120: EdTech Journeys - Revolutionizing Education, Verified Skills, and the Future of Learning with Territorium

Holly Owens (00:02):

Hello everyone and welcome to another amazing episode of Edup Ed Tech. My name is Holly Owens

Nadia Johnson (00:10):

And my name is Nadia Johnson and we're your hosts

Holly Owens (00:14):

And we're super excited Today. We have an amazing guest with us. We have Keith Look who is the Vice President of Education Solutions at Territorium with us. Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Look (00:26):

Welcome. Hey, thank you for having me.

Holly Owens (00:28):

Well, we're really excited to get into all things Territorium , but before we do that, we want to know a little bit about you. So tell us about your journey into this EdTech space. Give us a path, what happened? Nobody's as linear. It's very much filled with different experience. So tell us all about you.

Keith Look (00:47):

Gosh, alright, this could take the whole time.

Holly Owens (00:50):

Yeah.

Keith Look (00:51):

So about a million years ago I had learned to create a patch cable crossover so I could run internet into the first library out of the computer lab in the school district of Philadelphia. Oh my goodness. On a ladder, on a rolling cart with a drill learning to take the twisted pair to connect the library so we could have internet access in the first library in Philadelphia.

Holly Owens (01:14):

I already love this story.

Keith Look (01:16):

Fast forward a million years later, the work I've gotten into, so I've been a principal and a superintendent from well, Philadelphia to Appalachia. So I've gotten to see a ton of different environments and in most cases my students in the schools I worked in didn't have the traditional transcripts and test scores to easily unlock mainstream post-secondary opportunities. Yet my kids had this most amazing set of skills and abilities that one by one I was very lucky to always be surrounded by a committed faculty and we could take kids one by one to an admissions office or to an employer and say, Hey, don't worry about the grade in algebra two. Let me tell you about student and to a student we could get students. Then there are opportunities that they needed. The problem is, is that's not very scalable. I needed a better vehicle technologically to capture skills and abilities that would better represent my learners.

(02:16):

So as examples when I was in Philadelphia, was it a high school that was rated the persistently most dangerous high school in the state of Pennsylvania, which is a stupid acknowledgement in its own right, but my kids beat MIT every year in the hybrid car competition. Things that wouldn't show up when I'm at the lowest performing high school or what was then the lowest performing high school in the state of Kentucky. My kids got their pilot's licenses before they got their driver's licenses. Again, part of the story that wouldn't show up in a GPA or in a test score that was more reflective of their own learning journey whereby we expect them to catch up by a certain age, which we've learned from the pandemic catching up is hard to do. So what drove me then technologically was there had to be a better way and I had worked in as superintendent with a district.

(03:02):

Our district was known for authentic assessment and kind of the Theodore Sizer Exhibitions of Learning and we were trying even then to find the right software to capture these student demonstrations. They were showing a various set of skills in the evidence behind it and ultimately it was the drive towards the discovery of the movement of the comprehensive learner record that got me then from the traditional K 12 education space now fully into the educational world, or excuse me, the ed tech world because I'm always been the kind of guy, if I can identify the problem, if I want to complain about it, I got to be part of the solution. You can't just be the one standing complaining. So I had to call my own bluff, move over and try and help figure out how to do it.

Holly Owens (03:45):

I really like that story. Yeah,

Nadia Johnson (03:48):

That's such a great journey.

Holly Owens (03:50):

Started with some old school trying to figure out how to get internet and then went into

Keith Look (03:56):

It was a

Holly Owens (03:57):

Underserved communities, which is wonderful and we always recognize the bad, the negative and when there's good there too. That's the thing. I don't understand that, but yeah. Yeah,

Keith Look (04:09):

It's a long journey from a 1 28 KISD online,

Holly Owens (04:13):

I'll say say.

Nadia Johnson (04:17):

So we know that the EdTech landscape is just constantly evolving. It's always changing so many different new trends and innovations within this field. So what trends or innovations within the EdTech space do you find is promising or exciting and how do you see them kind of shaping the future of education in ed tech?

