Outschool CEO On The Pandemic, Serving Parents, And Helping Education Innovate

Welcome to the future of education. I'm Michael Horn. Delighted by my guest today, known to many, I think already who will be checking it out and around the world, but Amir, founder CEO of Outschool. Amir, thanks so much for being on here. I've been really looking forward to this conversation.

Absolutely. Likewise. It's a pleasure to be here, Michael.

Yeah, no, I was looking back at our email correspondence and the first time we connected, which was spring of 2018. So it's been, it's, it's been a lot since then, has changed in the world. But going back to that time and when you were starting out school, just for folks that maybe don't know your original mission, what were you conceptualizing that you were trying to create and what problem were you out to solve when you went, when you did? So.

So, you know, we were looking to create a consumer marketplace in K12 education that offered learning experiences outside of school. And that's where the name comes from, Outschool. And when I say learning experiences outside of school, I don't just mean kind of not occurring within the school system, but also a much, much wider range of subjects. So taking a really, really broad view of learning. And this came from a realization and a motivation that not all really important learning is captured by the typical curriculum or can be delivered by the school system. And the feeling that we could create an opportunities in education that were far more wide ranging and valuable and responsive to a changing world. And basically to supplement school and to have school be where kids get core subjects and get a common baseline, but then have another place that kids could go which was Outschool, where kids could learn differentiated skills. And I think, you know, that's so important in a globalized economy. And when I think about what I want for my kid and what they're going to need to prepare for the changing world, I think it's going to, going to have to be more than just the typical curriculum. So that was how we started out and what we tried to create and we launched our first version in 2017. So I spoke to you very soon after that and I've seen incredible growth since then.

Yeah. And so speaking about that growth, actually before we get to that growth, the experience is also pretty different from a lot of online marketplaces. A lot of places have created asynchronous learning experiences, sort of targeted mass audiences. You, by creating such a dynamic marketplace, have been able to create synchronous learning experiences with small groups of students and the teacher, but still have a ton of flexibility that online Learning enables to find the course that meets your schedule, needs and things of that nature. How fast did that have to come together for you to be able to have that demand side and supply side match up to create that robustness?

Yeah, that's a really key part of Outschool is the actual format of the learning experiences, which is small group, larger, live online. So classes meet, video chats, typically three to 10 students and a teacher joining from all across the country or the world. And you know, we came to this format, we discovered it really from our early adopter audience who as well as doing in person learning and using online content like Khan Academy and you know, YouTube, Wikipedia, all these great resources out there, they were also meeting online over video and this seemed really niche at the time, but we experimented with it and realized, wow, this format has just some incredible characteristics because it combines the best of in person learning with online learning. The best of in person being that people can actually react to each other live. Kids can learn from each other, from the questions, from how they're working together. You can ask the teacher, you can receive instruction that's personalized in the way the kind of broadcast video online doesn't have. But at the same time, it has all the great characteristics of online in that you can access, you know, content and people that aren't available locally. And so it has these, these great characteristics. And it was really, you know, back in 2017 was really a undiscovered format for learning and not one that had been scaled, but it had these amazing characteristics and we decided to focus on it full time, both because of those characteristics which you identified, but also because as a format it was growing a really fast clip compared with the rest of the marketplace. And so, you know, the combination of that live interactive format that makes learning so rich and engaging with a marketplace based approach, which takes a much broader view of education, has proven to be really powerful and valuable and was growing nicely before the pandemic and now has taken quite a turn with the unfortunate events in the last six months.

Yeah, so let's get into that and I see some people are joining us live. If you have questions, type them in the comments. I'll try to fire them to Amir as well. But in terms of the pandemic, obviously you were already getting a pretty good traction, not just as a supplemental tool, but also core schooling for homeschool families and the like. And, and then everyone sort of became a homeschooler overnight in some weird way. Tragically so in many cases we should say. But your usage Just exploded. Can you talk about what that's been like the last several months? What the usage of Outschool from a numbers perspective and a use case perspective is really looking like right now. And then I'd love to get into this pandemic pods and stuff like that after that, but let's set the table first.

Yeah, absolutely. It's been remarkable. And I say this as someone who's worked in startups for the majority of my career, so being very close to very fast growth and hyper growth before I was at Square, before founding Outschool, where we grew from 400 people to 1,200 people in the space of 15 months. My co founder, Nick was the first engineer at Airbnb. So seen very fast growth before, but we never saw anything like what we experienced coming into this pandemic. Our enrollments have grown 30x over the last few months since, you know, the stay at home orders were issued and we saw mass school closures. And, you know, to give some more perspective with the numbers, about 80,000 learners had taken outschool classes since we launched the first version of the products in 2017. But now hundreds of thousands, I think more than 300,000 have joined in just the past few months. And so it's just been a remarkable shift and there was degree to which we saw it coming. Obviously, like everyone else, we were shocked at the speeds that the pandemic emerged. But there were already signals in February when the CDC issues this guidance saying, hey, schools might need to shut and people need to start exploring what they called Internet based teleschooling. When I looked at that, I, I did this double take. What, what does that mean? Try to parse the words the guys like, they mean exactly what we, we are doing. That's exactly, that's what they're proposing. They're proposing live synchronous remote learning with teachers instructing groups of students over video. And, you know, we got ahead of it to an extent. We prepared for massive scaling and we also kicked off programs to share our expertise with schools. But we realized, wow, you know, this is going to be a giant mess if you're trying to move so many schools and teachers online at once. You know, there needs to be education, you know, because people don't necessarily have the expertise. And so we kicked off a sequence of webinars, reached out to school districts and teachers and tried and provided the benefit of the experience from our community as a means to help people with the transition. And, you know, obviously it was such a, even with the preparation it's such a sudden and shocking shift that it honestly was a drop in the ocean. But we were very glad to contribute in that way because I think we have more expertise of this type of learning than any other organization in the U.S. so we started preparing that way. Then when the pandemic hit, we also launched our financial assistance program on that Friday, March 13, when I think across the country, multiple states announced closures. And that was@outschool.org where we made a commitment to making a million dollars worth of Outschool classes available for free. Free. Because we also realized that a massive issue, another massive issue with the Sunshift online learning was access. That parents with the means were going to fare better because they were able to use resources like Outschool to supplement whatever it is their school was going to provide. And that school was likely to be degraded in terms of the quality of service, just the amount of teaching time they could offer going forward. And so access issues in education are a perennial problem and they're going to get a lot worse. So we launched that program and that also saw incredibly fast adoption, particularly around that first weekend. And then we put the announcements out that we needed thousands more teachers because with this spike in Demand, our classes, 60% of them were selling out completely in the following week. These are group classes so you can always add an extra student to. Even with teachers maxing out their classes, they were just all selling out. And so we put a call out for thousands more teachers and luckily we got a lot of media around that and teachers responded to our call because at the same time all this was affecting families, teachers were concerned about the economic impact and it was a compelling proposition for them to use Outschool to supplement their income. So all in all it's been a the kind of growth that is not typical even at the kind of top end of fast road startups. And we've been busy with scaling but now preparing for the longer term because unfortunately it looks like we haven't got the virus under control. And back to school planning by many schools is kind of reverting to know being less about, you know, opening in any kind of normal way. And schools that we talk to thinking about opening either very restricted ways or some just straight up committing saying it's going to have to be remote again for the next semester.

Yeah, so I'd love to get into that. And just so folks know what I've put down there, that link that goes to, if you Visit that site, Outschool.com School Closures, then it links you to the Outschool.org site. You can get all that information, you can see all the steps that you've taken, and you can also figure out how to donate and support learners in need who need these access to learning right now at a critical time in their lives. Let's get into what the fall is going to look like from your perspective First, I guess what are you seeing in the numbers? Because I suspect you're seeing demand slightly ahead of what the media or schools even in some cases know, based on projections of enrollments, I suspect in some of your online classes. So what, what sort of signal are you getting around that? For starters?

