In a Future Where Online Education Beats Offline Education, Data is Key
This article is a part of the Spotlight Series, that focuses on showcasing Pathship’s employees and the problems they are solving to revolutionize online education.
In mid-2015, Todd Gibson interviewed for a role at Pathship with co-founders Zach and Chris. Within two weeks they offered him a job and he had convinced his wife along with their two young children to migrate from California to Hong Kong. At over 13,000 kilometers, the journey would be once in a lifetime for many — but for Todd, this was a trip he had already made decades earlier. However, his journey to becoming VP of Product at Pathship is far more extraordinary than moving a family across an ocean.
Todd, a startup veteran with work experience all over the world, has dedicated much of his life exploring ways to radically improve online education. The way he sees it, online education today is massively missing the point. Rather than using data to create incredible learning experiences with teachers from all over the world, online education is viewed only with a utilitarian cost-effectiveness and efficiency in mind.
When asked what the greatest problem with online learning today is, he says “Human contact. If we are learning online, we don’t have an expectation of human contact. It’s the equivalent of going into a janitor’s closet with a textbook and deciding to not come out until you’ve done your ‘learning’ versus a rich classroom environment where you learn from your peers and teachers”. Todd’s mission is to revolutionize online education by putting human connectedness through teachers back in the center of every student’s online learning experience, whilst unleashing powerful data analytics to optimize the way we learn.
“…[Today’s model for online learning] is the equivalent of learning in a classroom with your peers and teachers versus going into a janitor’s closet with a textbook and deciding to not come out until you’ve ‘done’ your learning”
Todd was born in Chico, California, but at a young age moved to Goodenough, a small island 50 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea. His remote upbringing— where he depended on himself to learn, find entertainment and solve problems — greatly shaped his views toward education. Far away from technology and modern resources, the value of his education lay in the people he learned from. He fondly recalls one particular teacher, Mr. Horton, who taught Aviation with such passion and joy that Todd developed a life long interest in planes and engineering. Even today, he will happily meet with pilots who treat him as one of their own due to hundreds of hours spent in flight simulators. Thanks to Mr. Horton, on a remote island in the Pacific, he learned the value of a great teacher.
In spite of his somewhat idyllic existence, Todd struggled through highschool, yearning to break free from the limits of small-town living and missionary parents. He returned to California and picked up a series of odd jobs, including working at a bookstore, building houses and landscaping. It was only when he landed a job working as an inventory auditor that he became enthralled with technology. He says that seeing how technology optimized the storage of goods — how easy it became to create order out of chaos — bridged his ‘stone aged’ upbringing with the new, technology-driven world he was now a part of. Because of his upbringing, on a small island devoid of the benefits of technology, he generated a special insight into core issues that technology has an influence on today. From then on, he dedicated his life to solving problems through technology.
Todd’s ultimate question was whether education had been perfected almost 2000 years ago and required little adaptation or change, or that we had built such strong, preconceptions and institutions to support an ancient view of education that we simply were too narrow-minded to find alternative, better ways to learn
Todd’s first career was as an audio/visual engineer, where he fondly recalls working for a company building a flight simulator for Apache helicopter training in a blacked-out aircraft hangar in Arizona in the middle of Summer. Over time, he shifted his skills and passion to Product Management in software companies but he was constantly on the lookout for an opportunity to revisit his own education experiences at an Education Technology company.
Todd had spent years reading dozens of books, articles and papers on best practices in education and its related science. It struck him that, to a human from 500 B.C. who time-traveled to the year 2016, almost every aspect of the world would look completely alien, aside from a classroom where they would have felt perfectly at ease as so little would seem changed. His ultimate question was whether education had been perfected almost 2,000 years ago or that our preconceptions about education were so strong it prevented us from thinking innovatively about teaching and learning. As he puts it “we’ve inherited a model of education, a culture of learning, that online learning has cloned, but without the teacher. It is a very entrenched set of beliefs to change in any person or organization.”
Todd uses a quaint analogy that harks back to his Papua New Guinea days to explain these phenomena. When Captain Cook first set off exploring the Pacific Islands, he attempted to trade steel hatchets for local goods— the locals were using hatchets made of stone. The tribes-people deeply admired the steel hatchets but nonetheless refused to make the trade. They explained that they knew how to sharpen the stone hatchets, how to replace them, indeed how to tell a good stone hatchet from a bad one — but they knew none of these things for the steel hatchets. It was the tribes-people's entrenched behaviours that inhibited progress, in this relatively trivial way. Today, Todd believes that it is a powerful legacy system, rather than a perfected one, which has prevented change to education over time.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of corporate learning. According to Todd, “businesses have more need for quality learning than ever: high employee churn, massive skills gaps and constant threats of disruption all mean that companies should be really invested in providing great learning experiences for their employees”. But he notes that for most companies, learning and training are still seen as compliance activities, not ways to improve yourself or job performance. This is reflected in the channels of learning, which tend to favour very little interactivity and maximize efficiency through online quizzes, PDFs and video content.
