EdTech: Peter DeVries of Modern Campus On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On Education

Creating technology that drives positive social impact means ensuring that the technology isn’t gated to any one community. The technology should be available to individuals from all socio-economic classes, without barriers that negatively affect its access or effectiveness. This doesn’t mean your technology should be everything to everyone — it simply means it should support equity.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. In this particular installment, we are talking to leaders of Education Technology companies, who share how their tech is helping to improve our educational system. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter DeVries.

Peter DeVries has been innovating across the technology space for 25 years, focused on building industry leading and enterprise-scale SaaS products. Since 2008, Peter has been a leader in the EdTech industry, serving in a variety of executive leadership roles with Modern Campus, including President and COO since 2018. Peter’s vision to help colleges and universities attract, engage, and retain learners for life has resulted in the creation of cutting-edge software solutions to enable a modern student experience. Peter earned his Bachelor of Mathematics degree from the University of Waterloo, with joint honors in Computer Science and Economics. He’s also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional and Risk Management Professional, among numerous professional designations.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

It’s absolutely my pleasure!

My dad worked in the oil industry, so my family moved a lot — mostly around Alberta, Canada (in the Canadian prairies, against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains). We were a very musical family, and made sure that a common beat, rhythm and shared momentum was part of our daily routine. We were also a family of earlier risers! Everyone in our household was up by 5:30am every morning — which is a habit you can’t break.

I’m grateful for those experiences. They really helped to drive home a comfort with change, a sense of teamwork and a focus on routine — all of which have been critical in every subsequent phase of my life.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

I started my career in the IT space during the transition to object oriented programming. This was a pivotal moment in the transformation of the technology industry — as we shifted to programming models organized around data (also known as “objects”) rather than functions and logic.

At this stage of my career, I was with IBM and was assigned to the team responsible for mentoring any internal team that wanted to use this new approach to programming. It was an incredible experience to help experienced technology professionals adopt this new approach to their work, and to help them unearth new pathways to innovate in real time! On a personal level, this also allowed me to visit most IBM labs around the world — which was a great experience so early in my career!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

As you can tell, my professional background is firmly rooted in technology. Through my career, I led development and engineering teams for a wide range of technology companies. In 2008, I had the opportunity to make a move to a company called Destiny Solutions — a technology company that was transforming the continuing, professional and workforce education industry.

Destiny’s founder, Shaul Kuper, hired me as Chief Operating Officer — giving me the chance to move out of pure tech roles into overseeing business operations. This allowed me to unite my passion for technology with my capacity to create a shared rhythm across an organization and set me on an exciting trajectory to where I am today.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

This is a tough one — there are so many quotes, poems and ideas that are inspirational and poignant at different times. But I absolutely love this lyric from Ben Folds’ song, “The Luckiest”, and I find myself coming back to it in almost every circumstance:

I don’t get many things right the first time
In fact, I am told that a lot
Now I know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls
Brought me here

I fiercely believe in the value of starting. Part of why I was one of the early adopters of iterative methodology 35 years ago at IBM — which morphed into Agile Methodology — is that it is better to try and incrementally improve on your effort or failure than to avoid starting at all. I’ve adopted this mindset in every corner of my life and it’s why I find these lyrics so meaningful.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

I think pragmatism, agility and collaboration are the three most important character traits for any professional.

When it comes to pragmatism, I’ve always planned for what’s real and realistic. So many organizations tend to hope for a better result even though they’re stuck doing the same things they’ve always done in the same way. This is not a plan for success. It’s essential to use what you know and what’s available to determine a real plan, and then plan for a real outcome. This is the foundation for large and strategic success at every level.

When I think about agility, I think about the ability to pivot. To never get stuck. It really brings me back to my family and moving back and forth across Alberta. We kept our routines; we maintained our hobbies and we never let the moves derail us. It’s critical to find ways to maintain focus on what’s important — to roll with and be shaped by change, rather than being defined by it.

Finally, it’s essential for every professional at every level to maintain a high level of collaboration. It’s always valuable to have an opinion — your experience and your point of view is central to who you are. But again, it’s critical to not allow yourself to be defined (or worse, caged!) by your opinions. Always allow yourself to be persuaded by facts and the expertise of others.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our educational systems. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

Modern Campus is a transformative force in the higher education space, and our guiding principle is the belief that the modern student is a consumer, and a lifelong learner. They think, act and research like a consumer. As such, they expect an ROI on their investment of time and money. What’s more, they expect to be able to continue to engage with their education provider over the course of their lifetime — the same way they do with every other service provider.

We are enabling postsecondary institutions to build learner relationships that are student-centric instead of institution-centric. This means we’re helping them create a campus environment (both in-person and online) that’s primarily designed to recognize and address the needs and expectations of the students they serve.

Prioritizing student-centricity represents a massive change in the higher education space. Historically, colleges and universities have had complicated relationships with their students. The students have been considered “lucky” to have been accepted, and the administrative and bureaucratic structure of the college was designed primarily to make life easier for administrators and staff — not students. But against the backdrop of rising costs, skyrocketing debt, growing skepticism and declining enrollments, it’s essential for the higher education space to evolve, and to become more student-centric.

