Hardeep Gulati and Marcy Daniel on PowerSchool’s Unified Classroom Experience

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and today we’re talking with Hardeep Gulati, the CEO of PowerSchool, a leading ed tech platform serving more than 32 million students, 65 million parents and nearly 100 million users in 70 countries.

The company empowers teachers and drives student growth through innovative digital classroom capabilities and real-time communications across any device. Hardeep grew up in central India, earned a master’s in computer science at IIT and moved to the United States and started a process automation business that was quickly acquired. He spent almost a decade leading product development at Oracle and is now leading the team at PowerSchool.

On today’s episode, Hardeep is joined by Marcy Daniel, Chief Product Officer at PowerSchool. Marcy shares more about the platform’s functionality, what it means to be a unified classroom, and how schools are finding it most useful. Let’s listen in to hear Hardeep, Marcy and Tom’s discussion. And if you’re at your computer, you can actually watch this podcast recording at GettingSmart.com.

It’s the first of many video podcasts to come. We’ve got it linked in the show notes to make it easy to find. Let’s get to it. Hardeep Gulati, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Hi, Tom.

Thanks for having us on the call. Hey, great to have you here. And you’re joined by Marcy Daniel, your Chief Product Officer. Hi, Marcy. Hi, Tom.

Good to be here. Hey, great to have you guys on. Hardeep, I gather from your bio, you probably grew up in Central India, is that right? Yes, Northern India, but did learn and travel across the Central India as well. I moved to the US about now, of course, 22 years back.

Did you go to one of the IITs? Yes, I did my master’s at IIT. I did go to school here at the UPenn as well. Right. How did you get to UPenn?

I actually started a technology company back in the 99. And one of the things which clearly I learned from a thing was that while you can be great at technology, it’s very important to understand how to apply that to solving real business challenges and problems. Right.

So that gave me the curiosity to go and list myself at the pen and really try to get a better understanding on how to capture the voice of the customer. I love to talk about that startup. It’s interesting. It looks like you started that just a couple of years after college, is that right?

That is true. Where did the idea come from? So I was working with the telecom companies like Lucent Bell Labs as well as with some of the financial houses like Dunham Bradstreet. And one of the key things which was clearly obvious is that when it comes to information

exchange and data exchange, the lack of integration pretty much inhabited a lot of the business processes, irrespective of whether that was in the telecom world or the financial. And for that matter, even the high tech and even in education. We focused on building a service oriented architecture of how to make integrations more easier.

Wow. That’s actually a great background because we, as you both know, better than I face a huge integration challenge in education. We’ll come back to that though. But it looks like you were acquired pretty quickly.

Is that right? Yes. I joined a company which was acquired, which was focusing on solving that problem in high tech. And we had investors from Cadence, Flexronix, HB and Avnet who were trying to solve that

problem in global supply chains and how to have a more product and data exchange more smoother across the entire supply chain. So our service oriented architecture was then built more to be purpose built for the high tech. And that’s where I joined SpinCircuit as part of that.

And you spent almost a decade in product development at Oracle, the last half of that leading product development. That’s an amazing background. What were some of the takeaways from product development at Oracle? The progression from SpinCircuit as we were solving the problem for high tech, as you

can imagine this, and you said, the problem persists across industry. And Oracle was starting initiatives across both product lifecycle management, but master data management. So I joined Oracle to lead those initiatives. So I ran the master data management initiatives as well as some of the supply chain product

lifecycle management areas for Oracle. Really the exciting part for me, learning from Oracle, that’s been nine years there was you got to see every industry and how similar some of the challenges which exist in every industry. So in the last now 10 years being in the education sector, it’s been exciting to bring some of

those learning into the education sector. And especially in the K12 world in the last four years, I’ve seen which has been a neglected sector from a large enterprises like Oracle or IBMs of the world. And bringing that kind of technology and bringing that level of scalability and integration has been the mission which we’ve been following at Parsley.

I appreciate that. Before we started recording, I mentioned that my background is in the private sector as well. And so I appreciated when I came into education that there’s many things that are different about education, but there are a set of enterprise challenges that are quite similar to other

sectors. So I appreciate both your commitment to education and your interest in bringing quality tools and integration to education. How did you hear about the 2015 VISTA acquisition of Parsley? So Prinec Parsley was working in a company called SumTorl which was the number one corporate

learning platform. And we were doing a lot of work with the higher education as well. One of the missions that how we were championing that learning should not happen at an own silo. It should be part of a broader aspect of talent development.

It needs to be more just in time. It needs to be more contextual. I think you’ve kind of seen a big paradigm shift over the last decade or so with YouTube’s and learning is happening in much more micro or nano ways where it’s more contextual. That paradigm shift actually is even more so when you look at your kids.

I have three kids and I can tell you all the way from my four-year-old who was kind of wants to be able to navigate an iPad and navigate ABC most and go through different things much quickly. How do we, the paradigm shift of providing technology, paradigm shift of how we make the context of the learning to be much more to the digital natives which are next generation

was kind of what we were doing in the corporate side. And then PowerSchool was being copped out from Pearson. I got very excited and this starts me to lead that initiative and it’s been now like close to now five years. So I was thinking about this while I was running the Sporting Heart Deep that you had two important

shifts when you took this role. One is stepping into education and I didn’t realize that you had been in the corporate learning space. You had good learning management system background but you were stepping it one into a new sector and then to some extent you’re stepping into an integration challenge as opposed to a development

challenge and you had just spent 15 years really developing high quality products from scratch and here the opportunity was going to be integrating a set of tools around it, a kernel. It feels like two kind of step ups simultaneously. Feels like a big challenge.

Was it, has it been? Sure. Actually the integration challenge was actually very universal. So some of the work I have done at Oracle whether it’s a retail sector, teleco, life sciences when you look at it even now how you’re doing for example clinical trials versus

how you’re doing manufacturing of those clinical trials and how you’re actually going to do mass production. You don’t realize that actually a lot of those systems are separate and just like we talk about in education where you have a fragmentation of information and that creates a lot of holistic view about what their outcomes would be.

Actually the pharmaceutical companies struggle with that as well. There’s so many clinical trials who get on the side because they are not able to have the right information at the right time and that is a big challenge even in the clinical trials phase. So you apply that actually that same problem existed in corporate education.

When you look at and also in higher education where a lot of times when we are giving talent development to the employees, a lot of time employees can’t figure out that how this is going to help me do my job better or how does it really help me move to be a lot more to be able to grow in my career. From a corporate perspective it’s difficult to understand what is the engagement levels

of the employee. So same challenge exists, your talent systems, your learning development systems, your HR systems, your actual job tools are all different and sometimes they don’t talk to each other. So a lot of what we have been doing over the last almost 20 years now with the integration platform, with master data management platforms, with bringing suit together actually was the

same challenge I saw in K-12. In fact even more prominent, our districts when I first surveyed our customers back in 2015 to make sure I understand the K-12 challenge is better, the number one ask from all of our major customers was the biggest challenge was actually integration because every district was reinventing the wheel by connecting and they still lacked a holistic way to understand

how they can improve education outcomes. So that’s what there’s been a mission which actually is very consistent with what I’ve seen in other industries. K-12 it’s being even more prominent. That’s interesting.

So was Vista’s interest always in taking power school and building an integrated comprehensive solution around it? I’m curious if you and Vista both saw that opportunity initially? We both saw when initially we were talking to Pearson coming out, we kind of saw that Pearson while they had invested in the product and over the years made it the number one student

information system, there was still a best in class student system but sitting it’s a non silo. So we clearly saw that and that was validated by our customers that there was a lot of fragmentation. A survey I remember from the time we did, a teacher was actually using 19 different systems within a week.

40% of their time was going in administrative tasks related to the fragmentation of having to deal with multiple systems and having to do mundane administrative tasks away from the actual job of teaching. So we clearly saw that as an opportunity very early on and as we kind of build the vision and mission for our school that we invested how we can create a unified technology platform.

It doesn’t have to be our power school but does have to be a platform that can help tie all the different pieces for districts. So every district is not having to reinvent the wheel and the main objective is that they can get that holistic view of how they can understand where are the learning gaps and how do they address those learning gaps and how it’s really concerted effort to make that happen.

Let me back up and do just a second of history for our listeners. I bet almost everybody on the podcast will know the power school name. It was first developed in 1997. It was sold to Applin in 2001 and then to Pearson in 2006. So you ever saw the acquisition by Vista about five years ago, right?

Yes. And then Marcy, you joined a few months later. I did. I joined in February of 2016. I was part of an acquisition of Interactive Achievement.

