124: Innovating Education: Nectir's Trailblazing Approach with CEO Kavitta Ghai

Holly Owens (00:02):

Hello everyone and welcome to Edup EdTech and demos. We are super pumped for this afternoon session. We have a great thing about to happen and I'm really excited for all of you and myself to see this demo. So we have Kavita from Nectar, she's the CEO and founder, and she has a friend with her, Vicky as well, who she's going to introduce and we're super pumped today to share this tool with you. It is one that I just recently ran into and I'm excited to learn more about it. So I'm going to turn it over and you can take it away.

Kavitta Ghai (00:41):

Awesome. Thank you so much Holly. Thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Kavita. I am the co-founder and CEO here at Nectar. And here with me today I have Vicki, our director of community. She manages all of our active schools and has a depth of experience working in the resident departments at uc, Santa Barbara. And so she's going to help me out today with once we go through the demo, actually getting all of you guys into our Nectar Sandbox so you can try it out. So I'm going to go ahead and start off with the story of Nectar. I think that the founder fit here and why we actually built this as students ourselves is one of the most important parts of the product. And when we do our onboarding for schools and we go through our training workshops, we always let the instructors know to tell your students that this was built by students who experienced the exact same problems that they did and we're really building this in order to help them get the educational experience that we felt we deserved.

(01:41):

So to take it back to the beginning, nectar was never supposed to be a company. It was simply something that my co-founder Jordan and I made while we were undergrad students at uc, Santa Barbara because we needed it in our own classes and we couldn't find it. So for me coming into this, I am autistic and I have a DHD, so no classroom that I've ever been in before has felt comfortable or safe for my brain to be in. And then I got to college and I started paying $40,000 to be really uncomfortable. And that's when it became enough of a pain point for me that I said, okay, I've either got to drop out or I've got to do something about it. But I had no idea what that something was until I took a class that showed me what a modern education could really look like.

(02:25):

So the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I ended up taking a class that was taught by a grad student instructor. So he is a little bit younger and more tech savvy, but most importantly he was a student himself. So similar to us creating nectar, he understood the problems that students were having and wanted to solve for that upfront. So we walk in on the first day of class and Spencer sits us down and before he says a word, he turns around and he writes the link to a Slack workspace on the board and he turns back to us and he says, we're going to do this class a little differently and I need you to trust me. He said, I don't want you to raise your hand in class. I don't want you to send me or the TA a single email. I don't even want you to come into office hours.

(03:05):

He said, if you have any issues, and then whether it's in the middle of lecture or it's three in the morning before the midterm, your first line of action is going to be to put your question in the Slack chat because I guarantee that one of the 149 people around you will have a better and faster answer for you than me or the TA will. And he said, on top of that, if you answer someone's question really well, I'll give you extra credit for it because that lets me know that you understand the material so well. You can then turn around and teach to the person next to you, which is actually the highest level of mastery that you can achieve. And he said, even beyond that, this is my instant feedback loop into your brain. So based on how you're asking and answering each other's questions, I as the teacher will know whether I've done a good job at teaching you that concept.

(03:49):

It was the first class I've ever taken where I didn't have to speak up and say I didn't understand something. Spencer would immediately catch it in the conversation. And if I still did need help, I always had the answer accessible to me within five minutes. I wasn't waiting two days to get a response. I had somebody there that could always answer it in a language that I would understand, and every time someone did answer a question, it was an opportunity to make a new friend. So what Spencer did was almost bring this Trojan horse into class where he put community at the center of the learning experience and incentivized us to learn with the thing that we were most excited about in college, which was making friends and building our network and our community. In order to be part of that classroom community, you had to understand the material enough that you could engage with the students around you and answer their questions.

