How Outschool Uses AI in Live Online Classes | CEO Brian Co

In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Nate McClennen talks with Brian Co, CEO of Outschool, about how families and students can build a learning path from live, small-group classes taught by educators around the world. Brian shares what he’s learning in his first weeks as CEO, how Outschool uses AI to give parents class summaries and highlight clips, and why he believes the human educator will always take the center at Outschool. It’s a conversation about what becomes possible when learners can choose the teachers and topics that light them up.

Transcript

Introduction: Learning Ecosystems and Unbundled Learning

Nate McClennen: Welcome, everybody. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you’re listening from. You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Nate McClennen, your host for today. Thank you all for joining us.

We believe that people learn everywhere, anywhere and any time, and that’s why, as part of our Wayfinder work at Getting Smart, for learning transformation, we call out the idea of learning ecosystems as a critical element. Learning ecosystems represent the variety of educational options available to learners outside of the school walls, and the means to access them. This includes both virtual and physical spaces. We think this is a critical element as we think about the future of education and how to map to that.

Some of the options that students participate in will count for credit within the child’s school, or for other industry credit in the public sector, but often they’re supplemental and not counted, so the student learns, but there’s no credit assigned. As part of our work on credentialing, we think these experiences within this expanded learning ecosystem should count. Ultimately, we wonder if, while traditional school will remain an important part of many students’ lives, the ability to unbundle learning and then rebundle learning experiences to create personalized and meaningful pathways will be an opportunity that’s available to all students in the future. This is the idea of unbundling from a traditional system and repackaging in a way that makes sense for students, for their context, for their interests, and so on. Through creative scheduling and staffing and transportation and technology and partnerships and networks, more students should ultimately have more access to better learning experiences.

These opportunities within learning ecosystems broadly fall into the category of OST, out-of-school time. And we know that OST does a couple of different things. It supports working parents by providing extended opportunities for young people outside of school hours. That’s one thing. Extensive research supports that participating in out-of-school-time activities positively impacts academic achievement, future employment and incomes, and overall health and wellbeing. And then finally, and in some ways equally important, the opportunities available for students in a traditional system can be robust if the system is large, but are often constrained by what those systems can offer.

So the broader the expanded learning ecosystem is, the more opportunities young people have to learn what and how they would like to learn. We know that expanded learning ecosystems build more and better opportunities, which then positively impact all sorts of students.

Meet Brian Co, the New CEO of Outschool

Nate McClennen: So today we’re going to dive into an opportunity that students have, one of many that exist outside of school, called Outschool. Outschool is an online learning platform. It connects families with live small-group classes taught by educators from all around the world. Outschool so far has matched over a million and a half families with more than 140,000 live teacher-led classes, ranging from core academic subjects to special interest topics. Tom first talked with Outschool in a conversation with founder Amir Nathoo. In 2023, I unpacked Outschool.org, the nonprofit arm of Outschool, with Morgan Camu and Justin Dent. And today we are catching up with Brian Co, the newly appointed CEO of Outschool. Welcome, Brian. Excited to have you here.

Brian Co: Yeah. Thank you, Nate. It’s great to be here.

Nate McClennen: And I know that you are literally less than a month on the job, 20, 21 days or so, is that right?

Brian Co: That’s right, just a few weeks in.

Nate McClennen: All right. So some of these questions are going to be from an outsider’s perspective, and some of these questions we’ll have to explore together. I know that you bring nearly two decades of experience as a mission-driven education and tech leader dedicated to helping students access meaningful learning experiences and pathways, and I know prior to Outschool, you were at PowerSchool, Strada Education Foundation, and InsideTrack, among other places as well. So excited to have you here today.

Brian’s Best Learning Experience

Nate McClennen: I’m going to ask you the question that I ask every single one of our podcast guests: thinking back to your K-12 experience, what was the best learning experience that you had? That could be in school or out of school. And by best, I mean, how were you most engaged? You felt like you belonged. There were strong learner outcomes along the way. Talk to us about that. What was that experience that you can recall?

