Edtech Sector – Product Positioning Around Learning-at-
home – 22 October 2021
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Specialist:
Title:
Moderator: Nyree Hinton (NH), Third Bridge Sector Analyst
Paula Hidalgo (PH)
Former VP, Product at Age of Learning Inc (ABCmouse)
Agenda:
1. Early childhood education, elementary to high school and higher education edtech trends – evolution
of e-learning platforms and breakdown of core vs supplemental offerings
2. Competitive landscape, assessing volumes of new entrants and Age of Learning’s differentiation
3. Adoption dynamics across public vs private institutions, highlighting barriers to entry
4. Measures to increase engagement across age groups and global e-learning programme dynamics
Contents
Q: How have e-learning platforms evolved during your time in the industry? How should we frame adoption
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and the breadth of new options around different e-learning environments, whether in K-12?
Q: What do you think is the right learning environment balance between physical interaction and
supplementing learning experiences with platforms such as Age of Learning? Are teachers relying solely on
digital interaction between Zoom and these games, and that’s why kids are tired of being in front of Zoom? 4
Q: Can you outline market fragmentation across age groups and how the solution quality differs? Age of
Learning is very good at early childhood. Is early childhood the most competitive, highest-quality segment? 5
Q: Do schools or districts still require significant pre-qualifying attributes for supplemental solutions? To
what extent are barriers to entry lower for supplemental providers, given the fierce competition you noted? 6
Q: Pearson and other content providers had been the legacy behemoths in content creation for education.
Can you frame competition on the supplemental side and how the quality varies across age groups?
Q: Are any significant new players coming in on the core side, given the high barriers to entry? I assume
there are consistently high numbers of new players in the supplemental side.
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Q: We discussed US quality of education, and you referenced a statistic whereby 40% of kids are below the
global average in reading and maths. How have different states or districts reacted to the low scoring
percentages? Are they assessing core offerings and potentially adopting something new, and if so, what?
Q: How should we frame the adoption rate of supplemental education in private institutions? Core seems
like it’s through public and private, but there’s likely a lot more flexibility with supplemental.
Q: What are the challenges to retaining students’ engagement with apps across the age groups? What
content are players such as Age of Learning using to differentiate and encourage engagement with apps?
Q: How do individual schools and districts measure engagement, given it seems quite subjective? Do they
have their own way of measuring engagement, as we consider supplemental educational providers trying to
approach consumers for new business?
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Q: How do measures to increase engagement differ across age groups? There are new areas and
developments such as adaptive learning using algorithms to make learning more personalised.
Q: What factors can successfully increase engagement in children from 4-6 vs 6-8?
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Q: How has adoption of e-learning programmes trended globally? Are there higher adoption rates ex-US? 10
Edtech Sector – Product Positioning Around Learning-at-
home
Transcription begins at 00:00:04 of the recorded material
NH: Welcome to Third Bridge Forum’s Interview entitled Edtech Sector – Product Positioning Around
Learning-at-home. I am Nyree Hinton and I’ll be facilitating today’s Interview with Mrs Paula Hidalgo, former
VP of Product at Age of Learning Inc.
Paula, before we start today’s Interview, please state I agree or I disagree to the following statement: You
understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any such information,
or any other information which is confidential, during this Interview.
PH: I agree.
NH: Could you briefly introduce your background and the various roles you’ve held in the industry?
PH: Currently I work for Carnegie Learning. I have been there for about a year as the Head of Chief
Languages Officer, previously I was the Senior VP of Product. In Age of Learning, previous to that, I was there
about six years and I was the VP of Product. I led the development and the productisation of the assessment
centre which accompanied the flagship product called ABCmouse, and this was mostly early childhood
education and we were expanding into elementary and a little bit in middle school. Before then, I was for five
years just consulting. I opened my own consulting firm, then I consulted during five years with National
Geographic, Disney, Pearson, Cambridge University Press, and the projects were mostly in the strategy realm
because I used to work for McKinsey, and that is a strong part of my background, so I did some of that and I
did some of assessment on content development mostly for languages and for maths. Previous to that, I
worked for Math Solutions for about two years as the Director of Product, and previous to that, I worked seven
years for Pearson, where I was the VP of Product for Professional Development Product, which means
programmes for teachers. Previous to that, I did a PhD in applied linguistics and that’s where my knowledge of
languages and how to teach languages comes from, and I have two Master’s degrees and a Bachelor in
education.