With the explosion of the internet and technology in general, there suddenly became available the data and infrastructure that was required to implement what science had found would create a better educational experience. Today, Todd’s focus is on three critical problems within education that he believes can be solved with online education.
First and foremost are limitations in the ability to collect and use data to improve student learning experiences. For centuries, the way that we measured progress in education remained largely the same. We looked at grades, effort and qualitative experiences to determine whether a student was learning. However, educational psychology and affective neuroscience have given us myriad new ways to measure progress and indeed to design intervention strategies that ensure every lesson is a good one for students. These strategies rely on technology to pick up subtle data points such as emotional engagement, cognitive development and whether behaviour has changed for learners after a lesson. This is one of the biggest challenges. Take for example corporate learning and development. Whilst we all understand that L&D is critical to a company’s survival, it’s very difficult to measure change, much less ROI. This is simply because, as Todd puts it, “our environment to learn is totally separate to our environment to practice”. Why isn’t data shared between the learning environment and practicing environment? How can we collect this data without interrupting a person’s lesson or working day? How can we use this data to design more effective lessons? These are all questions Todd thinks about every day.
“Business has more need for quality learning than ever: high employee churn, massive skills gaps and constant threats of disruption all mean that companies should be really invested in providing great learning experiences for their employees”
If we can overcome the first challenge of collecting more sophisticated data to improve a student’s learning experience, then the natural follow-on question is how we use that data to continuously improve education. Today, Todd observes that every teacher has to “reinvent the wheel each time they step into the classroom”. He asks: “How can we use the learning experience of thousands of previous students, to inform and optimize the learning experience for the next student on a continual basis”. Rather than starting from a blank slate, we should use the historical data of a student to design lessons, adapt teaching styles in real-time and curate content that is guaranteed to engage them. Instead of creating a learning culture where “some lessons are great, some are just ok” — we should strive to make every lesson outstanding. Todd is working on several products at Pathship that will allow for the seamless use of engagement data to constantly improve the way teachers teach students.
Third and finally, Todd wants to use technology to ensure a certain quality control and level of efficiency in each lesson. Presently, there are few ways to know for certain if a teacher is a good fit for a student, or if a particular subject is well-suited to their interests. In essence, quality control is left either to luck or hard work — but not to intelligence. Not only does Todd want to use historical data to better teach a student, Todd wants to use data to predict how best to teach a student, thereby avoiding faults and challenges in the first place.
Ultimately, Todd sees data analytics as a means to an end. By focusing on engagement data, we can start to apply the latest findings in education psychology to every student experience, at scale. “It would be like introducing a combustion engine to a feudal society”.
If Todd’s vision for education comes true, every student will learn from an awe-inspiring teacher, and every lesson will inspire a life-long passion that naturally fecundates a career. As VP of Product at Pathship, Todd has the ability to make this vision a reality.
But what does a VP of Product do at a software company, where the product boils down to electrons darting across circuit boards? Understanding Todd’s view toward Product Management requires revisiting his first technical job as a sound engineer. Todd describes his love for that job as stemming from a desire to “facilitate sound, the beauty is already there — I just mix, accentuate and amplify it”. Similarly, this is how Todd views his role, as that of a facilitator. In fact, he thinks of himself as both the “engine oil” and “timing belt” of a product team. As engine oil, his responsibility is to ensure that everyone in the team is working to their optimal level, which in turn relies on excellent communication, availability of resources and support. As a timing belt, he ensures that the team is working off the same plans and blueprints. Todd may provide an idea or prompt here or there, but he sees his job as bringing out the absolute best in his team.
With two young children fast growing up, Todd is zealous about accelerating the pace at which we use technology to massively improve education. He wants his kids to grow up surrounded by a network of inspiring teachers, learning lessons that have been personalized to their exact interests and needs, that lead to positive changes in their behaviour. Above all, Todd wants his kids to walk into a world where they are excited at the value they can create and the prospect of making a living doing something they love. In a world where people are increasingly fearful and anxious of the future, we all stand to benefit from Todd achieving his vision for education.
This article was written by Christopher Schrader, CEO and Co-founder of Pathship, a company which is revolutionizing employee learning and development.
To find out more about how Todd is working at Pathship to help companies put learning at the forefront of their growth strategies, chat with us.
