Podcast: Julie Young on ASU Prep Digital

We’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. Where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and I’m excited to bring you today’s episode with innovative leader Julie Young, the CEO of ASU Prep Digital and Deputy Vice President of ASU Educational Outreach.

She has been celebrated as an education disruptor for more than two decades. Before leading ASU Prep Digital, Julie was the founding CEO and president of Florida Virtual School, the world’s first statewide virtual school and one of the nation’s largest K-12 online education providers. ASU Prep Digital is a part of ASU Preparatory Academy, a network of a dozen pre-K-12 schools

sponsored by Arizona State University. ASU Prep Digital is in its third year and has grown to over 20,000 enrollments nationally and internationally. That includes 600 full-time students across the country. The school is striving to equip all students with the knowledge and training needed in

order to graduate high school and be successful in college. Arizona State University believes that a strong college going community is imperative for students, communities, and a global society. Today, we’ll learn more about ASU Prep Digital’s history, features, and how they’re serving learners worldwide.

Let’s listen in. Hey Julie Young, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here. It’s actually welcome back. We’ve had you on the podcast before.

It is great to catch up and it’s been too long. It has. I was reminiscing last night that you and I, sort of in opposite corners of the country, were both starting statewide online learning programs about 25 years ago. You had been a teacher and then a principal.

What interested you about online learning 25 years ago? I stumbled into it, if I’m being honest. I was very interested in instructional technology and as an IT coordinator and a principal had the opportunity to design a couple of pilot technology schools back in the day in Lake County and did a lot of work with IBM in that effort.

Found myself being transferred with my husband and lo and behold, was in Orange County, Florida, where they had a grant for a web school. It was literally a two-page concept paper and it was in 1996. I laughingly say that no principal in their right mind would have left their day job to take on a virtual high school in 1996 for a $200,000 break the mold grant.

But for me, it was new. It was a promotion and at the end of the day, the assistant superintendent that offered being the job basically said, we’re really thinking about the kids that aren’t interested in the pep rallies and some of the students that have been disenfranchised and some of the students where we’re just not meeting their learning needs.

Lo and behold, it was a high school. I was an elementary person. I expressed to him that the only thing I knew about high school was what I could remember about my own experience and he laughed and said, that’s exactly why we’d like to have you.

And there I was and I think what interested me a lot about the entire opportunity and experience was the fact that there was no roadmap and there were no rules. And when I met with the commissioner of education, Frank Brogan at the time, he said, Julie, use your common sense, go make this up and come back and tell us how we should do this. And the rest is a little bit of history.

That program was called Florida Virtual and both I think you and the commissioner and then the legislature got a lot right and it quickly became the biggest and best state program in the country. I mean, what do you think you got right in the early years? You know, I tell people that if I knew then what I know now, I would probably not have

been anywhere nearly as successful as we were because it’s kind of like a child who starts coloring on paper and you just give them a blank sheet of paper and they create their own designs and then the next thing you know, you’re giving them a coloring book and now they’re trying to color within the lines. And then the next thing you know, they’re afraid to color outside the lines.

So I feel like at the time I was incredibly young, I was 34, had minimal experience with a school board, let alone a legislature and literally walked into this with a license from the state to do what’s best for kids. When I say don’t follow any of the rules, it was kind of you don’t have to follow the prescriptive rules of public education.

You’re a pilot and we want you to actually pilot new ways of teaching and learning. And so we were given the opportunity to put the student at the center of every decision that we made and we used common sense around education, tried to think about everything we did as if each child was our own and looked at, you know, if we didn’t have to follow the rules that had been established, so to speak, what would we change and why would we

change? And it turned out that literally almost everything was about the adults’ schedules and you know, kind of the, I use the word herding, but of students. And so what do we, you know, we said, well, why does the school year have to begin on one day and end on another specified day?

Why can’t the school year be around? Why can’t students work at a pace that’s conducive to their learning as opposed to what’s conducive to the average learning ability of the class? Why can’t students work at a time of day where their brain functions? And if that happens to be 10 o’clock at night, OK.

You know, why does a student have to fail? What if they could just keep going until they had the opportunity to actually learn the material or if they already knew the material, why did they have to go through it again? So all of these what if factors are what we designed the program around. And as it turned out, you know, we became a year round program with what we called

rolling enrollment. A student could start or end any day of the year. A student could contact the teacher any time that they wanted by phone, eventually by text, certainly by email at the time. Students could work on the weekends.

Students could take a week off. It really was all focused on outcomes. And it was such a joyous journey because you got to think about education in its purest form. The benefit of some great early teachers on that journey with you.

It’s fun for me to think back to the early teachers that I was working with that were sort of making it up a string thing a day out of the kids. Your legislature was super supportive. That’s great to to learn about Commissioner Rogan. And then the legislature gave you some really interesting incentives

like performance funding where they only paid you and kids finished. They did. You know, it was it was interesting to watch the program kind of evolve because for the first six years we were a line item about two years in, I believe it was Governor Bush came into office and became a fast champion of the program and the

ideals behind it. And we really had the opportunity during those six years as a research and development project to take, you know, one step forward and two steps back if we needed. We were able to talk to parents about the fact that, you know, you know, we were a

pilot and they were going to be part of it. And we wanted their help in kind of the design of the program based on their feedback. And then about 2003, I believe it was the class size amendment passed in the state of Florida and everything that was a line item, I shouldn’t say everything,

but I believe almost everything, if not everything that was a line item at the time zero budgeted. So that was kind of a fork in the road for us. And we were given the opportunity to either become a seat time model or a performance based funded model.

And we were incredibly focused on changing the landscape and changing the instructional models. And therefore we elected to go the performance pay route. And interestingly enough, at a time when their, you know, performance pay was unheard of, it was a hundred percent performance pay.

And so a student that was successful, we were paid for and successful meant that they passed the course with a D or better. And then of course, if the student was not successful or they left our school or they passed away or named that reason that they disappeared from our roster before completion, we were not funded for that student.

So kind of a couple of things aligned that enabled that to be a successful model at the time. Number one, we were funded at the same level as a school district our size. And so the funding level was appropriate, which gave us the opportunity to really look at, you know, what is practical in terms of a percentage of students that

will pass and therefore you will be funded for and therefore we could create our budget around that. I think the most important thing about that, and I have, you know, no regrets about going down that pathway, even though it was so risky, no one else has adopted it in its entirety.

But it really did put us in a position where we had to think about every student and how do we as the educators look at every student? As a student who can be successful and it doesn’t matter how much time you put in, if the child is not learning, then there’s something we’re not teaching. And if the child is not interested, then somehow we’re not engaging.

And it really fundamentally changed how we, the educators looked at our work. And as we started to recruit people to join the team, we had to be very specific about how we looked at our roles and our responsibilities and the fact that if our students weren’t successful, neither were we. And that not only showed up on paper, but also in our budget.

So interesting times, but it really did drive the change and it drove how we treated the kids and how we treated the parents. And I think part of it was that funding context and the policy environment. But I think part of it was your leadership. You were really attracted to a group of people that had that entrepreneurial

student-centered spirit. And so it was a great team doing really interesting and innovative work. I get last question about Florida virtual is that my observation is that your great success was probably the way that you partnered with school districts. So they didn’t see you as a threat.

They saw you as an ally and student success. I think back to the big, really innovative programs that you created with Miami Dade and Broward, some of the biggest districts in America. And that partnership spirit, I think was another part of your success. You agree with that?

I do. And it was an interesting test of navigation in that when we were first created, some of our key supporters were not as high on public education and were really interested in us kind of demonstrating that, you know, we could, given the opportunity, we could really do something incredibly different with a

different type of funding mechanism and different results. And so in some ways, in those very early years, we were kind of set up to compete. And so what we had to do was dispel that in terms of that, you know, we’re actually here to help. And I called it, I called it co-operative and that we had, you know, the ability

to cooperate with the school districts in such a way that even though we were kind of designed to compete based on the funding model, we worked really diligently, not to compete, but to complement. And we had some great people to work with that were incredibly innovative. Superintendent Carvalho, who is obviously still there, was just, you know, kind of

eyes wide open of looking at how do I embrace this asset that is available to me and my school district and instead of, you know, push it away. And so we had just a tremendous opportunity with him in the early years to create I prep Academy with him, and which is his school. He teaches in that school still.

And it’s definitely been a model of how to do blended learning really well. And then Broward County was our first franchise back in, oh my gosh. Maybe 99, maybe 2000, which, you know, prompted the entire Florida Virtual School franchise model in the state of Florida. And that came about from the fact that we were still a line item at the time.

And therefore we didn’t have an unlimited number of students we could serve. And they had more students than we could possibly serve that they wanted us to teach. And so, you know, they came to us and said, hey, can you teach us how to do what you do and, you know, we’ll use the courses and you can monitor the performance. And we can kind of do this together.

And sure enough, we piloted it and came up with what is now known as the Florida Virtual School franchise model, where every every district can have a local franchise of Florida Virtual School, in addition to their students having access to what we always called the mothership. So again, recognizing that for some students, the local model was what was best

and for others, the Florida Virtual School proper was a better solution for them. So let’s fast forward to your new role. You’ve been at ASU for three years. So ASU Prep Digital is the digital high school that is part of what is known as ASU Prep Academy.

And ASU Prep Academy is a network of charter schools that was authorized by Arizona State University about 10 years ago, starting with the turnaround school here in Phoenix. And the network has grown to approximately 12 schools across seven campuses and the digital high school kind of underpins the work of all of the schools and really gives us an opportunity as ASU to kind of scale the educational models.

We kind of look at our goals and responsibilities from two lenses, first and foremost, to improve educational attainment at all levels for all students that we can and will serve. And then secondly, to create new models of education success. And if you look at our network, one of the things that’s really important to note is ASU did

not get into the charter business to get into the charter business. They used this opportunity and obtained this vehicle to get into the K-12 business. That really speaks to our president, President Michael Crowe’s desire and initiative to create this continuum of learning from pre-K through life. He calls that a universal learner, which means that at any given time in life, there are

reasons why a student, whether that student be in fourth grade or be 94, may have a need or a desire to come back into a learning environment to either reskill or to obtain a new interest or change careers, what have you. And so this adding this K-12 network of charter schools gave ASU the opportunity to create an environment where we could try, test, develop and then scale new models of education.

All of our schools are incredibly different and give us an ecosystem of schools of pretty much every type of diversity that we would know across the board. So ASU Prep Digital came into play to kind of take that work and then scale it literally across the globe. So you, in addition to supporting the ASU Prep academies, you offered

full and part-time learning opportunities to kids in Arizona across the country and even around the world. Maybe you could unpack those. What do you offer on a part-time basis, I guess both high school and college courses? Sure. In terms of high school, we’re a little similar to some of the other programs in that we offer a unique opportunity for students to take courses, high school courses, full-time and part-time

on a part-time basis. We can provide for a student as an individual who might be homeschooled or coming from a private school filling a gap, what have you. Or on a part-time basis, we also serve school districts where if we take Arizona as an example, there are tremendous gaps in terms of math and science and the need for highly qualified and highly talented teachers. We have an extreme teacher shortage here in the state.

As you know, we’re wrestling with that nationwide. And so we have an opportunity to work with our school districts to bring that highly qualified teacher of which we can hire from anywhere in the world directly into those classrooms digitally and then partner with that school to create a strong learning ecosystem with a learning facilitator on site and a digital teacher at a distance collaborating together for those students

that are actually there on site. So we do that. We have over 50 partnerships here in the state of Arizona and then we have several more throughout the country that are developing now with school districts. In addition to that, we are providing mentoring teaching. So for example, you have a great teacher. They just graduated or they’re a great physics teacher, but you need them to teach chemistry. They really don’t know that subject matter at this point. We can come in and

provide a proven package of content of which that we can then provide a mentor teacher. It almost looks a little bit like a student teacher model that our teachers would go through as teacher candidates at the university where we can provide as much mentor teaching as possible and then we can just back out. And then a third model is that we’re also doing, you know, direct co-teaching where we’re literally co-teaching with teachers in the classroom

or individuals in the classroom that are in need of additional support or professional development. And I think what’s most important is that all of our partner schools, we call them actually collaboratives because we really are trying to collaborate with each individual partner to design a program that’s specific to their needs as opposed to kind of coming in with, okay, here’s what you need. And so I always ask two questions. What problem are you trying to solve

or what opportunity are you trying to create for your students? And then how do we craft a program around that? It looks like you offer more than a hundred college courses. How does that work? Yeah, that’s probably the most important thing that drew me to ASU is the opportunity to be part of the university and create this continuum of learning with a mentality that, you know, why should students be boxed into these boxes, I guess, that we’ve created, you know, called K5,

