The Three A's of Quantic School of Business and Technology

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horne. Today joined by a guest, Alexi Harper, who is one of the co founders of one of, in my mind, one of the most important innovations and services to enter the education world in the last several years. It's the Quantic School of Business and Technology and a broader company called Pedago that she'll talk to you about. But I just thought I'd give this vignette before I bring Alexi up to join me, which is the first time I got to meet her. I was at the ASU GSV Summit several years ago and her co founder, Tom Adams, had been emailing me and wanting to set up a time to show me this product that had been developed at the time that was called Smartly. And I sort of, kind of was brushing it off a little bit, and all of a sudden we found ourselves in the same hallway or something like that. And they came up and Alexei was with him and they showed me this product. And I get pitched a lot of products and services over the years. This is the only time that I got so obsessed with what they had built and what they were doing. And they were teaching me a course about how to shoot better photos, which I think my wife is very appreciative that I took on their platform. But it was such a unique, well designed experience that I literally sat there for 30 minutes learning the material and then made them late, I think, to their next meeting because I was so intrigued by it. So with that as backdrop and no pressure, I suppose I'll bring Alexi up. It's good to see you. Thanks for being here. Out of that experience, I became a very excited advisor to all of what you all have built over the years. But maybe let's start with your own story, because that's the first time I got to know you. But your own story of how you got into the world of education and into co founding what is an incredible company in school.

Yes. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me as well. So I guess I really started in the world of online education and just educational technology in general at Rosetta Stone. So I had studied languages in college and I was really excited to join a company where I could help create language learning software. And I learned quite a lot there and really began to feel like it was time after almost a decade of working at Rosetta Stone, to try something else, to take a lot of the lessons that I learned and a lot of the things that I wanted to experiment with and take that to something that wasn't just focused on language learning. So my co founders and I, Ori Ratner and Tom Adams, we left and we decided to found Pedego. And at first we were kind of thinking, you know, what is it that we really want to build? But we decided we wanted to create an active learning platform that would be able to teach any subject. And so that's really how we got into this. And it so happens that business education was a really nice way to try out the platform. There's so many different elements to a great business education. So that's kind of where we started.

Very neat. And it's been incredible to watch the journey along the way. It's obviously had a lot of twists and turns and unfolded, but now you have this Quantic School of Business and Technology, an accredited college. Can you tell the audience what exactly is quantic for those that may not be familiar with the brand and learning about it and sort of what's your unique value proposition as you've come out to learners?

Yeah, so we're completely online business school, Quantic School of Business and Technology. We offer two degrees, an MBA and an executive mba. And we have more degrees coming that we're really excited about. But really our value proposition is that we're all about active learning, so in many different ways. So our platform, as I mentioned, is very interactive, but we also want our students to interact a lot with each other. Despite the fact that this is a fully online degree, we also are very affordable. We know that it's very difficult for students to sometimes take time off work and invest in a learning experience that can help improve their careers. So we've tried to make our degrees pretty much 5% of the cost of traditional degrees. So each of our degrees is less than $10,000. And we're also very accessible. So if we want students to be able to take our coursework anytime, anywhere, that meant that we really had to be on mobile devices. So we work equally well on mobile as we do on desktop. We don't require audio for the core learning module, so you can be on the subway learning. And there are no large videos that require broadband connectivity. Yeah, stop there.

No, it's. I was going to let you keep going, but the. It's. I mean, it's so interesting. So let's dive into it because you. You hit the three A's that I put in the headline there pretty nicely as you wove through it. But I think it's what was so revelatory to me. Let's start with the active Learning Experience was, if I remember, what would you all say you're answering as a learner? A question like every seven to eight seconds. So that means you're really leaning in and absorbing this information, having to make sense of everything. And it's much more text and image based, as you said, not video based, than someone maybe, perhaps would have expected. Can you talk a little bit about the thinking behind the instructional design?

