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

Nicole Tomassi

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Westchester Education Services webinar about Best Practices for Engaging with a Vendor Partner Network. My name is Nicole Tomassi, and I'm the marketing and conference manager here for Westchester Education Services, as well as our parent company, Westchester Publishing Services.

We'll get the discussion going in about a minute or so. Before we do that, I'd like to go over a few general items related to today's webinar. Your microphones will remain muted throughout the session. However, we do want to hear from you. So, if you have questions at any time during the presentations that will follow, please go ahead and enter those in the Q&A box that is at the lower portion of the screen on the control bar. We will get to as many of your questions as time allows during the session, and we may possibly get back to you after the webinar if you have a particularly specific or detailed question. 

Also, I just want to bring to your attention that at the conclusion of today's webinar, we will have a brief survey that asks for some feedback from you about the information we presented today, as well as additional information you may be interested in hearing from Westchester Education Services about. 

So, with those few items out of the way, I would like to introduce our host and moderator for today's webinar, Kevin J. Gray, the president and chief content officer for Westchester Education Services. 

Kevin J. Gray

Hi, Nicole, and thank you and thanks to everyone for being here. I’m really excited to chat with you and to introduce you to our guests. Let me give you–for those who may not be familiar with Westchester, let me give you a two-minute or less kind of overview of who we are. 

Westchester is a product development company that works with vendors in… Or works with publishers and edtech companies. We're employee-owned, and we are headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, with employees around the country and around the world. And we offer full-service development, including content, art, design, production, kind of everything a product development company should be. 

Joining me today are Gina Faulk of EdGate and Johanna Wetmore of EvoText. We're going to talk a bit. We’ll allow them to give you sort of a similar… Or allow them to give you a similar overview of their organizations, then we're going to dive into kind of some best practices overall of working with vendor partner networks. And then as a bit of case study, we'll dive into the solutions that Gina's team provides, Johanna's team provides, what Westchester does, and how we have established working together using the sort of best practices we're going to talk about. 

So, let me introduce my two co-panelists, Gina and Johanna.

Gina Faulk

Thank you, Kevin. 

Kevin J. Gray

And Gina, if you would start us off with a bit about EdGate?

Gina Faulk

Sure. I'd be happy to do that. 

So, EdGate has been around for over 25 years now. We were established in 1997 in Gig Harbor, Washington. And we actually grew out of our local school district. Our founder saw the need for a way to align–actually, open educational resources to educational standards. So that's where our business really took off. It started with the OAR (Open Educational Resources), but then led to publishers coming to EdGate to have their content aligned to standards.

So, right now, we are the educational standards leader. We have about 150 active clients that we're working for. But in total, we've probably worked for 500 different entities over the years. And that's edtech publishers, traditional textbook publishers, libraries, school districts, higher education publishers as well, film companies, a little bit of everything. It's a hodgepodge. 

We also, in addition to capturing or doing the alignments to standards, we also have a large database of standards that we license out to our clients. So, that's also a core piece of our business. We build taxonomies. We create metadata for companies. So, standards, that's really our thing. 

So, that's why it's such a great partnership working with both EvoText and Westchester, because that's our niche, definitely.  

The one more thing that we do that I should add, we also–I mentioned that we started out with OER, and we still do have a collection of open educational resources that we track, manage, and use to work with our clients to fill gaps, or license out the collection of OER resources completely. 

Kevin J. Gray

Excellent. Thank you, Gina. Thank you. 

And Johanna? 

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

Well, hi! Thanks for having me on the show today. 

And yes, I've enjoyed working with Kevin and Gina in our various incarnations. So, I'm a co-founder of EvoText, makers of Content2Classroom, and we've been in business as EvoText for over 10 years now. We started out as an educational software development house onshore, entirely onshore, and able to build out some of the you know most reputable edtech solutions out there, and always had a mission of working with curriculum providers, educational techn–or, excuse me, K-12 educational publishers to bring their products to life in the digital space. And that's what we decided to sort of box up and create into a product, which is Content2Classroom. And that's going on its third year in the classroom space now, where we're actually helping publishers of all sizes really focus on their core competency, which is creating robust, award-winning curriculum, and Content2Classroom sort of, you know, vows to take care of the rest. It's a curriculum development and delivery platform. It's built from the ground up to meet the specific edtech needs of the K-12 educational publishing space. And when we talk about those needs, what we're really talking about is standards.

Not just academic standards, which Gina helps us with on a regular basis, but also interoperability, security, as well as accessibility standards. And having all of that architecture sort of ready to go allows our customers to really focus on their project at hand, which is getting their materials out to market in a fashion that is acceptable and wanted by their customers.

So, I’m really happy to continue on with this conversation today and dive a little bit deeper into that. 

Kevin J. Gray

Excellent. Thank you. And as background as you alluded to, we've all worked together in various different ways, and thought, you know, as different B2B providers in the space, we have different vantage points, and I don't think a lot of folks realize that there is so much interconnectivity between so many of us vendors. And so, I thought it would be helpful to kind of share some benefits of sort of picking folks who are well aligned and who have experience working together. 