Brian Co: That’s a great question. For me, it was an outside-the-classroom experience. I grew up in Santa Clara in the ’70s, back when there were more fruit orchards than there were silicon companies. My parents owned a computer store, and they brought these computers home when I was maybe in fourth or fifth grade, and I learned to program computers, and that’s really an interest that took off for me. That got me into not just computer programming, but all of the fundamental things that were required for me to be successful in creating these programs that I wanted to create, and how to market them and do all of those things. So it really was an interest-based, interest-led learning opportunity for me that then got me more interested in even my core academic schoolwork, because I needed math, and I needed English.

I needed a lot of these other things in order to accomplish what I wanted. But I was most turned on by school and felt most excited when I could lead what I was interested in and when the pace was set by me.

Nate McClennen: Right. That idea of choice, agency, personalization, that answer comes up over and over again. It was something meaningful to the person who was answering the question, something they had a choice and a voice around, agency, and they were able to follow the path that was interesting to them.

What a New CEO Is Learning About Outschool Families

Nate McClennen: So Brian, thanks for sharing your K-12 experience, and I think that’s really going to suit you well as you start thinking about what it looks like at Outschool to lead this pretty interesting and growing organization. I know you’ve only been CEO for a month, and that always is a fire hose type experience, right? There’s a lot coming at you all at the same time. So you still probably have this outsider’s view of Outschool. What have you learned so far? What have you observed? What are you curious about as you jump into this role?

Brian Co: It’s a great question. From an outsider coming in, I was fascinated by how many different types of families use Outschool. I think one perception is that maybe this is something used by homeschoolers, and that might be the core. We see, across the board, families who supplement private school, supplement their public school, some who use it as their core homeschool, or augment their homeschool with mom or dad teaching some of the classes and then turning to Outschool for subjects that may be better taught by somebody they find, one of our educators in our network.

It’s just fascinating to me how many different types of families and different modalities we’re able to serve at Outschool. That’s been really key. And then how passionate our educators are. The breadth and the variety and the novelty of the different courses that you can choose from is really amazing. We have such a long tail of really interesting, engaging courses, everything from astrophysics for middle schoolers to Minecraft geology. It’s truly amazing.

Nate McClennen: Was part of the interview process, and if it wasn’t, that’s okay, but did you actually have to take an Outschool course, or view one, or observe one, or participate? Was there an experiential component, I guess?

Brian Co: It wasn’t a requirement, but I had actually, way back in 2018, stumbled upon Outschool. I was doing my own research on homeschooling and unschooling and worldschooling and all of the different variations that might be an alternative. I have twin boys, and at the time they must have been six years old, and I signed up for an Outschool course called How to Tie Your Shoes, because these guys were wearing Crocs and they had no interest in tying their shoes. So I signed them up for one of those courses, and then we did a how-to-code-using-Scratch-on-an-iPad course, and we did courses on that. So when I was interviewing for the role, I did go back and log in and saw, oh yeah, Outschool. We took some courses there. We had a lot of fun, and it was an amazing experience.

Nate McClennen: And did they learn to tie their shoes?

Brian Co: They did eventually, but it wasn’t until they got interested in basketball.

Nate McClennen: Oh, right. There had to be a real need. The Crocs are so convenient, right? So it sounds like, I’m always curious about the challenge that’s being solved, and it feels like, let’s just take your particular case, you had an interest in teaching your students something and doing it in a creative way.

Matching Learners With Educators Around the World

Nate McClennen: So they jumped on, and it’s like learning how to tie your shoes or Scratch, whatever the case may be. Do you find that the general demand is that people want interesting courses that aren’t offered elsewhere? And the second part of that question is, there’s a whole flip side of this coin: you’re also meeting the needs of educators out there who know something, who want to share something, but don’t have a place to do it. So is it a two-sided market that really exists at Outschool?

