The Science Behind Developing Successful EdTech Products

00:02.91

Sean Strathy

Greetings everyone! This is another exciting edition of the Tech in EdTech podcast where we discuss technology that powers education and improves learning for all. In today's episode, we'll be discussing “The Science Behind Developing Successful Edtech Products,” specifically related to a hot topic in the world of literacy - The Science of Reading. I'm your podcast host Sean Strathy from Magic EdTech, and our guest for the special edition podcast is Stephanie Barber, Product Manager at Teaching.com. Stephanie thanks for joining me and welcome to today's show!

00:32.63

Stephanie Barber

Thank you for having me, that's great!

00:37.76

Sean Strathy

Stephanie, can you give us some background about yourself and how you got into edtech?

00:43.79

Stephanie Barber

Sure I have a pretty nontraditional background I'd say. I am the only child of 2 public high school teachers math and English, and I vowed I would never go into education because of all the strife that they experienced. But I found myself in private tutoring after college, and got really passionate about it to the point where I went back to school after seeing a lot of the inequities that I was you know, seeing day to day in my work; and went back to school and got a master's degree in Public Policy so that I could affect education on a grander scale that way, and went into nonprofit work, and policy work that way. And then through that, I had an opportunity to start working in curriculum and product development and fell in love and never looked back. So I've been in product development now, for edtech products for a long time.

01:43.21

Sean Strathy

Excellent, so let's give the audience a little background on what's been happening in the reading curriculum world in the past few years. I think most of us listening probably grew up learning how to read with phonics. Hooked on phonics worked for me, it was the commercial that was always on. But that hasn't been the case for the last twenty years or so, balanced literacy has dominated the pedagogy. Can you help us summarize what the balanced literacy approach entails?

02:10.60

Stephanie Barber

Yeah, sure. So in a nutshell balanced literacy is basically an iteration on an earlier school of thought which was a whole language learning, which at its core had the belief that learning to read was much like learning to speak and that it was an innate process. So instead of focusing on sounding outwards it focused on the meaning and context of words and assumed that if a child developed a love of reading first then the reading skills would naturally follow. Balanced literacy approaches rely heavily on techniques that have been disproven and can actually damage children's literacy development such as queuing - just a big one that people talk about -  which involves using context clues to guess at unrecognized words and their meaning instead of actually reading words. And it also emphasizes a lot of time spent on independent reading which is lovely in concept but is ineffective for children who can't actually read yet functionally. And I was going to suggest if anybody listening is interested in more about the background of balanced literacy, and now the science of reading and assuming you like listening to podcasts; the “Sold a Story” podcast is a really great riveting investigative series about this exact topic and I have no connection to it personally, I just really enjoy it. So just laying that to others.

03:42.51

Sean Strathy

Yeah, that's great. So you just mentioned the science of reading which is kind of taking the country by storm. There was an article in The New York Times a couple of months ago or last month that said that more than 40 states have passed laws to revamp literacy instruction. At the center of this reform is the science of reading. Can you help us understand what the science of reading approach entails?

04:04.36

Stephanie Barber

Yeah, so it's definitely the zeitgeist right now. There are big grassroots movements across the country to revamp this literacy instruction and the science of reading is the result of scientific research in a number of interdisciplinary fields. So It's not just education. It's also Cognitive Psychology, Linguistics, Neuroscience, etc, and it's really focused on how the human brain actually functionally learns how to read. So the culmination of all that is that the science of reading promotes an explicit, structured, and direct approach to teaching reading by focusing on phonemes - which are the individual sounds in spoken language and phonics - which is mapping those phonemes to letters and letter combinations and words. So that whole process is called decoding and is at the core of approaches aligned with the science of reading. That being said, a lot of criticism will say that you know something that is purely phonics isn't enough and that's true. The Science of Reading also focuses on other pillars which are phonemic awareness, vocabulary development, fluency development comprehension - all those things as well. But phonics is a big, core component of the science of reading approaches. 

05:30.21

Sean

Thank you for that.

05:34.25

Stephanie Barber

and at Reading.com the product that I manage - we are focused on all of those pillars. It's a big part of what we do.

05:41.64

Sean Strathy

That's awesome. Thank you! I think you know right now this is the hot topic, right? And it's changing the curriculum across the country. Companies such as yours and a lot of our partners are having to revamp their products to meet those demands. But we've seen this across other disciplines in the past as well. Math went through a lot of revisions in the past ten to fifteen years. So let's just talk a little bit more generally about your process for incorporating science and research into product. What is the depth of research that goes into developing a highly effective product like Reading.com?