Discussion

Kevin J. Gray

So, with that, Gina, you've prepared a slide. I'd like to throw that up and have you kind of start talking us through it. 

Gina Faulk

Great. So, let me open it up for you.

Okay. So, let me swap that over. Okay. Can you see that, okay?

Kevin J. Gray

Yep. Looks great. 

Gina Faulk

Okay, great. 

So, standards are sort of in the middle of everything. You can start out knowing what standards you need to align to, or you could create your content and then realize, “I really need to align my content to the standards”. So, working with Westchester and Johanna, we've come in at the beginning of the project, or the end of the project, or the middle of the project. And so, definitely, as Kevin and Johanna said, we have intersected quite a bit in the industry. So, we thought we would talk about just a brief overview of how we're working together. 

So, a couple of years back, Johanna and I realized that with the C2C (Content2Classroom) product that it was going to be important for us if we were going to work with EvoText, that we needed to figure out the API and how to connect. So, we set up an API integration so that EdGate could provide the standards via API to EvoText. So basically, our mutual clients tell us,  “Work with EdGate and EvoText to tell us what standards they need. Is it Texas? Is it all US states? What is it that they're looking to align to?” And then we're able to provide those standards via API to EvoText so that Johanna's clients can then go in and work with those standards, create their content, and align the content to the standards. 

So, Johanna, I don't know if you want to comment any more on that process.

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

I'm sorry. Just trying to find my mute button. 

So, yes, there's a process by which, you know, our customers will come in, they come in to start building out their content, and we have this product called a curriculum map. And that curriculum map usually has the goals, the standards, whatever it is that they're trying to meet, to create their curriculum goes into the curriculum map. And what fuels that curriculum map can be anything from the very basic copy-paste parties that we all know and are familiar with, to something much better, which is working with a provider such as EdGate. Not only to bring in a very uniform, nested product that really takes a lot of the work out of it, but also to have that watchdog who's going to help you out, you know, and make sure that the newest version is available for you, and make sure that things that… The standards documents are not one-size-fits-all, and oftentimes when they come into the system, they have to be made a little bit more uniform so that they can be read, so that they can be nested properly, so that they can really, you know, be used to their maximum effect. 

So EdGate provides a lot of that value, and then allows our customers to really just focus on, “We want to build out our content, we need the standards to be fed into the system”. Then we get those feeds from EdGate, including sometimes their skills library, which will pull along additional benefits to it. And then as our clients are building out their content in our system, often with the services of, you know, editorial service and content providers, our content partners, such as Westchester, they go from MVP prototype, to a fully aligned course or collection of courses that have full interactivity, that can be pushed out into the market and meet the needs of all the district and adoption requirements, and produce best-in-class, standards-based reporting. It’s so key to this market that standards-based reporting, and the fact that we have helpers who–you might look at this process and say, “I've got to build out this new product. I do not have the in-house staff to get all of it done. I need some help. And how do you get there? You get by with a little help from your friends. What do you do? You get together with folks like Westchester and EdGate, who can help bring in the armies of help to get you over the finish line. 

Kevin J. Gray

And I think that actually touches on… That's a nice segue into the next piece about the familiarity with partner technology. 

So, you know, one of the benefits that we have found in working specifically with a few key partners is that we're able to apply a “Train-the-Trainer” model. So when our team is working in C2C, we've got resources who have spent significant time working in it. We can ramp up really quickly because we already know your tool set, we already have the training materials in place, we already have a familiarity with the tool itself, and we know where to go and ask for help. And I think I heard a bit of that kind of implied when the two of you were talking about the API integration, that because you had a working relationship already, it made it easier to figure out,
“Okay, our tool does this, your tool does this, here's the way we can integrate”. Is that pretty accurate?

Gina Faulk

Exactly, yeah. 

And I know Johanna, and I have had conversations about, “Okay, you know, you needed the data this way”. 

So that segues right into the next one about our communication, which you don't have to worry about, you know, how does this data need to be set up? How does it need to be formatted to work correctly in the system–within the C2C system? We're going to work directly with EvoText and Westchester to get the data the way you need it formatted, so it's feeding easily into your system. So, the ideal situation is that your team doesn't have to bother with endless meetings and back-and-forth emails about how to get things set up so they feed nicely into your system. 

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

And really, to kind of, you know, follow on with that, folks will look at our system, our C2C system, and say, “Wow, this is amazing. It's really powerful. But my deadline is so short, and I'm really worried about the learning curve. I'm worried about learning how to use this system to create my content and meet the needs in time”. And that's why we provide these wraparound services. Okay, you need the standards in the system? Boom. We can just turn on the API like a faucet. You need editorial writers, you've got your prototype figured out, and we're going to help you even construct that prototype in our system using best practices and instructional design. And then you know what we're going to do? We're going to turn it over to Kevin's team and they're going to take care of it for you, and really lather, rinse, repeat that to a final product. 

So, this is the kind of thing where the secret to that success is often the partnerships, so they can really take out a lot of that learning curve and combat that anxiety of, “How am I going to get there?” Well, you're going to get there, because we've already established these networks in place behind the scenes, and we're going to make sure that you are successful. 