6, 8, 9, 12, and then college and beyond. We’ve created these arbitrary boxes, again, in order to organize students so that it’s easier for the adults to teach them. And so, you know, our belief at ASU is that a student should have entry and option and opportunity for higher learning whenever they’re ready. And they may be 14 and they may be 24, but we’re providing that continuum of learning. So ASU Prep Digital provides the on-ramp and the access to four students

who are in high schools to go ahead and start college in high school if they so desire and are ready. And that doesn’t mean they have to leave high school, doesn’t mean they have to take all their courses as college courses. But what we’ve done is we’ve mapped high school courses, we’ve mapped all of our high school core courses to ASU college online courses. So those courses we actually call concurrent courses. They obviously count for both. And then what we’ve designed are over 200

pathways into the majors. And if you look at that on our website, what we’ve done is we’ve taken, for example, electrical engineering. So I’m 15 years old. I’m a sophomore in high school. I really think I want to be an electrical engineer. Can actually come to the website or give us a buzz. And we will help you map out your entire high school curriculum pathway so that by the time you’re a junior or senior in high school, you’re actually getting into that major so that you get an opportunity

to test drive that major while still in high school, while you still have the support of your parents, being at home, and of both your professor at ASU and a learning success coach that’s provided by ASU Prep Digital. And so we work really closely with the students and not just the students, but their parents. Our learning success coaches do to teach them how to navigate post-secondary education as a high schooler. And we’ve had tremendous success so far. World Serve will

probably have close to 700 students this year that are taking concurrent courses through ASU online and ASU. And important to point out, this is not dual enrollment. There is not an intent that a student will graduate with an associate’s degree. That’s not what we’re after. What we’re really after is students having the opportunity to test drive a major while still in high school, become a college going student with a college going mentality so that when they graduate from

high school their question is not will I go to college, but I’m already in college and therefore I will find a way to continue. How do students actually gain college credit then? So important to note, these are bona fide ASU courses. They’re ASU professors and they are the same courses that if you and I were to register tomorrow, would and could be in. So our high school students actually are, you know, they’re enrolling at ASU. Those courses are not identified

any differently on a transcript. They are identified as ASU courses and ASU credits. If a student, anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world, wants to come through ASU prep digital to, as I said, start college in high school through ASU, they simply go to our website and they can identify themselves and they will work directly with our admissions advisors to become enrolled. There are certainly some prerequisites. There are certainly conversations that take place,

but we’ve really worked closely with the university administration to kind of create this pathway into the university that’s becoming easier and easier all the time for the student to navigate. Does it give you a leg up in admissions? It does. I want to also point out that because this is ASU, it is a tier one research university, those credits will transfer anywhere. We of course would love it if all of the students that came through ASU prep digital became ASU

students for life, but if the students do desire to take those credits elsewhere, they should transfer anywhere in the world. And I think you and I both know that’s not the case with some of our other routes with advanced placement and community college credits. And so I think that’s important to note. The second thing that’s important to note is because of the president’s commitment to reduce time and cost to degree and his fundamental belief

in the ASU charter, which is that we measure ourselves not by whom we exclude, but by whom we include and how they succeed. We really look at how we can take these students in on a reduced discounted price. And so if a student anywhere in the country comes through ASU prep digital, those three credit course that they’re taking with ASU is only a $600 fee. That’s for three credits. So there’s a significant discount. It’s a little bit higher internationally, but again,

a significant discount. So somewhere in the neighborhood of about 70%. So for a student who is committed to going to college and a family that’s interested in their students getting an early start, it’s a tremendous opportunity. What’s your full-time program like? Full-time program is awesome as well. We have about 600 full-time students this year. And again, we have a unique instructional model in that we have a teacher for every student. We

