Streamlining Product Development with a Solutions Partner Network

In this episode of Westchester Words, Kevin J. Gray, President and Chief Content Officer of Westchester Education Services has a conversation with Gina Faulk of EdGate, and Johanna Wetmore from Evotext about how working with a vendor partner network that provides complementary product development solutions can offer education publishers and ed tech firms the ability to develop their products and bring them to market in a more streamlined manner.

Transcript

[00:08] Nicole Tomassi: Welcome to Westchester Words education, Ed. Tech and Publishing. In this episode, which begins the third season of Westchester Words, Kevin J. Gray, president and Chief content officer for Westchester Education Services, is in conversation with Gina Faulk of EdGate and Johanna Wetmore of EvoText. Kevin, Gina and Johanna will also be presenting a more in-depth webinar about their solutions and how they can work for curriculum companies in January, shortly before the Future of Education Technology Conference taking place in New Orleans, January 23 to 25. To register for the webinar, please visit our website, WestchesterEducationservices.com. We hope you can join us then.

[00:50] Kevin Gray: Welcome to Westchester Words. Today we are talking about partnership and how Westchester works together with various companies in the K Twelve ecosystem to create complex solutions. This is a follow-up of our blog post and a lead into a webinar that we'll be hosting in January. I have with me today Gina Faulk of EdGate and Johanna Wetmore of EvoText. They're going to talk a bit about the standards and the platforms that Westchester can partner with to develop complex digital solutions. Gina, since so many things in education start with standards, let's start with you. Could you give us an overview of who EdGate is, what you do and how you work with companies within this ecosystem?

[01:38] Gina Faulk: Sure. Thank you Kevin, for the introduction. I am the General Manager of EdGate and we have been around since 1997, so a long time in this business. We work with tech, tech companies, traditional publishers who might produce textbooks along with supplemental materials that are online, and we even work with school districts, so a little bit of everything print and online. We are focused on anyone who is creating K through 12 educational content. We have at the moment about 150 active clients. And we feel like sometimes we work with pretty much everyone in the industry that's creating educational K through twelve content. The core of what we do is alignment services. So we have a team of former educators and those are our subject matter experts. They are aligning content to standards. We use a taxonomy. So when they're aligning their content, they're aligning the content globally, tagging with the taxonomy and from there it maps out to all of the state standards that they would like their content aligned to. Our clients have the choice of either using our subject matter experts to do their alignment for them, or some companies prefer to do their own alignment. They really know their content best and they feel comfortable using their in-house staff to do the alignment. In those cases, they can use our ExACT alignment tool and that's the same technology we are using in-house to do the alignment. They're loading up their metadata and then they're tagging their content with our taxonomy of concepts and from there it maps out, it does the alignment for them to the states, countries, territories, whatever it might be that they are going to sell into. We also map existing alignments to updated standards. So say a company has their content aligned to an older set of Texas standards, they can map them, or we can help them get their content mapped to the updated version of the TEAC standards. We can also crosswalk alignments to additional states. If a company has their content aligned to just Texas, we can crosswalk those over to the New York standard. One of the newest things that we've been working on is a tool that allows specifically assessment publishers to directly align their content to just one standard. Previously, how it worked, if you were tagging your content, it would have aligned to all of the relevant standards. But now if you're an assessment publisher, it's very important that they align to just one standard so that teachers can assess to that specific standard. So within ExACT they can align directly to one standard. Probably the most popular feature beyond the alignment itself is that our tool allows publishers to run reports and analytics to see how exactly their content aligns in each state to what standards, and they can view the gaps too. We can't do all this without having access to all the standards, so that's a big part of what we do. We have a repository of about 5 million plus academic standards and that includes the four core, as well as Art, Health and PE, World Languages, Social Emotional Learning Standards, CTE, Early Childhood and International Standards. We have a team that's always working on making sure that our standards in our repository are up to date. We are looking out at what kinds of adoptions are happening so that we're prepared for when the publishers come and need those specific standards. We also offer crosswalking capabilities so we can crosswalk standards to other states and provide those reports to publishers who need them. Standards comparison reports we can run. And then one of the most recent things we've been doing, we're very involved with IMS Global, now called One Ed Tech. We provide the case Identifiers that allow for interoperability so that if you use those One Ed Tech case Identifiers, those can be used and understood on various platforms. That's been a huge discussion in the industry that you can't be locked into one set of GUIDS or IDs. They have to be interoperable.

[05:44] Kevin Gray: Can we go in a bit and talk about how your team modifies and tracks the standards? How do you know when standards change? How are you communicating that to your customers?

