Real-world learning can give students experiences that traditional classroom instruction cannot fully replicate, but creating meaningful internships, apprenticeships, and other work-based learning opportunities at scale presents significant logistical challenges. In this episode of the EdGate Powers Podcast, Rich Portelance speaks with David Berg, Director of Digital Innovation at Big Picture Learning and co-creator of ImBlaze, about how schools can use technology to expand real-world learning while improving access, engagement, and outcomes for students.
Berg explains that Big Picture Learning's approach centers on student interests, relationships, and opportunities to learn from practitioners outside of school. His experience managing a high school internship program led him to develop ImBlaze as a way to organize the complex processes involved in connecting students with opportunities, tracking their participation, and ensuring that access to real-world learning is equitable.
The conversation examines how real-world learning can influence student engagement, attendance, graduation, career direction, and social capital. Berg also discusses the challenge of determining what constitutes high-quality work-based learning, particularly because states have different policies and there is not yet a consistent framework for measuring the learning that takes place through internships and apprenticeships.
A broader discussion focuses on what makes an edtech product successful and sustainable. Berg argues that products need to be built around clearly defined problems and the experiences of their actual users, with strong attention to user interface, user experience, engagement, and meaningful data, while ultimately measuring whether a product makes a difference in students' educational experiences rather than simply counting users.
- Real-world learning can strengthen student engagement by connecting academic experiences to students' interests and potential careers. Berg describes higher engagement, improved attendance, stronger graduation outcomes, and greater clarity about future pathways as benefits associated with giving students meaningful experiences outside the classroom.
- Technology can make work-based learning programs more manageable for schools. ImBlaze helps schools organize opportunities, connect students with experiences based on their interests, track attendance, collect mentor feedback, and manage the process from initial exploration through internships or apprenticeships.
- Equity needs to be central to the design of real-world learning opportunities. Berg emphasizes that students who already have strong networks often have access to internships and career connections, while tools such as ImBlaze can help schools extend those opportunities to students who may not otherwise have the same social capital.
- Work-based learning is gaining support, but education systems still need better ways to define and measure quality. Although educators and policymakers increasingly recognize its value, Berg notes that there is not yet a broadly established framework for determining what students should learn through these experiences or how that learning should be assessed.
- Successful edtech products should solve real problems for the people who use them. Berg argues that strong user experience, direct engagement with educators and students, and meaningful measures of impact are more important for long-term success than simply accumulating large numbers of users.
- Real-world learning in high school
- Internships and apprenticeships
- Student-centered education
- Work-based learning and career pathways
- Equity and opportunity gaps
- Social capital and career networks
- Technology for managing internships
- Measuring work-based learning outcomes
- Edtech product design and user experience
- Student engagement as a measure of success
- Innovation and disruptive change in education
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Host, EdGate Powers Webinar Series |
Director of Digital Innovation, Big Picture Learning, |
Making Real-World Learning Accessible to Every Student
Berg describes real-world learning as a central part of Big Picture Learning's approach to redesigning high school education. Rather than reserving internships and career connections for students who already have strong networks, ImBlaze is designed to help schools create equitable access to practitioners, mentors, and opportunities that connect to students' interests.
Notable Insight
"We want kids, all kids, to have access to adults out in the real world that are doing the work that they're interested in."
Key Questions Explored
- Why should students have opportunities to learn outside the traditional classroom?
- How can schools make internships and other real-world experiences more equitable?
- How can technology help students build social capital?
Defining and Measuring Quality Work-Based Learning
The conversation then turns to a challenge that has not yet been fully resolved: determining what makes a real-world learning experience educationally meaningful. Although states are beginning to establish policies around work-based learning, Berg explains that educators still lack consistent measures for evaluating the quality of these experiences and connecting them back to classroom learning.
Notable Insight
"There's not really enough policy out there around what qualifies as high-quality real world learning."
Key Questions Explored
- What should qualify as high-quality work-based learning?
- How can schools measure what students learn during internships?
- How can industry standards and educational standards work together?
Building Edtech Around Real User Needs
Berg argues that successful edtech development should begin with a clearly defined problem rather than with technology or data alone. ImBlaze evolved from the practical challenges Berg experienced as an educator, and the platform has continued to use feedback from practitioners and students to refine its user experience and focus on features that schools consider indispensable.
Notable Insight
"There has to be an understanding of user journeys, and there has to be an understanding of the problems that those users face in life."
Key Questions Explored
- How should edtech companies identify the problems their products need to solve?
- What makes a product a "must-have" rather than a "nice-to-have"?
- How can user testing improve an edtech product's design and engagement?