Brian Co: It really is. And I’m privileged to live in a community where we do have a lot of resources, and we have a lot of courses that might be available for my learners. But my dad lives in rural South Carolina, and when I go to visit him and I see, hey, they’ve got a Corning factory, but what if that kid is really interested in robotics or computer programming or something else where they may not have the resources in their community directly to provide that opportunity, be it in school or outside of school? So we are really providing a resource where we’re able to match families and learners and their interests with educators who have expertise, who are really able to deliver something that goes beyond any kind of geographic constraints or resource constraints.

Nate McClennen: Right. And it feels like, when you think about the things to learn in the universe, there’s, in some ways, an infinite number of things to learn. So if you can find that ultimate pairing between, “Hey, I want to learn something,” whatever, obscure watch repair, with someone who can then provide watch repair, given the billions of people on this planet, you’re going to find a match.

And it feels like Outschool’s trying to meet that need right there: there are people who want to learn something, there are people who know how to teach it, and how do we partner them up and pair them up in innovative ways? Is that what you’re seeing on your side?

Brian Co: Yeah, absolutely. And these typical classes, four or five students, really do serve a particular niche for many of these educators and for the families.

Live Small-Group Classes and Charter School Partnerships

Nate McClennen: What does the experience look like? Maybe you can think about your own experience, which I know was a while ago, so I’m sure Outschool has changed and modified over time, but are they typically live lessons? Is there any prerecorded? Is it interactive with the other students in the class? Talk through what the experience looks like.

Brian Co: The majority of the courses are Zoom classes, and we use just a pretty standard Zoom interface. Those are small-group classes. Other courses or other social activities are educator facilitated, but there might be more interaction between the learners themselves. And that’s another great part of this: we do have learners with lots of different needs, some who want to be on camera, some who don’t, some who don’t want to be in an environment where they’re engaging with other learners directly, and some who do. And we’re able to facilitate all of those different needs as well.

Nate McClennen: Got it. That makes sense. I know that originally you said there’s this sense that Outschool’s really just for homeschoolers, but I do know that you partner with a lot of schools and districts. Is that a big part of the organization? And even if it’s whatever size it is, what does that look like? Is it after-school work that’s contracted by a district, or is it actually embedded in classes? What are the different opportunities in terms of the districts and schools that you partner with?

Brian Co: Most of our partnerships right now are with charter schools that allow families to select courses on Outschool as part of the delivery of the charter school experience. So we don’t currently have it embedded in public schools, for the most part.

Credit, Credentials and Course Outcomes

Nate McClennen: Oh, and just acknowledging, obviously, that charter schools are public schools, right? They are, they just have more flexibility. Do you have a sense if any of them are offering credit for it? I’m always curious about this credit question. If someone’s tutoring in ELA or math and the student shows proficiency in something, can it count toward an ELA or math class, or can it count toward a credit or whatever is being taught?

Brian Co: Yeah, that’s a good question. I haven’t really dug into our charter school partnerships to see exactly what they’re doing with their transcript or acknowledgement of those courses taken. So I’m not really sure.

Nate McClennen: Do you have an opinion on it, being in education? Is that something that would be valuable? Here’s a scenario I’d play out: what if someone had a course called Outschool in their middle school, and a student could go in and choose 10 or 20 different Outschool experiences over the course of a semester or year, and that counted for something, an elective credit or something like that? Is that appealing? Is that something that makes sense for you, or would you rather see it as supplemental, outside of the school day?

Brian Co: No, I absolutely think that it is appealing, and it is something that we should and we’re looking to expand into. My feeling is that we need to meet families and learners where they are. And for some families, they are really going to want to make sure that they are taking accredited courses and that they’re getting full credit for that. Maybe they have a need for that to be NCAA recognized, to make sure that different transcripts are recorded. And we seek to expand the number of families that we can serve through our double-sided marketplace and our ability to bring on more courses that meet the needs of those families.

So I see a scenario where absolutely, you should be able to come to Outschool and say, “For us, we want to take an AP course, and we want it to have credit, and we want it to be recognized,” and we should be able to provide that.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. That would be interesting if it was an AP physics teacher who was somewhere else in the world and then could support a small group of students in a way that was convenient and relevant for them. Do you have a sense, from the courses or what you’ve learned so far, when you finish an Outschool experience, does the student get something?