We’re in a fast-changing, highly complex labor market and it’s changing every day. A new report from the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce says that by 2031, 72% of jobs will require some postsecondary education and that 28% of all tasks in current jobs will be automated. Creating pathways to relevant, workforce-oriented education — and ensuring adults have access to continuous upskilling and reskilling — has never been more important than it is today and will become more critical with every passing year.

To maintain a healthy labor force and economy, we need to ensure that people have the right skillsets, and the capacity to adapt rapidly to changing industry and market trends. By the same token, higher education institutions need to adapt and provide access to credentials and learning opportunities that address these outcome needs.

How do you think your technology can address this?

Technology provides us the capacity to achieve scale, personalization and responsiveness at levels we’ve never been able to imagine before.

We can empower students to engage with a learning environment that supports them across their lifetime. This is critical in the modern era, where we have a status quo of creating two- or four-year opportunities for people to learn before the start of their career…and then never providing them an opportunity to return.

What’s more, we have the capacity to enable colleges and universities to rapidly assess the needs of the labor market in real time, and develop courses and programs designed to respond to those needs. In an industry that’s historically taken an extremely cautious approach to change, access to this kind of data — and the capacity to accelerate innovation through collaborative technology — is transformational.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education?

I myself am a lifelong learner. I love learning new things, and really enjoy the “Aha!” moment that happens when something you’ve learned in one context becomes useful or relevant in another. Like when you’re in a biology class and a principle from English literature suddenly pops up — it’s unexpected and exciting!

Through my career I’ve pursued educational engagements designed to help me skill up into new roles, stay relevant with industry changes and prepare for new challenges. I became a certified Project Management Professional earlier in my career, and then earned my Risk Management Professional and Agile Certified Practitioner credentials from the PMI as my career progressed and the needs of myself and my team evolved. I am also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional, which is an essential certification for any senior leader at a technology organization in the modern era.

As an adult, I experienced the education landscape from the perspective of the learner — someone gauging their options and trying to figure out the best educational pathway to help achieve their personal and professional goals. Now, in my current role, I’m empowered to help bring that perspective to the higher education space — to leaders who have the capacity to deliver transformational experiences for people like me across North America and around the world.

How do you think your technology might change the world?

Education is a pathway to socioeconomic mobility. Access to high-quality postsecondary education is a leading indicator of growth for a community — it has a direct impact on improving job prospects, reducing or breaking the cycle of poverty and creating continuous familial pathways to education and work that lifts entire neighborhoods.

Our suite of technology solutions place students at the center of the higher education ecosystem. It helps them find the right educational offering for them, find relevant career pathways and generate ROI on their educational investment. We help colleges and universities attract, engage and retain learners — for life. And we take that mission incredibly seriously.

Keeping the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

We’re still in the early stages of the democratization of AI, and folks are still really struggling to get a solid feel for where it fits and how to make the most of it. There’s a significant gap in how students are using AI and where instructors and faculty see its value. In fact, a report showed a 30% difference between faculty acceptance versus student expectations of their ability to use AI assistance when completing assignments. This is a gap we need to recognize and address rapidly. AI is a fact of life, and will become more common by the year, by the month…even by the week! It’s critical we teach responsible use of AI and find ways to integrate it into assignments to ensure students are learning how to effectively leverage the technology without becoming over-reliant on it.

Secondly, I think there’s a real risk in the number of vendors and technology providers flying into the education space now that they’ve seen a profit opportunity. In the higher education space, we deal in highly confidential, sensitive data. There is reason postsecondary institutions are so commonly the target of cyberattacks. And through COVID, a “Digital Jungle” has emerged as universities rapidly grew their tech stacks — bringing on a range of emerging point solutions to quickly deal with problems they’d never faced. But now that the landscape is settling out, it’s critical for higher ed institutions to think more responsibly about the array of vendors operating on their campuses, and how data flows across and through the various technologies in place. Vendors operating in the space without a key focus on data security and accessibility simply cause mistrust of technology providers.

How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?

The education space is evolving rapidly to keep pace with the evolving expectations of modern learners.

Historically, colleges and universities have been very specific with their portfolio of offerings — focusing on full-time degree programs geared toward first-time, full-time students who are coming straight to college from high school. Unfortunately, in recent years, the cost for this kind of education has skyrocketed to the point where it’s not realistic for significant populations of learners.

However, we’re seeing a transformation in how education is being offered — and to whom. Instead of offering restrictive, expensive programming to a single population of learners, colleges and universities are offering more diverse portfolios of microcredentials that create access to relevant educational opportunities at manageable costs. At some institutions, these microcredentials can stack together to eventually lead to more robust credentials (like degrees), which a student can pursue when they have the time and financial resources needed to be successful.