What This Means for Education Leaders
Education leaders should consider real-world learning as an important complement to traditional classroom instruction. Internships, apprenticeships, and other work-based experiences can help students connect their interests to potential careers while giving them access to practitioners and professional networks that may otherwise be unavailable to them.
Schools also need systems that make these opportunities manageable and equitable. As work-based learning programs expand, leaders should consider how they will identify opportunities, connect students to experiences, monitor participation, gather mentor feedback, and evaluate the quality of what students are learning outside the classroom.
Finally, education leaders and edtech providers should focus on whether technology solves a meaningful problem for the people who use it. Products that are built around educator and student needs, tested with actual users, and evaluated through meaningful measures of engagement and impact are more likely to become tools that schools consider essential rather than simply another piece of technology.
Q: What is real-world learning, and why is it important?
A: Real-world learning gives students opportunities to learn from practitioners and mentors outside the traditional classroom through experiences such as internships, apprenticeships, and other work-based learning opportunities. Berg connects these experiences to greater student engagement, stronger attendance, clearer career direction, and the development of social capital.
Q: How does ImBlaze support work-based learning programs?
A: ImBlaze gives schools a system for managing opportunities and guiding students from initial interest through exploration and placement. It also supports attendance tracking, mentor feedback, and the collection of data about students' real-world learning experiences.
Q: Why is equity important when expanding internships and apprenticeships?
A: Students do not begin with equal access to professional networks and career opportunities. Berg argues that schools should intentionally create access to practitioners and mentors for students who may not already have those connections, rather than allowing work-based learning opportunities to primarily benefit students who already have strong social capital.
Q: How can schools measure the quality of work-based learning?
A: The conversation suggests that this remains an emerging area. While educators recognize the value of work experience, there is not yet a broadly established framework that defines quality, identifies specific learning outcomes, or provides consistent measures for evaluating different types of real-world learning.
Q: What makes an edtech product successful?
A: Berg argues that successful products begin with a clear understanding of the problems faced by their users and are designed around those needs. User experience, engagement, testing with actual educators and students, and meaningful measures of impact can help turn a product from a "nice-to-have" into something practitioners consider indispensable.
"Be courageous to think about breaking things in public education. I think the time has come to do some radical acts."
The following transcript has been edited for readability. Timestamps have been removed and minor transcription errors corrected. Speaker comments and context have been preserved.
Opening Remarks
Rich Portelance
My name is Richard Portelance from EdGate, and today, we're going to be talking with Dave Berg from ImBlaze–which is part of Big Picture Learning–and we're going to do an interview, and we're trying to understand a little bit better about some of the technologies and some of the innovations that are coming into the market, and why some of them are “sticky” and some are not. We're going to be running a few interviews, and then in a few weeks, we're also going to be hosting a webinar. It's going to be on June 20th, and we invite everybody who listens to this to join us for that webinar. Dave will take part, as well as a few people on the side of education; we have a high school principal, we have someone who's running an online learning academy, and we have another edtech vendor who is in this space of K-12, who's doing some pretty innovative stuff and, you know, having some success of actually being utilized within the classroom.
And ultimately, we all want to see these, you know, assessments, outcomes, and making a difference, right? And so, that's what we want to talk about today. And so, to start this off, we're going to get to know Dave a little bit and get into his head as a curator of ImBlaze. So, Dave, could you give us a little introduction of who you are and what got you to Big Picture Learning?
David Berg
Sure. So, thanks for having me. I am David Berg. My current title is director of digital innovation for Big Picture Learning. So, just an aside, Big Picture Learning is a nationwide nonprofit organization. It's been around for over 25 years with the intention of redesigning schools–particularly high schools–focusing that redesign work on student-centeredness, on student interest, and on building relationships. We think that as schools are evolving and should be evolving, those things; relationships and student interests, need to be pretty central to what's going on, particularly in high school.
The other key component of the design that relates to both of those things is that we think kids should get out into the real world. We think that cloistering young people inside the walls of a comprehensive high school has some value, but there's also some loss to that, and getting kids out into the real world to learn things that they're interested in by actual practitioners, with actual practitioners, and mentors in the real world, as well as building social capital–building those networks–is a critical new deliverable that schools can be providing for young people in a really equitable way.