Do they have to demonstrate proficiency in something, or is it the experience itself that’s the focus of Outschool? Meaning you go and you participate for X number of weeks, and then you’re finished. Or is there a culminating something to submit to get something, a badge, a credential, a certificate?

Brian Co: So we don’t layer any criteria onto the courses. These are developed by educators themselves, and some courses are going to acknowledge up front and let the family and learner know, these are the outcomes of this course, these are the expectations. Perhaps there’s some test or assessment that may be optional.

Some provide grades, others don’t. The great thing about Outschool is that each family may decide, “Hey, we don’t want to participate in that type of assessment or that type of grading,” and so they can find another course that is suitable for them. But each educator is able to create their course and create their outcomes, and how that works, in a way that works for them. Part of our job on the technology side and the platform side is making sure that kind of information is available to make a good decision about what that course means, that we have data around it, so everybody can search and find the right course for them. I want homework. I don’t want homework, and so on.

Nate McClennen: Right. Because there’s criteria associated with it that the educator provides, that these are the expectations for the course, which then allows students to find the perfect fit for them.

Brian Co: That’s right.

Education Savings Accounts and the Federal Education Freedom Tax Credit

Nate McClennen: All right. Let’s pivot a little bit to the funding mechanism here. You have Outschool. Outschool.org helps provide services or programs for those who need it, who can’t afford it. So you have this interesting hybrid model. You also, as we know, have massive growth of ESAs, education savings accounts, and whatever other formats they take across the country. And then, of course, in January this year, we have the emerging federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, right? The federal tax credit that’s coming down the pike.

We’ve done this on previous podcasts, we’ve unpacked this, but in short, every family or taxpayer could donate about $1,700, and then that money could go to a scholarship-granting organization, which could then provide it for something like Outschool. Are you playing into those markets a bit? Are you thinking about what this new tax credit might mean for you all? Or is it the same plan you’ve had all along with ESAs: you are available if a family has resources they can spend, and it goes from the family?

Brian Co: Yeah, we certainly are. We’re looking into it, and it was just recently released, how that is all going to work, and we’re navigating that as well. But with our ESA work in Arizona and Texas as a good example of what we’re doing there, we’re making sure that our catalog and that our courses and that our educators are prepared with whatever requirements there might be to utilize that funding. So ensuring, for example, in our catalog that we show eligibility for this course for ESA in this particular state is one of the things that we do. If there are credential requirements for certain courses, we make that visible. We’re able to capture that from the educator, really trying to ensure that the educator can build a business on Outschool without having to navigate all of the nuance and all of the complexity around what ESA compliance looks like and what future public funding compliance looks like.

That’s one of the value adds that we offer on the educator side. Certainly on the family side, each state is different. If you’re a homeschooler in Arizona, you might have each transaction individually scrutinized. So we do things to make sure that the family knows what is eligible and what isn’t. I think in some states we provide a guarantee that, hey, if we said it’s eligible and we got it wrong and you prepaid for that, then we’ll give you your money back. So that’s assured. But we’re trying to bring simplicity on both sides of that so that we can match families and educators and navigate those opportunities.

Who Uses Outschool and Expanding Access to Unbundled Learning

Nate McClennen: Going back to those families, do you have a sense of the breakdown of those that participate? So you could have homeschoolers, you could have public school or private school enrollees taking classes outside of the normal school day, nothing affiliated with the school or system. You have public charter school embeddedness, and then very limited on the public district side. Is there a dominant market? When you went through the interview process, you probably probed with some of these questions: who actually takes these courses?

Brian Co: Yeah. So right now at Outschool, the vast majority of our courses are self-paid from families, and they’re primarily, or predominantly, enrichment. So these are students in a traditional school looking to augment their education through Outschool, and homeschool families who are building and augmenting all of the other things they might be doing for their learners, as part of their homeschool, utilizing Outschool for that.

Nate McClennen: Got it. Got it. Do you have a sense that either one of those is going to grow over time, or is there a newly emerged market? I know that homeschool actually is leveling off a little bit, and I think so much of this is about definition. If you’re in a microschool, does that count as a homeschool, et cetera, so there may be a semantics question here.

