Zak Zielezinksi: in his own words
What do Ancient Egypt, a book exchange and a Palo Alto startup have in common?
This guy.
Meet Zak Zielezinksi, CEO of Declara, an online space which Zak describes as “a community-based, content-centric knowledge sharing and collaboration platform for professionals — in particular, teachers and educators — to engage in peer to peer learning, share and discover resources.”
This week on the Edunauts podcast, the team talked with Zak about his background, his vision and why Declara is such an exciting place for the future of learning.
“Declara uses machine learning to actually accelerate the learning collaboration process,” Zak explains, “to help discover and find those connections, those resources, those people and communities on the platform that are going to ultimately help you achieve your your professional objectives and grow throughout your life.”
Zak is no stranger to lifelong learning and discovery. “Declara is maybe my fourth startup in the education space. I got the startup bug very early, while I was actually in University, majoring in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. I actually started three companies that were in the education space while a full-time student.
“I felt that, being a student, I was familiar with the space a bit, and that led me to start my first company: a used textbook buy-back service to save college students some money. That was a great learning experience and we made some money for our investors. Then I actually started launched a non-profit organisation dedicated to fostering student entrepreneurship on college campuses. After that I launched an e-commerce virtual bookstore platform and Company for for private high schools and parochial schools as well. So I sort of got my start early on and after selling off my the last of those three companies that I mentioned, my now wife and I said, you know, we’re free, we can move anywhere we would like. I was into startups and technology and my wife ultimately knew she wanted to try to do her PhD in Education at Stanford University, so we said: sounds like Palo Alto, California is the place we should go!”
Zak is very much a proponent for exposing young people to environments in which they are encouraged to explore and innovate.
“Growing up, my family — my mother in particular was sort of an entrepreneur. She owned several small businesses, salons, and I sort of grew up around that. My first job was working customer service at the front desk, greeting people, answering phones, scheduling, that sort of thing. So I sort of grew up in a business. My dad was an engineer, which gave me a lot of the analytical and engineering side of my brain.
“Early on I sort of started to gravitate toward the marketing and business side of my mother’s business. That’s how I initially started to pick up some things and then I had some really influential mentors and advisors, teachers who were teachers but became much more than that, late in my high school career and early in my time at university. So those early experiences with those mentors and connecting with people who themselves were or had been entrepreneurs — I remember being very struck by the fact that the lens through which they seemed to view the world and things that they noticed, the way that they approached problems and problem solving was very different from from most people and seemed to align more intrinsically with my sort of view of the world, and also my my interest. And so, through that mentorship and learning more about their experiences and wanting to just gain more of that, looking up to them and then through of course the opportunities that they helped facilitate and create, put me on that pathway.”
Zak was quick to realise the entrepreneurial opportunities in traditional learning institutions.
“When I was at university, there actually was not an Innovation and Entrepreneurship program when I started. And so I was sort of undecided major. I was taking some management and business classes, but I was extremely interested early on in international development. And then in my second year at university, someone came up to me in one of my business classes and sort of said, ‘hey, you seem really smart and interested in the stuff we’re talking about and I was talking with this other kid, and we’re thinking about getting together and making a sort of business thought group thing with a few people just to get together once a week and talk about, you know, share ideas and bounce things around related to business and start up.’
“So it started out, five of us getting together in the library on a Tuesday night for one hour, and it was really just a brainstorm. We were basically just an open forum, people sharing ideas. We would kick things around, dissect them and say, well, what about this? And we were all really energised by it. From that, by about the third or fourth meeting, I shared an idea. I said, you know, at my high school, students had to buy their own textbooks. And when I started there, each year students would purchase brand new books and there was no selling the books back to capture the value, so people would basically either just trash them or put them on a shelf and store them. A student usually spends $500 a term on books, but for the most part they’re the same, year after year. So I and a couple of others in my class in high school came up with this idea to do a book buy-back service, where for the first year we let students donate the books and then we sold them back for a dollar for the soft cover, $5 for the hardback the next fall, and we made $5000. We did that again the next year and the next year, and by our senior year in high school we had about $40 000 in our senior class fund, which was about eight times more than any other senior class in the history of the school. We had a great senior prank that year, a lot of fun!
“So that worked really well, so I said, I think we might actually be able to do this here at the university, because even though the bookstore buys back books, you know that $100 textbook at the end of the term, if you haven’t even opened it, they give you back $20 in school credit for that and then they sell that same used textbook back for $80 six weeks later, when the next term starts, so that’s where they actually make their money. So we could raise some money and squeeze that at both ends — we’ll give the students better value, pay them in cash because they’ll want that at the break, and then we sell that for a little less and students will go for that because we’re giving them a better deal. Then we ended up doing just that.”
Zak believes that it is entirely possible for teachers who are not necessarily entrepreneurs themselves to facilitate learning in that area for their students.
“I look at it as creating the space for students, learners to follow their interests. One thing that I think was formative for me growing up was that I was given a very high degree of autonomy and input over my education from a very early age. My parents were both fairly well-educated themselves, especially my mother, who was what I would call an advocate. You could say that she was that parent the principal never wanted to receive a call from, because she was not afraid to speak her mind. I did not realise how influential and impactful it would be at the time, except to say, ‘Mom, could you stop calling the principal? Yes, I’m being disruptive in class because I’m bored to tears by this textbook and these worksheets, but you’re making it a little awkward!’ Looking back I see that was very influential because my mother was really an advocate who was making sure I was being challenged in school, and that I was being allowed to progress at my own pace and try to engage in things that interested me.
