Dave Sherwood of BibliU: 5 Things You Need to Know To Be A Highly Effective Educator or Teacher
An Interview With Penny Bauder
Having more women work in STEM fields is not just good for society — it’s also good for business. We know from research by McKinsey & Company and many, many others, that companies with diverse teams perform better. McKinsey’s 2019 analysis found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile. Similarly, McKinsey found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity on executive teams were 36% more likely to have above-average profitability.
As a part of my interview series about the things that should be done to improve the US educational system I had the pleasure to interview Dave Sherwood.
Dave Sherwood is co-founder and CEO at BibliU, a learning enablement platform that empowers colleges and universities to automate workflows and improve student outcomes with first-day access to eTextbooks from over 2,000 publishers. BibliU provides digital content solutions to over 150 higher ed institutions in the U.S. and U.K. To date, BibliU has raised $15M with the most recent round of Series A funding in 2020.
Dave is also the co-Founder and Chairman of Teach Learn Grow Inc., a charitable organization that’s vision is for every child in Western Australia to have equal opportunities in education regardless of location, background, or circumstance. Teach Learn Grow now operates at 18 schools with 500 tutors and 1000 primary students.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share the “backstory” behind what brought you to this particular career path?
My involvement in the education field started when I was in high school, when I co-founded “Teach, Learn, Grow.” Growing up in rural Western Australia, I witnessed first-hand the challenges of inequity of educational opportunity. “Teach, Learn, Grow” is an educational volunteering organization that provides children in Western Australia with equal education opportunities regardless of location, background, or circumstance. Today the organization operates at 18 schools with 500 tutors and 1000 primary students.
While studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, I saw the same issues present themselves, albeit in a different form. The cost of university textbooks has risen four times the inflation rate since 1977, leaving students strapped to pay for books and resources and often forgoing required materials altogether.
I realized there was a significant gap in innovation concerning textbooks and learning resources and created BibliU — leaving my studies at Oxford — to bridge the gap to ensure digital content is provided at a price point that works for publishers, institutions, and, most importantly, students.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Believing in your mission is key to success with a new company. Prior to our first investment round, we had run out of grant money and were almost out of business. We had real belief in what we were doing and persevered. It was our deep belief in our mission that helped us to keep going and inspired our investors to back us.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
At BibliU we’re pioneering a new approach for Higher Ed to ensure all students have access to the books they need on the first day of class. Called Universal Learning, our solution enables universities and colleges to license textbooks and courseware — primarily in digital format — for all students (as part of their enrollment) for a low, standardized per student per class fee. This solution directly addresses issues around equity in education.
To explain further, research shows that 65% of students skip buying their textbooks because of cost, even though they feel it will negatively impact their experience and outcomes. And students who face food insecurity are even more heavily affected: 82% of students who reported missing a meal due to the pandemic in 2020 also said skipping buying textbooks due to cost. Our Universal Learning lowers the cost of content for students by 30–50%, and guarantees every student has the same access to their course materials. This supports equity in education and increases student success and completion rates.
Can you briefly share with our readers why you are authority in the education field?
As mentioned earlier, my involvement in the education field started when I was in high school, when I co-founded “Teach, Learn, Grow.” I’ve dedicated the last 10 years to the education field, focused on ensuring students can access the support they need, equitably. At Teach, Learn, Grow, this focus is around students in the primary school system accessing tutors, no matter their location, background, or circumstance. At BibliU, this focus is around enabling equitable access to textbooks, monographs, courseware, and other learning resources.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main focus of our interview. From your point of view, how would you rate the results of the US education system?
The depth and breadth of the higher education system in the US is truly remarkable. I don’t believe there is another country that can claim to provide such a range of opportunities, from community colleges and technical schools to state systems to private and R1 institutions. That said, there is incredible pressure on higher ed institutions to improve student completion rates, while lowering costs for students.
Covid-19 compounded this: enrollment at US colleges and universities saw the largest year-over-year drop in a decade for the spring of 2021. Overall, enrollment declined by 3.5%. The decline was much steeper for community colleges in particular; however, with enrollment falling by 9.5 percent. This is consistent with a report released by the College Board in June, which also found more drastic enrollment declines at two-year colleges. According to the report, the “pandemic most adversely affected the college trajectories of first-generation, underrepresented minority, and lower-achieving students from higher-poverty communities and high schools.” This indicates that those who have been hardest hit financially by the crisis have changed their college plans.
Can you identify 5 areas of the US education system that are going really great?
As mentioned above, the depth and breadth of the higher education system in the US is truly remarkable. There are flexible study opportunities at more than 4000 institutions, which together are educating close to 20 million students a year. This ranges from top universities — around half of the world’s 50 top universities are in the US, and 14 of the top 20 — to the many community colleges that aim to make education accessible to students from all backgrounds, including adults seeking continuing education to improve their career opportunities. I would argue that the work being done at the community college level may be even more impressive than the incredible research and learning being carried out at R1s: about half of first-generation college students and students from minority backgrounds attend community colleges.
How is the US doing with regard to engaging young people in STEM? Can you suggest three ways we can increase this engagement?
As I’ve learned from my experiences with Teach, Learn, Grow, engagement in learning — in STEM, and other topics — needs to start at the primary school level. For Teach, Learn, Grow this meant ensuring every student had access to the tutors they needed to fulfil their potential. Other initiatives I have seen work well include helping students to be able to picture themselves in a STEM career — by showing people who look like them as examples (for instance, featuring women scientists in videos and stories). A third way is to integrate art and creativity into the STEM learning experience — so that the learning demonstrates principles of science, technology, engineering, and math, while also demonstrating how the use of creativity and imagination are key to innovation.
Can you articulate to our readers why it’s so important to engage girls and women in STEM subjects?
Key to closing the gender wage gap in the US, where women continue average to earn around 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, is gaining better representation for women in STEM roles. Today women earn a majority of all undergraduate and advanced degrees, yet they make up only a small share of degree earners in STEM fields — and they continue to be significantly underrepresented in STEM workforces. Instead, women continue to be overrepresented in fields where the average wage is lower.
Having more women work in STEM fields is not just good for society — it’s also good for business. We know from research by McKinsey & Company and many, many others, that companies with diverse teams perform better. McKinsey’s 2019 analysis found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile. Similarly, McKinsey found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity on executive teams were 36% more likely to have above-average profitability.
How is the US doing with regard to engaging girls and women in STEM subjects? Can you suggest three ways we can increase this engagement?
My experience with Teach, Learn, Grow — the educational volunteering organization I co-founded, which aims to provide children in Western Australia with equal education opportunities regardless of location, background, or circumstance — is that equal access to opportunities is crucial to achieving engagement in any kind of education.
Programs that target children early on, that focus on getting not just boys, but also girls excited about STEM, that are designed with equity and inclusivity in mind, will be more successful than those that are not. Initiatives I have seen work well include helping students to be able to picture themselves in a STEM career — by showing people who look like them as examples (for instance, featuring women scientists in videos and stories), and integrating art and creativity into the STEM learning experience — so that the learning demonstrates principles of science, technology, engineering, and math, while also demonstrating how the use of creativity and imagination are key to innovation. Finally, ensuring young students have access to tutors and other support resources, no matter their financial means or location, can play a key role in helping ensure all students have access to the same opportunities.
As an education professional, where do you stand in the debate whether there should be a focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) or on STEAM (STEM plus the arts like humanities, language arts, dance, drama, music, visual arts, design and new media)? Can you explain why you feel the way you do?
Integrating the arts with STEM, and applying the concepts from arts in STEM, can encourage creativity and lead to new innovation. It can also be a more inclusive approach to teaching and engaging students in science, technology, engineering, and math: appealing to students who are more inclined towards arts and creativity.
If you had the power to influence or change the entire US educational infrastructure what five things would you implement to improve and reform our education system? Can you please share a story or example for each?
I’ll focus on one area: equitable access to materials.
College participation rates for virtually every racial group are at or near historic highs, especially for Black and Latinx students. Yet, at non-profit institutions college persistence and graduation rates remain mired for most groups at less than 50 percent, with the lowest rates for Black, Latinx, and Native students.
Amid the constellation of reasons why students don’t succeed in college, there’s one that is entirely preventable: many face a huge challenge simply accessing course materials, particularly those students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Key to this is textbook affordability. Due to issues such as textbook piracy, rentals, and publishing costs, textbook prices have outpaced inflation. For students from low-income backgrounds, textbooks and course materials are often a “last-dollar expense” — they prioritize expenses like college tuition and fees, childcare, and other living expenses higher. A recent national survey spotlighted the scale of the problem: 65% of students reported skipping buying a textbook because of cost.
In this context, a new approach to textbook accessibility, called Universal Learning, presents the possibility of equalizing access to opportunity across the entire higher education system. Universal Learning is about ensuring all students have access to the content they need, on the first day of class — in ways that can have a transformative impact on student persistence, retention, and success.
Universal Learning solves a problem that has uniquely plagued higher ed: colleges and universities have largely equalized the costs of virtually every service they provide — except course materials. While colleges and universities charge vastly different tuition rates from each other, they have for decades made an implicit judgment about costs within their walls: tuition is the same regardless of major. Universal Learning helps institutions ensure that textbook costs do not also impose differentiated burdens on students based on their chosen field of study: done well, Universal Learning can reduce courseware costs by 30–50% for students — and even more when schools also incorporate Open Education Resources into their catalog.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Innovate, Implement + Iterate.” Business is all about doing something different and solving a problem that hasn’t been solved before.
We are blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)
I would love to meet Wendy Kopp, CEO and Co-founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent organizations working to develop collective leadership to ensure all children have the opportunity to fulfill their potential.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davejlsherwood/
https://twitter.com/davejlsherwood?lang=en
Thank you so much for these insights! This was so inspiring!