Yeah, you know, we see continued growth in demand for from parents to supplements. So you know, their expectation going into the fall is that they're going to need to continue to, you know, add time and services and instruction. So their expectation is that, you know, the school experience is still going to be be degraded. And unfortunately, you know, that's a change from the spring when parents were buying a lot of outschool classes kind of last minute and short term because there was this hope that, you know, this was just going to be, you know, part of the spring semester was going to have to be done in this way. You know, there's going to need to be some support over the summer. But then when it came about time for fall, it's called reopening. Whereas now we're seeing parents realizing that that's not going to be the case, it's not going to go back to normal and starting to make longer term, which includes using outschool. The other thing we are seeing is that we are growing even faster in states that are moving to aggressively reopen schools. So in some states we were seeing in Texas, in Florida, Arizona and Georgia, for example, usage of outschool will increase even faster, which is not what you might expect if schools are reopening. And I think this reflects many parents fears about even if schools are prepared to reopen in person, many parents fear sending their kids back because of the physical safety, not just to the kids, but to, you know, family members that those kids then come into contact with. And so we did a survey and we found that to be backed up by survey results that more than 60% of parents we surveyed said they were not comfortable sending their kids back to school until the vaccine was found. And I've heard in other news reports that those kind of numbers are backed up by larger surveys than just in our community. The other interesting results from that survey we conducted, which was Answered by more than a thousand of our community members was that 40% said they were much more likely to consider homeschooling going forward. Which is just an incredible shift given that pre pandemic, 3% of the US families with school aged kids were homeschooling about 2 million. And separate survey results had suggested that about 7% of families with school age kids would like to homeschool if they were able to overcome practical difficulties. So from 3 to 7 to 40 is kind of just a dramatic change in sentiment. And I think clearly a lot of it right now is being driven by concern around what the school system is able to provide and concerned about safety. With a pandemic, the thing that's unknown, but it seems hard to imagine there won't be larger scale change in the education system going forward even after this pandemic is over. Not just from a consumer habits point of view, but I think the forces that this is placing on the system will necessitate innovation and change. And you know, I'd love to hear your, your perspective as well. If, if I think about someone who's an expert on innovation and change and you know, and disruption in education, it's, it's you. But you know, we'll go there, we'll.

Go there in a moment. But I want to, I will, I want to dig into this question because I think there's two different views of it, which is one, the moment people feel comfortable in schools truly reopen, parents are just going to say, thank God that's over and I'm going to rush back. Right. And early research we conducted for disrupting class actually showed that sort of the uppermost limit of homeschool families in the US was probably around 10%, which five and a half million kids, let's call that. And I think it's a real question though, in this time, what's going to shift there? So I'm curious, like when you, when you think longer term changes and the pressures on the system, which are very real right now, do you think people are just going to rush back or they're going to say, actually we just realized we could do all this customization with, you know, with platforms like Outschool, we could, and we'll get into the pods and the equity issues in a moment. Let's separate that for the moment. But you know, we could start to really pick and choose communities in different novel ways. And, and let's be honest, childcare actually has sort of sucked in K12 education for a long time. Like, who wants 8am to 3pm coverage only five days a week. If you're, you know, both full time working parents with kids, we'd like more coverage. And so I agree those pressures exist, but I'm actually not sure at all which way that tilts. What's your own view of like, what could trigger that? I guess either way, you know, I.