“I remember when I was in fourth grade, I was bored with science and acing all the tests and everything, but I was really into biology and I was sure at that point I wanted to be a neurosurgeon when I grew up. Until I actually took my first high school level biology course, there was no question in my mind I was going to be a neurosurgeon. Well, then I took my first biology course in high school and I was like, it’s memorisation, and maybe there’s another fifteen years of school after high school — maybe that’s not for me. My mother finagled a way for me to actually stay after school the teacher of got dissection kits for me, so I was dissecting frogs in fourth grade and stuff. So she was creating those opportunities and going so far when I was in elementary school, my mom actually pulled me out of school for about a year and home schooled me. I got to really chart my own course and I was really interested in ancient Egypt, so she actually put together a whole curriculum based around that interest. So for three months, everything — my math, writing, art, geography, social studies, science — everything was contextualised around that area of interest. So I think it’s creating the space to contextualise learning based on an individual’s interest that became so influential and helped me become a lifelong learner, which is very important today.
“So I think for teachers, there are certain concepts and maybe standards for certain requirements that have to be met in order to keep progressing, but I don’t think there is anything that cannot be contextualised in a better way than you’re going to get from a textbook. Creating the space for — and wrapping around — the intrinsic interests and proclivities for the learner are incredibly impactful for fostering that curiosity and that lifelong learning.”
How is Declara challenging assumptions about teaching and learning approaches to collaboration?
“Our original first generation product that we co-developed with some of our early customers was — essentially we’ll call it a social LMS, if you will — you could create courses, you could publish those, you could administer assessments, progress tracking and monitoring. But embedded within the course concepts and also sitting alongside separately, we built social tools: forums for the courses to connect the students and the instructors, if it was an instructor-led course, to allow them to communicate and collaborate around the course content and really help support each other. Then additionally there were professional groups and professional learning elements separate from the courses. What we actually found, consistently across customers that were large education systems as well as corporate enterprise R&D labs working across continents to find cures for cancer and others, was that people would often join the platform because they had to do that as part of their job. They would have to take the course and once they checked the checkbox and completed the course, ok, back to real life, real work. And we would only see about twenty percent of those users come back twelve weeks later and use the platform. However, those users who utilised the social tools — the groups that started conversations and responded to questions that were tied to the course, for example — those users twelve weeks after completing that same course continued to persist between sixty and eighty percent of the time, versus twenty. So that was a very insightful moment that led us to step back and say, the way that we look at the world is that learning is moving towards lifelong learning, less compliance-based, and the fact of the matter is that if you look at the research, once you’re out of the formal education system most of the learning that you do in your professional life, particularly as a knowledge worker, is informal, just-in-time and on-demand.
“Let’s say you are working in a company and you get put on a new project team around a topic you don’t know about, and you may be with two people in your office, three people across the country and then another two people that are in a research team on the other side of the world. You’re being brought together to solve a specific problem and that’s sort of the lens we used to create a new platform from the ground up, which is what you see today.
“I ask this often of teachers, particularly those who have stayed in the profession and are sort of veteran teachers: what was the single most influential resource or thing in your career that made a difference and made you a better educator? Ninety percent of the time, that teacher will say, the most important resource was another teacher. It was not the teacher ed program, it was not the professional development, it was that teacher down the hall or that principal or vice-principal during that first couple of years that they were teaching in the classroom who became a mentor, and was a resource for them, and helped coach them and improve their practice through engaging in conversation, collaborating with them to help move their practice forward. And so a teacher’s best resource is another teacher.
“That is part of the insight that led us to how we developed the product and the platform, knowing that we wanted to connect teachers and educators, and more broadly even knowledge workers that are in learning organisations and networks, to other individuals as well as to the resources that are going to help move them forward on whatever they are trying to learn or collaborate around, whether it’s a project or a problem they’re trying to solve, or if they’re just trying to gain skills around a particular area. Those resources can take the form of content, of other individuals, or groups of content or people like a collection or a team of people.
“We use artificial intelligence and machine learning to actually automate a lot of making those connections and surfacing them for people in the platform in order to accelerate that discovery process and connecting you as an educator or you as an individual to that teacher down the hall — except now they don’t have to be that teacher down the hall, they can be across the world. It’s about that discovery process and finding the right resources at the right time for your own unique identity and trajectory as a learner and a member of the community. Instead of being physically restricted by proximity, we can expand that to be an entire school district or system, or even at the national level as we do for some of our customers. So we are trying to take that metaphorical schoolhouse and expand it virtually, to create the virtual schoolhouse encompassing the entire educator community so that you have more connections, more knowledge, expertise and resources that you can make those connections with. Then you have tools to enrich and enliven those things like discussions, the annotation of resources and really ways that you can focus and direct the collaboration and communication around what’s meaningful and relevant.”
FutureWe, in partnership with Declara.com, are excited to invite you to join in our six-week discussion:
To participate in this collaborative event and experience the unique online community created by Declara, sign up at bit.ly/future-community . All are welcome — together, let’s think beyond tomorrow so we can thrive today.