[00:02:38]
Q: How have e-learning platforms evolved during your time in the industry? How should we frame adoption
and the breadth of new options around different e-learning environments, whether in K-12?
PH: I started in the industry exactly maybe 22 years ago, just over 20 years, so I really started at the very, very
end of the era where there was no digital, so I caught the last year or so, and I’m thinking of 1999-2000, when
there were still floppy disks. Some of those things seem incredible, but that’s what we were doing at the time.
We were creating content and putting it on a floppy disk and selling it as digital content. I only caught less
than a year of that. At some point in 2000 and 2001 everything turned around with everybody having access
or most people having access to internet. Internet existed, but at some point, there was a push by the
government to get schools more connected and all that, so I caught that time, and I worked for a… sorry. This
is not about my background, this is what trends I’ve seen. I’ve seen the trend from the really old delivery on
digital to all the way now, especially with COVID, where the pressure is on for teachers and for publishers and
edtech companies to deliver and to be ready for all digital delivery of content. Obviously, during those 20 years
since 2001, more or less until now, there have been different degrees of adoption, different success rates, there
are the big publishers such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill and HMH that are big, big, like a big animal that
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moves slowly. They were less nimble and although Pearson did okay at the beginning really trying to get ahead
of the curve, it was hard. I’m saying it because we were acquired by Pearson in 2003 and we were a small start-
up. We were all digital in California, all ahead of the game in a way when Pearson came to buy us and we went
back in time a little bit because they were still trying to adopt technology as part of their offerings and we were
coming to the table with, all we had was digital.
That’s when I started to see that sometimes the tension between digital and print, but anyways after Pearson,
and at that time towards 2010 and all that, I think at some point, more or less in 2010, I think everybody
noticed that there was no way back. Different degrees of funding, sorry, levels of funding and different degrees
of commitment to the task, but everybody was trying to get online. Then we see the next 10 years, the second
decade of the century with many, many more offerings, many offerings of almost any type in the form of apps,
of programmes, of very varying degrees of quality. The quality is all over the map, there are things that are just
awful, and they still get on the market because teachers in some cases were pretty desperate to have something
and to show that they were, quote-unquote, cool and that they had some digital content. I said that was the
second decade, but I think that also belongs in the first decade. The last 5-6 years, I think have been
interesting because some of those apps that were bad started to disappear and the ones that stay are better
quality. At the same time, there was a very concerted effort by the government to put emphasis on data and
how we analyse data, so teachers and administrators became a little more sophisticated in assessing these
apps and these programmes, so if you didn’t have in your app a good way to track progress and to do good
assessments and show learning, and show learning games, it was becoming more and more difficult to get
acquired. Of course then with COVID, COVID accelerated even more that trend and it didn’t cause anything
new, but it really crystallised the need of teachers to have more digital resources and it also made it very clear
that Zoom is not the answer.
Kids are very tired of being in front of a computer, so now there is a kind of an interesting return to, you hear
kids when you do interviews saying, “No, I like my books. Sometimes I feel like reading a book. I’m tired of
being in front of the screen.” The jury is still out, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but certainly I think
companies are paying attention that the kids are tired, the same way we are, of being in front of a computer all
the time, and so who knows what the next 10 years will be, but that would be my humble opinion on what
happened in the last 20 years.
[00:08:44]
Q: What do you think is the right learning environment balance between physical interaction and
supplementing learning experiences with platforms such as Age of Learning? Are teachers relying solely on
digital interaction between Zoom and these games, and that’s why kids are tired of being in front of Zoom?
PH: It really depends on a bunch of factors, so you cannot say, “This is the right percentage.” One of them is
age. The younger the kids, they love being in front of devices, but they also have a very short attention span, so
working in Age of Learning, you’re very much humbled by how much work you can do, and the three-year-old
looks at it, “I don’t like it,” and they turn around and they leave the room. For really young kids, we shouldn’t
have too much stuff online except if there can be more physical, if it’s possible of course. I think you need to be
more careful not to put them in front of a screen for very long. When you go to the 15 year olds, 16 year olds,
they have a much greater tolerance for that, longer attention span, so that’s one factor that influences. The
other factor that influences is the content area. Learning a language is different than learning maths and is
different than learning music and different than doing PE, so it really depends on the content area. Then it
also depends on the topic itself. Some topics are easier on a digital environment than others. Having given you
all that big kind of caveat, the question is not so much, I always think that if instruction was well-designed and
if there was a lot of thought put into, this is what we’re doing. This is how the learning is going to happen
because we’re going to present this thing and the kids are going to do this with the content and then there’s
going to be that opportunity. They’re going to have an opportunity to write these things that will help them
apply what they learn.