Keith Look (04:43):

I think we can back map from what is currently a significant push towards skills identification and demonstration. So if you'll pardon the history lesson, we can go back to Ronald Reagan's a nation at Risk, which said, if you remember this report right, it was a polemic that he was funded in order to try and be reelected. Second time, this was after he wanted to eliminate the Department of Ed and it said if the public education system of the United States had been imposed upon us by a foreign power, it would be considered an act of war. And from that document we launched the standards movement and high stakes accountability testing and standards continued through, and then we got no child left behind and no child left behind for all of the things that you can criticize. Finally said, we're not just looking at the mean, we've got to pay attention to all the kids in the school and not just the average. And that then pushed us into what are we doing for those kids and got us into college and career readiness. Still tying back to standards and assessment.

(05:46):

The pandemic hit at a time at which CCR was starting to lose its flavor, like a piece of chewing gum. We needed something new. And we saw then what has become a significant turnover over a series of years in our teaching faculty, at least in the K 12 environment, and we can talk about this at higher ed as well because it's absolutely as applicable in those environments. And so we got a whole bunch of people in education who never went through standards training, never unpacked standards, never understood the details of it. And meanwhile, we've seen a major push towards alignment in education to workforce and workforce understands skills language. So where I think the movement is heading is about skills driven to align K 12 big push within community college. We're now talking about whether or not community college should be free for everyone in order to make sure that we can connect that concrete piece of learning for a learner who says, why am I learning this?

(06:46):

And for someone that we've also learned is yesterday's non-traditional learner in higher ed is today's traditional learner. They're more APTT to choose a non-linear path to completion. They're going in the time that they have the resources that they have and in the interest that they have to move up in chunks as opposed to going from start to finish, which is challenging this mode of delayed gratification we've always had in education in which your education meant nothing until you got your diploma or until you got your associates or until you got your bachelor's. Well, now skills-based credentialing is allowing us to provide incremental progress, showing tangible, concrete ways in which the learning experiences are impacting the learners' journey and providing to be an employment or further education, a much more tangible way of either giving credit for prior learning or moving up within an organization based upon the skills demonstrated.

Holly Owens (07:41):

I always say that the real world piece is missing in those areas. It's so missing and we have such an opportunity here to marry those two together really mesh those worlds together with the real world and the education system. And I feel like maybe Covid definitely do this, it exposed education in a way that it's never been exposed before and all the different gaps, whether that's skill-based or knowledge-based that exists in these sectors. Like you said, education K to 12 or higher ed as well. So it's 100% something. I love all that you're saying about this because I feel like as a student when I was in college, which was in the early two thousands, I knew I wanted to be a teacher. I knew I could do it, I just needed to just get me in the classroom. I'm sure I can do it, but you had to check off all the boxes

Nadia Johnson (08:41):

And the why behind all the things that you were doing leading up to that point. And I think that's such a good perspective. I think the way you broke it down just made it sound so much more, especially for me. I know

Holly Owens (08:58):

It's

Keith Look (08:59):

A fun story to tell.

Holly Owens (09:00):

Yeah, it is a fun story to tell. I think a lot of that still exists in academia. You need the credential to prove and which I think is slowly, there's a lot of different news stories and things that are coming out about what's the RRI on my degree because a lot of us sitting even in this room have student loan debt because we were raised to think that going to college and getting a degree was our ticket to financial stability, freedom, taking care of our families, all that kind of stuff. And now we're like looking at it like, whoa, that was not the case. We were kind of fed some BSS there. So I'm going to get off my soapbox though. I can really go in my soapbox about that. But just you talking about this world application piece, and I know this will resonate definitely with a lot of people in our audience. So let's get into it. Tell us about Territorium . Tell us all the products, the service, what you offer, what you do for the audience who've never heard about it before or been to your website. Tell us all the things.

Keith Look (10:03):

So the shortest version is Territorium is about moving learners to employment based upon verified skills. Simply stated, that has meant we started in 2012 originally a couple hotshot programmers out of Monterey, Mexico enter college realized they hate their LMS build a competing LMS business explodes. They go to their college presence, say, Hey, we got to drop out. You're a client. Business is blowing up. We don't have time to go to class. And the president was smart enough to say, tell you what, use your faculty, use your business advisors, use your work experience to count towards your academic credits. All I need to see is evidence from your work aligned to the learning outcomes you would've achieved through traditional coursework. And they built what was then a skills and abilities guide digitally speaking that launched a series of products based around learning management system that was more skills or competency-based through the pandemic.