also have a learning success coach for every student. That learning success coach deals with helping the students with their college preparedness, setting goals, learning how to navigate their time, time management, teenage drama and trauma as I call it. They’re there to support the student and the families the entire time that they’re with us along the journey. So ideally, a student who would come to us for the full-time program as a ninth grader would have the same

success coach through their entire career with us. The teacher is the teacher that handles all of the academic needs for the students, creates opportunities for live lessons every week, dialogues with the parents on academic needs and supports all of those instructional needs of the student. And so they work as a team and that has proven to produce incredible results for our students. We have a very low attrition rate after our students go through new student

orientation and they understand what the program is all about. We’re experiencing less than a five percent attrition rate, which is fairly unheard of in our industry. We have students from all over the country, but our local students that are in Arizona, we have probably a couple times a month where we have on-campus opportunities for them to come together. Those are certainly offered to students anywhere in our full-time program and we’re starting to offer some of

those opportunities to our part-time students as well in our school districts, trying to really look at how do you build community differently in an online program. And we have student clubs, we have a student council, our students are planning a prom, which is going to be a first for me and very interesting. And so we’re really trying to create a very strong community of learning for those students. So it’s not an entirely solitary affair if you’re a full-time online student?

Not at all. Students are required to work with each other. We’re designing our courses so that students have to push away from the computer for a certain percentage of those courses, depending on which course it is. There’s a very conscious effort in terms of how do we teach students how to communicate with adults, how do we teach students how to communicate with other students, how do they work on projects at a distance. You know, it’s kind of fascinating

as everybody thinks that, well, how can you do project-based learning or expect kids to work with other kids in an online environment? Whereas you and I both work remotely, at least half of the time. I live in Florida, I work in Arizona. You live in Seattle and spend some time in Arizona. So we do almost all of our work with our colleagues remotely in some form or fashion. If we’re not teaching our kids how to do this in high school and in college, we’re not preparing them

for the careers that they will be joining. So we really need to look at teaching kids how to collaborate from a distance through these technological vehicles as a life skill, certainly a skill that prepares them for college. I think the same way about students learning how to learn in an online course. When they leave high school, it is highly likely that when they enter college, they will be slotted into some online course offerings that they will not have an opportunity to take face to face.

So they need to understand it’s a different learning experience, just like it’s a different teaching experience. So we take that very, take that responsibility on. Talk a little bit about your course roadmap, both the courses that you’re developing and the course was developed on campus that you have an opportunity to offer. Sure. So one of the very cool things about being part of Arizona State University is having the

availability of the breadth of assets that the university has to bring to bear as we look at how we design and develop these programs for high schoolers. I think we like to say that the real innovation is the integration with ASU as we are growing and defining our program. So we have the opportunity to look at all of the assets and kind of mind the university for which assets would be appropriate for our high school students. And then we work with the colleges and the designers

to sometimes, you know, to tweak those assets to bring them into our high school portfolio. So our goal as, you know, I’ve been at this now, as you said, for, I don’t know, 24, 25 years. And as we’re designing new high school courses, our goal has been to kind of turn that design on its head and truly create a next generation learning tool that not only changes the learning environment for the student, but changes the teaching environment for the teacher. So that

teaching becomes fun again, learning becomes fun again, and that both the learner and the teacher are highly engaged in the work that they’re doing. So we are looking to develop a superior product that really expands the reach and our ability to serve and educate a broader range of students, regardless of their current proficiency, through creating truly adaptive learning tools. You know, that word adaptive gets thrown around as much as that word personalization gets thrown around.

But in essence, we are creating products and tools that learn our learners and give each student a personalized pathway to success. And so if we think about reaching students from as low as sixth grade proficiency through university mastery, that’s how we’re attempting to align our courses through development. It’s exciting. We have a prototype, a couple of prototypes we’ve just launched. One is called BioBeyond, which was created here at ASU by the Center for Space