So, I'm a former high school teacher, or science teacher, and U.S. government teacher, and I worked at a Big Picture school back in the day, and that Big Picture school had an internship program; it was in Sacramento– it is still in Sacramento, California. And the internship program was two days per week, all four years of high school. So, fully, 40% of all academic minutes for that school, kids spent out in the real world. It's a big commitment to the idea of real-world learning, and it was something that we were really proud of, but it was also really hard to manage. Managing what I call a “distributed learning environment,” where kids are out in the world learning, creates some complexity challenges. And so, I started to hack together some solutions for that because of some prior work experience and comfort with database design, I started to hack together some solutions to that. Those solutions became known by other schools; other schools wanted something similar, and that evolved into eventually what is now ImBlaze.
So, ImBlaze is a tool that enables schools to grow their real-world learning programs. There's a bit of a lexicon problem, like “real-world learning”, “internship”, and “apprenticeship”. It's like, see, like… “work-based learning”; there are lots of different words that sort of encapsulate the same kind of thing. And so, we fall back to real-world learning to try to absorb all of those words and those phrases. And so, the tool itself is enabling schools to grow their real-world learning programs in a way that ensures equity of opportunity for young people, while also collecting this new emergent data around what young people are doing out in the real world, so that we can have that data and schools can have that data to help drive practice and emphasize the importance of real-world learning. So, yeah. I'll leave it there for the moment.
Discussion
Rich Portelance
That's a great start, thank you. A few things that kind of I latched onto: I'm curious about your work in Sacramento, the outcome number. So, when you talk about the data, David, how did that affect the students’ learning and outcomes through that 40% of time spent outside the classroom?
David Berg
Yeah. You know, Big Picture schools that have this design are historically in communities that are underserviced, undersupported, and oftentimes have a variety of other challenges related to student success by traditional metrics. So, as a result, coming in and saying, “Okay, well, learning in school is having some pretty low outcomes here. Let's try to break that system. Let's try to get kids learning outside of school,” has shown good results. Meaning graduation rates are higher, student engagement is higher, student engagement back in school subject matter courses is higher because of the relevance of going out into the real world.
I like an anecdotal story related to this that I tell from when I was an advisor and an earth science teacher at this school. I taught earth science; like, geology is kind of my thing, right? I had a kid who's in my advisory who was going to an internship with a practicing geologist. Like, somebody who's actually doing the work, right? And that work was like an inch wide, a mile deep, to overuse the geology metaphor a bit, I think. But every time I would visit that kid at their internship, me, the earth science teacher, would learn something about geology from the kid, because that kid was being mentored by an actual practitioner in the field, not me as a, you know, quasi-academic educator teaching the subject matter to California state standards.
So, when that happens, you get, you know, increased engagement in school, better attendance, and then I think the most important thing is kids having a better sense of their direction of what they want to do. They don't have fantasies about what the workplace is like and what their vision of their workplace is–they actually have experience there. And lastly, they have the social capital to really start to leverage that. They have people that they can call up and say, “Hey, I need– I'm interested in this work. I need an internship while I'm in college,” “I need an apprenticeship now that I'm out of high school,” or “I need a job,” and they could have that network to build upon to persevere through college, to move up through the jobs ladder, and so forth. So, the success is great, but what that doesn't necessarily always show is, like, highest test scores because that's the thing– those are the places we work, you know, those are the schools that we work in. This tool that we've built is about building social capital. That means it could be a tool for good or a tool for evil, as far as I'm concerned, meaning we could sell ImBlaze strictly to private schools who offer internships for the highest functioning kids, who are the most successful in the traditional system, and they are, you know– For example, they're on a path for early graduation from high school, we don't know what else to do with them anymore, let's give them an internship, great, ImBlaze would super help with that. But those kids already have all the tools and the toolbox that they need to be successful. Like, they– and they probably already have a pretty good social capital network around them. And so, we tend to really focus on the equity part of this, and really bridging the opportunity gaps. We want kids–all kids–to have access to adults out in the real world that are doing the work that they're interested in.
Rich Portelance
That's a terrific place to start, and certainly it's well needed. You're filling a huge gap in the marketplace, right, that these students who are underserved are getting these opportunities. Were you finding that more of those students end up attending college, or go directly to the workforce? Were there some kind of numbers that came out?
David Berg
I would have to look and remember what the numbers were. I think that the… you know, it's an interesting question. Like, my highest… in one of the cycles that I worked there, because we worked in four-year cycles, the kid who had the highest GPA was the highest GPA for the school–you know, summa cum laude, or whatever that's called–and could have gotten into any– you know, like, one of the requirements is that you at least apply to colleges, and got into every college he applied to, but he didn't go to college. So, like, I look at the reality– I'm really interested in computer engineering. I look at the reality that I could walk out of high school because of my internships doing computer coding–I can walk out of high school and get a six-figure job. Like, why do I need college? And why do I need, you know, his parents were teachers, like, why do I need college debt? Like, I just don't see it. And I had to be like, “Okay. It's hard for me to argue that.” So, the metrics are better–graduation rates are higher. Exactly how much higher? I don't know off the top of my head. That was also 15 years ago, so I'm trying to remember it now, but our graduation– it was considered a highly successful school in California.
