91: Transforming Education through People-Centric EdTech: A Conversation with Marco De Rossi, CEO of WeSchool

Hello everyone, and welcome to another fantastic episode of EdUp EdTech. My name is Holly Owens and I'm your host, and we are excited because today,, we have a very special guest with us. We have Marco de Rossi, who is the CEO of WeSchool on the show. So Marco, welcome on in.

Hi everybody, and thanks for having me here.

We are super pumped, and unfortunately Nadia had another commitment. She couldn't be here for the recording and she really, really wanted to, so shout out to Nadia, we're thinking about you. We're going to be talking about a lot of different things on this episode. But before we get into everything WeSchool, Marco, tell the audience about your journey. How did you get started into this entrepreneurial EdTech space? Give us all the details.

Well, like many other EdTech entrepreneurs, I started just because I was a non-satisfied student, like everybody or many of us. So, I was just enrolled to high school, I was 13 years old, and the school was just about Latin, Greek and Ancient Latin, Ancient Greek. There was no computer science at all in the school. And I asked to a teacher, "Well, I would like to study computer science as well." And the answer was, "Well, I'm sorry, but nobody in the entire building knows what a website is." And so, I started in the afternoon when I was 14 years old, to create a website where everybody could be able to teach and learn computer science for free.

(01:36)
And that was the year before YouTube arrived. So, even just very basic sharing of content was pretty difficult. But the idea was, and it was something similar to the Web2 trends that arrive afterwards, that everybody can learn and teach through the web. Everybody is potentially a teacher of something. And that was my first EdTech startup, that I've brought on as an informal project for a few years. WeSchool started actually five years ago, so it's more recent. I'm 33 years old now, and it happened-

Oh, you're so young. Look at you. Oh my goodness. You're already super successful. That's fantastic.

... I'm not young at all. 33 is...

I won't tell you my age.

Okay. I will not ask. Joking. And so, I come from a tech background, and I really think that connecting the dots between business and technology is important if you want to build a tech business. I'm not a huge fan of tech entrepreneurs, but I haven't a strong technical background as well. And in the case of WeSchool, our journey is really focused on our thesis. So, we are a thesis driven company, and our thesis is that e-learning doesn't work. It's boring. Nobody likes that. Nobody likes to go through a list of videos. Even just probably the term e-learning, if you mention the term outside the industry to ordinary people, it's not cool at all, even the term itself.

(03:13)
And that's why, in the first bubble, in the first web bubble, it didn't work. And the vast majority of experiences are still around as, far as we see, going through a list of content. We want to change this. And this is very important because if we are in the information age and the most important weapon in the future will be becoming autonomous learners and autonomous teachers, how we teach and learn is really the skill at the base of a new millennium. And so, building the technologies and changing and helping the people to embrace this technology, it's something that I really think it's worth dedicating my life to. And I'm not alone, the EdTech industry is flourishing, so I'm very excited about that.

Yeah. And I definitely agree with you. There's a lot of different e-learnings. And Tim Slade, who I don't know if you know, he's an e-learning development instructional design expert over here in the United States. He came on and he says this in his book too, "Most e-learning is crap." And it really is. You're not thinking about the learner and the interactions, so I'm really glad that you're taking the time to consider those things and bring that to the learning space with WeSchool. So, Marco, you are an EdTech expert as far as I'm concerned. And I want to know from you, how would you personally define educational technology?

Educational technology. So, before answering, I really think that in order to change education, technology is not enough.

Right.

And that it's all about people. I think that Covid proved that because we just accelerated suddenly. We could have done that also before Covid, but we just had to wait, external strong pressures. So, education is complex because the user, the learner is not the adopter, the teacher, is not the payer that is the company of the school, but is not the regulator. So, it's a very complex industry, and for this reason, technology is not enough. Said that, educational technology is the set of technologies that empowers people to learn and teach better in an autonomous way. That's my definition.

Cool. Very simple, straight to the point. I really like that. And I agree with you, technology really does come secondary to the learning part of the situation. And I want to talk more about WeSchool. So let's get into it. You've alluded to some things about WeSchool. So, give us all the details about the product, the service, and describe how you're helping institutions and organizations in education and beyond.