Think it's hard to imagine, you know, a lot of people not rushing back to the school system once it's able to reopen safely in physical locations. I think the question is though, will that look the same as when schools shut down or would it look significantly different? And my thesis is that it's going to look very different. And so education is going to look different both from the point of view of parents who continue to adopt alternative options even once the pandemic is done. And that school is going to look very different. And my thinking about why would school look different is a combination of budget constraints combined with new capabilities. And we're already seeing signals of the economic situation of affecting school budgets, which means less available teacher instruction time, an increased need to focus that budget and instruction time on the very, very core subjects. And I think people want a little bit more from school than just the very, very core. So then how are schools going to provide it? And how are going to schools provide all the additional range of services that they need to provide, such as, you know, special education services in the face of budget cuts. And so at the same time, schools are going to come out of this having new capabilities. Their staff will be much, much more experienced at using online tools and resources, and as a result, you know, theoretically able to be much more flexible if they can have the bandwidth to actually use that flexibility. And so, you know, I think that that combination of pressures could lead to innovation and very productive change. I think a positive vision of the future of school will be hybrid, where schools are both able to provide in person community in the way that's so, so important and that core instruction, but are also able to take advantage of remote teaching, bringing in resources and experts from other places where they might not have that expertise locally in a way that's much more low cost than it would be to maintain a large staff of local teachers. And it also potentially solves access issues. One of the challenges now is that larger schools just have an innate scale advantage and they can provide a wider range of services because naturally, because of their scale. So there are already kind of significant differences in the provision of services within education system before this and the playing field can be leveled through A hybrid model. So I, I, I see that as the, the positive vision of the future education coming out of this, you know, whether it'll play out or not is dependent on a lot of factors aside from the school system and, you know, the assumption that a bunch of parents are going to rush back to, you know, a changed school system. I think there's also going to be cohorts of families that discover through this that actually the alternative options are more attractive to them than they maybe have thought. Some will succeed in forming learning paths that are actually like very successful and convert from being stopgap measures into being the default for a subset of families that decide to go that path. Other families are considering micro schools and maybe certain types of local schooling they might not otherwise have considered. And so I'm hearing about a lot of growth from micro schools, micro school startups, services that support micro schools. And so again, it's not that parents are necessarily going to wholesale adopt homeschooling for the long term, but there's all these other different variations of that I think amount to widespread, will amount to kind of a widespread behavior change both from the institutions and.

No, that's super, that's super helpful. And I think your vision for how schooling could come out of this much more positive is interesting in two ways. Because I think when we wrote disrupting class in 2008 and hypothesized some of these things, you know, we were thinking, honestly, some of the basic courses like, you know, 60% of high schools don't offer physics in America. And I don't think people sort of grasp that. Then you put your marketplace on top of it and you look at the wide range of subjects and areas of interest that people can delve into and learn, you realize, wow, schools aren't covering like a fraction of human knowledge and skill that is out there and all that you could do to create personalized environments, as you said, beyond sort of this common experience, which I think a lot of families still want their kids to have in a community, but then go much deeper in a range of topics and also personalize how it's delivered in some very neat ways that you all have been able to do with your teachers. I guess I'm curious then to shift into the pod piece of this because that seems like a very interesting element of personalization and customization. It's sort of, as many have written, it harkens back to the true one room schoolhouse in many ways. And really getting to think about what community do I as a family and my kids want to be a part of and things of that nature. It's a very live conversation in my household with our twins who are about to turn six and. But so I guess I'm curious, how are you all supporting the creation of these, of these pods? Because I'm sure many of them are using outschool. And second, you know, the equity issues again around this and the access that we're reading so much about like this is happening anyway, how are you all supporting a more equitable spread of this or helping districts to think about it, or what's your role, I guess, in that movement right now?