Kevin J. Gray

Yep. 

And adding on to that, our project managers know your project managers, our project leads know your project lead, so it really does streamline that communication in that we've already got established communication protocols, and we can skip past the “getting to know you” part, or the, “Okay, how do we figure out how this toolset works”, and get right into the, “Okay, let's work together to build a schedule. You know your dependencies and our dependencies. How much time do you need?” And even we already have a sense of that, because we've done this a few times, so it's not reinventing the wheel from there. 

Gina Faulk

Right. That gets into the pricing, too. Because–and our unique skills, because there are things that EdGate does. As I mentioned, we specialize in alignments and standards, but we don't necessarily specialize in creating an entire curriculum. So that's where we would say, “Okay, well, you know, let's talk to Kevin and his team. Let's talk to Johanna and figure out, you know, how do we build this in?” Maybe it's one SoW, or statement of work, or maybe it's multiple, but we figure out together what that will be. 

We want to use and win over new clients, but we also know where our limitations are. So we're going to have a very transparent way of pricing out our statements of work and leveraging everyone's particular skills. We can't do it all. We can only do it together as a team is what we figured out.

Kevin J. Gray

Yeah. 

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

We also have, I think, one thing, you know, to kind of add onto that is there… And forgive me for saying this, but you know, in working with a vendor, often they will apply a little bit of padding for the unknowns. Especially if they're going to be walking into a system they're not familiar with or walking into a relationship where they don't have a working partnership in place. Those things don't really apply here. You know, the work that we do with Gina's group is we know exactly what we're asking her to do, and it's almost like, “Here. Turn on this light switch”. And then the work we do with Kevin, his team knows the system. They know how they're developing each and every piece. So those uncertainty costs, those overruns that are often padded into the system, you're talking about getting, I think, a more preferred price because we know that the devil's in the details, and they know the details. 

Kevin J. Gray

Yeah. I mean, from my end, I don't have to worry about whether… I don't have to worry about the quality of the standards. I know how the standards are going to come in, I know how we're going to interact with them when we work with Gina's group, and I don't have to factor in a ramp-up cost for figuring out how to work within yet another system. We already know the C2C platform, and so we know what its capabilities are, we know how to streamline it, we know how to make it sing, and that does translate into some cost savings that we're able to pass on. 

I think the last piece, and I'll use this as a transition to have each of you talk a bit about your  specific platforms or your specific solutions is, you know, we really are–this really is three pieces of a puzzle, right? There's a little bit of overlap in some places, but by and large, these are three discrete solutions that work well together. And so I think it's worth diving in a bit to get into, you know, a little more. We've touched on a little bit of this at the top line, at the top level, but a little more about what EdGate does and a little bit more about what the C2C–easy for me to say–can do. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Gina, and ask if you could give us, you know, maybe a five to 10-minute kind of crash course on your world.

Gina Faulk

Sure. Okay. Thank you. 

So, okay, let me zoom out of the way.

Basically, as I mentioned, we have a huge collection of standards. So, we're up to about five million standards now, with a big chunk of that CTE. CTE is giant because every state has just a huge number of CTE standards, but that also goes across… It's K through 12, there's career related standards, there are certifications. I would say our largest, still, market is K through 12, for sure. But, so, we've got a standards library that we license out to publishers, edtech companies, all of the entities I mentioned before, but it could also be an organization that is creating standards. So they want to see other sets of standards that are similar, and they're going to gather those from EdGate, because we already have them sitting in our repository in machine-readable format, ready to load and dissect. 

We can also crosswalk standards. So, we can take standards, say from Texas, and crosswalk those standards over to compare them to California or Florida. So, if you're looking at your content, and it's already aligned to Texas, and you want to see, well, how is this different in a different state, you're able to do that.

We also have our reporting and analytics program, it's part of our ExACT system. So we call everything… The standards sit in our platform called ExACT, but you also do alignments within ExACT. So, probably every client we have uses our reporting system, so I would say it's the most well-used tool that we have, because everyone needs to generate those reports showing standards, and how it relates to their content. 

One of the big things that we've gotten into over the past few years is that we joined IMS Global, now called 1EdTech. So we are able to take standards and put them in the CASE (Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange) format using the CASE identifiers. So that's a big deal, because publishers want to make sure that their content is interoperable, so it can be used across multiple learning management systems. So we are able to do that. 

And as we talked about earlier, we have an API, so we can deliver standards via API so that you can integrate them directly into your system, and that's what we're using with EvoText, but also with many of our clients.

So that's a brief overview about the standards, but getting into the alignments, which is a big portion of what we do, we have a team of subject matter experts, and they're divided into different subject areas. So, we have our early childhood group, we have our math group, our ELA group, you name it. We've got a team of people for each different subject, and there are multiple folks within each group, and they handle the content alignment. So, if you are a company that says, “You know, I really don't have time or I don't have the resources to handle high school math and doing those alignments”, you are able to outsource that to our subject matter experts, who, I should mention, are all former educators. So, they've all spent time in the classroom and really understand the standards as well as the particulars, the politics of what's happening in every state. And so, they can do the alignment for you, or you can go directly into our ExACT DIY Alignment Tool to do your own alignment. So if you feel like, “I really know my content best, I'm going to do my own alignment”, that's fine. You can use the same technology that we're using and do your alignment yourself. 