(04:41):

I left that class with the highest grade that I got in college and more friends than I had ever made before, and I was like a dog with a bone. I said that was it. Put slack in all of my classes and it solves our issues. So I approached UCSB and I said, somebody explained to me if me and 26,000 other people are paying you $40,000 a year, why can't you put Slack in all of our classes? And UCSB was kind enough to sit me down with their instructional design department and walk me through the logistical hell of putting a separate Slack workspace in 1500 classes every quarter, teaching professors who are on average 55 how to use an enterprise level tool and then paying an enterprise level cost for 26,000 students every year. They said, it sounds good in theory and maybe you have one or two instructors use the free version the way that you just saw, but this will never work across an entire campus because Slack isn't built for schools.

(05:35):

And I think in that moment you could see a literal light bulb appear above my head because I said, well, if Slack isn't built for schools, then I'm going to go build it. I will spare you the bloody gory details. But Jordan, my co-founder and I spent the next year in that same office with ucs B'S instructional design department and said, tell us exactly what you would buy, what would Slack have to do in order for you to be able to bring this to the entire campus down to how much should it cost and how should it integrate with the LMS? And we built exactly that, and a year later we got all 26,000 students at UCSB using Nectar in almost every single one of their classes with the instructors being the champion of it. And we got UCSB to pay us five figures a year for it.

(06:21):

So we got our tuition back, which was awesome. After that, we went on to raise $2 million to build out the team and we've now been able to put nectar in over 40 campuses around the world, both K 12 and higher ed. So we are really excited to not only have been able to solve that issue for ourselves while we were in school and for all of our peers, but now to be able to go deliver this modern learning experience to students around the world because we really do believe that this is what the classroom of the future will look like. It will look like students teaching each other and learning how to be part of a community and finding the answers amongst themselves so that they can take agency over their own learning experience. And we've seen some incredible results so far. So I'm going to go through these slides pretty quickly because I know we want to see the actual product itself and jump into it.

(07:10):

But really what I want to share with you is the fact that what we're doing here is we're on a mission to democratize access to educational resources. Sounds fluffy, but what that really means is every student should have the accessibility in every classroom to get the information they need right away. The modern classroom should be a place where students feel safe to be themselves around each other and their instructor and ta. So we're really trying to put everyone on the same level so that you can have these candid conversations about the material and that's where you see that authentic engagement start to happen. As a student myself, I felt like I was being given all of these tools like the LMS forum that were outdated and felt like they weren't really made for me to learn, but rather for me to just get participation points.

(07:58):

But when you meet students where they are with technology, they actually understand that is when you start to see that authentic engagement. And so what Nectar allows you to do is create an AI enabled classroom back channel that integrates directly with your LMS. And so I'm sure you've heard of the LTI integration. We actually take that a step further and we integrate Nectar and I frame it right within your LMS so that you don't have to pop out to a different window. It's one seamless experience right inside of your class page and it'll auto create a channel for every class on campus and then auto add your students, your TA, and your instructor into it because we want to remove that human onboarding aspect completely. We should automatically be able to onboard an entire campus at once if we want to, or even just start department by department or class by class.

(08:47):

So we've built it to be incredibly customizable to any campus of any size. And again, I give all of the credit to UCSB for teaching us exactly to build that other ed tech tools haven't been able to accomplish. And that's why we've been able to see the engagement be so high. So this, to give you a quick idea of what Nectar looks like, really what we're trying to do is take aspects like Slack and Discord tools that students and teachers are already used to using and bring that into the classroom so that they intuitively know how to use it. And you don't have that huge learning curve of what am I supposed to be doing here? For most students, they already have unofficial group chats outside of the classroom that they're using. But when you look at research, it shows that back channel technology only becomes a pedagogical tool once the instructor is present in those spaces.

(09:35):

That is how you see consistent engagement all the way through the term. Otherwise the conversation usually drops off. And so like I said, what nectar truly is a back channel and that is a conversation that happens alongside the primary instruction. So as a teacher, you get to decide whether nectar is used after hours when students get home and that's when they're asking questions to each other or if this is a tool that helps you do synchronous discussion during lecture itself so that you don't have this turn taking issue and everyone can actually put their opinion in at once. So it's really up to you how you want to set up your classroom community and you really want to give that agency to your students by letting them know, here's how I plan for us to build this community and here's how I want you to participate in it.

(10:23):

And I think the most exciting part and what people have really wanted to know for a while is about soma. So eight months ago we released Soma, she's our AI teaching assistant and everyone's favorite feature within Nectar. Essentially what we want it to do is allow you in a FERPA and Kapa compliant way to bring in technology like chat GBT into the classroom, but ensure that you have visibility over how your students are using AI and the content that the AI is able to give back to your students. So we did about a thousand user interviews before we even started building soma and we asked teachers from around the world, what scares you the most about ai? And if you had a magic wand, what would you never want to do again in the classroom? And what we heard from them was, I'm so scared that my students are going to go to chat GPT and get information that isn't correct and I won't know and I won't be able to correct it in time.

(11:16):

And then once it's in their brain, it's there for good. And the other part of if you had a magic wand and you never had to do something again, they said, I want to stop answering the same questions that are on the syllabus a dozen times in my email inbox. I wish that students knew how to go find that information in the syllabus themselves. And so those exact things that we've fixed with Soma, she is an AI teaching assistant that sits inside of every Nectar class channel and the teacher can toggle her on or off at any time they choose, and then the teacher decides which information they upload to soma such as the syllabus or their lecture materials, and that will set the parameters for what Soma is able to answer for the students in that class. So if you have not uploaded a document about the material, Soma cannot answer it for the students.

(12:03):

She will not be pulling that information from GPT-4 and giving them any random old answer. And on top of that, every answer that Soma gives is tracked. It can be seen by the instructor, and on top of that, it shows you the source of where that information came from. So it'll actually link your students directly to the syllabus or the lecture material that piece of information is coming from. So we'll show you how to use this and we'll give you an opportunity to test out Soma yourself and even create your own channel and upload your own information to Soma, which again, completely FERPA and COPPA compliant. We're keeping your proprietary information safe. We don't even get to see it on our end. So you have no worries about using it within your class with your proprietary information. So I think one of the most exciting parts is that we have finally been able to see the pedagogical effects of Nectar on a campus.

(12:54):

We knew that this was going to affect the student's sense of belonging and give them a place to authentically engage, but that is already translated into us being able to see that in classes that use Nectar, were able to increase the class average by an entire letter grade. It's incredible to see that happen. And really when you ask and survey the students on why is this happening, it's because the information they need is accessible to them right when they need it. They're not waiting for an email response from the TA or the instructor. They're able to go find that information themselves and continue their learning journey on their own. So again, it's giving them that agency over their learning experience. And so what we found for best practices from the over 45,000 users that we have on Nectar to date is that the real recipe for building your classroom community involves these three main components.

(13:45):

It's building that trust and relationships amongst the students in your class and with the instructor and TA as well. And then putting everyone in this collaborative environment where they know we are going to learn together, it's our collective responsibility to make sure everyone gets to the finish line. And that's really where you see a boost in that incourse persistence. So once students feel like they are part of the community, they actually want to show up every single day because they know they have a role in that community and that people will notice if they're not present. The last part is the shared values and norms. I think this is the most important aspect of building any community. It's sort of setting the guidelines and the structure for how are we going to use this community. So again, we tell instructors on day one, you get to decide exactly how you want your students to use this space and you want to relay that to them, right Here is exactly how we are going to use Nectar. It doesn't matter if you use it differently in another class. In this class, I want you to not use it during lecture, you're only going to use it after hours. Or some instructors say, here's where I'm going to do my hours. I actually do want you to only come talk to me on here and not in person. So very customizable to what your campus and your classroom looks like.

(15:02):

And again, we've seen an incredible response from the teachers, the staff, the admin and the students that have been using this at over 40 campuses around the nation. And also, like I said before, we're seeing this in both K 12 and higher ed. So the youngest students that we have using Nectar today are eight years old. And it's awesome because they actually know how to use Nectar better than anyone else does. These are iPad babies who have been using Discord and tools like that for years. So they get in there and they take off with it. And it's really, really cool to see because what we're doing with Nectar is also teaching them these career skills that they're going to need to take with them into the workforce, right? They're going to use tools like Slack and Teams and we want them to experience that early on so that they know and they're prepared for how do I have a virtual team where we work together to solve these questions and these problems together.