Rich Portelance
Okay. Fantastic. So, you know, and those outcomes, right, they talk about the program efficacy that talks about, you know, and what we want to kind of get to is, you know, how do some of the technologies that are being deployed affect those outcomes? So, you built ImBlaze through the Big Picture Learning group, so this is kind of an innovation delivered by Big Picture Learning, and we know that you're with one particular school with Dr. Rubin out in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, who's running an internship program. How is ImBlaze being deployed, and what kind of effect is it having on their program?
David Berg
Yeah, so tools matter. You know, the analogy I use is that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Like, so if you don't have tools to do disruptive innovation stuff– disruptive, like, if you don't have tools– if you don't have tools that promote disruptive innovation, you don't do disruptive innovation–you like, you need the systems. And the tools don't have to be digital tools, but you need those tools. Think about, you know, Uber is just an app, right? Uber disrupted the transportation sector… Uber and Lyft–and the reason is because they provided a tool to enable anybody to transport anybody else in a car. Like, it's, you know, and from there it grew, but that's, you know, that's a disruptive innovation. If someone had not built the app, Uber, you know… like, that isn't able to happen.
So, in our case, managing real-world learning or internship programs is complicated; it is outside of the natural skill set of a single subject teacher. The metrics are a little fuzzy, like, what makes a good internship? What's not? Like, how many hours? Like, all sorts of things. It's hard– it's been up until this point hard to track, like, how successful internships are when they are imposed on a kid, as opposed to when kids pursue them based on their interests. And so, what we see– you know, we're in a big growth curve right now; we see lots of programs taking on ImBlaze, and we're really excited about all that. And it has to do with the fact that schools, practitioners, intuitively know their limits to what they could provide kids inside the school building. And they intuitively know because they love young people, and they want to see them set off to be successful. They intuitively know that getting them out into the real world to experience the things that they're interested in, and to learn from other adults other than parents and teachers, is a net positive, is a good thing for kids.
How to do that, like how to actually implement that, is just really… you know, it's like trying to learn Mandarin, like, oh my God, I don't even know where to start. You know, like it's– And so that's where we come in is the tool to help schools build out a database of opportunities, of, you know, potential opportunities. And then, the tool it also has embedded in it a system that really supports equitable processes, from going from student interest to exploring that opportunity–an opportunity like, with a shadow day, or whatever. And then, converting that to some sort of an internship or an apprenticeship, and thinking about what are the goals, what are some of the outcomes we expect for that. And then tracking attendance so that, you know, kids are showing up, and that you're getting good mentor feedback along the way. So that's how schools use it.
We now have around 250 schools that– or programs, they're not all schools, actually, that use ImBlaze. We've logged about two million student hours of attendance on the platform, which equates to around 500,000 student days out at internships on the platform. So, we suspect–we have no reason not to believe this–but we suspect that we have the largest data set of actual student, real-world learning experience, and researchers are starting to get interested in that, interested in looking at that large data set for AI to explore, and so… yeah.
I don't know if I answered that question, but that's, I mean, Uxbridge is a great example; a traditional high school that also recognizes the importance of doing something non-traditional, which is getting kids out into the real world, and they place–from the leadership on down–they place a lot of value in that. Like, “Okay, we need to make sure our kids have mentors; we need to make sure our kids get out in the real world; this is a priority.” They didn't know how to implement that, and then we, you know, and ImBlaze came along for them, and now they are able to do that. And the other piece to that is that there are now, in a variety of states, state policies that are unsupported with solutions to implement them, but their state policies around, “Hey, kids should graduate with at least, you know, 60 hours of some sort of work-based learning experience.” Like, that all kids should have, like, they're– They're not yet mandates, but they're policies that are in place that are trying to push that idea of work-based learning being a key deliverable of schools, but no other way to solve that. We don't have real competition in terms of what tool that we provide. Hopefully that answered– that was a long, long meandering.
Rich Portelance
No, those are great answers, because you gave a lot of information there, and it's well beyond what I was asking, which is terrific. And it gave me some insight into ImBlaze. I'm curious, how important are… you mentioned academic standards, and I'm curious how important are academic standards and CTE standards in this case for student learning? Is there the development, or are there some of those standards that are existing for the internships that are helping to guide what these students are doing and learning about?
