The following transcript has been edited for readability. Timestamps have been removed and minor transcription errors corrected. Speaker comments and context have been preserved. Please note that Heather's job title has since changed. However, her title in this transcript reflects her position at the time of recording.

Opening Remarks

Rich Portelance

Hello, everyone. My name is Richard Portelance, and welcome to the EdGate Powers podcast. Just a reminder that on June 12th at 11:00 A.M. Pacific Time and 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, we will be hosting a webinar. My friend, Heather Talbot, from EdGate, will be there, and she's here to speak with me today. We also have guests from Edmentum and News-O-Matic. 

It's going to be a great podcast where we're talking about technology and how it's influencing the market today, and what we're seeing in terms of changes and evolutions. So, without further ado, I want Heather to introduce herself and then we'll kick in a little bit further.

Heather Talbot

Hi, guys, my name's Heather Talbot. I have been with EdGate for… gosh, quite some time, over 20 years now. We are a very family-oriented group. So, we've been here, and we've been working together for a while. I started actually in this company as a client support person, supporting some of our other products earlier in the days that we– teacher-facing products earlier in the days, and have just kind of navigated through several different positions, which I feel like have really helped me to be able to grow into the position that I'm in now, which is in business development. 

Talking with people, listening to what their pain points are, and trying to find the right solution to help with making their correlation needs much easier. And that's where I'm at right now. I get to talk with a lot of different people and help problem-solve what their needs are.

Rich Portelance

Heather, thank you. You know, Heather and I have known each other now for, I think, the three and a half or so years that I've been at EdGate, and she is understated as always. She is one of the leaders on our team, and that's because she gets in front of the clients, and she has these conversations, and they trust her, because she's honest and always forthcoming, and it's one of the traits I admire about her. 

Discussion

Rich Portelance

You know, Heather, when you– when you're looking at the marketplace, what's one of the things that you're seeing that may be an indicator to people that, you know, there is change afoot, you know, as we kind of look at these state requirements changing. But are you seeing anything specific that we can pinpoint?

Heather Talbot

There's a couple of things that I feel like that are bubbling to the surface. One of them is just being able to gain visibility on how each state writes their standards, where there may be some crossover as the publishers are building their content out. If they can cover more states where they're similar with, you know, content, versus having to write 50-plus state-specific content pieces, it really helps them in their content development area to have that visibility on where states cross over. 

Also, I've noticed that there's been some stirring around being able to make their correlations more accessible, getting visibility on their correlations and more accessible to their clients or their end users, where they can be more hands off in that, and not having to create reports on the fly all the time by request. Publishers are busy, so they don't have a lot of time to, like, go in and be, you know, creating specific reports for states and whatnot. So, just getting some more easier visibility on their correlation data. 

Rich Portelance

So, what's a reason that an end user would want to have visibility of a correlation? What's the purpose of that? 

Heather Talbot

If I'm a teacher in a classroom and I am doing some research on the curriculums that I want to use in my classroom, I want to be able to just go and take a look. I want to be able to search for a product, I want to be able to see… maybe not necessarily with having to talk to someone specific, because I'm still in the exploration phase. And so, you know, I'm exploring 10 products, and I just want to get a quick glance at where their content meets my standards in my state.

Rich Portelance

Okay. So, meeting the standards in the state, the teachers need to see that.  And you also mentioned during the intro, you were saying that the publishers are needing to report out more and more, right? And so, what types of reports are they looking to generate, and how is EdGate helping to fill that gap?

Heather Talbot

So, there are a couple of different types of reports that publishers are needing to make. They need to be able to show states specifically where their content meets state standards criteria at the state level. And they also, when they're trying to get buy-in from a school district specifically, or a specific school, then they need to be able to present that data as well, to like a school district administrator, or a principal, or, you know, whoever the decision-maker is in a school. And they gather the feedback from teachers specifically on what might be the best thing to implement in their schools.