(15:56):

So I'm finally at the end of the slides, I promise we'll jump right into Nectar. I just want to save this screen really quick and I'll also have Vicki upload it to the channel for everyone. But if you'd like to see a live demo, talk about how this might fit into your school or even just brainstorm with me, how do I bring AI safely into my classroom or campus? I would love to meet with you. Please send me an email book some time on my calendar. We are always here for you to help you set this up on your campus because we know how difficult it is to introduce new technology to a campus. So I'm going to go ahead and hold up this screen now and take you into

Holly Owens (16:35):

Connector. I just want to pop in here and say that I really love your story. Thank you. And what you've done with this and the evolution. And also too, I want to say in the video that the LinkedIn Live had some technical difficulties. So we're going to have a revamp of Nectar in the coming weeks because LinkedIn wouldn't go live. So a lot of people might be jumping into the Riverside. So just to let you know to ask questions. But yeah, I really love this story and this is great that you're sharing.

Kavitta Ghai (17:04):

Thank you.

Holly Owens (17:06):

This tool and everything that you've done, this is why we have this podcast. So thank

Kavitta Ghai (17:11):

You. No, thank you Holly for giving us this platform to do this because you're exactly right. I think that if we want to see real innovation happen within education, it has to be from the people who are experiencing that problem themselves. We innately know how we need to solve that. And I think the key here is that rather than just building this for students or just for instructors, we really sat down with UCSB and said, how do we make sure that Nectar has an equal value proposition for the student, the ta, the teacher, the staff and the administrator? We want everyone to be able to be part of this campus community. And really the whole purpose of Nectar is to build a network across the entire campus. So now that we're in the tool itself, I think one of the key factors of how is this different than something like Slack, where Slack is a separate workspace that you would put in every single class.

(18:02):

NRA is one workspace for the entire campus and each class is going to be a channel like you see right here on the left hand side. And so I'll actually show you, this is Nectar in just the web app and you can always download the desktop or the mobile app, but where we see 79% of our usage happen is right here inside of the LMS. So like I said, nectar, we wanted it to be no human onboarding whatsoever. And so what that means is once it's integrated with your LMS via LTI, it can auto-create your class channel for you. All the teacher has to do is come and press that nectar button on the left hand side. We're showing Canvas right now, but it works with any LMS at all. And what will happen is it'll automatically create a channel for that course and it'll add all of the students from the registration of that course page and it refreshes every 24 hours.

(18:56):

So if you have students add or drop the class, it'll constantly refresh that registration for you. And so what we wanted to do was not just have that registration be done so that we could auto-create the channels, but actually embed it right inside of the LMS so that students and teachers didn't have to pop out to a new window in order to use Nectar. They could do it right inside of the LMS where they already were. And that's really why we see the engagement be so high because it's incredibly easy for students to use it. And then like I said, they can always download the Nectar mobile app and that's how they're getting their notifications delivered to them where they are right now. So we hear this, a lot of students aren't opening their email. I can't get the messages to them. And that's exactly what Nectar is for.

(19:38):

It's meeting them where they are with technology that is very similar to the social tools that they're already using today. And so you can see once we're inside of an Nectar channel, it's pretty intuitive and simple to figure out exactly how to use it. So on your left hand side, you're going to have your navigation for all of the channels that you're in. So you can see I even have this private faculty channel. So you can have channels that are just for staff, just for faculty, and all of the channels within your campus workspace will be available right here on the Discover page. And so here's where you'll be able to see all of the channels that have been made on campus. I can see even the private ones that I'm part of, but this is where you'll see all of the publicly made channels.

(20:18):

So one of my favorite ones is during the pandemic, we had a school create a pandemic book club channel. And so they invited staff, faculty, students to join. There was over 500 people how cool it was. I love that was awesome. And every week they would pick a new book and people would just go into the channel and chat about it. And it created this incredible community across the campus. So really what Nectar is for is wherever those spaces can't exist outside of the LMS or you don't have a virtual community for them, such as all of the majors on campus or the dorms, you can have all of that information and communication flow through Nectar. And it also has the ability for direct messages like you see here. So if I want it to contact my instructor or my advisor, anyone on campus, again, all of my classroom and campus communication can flow right through Nectar.

