Tutoring Support For Families Amid Remote Learning

Welcome to the future of education. I'm looking forward to this conversation as we dive into tutoring in the age of COVID 19 and the opportunities to help a lot of learners and a lot of families around the world and country and so forth. Deal with this moment and the great variety of schooling that we see right now. We have a veteran of the education world with us today, John Murray, the CEO of Noodle Pros. And John, first, welcome to the show. Appreciate you being here.

Thanks, Michael. I appreciate you inviting me on.

Yeah, absolutely. And for those that don't know, you've been in a number of very interesting roles in education. We'll get into that in a moment, but I'd love to start with just for those that don't know. What is Noodle Pros? You're obviously provide a tutoring service, but what's your unique spin on it relative to all the other options out there?

Sure. Well, Noodle Pros is really unique in the sense that it's a collection of teachers and tutors who have seven to 10 years of experience and exceptional national reputations. Each member of the core team has about 25 to 30 years of tutoring experience. John Katzman, founder and prior CEO of the Princeton Review, is our principal investor and board chair. And I think John knows more about tutoring than and test prep than anyone else I've met. Both John and myself have also run several significant K12 organizations.

And so before we get into the other organizations, just talk about tutoring more generally. And before COVID even, there was a lot of research base that shows the value of tutoring for the performance of individual students. How do you think about the importance of tutoring?

Well, you know, the thing about the tutors and especially the what I would call the kind of top end tutors is they've been doing it for so long, most of what they do is in person. They've been doing one to one in person with typically about 30% of it online. And unlike in the typical K12 software sphere, when online means synchronous or asynchronous use of curriculum. In the tutoring world, online really means remote video using tools like this. But it's still very much a one to one in person over video. And before COVID about a third of our tutoring was done through this medium. Since COVID it's now 100% and it's working exceptionally well.

That's helpful to know because I think a lot of people have wondered about the shift from in person tutoring to online tutoring. I'm curious, you know, you had a number of roles before this. We got to know each other when you had a very interesting role working with school districts and schools, helping them set up learning centers inside of the school, schools within schools, in effect. And now you're sort of, you're working more in the direct to consumer, if you will, aspect of this. Direct to parents, direct to families to support learners. What are the big differences and what are the big similarities that help you think about how to best serve learners and really transform or update education to better serve all individuals?

Yeah, that's a great question. And one of the key things for me is that in the tutoring world it is very much one to one with the experienced tutors who have really taken a decade or more to hone their skills, getting to know the students, getting to engage them, but more importantly, treating each student, whether it's an individual or in a small group, as an individual, increasing that individualized learning plan for them and not only engaging them, but assessing the kid, either through some tools and products or just based on their interactions with them, is to determine the particular learning styles of each student. So it's really been done for a long time. It's purely one on one focusing on the kid, helping the kind of the student with every aspect of their education, social, emotional aspects, everything. The things that K12 districts talk about, they struggle to do.

That social emotional element piece of it is, I think, really important because it's a part that's often overlooked, I would say, in large parts of the education technology industry and so forth and the entrepreneurial angles of this need to connect at a very personal level. Right. Like there's sort of the functional dimensions of helping someone learn math and learn to read or read to learn history or whatever it might be. But there below that there's, there's a person who has social emotional needs and is not going to respond if you really haven't hit those on that functional level that you desire. The tutoring seems to me to be a really very intriguing piece of this, but. But historically has been very expensive also. How do you think about sort of breaking that accessibility with creating those social emotional connections for all learners?

Yeah, it's really interesting. When I joined Noodle last spring, I came in to lead an M and A effort for the company to look at the industry and see if we could find some companies to acquire. So we took a good look at the industry and one of the things that really stands out for me is that the average package price of a tutoring package of services is the same for most companies, whether a company is billing out $125 an hour or $250 an hour or even more. And so if the package size is the same for high priced tutors versus mid to lower range tutors, that talks to the experience of the higher priced guys. And to be able to get the job done in less hours, typically, especially for test prep and the number of engagements in the package is important to the family because every one of those takes organizing, logistics, planning, sometimes travel. And so I think that's an important thing. The one thing I'd say that with the career tutors like Noodle Pros and some of the other career tutor organizations is that the social emotional part of that is really important because if you launch into teaching somebody without really getting under the hood of how the person reacts to discussions, pressure, suggestions, sequencing, and then there's the whole issue of mindfulness and mindset, which I want to talk about a little bit later, you don't get that from your kind of lower end tutors. You certainly don't get it from the marketplace tutors.