But do you have a prediction of where those markets will go? Enrichment obviously is a much larger group of people, because most of the students are enrolled in a school somewhere. Is that where the growth area is, or is it really focusing on homeschoolers?

Brian Co: So right now at Outschool, our biggest area of growth is ESA-funded families. In Arizona, it’s Amazon, then Apple, then Outschool in terms of the top three vendors for spending of ESA funds. And as we see ESAs roll out to more states, and we see other public funding roll out to more states, we would hope that there’s an opportunity for more families to be able to participate in different variations of unbundled education.

I would hope that, increasingly, a bundled public school is not the only option for families. Whether they use public school for part of the day or for some of their education, they’re able to access resources and access courses like Outschool for other parts of what they need. I would hope to see more blended opportunities where you can do both. And the thing is, Nate, that for a lot of families, and especially privileged families, they’ve been doing this for years.

They can choose a great school because they move into a community where they’re going to get a great education, and then they still augment that with all of the other resources that they can for their child. So that could be sports and soccer and other activities and coaching and math tutoring and college prep and many other things. But that’s not been equally available to everybody, and every family.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, that’s a really good argument. As we know, ESAs and the federal tax credit, the Education Freedom Tax Credit, there are, to put it mildly, strong opinions on those particular programs across the sector. And I think the way you described it around access is a really interesting one. We do know that those who have the means have always bundled together diverse and interesting and engaging learning experiences for their children, and those who don’t potentially have fewer opportunities.

So if something like an ESA or a tax credit, whether moving through a school foundation, which we actually think may be an opportunity for the EFTC, or a typical ESA, can increase opportunities for all students, then we feel like, at least at Getting Smart, that’s a win, right? Because then it’s a great equalizer and people have access to the opportunities. Everyone has equal access to the opportunities. So that’s an important point, I think, as we talk about the funding model for this. What’s the relationship with Outschool.org? Is Outschool.org a subsidiary of Outschool, or is it a partner? How does that work in terms of organization?

Brian Co: Yeah, they’re a separate 501(c)(3) organization. They’re not affiliated directly with Outschool.

Nate McClennen: Gotcha. But they do support and use the platform?

Brian Co: Yes, and Outschool is a supporter of Outschool.org.

Nate McClennen: Got it. Yep. No, that makes total sense. And that’s another way for students to access through Outschool.org as well. So there’s a couple of different opportunities there, it feels like.

AI in Education and the Role of Human Educators

Nate McClennen: Let’s pivot to everyone’s favorite topic, AI. So your classes depend on humans interacting with students online. Is there a foreseeable future where AI can play, what role do you foresee AI playing at Outschool in the future, if any? Because you might say, “We don’t need it. We’re human-directed.”

Brian Co: That’s a really wonderful question. I get this question probably more than anything, both internally and from our educators and others: what does AI mean for us? At Outschool, the human educator will always take the center of what it is that we’re doing. We do see a role for AI. We use AI now. We have AI tools on our platform today. It’s interesting, because a few weeks ago, we had a panel of homeschool families who use Outschool, and many of them were outspoken about resisting AI, not wanting their child in front of a screen interacting with AI. And some of those same families said, “You know what was really great about Outschool is that at the end of a course, you give me a summary, and you give me a few clips around how my child was engaging with the class that day, and that was really wonderful.”