David Berg
Yeah, so, you know, like, there are credits that can be awarded to kids for 120 hours of, you know, of a work-based learning experience. I think that that's an important question, and that's the piece that's really emergent right now, is we have this large data set that we can really look at what represents quality in terms of learning or experience that can then transition to learning back in the single-subject classroom. We have the data, but only we have the data, so there's not really enough policy out there around what qualifies as high-quality real-world learning. And so, unfortunately, in the current state, educators intuitively know that this is important, but they don't know how to measure that importance. And so, they'll do things like, you know, work experience, great, you got work experience; like, that's cool. Like, that's not a bad thing, like, okay, you got work experience, but what does that even mean? It probably means something positive for the young person, but what does that actually mean? What's the matrix? Like, how do we measure that? How, you know, are there components to that? Is there a rubric for it, or something?
Like, there's not that yet out there in the space, and that has to do with the disruptive– the emergence of work-based learning as being important relatively recently, the fairly distributed nature of education in the United States, with each state having its own policy about that. The good news about it, though the–hopeful news–is that regardless of your political persuasion, the idea of kids getting out into the real world and work-based learning seems to be like one of the few commonly agreed-upon, uniformly consensus things about, oh, yeah, that's a good thing for kids. There could be different– from a more left-leaning, progressive perspective, it may be around, like, you know, bridging opportunity gaps, inequities, and things like that. From the more conservative or right-leaning side of the equation, it might be more around employability and getting kids out, you know, into career pathways and things like that. But either way, the net effect is like, yeah, they know this is important–we need to do this. And so, we're at this junction in time right now where we see this as a pretty transformative, but also pretty doable thing for education policymakers to address. It's kind of a win-win for them.
Rich Portelance
No, that's fantastic. And it kind of makes a ton of sense, right? I think people understand the importance of real-world experience. I know from a personal anecdote: my daughter decided not to go to college; she's in an apprenticeship program now, and it's a two-year program at a hair salon, and I'm just so impressed with the level of teaching that goes on. You know, every Monday she's in a course, she's bringing in people who want to have a certain thing done, you know, whether it's roots, a touch-up, or whatever.
David Berg
Right.
Rich Portelance
You know, they'll focus on it, and they'll teach some of those skills, and then she has the rest of the week where she's doing hands-on work, and, you know, I've seen this amazing growth, and within that culture, there's an assessment, right? She has to be at a certain level of proficiency to be able to work on humans–
David Berg
Right.
Rich Portelance
-and so, you know, as you were talking about, there's still this amorphous area of uncertainty of how do we measure? But it's really important I think, you know, being a data geek, and it seems like you understand and appreciate the data. You know, we do have to get to a point where we're measuring, and we're setting some level of expectation so a student can achieve that, and then they can be deemed proficient and ready for that next step.
David Berg
Yeah. The challenge there, like there are industry standards–like you're talking about with your daughter–like there are industry standards, there are industry measures that can be employed. The problem with that is that it runs up against the status quo of the education system about who is the assessor, and what are the assessments? If we bring that into school, using your daughter's example, it may be very likely that she would get through the entire apprenticeship program never having to learn anything around… algebra. Or, you know, like it may not be a skill that, you know, we have these compacts in society around, like, the basic level of knowledge we should all have and agreed upon, and some of that stuff may need to evolve, because right now, I could do any algebra with my voice on Siri on my phone. You know, like, I can ask it what the Pythagorean theorem is, and… great. And so, there's a bit of a lag as these institutions… you know, meaning like single-subject professionals and the institutions that support them catch up to the reality of industry standards, and what the industries need–there's a gap there right now.
Rich Portelance
So, in terms of that gap, and you mentioned something that I think is important, is, you know, as we start to discover, and I want to pull this– tie this back into, you know, the whole point of conducting this interview, which is, you know, giving those who listen some understanding of what's important. If you're launching an edtech product, you know, whether it's AI or not, is the efficacy. And so, you know, you're talking about the datasets that come out of the work you do, and you did– before you got to the point where, you know, ImBlaze was something, right, there was a– you know, you saw a need and you started to build up a dataset. And then you said, “Okay, we need a tool to bring this together to manage it.” But that tool is now providing an even broader dataset that, you know–
David Berg
Yeah.
Rich Portelance
–you can draw upon to say, “Okay, these are the Innovations we really need in order to get to the assessment,” right? So, you're building that bridge in a very methodical fashion. Does that resonate and make sense?