06:23.60

Stephanie Barber

I mean the short answer is a lot. So you know we devoted, not just myself but the executives on my team, I mean big members of you know, all of our team devoted years of deep academic and market research before we even broke ground, so to speak on this product. It actually was inspired, the whole impetus for this product was, our CEO Austin Butler decided he wanted to teach his own son to read at home and while doing that just ran into all the pain points that a normal adult would run into trying to do this, and realized that there weren't great products out there. There wasn't you know, I think there was this big hole for somebody like him trying to teach his child to read and he was doing the research on what the right way to do it was and all these things. And then when I came on board we extended all of that research to you know again digging into the science of reading and what the actual techniques are and whatnot and all that. So I mean it was a lot. There was a lot of work before we even started doing any kind of building in the app and then once we did actually start designing activities and the curriculum, we had a pretty extensive Beta testing period where we had a group of really dedicated Beta testers that we were talking to regularly. You know we were having them test our designs and you know test their efficacy and we were interviewing them. We were sending them Surveys. We were you know, really in close contact with them, which we're so grateful for their participation that really helped us validate our instructional design and tweak things here and there to make it better.

08:22.53

Sean Strathy

I kind of want to dig in a little bit to the nuance there because, you know you just talked about the research aspect, and then you kind of jumped into the Beta testing aspect. But how do you go in the middle from doing this research to coming up with the ideas and then translating those, making those decisions to actually incorporate them into the product?

08:46.17

Stephanie Barber

I mean that was really you know, that was us, you know we have a very talented product designer on our team who we were able to work together to collaborate really highly on -  here's what we need from a curricular design standpoint from an instructional design standpoint and here's somebody that's coming from a product design standpoint. And how can we marry those two to have something that is a really intuitive, beautiful interaction on a screen that accomplishes both goals of achieving what the curricular goal is and what we're you know, the interaction that we're trying to get the user to do. But also making sure that it's hitting all of those product interaction needs. And so then we, you know, create prototypes of those learning activities and then getting it up on, in this case, it was iOS devices. It was the easiest way for you know, getting that up on iOS devices and then being able to release that to a small group of beta testers and them being able to actually interact with the product and get back to us on you know on these early interactions, these early designs for the learning activities, and tell us what was going on as they were actually implementing this with their kids.

10:10.35

Sean Strathy

It's interesting. That whole workflow I'm thinking, i'm jumping around a little bit here. But you know your product has an element of direct-to-consumer as well I think you guys, I saw on your website that you're launching a teacher edition. So, I'm assuming that you would eventually be selling this to districts and everything as well. With multiple buyers, you're taking multiple perspectives into consideration and helping the product but on the flip side of that you have different metrics for those different models on how you measure you know, not just the efficacy of the product but measure engagement, retention, ultimately the success of the product in general. Tell me a little bit about that and kind of what metrics you're looking for in a product like this across your different users.

11:00.99

Stephanie Barber

Sure I mean we haven't released for schools yet. But that is right around the corner. We were actually very, I won't say we were surprised but we were very happy to see that you know we went direct to consumer first because that is our you know like I said that was the inspiration behind this entire product was parents wanted to teach their child at home. So that's what we created this for. As soon as it was out in the world. We just got barraged by teachers saying, “I want this! I want this for my classroom. Do you have a classroom, like this is exactly what I'm looking for?” We were like okay we got to like figure this out and make sure we can get this out for teachers. So that's what we're working on right now. That being said, as far as our metrics that we care about I mean we follow the pirate metrics you know, acquisition and activation, retention, referral, and revenue right? So we follow those. We use those regularly in our decision-making. That being said, where we are in our life cycle, we're pretty focused on acquisition, and I'd say retention, right, and engagement is a big part of retention obviously. So, for us, it's less in completions. We have mini-games in the app that the children can use independently for reinforcement and things like that. So we're looking at that level of engagement. That being said, we made a very conscious decision when we created this product and we hold fast to that we do not use gamification techniques or other sorts to, you know cause any sort of like addictive behavior or keep people and keep kids especially engaged at the sacrifice of all else. Like for us, it's about fostering an intrinsic love of learning and reading. And that makes it harder for us, right, but it makes it so that the product is more effective and that it's better for kids. Like this is something that we want to have a really, you know positive impact on kids and so it's effective and they're learning and it's it doesn't harm them in any way with like addictive screen time. And thankfully, you know when users get in and they see what we've done, they get it like right away. Like parents go in and they’re like I love that this isn't you know like tricking my kids into you know, being addicted to this game. You know like they get it. They can see exactly what's going on and that it's low stimulant. You know it's not over-stimulating. It's not. It's all of those things. 

14:09.30

Sean Strathy

That's awesome. Now with this changing market right? So the market kind of was following more of the moving to the science of reading you know and away from balanced literacy. Is there an element of customer education that is required with your product or with products in this space? I don't want to put you guys in a position to respond only on behalf of your product. But I guess just from your understanding of the market in general, is there a lot of education that is required for teachers in the space or is it something that they're just hungry for?