Yeah, that, that, that makes sense. Let's dig into it right now. And by the way, I should post your, your site for those that want to check out noodlepros.com but let's, let's get into that a little bit. You just talked about the mindfulness nature of it. It's becoming a trend, I would say, in education that people realize that they need to be paying attention to it. It's increased as a trend, I think given the pandemic and the resulting trauma and so many students right now. How do you think about the importance of that piece in particular that you just ref.

I think this is probably the time where the whole issue of mindfulness and mindset has raised its importance algorithmically really to what normally happens. If you consider the fact that kids have been out of school for almost six months, the reopenings of schools are going to be very bumpy and disruptive and confusing for them and less social for the kids. And so whether they're attending in person, online or in some combination, they're just confused and they're going to be under a lot of stress. So I think mindfulness and mindset coaching that can have a really positive impact on more kids now than ever before. And it's an important tool not just for increasing cognitive flexibility and thereby improving behavioral flexibility, but it really helps the kids adapt to different environments, including learning environments. And we've had a big focus on that over the last several months.

And how do you push that out among I mean you have tutors who are veterans of this space, right? Like they know their craft, as you've pointed out, that's a key differentiation. But they also, I assume bring different styles and assets to their tutoring craft as well. How have you pushed that out as a company to make sure that people are getting that consistency of experience, if you will, on the other end of it?

Yeah, we have a handful of the really senior tutors who are very adept at that and they're, they're typically also linked based on their preference and also their career experience to different age groups. So we have some people that are really solid when it comes to young kids pre K through maybe age 6, 7, 8, others more the high school, middle school range and others are people in college. And so there's been a go to group of tutors that typically we've used for delivering those services. But in the last couple of months we've put a fair amount of resource into taking our existing mindfulness mindset program and really enhancing that and strengthening it. Putting together professional development training program for the rest of our chooses so we can get them into the act as well.

Makes a ton of sense and helpful to hear about how you've been thinking about that process. This gets into the question that I'd love to have you reflect on. You named one major change that you all have made since COVID hit. You said you were doing a lot of online tutoring before, but now it's all basically online talk about how else you've changed and shifted to meet this moment. And what are you seeing as the big needs of individual students and families and educators on the ground that you all are uniquely positioned to help?

Yeah, well, you know, in addition to the kind of thing I mentioned earlier about doing the industry research and the kind of average package size essentially being the same. The other thing that we've seen around the country looking at, you know, probably 100 different companies is that there's been several recessions in the last 30 years and test prep tutoring companies are typically recession proof. Typically what happens in the recession, there's pressure on set ect, but because people are changing jobs at jobs, there's an uptick on grad level work. What's happened this time with COVID if you consider it to be like a recession, it's a bigger challenge because it's really, it was a more immediate impact than a typical recession might be. Not only that schools and colleges closed down Entirely. So that really created a couple of different challenges. One is how are the kids going to be educated when they're not in school within school systems who typically struggle to scale things to good effect very quickly and to change their path very quickly. And the other one is parents being sent home, having to work from home because offices are closed and all of a sudden kids arrive on the doorstep with a message that they're yours until further notice. Teach them. And so we look to that in a couple of different ways. And I'd be happy to share those.

Yeah, I mean, I think that'd be fascinating for folks because like you said, it's no longer. I mean the big observation I've had for educators is you're no longer just, just having a relationship with the student. On the other side, the families, the parents, the guardians, they're really the co educators in many cases or significant parts of the home life or classroom life, if you will, quote unquote, that you need to take into account as you build the right way to meet each individual student. So I'd love to hear you reflect more on what that's meant for you all and how you're working with families.