If all of that happens, sometimes it doesn’t even matter how you did it. Meaning, if a class is really well
thought through, probably you can do it really well in person and then maybe in Zoom, it doesn’t work so
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badly. The problem is sometimes when we are physically in front, it’s much easier to solve for things you didn’t
prepare very well, so for example, you say, “Now everybody, that’s X,” and you see that kids are all confused
because you can see them, and you’re like, “Time out. Let me explain to you what I meant,” whereas when you
produce a game or you produce a whole online course, you are not seeing your students, so you have to make
up for all of that. When you say what percentage or what, it really depends, but it really also, the key is to have
well-designed instructions. Whether it’s going to be digital or in person, it doesn’t matter. It has to be well-
designed. We’ve seen teachers that get in front of the classroom and have no idea what they are doing, and it’s
very disorganised and learning is much less than it could be, and we’ve also seen the same thing in courses
that were online or in a Zoom. It’s not so much about that, it’s how well has the instruction been thought out
and how well has the learning been anticipated, meaning how do kids learn and all the cognitive science
applied so that when something is presented, it’s really accessible to the kids and then they can build from
there. There are lots of frameworks, of course. There is the Bloom’s taxonomy of how we learn all the rules of
how people learn, so the more all of that science can be applied when instruction is designed, the more likely it
is to work, whether it’s digital or in person.
[00:13:21]
Q: Can you outline market fragmentation across age groups and how the solution quality differs? Age of
Learning is very good at early childhood. Is early childhood the most competitive, highest-quality segment?
PH: Look, this is just my opinion. If you take the United States education and you compare it with other, we
can call them industrialised countries, the US does very poorly, so when you ask me, is the quality good? I
could use that framework to tell you, no, it’s not very good because the results are very bad. NAEP, the
national, I don’t know if you know, but kids get accessed on fourth grade and eighth grade in reading and
maths and the results are published and it’s a big deal, and invariably, they come below grade level in reading
and in maths, and not by a little bit, by a lot, and a lot of them. 40% or whatever, I don’t remember the last
one, but around 40% of the kids are behind in reading and in maths. I don’t know if that’s what you’re asking
me or if you’re asking me more specifically if there are areas like K-12, if you want me to comment on whether
there is more material for the younger age.
NH: Many schools haven’t fleshed out their digital capabilities. In early childhood, there are offerings such as
Age of Learning where a school can defer to this company to supplement learning curriculums. What are the
options available for US schools to differentiate high-quality supplemental solutions?
PH: Thank you for clarifying. I think you know that there is core and there is supplemental, and so the
supplemental like you just said is like, no district would say, “Age of Learning, please teach my kids maths,”
because it’s a supplemental product. Basically, some states have adoption cycles, and if it’s an adoption year,
they will adopt, and so different publishers and different companies present their materials, and the materials
must match a lot of things like the Common Core Standards and a lot of, they have huge documents that we
review and we do our very best to comply with everything so that we have more chances of winning an
adoption. When I say we, I say any company does that. That is for core. The states that don’t do adoptions still
look for a lot of very difficult to comply with characteristics. For example, it could say, it has to have print and
digital. It has to be aligned to the Common Core. It has to comprise a student book, award book and whatever,
it has to block, but I’m telling you, it’s lists and lists of things that they have, through the years, understood
that those are the things that make a programme successful and that help the kids. Once, either through an
adoption cycle or without an adoption, but they still have these documents that guide the administrators to
purchase, then different programmes get adopted in one case or purchased.