Yeah. So it's sometimes easier for a student to kind of sit back and relax and listen to a lecture. But we knew that if a student's really engaged in what they're learning, they're going to learn a lot more just by doing. And so we took his inspiration. Mobile apps, games and other learning products that really prioritize engagement. We wanted to build a platform that students would actually want to come back to. So if you have a little bit of free time on your phone, we want you to want to take our courses. And we've created interaction types that really help students keep focused on what they're learning and also test their understanding as they go. So you don't get to the end of a module and realize, I don't actually know what I learned, you'll be testing your understanding the whole way. And that's, that's something that's really important to us. And to that end we've. We give feedback all the time and we give feedback both when you get something wrong, which I think you'd expect, but also when you get something right. We try to reinforce why answers are correct. So that was kind of the foundation of our platform.

Yeah. And folks who've been obviously watching me on this channel know that active learning, I think, is an incredibly important deal. It's from a research base. It's one of the few things that shown to actually move the needle in a consistent way in terms of learning outcomes and the like. What's so unique about the way you all do it? As you said, relative to say, some of the other platforms we featured lately which are very discussion heavy and a different form of online learning, you're really helping to build the foundation. Like the platform is incredibly good at building the foundation of knowledge. Far better than say, watching a video on a MOOC or something like that, which is sort of the analog, I think, experience out there. Is that how you think about it?

Yes. So we always say that we want to be able to take someone who knows nothing about a subject and start them at the beginning and then take them all the way to a really deep understanding and so on. Our Content team. We talk a lot about building like scaffolding understanding for our students and we built the platform to really support that. So I think we're kind of unique in that we created our platform to really serve our content creators as well. So both kind of influence each other.

Yeah. And then on the other piece of it you said is the mobile piece and the accessibility, in my mind, this is really the first mobile, first MBA program in the world of which I'm aware. And I think the distinction there is, as you said, you can do it on a desktop computer, but this is like optimized for your phone and bite sized chunks of learning. Hey, you want to learn something more about strategy or finance or whatever, like, hey, click away, like start going on your phone wherever you are and it doesn't require a lot of bandwidth. Can you talk a little bit more? And is that how you see it as really the world's first mobile. First idea? Yeah.

Yes, definitely. And that was very intentional. When we create our content, we have a way to preview on both mobile and sort of a desktop view. And we, we make sure that everything that we're creating is optimized for that mobile experience because we feel like especially, you know, if you're a busy person who has a career that you don't want to leave to go back to school, you want to be able to study when you have time. And that might be when you're on the bus, it might be standing in line at the grocery store. And so we thought very hard about making sure that what we're creating not only works when you're outside of the home, but also that it's in, it's created in bite sized enough chunks that you can actually get through something when you have a little bit of time so you don't have to sit down and devote 40 minutes to making progress. Which is. That was one of the lessons I actually learned from Rosetta Stone because I felt like there sometimes lessons could stretch a little bit long and that maybe people weren't always finishing them. And so that was definitely one of the lessons that we took.

Well, I'll never, I'll never forget my own experience in Rosetta. So. And trying to learn Korean and trying to speak to the thing and my wife cackling in the background at my ineptitude. But being stuck in the middle of the lesson and not feeling like I could jump out to ask her why she thought my accent or pronunciation was so bad. But the. But the but but I think, you know, everything you just said has Been my experience as well. The I. The other element of it that I'm interested in is what you said about the affordability. I mean, under $10,000 is incredible. How do you all do that? Like, how is that possible?

So we really have focused on creating a model where, you know, it's possible for us to deliver this education on a platform in an affordable way. And we also focus really, you know, focus quite a lot on tuition reimbursement. So that's something that I think is also something that we're even working to further going forward. We want to make sure that companies really understand how valuable this is to our students and how valuable it will be to the company. And so we're trying to help make sure that companies are supporting our students by paying for their education as well, which is phenomenal.

And I tried to throw up, by the way, a quote there from Austin who says Quantic's active learning pedagogy is a remarkable experience. Found myself considering new subjects old hat in a matter of just a few weeks. And I guess he was in the executive MBA program, enabled him to have a greater impact in a Fortune 100 companies Commercial function pretty instantaneously, it sounds like. So, so let's dig a little bit deeper then. Who are the students that you're attracting in these two programs, the MBA program and the exec MBA program? And how many of them and sort of how do you get in to the program?

