Akiba Covitz from Foundry College
Biography of the Speaker
Akiba Covitz has worked in the Higher Education space for most of his career, both as an academic and as an entrepreneur. For the majority of his career, Dr. Covitz was Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the Harvard Law School. He recognized the changes in the educational ecosystem that were taking place a decade ago and left Harvard to serve as founding Vice President for University Relations at edX, then moving on to Senior Vice President for Strategic Relationships at Academic Partnerships, and serving as the first Head of Business Development at the Minerva Project. He is now the President and CEO of Foundry College, an online college that equips working adults with skills and knowledge needed for the future of work and a Zanichelli Venture portfolio company.
Question 1: Foundry College was founded in 2018 by a team led by Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, your former Harvard colleague. Foundry College has gone on to become an innovative and distinctive online college for students keen on learning skills for the jobs of today and tomorrow. Recently, it has been featured as one of the 100 most promising EdTech companies in the HolonIQ North America EdTech survey. Can you tell us more about Foundry College?
AC: The purpose of Foundry College is to disrupt the traditional two-year college model. We want to provide learners with 21st-century skills and knowledge for the jobs of today and tomorrow. Before entering the entrepreneurial world, I was a professor at Harvard Law School. I left what should have been an ideal job because of the trend I saw on the market. Technology was advancing very rapidly in the early 2010s to the extent where you could watch classes online quite easily. Shortly thereafter, you had the invention of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), with Coursera, edX, and Udacity leading the way. These companies created an ecosystem of online learning that made a massive impact on the world.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution that MOOC platforms gave us was the huge amount of data about how people learn. In my time as the first VP for University Relations at edX, we were able to track which learners were performing better and figure out why that was happening. We started to understand that we could figure out how people learned.
In the meantime, Stephen Kosslyn, chair of the Psychology Department and also Dean for Social Sciences at Harvard, had been focused, among other things, on how people learn, on what we have come to call the science of learning. With more than 30 years of research, more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles, Stephen and his colleagues were discovering how people assimilate knowledge. This research found a good ally in the shift towards online learning, which was quite radical even ten years ago. Combining the scientific knowledge of Stephen with the online learning trend that was picking up globally, Foundry College is an ideal solution.
ZV: Thanks for sharing this origin story with us. What trends do you see on the job market, and how are you designing Foundry College to help learners make the most of them?
AC: Many of today’s jobs will be displaced by AI and automation. How do you train people to do tasks that only humans can do for the foreseeable future? This is a key question for us at Foundry College. With this in mind, we combine insights from the science of learning, our understanding of the upcoming wave of automation, with the greater access to digital bandwidth to create the perfect mix for the best online learning experience. A decade ago, students could really only watch recorded videos. Now they can also attend synchronous classes.
At Foundry College, we built our own proprietary platform called the Forge, which was built from the ground up with active learning and teaching in mind. For example, one of the building blocks of the Forge is the concept of synchronous breakout rooms that can be actively monitored by faculty. One of the main reasons why it’s difficult to scale synchronous learning is because you previously needed teaching assistants in every breakout room to ensure that the students were interacting in a way that is conducive to learning. We built proprietary, patented software that monitors what’s happening in every breakout room, creating a heat map. If there’s a lot of activity happening in one room, the room appears red to teachers on our platform. If there’s too little activity, it’s coloured in dark blue. The ones in the middle, that have about the right amount of activity, are in grey, so the teacher can focus her or his attention on the more pressing needs of the too much and too little breakout rooms. Using this method, one teacher can quite effectively manage a classroom with 200 or more people without any other additional teacher support.
ZV: Focusing on the customer base of Foundry College, can you tell us why you think a student would choose to study at Foundry College? How do you manage to attract them?
AC: This is a very interesting, complex, and honestly fun challenge to solve. The educational landscape went from being very limited to having a huge number of options out there very quickly. How to stand out is a continuous puzzle to solve. One way we stand out is by using partnerships. For instance, we have a partnership with a large foundation in the United States called the George Kaiser Family Foundation. They have a particular interest in supporting families and learners in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area, and they also work on several worldwide issues, such as global health, childhood poverty, and others. We geofenced our recruitment strategies, using traditional means such as radio and outdoor along with digital marketing including social media and retargeting, ensuring that the people living in those American Zip codes are informed about Foundry’s offerings. In some ways, parts of the education market are very location-specific, and the power of geofencing technologies can help us access neighbourhoods to provide solutions tailored to them.
Tulsa is a particularly interesting place in which to market. The region used to be largely based on an oil and gas economy. The market is changing rapidly now, and many people are losing their jobs either due to automation or a shift in focus, for instance, from natural gas and oil to more renewable sources. Last year we offered an incentive for people in Tulsa to join the program. The George Kaiser Family Foundation is paying for these students to join Foundry College — there’s no cost to the learners. But from my experience at edX, I know that most people drop out of MOOCs ironically because they’re free and they have no perceived stake in it. To overcome this issue, we offer a $500 incentive to students who finish our program in a reasonably fast period of time.