(21:11):

And so now we'll show you right up here Soma. So as the instructor, as the owner of the channel, I'm the only one who's going to be able to see these two I icons right here, Soma, and our analytics page. So Soma can be added to the room or turned off at any time. And this is where I'll go ahead and upload any files. And so I'm actually going to add another file. I'm going to go ahead and put in my Python loops lecture and you'll see it'll go from not trained and about 10 seconds it'll train on that information. And now I've expanded her knowledge base and so she has a little bit more information that she can share with my students. So while this is getting trained, Vicki, if you don't mind putting in the chat the actual link to join this space. So we will get all of you guys in the actual Nectar Sandbox. You can test this out with us. Going to go ahead and save that.

(22:08):

I'll put it in the other chat too. Perfect, thank you so much. And then what I'm going to do is I can come down here and I'm going to tag Soma. You can even just type at Soma like that. And I'm going to ask her what are Python loops and how are they used in the second assignment? And you can see Soma starts typing and she's parsing that information to be able to give my students a quick answer. And once that pops up, we'll go ahead and show you. And so again, once you get into this space, feel free to tag Soma to go ahead and respond to the poll right here. You can even send a GIF down here. I'm going to say hi. There we go. And I'm going to throw that gif right in here.

(22:57):

Alright, let me see, are we getting some people in here all, let's wait and get everyone in there. And then while that's happening again, I want to pop back out to the full web view. So you can see it like this. One of our other favorite tools is right up here. You'll be able to see the analytics tab. So there's a live analytics page inside of every channel that will show you the engagement from least engaged student to most engaged. And then you can export any of these to your grade book for participation points or even to your SIS or your CRM if you want to be tracking nectar for student retention. So this is great for teachers to have an early alert system to be able to pull students back into the community as they disengage.

(23:42):

So I'm going to go ahead and wait for any questions and you can go ahead and drop your questions into the actual Nectar channel and we'll be happy to answer them. So I'll pop this up and show you. There you go. There is Soma's answer. So she lets me know what Python loops are and how they're used in the second assignment. And I can even pull up the sources to see exactly where Soma found that information from and the character in that PDF. And then it'll link me directly to that PDF, so students can always find the information that it's coming from. Alright,

(24:23):

Someone got excited. And then also what I'm going to have Vicky do since we're coming up on time soon is she's going to put in the links to the pricing page so that you can know a little bit more about what Nectar costs. And that is a dollar per student per month, so $12 per student per year. And we are billing either by department or by your entire campus, so very customizable to how you want to start using it. We can even put it in an individual classroom first. And there you go. Vicki's got our pricing page right there for you to check out. And then she's also going to throw in our Nectar learning library. And so this is a great page where you can go through and see a quick walkthrough and all of the different features that we have and the best practices for fostering inclusive classrooms, enhancing student engagement. You can even see some of the case studies that we have from previous schools and check out how we've been able to increase that class average, like I said. So there we go. We've got the learning library in there. Thank you, Vicki. I come right back over here.

(25:31):

Any questions so far? Anything that you guys would like a deeper look at? Anything that you're curious about, whether it's on our roadmap? Would love to hear some feedback.