14:47.93

Stephanie Barber

Yeah I mean I'd say that you know there are people because it is in the zeitgeist. People are looking for you know,  at least we see right? People are looking for this. They're looking for something that follows these…especially the teachers. The teachers know what's going on and they are seeking this out to help them make the transition in their classrooms. But even parents. You know, a lot of parents are already educated in this topic and are seeking something like this out. I'll say, those that aren't, I don't know if it's really our like we're educating them on the science of reading per se I think what we run into is that we are educating parents on how learning apps like this can be most effective with young children because our product is unique in the space.  We actually require an adult to go through the lessons with the child. It's meant as a co-play activity. So these are things that they do together and that's something that's really odd you know, most parents are used to downloading an app and then handing it over to their kid and that's kind of the end of it, and it's just something that kind of you know occupies their kid for a while and they, you know it's educational enough that they don't feel bad about it and you know that's good and there's a place and a time for those apps for sure. But that's just not what we are. So we have to educate parents in order for you to have - particularly in this topic of reading - in order for it to see results of actually teaching your child to read or needs to be direct and explicit instruction from a human adult that's caring about this child like that's what needs to happen. So we facilitate that with our program.

16:47.50

Sean Strathy

That's awesome. Can you talk a little bit about how you ensure customer satisfaction and adequate support in this market?

16:56.85

Stephanie Barber

Yeah, we're a very small team but we send regular emails and surveys to our users. We also have an internal customer service team and they're all US based. And as the product manager, I'm also checking in on customer service every day and I respond to feedback myself daily. So we’re very hands-on. Even our executives are very hands-on. We're just a small kind of tight team and everybody's involved.

17:29.19

Sean Strathy

That's awesome. So let's shift gears a little bit. You know this is all really exciting stuff. But I want to talk a little bit about the future of edtech. AI has been a part of almost every conversation that we're having on the product level across the education space. So from your perspective how will AI play a role in the future of educational products and what possibilities of AI are you most excited about?

17:58.11

Stephanie Barber

Yeah I mean there's such a broad spectrum of educational products. I think it'll be on all of the product leaders to be very thoughtful about how they incorporate AI in a way that is ethical and useful for their product. And so you know, we're kind of in, like you said this is kind of the hot topic of conversation in the space for sure. But we're kind of at the beginning stages of the hype cycle right now so everybody wants to use AI and incorporate it in some way. And I think that the threat is wanting to use it even if it's not yet the right tool for your product. And so I think it's important that we all take a step back and think about how it's actually used. That being said I mean we use AI every day and our daily work, like our developers, our designers, our writers, you know we use it all the time in our you know, behind-the-scenes work. But as far as us incorporating AI into our product, I don't see that happening anytime soon. We’ve chosen, we've really doubled down on having a very human experience with a caring adult interacting with the child and that's something that means a lot to us. And it's not just that it means a lot to us like that's based on the research of showing that there is a quote from, I think it's psychology today that did a big piece. A research piece that learning apps are 19 times more effective with small children if they're done in concert with an adult going through them. So that's something that we hold as our north star.

20:01.12

Sean Strathy

So you just brought up a really good point and we see this all the time: there's the customer-facing AI models that people might use to enhance the product. And then there's the behind-the-scenes efficiencies that AI can create in product development. So just without giving away any secrets, personal opinion -  What's your favorite part of the process that's been improved by AI so far?

20:30.95

Stephanie Barber

Oh wow! Like I said we're a very small team so it just makes everything we do faster. So you know for our development team, if they're stuck on something and not sure how to tackle a problem, they can get code that’s usable. And then they can look at it and say oh this needs to be tweaked here and there and oh yeah, you know they can fix it. But for them. it's a huge way to speed up their process. Same thing for our designers, if we're you know trying to instead of scrolling through a bunch of stock photography to find something that we're trying to use, we can just generate it. And then edit it and things you know. But it just makes all of our work so much faster. 

21:28.70

Sean Strathy

That's great. Last question: any parting thoughts or advice for fellow leaders in edtech or in the education space?

21:38.28

Stephanie Barber

It's really hard. It's really hard to make a good EdTech product and just to make something that's effective and engaging as we talked about and, you know, ticks a lot of the boxes we have. There's so many challenges right now with privacy, with those kinds of concerns too, and in the post-covid world, and especially if you're selling to school districts. So, there’s just a lot of hurdles that we all need to jump through. And so you know, just sending empathy out to everybody else who's trying to create good edtech products and I guess also just hire really good people. You know, make sure you're hiring you know a really productive team and you understand your tech stack really well and so at least you don't have that to worry about.

22:28.66

Sean Strathy

Well, I think all of our listeners and myself included would agree with you that we didn't get into education because it's easy or for the money we did it because we're passionate about student success and I think that's a great place to end it. So, Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us on today's podcast.

22:45.76

Stephanie Barber

Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.