And that’s entirely AI-powered. We’re able to use AI as part of our digital classroom experience to pull out interesting segments of the course and share that with the parent to show evidence of progress, evidence of engagement, evidence of mastery. I think that’s a wonderful use of AI, and that is where we’re leaning in. How do we have a teacher assistant? How do we use AI in ways that help the parent and help the learner and help the educator understand where a learner might need more help, where they were falling behind in the course? That can be both live, increasingly, and through these summaries. So I think there are wonderful uses of AI. I just don’t believe that for us it means sitting through rote drilling of questions until they’ve beaten you into submission into knowing the answer.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, that’s super interesting. It reminds me of athletes who are coached at a high level or have access to film, right? AI can pull out segments where that athlete has touched the ball or shot a basket or whatever. And so at Outschool, you’re doing similar things, it sounds like. You’re providing clips in real time, or clips of their children interacting with the content, with the material, with the group, et cetera, and then providing it to the parents. Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Brian Co: Yeah, that’s right. And we’re looking to do a lot more of that on our platform.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. That’s super interesting. Okay, let me push you further out in the future, and I believe humans will also play a critical role, so I am not assuming that AI will replace them. But two things are happening right now, and I’d love your reaction to them. Number one is that agentic AI is becoming more and more sophisticated, so the ability for AI to make its own decisions, et cetera, et cetera. And number two, video is becoming more and more sophisticated. So in Claude the other day, I provided a text prompt, and it created a one-minute video for me that was pretty sophisticated in terms of what I wanted. So I only think that that is going to get bigger and bigger. You can answer carefully on this one. Do you see a place in the future where maybe a teacher would say, “Hey, this is who I am, I’m going to teach my course, but I also want to make some modifications, and I’m able to offer it at 10X the level. Can you do an AI replica of me, and then that also will be a teacher in the course, because it’ll know how to interact with the students the way I do,” et cetera, et cetera?

Or is that taboo? You’re always going to be human first and not really incorporate that on the teaching side, more the supplemental, assistant side?

Brian Co: Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting scenario. I think that if a teacher, even now on Outschool, wanted to create an asynchronous course utilizing AI, we’re a marketplace, and they would be able to do that. That’s going to resonate with some families or some learners and not others. The magic is going to be, and we hear this consistently, that families find an educator that really connects with their child, and that’s who they follow. It’s not because they magically taught them what three times three is. It’s because that educator connected with their child in a way that sparked the joy of learning, sparked the curiosity, and lit up their learner in a way that they recognized. And I have a hard time seeing AI replicating that now. Now, maybe for a kid like me that was super into learning everything, it would be just wonderful and great, but I don’t think that that’s for everybody.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Well, I think you’re speaking to the fundamental thing about great teaching: great teachers spark curiosity and wonder in young people and motivate them to do incredible things, and that relationship is everything. And I know that not every kid has a teacher that does that for them.

Almost every kid probably has at least one teacher that has done that for them, but they don’t have every teacher doing that for them. And I think as you start talking about a larger marketplace, the ability to select that in something like Outschool solves for that problem, because you can start to say, “I want teacher A, B and C, because they’re the best connection, because I have a selection of 100 to 1,000, et cetera, teachers that are out there that I can select from.”

So, okay. Yep, good answer. I don’t know the solution either. I am optimistic that humans at the center is important and AI assistance is also important, and that we’ll see how it all transpires over the next five to 10 years. A little Wild West-y, in my opinion.

Helping Families Reassemble Learning

Nate McClennen: All right. As we think about closing here, in your vision, or what you have seen so far, what’s the best role that Outschool can play in the future that might be expanded from what it does currently? And then what are the barriers that are getting in the way of that?

Brian Co: Yeah. So I think that the unbundling that Outschool has been able to provide has been incredible. If you think about what most families need, unbundling is great and having all of the selection is wonderful, but schools provide a lot of things beyond just courses. There’s a curriculum director, there’s somebody who’s coordinating, doing a scope and sequence. There are a lot of elements to this. When you decide to homeschool, that family is taking on a lot of additional work that is invisible to most families, because this is kind of what you get as part of the package. Outschool can do more to help families that do want to assemble and kind of reassemble through these unbundled courses.

We can do more to help them reassemble that. How do you actually assemble sixth grade for one learner, and fourth for another, and your seventh grade, and how do you make sure that you’re doing everything that might be required for entry into the UC system and these types of things? When you remove yourself from some of these institutions, you remove yourself from many of the systems that I worked on at PowerSchool as well, that were there to coordinate all of this. So what does the decentralized, family-sized version of that look like? Nobody’s really providing that now. We’re providing the supply. We have this two-sided marketplace, and I think we can do more on our platform to give individual families the type of tools and the type of systems that they don’t have access to once you’ve stepped outside of schools.