Yeah, so we tend to distinguish our MBA and our executive MBA students by experience. So our MBA students may have, you know, six to eight years of professional experience. They're coming in with an idea that they want to be leaders in their organizations. And so that curriculum really focuses on getting them all the core knowledge that they need, just creating a really solid foundation. And our executive MBA students tend to already have a lot of experience and maybe there's something that stalled them in their careers. And so we want to make sure that they have that leadership background that they need in order to rise in their organization. But we also give them opportunities to explore other topic areas, things that interest them that they feel might further their education, and then also to do a business plan capstone that really helps them put into practice everything that they've learned in the program.

So just to double click on the MBA program, like the students who are attending this aren't perhaps looking for their two year vacation at the Harvard Business School or something like that. I mean, these are students that are probably continuing to work while they're enrolled in the program. How Selective, is it? What's their profile like and so forth?

Yeah, so we tend to be fairly selective on our students because we want to make sure that we're creating a really positive experience for them as far as the networking is concerned. Because that is something. That's one of the major reasons that people choose to go to business school. So we say that we accept about 7% of applicants who apply. And it's true. Many of our students are not looking to take time off of work. They want to keep working. They already have, you know, an idea of what they want to do for their careers. And so what we enable them to do is take the time that they have available in their lives and use that to get their education, to learn, but also to be able to put that information into practice at their current position. And I think that that's actually a great way of pairing school and your career because you're able to say, I'm learning this right now, and maybe there are opportunities for me to practice that while the information is still fresh in my mind.

Gotcha. And so just to double click on that, like, how big is the class for a program and how long, given that flexibility, how long would it take? And then that'll segue, I think, into the other aspect that you and I have talked a lot about over the last couple years in terms of the cohorts. But let's start with the size and sort of how long are the programs?

So each of our cohorts lasts for about 13 months, and we actually have sort of a rolling schedule because we know that students may not be able to start exactly at the time that we decide, you know, if. If all of our cohorts started in September, that might be difficult for people. So we actually try to space each of the cohort start dates out by six weeks. So every six weeks we have a new start date for our students. For our MBA students, we have about 200 students in each cohort. And for MBAs, it can be a little bit more than that. So it's a. It's a core group of people that often get to know each other well. And we host events throughout the year, both virtually and in person, that can sort of further those connections. But it's always really nice to have a core group of people that you're getting to know, you're in slack groups with, you're having virtual events with, that you can take those relationships into the rest of your life.

So that's actually another interesting element, though, because any given class is quite small. And intimate. But as a school, if I'm doing the math right, that probably makes you all the largest business school, at least in the United States, I imagine, in terms of number of students at any given time. Am I doing the math right?

Yeah, we do have several thousand students that we're working with at any time.

So the other piece of it you just mentioned is as those cohorts is these meetups and projects that people are doing together. This is sort of the other side of the platform, right? Like, the platform has this incredibly active experience to learn the foundations, learn the knowledge from the beginning, all the way to very complicated concepts. But then putting it into action, whether that's through your job or in these projects and these networking opportunities, speak a little bit about what that looks like. And while you do so, I'll flash up a couple other comments and hopefully I won't cut off our heads too much as I do so. But speak about that piece of the experience.

Well, that's another part of learning by doing for our projects. It's. It's important for us to feel like our students are learning something and they're immediately able to put that into practice. And not just in sort of a solo project, but many of our projects require them to work with others. And so not only are you getting an opportunity as a student to sort of put into practice what you've learned, but you're also doing that often as part of a group experience. And that's, you know, learning soft skills, practicing being in a group. Those are all things that all of us can use a little more experience with. And so I think it's very popular with students. We always get requests for even more projects because it's really nice to be able to have like a focused way of practicing something and then get feedback on how you've done.

Another interesting thing that occurred to me, and then we can shift a little bit, but is that it occurs to me there's a lot of research that I find is often ignored from folks, which is that if you're a novice learner, lots of interaction socially overwhelms working memory. And so you still want an active learning experience, but you want it in a more solo environment so you can focus on the knowledge. And then as you become an expert learner, interaction and working together becomes more and more important to apply. And as you said, develop these quote unquote soft skills or the really the critical thinking, the communication, all those elements in the context of that domain.

And.