Question 2: Do you find that your customer base is fundamentally different from traditional universities? What could be the drivers for someone who is deciding between Foundry College and a conventional university path?
AC: One of the phenomena we’re seeing post-pandemic is that people think in months now, not in years. In a world where things change as quickly as we saw them change in 2020, we are increasingly unsure about the willingness of people, for instance, to go to university for four years without really knowing what the end result is likely to be. They are now looking for a rapid return on their investment, in terms of both time and money.
In the past, someone in the U.S. may have said to themselves, “My parents went to college, my grandparents went to college, so I should go as well and that is simply what is expected of me.” Learners are now much more empowered to choose whatever career fits them best, and some colleges are trying to adapt by offering people various opportunities. For example, more and more schools are offering certificates as opposed to traditional degrees. Our partnerships will make us part of that process. It’s taken innovative companies like Foundry College to recognize that people are looking for substantive but more targeted opportunities. Learners want to know what they need to learn to land specific jobs. We offer credentialed certificates in under nine months for learners. Once completed, they will not only have a certificate from Foundry College, but also widely recognized credentials from Salesforce and CompTIA. Having these credentials on their LinkedIn profile will push their job applications to the top of the pile. I think there will always be a minority of people in the U.S. and around the world who will recognize a four-year college degree as the right, simply default course of action for them, but that number is getting smaller and smaller.
As soon as we went live with Foundry College, we had a lot of interest from corporations as well. For example, imagine you have a frontline worker who understands the company culture really well, and you would want them to climb up the ladder within the firm; you will probably need to teach them low to mid-level management skills to be able to thrive in the new role. We will work directly with companies internally to upskill current employees from entry-level jobs to more senior roles.
Another key lesson in the world of higher education is the rise of EdTech start-ups. Education is not just for colleges anymore, companies are playing a bigger and bigger role. And who’s to say that colleges should be the ones teaching you how to do business? Why can’t a business teach you how to do a business instead or at least in addition? Knowledge is now becoming more accessible, and we are capitalizing on this as part of a thriving EdTech sector.
ZV: What kind of topics do you teach at Foundry College? How do you ensure that these are the areas sought after by the employers?
AC: First, we teach human, durable professional skills, such as clear communications, effective communications, collaboration, and problem solving. These skills sit at the foundation of our learning value stack. On top of those, you can decide between two certified credentials: one with Salesforce and one in project management with CompTIA. In our market research, we noticed that there are thousands of Salesforce and project management roles that are always available. We then decided to look to these organizations that offer certifications in these in-demand areas. We then reverse-engineered the exams these organizations offer, and our teachers and coaches help our learners pass these exams, even paying the fees for them to take the exam.
At the end of your Foundry College experience, you can, for instance, hold three Salesforce superbadges, incredible professional skills and the Foundry College certificate — the perfect recipe to stand out. When you showcase those three super badges from Salesforce, and you apply for a Salesforce job, the job-matching algorithms see you have the credentials, and here we go: you land your interview. With the clear and effective communication skills we provide our students, they can handle the interview and get the job. From there, they can climb the ladder of success both professionally and personally to wherever they want to go, including to the associate degree that we offer, and to work with other schools we will partner with in offering a bachelor degree and beyond.
When it comes to ensuring these are the right skills for the workplace, we started out by asking those employers who are seeking the right employees what skills were missing from applicants. Instead of making assumptions on what skills their new graduates have to show, we spoke directly to the stakeholders involved.
For example, I teach U.S. constitutional law and civil rights. It’s almost inherently interesting material, and students like to learn it, but I am not sure how useful it is, other than providing most people some good lessons in civics and logic. At Foundry, on the other hand, we’ve created a clear set of skills that are most needed in the workforce of today and tomorrow. Organizational management theory, for example, taught us the best practices on how to solve problems within the workplace. But how do you actually organize yourself at work? How do you behave in a meeting? How do you take responsibility for your own work? How do you teach the value of diversity and how to embrace it? Thanks to globalization, you now have the privilege of working with people from different cultures, people who speak English in a different way from you, people who have different backgrounds. We teach our learners to recognize that even though it might be slightly more difficult to communicate across those boundaries, the quality of your work increases in such settings. These are all questions we tackle and teach at Foundry College.
Question 3: How does Foundry College then differ from a traditional MOOC or a bootcamp? And do you see your model being translated in other scenarios, such as secondary schools?
AC: The basic model of the MOOC is that the subject matter expert speaks to the massive asynchronous crowd, everyone listens (or tries to), and they are then given multiple choice questions about the content they were just watching. For all the advantages of MOOCs, this is not the best way people learn. This method only teaches you how to memorize and repeat what you learned. You are not taught how to critically analyze, how to work in a team, how to communicate.
Our approach is different. You can see this in many ways, including in the technology that is purpose-built into our proprietary learning platform, the Forge. With MOOCs, you can easily have 10,000 students enrolled in your course, but probably fewer than 1,000 will finish the course. Maybe the real problem is that the remaining 90+ percent don’t feel particularly disappointed or bothered for not having completed the course because they didn’t have much of a stake in finishing it in the first place. They watched a few entertaining videos and then they fell off.