Post-Secondary Pathways, Meaningful Education and Key Takeaways

Nate McClennen: Yeah, that ability to unbundle and bundle, we keep coming back to that, and the decentralization of the learning ecosystem through a marketplace is sort of fascinating. I want to step broadly back now. You’ve been in education for a couple of decades in a variety of different roles. What’s the biggest challenge to be solved? So if someone at a dinner party or in an elevator said, “Oh, you’re in education,” what’s the biggest challenge to be solved? What would your immediate reaction be?

Brian Co: Yeah, for me, it’s very easy. The question is how do you help somebody make sense of education? How do you make education meaningful, so that their post-secondary pathway, what happens after K through 12, has a meaningful impact on their lives and what they hope to do? And this is why I got into it to begin with. Forty percent of Americans who attempt college don’t complete any degree or certificate after six years. I started on the college side and the higher ed side, and I kept moving to the left, going, “Oh, well, if you really want to have an impact, you’ve got to work with high school students. But if you really want to have an impact, you really have to work with middle school students.”

And I still see that as a challenge. And we’ve done very little to move the needle in 20 years, right? You know better than I do that we’ve not increased that significantly. And I think that’s a huge challenge, one that I still intend to work on at Outschool. I think there are many things that we can do to help people understand what post-secondary success looks like for you. And that’s also very individualized. It is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, and I would agree. And it’s a rapidly moving mark, right? Because post-secondary success, we talk often about thriving or flourishing, and part of that is, do you have a set of friends? Do you have your basic needs met? But part of it is having a job that makes you enough resources to live a comfortable life, and that’s a moving mark. And so being able to be flexible and being able to pivot fast, the monolithic nature of our education system writ large sometimes makes that harder to do, and I think we’re starting to see that break apart a little bit. And if the question came to me, I would say more students having access to great learning experiences, leading to the outcomes they need to find to live a successful life. And I don’t think we’re there yet. I think, as you said, we’re not there yet, and things like Outschool are an idea that, hey, maybe we’re moving the needle a little bit in that area.

So, yeah. Brian, thanks so much. Great conversation. I just want to summarize a couple of things that I heard that have come up over and over again that I think are important for our audience to consider, whether they’re working in the public system, the private system, or the decentralized system. We have folks who listen from all over. There’s this idea that there’s a growing demand for expanded learning ecosystems, and this idea of how organizations like Outschool can play a role in a decentralized marketplace where you have a lot of teachers who are eager to teach and a lot of students who are eager to learn, and how do you partner them up into the perfect pairing? It’s almost like the Amazon of education in some ways. You’re trying to find that best match.

And then the idea that it’s educator run, meaning the teachers are designing their courses, and you’re depending on the market to say whether they succeed or not. And your continued assertion that, while AI may be an assistant, humans are always going to remain at the center of Outschool. I think that’s an important premise that I appreciate and certainly our listeners will appreciate.

And then I think the last one, which is beyond Outschool and really talking about education overall, is that what we’re trying to do is find great educators who are connecting with students, those who have the best connections, the best relationships, so that the educator enjoys the conversation, the classes, and the courses, and the students learn the most and are engaged the most and are having rewarding experiences during that time. So the magic of that great partnership is really important. Brian Co, thanks. Good luck as you move on to month one and into the future. We’ll be tracking Outschool and seeing how you all evolve over time. And thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Brian Co: Thanks, Nate. It was a pleasure.

Links

• Outschool announces Brian Co as CEO
• Outschool
• Outschool Arizona ESA page
• Getting Smart, Amir Nathoo on Outschool: Learning for the Future (2021)
• Getting Smart, Morgan Camu and Justin Dent on Unbundled Learning Ecosystems and Outschool.org (2023)
• Getting Smart, Unbundled Learning publication
• Getting Smart, Learning Innovation Wayfinder
• EdChoice, federal tax credit explainer
• ABC15, Arizona ESA spending analysis