When they get adopted, what happens is that, let’s say, we have programme one, programme two and
programme three, these three programmes were, quote-unquote, adopted. Those three programmes will show
up when anybody in that state wants to buy the materials, and those will be top of the list. There are different
rules about this, so I’m not going to get into all the details, but that’s in the states where there are adoptions,
and in the states where there are no adoptions, then there are programmes that get recommended or those
documents that I was talking about guide the purchase. All of that is the core, and let’s say, it’s 70-80% of what
the schools use for teaching their kids. Then there is the supplemental, and the supplemental, typically there
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are other monies for that, and there is, depending on how much or how much they spend, they can have more
or less money for that. The reality is a lot of companies live off of the supplemental monies because if their
programmes are not comprehensive enough and they don’t comply with the huge list of things they have to
comply. I’m telling you, it’s very easy not to comply because they are so comprehensive that, for example, if
you did something on maths and you did only a couple of strengths from the Common Core of three or four or
five, no, you have to have everything. You have to have every topic. Sometimes they want you to have every
grade level, so small companies struggle to get to that comprehensiveness of content
They can aspire to be bought as a supplemental product, and so your question was about that, right? Are they
good? My answer is, they are all over the map. There are some good supplementals and they do very well in
the market. There are some others that are less good. The competition is fierce and school districts and schools
tend to be very careful how they spend their money, so when your product doesn’t show results, it’s quite
difficult to sell it because as I said before, everybody has become more and more aware and more
knowledgeable about how to measure learning. I think that’s why some companies, I think, find it harder to
compete because they have to compete with supplementals, but more rigorous companies. That’s where I
think where the trend is more rigorous. Even if you’re a supplemental, you have to be pretty high up there
when it comes to rigour.
[00:21:16]
Q: Do schools or districts still require significant pre-qualifying attributes for supplemental solutions? To
what extent are barriers to entry lower for supplemental providers, given the fierce competition you noted?
PH: I don’t know if there’s anything in writing, so I think, but I’m going to be very honest with you, and I
think it’s mostly about a sales person saying, “I have these wonderful videos here, would you like to buy them?
They are not about all of second grade and third grade and fourth grade and fifth grade. They only cover third
grade, but they are wonderful.” Then it’s more of a negotiation like you would sell anything and they don’t go
through the formal process of adoption or anything, it’s more like a purchase. It’s more up to how good the
sales person is and how many other products they are comparing to yours, so supplemental is a little bit
different because somebody could like your product and your product might not be that good, but if they are
not comparing to others that are good, maybe you can sell it. You see, it’s like selling cars.
[00:23:02]
Q: Pearson and other content providers had been the legacy behemoths in content creation for education. Can
you frame competition on the supplemental side and how the quality varies across age groups?
PH: For full transparency, the problem is the landscape changes all the time. Every year there are new
companies that show up, new companies that disappear, so the only reason I said varying quality levels is
because sometimes I go online, I hear the name of a new company, I look and I’m, “Oh my God. How could
they do this?” Then I’m just assessing them. Then sometimes I’m asked more officially by somebody, whether
a company I’m working in, “Can you please look at this and tell me if it’s a good candidate for acquisition?” For
example, then I look at it more carefully, but even more unofficially, I could just look at things online, and I do
see that there are products that are pretty poor in either they tackle only, let’s say, second-grade measurement,
I don’t know, something. It’s a little app that teaches the kids how to measure when they are in the second
grade, which could be with conventional units or non-conventional units, whatever. You take a little, little
topic and maybe sometimes they do it well and they go to the next topic, but sometimes it’s so narrow that the
districts would not even engage because it’s too much work to engage for such a small portion of everything, or
your app is so cool that the kids will love it and maybe the district bother to talk to you. I’m not in those
conversations so I don’t know how it really happens, all I see is the result of some apps really growing and
doing better, and some companies, one year they are in a conference and in the exhibit hall and then two years
later, they are no longer there, so you see what I mean?
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It’s not first-hand information, it’s my conclusion of what happens is that some of them don’t make it, and the
reasons, I think partly is the quality, but I haven’t done a good study to tell you that that’s the reality.
Sometimes obviously it’s how much capital they have and what infusion of capital they get, obviously that is
huge, and sometimes you could have something that’s not so good and you get a bunch of money and you
make it better through time. Maybe when I saw it, it wasn’t good, but it gets better, but it’s all over the place
because people obviously are free to start any company they want and people start companies and create
educational products, and many of them don’t want to ever become core, by the way. Many of them just want
to do what they do, like there are companies that do coding, all they do is coding, and I think now slowly we’re
getting to a more formalised coding curriculum, but at the time, “Do you want a coding app?” “Yes, why not?
I’ll buy it.” It’s pretty open, pretty free, and because there are guidelines, everybody knows what is taught in
second grade, so if you say, “I teach maths second grade,” you’d better know what you’re saying, but other than
that, supplemental is considered more of a free space, if you want.
[00:26:52]
Q: Are any significant new players coming in on the core side, given the high barriers to entry? I assume there
are consistently high numbers of new players in the supplemental side.
PH: Yes, I think, for example, Newsela started like this small company that I remember it, and then some day,
I think they are able to be adopted as core product, because you see Newsela, this is another interesting
wrinkle into this. You can have your core product, but sometimes you need the supplement, so it’s necessary to
have supplemental, either for the kids who do not so well so you need some intervention or something or it’s
because of literacy, you want a supplement of more books, for example. I think Newsela, I think, they started
more like that, like it was this little supplemental and now I think people are adopting them as core
curriculum. I think that can be probably checked online, so I do want to explain, I don’t know a lot about
Newsela, I just hear it in conversations. I think there are good success stories of people who started small and
then they grew to be more widely adopted, but the domination of the big ones such as HMH, Pearson and
McGraw-Hill in the core product, I think that one is shifting under people who manage, people not companies,
that manage to be competing now with core product. For core adoptions and core products that before you
always had your usual suspects.
[00:28:49]
Q: We discussed US quality of education, and you referenced a statistic whereby 40% of kids are below the
global average in reading and maths. How have different states or districts reacted to the low scoring
percentages? Are they assessing core offerings and potentially adopting something new, and if so, what?
PH: It’s a big, big question. Let’s see how I answer this. This is a tricky one because look, nobody wakes up in
the morning and says, “Today I’m going to go to school and really do a poor job teaching because I don’t like
kids, but I want to damage their lives and I will not teach them.” Nobody does that. Everybody who’s working
in a school typically wants the best for the kids and wants to teach well. Some people don’t know how to teach
well, some people cannot teach so well, and some people teach well. The training in the US compared to other
countries is very minimal, of teachers. For example, the US, you can become a teacher with a very short time of
training whereas in other countries, you train for much longer. Whether that’s the origin of the problem or
not, the cause of the problem or not, it’s a different story, but what I’m saying is, even when, to answer your
question, the NAEP results come and somebody says, “Oh my God. I can’t believe we went down again. This is
terrible.” It’s not so easy as to say, “No problem. Let’s teach better tomorrow,” because you still have the same
teachers who do their best, but that’s their best.
Yes, it’s a big conundrum, how do you improve that? There have been studies of what to do. I actually
participated in some of these, and there are ways that other countries have managed to turn around
educational systems that were not giving the results, but it takes money. The budget in the US, it has always
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been quite limited for education, so you would be speaking about new budgets, new everything, and so it takes
the whole country to make that change, so in the meantime, we’re just making these little changes, and it’s not
enough. I don’t think it’s enough if you ask me, but I also don’t manage the budget of the country and I cannot
say, “Please double it for next year.” You see what I mean? Or triple it. Really it’s a societal problem and it’s
going to really take a long time before I think we allocate the necessary resources to turn around education.
NH: Some private institutions are receiving significant funding because the public system can’t get mask
mandates right and parents are pulling their kids out of public school and going to private. It’s a higher quality
of education, but they’ve also potentially adopted supplemental programmes more quickly. I’d be interested to
hear about the private side’s willingness to take on supplemental solutions such as an Age of Learning.
PH: Yes, it’s possible that you’re making a little bit of a cross-meaning of things. It doesn’t mean that because
you are private, you don’t use core products. I think you are associating private education with supplemental.
[00:34:06]
Q: How should we frame the adoption rate of supplemental education in private institutions? Core seems like
it’s through public and private, but there’s likely a lot more flexibility with supplemental.
PH: What happens with private is that obviously they have more resources, so I think in general, we can safely
assume that if they like something, they can buy it. If they like some app, they can buy it. Maybe, I don’t know.