(11:00):

What evolved was a very robust remote proctoring online assessment system and the skills and abilities guide after colleges in the US started going test optional the evolution into a comprehensive learner record credential wallet, also known as a learning and employment record. There's lots of reasons to split hairs over these names, but for the sake of conversation, the Venn diagrams says they overlap by about 80%. But through that we now have goodness over 10 million users in 15 countries. And so significant presence doing everything from summative admissions assessments in South Africa to we run the workforce training system in a South American country that's about 2 million users, 180 campuses and really are interested around the United States for what I describe my experience to be helping learners identify their skills and abilities, not just as a repository of badges and microcredentials and so forth, which we can do, but all those things together mean something.

Holly Owens (12:01):

So what territory? I would say you can have a pretty badge any day. Nadia can make you a pretty badge. I can make it pretty badge, but what kind of weight does it have behind it?

Keith Look (12:11):

Right? We can have a competition as to how long our email signatures can be, right with all the different stickers that we'll put on it. Yes. So the cool thing about badging number one, as you know is that there's a way to make them verifiable where they're cryptographically signed with all the necessary metadata so that they're baked in and they're forever true. Awesome. But ultimately, I might get some from one institution. I might get some through programs like Coursera or LinkedIn or Google or other programs or my employer. And once I have this hodgepodge of badges, there are a bunch of stickers unless I do something with 'em. So what we do is we then analyze those collectively for the skills that they represent, and now we can create a profile of the learner based upon the set of skills that they have, and we can take that set of skills and help the learner compare 'em to their chosen fields or pathways so they can see their level of qualification.

(13:04):

You are 62% towards becoming an accountant, you're 37% towards becoming a nurse, whatever the case would be. And that also means we can identify the gap to the learner and help the learner route themselves back to their institutions for those opportunities that help them level up. So the gamification, how they become more qualified. The engine then can also accept evidence from within and beyond the classroom internships, apprenticeships, or even self-assertion. So if I am able to, maybe I haven't had the opportunity to prove my second language proficiency, but maybe now I can go ahead and upload into my credential wallet evidence of me reading, writing, speaking and listing in a second language. So when I make applications somewhere, I can demonstrate that competency as well. So then with my opportunity fit, my level of qualification, my gaps that I'm filling in, we also can take that same information and help the learner conduct a job search.

(14:00):

Being able to find jobs in those specific pathways that are looking for people with that exact set of skills or that proximity of skills to where now as a learner, I can look at that job specific and say, oh, I need to go and get qualified in this or credentialed in that or badge in this so that I can make application and be even more competitive. So it's everything from the wallet, the repository, the analysis of what is in said wallet from a quality or an opportunity fit is what we refer to it as. And then for lack of better terms, a dating service with the jobs world so we can get you with a good

Holly Owens (14:35):

Match it. I feel like dating, I go on, I'm sure a lots of people in our audience that will resonate with them. They go on a lot of bad first dates with interviews and companies. That's a great way to describe that process.

Keith Look (14:49):

And our commitment to the learner is a couple things. Number one, what will sound magnanimous, but it's actually strategic is we will forever be committed to interoperability. We're going to build this on standards that allow our system to plug and play with everyone. We want to play nice with everybody. That's the strategy. And it's designed so that the learner is able to own and operate their own data ultimately at no cost to them forever. So right now, the financial burden is born by the institution and when the learner leaves, they get all their data and all these tools and everything else with 'em to forever use. So it's also a great thing for the institution to be able to give to that learner, something that they know they can use forever in their pursuit, always in reflecting back on their institution and being thankful that this was provided to them.

Holly Owens (15:38):

My goodness, it's all aligned and it's all in one spot. I think the other challenge is that there are a lot of great tools out there that you can use, but you have to hodgepodge them together to get it to all function for what you need it to do. Especially like, oh, you go here for get your badges and your M Mozilla backpack, or you go here to this site to put in Indeed to put in your resume and then you search jobs. So streamlining this and putting this all together is revolutionary and so helpful to people who are on this path. I know a lot of Gen Z or Gen Alpha, if we're going to talk generational stuff, they're really going to, they want the all-in-one, they don't don't want to go into five different applications. They're like, no, just give up. That's it.

