Innovation in Education – Digital CxO Podcast EP94

Hello, and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and I'm excited to have non MA here today. He's the CEO of Numerate.

How are you doing? I'm doing great. Wonderful.

Well, can you share a little bit about Numerate and what services do you provide? Yeah. numerate is an EdTech, uh, learning platform, and we provide STEM video-based learning content and an AI tutor to every single student, the world that's looking to understand.

Wonderful. Well, um, that leads us to our topic today, which is essentially the digital transformation of the educational industry in general. And let's start with, um, you have a partnership with George Fox University, uh, giving students access to AI for tutoring, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about that partnership.

Definitely, definitely. And you know, as you mentioned, Amanda, we are going through this digital transformation as it relates to education online, but also with ai. Over the past two and a half years, there's, there's been this explosion of this technology, but within the realms of education, it really unlocks huge opportunities for students, administrators, and teachers more specifically.

And this is what we're about, is allowing students to, to receive the benefits of tutoring at scale. And so today, what you see in real life, traditional tutoring, it costs so much, it costs anywhere from a hundred to $150 an hour for tutor. And the reality is the vast majority of Americans just simply can't afford that.

And so with platforms like ours, new Ray and others that have integrated AI into their platform, in addition to building out the AI such that it's trained on proprietary LM models that include training data on actual humans and educators creating content. And so our platform provides a lot of this in terms of the output. Um, students now can actually reap the benefits of a tutor at a extremely low cost.

And so the opportunity with George Fox, which is, uh, the largest private college out in, in, uh, in the Oregon area, we've been fortunate to work with them and partner with them to extend our services to all of, uh, the George Fox community. Uh, and so what this actually means is when a student is stuck and they need help, there are learning centers on campus in George Fox, but also other colleges. But the reality is students, they, they need help really all, all the time deep into the, the, the, the late hours at night.

And it's hard to go to a lot of these learning centers. And so they can simply come to our, our site through our partnership and get free access towards tutoring benefits in the sense of video explanations, concepts, explanations, helping the student actually get to, uh, the how to of solving problems or homework or even studying. Absolutely.

And you're so right. And it's such a different experience than what I went through when I was in college to be able to just jump online and get that help immediately at my fingertips and not be waiting for the next time that the lab is open for me to go try to find a tutor and schedule for some help. And it's very expensive.

You're right, if you're, if you hire a private tutor going that direction. So I imagine this is making a very positive impact on the students. Yeah.

You know, we, when we think about tutoring at, at its core, right? When we think about some of the first, um, recordings of, of, of tutoring, you go back to you maybe Greek days where Socrates and whoever philosophers were, were, were tutoring, um, you know, uh, princess. And, uh, the key there is, is tutors understanding where that student is within her or his learning journey.

And the beauty of what we have today is the ability to construct a student profile where we have a deep understanding of what the student is learning, where they're going astray. Uh, for example, we have over, you know, millions of videos on our platform, and we're able to understand where students are potentially going as astray based on their viewing behavior. And all that robustness and data allows us to piece together this map of that user journey.

And the personalization side actually helps then reinforce certain, uh, topics that the student actually needs to learn further. Especially in STEM education where everything is sequential, you don't know the, the prior topics, it's hard for you to continue forward. That's absolutely amazing.

So, um, have they been able to do any studies? Has this been going on long enough for them to, to, uh, to be able to show some concrete evidence of, of it helping their students? Yeah, we just kicked it off in the past couple of weeks, and we are working in close collaboration with the university around these types of studies.

And so, uh, we do have analytics that we built out for them. We're constantly refining that and working with them to drive that. But overall, I'd say from a, uh, platform basis, uh, we are primarily direct to consumer and we see, we see a lot of the efficacy through retention numbers, through engagement numbers of students just coming back re-upping on their subscription and continuing to use a service.

Wonderful. So in general, we know a lot more students are, um, you know, with busy schedules and, um, this new digital environment we're in, they're going to school more and more online. Um, and, um, so I can imagine that this is just so helpful to have all these availabilities, these tools available.

And I was curious, when you say, um, AI tutors, is it like, um, through the form of a person talking to them? Like, is does it look like a, a digital AI person or is it textual or videos or Mm-Hmm. Uh, how are they getting that tutoring?

Right. For us, it's primarily video based right now. And so we do have millions of videos that are educator produced, but then we also have AI produced videos as well.

And they both work, um, you know, across each other, uh, in the sense that the educator videos helps ensure that the AI generated content is pedagogically sound. So they, it's a training system, but the re uh, uh, for us, the, going back to the student, it is in video form. Uh, we do have a lot of interesting engaging, um, formats that we are going to be launching pretty soon to help drive further engagement with the student.

And so more of that to come, but right now it's all primarily video based. Okay. But there, I imagine with as fast as this technology is advancing, though, I could see, um, a time maybe not too far in the future where students could log on and essentially be, uh, talking to some digital person that, that seems real and in real time asking them to work them through a, a math problem or helping them with something just visibly, um, in real time voicing their questions and getting responses back.

Right, Right. Yes. And when we think about the learning process for just students in general, there are so many components of that.

And I think visuals, um, how this potential, potential avatar looks and feels and behave back, be, behaves back to the student is, is, is critical to the learning process. And great teachers are able to, uh, showcase themselves and instruct in, in a certain way that gets towards certain points at aha moments better than others. And so I think that's a very interesting area of exploration.

Definitely. Well, if there was one key takeaway you could leave our audience with today, what would that be? I would say when it comes to AI and education, this is this new endeavor that we're embarking on now, and it is happening, and then that, um, there's a lot of fear and concern about how AI can potentially disrupt the education market, especially for educators.

But we see this as an incredible opportunity for students and educators to, uh, especially for students to learn at their own pace and, and get the resources they need to actually learn and continue on that path towards competencies and building confidence. And at the same time, for educators, it's a, it is just an amazing tool for them to reduce a lot of the manual work and really help focus students on, on growth and learning as well. And so we see this as an incredible opportunity, uh, in AI and education right now.

Absolutely. Well, thank you for coming on and sharing your insights with us today. Of course.

Appreciate it. And thank you to our audience. Stay tuned.

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