It depends on how the owner or the board of the private school, so it depends on how you are managed
because it’s really like a private company, but if you have the resources, you could buy as many supplemental
things you think your kids need, you could do anything. There’s still a lot they have to abide by, so a kid in
second grade still needs to learn a bunch of things that the kid will learn in the public school, so the Common
Core Standards, even though they were not adopted in all of the states, those stipulate what should be learned
in each grade level. Parents do move from one state to the other, so even if you go to a private school, you
would hope that your kid is at grade level so that if you move, your kid will be okay in terms of what they
know.
Let me see if I can help you with that. Core and supplemental have nothing to do with private and public. To
be honest, I’m not an expert in private schools. I have never worked, yes, I have worked in one, but very short,
and every private school can be different from the rest. It’s not like public where there are things that come
from the government that everybody complies with. They do have a great deal of independence. There are
really good privates, there are really bad privates, anything in between, so it’s a little… I’m sure the question
you were asking about supplemental and core, I’m sure that there are some privates that spend a lot of money
in supplemental and there are some that spend no money on supplemental or very little, so it will more
depend on their finances and how they allocate the money.
[00:35:54]
Q: What are the challenges to retaining students’ engagement with apps across the age groups? What content
are players such as Age of Learning using to differentiate and encourage engagement with apps?
PH: I see. Let’s call it engagement because the student retention officially means something else, so let’s call it
engagement, student engagement. Yes, for supplemental apps, student engagement is key because that’s what
will make a teacher or an administrator want to buy something because they know kids will love it, and why is
it important that kids love it? It’s because it’s a lot easier to tell a kid, “Do this now for the next…” they finish
early, they don’t know what to do. It’s much easy to say, “Here you go. This is a game for you. Why don’t you
play it?” The kids love that, whereas if you say, “Here’s this worksheet. Complete this worksheet,” it’s very
boring, so engagement has been the currency of educational apps, and some have done it really well and some
have not done it well, so bad engagement is, sorry, I shouldn’t say bad, but maybe superficial engagement
would be that everything has music and colours and stars coming out of everywhere. That’s fine because it’s
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more fun to see things flying and all of that. However, the real engagement is when the educational experience
is so good that the kid is engaged in learning. He or she is not doing the exercise so they see some explosion at
the end. We would have that problem in Age of Learning where sometimes a reward was so good, and the guy
who did the animation was so good that kids wouldn’t even care to do it, they just wanted to see the explosion
at the end. You have to balance all of those little things that kids love, that explosion, somebody dancing, little
animations of whatever, you have to really balance it with good instruction.
I think Age of Learning quite does a very good job of both, that’s I think why they do so well. There are apps
that are very good engaging kids in the content, but if they are not visually attractive, it takes time for the kids
to notice that it will be interesting, whereas if you give an app to a kid and it’s all colourful and something
jumps out of the screen, the kids love it already. Engagement is expensive to create, both of them are
expensive to create. The one about the stars and everything flying is a little easier. The real engagement is hard
because you need to do a lot of user testing, and as I said before, we would create games and things that we
thought were the coolest thing on earth, and then you put it in front of a three-year-old, and the child turns
around and leaves the room because you didn’t do it well. It takes a lot of iterations, it takes a lot of
humbleness and being willing to iterate, and it takes money.
[00:40:22]
Q: How do individual schools and districts measure engagement, given it seems quite subjective? Do they
have their own way of measuring engagement, as we consider supplemental educational providers trying to
approach consumers for new business?
PH: Actually, I would like to disagree that it’s hard to measure because there are KPIs, key performance
indicators that you can establish are key to you and so for example, if it’s at the district level, the district could
say, “How many kids started,” let’s say you’d have 10 parts, “How many kids started part 1? Of all of the ones
who were given the opportunity, how many finished part 1? How long did they take? How may interruptions
they have, how many that finished part 1 went to part 2?” There are so many things you can track behind the
scenes to know if there is engagement or if there isn’t. It’s very easy to see. You typically do AB testing, you do
it in two different ways, you see which one sticks more, so no, it’s very easy to track, you just have to track your
metrics behind the scenes.
For example, if you think this game is fun and the kids spend three or four minutes and they close out of it, it
means it’s not engaging, whereas if all the kids continue doing it, then it is engaging. Then you have to think
what parts of the game are engaging and which ones are not, because there will be parts of your game where
you will lose a lot of people, a lot of children. It’s not even as simple as saying, “Is the game engaging?” It’s
what parts are engaging, where are the weakest points? Can we change them? No, it’s really easy to track.