David Berg
Yeah. I mean, in some ways, compared to other edtech products, we built backwards. And what I mean by that– and not all, but the platforms that are comparable to what we do, they've gone in and said, “Okay, data is important, measurements are important, we're going to build a district tool–a school district tool–to measure real-world learning– or work-based learning, like we're going to build that.” They build that, you know, like the district portal and all of that, and then the bottom stuff where the educator interacts with it, where the student interacts with it, it's sort of an afterthought or not even part of the functionality. Those platforms flounder because you have to make a priority list of your users, like… and they're sort of blocker users. If one user isn't using it, the next user won't use it, either. Like, it's– there has to be an understanding of user journeys, and there has to be an understanding of the problems that those users face in life, and how you are solving their problems. If you're not, you're just wasting time for them. And so, I think that a lot of edtech companies–and I've been part of accelerators before, and so worked with and mentored a bunch of edtech company folks and entrepreneurs–they come at it from that data perspective, which is really great, but if you're not thinking about your UI (user interface) and your UX (user experience), if you're not thinking about the problems you're solving for a student or for a teacher, if you can't define those problems really, really clearly to really help you segment the market and see who are the people you should be working with, then you're not going to get anywhere. You might– you– actually, you might get a half-million-dollar sale for a school district, or for a state, or something like that, like you might, but the platform is not going to endure; like, you're not going to build on that.
A legion of adherent users of the platform who feel that it is absolutely indispensable, like, I need this tool to do my job, that's the thing– like, when you hear Uxbridge or any of these schools, like, when they say things like, “This tool has enabled us to have an internship program,” or something indispensable, that's like, that's all I want to hear. Like, okay, great. Like, what we do outside of that for data reporting, for program improvement, and for policy advising is really secondary to practitioners saying, “This tool is indispensable to running our program.” In our case, when principals see the attendance functionality, that they could see where kids are, when they're checking in and out for their internship, there's sort of this, like, “Oh, I can't put that genie back in the bottle; I can't unsee that.” Like, once they know that there is a tool out there to ensure kids–who they're liable for during the school day–like, that they could see that they're at their internship and when they leave, like–
Rich Portelance
That's massive, that's huge.
David Berg
They can't unsee that, like, who– like, it's not that who cares what's happening there. Like, we want them to get to driving it down into, like, the importance of those experiences, but once they see that piece of functionality, they see that it is indispensable, and they can't– as I said, they can't unsee it. Now there's almost a bit of a liability, like, “I can't not use this because this tool exists out there in the world.” And so, that has been our ticket to success thus far is just that; where now the policies are starting to catch up to also sort of push from that direction–from the top direction–as well.
Rich Portelance
You know, I'm a– I did some advisement down at Fairfield University; they have a startup program. Fairfield is here in Connecticut where I live, and the professor that runs the program asked me to come down and be part of a panel, assess the companies, and give them some advice, and one of the things that we talk about is being a “must-have” versus a “nice-to-have”. You just described that so perfectly; it's, you know, if the person's really not engaging, if it's, “Okay, this does something,” but it doesn't, you know, “I don't have to do this”, then you're not going to get real traction. But like you said, not all of a sudden, you know, you can't unsee that data; you can't unsee the fact that the students are checking in and checking out and understanding what's happening. Now it becomes a “must-have”, and I bet you the principals and the people in charge are checking that every single day and saying, “All right, you know, where's David? Is he in–” you know, “Okay, he did his thing, and now we can expect him back at school or do that next piece.” So if I'm an edtech provider, and I'm looking at what are those things going to be; important, measurable, and going to drive success, you know, you just pointed out a really important one, which is, you know, be necessary–be a “need-to-have”, but also you talked a little bit, David, about the UI/UX, and I'm a big believer in engagement, you know, making sure that whatever you produce is, you know, will engage the people–its intended audience. Can you talk a little bit about how you looked at that with ImBlaze and how you made your product “sticky” for those students?
David Berg
Yeah. Well, so this is a bit of a cautionary tale also related to… Like, if you think about people who are entrepreneurs in the edtech space, if you put them in and categorize them or stereotype based on them, by and large, they are people who were successful in the existing school systems. Like, they got to– they navigated the existing– they're not great innovators in that sense, then, because they're like… they personally didn't struggle through the existing system; they’re not– No, no, let me take that back. They're great innovators, they're not necessarily great disruptive innovators… because they come through it with the lens of, “Oh, I can make some tweaks along the sides of this thing called ‘education’ and make it better,” when what we're really trying to do, like, is recognize there's some fundamental things about public education in the United States that are broken. Like, I get to work for a nonprofit, so I can say some of these things, like that– like there are some things that are fundamentally broken.