The great thing about what we do is that we are constantly updating the standards. So, if you do your alignment within our system or we do it for you, because we're always updating the standards, your content is going to automatically realign to the most recent standards. So, if Florida suddenly decides to update their standards, we're going to capture that and you don't have to deal with going back, making changes, and updating to the most recent standards. So we do the mapping, so that goes on to the next line item, which is the mapping of alignments. 

So, say you're a customer who has done your alignments, but you did it five years ago, and now there are changes in a particular state. You could actually send those over to EdGate, and we would map those old alignments to the new sets of standards. And we're able to do that because we use a taxonomy. So when we actually start the alignment process, we're tagging your content to concepts in the taxonomy. So, an example would be photosynthesis, adding fractions, or adding fractions with like, denominators. So it really gets into the specifics of what you're actually teaching. So we're tagging the concept to the piece of content, and then from there, it maps out to all the standards. And so, that's why we're able, as Johanna said, you can kind of, in a way, flip a switch, and when the standards update, we're capturing all those, because everything's been tagged to that spine.

We also do crosswalking of alignments. So, you know, in addition to mapping to the newest standards, we can also, as I mentioned on the previous slide, crosswalk to other states. And again, the reporting and analytics is a big item here. Most publishers need to show those alignments. They need to show proof that their content does align with standards, as well as show gaps too. So that's important for their sales and marketing folks, as well as RFPs or adoptions. Most often, they have to show either in PDF format, or in Word, or in Excel, or in HTML. Whatever it is, they need to show proof of the analytics and reporting.

So that's kind of the long and short of it, but I also want to quickly show you what the ExACT platform looks like. Here's a really brief screenshot of what the dashboard looks like and the reporting tool. Again, you're able to run reports, but I also want to go ahead and show you what that would actually look like if you were to go into the platform. So, let me share really quickly. So, I should be sharing the ExACT dashboard now. Are you able to see that, okay, Kevin and Johanna? 

Kevin J. Gray

Yep, we see it. 

Gina Faulk

Okay. 

So I'm on the dashboard, and it's going to refresh, and you're able to see, you know, here in the top left, you would load up all of your content. So these are different buckets. So you could have your ELA, your math, your science, whatever it might be. To the right you have all the standards that are in your profile. So this company has all the state standards. At the bottom right, you're able to see the standards update. So as I mentioned, we're constantly updating standards. So you can see what's happening in North Dakota, and what's happening in Hawaii. Every week, we've got a list of standards that we're updating from every state, and try to keep up with it because there's a lot that's always going on. And to the left, you have the correlation coverage. So you could pull up a program and see what your coverage looks like in each state. So, if you are a publisher that really feels like, you know, you're going after Texas, and you want to align your content to specific standards in Texas, you would be able to scroll down and click on the standards in Texas. I'm going to show you… I'm going to pull up “Math”, pull up “Grade Three”, and you know, I'll uncheck this. I'm going to pull up all of my content and see how my content aligns to Texas grade three math. So, do a quick search, and I know my text standards really well, let's say, and I go down to standard 111.5.b.3, and I decide I want to–I know I have a piece of content that will align to this particular standard. So, then I can drop down to “Tools”, and say I'm going to align a piece of my content to this particular standard. I go to my math content, and I say, "Okay, I know this adding and subtracting fractions piece of content should align to that particular standard." So, I'm going to click on that. It's going to then show me the concepts that that particular standard it's teaching. It's teaching fractions and fractions with mixed numbers. I'll go ahead and submit that. And okay, now it goes to a moderator. There's a moderator step so that if you're working with a team, they can approve of that alignment that you made. Then when I go back to the dashboard, I can see all my content again. And I'm going to click on the “Adding and Counting”, because I know I aligned that particular standard. So now it's “Alignment Pending”. So then I can view the standards. 

So, I can say, “Well, I want to see how that does look in Texas. Let me check it out”. So, I go down to Texas and I view what that alignment I made looks like in Texas. But I can also go back and say, “Okay, well, that's great. Well, let me see what that looks like in Arizona”. So, I'm able to–really, you can just go state by state and see what it looks like. But we made that global alignment. And so, that's why it's so cool that you can do this global alignment and not go state by state. And so often, we talk to publishers that are going state by state when you really don't need to. You can, but you can also do a global alignment that works really sweetly. 

So I'm going to stop sharing that and go back to my deck. Let me get back there. Bear with me. Okay, so now that I've shown you that… We should be back to the slide deck. See that? 

Kevin J. Gray

Yeah.

Gina Faulk

Okay. Okay. So now that we've talked through that, there are various ways that we have been working with Westchester. Now that I've given you the overview on EdGate, when Westchester has a need–and feel free to chime in, Kevin–for us to help out with standards alignments, they can toss that over to us, and we can help with those alignments. We can also provide the standards directly to Westchester if they would prefer to do that using their own team. We can run gap analysis so that Westchester can then be informed, or their clients can be informed, of the content gaps, and then start working on creating that content to fill the gaps.