Okay. So you were part of one of ten acquisitions. So, Hardik, you’ve been busy making an average of two acquisitions a year for the last five years. Marcy, you’ve been leading a product for the last two or three, right?

Yeah, since about four years now. Now, many people will remember that you acquired Schoology just over a year ago. Was that a year and a half ago? Yeah, actually less than a year ago. It’s almost now.

Oh, really? Yeah, it was November of last year. And with Schoology and many of these other products you’ve developed, what Marcy calls the unified classroom. Marcy, maybe you could tell us about the functionality of the unified classroom.

Sure. The unified classroom really gets to the heart of what Hardik was describing as we saw a problem, heard a problem about teachers having very disparate experiences across multiple applications. So you have a productivity loss there. And then you also have the just the data, you know, learning data sitting in a lot of

different places. So unified classroom, we developed that really starts bridging those things across learning experiences, assessment, your grade book, mastery standards, and really loops all those things together into a single workflow experience. So you’re not going into those different applications trying to bridge all that work that’s happening

for a student and understand, you know, where their learning is. Most importantly, like how do you adjust their instruction, right? Like how do you adjust what their learning path is based on real time data versus data that is very backward looking. So those are some of the things that we have threaded together in that unified classroom suite.

Is Schoology the learning platform in a unified classroom? Yes, Schoology is the learning platform in a unified classroom. It is a well respected, one of the bigger, better learning management systems. I think it was launched probably around 10 years ago, right? 2009.

Yeah, 10 years ago. Marcy, this is I think you’re one of the first platforms to integrate HRIS along with the student information. So human resource information. Is that an important part of the unified classroom?

It is in the respect that I think that one of the, you know, you have the teaching and learning loop of how you want instruction to happen and the feedback loop to happen with students. I think there’s a feedback loop there also with teachers and understanding where they may need some additional professional development.

And so you see that crossover into talent management with student data to understand areas that they may need additional professional development to, you know, focus on a particular subject matter that they haven’t done instruction on or classroom management. There’s, you know, a number of things. So that’s where we see the bridge across student learning and then tightly wound with

talent management and professional development on the other side. That’s great. I can’t think of another example where there’s really good link between a teacher learning system and a student learning system. I imagine there’s a number of benefits there.

Yeah, I mean, it’s really actually very compelling when you show like, let’s say a learning gap on a particular standard or a mastery and to be able to, you know, directly click in and get professional development that’s directly associated. Again, back to that early discussion we had about contextual professional development. That’s what teachers are hungry for.

It doesn’t only be all like two days in the summertime, it needs to be contextualized so that they can be better teachers. Does it work? I was just thinking of micro credentials and talking about that today. So credentialing gives teachers some options in terms of what they learn, how they learn,

how they demonstrate. Is there some of that functionality in the platform? Yeah, so we have a very enterprise level professional learning module that has all those type of features that are designed to, you know, meet teachers where they want to be and credential in a way that is appropriate, you know, whether it’s classroom learning,

of course not right now, or online learning, group learning, those types of things. You probably have seen this time, it’s about $18 billion which gets spent on teacher professional development in the area. Right, and most of it’s lazy. Yeah, and most of the time it’s actually a very peanut butter approach.

And what we’ve heard from our teachers is actually, it actually does a lot of overhead on them to actually sometimes go through it where they don’t find these things to be useful. And yet, you know, we struggle with some of the effectiveness in the classroom as well. So how do we make it a lot more contextual and pinpointed? Right.

Well, as you said, there is not another system which has brought the student side and the talent side together. So we really saw that as a key gap. What we heard from our customers is that how we bring these two pieces together. So that’s in very unique aspects, not just classroom, but even the talent, because ultimately

teachers are in the front line of effective learning and education. And unless we can make sure that we have the right tools, the right training, and we can make them more productive, you can’t improve classroom effectiveness. Yes, do you have a budget management module in the unified system as well? Yes, we do have a back office system as well, including the entire finance and HR and budget

and fund management. The key goal there is that tying these pieces together with the student system, kind of the fore leg of the student rights, the student system, the ERP and the back office systems, but the classroom and the talent system. And we also include, we’re going to talk about the parent and the outreach and the community

outreach as well. So there’s a lot of focus on that too. All that is what we derive, what we call the 5E’s of effectiveness of driving better education outcomes. We do need that part because where does the dollar spend is worthwhile?