The notion that kids, who are digital natives, they are digital natives, right, can learn anytime, anywhere for free from an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) professor on YouTube and do that all day long really starts to shake the foundation of what teachers do, right? And so, like, sure, you could find ways to make their classroom teaching more engaging with better SMART Boards or whatever, like, but that's not super disruptive. So, to get to the– like, so, I just want to like, flag that a little bit. And the other piece I want to flag also is about “nice-to-have” and “must-have”; you can have “nice-to-have” and be really successful if it's really, really nice to have. Like, people love, you know, you probably have apps on your phone that you don't need, but you spend time on them, like, you know, because they're pleasurable to engage with. And so, you better– in terms of UI/UX, if it's going to be a “nice-to-have”, it should be really nice. You know, something that's really engaging and enjoyable for folks to do. And that could be a way to build a lot of success. You know, when Schoology started, they gave it out for free, you know, the LMS (learning management system), Schoology, years ago they gave it out for free to teachers, and it looked like and it felt like Facebook at a time when Facebook was, you know, pretty preeminent right there– when for teachers, a lot of teachers were on Facebook. It felt like that, and it felt so much different than the existing LMS’s that were out there, that they started with that approach of just, like, this is– you don't need this, because you've got an LMS, but this is so much nicer. So, yeah. So that's– The UI/UX is super important.
We are lucky because we work in the network of schools, while the majority of ImBlaze customers aren't affiliated with our schools–our network schools. We have that base of practitioners to really– practitioners and young people to really leverage to learn from, and we're always doing user-design testing and and user-experience testing and stuff like that to get a better sense of that. So, lots of testing is really important, which can be hard also if you are an entrepreneur, and you just don't have easy access to schools as a place to test–you tend to start to infer what kids need.
Rich Portelance
So there's a really important point when you talk about inferral versus understanding and really having that measure, right? It's just like, you know, we talked about standards earlier… and assessment–there's a measure there. Once you understand some of the data, you can infer certain details, but eventually, you have to back it with real data, right? You have to have that assessment that says, “Okay, this is, you know, this is as factual as we can get it. You know, we understand it, and this is what's happening,” right?
David Berg
Well, it depends on for who. Like, the other thing is if you're– the data you need is for investors, you know, let's just be real–like, if you're– that's different than impact data, like that's different, like– it's different than research data, it's different than pedagogy data, data around pedagogy, like, it's different. And the reality is that the majority of edtech products out there are private, for-profit, and their VC (venture capital) or other funding– you know, they have a funding mechanism that expects a rate of return that's 10x or higher. And so, you know, what you want then is student eyeballs; you want, like, I don't care what they do on the platform, I just want to be able to say I've got 300,000 users. Great. You know, the loosest measurement of that you possibly can make would be fine. There was a competitor to ours, and I looked at their public data–and they're privately funded–and they're great, I'm not going to tell– like, I'm not going to out them for this, but I will say like, they announced like, “We have 180,000 students,” and then they listed how much experience they had, how many like, actual work-based learning experiences that they had, and when I did the math, I was like, “Oh, that's about three hours per kid on average,” so about an average three hours. So I was like, “Cool, our numbers are way, way, way, way, way smaller than the number of users, but let me run those numbers and see.” And ours were 33–ours was 10x greater than the amount of hours that their kids, on average, were spending out in the real world. Do investors care about that? Like, no. They want the 180,000 users. Like, I get it, that's– So, anyway, you’re getting me on a soapbox here.
Rich Portelance
Well, it's important that I think people hear that, because those numbers are different, and when you talk about– because when we started this conversation, you were really talking about the pedagogy. You know, you spent the time to kind of figure this out from, you know, to understand why it's really needed, and the product evolved from that experience, right, of teaching in Sacramento, and, you know. And looking at what Big Picture Learning was trying to do, and now you have a platform, you're taking that experience and that pedagogy and building a product that makes sense, and it has this 10x performance. So one of the things that, you know, we're kind of trying to push a button on today is, you know, what drives innovation acceptance? It's not just innovation for innovation’s sake, and so you– I think you just hit on a big one. You know, obviously I'm going to do a shameless plug for EdGate and what they do in terms of standards. You know, they work really hard at understanding why standards exist, and how to do the correlation or the alignment of standards to content, and provide some of that assessment information at the end of that rainbow, right? And they've been doing this for 27 years, and they've developed patents on their technology and their taxonomy because it's important. But it was all born from educators– from pedagogy that was developed, right? It wasn't just an edtech provider coming in saying, “Hey, I want– I know I can make money at this,” so…
David Berg
Yeah.