[05:54] Gina Faulk: Great question. Our team is tracking the standards so that publishers don't have to so often and talk to companies out there who are trying to do it themselves. But you need a team to do it because states are constantly tweaking, the standards can quickly blow up and get really out of control. If you're trying to track all those and also do your full-time job. We use all kinds of web watchers. So when states make changes to their standards, then we go and evaluate what kinds of changes these were. Was it just someone added a space or a comma or do they make a significant change that our clients would really want to know about and it affects their alignments. 30% of standards are changed every year. States are always going in specifically during the summer. They're making their changes, so we're very busy making sure that we're capturing all those changes. The other thing that we see publishers doing too is states are putting a lot of their documents still in PDFs. And that's a big part of the problem is that you've got to pull all that stuff out of PDF or Excel or Word and organize it and make it so it's machine readable. That's another kind of really annoying thing that's happening that we can help with. You don't want to have to mess with that, so we're making it easier for the publishers to avoid that problem altogether.

[07:06] Kevin Gray: In essence, what you've created is a machine readable database that takes all of that translation out of the process and you've added a level of consistency so that you can understand how to interpret a set of standards and how they relate to other sets of standards in terms of the hierarchy within the standards. Is that right?

[07:26] Gina Faulk: Exactly. You're going to see the top-level standard as well as the child standards, and it's all going to be a very organized CSV file that we can also provide via API.

[07:35] Kevin Gray: Do you also track the breakout standards?

[07:38] Gina Faulk: We do, which is also very important in Texas specifically with a big Texas science adoption coming up, but we're hearing more and more about that.

[07:49] Kevin Gray: Yeah, I expect your standards team will be very busy with those Texas standards. Thank you, Gina. And what I'd like to do is turn this now to Johanna. So Johanna, if you want to talk to us a bit about EvoText and specifically Content2Classroom Platform, I would love to know a bit more about how you see that working within this ecosystem.

[08:09] Johanna Wetmore: Absolutely. And it is a really amazing set of partnership opportunities. We consider Content2Classroom to be the platform where the work, the skills, the technology, the points of integration of a lot of the pieces of the Edtech ecosystem come together and meet and work. Content2Classroom is a publisher suite and a classroom suite rolled into one. So you've got two sides that you're serving. The idea there is to be an end to end solution that allows for plug and play of a lot of different elements within a text space so that you can get the best of what you need to serve your ultimate customers. Our customers are the educational publishers who have built out award winning products that maybe have never gone beyond print or maybe they've got a very small footprint in the digital side. Folks who have been in Digital for quite a while and are looking to expand and create a much more scaled version. Folks who are looking for something that's a little bit more standards rich and standards based in terms of how they proceed next with their technology platform. So we've worked with publishers of all sizes, all subjects, and one of the key things that they all have in common is a need to be in the K Twelve Ed tech ecosystem to have the integration points already at their fingertips. For SIS LMS SSO to have the connections with the standards providers such as EdGate, who can provide the base standards from which they're going to then build out their curriculum, to have the connections with various technology tools like different calculators. But the main thing that they're coming to the table for is the ability to work directly in our publisher platform to either build content and or pull in content. So we make no bones about the idea that content is going to come from a lot of different places, but what turns it into curriculum is the additional pieces that CDC has built from the ground up to support. So C2C is a curriculum management and delivery platform that is standards based from the start. When folks are going out there to find a publisher platform and they're looking for a content management system, what they often will not find is one that is really specifically made for the K Twelve environment. Whereas the standards are very important, curriculum mapping is incredibly important. What you're going to do with the content, in addition to creating lessons and assessments and wrapping that all together into a course, those pieces are incredibly important and specific to the educational arena in that way. C2C was built with the idea that curriculum management is the heart of the Edtech content creation process. Curriculum creation. And you can't have that without having a very well powered curriculum mapping tool that will help you to map out, as an editor, what standards are going to get covered, where and how those standards are going to get. Covered, how many times they're going to be covered, and then to allow for the content to be built within the system or to be pulled into the system, or both, depending on where the content is coming from. But being able to marry it up into one source within the course files within C2C allows them to pull in videos, audio, multimedia of any kind they wish, create interactive lessons. We have over 25 different tech enhanced item types, connect up with other providers that they're using to create some of their content and allow that to actually be sprinkled within. The idea here is, is that everything gets married up inside of the course creation tool set in C2C, from the standards to the content that's being developed and then gets published out. You can manage your the districts and schools that you're working with inside of C2C you can manage their product licenses, you can manage the creation of the content, various versioning of the content. Pretty much every step of that process can be managed within the publisher suite of the Content2Classroom interface. And then publishing customers can choose to create a configurable satellite on the other side of the fence that will serve their customers. So what we have in Content2Classroom is a configurable end user experience that allows for it's already connected up with various LMS and SSO opportunities and methods that need to be accommodated and it also has the ability to be branded and for the various tool sets to be considered for further customization can be very much a plug and play. There's a teacher interface, student interface, district administrator, school administrator. There's multilevels of reporting. Every single level, every user type has a different level of reporting. Standards based reporting is key to the system. Meaning if you do the curriculum mapping work in the publisher side, map up your content to the standards, then out of the box you will have performance, usage and progress reporting against those standards, including multiple filters and different ways to export the content and at various levels down to the student, the class, the school, the district. There's also course reporting which allows for reporting against specific content objects. So it's not just the standards, but you can also sort of flip it and look at the course materials as well. Classroom management, course management, assignment management, roster management, all of that is included within. So the idea here is really just focus on what you're going to do with your content to map it to the standards, how you're going to transform it, if it needs to be transformed to be more interactive and how are you going to leverage what is game changing in our system, which is a deep set of analytics that will allow for you to not only map up against what standards to content, but also how end users, how students are actually and teachers are actually using the content. What buttons are they clicking on? Are they actually using the tools inside? What's their time on task? What resources do they have at their disposal and how are they using them? How much time are they spending per screen, how much time do they spend getting incorrect answers versus correct answers? How those are aligned and how the tracking mechanisms are in place within our system allows for some very interesting conclusions and data sets to be pulled together by not only the publisher but also by the district to see what levels of engagement they're getting. So we're talking about something where you as a publisher can be gleaning and learning quite a bit about the content that you're writing in terms of its efficacy. You can be learning quite a bit about how your content is being used by your customers when it's being used, how it's being used to what success level it's being used, that sort of wrapped inside of one interface.