Yeah, you know, we're seeing the same thing that's being talked about, you know, in the news and that is parents, you know, at scale, like making the sudden shift to thinking about, you know, doing education themselves and forming groups. And we see that within our community. I see our role as being, you know, to supplement these pods in the same way that we seek to supplement school. You know, pods are small groups of parents coming together saying our kids are going to learn together in person and they're looking to hire a teacher to, to provide instruction. But one teacher for a group of your four or five kids can only do so much. They'll have, you know, strengths and expertise in certain subjects and they won't in others. At the same time, parents ideally would like their kids interacting with and socializing with and learning with a wider range of other kids than just the four or five they might be potting up with. And so our role as a supplement is both to provide the pods with more expertise from teachers around the world in areas that their kids are interested in, but their core teacher doesn't have the expertise in, and also to give their kids access to a wider group of classmates. And it's interesting that this term learning pods is being used because these look an awful lot like homeschool co ops to me. And we've been supporting homeschool co ops since 2017. And a homeschool co op, I guess, is just maybe a little bit more established. They often have larger groups of families than just four or five. They might be 10 to 20 and maybe a little bit less formal as it's not full time. Some of them meet only a few times a week or for particular subjects, but otherwise, basically, structurally, it's the same thing. And so we were able to support them in the same way. And I guess the only distinction I'll make with a micro school is just level of establishments, licensing, and it's usually teacher led a Teacher entrepreneur is usually the person founding that. Whereas, you know, homeschool co ops and learning pods are parent led. They're founding it and then hiring in the teacher. So there's a degree to which this form of learning is very, very familiar to us. It's just we're seeing it being called something slightly different, some different motivations to people going in and it happening at scale. And you know, we, we have community groups where we're not really active in the parents finding each other and actually connecting and hiring teachers. That's happening very organically and locally through social platforms and through existing networks of families who know each other now. It's an incredibly interesting trend. I think there are very sad aspects to it. The fact that parents have to do this, they have to take matters into their own hands and it shows that they're thinking in the longer term that they're expecting disruption in the longer term.

Yeah, that's a good point.

If they thought that schools were going to come back in the next month or two, then they might act differently. Yeah, but there's now a lack of belief that we're going to be through this pandemic in that time frame. And I think a lot of desperation, which is driving that behavior and a lot of anger and frustration with, compared to, with what they had hoped would happen, which is that we would have the virus under control and that schools would be more ready to reopen.

I'm curious. Yeah, well, I'm curious just to push you. And then, and then we actually have a viewer question in a moment. But the, in terms of the equity aspect of this, in terms of, you know, those with resources are forming these the fastest, it seems, certainly from media reports. A lot of them seem to have some guilt, interestingly enough, about doing it and realizing that they're opting in, if you will, to some privilege. The irony being that they may have already opted into that based on the zip code that they've chosen to live. Of course. But I guess the question that I've had is, you know, are there ways to allow districts to write, you know, draft off of this effort and basically be more flexible to organize heterogeneous groups of families in intentional ways in these pods or out of the classrooms that they group with? Are you seeing any momentum around that? Are you supporting any districts who are thinking about that, or what's your own take about how we sort of crack that nut?

It's a super important issue. I think the closest I've seen to it is the announcement by San Francisco Unified School districts of forming what they're calling learning centers around the city and kind of isolating certain groups of kids so that they have a small group and a place to go. I think that's very, very promising. You know, this POD trend is, is kind of a, an innovation that individual families have started driving, but I think is one that schools could and can and should pick up. Have schools be involved in the formation of pods within, within their family base, provide safe spaces and provide teachers. But it's very, it's very, very different from what a normal school schedule would look like.

Totally. Yeah.

But I hope to see that happen more. We are wanting to kick off programs through our outschool.org non profit arm where we fund, provide basically grants of both free outschool classes and potentially funding to help school districts form these pods. We hope to make a concrete announcement about you know, financial commitments in the program pretty soon. It's not quite ready yet. Live situation. But, but you know, that, that I think is key to addressing, you know, the access and, and equity issues. There's no reason why learning pods should only be a private, privately funded initiative. It could be organized and, and funded. Funded publicly and it should be.

Yeah, I was going to say quickly. You know, you could also imagine schools and public cities using other spaces that are not being utilized right now toward that end. Right to giving, whether it's public libraries, you can house X number of pods in them in safe separate spaces. Outdoor spaces of course being another one, but also YMCAs and marshaling some of the private spaces that exist toward that end as well. I would think.

Yeah, I think that that's exactly what needs to happen. I think the mindset shift that needs to occur in order to enable that is the idea that the teacher is teaching a subject instead the teacher has to be consistent with the POD and they're going to have to be this acceptance that that means they're not moving from POD to POD teaching their subject, but instead the POD and so are taking a more of a kind of coordinator or role and support role for the kids and you know, and hopefully using other resources and online resources such as free outschool classes to actually teach the content. And I think that mindset shift would have to have to happen which is easier for the younger age groups where it's more like that anyway and much harder for the older age groups where there's the expectation that kids are moving.