Yeah. The two things that we looked at as soon as Covid happened, one based on priority experience of recessions, is we need to beef up our academic offerings because we believe that's going to be more important to families than some of the test prep, SAT ACT stuff. But in tandem with that, given the colleges we're closing and the uncertainty over SAT act with choice optional and stuff like that, we felt that we were going to see some impact to our SAT ACT business. As it turns out, what we've seen year to date, halfway through the year compared to last year, is our SAT ACT business is reasonably flat, just up a little bit. Our academic work is up about 67% and that was by design because we jumped on it. And our grad work is up about 27% as well. So from a business point of view, that's all good in a tough economic and crazy situation. The other thing we looked at is in our own company with a few hundred employees across the different business units, with everybody being home, having to look after kids and deal with the communications issues, the technology issues between them and the district, and then try and do a full time job, we just felt it was going to cause a lot of stress and anxiety and impact workforce productivity. So we put together a team of tutors and educators from some of the other noodle companies and came up with a program that we made available to our employees as a well being benefit where we would provide one hour a day tutoring online using our tutors to the employees kids, free of charge to them. We paid for the tutors. We ran that for about two months from mid March through end of school year. The next thing we thought about is some accounts are not going to come back anytime soon given Covid. So we also put together 30 online enrichment programs, you know, things from storytime, sing along for young kids, coding languages, chess, things that they wouldn't be able to do on their own. And the thing I'd say about our tutors, again, given their experience and given that they're kind of masters of many techniques, is they create that social environment with a group of kids on video that I'd say most people just struggle with. So the kids still a lot of fun, but it was also academic. And so we provided the summer school stuff not only to our employees, but we also started providing that to clients. And since then we've created three different programs that we launched a few weeks ago. One is for kids who need some support. I read a statistic the other week that I think kids have fallen behind. 45 to 50% of kids have fallen behind through not being in school. And so we're offering support to students to help them get back on grade path as quickly as possible. Other kids want acceleration, you know, despite Covid, they still want to accelerate and get into the next grade to the best of their ability. And then as we were going through that, Both on a B2C and a B2B business, the whole notion of school pods and microscores came up. And so then we said, well, look at the moment, the programs that we are offering are based on our curriculum, our tutors, everything is aligned to Common Core, but it's kind of prepackaged for 7 to 10 hours a week to make up that supplement. But for a microschool, and we're calling it microscoodle based on the Skoodle program we did internally, that has to be a district program aligned to the district curriculum, taught to those standards under the supervision of one or more parents that form these groups. And so, you know, it's not much of a shift from what we're doing, but it's more of a fine tune to meet the specific needs. The issue of price point is extremely sensitive, you know, depending on the rates of your chooses in the first place. And I have to say our choices have been really good and accommodating and accepting some discount for us to lower the price point and help meet the needs of more families. But even that becomes a bit of a challenge for a lot of the families. We like to get to a price point that doesn't solve the equity problem, but kind of helps close that gap a little bit more. And so we've been working with some affiliate companies that have really good tutors that may do it for three, four, five years. They're not noodle pros, but they're experienced and capable and we're helping develop those so we can get the price point down even more and meet more needs.

It's fascinating and good to hear about the innovation in the equity side. It was a question I was going to ask.

Ask.

Let's go to two different places. The first area, as we start to think about wrapping up. First, I want to talk about tips you have for students and families as they navigate this moment. Could apply to tutoring, but could be broader. And then we'll shift to a couple questions I have about the landscape of tutoring more broadly and how that's shifting. But let's start with the first tips that you have for families as they're navigating this current moment.