[15:15] Kevin Gray: Excellent. I had a few questions for you, but I think you answered most of them. So I'm going to end with this. We've talked about this within the ecosystem. We've talked about how we partner you highlight what a case study might look like, where a customer might come to you or to Westchester or to EdGate and use our three solutions together. Feel free to kind of offer up how you see that case study looking.

[15:39] Johanna Wetmore: I can tell you in a couple of cases where it's actually worked exactly this way. There was an upcoming adoption in one of the major states, and that customer needed to get their materials ready. The list of technology requirements is not insignificant when it comes to meeting adoption level technology requirements, accessibility requirements, security requirements, the whole nine yards we're talking about. But because C2C is built with that in mind, that level of security, that level of technology and accessibility in mind, it's already sort of taken care of. It eliminates one of those big hurdles that a niche publisher, medium sized publisher, may be looking at as a barrier to getting into that adoption. What they would do is come to us and say, great, we love your end solution. We know it'll work in the district because it's already in the districts for which we wish to get adopted. But now we have a secondary problem, say secondary very loosely. We need to get our prototypes into the system. We need to get the alignment work done within the system. What can you offer up to us? And so we'll say, great, we think you should potentially work with EdGate to get your standards into the system. We turn on the standards feed from EdGate based on per client. The starting point is, let's get that standard feed turned on for what they're going to need so they can start to build their curriculum maps and start to put their course material together. And then we're also going to have them reach out to connect them with Westchester because they've got a great prototype. They just really need to get going on the course of development so that they can make the adoption deadline. They just need hands to help them, guide them, to get all the chapters written, to get all the content created in time. And so with those two partnerships, what you have is you've got your standards in here, you've got your content creation process going strong, and then we help get you to the finish line.

[17:38] Kevin Gray: Excellent. Gina, anything you would add to that?

[17:40] Gina Faulk: As Johanna said, that's exactly what we're doing. We're feeding EvoText the standards via our API, and it is specific to each client. So one client might want one state, another client might want all states. And as far as Westchester goes, there's been a number of different scenarios that we've run into because we do the alignment or the customer does the alignment. Using the EdGate standards, they're also able to see the gaps and in some cases the publishers find many gaps and so that's when we would refer them over to Westchester and tell them that you might want to work with Westchester to help fill those gaps. The other thing we've seen and talked about was an instance where a company had done a translation and the translation needed a little bit of editorial work. So we are working together on that type of project. The possibilities are endless as far as content goes. We're either at the very beginning stage where they're just starting to review the standards and figure out how to create their content, or we're coming in at the end where they have their content all created and they're now doing the alignment. So it could go either way, and in both instances they might need a referral to a company like Westchester who can help them.

[18:52] Kevin Gray: Thank you. And you're right, the way Westchester works with both groups here is folks who are coming from a place of having a repository of content for one market, maybe one particular state or one region or one country, and are looking to move into another market using maybe the curriculum mapping tool from CTC so they can identify where those gaps are driven by the standards. From EdGate to see a way to align it to the standards. And then working with Westchester to not just do the localization to change the language, but also filling in areas where US. Standards might address something that international standards might not. I'd like to thank you both for being here. I'll look forward to meeting in person at FETC in New Orleans the 23rd to the 25 January and hope to see many of our listeners there where we can get into a little more in depth brainstorming about the way our three companies can work together.

[19:56] Nicole Tomassi: Thank you for listening to this episode of Westchester Words. If you're looking for previous episodes or want to read additional content that has been shared by some of our guests, please visit our website, Westchester Publishingservices.com and Westchester Educationservices.com for an international perspective, check out our sister podcast Westchester Words UK and International, available on the Westchester Education UK website, Westchester Education.co.uk or wherever you stream podcasts. We love hearing from our listeners and welcome your emails at westchesterwords@westchesterEdsvcs.com. Tell us what you enjoy hearing on our podcast or suggest topics that we can cover in future episodes. Speaking of future episodes, I look forward to having you join us for the next episode of Westchester Words when we'll be having another engaging conversation about a topic of interest to the education, edtech and publishing communities. Until then, stay safe, be well and stay tuned.