Holly Owens (25:44):

I just want to ask, is the demo going to stay open for a bit? So if people after the fact want to explore, they can still go in and Okay, good. Absolutely. Awesome. Love it. It'll be in the show

Kavitta Ghai (25:52):

Notes. Exactly. And so while you're in this space, you can go ahead and come right up here to the top left corner and here's where you'll be able to create your own public or private channel within this space. So I'm just going to create a channel and you can see I can toggle it between public and private, and then I'm going to make test space 1 0 1 and I can create it. And there you go. I've got a brand new channel and I can come right up here since I'm the owner of it and set up my Soma and I can say hello world. And so please feel free to go and make your own channel, try out Soma yourself, upload your documents to it and pretend that this is your little class space. And again, you can keep that private if you'd like to. We're going to go ahead and keep this space open for a full week after this. And so you can always go in here and let us know your feedback in the general channel as well. So you can come right in here and let us know what you think about it, if you have any feedback on features and oh, there we go. Thanks, Holly. Perfect. So I do see a question right here. I saw the poll box was included. Is there a way to remove that automatically

Kavitta Ghai (26:59):

In

Kavitta Ghai (27:00):

The data for produce? Oh, okay. Alexander, your question. I saw that the poll box was included in the data for participating students. Is there a way to remove that automatically for the instructor so you can decide exactly where you want that data to come from? If you don't want to create any polls in your channel, you absolutely don't have to. That's just one of the tools that we like using in there to increase that engagement upfront. It's easy for students to interact with, but when you're looking at the actual analytics class page, that will not be pulling from the polling information that's looking at the actual messages sent by the students, and that's what we're tracking engagement on. Any other questions?

Kavitta Ghai (27:44):

Yeah,

Kavitta Ghai (27:50):

Gotcha. Yeah, let me go and pull that up one more time.

Kavitta Ghai (27:55):

That's a good

Kavitta Ghai (27:55):

Question. Yeah, so everything that you're seeing here, this is actually just coming from the messages that are sent in that channel.

Guest (28:08):

I guess my question here is if you're the professor and you're using the poll to track engagement anyway, at least for me, I would imagine I wouldn't want to see the poll as a part of the number of messages.

Kavitta Ghai (28:23):

Oh, gotcha. You're saying this one

Guest (28:25):

Also envision that that could be a lot of messages. I could make up a

Kavitta Ghai (28:30):

Gotcha. Okay. That's actually really good feedback. I will totally let the engineers know to take off the poll bot from it. It's just because the poll is one of the users technically in the channel now, but t hat's something we can very easily remove. So thank you for calling that out. We have not had anyone mention that to us before. That is a really good call out.

Kavitta Ghai (28:49):

Thank you. Perfect.

Kavitta Ghai (28:52):

Any other questions?

(28:57):

Awesome. Thank you, Vicki. She already noted it and sent it to our engineering team, and that is exactly why we have a community manager in the workspace so that anytime that you need help, somebody is accessible to you. So in every workspace you can always come down here to the lifesaver icon, and this is where you'll be able to get live support. And so Vicki actually lives right inside of this little spot. You'll be able to send her a message and any student, staff, faculty or admin can use this Monday through Friday nine to five. And so you don't actually have to put your IT support in there to help post nectar. We will do that for you. So we want this to be a managed workspace and that comes with your campus wide contract.

Holly Owens (29:41):

Cool. Well, right on the dot.

Kavitta Ghai (29:43):

Awesome. Good timing.

Holly Owens (29:46):

So thank you both so much for telling. Now I want to try it in my classes. I'm starting to teach next week, so I definitely want to talk to you and maybe try to get this incorporated. I just find what you're saying, discussion boards and all those different things, it can definitely get chaotic and trying to find the different things. And this is a tool that is real world applicable and people already know this is what we're doing in our everyday lives. So I love it. And I will say we are going to do a follow up and have a rerun of nectar and the demo. So I want to invite you back totally so that we can get the live working. I'm sorry about that. No worries. But it's all going to, oh, sorry, I turned my mic off. So it's all, everything you shared is going to be in the show notes and this is going to be shared as a video episode in the upcoming weeks. So thank you.

Kavitta Ghai (30:40):

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having us, Holly, and we will be very happy to get you set up next week for your classes. Super excited to see how those go. And thank you everyone for joining us for this. We had a great time with you all. Again, if you have any feedback for us or you want to meet with us and chat and give us your thoughts on what we've built so far, always open to hearing it and very happy to meet you all. So thank you for having us.

Holly Owens (31:03):

Of course.

Kavitta Ghai (31:05):

Perfect. All right.