Between class or their subject matter disciplines and so forth. So that actually gets into. As we sort of wrap this up two Questions, I think to close one from the audience, from Arlen Bitzky, who asks, what about the actual online learning environment itself? There's sort of that age old question around trying to fit or force fit, what happens in a brick and mortar classroom into the new medium. How do you think that might evolve as well going forward?

So I guess the first thing I'll say is I have a high degree of confidence that with the live online format, it's possible to create really, really great learning experiences. Because, you know, we see this every day, that when teachers have the right tools, the right training and enough time to move their curriculum over, it can be great. It's different and there's certainly work to translate, but it can be incredibly inspiring. You have all kinds of new tools which allow different types of collaboration with the students. You have a mute button. So classroom control has never been easier, you know, but it does require just know, getting used to it, which is why we're providing, you know, training based on our community's expertise. So I have confidence that it's possible to create learning experiences and those will get better with time as the tools education gets better. I think the, the problem is there needs to be this expectation that, number one, it's going to take time and the investments in, in saying, you know, this isn't just in the short term, we're not just kind of putting a band aid on this, but we're actually going to invest in trying to make these learning experiences really great. And that also requires letting go a little bit of, you know, the older ways of doing things you can have. There's going to have to be big change in how teachers interact with the class. There's going to have to be training. And I hope, you know, I obviously hope that this pandemic comes to a close sooner than later, but if it doesn't, it'd be better to invest sooner and later in planning for, for the outcome that we're going to be in this for a while.

Yeah, that's an excellent point. So as we wrap up last question for me, let's move to a lighter note than the pandemic conversation. I'm sure this is asking a little bit like you to choose among your favorite children or something like that question. But I suspect people would know. What's one or two classes that you're super excited about personally right now on the platform? I suspect you have some that you're jumping into and learning from and the like. Is there anything hot on your list that you'd say, hey, check it out.

I mean there's just so many, you know, I love our cats classes. We have vets teaching about cat anatomy, everything from hard science to more like pet show and tell. We have a fortnight class where the kids demand homework from the teacher so they can tell their parents.

Imagine.

Complete fortnite assignment. We have some wonderful, just wonderful classes that really link core learning to fun topics. And the one that springs to mind is actually just one we looked at yesterday and it's, the class is called Farts, Farts and More Farts. And we watched this class and you were, you know, when this was proposed, we were obviously a little kind of nervous and skeptical. The teacher was very qualified, had a great story and so we let it go through and it's now an incredibly popular class and it's just incredibly inspiring. It's a hilarious topic, presents in an energetic way and it has real science in it. And we watched that class and the kids were just so engaged and every single one came out of that with just a much greater love and appreciation of how fun and ridiculous science can be. And you know, and it got to the point where this class became so popular and word spread around it that it became one of the largest search terms outschool for, for a period and teachers now more classes around it. So it's just, you know, it's that kind of risk taking creativity that we allow teachers that helps inspire, inspire students. And I, I wouldn't want to leave you just with that. We have core classes in algebra, the 5 paragraph. All the things you might expect. But what really hooks the students and gets them into science, they take the cool classes is those, is those fun topics that link to things they find interesting.

Well, you've pointed to an age old observation that many have known and research has supported which is when you start with an interesting question or a paradox or something like that that attracts people, then it's a lot easier to motivate the rest of the learning through the experience. So Amir, huge thanks honestly for what you have been providing over not just the last several months, but last several years, but in particular in a really trying time for so many, not just in America, but around the world. For this service to exist has been enormously beneficial to so many and deeply appreciate it. I'm putting the website up there again, outschool.com for folks that are not aware. Check it out. And Amir, thank you again and best of luck as you keep growing and innovating through this.

Yeah, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to talk. And I've been really inspired by your work on innovation education. So thank you.

Well, you're very kind. And we'll be back. Next time on the Future of Education.

Take care.