For large-scale projects, as I mentioned, that probably wouldn't be something that we would take on where you're developing a complete curriculum for a specific grade, subject, or an entire program. So, we would–definitely if we heard about something like that, or if a client asked us about that, we would toss that over to Kevin and his team. 

“Translation and Editorial Review”, again, that we would share and work with Kevin, because that's not something that we're really focused on.

And then large-scale illustration production, you know, we can do small-scale stuff, but that's not something that we would be seeking after. So, we would, again, share that with Kevin and his team. 

So, Kevin, any comments on this one? 

Kevin J. Gray

Yeah, I think what one case study that's been really effective is as we've gotten companies looking from outside the U.S. looking to come into the U.S. That's a use case you and I have seen multiple times, where your team does that gap analysis to say, “Okay, this was created for the IB (International Baccalaureate) curriculum, perhaps. But the companies looking to get into, say, Texas and California, how does that align?” And so, we've worked with you closely to find those gaps, and then worked with the customers to say, “Okay, hey, you're about 80% there in Texas, you're about 40%, or maybe 60% in California”. And then we've worked to help them build out that product, and that's been a really, really successful use case with the two companies working together.

Gina Faulk

Definitely. Thank you. 

Kevin J. Gray

Yeah. 

Gina Faulk

And then, as far as the work with EvoText, Johanna and I have, for several years, been, again, we can provide the standards to EvoText via API, and then EvoText clients can use those standards directly in the C2C platform. We can provide the updates as the state standards change, and that's all seamless, all behind the scenes via API. And then with the alignments, we can either align the content to standards and provide those alignments to EvoText, or the clients are developing their alignments directly in the C2C system, which also works very nicely. 

“Crosswalking”. If the client of EvoText has aligned their content to, say, the Florida standards, but needs to get the crosswalks over to Texas, that's something we can also do via API. 

And then, again, back to the “Curriculum Authoring”. If that's something that we hear about our clients needing, then we would refer them over to EvoText to do that authoring within the EvoText platform to build, edit, and deliver those resources to the classroom. 

So, Johanna, any comments on this slide? 

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

No. I agree with pretty much everything you've said. I've just sort of been nodding along. 

Gina Faulk

Okay, good. 

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

I think you've covered it!

Gina Faulk

Okay, great! 

So, I think at this point, I'm gonna pass it over to you, Johanna. 

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

Excellent. I will take the baton. 

Gina Faulk

Okay.

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

Alright. Let me go ahead and cue up my slides and move this out of the way. And here we go. 

So, let's talk about the platform. We have content, we have standards, now, where do we put it?  So we developed Content2Classroom, which is a curriculum development and delivery platform designed and built from the ground up to meet the specific edtech needs of the K-12 educational marketing–educational publishing market. 

And what are those needs? Well, as K-12 publishers in the edtech space, you know that to win state adoptions and to deliver to states, districts, and schools across the country, your solution will need to deliver to the standards. And what standards? I mean the standards of interoperability, accessibility, and security; I mean the district ecosystem. So that's composed of LMSs (Learning Management Systems), SIS (Student Information Systems) providers, accessibility, and stringent security protocols. All of this before we've even begun to address the academic standards. And it's a tall order, and it can be very expensive to build and maintain a curriculum development delivery platform if you try to do it yourself or work with partners unfamiliar in the edtech landscape. And fortunately, at EvoText, we've developed C2C to meet these standards out of the box with an end-to-end curriculum management delivery platform that gives you the tools to focus on the pedagogically sound, award-winning curriculum that got you here in the first place, so that you can not only meet the standards, but exceed the standards. So we're here to help you focus on your core competency and value, which is developing the curriculum, and we'll take care of the rest. 

So how do we do it? We do it with a two-part system. It's a multi-tenant publisher suite that feeds directly to your exclusive, brandable, customizable, configurable classroom experience. Or, if you already have an end-user experience you're happy with, you can use our extensive library of APIs to fuel it. Our publisher system was built from the start to address academic and learning standards. So you'll use C2C-exclusive technology to craft dynamic curriculum maps to organize standards coverage, waiting, and categorization. And you can even create dependency charts to fuel personalized and adaptive learning paths. 

The course lesson and assessment editors offer rich multimedia management, including activities and 20-plus different tech-enhanced item types, including math-type item banking, resource banking, editorial workflow configuration, smart version control, one-click publishing, as well as intelligence reporting about your content, curriculum, alignments, how it is being created and consumed, and by whom. We have a number of integration partners for content development and standards development, as well. So not only do we work with Westchester and EdGate, but we also work with other technology partners out there. If, say, you are a Learnosity user, and you want to plug your Learnosity account into our system, you can do that and actually push your Learnosity assessments in through our courses. Or, if you are a user of any system where QTI (Question & Test Interoperability) is a format, we can definitely entertain integrations of that nature. 

And all of this is to fuel a peerless classroom suite that you can brand and configure to showcase the power of your product to admins, teachers, and student experiences. These are designed to be easy to use to deliver your curriculum your way, but they're backed up by the most powerful standards-based reporting on the market. So, you can go from the 30,000-foot view down to ground level in a few clicks. So you can help your teachers, administrators, and students gain the insight that they need on performance, usage, progress, and engagement with your content. C2C reporting can tell you not only how a student is performing against each standard, but how much time, progress, and engagement they are also gaining on that standard, as well as what makes teachers' time more effective, and administrative reporting rich, informative, and able to help drive strategic decision-making, which is all the name of the game here. 

So, this is not a magic box–it's data-driven education, and C2C is the research-based solution for delivering curriculum in an effective edtech platform. And how we do it is by focusing on supporting you, the educational publisher, and your mission of empowering the teacher, informing the administrators, and driving student outcomes. We don't call C2C a content

management system because we focus on the unique needs of delivering curriculum. So this is a curriculum system. Why? Because I like to take it back. Let's go back to the beginning. What is curriculum? Curriculum is not just content, and content is not curriculum, necessarily. Curriculum is that standards-based sequence of planned experiences where students practice and achieve proficiency, content, and applied learning skills. You can see the definition on the screen there. 

What does the curriculum require? You have to have standards, you have to have methods, you have to have instructional materials, and you have to have assessment opportunities. Which is why C2C focuses on helping publishers deliver on all of these elements in a research-backed manner directly inside of our platform. 

And how do we help? Well, we start with the end in mind: the experience of your users, and the power of the curriculum mapping philosophy to guide that experience. And the way that we do that is by saying, “What would your users want to see? What do your end users need to make their–to make their jobs successful?” 

So, I'm just going to take you into one of our client accounts and show you some of that end-in-mind philosophy. So, let's pop over into some standards reporting. So, for example, let's say I'm teaching biology and I have this entire set of standards–a tall order, an entire set of standards that I have to cover. And I'm also, by the way, trying to get my students ready for the end-of-grade examination for my state. So, I have to look at things from the perspective of if I come into this report, it's usually to answer the question, if my students took the test today, how would they do? And so you can pop down into the lower-level reporting, which shows you all of the standards. In this case, it also includes waiting and some other materials that this particular publisher wanted to include to help teachers make decisions about what to do next. All of the students are listed across the top. How the student is doing against every single standard at this moment in time is listed here. And if I want to dig in a little bit further to see how the students are doing against the content that's aligned to the standards, I will see the list of names here, and I will see every single assignment that has alignments to this standard, either at the item level or at the assignment level, and how students are doing against those. I can also take action here by saying, “Okay, great. This is how they did with the supporting success. Let me go ahead and sign out this next thing that they should do to help them”. 

So I can make my assignments right there at the point of use and take action right away. And then I can also see if it's down at the assignment level or at the item level, and I can change up what I'm looking at. So this will literally walk me through every single item that's aligned to this standard across every single assignment that's available for the students to take. So, an answer to the question of where they are and now what, I can do that directly inside the reports right off the bat. And then I can also go dig deeper into the grade book itself, or what we sometimes refer to as the grade card or the scorecard, and I can see several different pieces of material in here. Not only how the student is doing in terms of the status of the assignment, but I can go in and look at it slide-by-slide on the assignment. I can also see the details of this assignment, including every single question and how they scored. I can click in and go directly into a question, I can exclude a question if I find that the question should not have been used as part of this assignment, and then I can also even dig into the engagement material. So, “Time on Task Summary”, “Support Tools”,  “Resources”, “Markup”, how are they using the experience? 

So, let's just go back out here and take a look at what that experience might mean. If I were to head into one of these pieces of content, what might it look like? And again, I just want to put out there, this is this customer using our tool sets to drive their needs, and it can look any number of ways. This is how they chose to brand their experience. And this is how they chose to represent the materials that they are building inside of our lesson editor. And so, with that lesson editor, they chose to focus on creating an experience that would really mirror the end-of-course examination. This is for the Texas STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) tests. So they were able to go in and use the tool sets that we have available, configure those however they need to, and come back with something that looks a heck of a lot like what the students are going to be faced with when they go through that end-of-course examination. This just happens to be how they chose to use that product. And they have the ability to use the tech-enhanced item types to really make that sing. 

Another customer out there might be using this for a totally different purpose. Say, a full course of study for social studies in the elementary area. And so, what they're going to be doing is focusing on how they want those materials, and how they want to incorporate all of the vast amounts of materials that they have in the system to really create an experience where the students can have a lot of interactivity, have a lot of fun, get text-to-speech accessibility needs taken care of, have annotation, and just have a sense of what it is that they can interact with. And knowing that each one of the slides, every single element could be aligned to a set of standards, and getting the data on that just based on the student using that is something that is really kind of core to the system. 

And you don't have to take our word for it. We have many customers out there, and partners who are using this product to really fuel their learning experiences along the way. So, our team has developed and implemented some of the most successful K-12 digital products on the market, and we are currently delivering learning to over four million students, and that number is rising quite quickly day after day, with 300 million assessment items and over a million lessons delivered. Our shared success model and wraparound services professional development advisory model encourage your product to shine. We are going to be there with you every step of the way, we're going to get your product into the system, and we're going to make recommendations to you that will help to make your product truly sing in the classroom. 

But you don't have to take my word for it. I'd invite you to read some of our case studies of partner success on our website, like one of our partners who went from $5 million to $12 million in sales in less than two years with our digital solution. Or another that was able to get to market within three weeks, not months, but weeks, and meet the requirements of a major state initiative. Or how one cut their curriculum development expenses by 60% using C2C. Or another that was able to increase market reach by 75% in one year using C2C. All of this while not paying the extraordinary AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud bill that I have to pay every single month. So that's a really nice thing. And all of this while not having to worry about things like COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), and all the other things, because we're taking care of that for them. 

So, we invite you to read our case studies or have a conversation with one of our partners and to truly see what we can do for you. We'd love to show you how C2C can take your product to the next level. EdGate helps our customers get their academic standards into the system, and Westchester helps them meet their content delivery deadlines with wraparound editorial services to take your content from prototype to prize-winning in the C2C platform. And I think that's the best you can say about a partnership is where you know that the partners are holding hands and just helping you all along the way. 

And with that, I'm gonna pass it over to Kevin.

Kevin J. Gray

Yeah. 

And I'm going to invite folks, I meant to mention this at the top of the hour, all three of us will be at FETC (Future of Education Technology Conference) next week. And so, for folks who want to dig more into some of the other solutions that Johanna's presented, or that Gina's talked about, please be sure to reach out to me or reach out to them directly and set something up. 

I'm going to do a real quick overview of what Westchester brings to the table, and then we're going to open it up for questions. So, I'm going to share my screen now. Can you all see that?

So, really quickly, we are a full-service content or product development partner. So, when you think about your own internal product development teams, we have staff and external resources that match that. From content development and editorial services through art, design, and production. We focus on a 6C model. So, down the middle is really our focus on how we make sure we get the quality right. We consult, we do a calibration round, maybe a thin slice of content, working with customers within the system, really making sure we've got this nailed down, do a round of confirmation, and then we can go on and create the rest of the program.  The two pieces down the side really relate to problem-solving and customer experience. So, making sure we're communicating and collaborating as we go. There is kind of a baked-in seventh “C”, which is our culturally responsive education; go beyond just diversity, equity and inclusion to help customers, look at backlist material to make sure it's culturally appropriate and relevant, using some tools that we've created and resources, and then also developing that into new content development. And I know it's brief, I'm trying to be mindful that we've got a few questions here. But, like I said, we invite folks to come out and talk to us at FETC and see the things that we're doing. You can sort of see how they layer in. Our content is very standards-driven, and we're able to develop it in platforms like C2C. 

Audience Questions

Kevin J. Gray

So, I'm going to turn it over. We have a couple of questions. 

Gina, the first one is for you. Somebody asked, "Are you able to look at the new state standards before they're released to the educators in that state? What sort of sense of preview do you get?"

Gina Faulk

I saw that. 

We can see the future standards. So, we're watching all the departments of education websites, and we've got these web watchers up. So we're getting a little “ping” when things change with the standards, but also when they're updated. So we can see them, we prep and get ready for those standards, and we load them into our system and start working on them, tagging them to our taxonomy. But we wouldn't see them before the educators see them. We're not, you know, on the inside looking at them before the teachers or the members of the Department of Education see them. So, no. We see them at the same time as the educators. 

Kevin J. Gray

Okay, cool. 

Another question we got was–and probably really thinking about how you're working with multiple vendors, “What's an effective…”, it's a two-part question. “What's an effective project management tool to manage 8 to 10 concurrent projects with cross-departmental relationships, and what are some key leadership staff that you need?”

Westchester uses some proprietary tools that we've created. So, I'm not going to get into much of that, but I know that in talking earlier, I think both of you use a very similar solution. So, Joanna, do you want to address this one? 

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

Yeah, absolutely. 

So, we're, you know, for better or worse, people have a strong opinion when they hear “Jira”. And I think that it's important to know what Jira is very, very good at, and maybe what Jira is stretching to please customers with. Jira is excellent at technical ticket management, and in establishing burndown, sprint planning, all the things that you need to kind of keep multiple people (i.e., multiple editors, multiple engineers, multiple correlators) engaged at the same time, working at on the same project, but potentially having dozens of different tasks, right? So, they're very good at that. Kanban boards, very good at that. 

I think where they are really trying to reach is in establishing road mapping as a future tool. So, excellent for the day-to-day, I think, and excellent in terms of management of triaging of things. But one of the things that they are stretching to try to do now is to help customers roadmap the future and read in multiple partners who could potentially not even be in the organization, but still need to see, have access, and view privileges on certain things that are outside of their specific organization, but inside the project.

Kevin J. Gray

Excellent. 

Gina Faulk

We are also using Jira. Johanna and I just talked about this earlier. So, yeah, I said the same thing, like, there are good things, and there are bad things, but it really was created for developers. So it gets a little techy for some of our, you know, ex-teachers who are just trying to align content. So, we don't need to use all the bells and whistles. Sometimes it gets a little too much for what we really need it for, but we do also use Jira, put in tickets, and track everything that way. 

Kevin J. Gray

Excellent. 

Gina Faulk

As far as time spent, and who's passing off what to whom, so it’s the same situation. 

Kevin J. Gray

Very good. And the other piece, the leadership roles, I mean, what we have really found is creating… Kind of umbrellas. So, within my content teams, I've got a content director of STEM, and I've got a content director of literacy, humanity, and languages. She is the one who's–in both cases, each are the ones who are kind of providing that general oversight with sort of branches underneath, and, you know, we really do work in a hierarchical model where we would have one or two folks on–or multiple folks, depending on the side of the project, working on a specific project, but then also reporting up at specific levels so that we do have a kind of supervisory direction on the multiple products. And then we also pair that with project management, so all of our projects, in addition to having their content leads, or designer, production, or illustration leads, also pair with a project manager to make sure that the non-content or non-production specific pieces are getting met. And that seems to work really, really well for us. We do 120 plus projects a year, with many of them overlapping for 40 or 50 clients. So that's the only way we found that we're able to create that volume, is to kind of make sure we've got a smart hierarchy in place and very clear roles and responsibilities. 

Anything either of you would add to that, the sort of leadership that you need to have in place to make these things work? 

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

Yeah, I think that, you know, to deal with a similar volume on our side, we really have subscribed to having to using an agile methodology. We have to. You know, people talk about agile as sort of a buzzword, but if you really, truly do “agile” the way that it's meant to be done, you will gain efficiencies that you could never have conceived of before.

And so, we use–our project management is Scrum Alliance certified, and we really swear by that in concert with using the Jira platform as it was intended for technology products. And, you know, just making sure that we understand that the month-to-month is a daily reorganization of what needs to be done. And so, the smaller that tasks that can be made, the more likely you are to achieve progress. There's definitely some agile thinking and Scrum Alliance thinking that I think is incredibly important to keep in mind to promote overall productivity. Especially when you're dealing with dozens of projects at exactly the same time, potentially… You know, going across purposes, it can be very overwhelming. But your best friend and your best weapon is going to be an astute project manager who is trained in Scrum, and to have as many of those as necessary. 

And also to mirror on the other side of the fence. Have an owner of the product, have a central point who is designated to gather decisions, to gather information and opinion, and bring that back to the team. Make sure that that's sort of a one-to-one, you have a mirror on the other side who's helping to manage that. 

Kevin J. Gray

Excellent. 

Gina, real quick, anything you'd add to that? 

Gina Faulk

Oh, I'm just thinking about our resource meetings, too, where I feel like a lot of our project managers have been working with the same clients for years and years. So, it's almost like, you know, they go, and they advocate for their clients like, “No”, you know? It is agile, you know, I mean, mine's really big, and they've been waiting, and I got to the top of the list. You almost feel like you're on the stockbroker floor or something. You're like, "No, no, no, no, no, mine's next, you know?” And so, every week we work on, “Okay, we've got to move this, we got to move that, there's an adoption, this is really important, this is a hard deadline”. So, we are always fighting and advocating to make sure that we're getting everyone what they need on time. 

Kevin J. Gray

Excellent. Thank you. 

Closing Thoughts

Kevin J. Gray

Alright, like I said, we will be at FETC next week, so I invite folks to reach out to me, or to Gina, or Johanna, or all three of us. We'd love to have a multi-way conversation to see how we can help. 

I also want to preview that we've got another one of these webinars coming up on February 23rd at noon. We'll be featuring Jay Diskey of Jay Diskey Consulting, and it will be the 2023 federal and state education funding update. So, Jay gave us an update maybe about six months ago, and then provided a brief overview at the EdWeek Market Brief, and, you know, things have shifted and changed, so he'll be providing an update there. 

I’m going to turn it over to Nicole. Thank you to both of my guests. I appreciate it. I look forward to seeing you in New Orleans next week. 

Johanna Wetmore, Ed.D.

Absolutely. Thanks, Kevin, for having us. 

Gina Faulk

Thank you, Kevin.  

Nicole Tomassi

Thank you, everyone, to Kevin, Johanna, and Gina for presenting the information today. Thank you to all of you who took an hour out of your day to take this information in. We hope that you found it very helpful. And to reiterate what Kevin, Gina, and Johanna said, if there is additional information that you'd like, either seek them out at FETC next week, or you can contact any of them individually to get more specific details about how the three companies work together to make your product the best that it can be. 

So, with that, I just want to let you know that within the next week, we'll be getting out a link to the webinar video to you so that you can review the content again or share it within your organization. As I had said at the top of the hour, to make sure that we are giving you information that is of benefit to you, we really would appreciate it if you could take a minute to complete the survey that will come up on the screen at the conclusion of the webinar. Your information remains confidential, and it just helps us make sure that we're bringing you content that's relevant, useful, and meeting the needs of what you're looking for as you're continuing to develop your products.

Kevin J. Gray

Excellent. Thank you, everyone.