At Foundry College, students learn through our proprietary platform and its multitude of active learning features. They get to know other learners in our active, synchronous lectures and in the breakout rooms and collective experiences they have creating work products together. Learners using the Forge are shown and taught clear, structured learning objectives that drive each class forward. They come to recognize the importance of learning together, and they share knowledge with each other. You just don’t see this in a MOOC.
With regard to expanding our use cases to secondary schools, we now have partnerships in the secondary school / high school market. One of them is a bridge program between New York City public school students and a great local college in Brooklyn, St. Francis College, where we’re trying to address the low averages many learners graduate with. Many of these learners can potentially go quite far in their learning journeys, but without a bridge built beyond high school, they will end up in low-paying jobs that will likely be automated in the near future. With our partners at St. Francis, and their visionary president, Dr. Miguel Martinez-Saenz, we are building a program that ensures that these learners are equipped with the right skillset to access and succeed in furthering their education with St. Francis, with Foundry, or with other organizations.
We’re also working with the Urban League of Central Florida, an extremely well-respected organization in the United States, that aims to support people from underprivileged backgrounds, with an emphasis on African-Americans. We’re working through the Urban League with the foster care system and juvenile detention centres in Florida to ensure that the people who come out of those systems have skills they can use for new jobs and fulfilling lives. We want to help those students to get to a point where they can graduate from high school and be free to make their own career choices with our support, and the support of Higher Ground, another of Learn Capital’s (who are our lead investors) affiliated companies, whenever the learners need it.
ZV: It’s very heart-warming to hear the impact you’re having with Foundry College, breaking the inequality barriers that are unfortunately being even widened by the pandemic. You are using your own privilege and experience to make a tangible change in communities that need it the most, and that is incredible. What connection does Foundry College have with the job market?
AC: Our ultimate proof of concept is for people to find fulfilling, lasting work. To accomplish this, we work directly with people in organizations that help our learners find jobs. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, for instance, we work with the George Kaiser Family Foundation, and two of their affiliated organizations, Atento Capital and The Ideate Project. We show these partners the very special skillset we’re providing to our learners, and how valuable these skills and knowledge are to the employers in their geographic area. Ideate’s mission is “to help every person have access to economic mobility and the American Dream,” which is in exact alignment with the purpose of Foundry College.
We are also working with Pathrise, another of Learn Capital’s affiliated companies, which finds mentors at the companies where learners want to work and pairs those mentors with students to explore the typical day-to-day jobs and how to succeed. We pay our learner’s fees for Pathrise, and our coaches work with learners throughout their time at Foundry to ensure that our students get the most out of these resources.
ZV: Thank you for sharing your story with us, Akiba — your work is exemplary, and I cannot wait to see what great things you will achieve next. We are so proud of having chosen to invest on Foundry College at Zanichelli Venture. Before we close, is there anything else you want to share with us?
AC: In the United States, we have spent much of the past year coming to terms with the troubled relations between different parts of our country: politically, racially, and otherwise. I spent my career teaching civil rights, I grew up in a Jewish household, and I dealt first-hand with the discrimination that we Jews have often faced. I feel it’s my responsibility to support Black people in their continuous fight against racism, especially here in the United States. We want to do all that we can to give Black people give them the opportunity to attain the skills they need for future-ready jobs. As an example, we have a partnership with the Urban League of Central Florida, where we are helping them stand up the Whitney M. Young Academy. The Urban League there was already providing Microsoft certification training for the Black community. These types of learning opportunities are helpful not just for African American and other minority communities but for everyone who finds themselves in difficult circumstances, such as in foster care or in a juvenile detention centre. These scenarios, often the result of long-standing structural inequities, shouldn’t be a life sentence. Being poor or the results of the injustices of the past shouldn’t be life sentences, let alone a death sentence.
We are a venture-backed company, and we can do the right, just, equitable thing that also makes sense from a financial perspective. The driving force of my work personally, both when I was teaching civil rights and in leading an EdTech company, is my emotional connection to doing the right thing for communities that are most in need of support and opportunity. The work we do with the Urban League, for instance, was strongly backed by Greg Mauro, one of the managing partners of Learn Capital. But this work is not just charity. We are proudly venture-backed, and we want to do the right thing for our learners and the communities in which they live. The need for profitability pushes us to be more and more innovative, and we want to continue to do so while we support communities that need our help the most.
Key Takeaways
- Foundry College was born from the combination of the science of active learning and the analysis of market trends in online learning and job automation.
- Teamwork, clear communication and problem-solving skills are coupled with technical skills in Salesforce and Project Management to equip students with the right skill set for the jobs of today and tomorrow, and put them on the road to Foundry’s associate degree and, beyond that, to other colleges that accept transfer credit from Foundry.
- Partnerships with several organizations in the U.S. allow Foundry College to keep strengthening its brand, access specific market segments and stand out in the changing educational landscape.
Closing statement
We thank Akiba for taking the time to speak with us. If you want to read more about Foundry College, visit their website. Have a look at our previous publications in the “Rethinking HE” space:
