The Rise of Reach University and Job-Embedded Learning

Welcome to the future of education. Delighted by the conversation I'm going to have today with someone I've known for many years, Mallory Dwinnell, the founder and chancellor of Reach University, which she's going to tell us all about. I suspect we'll geek out a little bit on how we got acquainted with each other through the work of Clayton Christensen and some other connections that we have around innovation in education. But for now, I'm going to bring up Mallory onto the virtual stage. It is good to see you. Thanks for being here today. I'm excited to talk about Reach University.

Michael, thanks so much. It's great to be here.

So let's get right into it right now. I'd love to hear. I followed your career, but others haven't. So tell us your founding story behind Reach University and why you created it.

Yeah. And it actually oversects with or overlaps with how you and I first intersected. So as a little bit of history, I started out as an academic. I did my PhD in rural teacher shortages. And when I got to HBS for, for business school, I was working with Clayton Christensen about, look what we're seeing in teacher shortages. This was after you had published, you know, Disrupting Class. And we were thinking all about the fact that teacher shortages are feeling the, the downstream effects of the same reason K12 is failing. And there needs to be disruption. Teacher shortages are just another manifestation of that. And so, Michael, the way you and I first met was taking all of that doctoral research around how to teacher shortages arise, where do they come from, and refocusing it through the lens of disruption theory. And the findings we came away with there was that the primary institution that needed to be disrupted was higher education to create K12 teaching pipelines that are representative of their local communities, that are sustainable, and that are coordinated with the local labor market. And so what started as the Oxford Teachers Academy and is now part of a broader Reach University is the manifestation of that work that you and I first started researching together in 2014, I would say around how we can build a disrupted institution of higher education to fill teacher shortages.

So let's dig into that problem that you're solving then around teacher shortages. Just sort of unpack what the problem itself is. You don't have to do all your dissertation research, which is deep, but give us sort of a high level sense of what that problem is, why it's caused, and then we can start to get into the solution that you've come up with to tackle that on the ground.

Absolutely. I think you Know, the key part of disruption that really matters here is non consumption from overshooting. Right. So we will talk all the time about how people don't want to teach. That's actually not true. There are people who can afford to go to a four year institution and or whom are willing to take on massive amounts of student loan debt. Those are not the same people who then want to go into the classroom in general and is certainly not distributed evenly across geographies. Right. That every community in America has exactly the number of those people they need. But there's a massive amount of non consumption of people who would like to be teachers. They're typically paraprofessionals, clinical classroom aides, after school volunteers. There is this invisible demand of non consumption of people who want to be teachers but they can't afford four years out of the workforce. They can't afford to go away and get a degree and then come back. Those are all things that traditional degrees require. And institutions of higher education have been trying to attract people by, in my estimation, the wrong tools. They've been trying to automatically offer more fun activities, more buildings on campus, all of these other tools that would attract people, but that's overshooting on the demands of people who are not consuming because they can't afford to go in the first place. And so what our focus was on was, well, what if we could make it where your job turns into the degree? Right. Like what if we are not, we are not going after students who are choosing between coming to us and going to another school of education. We are choosing between, we are, we are going after students who are choosing between coming to us and not consuming higher education, just continuing to work as paraprofessionals. And so I'm happy to talk through how that method and model works, but that's, that's the foundational shift of who we're trying to go after and how we get there.

Yeah. So let's, I mean, let's dig in right there. I think it's fascinating, this notion that universities basically are adding all these features and amenities and success coaches and so forth, and they're not actually getting at what's effectively latent demand of these people who, according to the ones you just listed, are actually working in schools. They're just not able to get the credential to become teachers themselves. So dig into that dynamic and how you all are actually addressing it.

Absolutely. So let's just start with what we already know is happening oftentimes in schools and then what reach does. So right now in schools. Every single state in the United States of America has a structural teacher shortage. Every single state, there's are hundreds of thousands of vacant positions that reach an estimated, I would say as as many as about 5 million children in the United States walk into a classroom or at least one class.

And this is before, this is before COVID as well.

Right before COVID walk in. And there is, there's not a credentialed teacher in their classroom. Now meanwhile, there are by and large paraprofessionals floating around in that building who are de facto serving as the teachers as a result, whether we want them to be or not, you can't just have a pack of second graders sitting in a classroom and no adult in there. So we'll have paraprofessionals in there. They are from this community. They are working in that classroom every day with kids. And by the way, if and as we bring in a new teacher who doesn't know what they're doing, the odds on bet is that person is still going to be the one behind the scenes running that classroom. Because their experience actually matters. And this is critical to our degree. Their experience is actually its own form of education. It's just not recognized inside of our traditional systems. So the way that gets into so what is reach a system instead? So what the reach method does is thinking about the level of how we focus. So first we see ourselves as a business to business university. So we do not partner directly with a student, we partner with a school district. And that school district will say to us, look, we need about 15 new teachers. And that's a really important first piece of if we're going to coordinate supply and demand, we have to start with what are actually the demands for teachers and in this local community, not on aggregate, how many teachers do we need in the state level? Yeah, exactly. In my school district right now, in what subject areas, in what grade levels, what do we need? And then step two is then they identify for us who are the people already working in this building, who they know, who they believe are a good culture fit, who they want to see to be teachers. Right. And by the way, there's a ton of research. There is a study years back in which they asked school leaders to predict and other teachers to predict first year teachers who was going to get good results for their students on standardized tests and their peers assessment of them was a far better predictor of a quality educator than any other proxies we were trying to look at. So what we know is that these groups are actually really good at quality selection. They know who are the people that are going to be great teachers. So step two, as step one, they tell us what the issue is. Step two, tell us who are the people that could fill that role. Those individuals, those paraprofessionals, classroom aides, whomever then enter reach university. And then the way our degree works, there's degree design and then there's the financial structure. So briefly, to each their job is half of the degree. Happy to talk through how we've made that doable because most universities will tell you it's not possible. It truly is. So their job itself as a paraprofessional counts for half of the total hours they have to log to get their degree. And if in that time they are, you know, going to school wide professional development sessions and then going and working with students in a class, then what happens is then they come to reach for online zoom classes that are scheduled on nights and weekends around their job in which they're going through Oxford style tutorials, little mini discussions of saying, okay, we're in a childhood development college course right now. You went and did this PD in this workshop you went and we're doing this work in a classroom. In theory, child of development should look like this. These should be the stages. What are you seeing in practice? What's similar, what's different? So instead of being lectures, our online zoom classes are sense making of what are you seeing in the workforce. That's the curricular side from the financial side because of the fact that now half of their job or half of their degree is their job. Because of the fact that we're able to draw registered apprenticeship dollars, pell dollars, we don't have to pay for big physical footprint. Our promise that we can make to a student is you need to agree to submit your paperwork right to FAFSA and these other places. But if you submit the paperwork, we ask that you or your district pay $75 a month. So you've got skin in the game and that's it. So what that means for students are getting paid as a paraprofessional, their district is paying $75 a month or they're paying $75 a month. But there's no student loans, there's no hidden fees. The net result is they're getting paid to earn a degree and graduating into a job at the place they were doing that work.

Super interesting. I want to unpack it and just make sure I didn't miss anything. There's some great comments by the way, coming in over the transom as well. So I'll bring a couple of them in. But the. Just on the payment model first, and then let's get back to the actual educational and architectural innovations that you have there in place. So, because half my curriculum, as you said, is the actual work that I do, the job and the job itself, which becomes the job. Embedded learning that's in effect paid for, if you will, by the salary I'm getting. If I understand. And re. So reach is not taking money out of that. That's. Or. Or. Or it is. How does that work?

No, so the way it works is the district. We require that the district pay our students. Right. If you're doing work, you are being paid and your district is paying you that salary as a paraprofessional, as a classroom aide, as whatever else, we don't take that. We ask that the student then fill out FAFSA and give us all of the documentation required to either get Pell grants and or registered apprenticeship dollars collectively, on average. You know, we're. It's always a projection, but we project that we're able to get about $7,000 per student per year through those two streams. On average, our marginal cost is about $5,500 per student per year. And so what that means is we do ask that either the district or the student pay $75 a month because we see the value of skin in the game. Right. You need to pay something. But we can always waive that when there's hardship because it's not actually part of our revenue model. Our costs are completely covered by those federal streams. And so employers pay their students for their work. The federal government covers their tuition for us and the student, as long as they do the work, is not incurring any costs or debt.

Super interesting. And so then the $75 a month is effectively a subscription fee for skin in the game. How long is the duration of a program to earn the credential? Is that a typical. Is that a typical duration or what does that look like?

It can be two, three, or four years. So two years, if you're coming in and you already have an associate's degree, three years. In some states, we articulate with alternative certification providers, in which case you spend three years with us to get your bachelor's degree and then you articulate into an alternative certification provider. In some states, they want us to be the college degree and the credential. And so then it's a four year.

Four year program, in that case, credential. Gotcha. But you're flexible around that. Basically depending on the state requirements to get that credential and become a fully certified teacher. I want to go to an audience question and then come back to my questions that I'm deeply interested in unpacking. So our friend Chris O. Williams has a couple in there. I think you addressed the first one about the fact that you can actually identify the teachers who are going to be effective and that there is a pretty good pipeline of these individuals working in schools. He's curious to sort of quantify that pipeline a little bit more of how many of these prospective teachers exist that are working in schools as parapros or whatever else their role might be. And what does that distribution look like around the geography? Is it evenly distributed?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's evenly distributed. It's not necessarily always categorized the same way. So it will look different depending on what a state's requirements are. So just as some examples, in some states you have to have a paraprofessional. Paraprofessional in certain classrooms. So those people are very well documented, they're very visible. In other states it's not required, but there's usually just someone working as a classroom aide, as a one on one specialist to a student, as an after school support. They get called different things.

So.

So it's hard to quantify, but I would put it this way of. In general, what we're seeing is if There are about 4 million full time teachers in the United States, irrespective of what the official counts are, we see that in any given school there are at least that many people that are working as paraprofessionals, working either formally or informally in the roles that we're talking about targeting. And so what we're seeing for districts is that this is actually a really exciting way of. In the same way they have teacher vacancies. Oftentimes they have vacancies in these positions too. Because often the great paradox of all of this is you'll have someone who's trying to choose, I want to become a teacher and paradoxically I have my associate's degree, I'm trying to get a bachelor's degree. The best way for me to do that is by going and getting a job at a fast food restaurant because it's not going to conflict with my college schedule. So what we're seeing, the demand from our employers is allow us to use this as a way of a recruitment tool for our paraprofessional role. Right. Come be a para with us. Your job is going to be your degree and in two years you are going to become one of our teachers. And so we're seeing it as there's about a one to one count of paras, aids, that broader assortment and teachers. And we see it as a flow of attracting people into the para role and then moving them, upskilling them to teaching and then repeating the cycle.

It's fascinating. My head is jumping to other fields like medical education and so forth, where this could be used as well. We can go there later, I suppose. But let's dig into the educational model itself now, because you said separating out the job embedded piece from the academic zoom part, where effectively you're doing the Oxford teaching method that you've done at Oxford Day Academy and other places and really developed these seminar style conversations, to use a more colloquial phrase. But before we get into that, talk about the job embedded learning itself, how does that work? How do you get the ability to do that? That sounds like prior learning assessment. It sounds like competency based learning. It sounds like all these things that people like me have been excited about doing, but we haven't been able to sort of crack through the policy or regulatory wall. How do you do that?

Yep. And the answer is we do something else. Because to your point, I'm a huge believer in credit for prior learning and in competency based education. I think higher education has a very big problem in that we don't know how to recognize knowledge that doesn't happen from us. And so it just goes unclaimed and unaccounted for. Now my challenge though, with APL assessment for prior learning and competency based ed is exactly what you said. The way it's structured, I don't know that we'll ever be able to get consistent interoperable scale of institutions using, using assessment for prior learning and allowing things to transfer. And the reason for that is that lives in a highly regulated space. Anytime you want to introduce apl, you have to go through faculty senates, you have to go up to departmental approvals. A lot of times you have to bring in an accreditor. It's just slow, it's unwieldy, it doesn't work. And it certainly doesn't work in a way where you create an interoperable, consistent experience across institutions. So we have ignored assessment for prior learning and instead what we've gone after is the homework component of a course. So inside of a taught course, a three credit course at a university, there's always a two to one ratio that is required by, by statute of how higher ed works. And that two to one ratio is that for every one hour of seat time, typically lectures, you're supposed to have 2 hours of non seat time. Typically that is problem sets, writing essays, doing reading, etc. What Reach says is instead of having being lectures plus essays, what if you had that homework be on the job, training, credit for work. And then when you come in, instead of it being lectures, it's these Oxford style tutorials that are helping you connect that content to a particular subject area. So for example, you take a childhood development class at Reach University. Instead of going in, reading and writing an essay about Piaget's theories of development and then coming into class and listening to a professor lecture on those theories of development, what if instead you are at your job and you were given the assignment by your Reach professor? Hey, we're going to be discussing these different theories of development. I need you to go find the work of two different students you're working with who are at two different levels. And when you show up, you're going to need to come in prepared to discuss what about this was the same as what Piaget would predict. In what ways was this different and how do you make sense of that? So for us, it's about achieving the same goals of assessment for prior learning, but without getting stuck inside of that regulatory morass. Because what a professor assigns as homework is a syllabus level decision that is not something that needs faculty senate approval, that needs to go before any regulatory bodies today, any university, anywhere in America, any community college, any four year institution could immediately today flip the switch and start using this method.

So that cracks then the nut of how do you do this at scale, really elegantly actually. But it raises the question of how do you do it? You know, you talked about interoperable and having sort of that quality bar, right. That we know that the outcomes, what you're actually working on, are skills that you are in fact mastering. So that we're really sort of tying the job, embedded learning, et cetera, to the classroom practice and conversation and the skills that you want to get out of this. How do you connect those dots and sort of keep the validity and reliability of, of, of that component?

Absolutely. Also, apologies, my neighbor's mowing their lawn right now, so apologies.

No worries. It's all part, it's all part of the world in which we live.

The world we live in. So. Yes. So first let's start with the quality piece and then the interoperability piece. So starting with quality at a philosophical level, when groups get this right. It's not just that it's as good as existing learning, it's better. And I believe that categorically there is a reason why in our business no one wants to hire first year teachers. There's a reason why, you know, my husband is in medicine. There's a reason why you can't become a doctor once you have your MD without first serving as a resident. We know that experience is quality when it's done well. Now that brings up the important caveat of what does it mean to be done well? And we think about it in terms of internal controls and external control for accountability against quality. Internally, we've built this tool that we call CRAFT that allows for professors to basically make sure that when a student is going and working, they're not just like sitting on the job doing something completely unrelated. Right? Like me walking a student to the bathroom. The school might need that job. That's not the same thing as me getting the learning. I need to then go weigh in on child development. So the first thing is internally we built this tool, craft that allows the faculty member to assign tasks to a student that relate to the professor's student learning outcomes. These are basically like the Common Core standards for higher ed. So if I'm supposed to be learning about stages of development to assign tasks, collect evidence of students at stages of development, students then have to go collect that data, then get sent to their mentor teacher. So their employer who's supervising them weighs in and says, yes, this is Mallory's work, yes, she did a good job, or no, she still doesn't understand it. And then it sends that data back to reach university so that the professor can actually have a line of sight of the quality of the experience in the classroom and use that to inform their decision making around evaluation, around grades, around assessment, etc. So that's internally how we think about it is that creation of that tool externally. We've actually become founding members of a group called WTEA Workforce Talent Educators association. And they are working to become in the same way that you have CAPE accreditation for groups that want to offer teaching programs and ABET accreditation for groups that want to oversee environmental quality and industrial hygiene. WTEA is looking to become that quality seal of approval in any workforce based learning. So making sure they do it in the form of external quality audits. It's really similar to a lot of the work you did, Michael, previously around EQUOS and around QA over at Entanglement. And the idea is then, but it's meant to be accountability. So Signing up for having external audits, saying yeah, the quality was actually happening. Learning outcomes were actually aligned between work.

It's actually the exact same. It's actually identical, I think in that way.

Yeah, exactly, that's right.

Yeah.

That's what we think about is internally and externally thinking about that quality control.

So double click on those something because I think people are starting to ask a couple questions on this front.

That.

Makes sense how you verify what's the incentive of a school. Not just to say like, God, I need this teacher, I want them to get the credential. Yeah, that's Mallory's work. Sure thing. She did it. You know, like how do you think about like what Western governors has done on the competency based side of having the ability to have multiple reviewers who don't know. Right. You or what certification happens in industries. Right. Where you actually submit a portfolio of work in an external reviewer validates it that doesn't have sort of that financial incentive in place. How do you all think about that? It sort of sounds like you already cleared the bar of teacher education. I'm curious if you even go farther than that, does that make sense?

Absolutely. And I think one really important distinction is at the end of the day, the assessor is always still the university instructor. Right. So the person is. They're not just saying, oh, Mallory did this. It's I, Mallory, have to submit pieces of my work, I have to come in and discuss in these tutorials. So, so there's a second level. But starting with that first level, an important caveat here is the field supervisor is just one more data point. Now I would argue the schools have an incentive. If I'm going to have to eat my own dog food. Right. The teachers that produced in this method are going to become the teachers in my school. I'm actually invested in them being quality. But even the degree that you said they're still conflictive of like I need this person here today. The instructor's control over assessment and grading and this just being one more data point is the first level of control. The second we think about is, you know, we are excited about the work that groups like ace, Credential Engine, these other groups are doing. The way we see it as it's, it's both and we want to make sure that we are not reinventing the wheel groups that are already doing best practice in this work are coming in and like WTEA doing that oversight, providing that assessment. And then that's just one more data point that allows us as a university to feel confidence in the quality of what we're approving.

Very cool. Very cool. We could geek out on this for a while, but I want to come back out a little bit of how do you all think about the skills you're looking for? Do they map one to one to what the education field is historically? Or are you saying because you have taken the practicum and brought it into the classroom that you're actually saying no, we actually maybe care about different sets of standards and skills. How much innovation is there on that side of it as well?

Absolutely. And it's always this dance right of on the one hand, if we want to draw registered apprenticeship dollars, as of January, registered apprenticeships now recognize K12 teaching as an apprenticeable position. And that's super exciting. Anytime you go through CAPE accreditation for teacher quality regional accreditation that just looks at as a university, are you following certain standards? And then now registered apprenticeship programming, they all have certain things that they think a teacher should know how to do. Our teachers also have to be able to pass practice exams. Right. Or their local credentialing exams. So those things keep us from getting to say we, you know, we get to do whatever we want. However, what I'd also say is, Michael, as you might also recall, for me, my work started in a charter school, Oxford Day Academy tutorial experience to the high school level. And our big theory of scale was reach University. It was let's not do brick and mortar replication as a charter school. It's instead, if we can control how teachers get trained and instead of focusing on good teaching being what it's been historically in the past of I'm going to sit down and I do we do, you do. And you're going to remotely like, you know, passively just copy things down. If we instead use the tutorial method to train teachers in the tutorial method and then they go in as futurist teachers, that's how we'll scale that pedagogy. And so that's the tension we balance of. On the one hand, we have to stay in compliance with certain things. But those are more about the what's the content? These people know how they are trained to teach is very much left to our discretion. And we're seeing that using the tutorial method is making us better professors and it will hopefully transfer into our teachers learning how to be better futurist teachers who bring that tutorial method and that experiential learning and the things we believe in into their classrooms.

It's very cool. Very cool. So one more brass tacks this isn't. I think I've gotten most of the. I'm looking at my questions that are coming in. I think we've gotten to most of them obliquely or directly on. But the other one that I'm curious about is accreditation. You guys got accredited. It seems very quickly you're taking another step up on that. But just for folks who are interested, how did that process work? And sort of give us the quick nuts and bolts of that.

Absolutely. So first, I think there's something that needs to be said around accreditation. Is a lot of times when we talk about innovation in higher education, accreditors get made into the boogeyman of, oh, universities would do this, but their accreditors won't let them. And I have just seen that to be categorically untrue. We're regionally accredited by wscuc, sometimes just called WASC because it's easier to say. And that has not been our experience at all. As you mentioned, we found a quick way through accreditation, which I'll talk about in a moment. And even post accreditation, like all the way down to our accreditor meets with us monthly to help us think through how can we do this, what do we want to do, and how can we do this? I think the first important thing to note is that I think accreditors are the boogeyman around innovation, when in fact, I actually think it's institutional will. That's the much bigger issue that we have to navigate from there. How we got through is a process that was called incubation. Where we were originally the Oxford Teachers College, Oxford Teachers Academy, that was going to scale the Oxford tutorial method pioneered at oda just at the undergraduate level. There was a policy. It no longer exists, but there's still commensurate equivalents that people can pursue called incubation, in which an idea like Oxford Teachers Academy could nest itself inside of another institution that's already accredited, have that group oversee them for four or five years. Once they have demonstrated their own results, they can basically go through mitosis. Right. And then and split away and become their own accredited entity. And that was meant to solve this chicken and the egg problem of you won't accredit me till I have quality outcomes, but no one will come to me until I'm accredited. And so what do we do? And. And this is the same route that Minerva followed, that we followed as well. Of the REACH Institute was originally a postgraduate alternative certification provider that was actually doing the alternative certification work. At Oxford Day Academy. They offered master's degrees and teaching credentials. So originally we started as two different entities where we were going to be nested inside of them, incubated by them. And then what we ultimately realized was a real possibility is it was better for all of us to just not incubate. Right? To just stay permanently together. Because these alternative certification programs that the Reach Institute was offering needs people with bachelor's degrees. Oxford Teachers Academy is producing people with bachelor's degrees, but didn't want to be in the business of credentialing. And so we permanently stayed together as now Reach University. But I think the important thing to note that's generalizable here for anyone is while incubation might have been sunset, you can still go in and, and if you can find the right innovative institution of higher education offering nested programs inside of that institution, doing partnerships with them, in which there is, you know, outsourcing or collaboration. Which is why, again, it comes back to me of, I think an institutional's will. An institutional will is really the big barrier to innovation. Do they want to innovate and will they work with collaborators to innovate?

That's really interesting. Okay, so let's, let's go to two other places as we wrap up. Let's talk about impact and growth in this field. First of teacher education. Start there. But I'll just foreshadow then what other problems can you use this model to start tackling?

Absolutely. So with teacher shortages, we think about it in terms of direct impact and then also how we can reach beyond our own work by scaling the Reach method to other institutions. So direct impact. Reach University is in its second year of operations as having that undergraduate degree. We, our goal is in the next five years to scale, to provide 10,000 teachers, all of whom will be reflective of the communities they serve. So looking at a disproportionate number of students who are coming from. We want 90% of our students, and we're currently on track for this to be either black, Latino, indigenous and or low income and, or first generation and or working parents. Right. We want 90% of our students to reflect one of those boxes, at least because we know that that is the future of our workforce and we want our students to be reflected in their classrooms. We're also realizing, you know, 10,000 teachers does not scratch the surface on how many teachers are needed to fill those vacancies mentioned at the beginning. So we've also just piloted this year a partnership with a group called Dallas College, and they are a community college that has just launched this Year their own four year degree in teaching credential. And they're doing incredible work. They're as their name might suggest, in the state of Texas, that's not a state that REACH currently operates in, but we're piloting with them is can we share the tools, can we collaborate so that they can offer these same apprenticeship based degrees? And actually there's a huge shout out to them if you look in the news. I think as of yesterday they've publicly announced that they've just been approved as a registered apprenticeship for teaching in the state of Texas.

That's exciting.

It's incredible. Dallas Colleges, if anyone is looking for a gold standard, please go look to Dallas College. And so all to say what we're looking at is 10,000 teachers directly from us, 300,000 new teachers produced collectively across institutions using this apprenticeship based method over the next 10 years. And our goal is that in general any state we enter, so we're currently in California, Colorado, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and that in any state that we enter, that within seven years there are no more structural teacher vacancies in that state. We're hoping that in 10 years we can see the same thing across all 50 states. States.

Wow, that ambitious set of goals. I'm just taking a look at the comments again as I keep doing, but it's very, very cool to see this sort of reach starting to expand. So let's start to think about then beyond just teacher shortages in education. Where else can you take this model to bring this apprenticeship approach and start to make a dent in, in a lot of the labor shortages that we see?

Absolutely. And I think one thing that has been challenging for groups in the past, that this is a three sided market. Right. So it's hard enough to deal with supply and demand along two vectors. But anytime we talk about these workforce development initiatives, we're talking about three groups, individuals who are both employees and potential students, the employers. And then we're talking about the university doing the training. And so an interesting thing started happening at REACH that informs where we think we're going. And the short answer is we think this apprenticeship based approach the system, same way we're scaling it to other teacher training programs, we're seeing an appetite and a capacity to adopt this in any industry, healthcare, it, et cetera. And so to back up, you know, when we first set up Reach, we started getting a lot of what I'd say, false positive demands. So groups, individuals that were coming to us saying, hey, I want to go through your program, but they didn't want to teach, right. They were typically saying something like, I'm a mom with two kids, I can't afford four years out of the workforce, I can't afford to pay for daycare so that I can travel two hours away to an institution. Institution. I need this degree. And if I have to be a teacher on the other side, I guess I'll take it. But it's again, it's non consumption. Right. And so that was the first side of the triad. The second side of the triad is we had some employers who were philanthropically donating to Reach, right? They were looking at what Reach was doing as a corporate social responsibility to their communities. And as a result, we were sending them our reports on, here's the diversity of our candidates, here's their persistence, you know, here's employer satisfaction with the districts. And we started getting inbounds from these employers saying, well, could you offer a degree in supply chain? Could you offer a degree in nursing? Like we need this, could you provide this for us? And Reach? His answer was no. We most days barely feel like we can do teacher training. But that was the second side. And then the third thing is we started hearing from institutions again, like Dallas College of We want to do this work. We believe in apprenticeship based degrees. What are the tools you're using that allow you to do this? And so whether it's that conceptual framework and design we figured out of, make this about homework and not about APL and giving away the craft tool for free so that anyone who wants to collect that data and partner with institutions can. And so the future that we see is the market is ripe with all three sides of that stool. Right? Individuals, employers and institutions. So we are just embarking now on a collective impact project to look at groups in four or five different industries. So healthcare, IT and cybersecurity, supply chain management and advanced manufacturing are the areas that we're looking at because these are high wage jobs where there could be a strong apprenticeship based degree. And we're seeing real serious appetite from all three of those groups because there's such a shortage of labor in those spaces. And so we're just beginning to go through a process in which we train those other parties to replicate this method in other industries.

It's really exciting. Mallory, really appreciate the work you're doing and joining us to explain all these details. For those watching, if you've enjoyed this, give it a thumbs up because I'll just say there's a lot here that I think addresses a lot of challenges. I know folks had more questions in the chat. So Mallory, if you we didn't answer everything that they wanted to where can they find you or reach university to learn more and at least one person said they want to scale this into Africa. So how can they learn more and engage with you?

Well, their timing is great because we have just started some international work in other in other countries as well. Again, more through this train the trainer approach so that group along with anyone else can reach me and my email is just my first initial last name. So M. Dwindal you look on the screen and then they can also just go to our website of reach Edu and so through either of those channels they can find a way to get involved.

Awesome. That's terrific. And Mallory, thank you again for being here and all of you for participating in a really rich conversation. We'll be back next time.

Thanks, Michael.