Yeah, I think one of the challenges, and I'd be in the same situation myself probably if I was looking for a tutor, is looking at the fact that you have to do something that you're not used to doing. You haven't budgeted for it, how can you make it happen without breaking the bank? And there's always a tendency to say price is the number one decision factor and let's go for the lowest price. And I think that's a mistake. Money's important, but I think the outcomes you get. So when people look at bringing somebody in to do a microscope or, or bring somebody in to do tutoring, don't just look at the price, look at the credentials and look at the likely outcomes you're going to get from the person, whether it be a grad student, a teacher or a tutor or an experienced tutor. And if you're going to form a micro school, there's a lot of logistics and other things you need to look at to consider and pulling together. It's not just grabbing some local neighbors and friends and family and saying, we're going to make this work. There's compliance issues with the school district and standards. There's also the challenge, especially with COVID continuing unless people get back into families homes and we're being asked to do that and we've developed COVID protocols and all of those things for doing that. But I think parents have a bit of a dilemma. A one hour a day or two hour a day tutoring or academic support package isn't necessarily enough, especially for young kids that take most of the parents time. They're looking for something that's broader than that so that they can focus on work. The way to get that is to have a tutor online or online support materials, you know, math products and things like that. But that means the kids are sitting in front of the computer. They also don't want a zombie. So what's the fine balance? And you know, for really young kids, they also need a baby sister or a child care person. So I think you're going to see child care marrying up with academic support to provide a joint service.

Makes a lot of sense to have those marriage. And I suspect we'll see a lot of innovation frankly in the child care space. The longer this stretches on to create an offering that is actually more robust than what even schools traditionally provided in the sense that eight to three, five days a week, no summer coverage for many families wasn't optimal actually as an arrangement begin with. So we might actually see a lot of innovation that starts to pair the tutoring and academic content with child care function. Is my own hypothesis shifting to the business case as we wrap up here, I'm curious, you know you mentioned the SAT act. That demand actually has been relatively flat from prior year, which is fascinating given the test optional movement and how many cancellations of the SAT and ACT we've seen across the country right now. I'm curious, what do you think is driving that continued stickiness of the product around helping people prepare for tests?

I think it's really a client base. If you look at some of the tutoring companies that do, whether it's an adaptive SAT ACT program with tutors online as a hybrid model or whether it's some of the more regional, lower price point chooses. The clients there are looking for spending a reasonable amount of money but not too much because it's something they have to come up with. And the uncertainty over whether the SATATT tests are going to happen, many of them are saying why spend that money now? Whereas the other end of the spectrum, if you've got people who are just going to spend the money, they can afford to spend more money, they're just going to go ahead and do it and be prepared for it. So I think it's really a case of who is the real client there and the affordability.

Gotcha. No, that's Helpful. Last question for me. I'm super curious, because tutoring has been this area where the gains and the connections you can make with students have always outpaced traditional instruction. And yet we've always had this dilemma, right. Of access and sort of the equity question that you were referring to earlier. But there's been this other piece of it too, which is we've seen in innovations in the tutoring marketplace, we've seen new entrants come in, and yet the marketplace has remained very fragmented. I'm curious your take on that fragmentation. And I assume a goal of Noodle Pros is to cut through that fragmentation and create an offering that really can transcend that and become a dominant player. What's going to be your secret sauce in that? If my assumption's correct?

Yeah, you are correct. And I think that the challenge is most tutoring companies get started by somebody in college or grad school to earn some extra money. And some of them realize that they can actually develop a very nice business in doing so. And they get there and they become a million, maybe $2 million in revenue. The challenge is getting beyond that where they have to hire people, and some people get through that, make good hires, and some people don't. The next challenge is building up the tech platform. And that becomes a challenge for some. And what tends to happen with a lot of these companies is you start to build a business, you have to put in hr, finance, tech, all of those things. It kind of eats into the thing you're passionate about, which is local community, word of mouth, sales, marketing, and service. And so the key thing here is how do you leverage the best of the different companies in different geographies and provide an appropriate level of high quality services for them more efficiently and at a better price point? And I think that will happen. I don't think it's going to happen as has happened in the industry before, with some of the big test prep companies buying a bunch of regional companies, gobbling them up, changing the brands and running the risk of destroying them. I think you're really looking at a national cooperative with an umbrella organization doing all the research, R and D and provisional services.

Yeah, it's helpful. I appreciate it, John, and thanks so much for joining us today. And the work that you're doing to keep students on track allows some of them to accelerate and meet their differentiated needs. I'm very appreciative.

Well, thanks, Michael. I appreciate your time and speaking to you again.

Yeah, I know. So be well, everyone stay safe and we'll be back next time.

Thank you.