Keith Look (16:28):

And what's the latest data? Was there 42 million Americans with some college and no degree? I think that was clearinghouse data. I could have that wrong, but that's a bunch of people that have a whole set of skills and abilities that we forgot to tell them. You have key skills and abilities. So if we can now help you distill that information from your experiences educationally and employment wise, now you can better determine what your next step is along whatever career or pathway or journey that you've laid out for yourself and not feel like I never got finished. So I guess this is the end of the line.

Nadia Johnson (16:59):

And sometimes I think that's the hardest part is establishing what you want to do. I think that's the biggest thing that most people have trouble with is what do I want to do? How can I use my skills and how can this translate into a career? And I think that's the biggest thing I've seen is what do I do? So this kind of streamlines that process and just like the job market now and finding a job, it is overwhelming. It's a lot. And so being able to hone in on those skills and figure out what it is, have that alignment and figure out what it is that you can do given the skills that you have, I think is so, so helpful. And especially in this day and age of finding a job and determining what it is that you really want to do. I know that with the recent pandemic, given those global events, many educators and institutions are still kind of moving into navigating this whole transition into digital learning and ed tech. What advice or strategies would you offer to educators looking to effectively integrate technology into their daily instruction or teaching methods

Keith Look (18:14):

And assets and deep breaths?

Nadia Johnson (18:17):

Right, step one, you can tell we're educated, we're former.

Keith Look (18:22):

I mean, you look at it from that perspective, the pandemic forced overnight for institutions to go one-to-one and pick up an LMS, and any gradual plan was thrown out the window. Luckily there were Esser funds to help make that investment. They created tons of positions to create support, and now we're at that point of the financial cliff of where all that funding goes away. So you got to figure out a way to different fund those positions and all of those devices are going to expire at the same time, so the refresh rate's going to be there. So it's tricky then to come to the conversation and say, Hey, by the way, there's this additional piece of the stool that really completes your picture. So a lot of, I think what educators need to be able to do is at the moment, try and take that 30,000 foot view as to where we are being the fact that college and career readiness still probably aren't exactly equal tier, but we're getting closer.

(19:18):

And the more in which we pay attention to the CTE side of the world, the more in which we pay attention to the multiple pathways in which learners can pursue their future. The demand to identify and acknowledge skills really is key. And if you're going to identify skills, now you have to look back at your technological ecosystem to see how your system is designed to support that next evolution. That really is, I think the picture and the process we have to work people through, right? Lots of institutions got used to strategic planning, the plan, do, study, act, and that documentation, we set the goals and they were smart goals and the rest of it, this is that next phase of work and being able to map out the journey for the learner. And I think what's particularly powerful in that equation is that for up until relatively recently, most technological solutions in education were designed to meet the needs of the system, and we would force the learner into a box that met the need of the system.

(20:23):

But as we get into the ability to identify granular competencies of the learner, we actually can start at the learner technologically and build up to the system level needs. It's like Legos, the smaller the building block, the cooler, the Yoda, you can eventually construct and getting educators to see that this shift is occurring, which actually I think is much more respectful of educators because it is about that granular work and it's about progress and growth and it's asset based. All that stuff we talked about forever about growth mindset finally actually becomes operational in meaningful and demonstrable ways.

Holly Owens (21:03):

Wow. Gosh, yes. All the things you said, all the things you said. I mean, so much of what you're saying obviously resonates with us because former classroom teachers and seeing all the different, when you give us a history, listen about all the different standards and things that came down the line, it's like putting everybody into this box that they don't necessarily fit into these experiences that they have or these skills that they have that don't fit into that box. We think so much about, and I do this too because I've just been in education most of my career, is that it's like, go get a degree. You get a good job, you're financially stable, or that's the pathway to happiness when in actuality there's so many different things that you can do in that you don't realize. I don't think I realized until I was almost middle aged that there's so many different skills that you have that weren't being tapped into during those experiences that didn't prepare you for what you're doing now.