And that's where social and interaction becomes way More important. But I find at least a lot of platforms sort of confused. And they go either all to one end or all to the other end and not sort of have that continuum baked into the, into the pedagogy and instructional design. How much of that is intentional on your all part?

So it has been very intentional. We felt like we wanted to give students a safe place to sort of learn what can be quite intimidating topics. So that's always something that we talk about is how can we make something that could be really intimidating? You know, for some people, that's finance or accounting. For others it's operations management or something, you know, math focused. How can we make that an experience where you feel like you have room to experiment? And so a lot of our interactions let you get things right or wrong without any penalty. And so that's sort of that solo experience as you were describing. And then we have sort of this capstone experience at the end of each of our courses that is again, solo, but it's. It's allowing you to test your understanding in a case study form, like a solo case study. And once we feel like we've built up enough of that knowledge, we want to kind of open things up to the more social experience. So that could be case studies with a faculty member that are not graded but are just sort of extra opportunities to practice, or that could be working on a project or even your capstone project or another type of presentation where you're taking everything that you've learned and you're delivering it, or you're interacting with others as you explore that topic further.

Terrific. And speak to outcomes. A little bit of the students, like, what are you seeing as they. In terms of grad rates and where they go and what this enables them to do?

So we see that many of our students go on to work at very aspirational companies, and many of them are working there to start with. And I think we have a fairly high graduation rate for a fully online university, so we're always looking to improve that. But, you know, I think something like 70% of students more recently have been.

Tied for online computing.

And yeah, I think just generally it is a focus of ours too, to make sure that students are getting the jobs that they want. So we help students with analyzing job descriptions, with, you know, looking at their own resumes and those types of things that are not really part of like a school curriculum, but I think are typically included as part of an MBA program. And we also think that that's really important. So we do a lot of work with our students to make sure that they're prepared to apply for positions that they're interested in.

Very cool. Now, let's talk about future directions. By the way, we're getting so many thrilled comments online right now. It's very cool. There's one push that I'll ask in the moment, but I'm curious more just you mentioned future plans. It sounds like maybe more degrees in the works. What can you share and talk about openly?

Yeah. So we are really excited that we have some new degrees that are going to be some that are coming out next year, some that are probably a little further away. But we're working on an executive MBA in strategic leadership, which we feel is a much more focused degree that for some of our executive MBA students, this will be a really nice opportunity to focus on some of the skills that could really further an executive career as a leader of a company. We're working on a track for our MBA program in entrepreneurship. That's a topic area that we know is really popular with our MBA students. And then we're working on a few other degrees that are not MBAs. So a master's in business analytics, software design and engineering and finance. And we think all of those will sort of round out the type of business education that we're able to offer.

Very cool. Very cool. People talking about the disruptive aspect of Quantic in the chat. There's just some very cool comments and points being made. One question that was asked is, how does the app evolve over time, or maybe it already has, to support people with visual impairments so that they can access and learn from what you all have built if they're not able to, I guess, see the text or in the same way others would.

So this is something that, honestly, I think that we can do more with. We have had students who have had visual impairments, and I've even watched them use screen readers and things like that. And I think there's a way to get through our program, but I personally like for us to be able to spend more time improving that in the future. One thing that we've done a lot to help with are students with hearing impairments. Our platform sort of naturally is very conducive to students who have hearing impairments, but I think recently we've done a lot with the sort of interactivity pieces when students are attending webinars or case studies with faculty members or otherwise interacting with others. We've added a lot of features to try to support them. And so I feel pretty good about a Lot of those efforts. And I think we can do more for the visual impairment efforts.

Super helpful. I will say. This is me editorializing for a moment. One of the things that I think is interesting is schools also being super clear up front, like who you're set up well to serve and being honest, hey, we're not there yet on X. Or maybe that's not in our plans. And there are often a lot of pushes for schools to be all things to all people. And maybe we're not talking about the, you know, the impairments aspect of this right now, but just as a general statement, I think it's an important thing to be able to say, hey, this is where we're excel. If you fall into this category, great. And if you don't, we're going to find a better place for you rather than try to educate someone we're not set up well to do at this point.

