think they can achieve the same outcome but is a lot more efficient and can get us there quicker that sort of thing I think being able to just get through the kind of foot dragging that is inevitable and you know that's where the leadership aspect really comes in to break through that because you know people who are resistant to change have played the game before so to speak they've heard about big initiatives and they've nodded their head and said I m on board chief and then done everything they can to either ignore undermine it and they've waited it out and they've seen these things come and go and they'll say I ll just do it again this time so there really just has to be a firm commitment that sense of urgency and you know if people aren't willing to come along then you just have to be willing to make those changes too because not everybody is going to make that transition I have a question about the system approach and it's rather linked to this movement would you say that the movement of education of publisher is moving into like into the education model itself like you are trying to create some part of the learning management system you are trying to create some sort of that active learning model where the learner and the content interaction is kind of like produced by you created by you right do you would you say that there is a blur line between the education operation and the where the learning activities are and the publisher activities you know the operation is that a beginning to see a blur line or how do you see this month into in the last two years is that any change in your opinion well I think that you know again with Macmillan that we our commitment to releasing recently a a new courseware platform that takes a different approach it very much reflects that I think we feel like that's the richest learning experience that can produce the greatest outcomes but at the same time you're always partnering with your instructor with your customer and with the institutions and in some cases you're also having to think about a different more modular approach to how you are delivering the content in the first place because a lot of our content and our courses get delivered into about it's about half and half people adopt our flagship proprietary lms and the other half are delivered into a universities already established lms so you've got to be able to you know work both sides of that and in some cases you know we re seeing signs where our customers may not even be interested in a pre-packaged course they've they've got their own lms they've designed their curriculums and they have courses set up what they may really want is just access to our content you know I m kind of a subscription model or whatever I mean there's a lot of investigation that still has to be done to see if that's a viable business model but there are signs that those kind of trends are emerging as well and to be able to adapt and take advantage of those kind of emerging opportunities you know but at the same time you know the activities that we provide in pre-class in class post-class types of activities really tie in and we're you know we want to be as close to how our customers want to create their learning experience give them the flexibility to do so but give them the platform that enables them to realize their vision as they put their curriculum together would you want to give some examples of some of the interactive learning experiences that that you have seen that well successfully for the for your customer sure I mean we have in kind of a pre-class they re I won't call them really assessment items they re kind of metacognitive exercises that help students understand where they are going into a course or going into a set of lessons in that course so it orients them gives them some information gives them a way to sort of test themselves and say what's my level of understanding as I as I go into this therefore I know where I m strong you know I can take some questions and do some lessons and based on what I m showing competency in you know I ll I won't get those kind of questions and what further and where I m struggling I ll get more of that sort of you know an adaptive kind of approach and help the student themselves understand where they're strong where they're weak it'll help where they need to concentrate you know or where they need to go to their instructor an advisor for additional help is one example and the other one is you know there are interactive experiences whether it's something that's created in something like articulate storyline for example where you have the ability to have you know animated or progressive you know choose your own adventure kind of experiences that aren't you know the straight instructional material but they enhance that experience right they reinforce and they're not giving you a formal assessment but they're giving you tests to say you know for your own benefit essentially you know how well you extend understanding this and giving that kind of information in various ways so that you know different types of learners with who respond to different kinds of experiences have that variety so that the thing that they can make the most progress in is available to them thank you Paul please stay back for the for the panel discussion where we talk about the innovation keys to the future now I m thank you Paul and I m now going to invite George Kerscher to join us josh can you unmute and also show your camera thank you can hear me yes I can hear you but I can't see you yet there we go okay hi everybody my name is George Kerscher I m chief innovations officer with the daisy consortium and also senior officer of global literacy with benetech so I ve got a few slides to share so there we go you can see it now right yes I can see your screen but it's not your PowerPoint there you go you can see your P
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