Sure. So, WeSchool is a community learning platform. So we think that at the base of, at the root of a learning and teaching process is people interacting, and not content. So instead of e-learning platforms that are a set of content that you need to comment, and nobody does that. So, we have been talking about such a learning for, I think, 15 years now, 10 years. And then, the platform are just empty deserts, boring. We did the opposite. We start from social technologies, like social networks, and WeSchool is more similar to Slack than to model, just to make examples. And we create communities where people always structure in course, so we're a huge fan of a course space based model.

(06:52)
We don't like the self-paced model where you just feel alone in front of a screen, and if that's the case, it'll always be boring. In this community, you have a set of activities that challenge you in terms of developing content, working with others, do group works, do office hours. So, it's really the engagement experience that we have all experienced in good schools, in good business schools, and it's the opposite of the [inaudible 00:07:18] learning. And it's not just that. It's also to be used when you are physically with other people in the same room. And that's a very important point because...

(07:28)
So you said educational technology. Everybody think about technology that you use when you're not with the same people in the same room, in opposition to what you do when you're together in presence. That's not the case. It's like saying, "I'm in the office, so why should I use a computer? I'm in the office with my colleague." Technology is everywhere. Also, when you are with your girlfriend in the same room, you just use tools in a different way. And that's the same for education. That's why in WeSchool, the 40% of the usage is with people in the same room. It's a collaboration tool as well. And so, in a nutshell...

I'm loving what you're saying, Marco. This is great. I'm really loving this. I'm really loving the collaboration that you're promoting.

And now, we tend to divide internal communication tools on one end like Slack and Teams, LMS's, but that will not be the case in a few years from now. So, what we are seeing is the destruction of the barriers between these tools. And you will learn and teach with tools like WeSchool or Slack, and there will not be such a strict distinction between the learning tools. And that's fine because, if you think, we have been speaking about learning on the job so much for years, but that's just the theory.

(08:47)
When you are in the company, you just have different tools for that. But how can I learn on the job if the learning platform is not the same where I work? They should be merged. And so, in a nutshell, what our prediction is that learning will be divided into two categories. The learning that doesn't matter, the boring one that you just need to do because HR said that in the companies.

I had that experience recently. I had that experience recently where I just listened to videos and I didn't really engage too much. It was just videos.

So, the learning that doesn't matter will be managed by HR, but what really matters to boost the revenues for onboarding people, to train sales forces, to do learning on the job, will be done collaborating by teams. And that's why we created WeSchool, the platform that enables team to learn and collaborate together.

Yeah. I love it, and I really like that collaborative feature, and I feel like people in certain areas can find out where other people are and do different things together. In the states, I did some research recently when I'm studying my doctorate, and I found out that 55%, even if the school's online, about 55 to 60% of people live within 50 miles of the institution that they're taking the online courses for. So, they could definitely use WeSchool to do some collaborative things.

Sure.

I think that is something definitely I would like to introduce to my fellow colleagues, and I want to start using myself. One of the reasons I love doing the show, finding great and new tools. So, tell us a little bit about what's coming up for WeSchool. Don't violate any NDA agreements or things, and do you have anything that you can share with our audience about anything on the roadmap or some of your goals?

Sure. And we don't use NDAs. At the end of the day, it's all about [inaudible 00:11:02]. So-

Oh, okay.

... ideas by itself

Here, it's very big in the United States, so obviously there's a difference there, which is good to know.

Yeah, no, we try... The less money we give to lawyers, better it is. Joking. So, what are we working on? Our roadmap is based around three swim lanes. So, guide and gauge and measure. Our goal is to enable anybody to be an effective structural designer without being one. So, without studying what a structural design is, without studying methodologies. So we started asking ourselves, how can we enable a team leader in a company or any teacher to be an effective educator with a technology that guide you? And a good example of the guide streamline is what we're doing with generative AI.

(11:50)
So, from mid-October, you'll be able to design an entire course. And design, I mean all the detailed macro design, methodologies, topics, subdivision of a lesson, duration of a lesson, icebreakers to catch attention of the audience, everything created by generative AI, and the user can, of course, change everything before delivering the course. And we are doing this basically using our big data to train the models. The second example that I want to give you is related to engage. So, how can the computer help educate or better engaging the learners? And we are creating this teaching assistant that basically just that does what a good teaching assistant human would do. Tell you what you need to listen.