What this means is that we’re creating a more equitable and accessible education ecosystem. We’re making learning opportunities available to a much more diverse population of learners than we ever have before, and we’re working fast to figure out the infrastructural and policy changes required to support this evolution of the education space.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

You know, this question is a really interesting one. It led me down several rabbit holes in trying to come up with exactly the right five ideas. But when it comes down to it, at the brass tacks, I really believe that building technology that makes a positive social impact comes down to one simple idea: doing the right thing. If you have a clear purpose and mission, and build technologies to help achieve that goal, you’re on the right track.

Looking at this idea more specifically, I think there are five critical components to guide “doing the right thing”:

First, we must protect data privacy with real informed consent based on value. Too many organizations look at consumer data as the product that they can sell. This is a worrying norm, and it creates a broad sense of distrust from consumers in the technologies they interact with daily. As technology providers, we have a responsibility to protect data, and to ensure that any data usage is permitted through informed consumer consent.

Second, it’s critical to create a plan that bridges the gap between your present state and your vision state. This comes back to a few topics we discussed earlier — staying rooted in reality and being agile. Having a clear vision is essential to creating broad buy-in (across the organization and among your customers) for your mission. But then you have to create a plan that operationally describes how you’re going to get from where you are today to where you’re going to go. That plan can change depending on variables like new possibilities facilitated by technology change and industry transformation, but at the end of the day your vision should be absolute, as should your commitment to achieving that vision.

Third — and I know this is very difficult for some leaders — it’s critical to listen to both detractors and champions. Over indexing on feedback from champions can create the impression that you’ve already achieved your vision. Similarly, over indexing on your detractors may create a perception that you’re failing to achieve your short-term goals and that your vision is unattainable. Maintaining a balance of feedback between those two audiences is crucial to staying on a consistent path to success.

Fourth, and along these lines, it’s essential to always keep the vision in mind. It’s easy for many leaders to really focus in on short-term operational milestones — always thinking about the next feature or release that will help the company reach its next base camp. But, especially for senior leaders, it’s critical to keep an eye on the peak of the mountain and to always ensure that the company is progressing through its short-term objectives as milestones on the way to that peak.

Finally, creating technology that drives positive social impact means ensuring that the technology isn’t gated to any one community. The technology should be available to individuals from all socio-economic classes, without barriers that negatively affect its access or effectiveness. This doesn’t mean your technology should be everything to everyone — it simply means it should support equity.

In the realm of EdTech, there’s often data collection involved. How do you ensure the ethical handling of user data, especially when it concerns students?

When it comes to data collection and management of user data, the cat is out of the bag. There’s a right answer here, which is that end user data should never be used outside of the intended use to satisfy the system or transaction.

However, the proliferation of technology apps and the jadedness people have developed when it comes to data privacy means that today, people have effectively given up their privacy in any mobile application that they download. Full disclosure of data usage amounts to boilerplate text that is ignored.

At Modern Campus, our approach is that the value to the student should be presented in a meaningful way. If they want to have a personalized digital experience, where their engagement is guided and supported by the smart and purposeful usage of data, they should be aware of what this means with regards to the data they’re sharing and how it is going to be used.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Plan for the future! With advances in medical technology and quality of life improvements, the average North American is expected to live for over 100 years. This means most people will, on average, be on this earth longer than they think they will be!

As such, every person needs to consider the actions they take in the short term as a practical matter. You’re not just affecting some theoretical, anonymous person in the future with your actions. You might be directly impacting yourself!

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

As I mentioned, I tend to be an early riser — so my preference would be to meet for breakfast, and I would love to grab that breakfast with Isaac Asimov.

Asimov was a famous writer and biochemist and was considered one of the great futurist fiction writers of his time. He famously penned “I, Robot” (among many, many other works), and devised the three laws of robotics.

It would be a fascinating experience to chat with Asimov to get his thoughts on what the world is like today, and how it compares to the future he dreamed about when he was writing in the mid-20th century. It would also be exciting to get his perspective on what the near and distant future may hold for us, given the transformations we’ve seen especially since the turn of the century.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Modern Campus is deeply committed to contributing meaningfully to the direction of the higher education industry. We’re passionate about this space and want to have an impact on its future.

To that end, we launched a publication called The EvoLLLution, which shares insights from leaders across the higher education industry reflecting on the trends shaping the space and its direction. We also maintain a podcast called Illumination, which similarly provides innovative higher education leaders with a platform to share their perspectives on the topics and changes that are impacting our space.

Finally, we regularly support the development of critical research that shines a light on the direction of our industry. We pioneered an annual State of Continuing Education Report, which we now publish in partnership with the University Professional and Continuing Education Assocation, to share insights on the opportunities and challenges facing continuing and professional education leaders. We also support the biannual eExpectations report, led by Ruffalo Noel Levitz, which shares the factors that drive high school student decision-making as they consider a college education. Finally, we’ve partnered with the Association for Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (ACCRAO) on two research initiatives, designed to provide some insight into how their profession is evolving and what the future holds for microcredentialing.

You can also visit: www.moderncampus.com.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.