Companies track that, districts track that too. Obviously, if they spent money on a supplemental app and
nobody used it or lots of kids started it but never finished it, that was a bad use of the money, so they will
probably not purchase it again, so they do, most of them, I think, do pay attention to how engaged the kids
were on that.
[00:43:15]
Q: How do measures to increase engagement differ across age groups? There are new areas and developments
such as adaptive learning using algorithms to make learning more personalised.
PH: Again, it depends a little bit on the age, and so the kids are very different. If you saw how different a five-
year-old is even before going to kindergarten and after going to kindergarten, you would not believe it’s the
same person. They change a lot, they change quickly, so it really depends on the age, and what will make a
three year old engaged will not make a six year old engaged at all. On the contrary, they will look down and
say, “Oh my God. They think I’m a baby. They are giving me this,” so it’s really, your question is a great
question, but it would be very hard for me tell you what to do with each age because each age is very different.
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Most of the times, the way you find out is with good user research. You do meet with them, you tell them what
do they like and all that, and then once you prototyped it or you wire-framed it or whatever, you put it in front
of them and you see, do they like it or not? Don’t worry. If they don’t like it, they will tell you. The kids, they
tend to tell you. You say, “Why didn’t you do it?” “Because I don’t like it. I don’t want to,” they tell you. That
part is easy, and after 12 years old, they start being politically correct and they think they have to be polite with
you, but the young kids are great that way. It’s just that until you do it right, the kids cannot tell you, “This is
why I don’t like it.” They just know that they don’t like it. Older kids sometimes can tell you. “I didn’t like it
because blah, blah, blah, because it was too long,” so it depends on the age.
[00:45:25]
Q: What factors can successfully increase engagement in children from 4-6 vs 6-8?
PH: 4-6, typically they’re illiterate. They can’t read, so it’s a very different design than 6-8. The directions are
different. It’s hard for me to give you advice in the vacuum, by the way. It’s very hard because I don’t know
what content we’re talking about, I don’t know what topic, but in broad strokes, just know that before six,
normally you do not rely on them reading. Therefore, your instructions have to default to an audio. Sometimes
some kids do read, and so there’s no hurting, it doesn’t hurt to actually put the sentence or whatever you need
there. Normally you do need some tutorials. Kids don’t like tutorials, but sometimes it’s very hard to get away
from telling them what you want them to do when they cannot read and so you want to say, “Please, drag this
from here to there,” so you can show it with a little hand or with a little icon or with something. These user
design experts and user experience guys and girls, they know a lot about these things, and so they are the ones
to propose ideas and then you test with the kids and you see which one is best, but 6-8 is a lot easier because
you can actually write things down and expect them to read them, not too long, but they can read them. They
also have a much longer attention span, and so, yes, it depends on the topic, but those would be very general
thoughts about it.
NH: How successful is Age of Learning at putting its products in front of students outside the US?
PH: I wouldn’t know that because I don’t have access to those data, I don’t know.
[00:49:08]
Q: How has adoption of e-learning programmes trended globally? Are there higher adoption rates ex-US?
PH: As you know, there is no such thing as, the US is not ahead of the curve when it comes to technology any
more, as you probably know, so the adoption of wifi, phones and all of that, it’s more or less the same
everywhere at this point, and every country has different companies creating content. Obviously, the language
is a huge factor, so if you live in a country where you don’t speak English, there are things that you cannot buy
from the US because it’s only in English and the kids won’t understand. The same way we cannot buy the
coolest app from Japan unless they have an English version, so there are lots of really good programmes in
every country. The US is very prolific, of course, Canada too. Today I saw one done in Sweden, thank God it
was also in English, because otherwise I couldn’t have accessed the content, but every country has really
wonderful things. I think in terms of adoption, that’s something that probably exists in some database. What
kind of penetration all these digital apps have in different international markets, I don’t have those data.
[00:50:38]
NH: On that note, we’ll end today’s Interview. Let me close by saying thank you, Paula, for your time today,
and thank you, clients, for joining Third Bridge Forum’s Interview. Clients, if you would like to speak to Paula
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in a private call or meeting, please let your relationship manager know. Have a good one.
PH: Thank you. Bye-bye.
Transcription ends at 00:50:50 of the recorded material
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