(12:38)
So, instead of having all those dashboard and reports where you need to go through pages of numbers that nobody looks at on LMS's, you have a TA that directly predicts the dropout rates of all the users. So, the TA can say, "Now, we are at 70% of accuracy rate, which are the users that are going to drop." And so, you can act between by drop of course, or the TA tells you which are an effective content. The TA can understand pattern of inequalities. So, we discuss so much about inclusion and inequalities, we need to bring this also in learning platforms. So, who cares if the average grade is six? What I want to know is that if they're all around six or if a class is divided in into groups, health is eight and health is four. This is completely different, right? And the LMS's are not saying that.

Right.

The last example of good things, very good things that we have on our roadmap for the next four or five months is related to measure, our third and last main keyword. Now, everything is within LMS. So if you are outside of LMS and you want to, for example, check the learning credential of somebody before hiring him, you cannot do that. And same is for if you want to give feedback on your school, on the schools that you attended to. So, right now, school reputation is just word of mouth.

(14:13)
So MIT is strong just because it is MIT. You don't have structure data on that. With WeSchool, from October, you'll be able to directly emit credentials on the blockchain, wrapped in NFTs. They're undestroyable, they're on this centralized servers on IPFS, so they cannot be destroyed. So, all the credential of users will be public, if you want to of course. It's not mandatory.

Right.

And whatever happens in the learning platforms becomes a public signal. But everybody out there can use how they want, to give you a job, to give you better condition on a loan. So, your learning credential becomes an information, a signal, we like to say, that is publicly usable.

I love everything that you're saying here. And definitely the guide, engage and measure, and how you're going to be connecting things to the workforce as well. I think that's something that, what you're saying about LMS's have trouble doing is connecting, and especially in higher education over here in the States, is really connecting the learners with the workforce and what they're doing and creating those real world scenarios, and putting them in those situations.

We will send you a demo account as soon as we're ready.

Yes. And I want to definitely share. Yeah, I definitely want to share that with the listeners as well. We're going to put everything in the show notes for WeSchool and how to connect with you, Marco, and how to go out and get a free trial. You've said a lot here, but we're coming up on the final two questions that we like to ask on our show. So, the first one is, is there anything else you'd like to share? Did we miss anything? And then the final question is, your being an EdTech entrepreneur and an expert in this space, we want you to predict the future of EdTech. So, tell us what it will look like. So, did we miss anything? Anything else you'd like to share? And then, tell us what the future looks like.

I'll put the two questions together.

Perfect.

So one, it's not advice, it's more a desire. For anybody out there, is really being self-confident in the fact that everybody is able to teach, will be a teacher. The teacher, teaching is one of the skill of a new millennium. And so, the strong division between learning and teachers and also the fact that teachers is a separate profession is something that will not last forever. And this is great because this will make more accessible the possibility of everybody to improve themselves. And the second desire is more for entrepreneurs in EdTech like me. And it's fine to listen to learners, yes, but let's remember that if you ask two people, they would ask about a faster horse, not a car, right?

(17:20)
So, it's very important if you think about the future of education, to really start from scratch in being very creative in understanding that solutions could be also very extreme, like the one that we mentioned before with AI replacing instructional designers.

Right.

So it's not taboo, or industry are going to converge, like we discussed before about internal communication, merging with learning. It's not a taboo. You can do that. So, let's not have any kind of prejudice. Let's start from scratch, because at the end of the day, what matters is not to preserve roles in companies, but to make people learning. And so whatever we can do to help people to learn, that's fine.

Definitely, and I think that's a great perspective on how learning is going to be. So many people fear what's going to happen, like you said, with AI and replacing roles. But if we work in collaboration with it and use it different ways, it's not going to be about perseverance or competition with the AI. It's about learning the new tool and upskilling ourselves so that we can make learning better.

Yes, you will just have new roles and new technology.

Yeah, new names.

Every time... Exactly. Every time that we progress, we see a new way to progress, and this will create new challenges for new people, new entrepreneur, new excitement. That's life.

Absolutely. I 100% agree with you. Marco, thank you so much for coming on EdUp EdTech and sharing all the things about WeSchool. After all these fun things come out, we're definitely going to want to have you back for our Where Are They Now episode in the next 6 to 12 months so you can give us some updates. Like I said, we're going to put everything in the show notes about where to connect with Marco, go find out more about WeSchool, and we just appreciate you being on and sharing this with our audience.

Thanks again for having me here. And yes, let's chat soon.

Yes.