Rich Portelance
If you step back and you say, “All right, I'm a–” Pretend to be an innovator who's in a for-profit. Okay, so put yourself in those shoes for a second. How do you approach the market? What do you tell others, and what do you do that's going to drive your product?
David Berg
It's a good question. I think, like, some of the things– some of it gets to the values of this hypothetical product, or this team, or this organization, because it's a worthy goal to say that our value is to get into the hands of half a million kids, or, you know, like, whatever it is. Like, there's worthy– there's– I don't for a nonprofit, but I’m pretty psyched about capitalism too. Like, I think it's not great, but it's the best thing out there. I think there was a quote around that like, whatever, “Capitalism is terrible, but the andonly thing worse is everything else,” or something like that, like, so… And so, you know, what I'm hoping that for-profit edtech products are doing is…you know Gallup did a survey of– I can't remember the number now, but I think it was like 1.5 million students a couple years ago and it was a student engagement survey, and what they revealed is that between seventh grade and 12th grade, there's this engagement cliff–you may have been familiar with this. And like, the engagement level goes to something around 38% around 11th grade, meaning 38% of kids say that they're engaged in their learning. Now I use– I think of that number as like– let's think of that as like the success metric, like if there's, you know– because from a pedagogy point of view, if we all know that if someone's not engaged, they're not really absorbing the content. The standards are great; they might meet the standards, but they might not be retaining the knowledge and gaining wisdom off of that knowledge.
If they're not engaged– not they might be, they're not, just from like, from a neuroscience perspective, they're not. So, I think about that 38% number; it's like, that's the key to me of a success metric of schools. If, you know, an airline had a 38% on-time performance rating, or a 38% safety rating, or something like that, they'd be out of business, like, long ago out of business. Like, these are success metrics that are so low that if you put them into a for-profit mindset around business, if GE (General Electric), you know, 38% of their wind turbines or airplane engines worked properly, like… long gone! Like, you know, like way out of business and bankrupt a long time ago, like out of business! So, what I think about to answer your question is what are the– if the tool is increasing those numbers, increasing engagement in young people in the school experience, meaning increasing their engagement for those, you know, 180 something days that we get them for 12 years, like… if we're doing something better with that time in these young people's lives where they're– that something better is being represented by increased engagement that they report, then it's a win, then it's a good tool as far as I'm concerned. Like, that's the baseline there; is it increasing their engagement?
Rich Portelance
That's an absolutely terrific measure. It's funny, when I started up CareerPath back 10 to 11 years ago, one of the things we were trying to do, we were asked to do originally by Valparaiso University School of Law, was to increase the engagement of the career center, and we built a tool that was designed to do just that. It was successful, and we were hired by Dartmouth College, where we actually started the company at that point, and said, “Okay, we got something here because it's engaging and it's getting students involved.” And, you know, we did some good things, and we did some things that didn't necessarily work out during that period, but I always talk about, you know, I think the component that we had right was we understood why engagement was important and how to engage those students. It's then, you know, translating that into the performance that is expected, right? So, if you have them engaged, then, you know, what can you– where can you go from there? And it sounds like Big Picture Learning is doing a really good job with ImBlaze, the work that you're doing to continue that engagement to get the kids excited about these internships, and providing the outcomes that the schools are working for are expecting. Is that accurate?
David Berg
Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's what we hope. Absolutely. I like the way you say it.
Closing Thoughts
Rich Portelance
Well, I, you know, David, I could talk to you for hours; I think this is absolutely fascinating. I would say, is there anything that you would want to leave the audience with that you thought was particularly important today, or that was either said or maybe not said?
David Berg
I think, be courageous to think about breaking things in public education–I think the time has come to do some radical acts, and… yeah, ImBlaze.org, check us out! I’ll do my plug as well, like, ImBlaze.org, check it out, sign up for a demo; we'd love to talk to you all. We are– because it's a nonprofit, we are not pushy; we're more around finding the right partners and finding the right relationships that we can build and help programs do good, disruptive work.
Rich Portelance
I'm a huge fan of what you're doing. I believe in internships and apprenticeships, I think there's a massive space that needs to be filled and can be filled by the work that you're doing, so thank you for joining us, this is going to be a terrific webinar coming up–again, I'll mention, June 20th, David will be there, Dr. Michael Rubin from Uxbridge High School will be there, we'll have a representative from ORIGO Education on that, and a representative from Jefferson County out in Ohio who's doing online learning, so we have a really good panel. David, thank you for being with us today, and we wish you a lot of luck with ImBlaze. I hope you continue to spread the word–we'll do our part, and you guys get into another 250 schools here in the next year or two.
David Berg
Thank you.