Yeah. And kind of to that point, we actually allow students to try us out before they decide whether they're interested in joining our cohort. So we provide quite a bit of free content that students can go through to see, is this a way that I enjoy learning or not? And it's fine if someone decides this isn't for me. But we do think it's important for people to be able to try that out because we are a very different model and we want to make sure that people are making the best decision for them.

Yeah. And I'll just say I've always had the app on my home screen and when I'm walking around pre Covid at conferences or whatever else, and I'll show people, hey, look at how easy it is to learn this concept or whatever else, because it is addictive and it is so easy just to sample some of that early content and so forth, like you said, to see is this a good fit for what I'm trying to achieve. And so, last topic as we wrap up here, which is you all recently held a Women in Leadership summit, which I think was exciting. I don't recall you all having a summit around a topic like that before. So talk about the impetus. What were you trying to achieve? And what was it like to do what I assume was an online summit?

Yeah. So during COVID times, we decided that we really still wanted to engage our students in a much more interactive sort of live way than perhaps we were worried, I guess, that we were not able to do local meetups, we weren't able to do conferences. And so we began working on virtual summits that were kind of large scale. This is one of the summits that we've run. We had one about sustainability a little bit earlier this year, which was also really exciting. But this one, the Women who lead summit, was really important to us because Covid has impacted everyone, but it has had a particularly harsh impact on working women. I think. According to the Department of Labor in the US Adult women's employment rate is at its lowest pre pandemic level since September 1988, which is quite low. We've also seen that during COVID the number of women applying to MBA programs increased quite a lot substantially. We wanted to highlight a lot of the amazing women in our program and also just hear about some of the things that women tend to struggle with related to MBA programs or the business world. That was the reason that we decided to hold the event. But it was very rewarding, I think, for a lot of the people who came. Just carving out that space for people to talk about issues that they've experienced, to hear how other women sort of deal with some of the things that others are experiencing, and then maybe also to inspire people to tell their stories. So it was a very rewarding experience.

Overall, it's very neat. And I suspect, as you said, it is a trend that more and more women are enrolling in MBA programs. They aren't the male dominated schools, perhaps that they were even 10 years ago. We've seen a substantial shift. So out of this, did you already start to see some of those inspirational moments perhaps occur? Any, any highlights that you can share or messages that really resonated to lift this important conversation further?

Yeah, so we had a lot of really positive feedback just looking at some of the things that our students said. Just I participated in some workshops and one of my favorites was who are you going to be in 2022 where I got the chance to meet quantic students and alumni around the world. You know, we had people who were excited to be moderating who said, what an amazing and inspirational week. So yeah, I think in general, our students were really, really excited to participate. And we also had a lot of our alumni come back as well, which was very exciting.

It's very neat. And I just think it's an incredibly important topic. Not just because we're at this crucial juncture where so many women have exited the labor force, but more importantly, I think setting those role models up and showing women in leadership positions should not be a novel thing. And in fact, there are great examples, you included, of people who are doing incredible things that people can aspire to and see themselves in. So I was super appreciative that you all did this and showcased it. And hopefully more coming perhaps around the corner. More summits of the Salk.

Yes, we definitely plan on it. Yeah. And we had over 1,000 students participate and it's just really rewarding to be able to bring so many people together all at the same time. So it's definitely more in our future.

Terrific. Well, incredible work that you all keep doing. I think we hit the three A's and that important summit. Any closing things that you just sort of table set or wet our appetite for continued innovations to come from Quantic.

Yeah, I mean, we're really excited for these new degrees. We're thinking about beyond new degrees, what's next and how we can keep evolving our platform. So I won't give too many details there, but that is something that we're actively focused on and excited about.

Well, we will keep an eye out for it. For those who have enjoyed this talk, throw a thumbs up in whatever platform you're viewing it in. So we know that you like this sort of content. I will continue to say the Quantic School of Business and Technology, I recommend it to everyone. I think everyone ought to check it out. It's an incredible experience that I just haven't had anything like it and I still don't see much out there like it. And I think it really does advance learning. It advances opportunity for a lot of folks. So, Alexei, appreciate you joining us and for all you tuning in, stay tuned next time for the future of education. Thanks so much.