Is it to better opening additional classroom, additional curriculum, additional investments for the student? It helps you really understand all the different data aspects together. Marcy, the good news badly is in the learning platform space in the last 10 years, there’s a lot of free stuff out there.

Both Google and Microsoft offered a really lightweight platform, not quite an LMS. But it integrates with a lot of productivity tools and that makes it a challenge for somebody like you, leading a product team, trying to do a premium product that’s fully integrated. But isn’t that part of the challenge for your team of competing with free stuff? Yeah, I mean, I think some of the free tools that you’ll find on the market are really

more document management than they are learning management. And so, part of what we want to educate our customers on and districts on is that there is a difference between an enterprise LMS versus some of these other lightweight or document management type of tools. Some of the key things that really are, I think, going to be accelerated by the online

learning and having to move to remote learning very quickly around mastery and those types of things. It starts hitting on some of the challenges that you have with a document management productivity tool model versus something that ties everything to learning objectives. It ties everything to a consistent standard base, like a consistent collaboration tool

where you’re not just talking to a student or just talking to another teacher, but you have that continuous loop between teacher, student, and parent. So those collaboration tools, that learning objective, those are some of the key things that some of the, I guess, free tools don’t really bridge to that. And that’s really what you need to really understand what’s happening to your kids

while they’re at home. Hey, we’ve said recently that we think every school should adopt if they don’t have a learning management system that they should adopt on in the next 60 days. I think they’re teachers on use and be ready to operate a high-quality blended program at school and a remote program out of school and operate those in sync.

I imagine you guys would agree with that comment. Yeah, no, I would agree. Go ahead, Hardy. You know, I think maybe a good point for us to kind of share with you some of the things we’re doing.

In short, I think, as Marcy was saying, one of the things that we really are seeing, it’s very important to have a structure to the learning, even if you’re doing a full remote learning or if you’re doing a blended learning, which might be the reality for some time, but something which is really beneficial even in the long run. It’s a really basic asset for the districts to do that.

That structure in learning is very important, which can naturally happen in a classroom, but there is also benefit of that to support additional through an online tool as well. What we’ve seen is that, especially in the last 10 weeks as district had to do remote learning, where districts did not have the right tools, where the students had to go to Zoom meetings or teams or go to a classroom, then they had to go look at another content

online. They had to go do study groups or stuff in a whole separate tool. It was very hard for teachers to see, especially when it comes to middle school and elementary school level, to really see how the kids really engaged and having that holistic view. Even for their parents to step in and help out, because parents were equally confused

on where is all the structure, what is the curriculum, where are we teaching? Enterprise, as you were absolutely right on, I think it’s very important. It’s not a replacement for the productivity tools like Google Teams or Zoom, but it sits as a structure, as a one-stop shop that allows you to consistently provide the entire learning experience.

You can keep the kids engaged, even whether it’s in a blended learning format. We’re seeing time and time. LALA Unified is a great example of that. As a great job by the district, as it rolled in 100,000 new devices over during the time where they had to, with the full moving to a remote learning, the first thing students,

when they log into devices, they log into Schoolergy and then being able to really get a navigate and effectively be able to engage. I think you’re right on that, and that’s what we’ve been recommending. Seeing actually a lot of districts, we’re taking that very seriously. Marcia, you’ve been studying some feedback from teachers.

Maybe you could tell me what you’ve been learning, listening to teachers and school leaders, some of the key messages and trends that you’re seeing. Yeah. Some of the things that is definitely talking to customers, but then also just looking at trends that we see behavior changes in our own platforms, just good product management

work, is we’re definitely, as state assessments were waived, we’re seeing this huge increase in formative. I think that that’s a really exciting thing because it accelerates some of the innovation that was happening on assessment earlier into a new place. Lots of work around rubrics and more performance-based type of work, which is exciting again, moving

away from more traditional assessment means and into more innovative ones and accelerating that. That’s a big takeaway. I think some other interesting things is things that you would expect to have gaps are getting wider.

There’s been plenty of press about access and those types of divides between rural and more urban or micro-polleton type of space. We’re seeing that also there’s some light there that people are able to make that shift over to distance learning from blended learning 100%. The usage is huge.

It’s not just double or those types of metrics. People have really created an engagement that’s, like I said, I feel like it’s a hope and that the learning will continue once we get past some of the initial access points that the districts are suffering from right now. What’s your take on what will be different next year?