Exploration by a professor by the name of Ariel Anbar and a Gates grant. It’s an incredible biology experience for non science seeking majors. And so we took that course and work with them to tweak the design of that course and make it appropriate for high school students, reduce some of the lexile levels, etc. added in and chunked the content a bit so that it met more of a high school format. We launched that in August and we’re having incredibly great results

from both our collaborative partners as well as our full time students in our network. We also launched a new chemistry course, which is all designed around case studies, real case studies. So for example, the kids, you know, the first module is around a person who has cancer and the students are actually learning the chemistry components around the diagnosis and the treatment for cancer, again, recognizing almost every person in the world today has had somebody

touch their lives that has had cancer. So again, highly relevant. So our next step in this roadmap and this design is to work with the university and the colleges to create concurrent courses that are both high school and college where you can turn components on and off. So if I’m a student and I just want the high school component, I can turn the college components off. If I want both, I can turn it all on. I just want the college credit because I don’t need the high school credit.

We can turn the high school off too. So we’re pretty excited about that. We’re currently seeking philanthropic funds to support some of that development and as well as the support from the university. That’s really cool. We will add a link in our show notes to some of the work that your colleagues at plus at ASU have done around adaptive learning. They’ve really made a lot of progress at adding adaptive learning across the core curriculum at ASU. So

it’s great that you’re tapping into that. I guess as we wrap up here, I’m just curious if we think more broadly about ways that innovative programs like yours are helping to inform or transform higher ed. Are you encouraged by the way that high school innovators like you are or are we making progress in higher ed? I think slowly but surely. We definitely feel like we are making progress here at ASU just in terms of thinking about kind of the cultural mentality

three years ago as opposed to where it is today in regards to can high school students do this. Being able to actually demonstrate that many can, seeing is believing. I think that one of the things that I realized a long time ago at Florida Virtual School was I started getting phone calls from universities that were receiving students that we had had where students were unhappy or dissatisfied with their online experience at the university level.

So I started to be invited to come speak to different groups of university educators about what they should expect from students who have gone through the programs through the Florida Virtual School program. And I think to some degree that the universities that I did work with really worked to listen and to tweak their programs recognizing that you can’t just give a student an online syllabus and mail them a book and expect them to be an engaged learner, especially if they

are a young learner, a freshman or a sophomore in college. I would like to see the impact be stronger faster. But again, I think that we are seeing progress. It has, I think the real progress is going to take place with the students pushing the envelope that are coming into our universities and expecting a certain level of learning when it comes to engagement. And I think we’re also seeing that just like a homeschool student and family and the younger years started to piece

together their education experience for their child, we’re seeing that at the university level as well where the students will take so many courses on campus, so many courses online, so many courses with this institution, that institution, they start piecing their learning together based on their needs and the relevance for the programs. I think we’re also seeing students choose credentialing pathways as opposed to full-blown college degree pathways. And so we as

universities are having to learn that we have to tap in and buy into that and provide those opportunities for students. We’re seeing students take gap years and travel around the world, so they have just a broad knowledge of relevance. So as they come into their learning experience at the university level, they have such different expectations because they have such broader experiences. So I think slowly but surely we’re going to start to see that impact.

So after 24 years of teaching and leading online, are you optimistic about the future of online learning? You know I am because it’s a fundamental need and so you know I think we’ve seen over the last 10 years a lot of turmoil in the virtual high school market and anyone who has followed has you know that cannot escape them. And so I think that has produced skepticism in some in some realms. At the same time it continues to grow because there is a need for it. I also

think we’ve seen some consolidation in the market which is a good thing. We have seen advancement in terms of students having more options and therefore they can take their business elsewhere. But if we think about the way that our world works today and what a learner desires in terms of how they not only piece their education together but also as they look at their careers, there’s such a need for this type of learning. I don’t see it going away. I only see it growing.

And the bigger question is how do we ensure that it grows with quality and efficacy so that the learner really gets the experience that you know they desire and that they deserve? I’m optimistic too but it’s because people like you are working on building the future of learning. So Julie Young, it’s been a treat to have you on the podcast again. Thanks for joining us. Tom, thank you. It’s always a pleasure. A big thanks to Julie for taking time to chat with us

for today’s episode. We appreciate her leadership in quality online learning and real student-centered engaging options. And thank you listeners for tuning in today. If you haven’t already, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss out on any future episodes. And while you’re there, be sure to leave us a rating. That’s all we have for you today for the Getting Smart podcast. This is Jessica signing off.