Keith Look (22:07):

Well, sometimes we just forgot to tell people, no one, I don't think has ever had their career unlocked from getting a b plus and a world geography course. But if in that course, part of the work was to build a pivot table where you're comparing economic trends based upon weather patterns and agrarian resources, that's a skill of data analytics. And if we would've told the learner that that's immediately valuable in the skills-based equation of pursuit, that was great to have that opportunity in that class. So it's not necessarily have to throw out the curriculum, it's more about teasing out from the curriculum, what are the other pieces that are coming alongside these experiences.

Nadia Johnson (22:46):

Yeah, that's such a good point actually showing that connection to students and learners that what you're doing here, how this connects in the real world. Yeah, that's very insightful.

Holly Owens (23:03):

The time has actually flew by for this episode.

(23:07):

I've thoroughly enjoyed it. But we have two final questions for you, Keith, and we really appreciate your time and talking about all the things territory. But two final questions for you to answer. Is there anything that we missed that you want to tell the audience about Territorium or anything about your journey that you want to cover? And then we also want to know from you being an expert in this area and education based ed, tech based, vice president of a ed tech company, we want to know what the future looks like. So did we miss anything and then tell us all about the future.

Keith Look (23:40):

Fair enough. I will warn you that traditionally I'm known for my crystal ball to be cracked, so I'm a little scared of the second question. So as far as what was missed, I think the one piece I would add is that the way in which Tial also identifies and looks at skills is not just about the badge of the credential, but also the evidence. So as there has been this push since the scans report of 2000 for employability skills, post-secondary skills, durability skills, where you want to call 'em, part of the challenge of that is that there's no universal definition of collaboration. So if all of us aren't a badge of collaboration and we want to share that with an employer or with an institution of learning, I always worry that the employer is either going to throw it out judged by the reputation of the institution or the zip code it's coming from.

(24:27):

What we've been able to do at Territorium is attach the actual evidence a learner submits in demonstrating competency, video, PowerPoint, presentation, PDF, so forth, which doesn't solve the issue of equity, but moves us along that trajectory by creating a greater level of authenticity to the badge and a greater level of validity on the reviewer side to see, well, what did collaboration mean at your institution? And I really hope that our attachment of that helps push the industry writ large as we do profiles of a graduate. And this continued conversation around employability skills that until we have that universal definition like we do CPR, we all know what it's like, the ratio of compressions to breast and we pound on Annie's chest. We all have the mental model of that. We eventually need that for the post-secondary skills too, and hopefully our work by attaching evidence to badges, adds that to that same effect.

(25:18):

I think ultimately the crystal ball side of this is we were watching what, while we probably internally we'd like to call revolutionary, is probably more evolutionary of the transcript and the resume. How are we representing ourselves with who we are, what we offer an opportunity, and what we bring to the table in a way that's fully verifiable, provable, concrete. So whether you call it the comprehensive learning record, the learning and employment record, the credential wallet, even degrees of an e-portfolio, that is what I think is next, is to get us to that stage whereby there is a more fair and clear and provable exchange of data around our candidacy and our capabilities.

Holly Owens (26:06):

I like it. I like that. The only time you really have, and I was thinking about the transcript, the only time you have to request a transcript, I don't think any of my most recent jobs, I've looked at my transcript most of the time, if you're working in academia, yes, but corporate, maybe government, I don't know. But I have all these expensive degrees up on my wall, but nobody's ever asked one time to see them. Proof of that, that has happened. It's on my LinkedIn, it's on my resume. I may or may not have done it.

Keith Look (26:45):

I suspect when you run for office, someone will

Holly Owens (26:46):

Check, oh no, we're not going there. That's not happening. That's a hard pass for me, maybe Nadia. Oh no, absolutely not. Well, Keith, I've so enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for all the insights that you provided to our audience and all the things that you're doing at Territorium . It's been really great having you on the show. And we'll send an email out in about 200 days or so. We like to do, where are they now episodes. So we definitely want to hear about what you're doing six to 12 months from now and come back on the show. So thank you so much for your time. Hey,

Keith Look (27:21):

I appreciate it guys.

Holly Owens (27:22):

So insightful.