You think you’ll see some new use cases? Yeah, I think, Marcy, feel free to jump on this. One of the things, Tom, what we’re seeing definitely is that there’s a better understanding of first to understand where the gaps are getting created because of the engagement. While Marcy talked about there’s some positives about formative, there’s some positives even

about gender, we actually saw that we’re in a very unique position because we get to see almost 9 million students learning distance learning on our platform day in and day out. We were in a unique position to see over the last few weeks how that learning was happening. There were some actually benefits of gender actually where female students were actually a lot more engaged because they loved the structure in some shape or form.

Even as Marcy mentioned, in the micro part, there was 8,000% increase in the usage. We had 1 trillion learning engagements which actually happened in our environment in just over the 7 weeks period after the disruption when the shutdown happened. Where we are seeing still, there are still big, even though the learning is happening, there are still definitely areas where the gap is increasing both from the engagement

and adoption level but also from the achievement level. One of the benefits we have again is we are not just a learning management platform, we have the full assessment and analytic platform and a special education platform so we can even look at how our different aspects of where the gaps exist and be able to see the natural with summer slide versus what the COVID slide is where how is now COVID actually

creating that longer. I see that in my own home. I think any parent probably, any teacher understands that some of this disruption is definitely creating not just the ketmic level but even social emotional aspect that need to be worked on.

So working a lot of districts is actually giving them that view which is more holistic whole child view and we are actually seeing the trends that more than the summative assessments, actually the districts are realizing that whole child view is even much more important. Understanding engagement, understanding social emotional along with the grades and achievement, looking at the more holistic view is actually what there is a growing recognition and that’s

the trend and then coming up with the intervention plans and making sure there are more personalized learning parts because every child is probably going to be at different levels and that’s definitely the key trend we are saying. Marcy anything you want to add to that? No, I mean I think on a lot of it, I think that because so much more online learning

is happening now that just to hook on to what Hardeep is saying about personalized learning, like I think having all those data points in that sort of continuous flow of instruction will enable that to really start taking hold whereas previously maybe it was in a few different spots. I think that like I’m an optimist, I think that that brings opportunity for students

and for educators. Marcy has the last two months changed your product roadmap or are there things that you’ve tried to bring forward in your product roadmap? Yeah, I mean I think that we have always had a unification integration strategy and we’re bringing a lot of those things faster forward to improve that experience and again tie more

to those data points together. We have done a lot of work around our Unified Insights platform which we just launched that again we brought a lot of things forward about 12 to 18 months that we thought were incredibly relevant and valuable to our customers to really understand what, again back to that question of like I’m not in front of 25 kids now and so I don’t really know what’s happening

with them unless I understand it, right? Marcy, does the Insights platform include some formative assessments or is it a data integration platform? What is it? It’s a data analytics platform where you can understand what’s happening across all kinds

of dimensions with online learning. That’s great. Hardip Gulani and Marcy Daniel, it’s been great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for the update. It sounds like you guys have been busy.

Well, Skrull has been online for the last two months. We definitely have seen 400% increase in usage of the tools so that definitely has kept us busy but at the same time I think it’s a great privilege as a 2400% representing 2400 employees of our school who are passionate about K-12 education. We could not be prouder of the work our team has done and how we have been able to support

these districts during this time. To your point, I think what we do see is that going into the fall, going into the next school year, there’s growing recognition of understanding that these tools can truly help them during this planning process but these are also very good strategic investments for long term. We are really doing our part to offer districts not just solutions but best practices, professional

development, things which will help us really support them as they continue to make sure that learning is happening not just in the classroom but also in the home. You’re well positioned to deliver value to schools. We’re glad you’re doing the work you’re doing. Thank you.

Thank you for having us on the show. A big thanks to Hardip and Marcy for joining us on this week’s episode. To learn more about PowerSchool, check out their website at www.powerschool.com. Also listeners, before we go, I wanted to make sure you know about our Getting Through series.

We know many school and district leaders face a challenging few weeks ahead as you get ready to reopen your schools in order to serve students while also keeping them safe during a global pandemic. If you’re looking for tips, strategies, and lessons learned as you plan for the school year ahead, check out GettingSmart.com slash Getting Through.

You’ll find a well-curated resource set to help guide you as you face the challenge of reopening schools. All right, that’s it for today, listeners. Thanks for tuning in. For the Getting Smart podcast, this is Jessica, signing off.