Rich Portelance

So, the teachers are providing that kind of impetus so that the publishers are meeting the demand. And now, one of the things we talked about before we started to record, we were talking a little bit about the ExACT tool, and like, three years ago, when I started, it was fairly basic, right? But, with the demands that are changing the marketplace, yeah, I know everybody's been working hard in the background to increase the tools and improve the tools that are available through the ExACT system. Can you talk a little bit about that evolution and, you know, what it means to those end users? Because I think there's a connection point through that– or thread through that whole thing, right? 

Heather Talbot

Yeah, certainly. When the tool was first created, there were really two basic functionalities: it was to align your content to standards, and to be able to report out that correlation data. Since then, over the past few years in particular, we have done quite a bit of work just talking with our clients who had been using the tool since its birth, and finding out, you know, what it is that we could integrate into ExACT in order to meet the changing demands in the market right now. And so, we've incorporated… we've done a lot of– made a lot of enhancements and incorporated some new features into ExACT in order to help meet the demands that we're seeing in the market right now. 

There are more robust reporting capabilities as far as not just being able to generate reports on your correlation data, but seeing where the gaps are within your correlations, being able to get that visibility on how standards compare, or how they differ across the various states with a standards comparison reporting feature. We've also added some additional flexibilities around, once you've, you know, got your correlations in the system, how you can modify them, edit them, you can work directly with the standards. There's a global alignment process, and then there's also just working directly with the standards. And so, it just gives our clients more power and more flexibility to be able to meet those state adoptions that they're trying to meet.

Rich Portelance

That's terrific. You know, I was talking a little bit on the last podcast to Melissa Quinn from News-O-Matic, and we were talking about that adoption process across all 50 states. And for them at News-O-Matic, they're publishing five articles per day. 

Heather Talbot

Yes.

Rich Portelance

And all five articles have to be aligned to all 50 states' standards. I think they said K through six… or K through eight was where they were focusing their energies. That's a ton of work, but they were using ExACT to kind of shorten the cycle and get that work done. And so, that's really important, and she talked a little bit about the gap report. Tell us a little bit about that report and why it's so critical. 

Heather Talbot

Yeah, sure. So, it's… As publishers are creating content, it's really… If they're really trying to branch out into new markets, especially if they're very focused in some, but they're looking to branch out into new markets, it can give them the ability to see right out of the gate, like, how does my content meet the standards in this new market that I'm trying to get into? Where are we at? Do we have any gaps? Sometimes, states will give you a certain percentage of alignment that you need to meet their standards. Sometimes it's 100%, sometimes it's 80%. So, the gap reporting feature can give the clients the visibility to see how many of the standards they already meet, and where the gaps are that they might need to create new content, or modify existing content to be able to fill that gap.

Rich Portelance

Okay. So when they're modifying content, they're doing that within whatever tool they use to write content, right? And then, they're doing the alignments within the ExACT system. And I understand now too that in terms of the standards themselves, there's been some improvements and availability to actually develop frameworks and develop standards, where previously we really didn't have that capacity. How has that evolved? Why did that evolve? Because I think that you being customer-facing, you've probably seen the kind of the frontend of, you know, why that all came to be.

Heather Talbot

Another demand in the market that is becoming a little bit more relevant now is that some of our clients are actually creating their own content standards. And also, there's not a lot of consistency across states in how the standards are formatted, how they are authored, and so, one of the newest features that we've been working on is a standards authoring tool. It is available in ExACT, and it provides the ability for states, state agencies, or publishers who are doing this work to have a place where it's organized and easily accessible to all of the team members, versus work– you know, passing around a word document, a PDF, or an Excel document. The frameworks live within ExACT. 

They can be edited within ExACT by any of the team members. Feedback can be provided as well. And we're hopeful that this is just going to be another added benefit that will make creating content easier for our clients. And also for us to branch into new markets as well.

Rich Portelance

Yeah, I would imagine, I mean there's– you know, we have a huge repository of standards that's been built up over the last 27 years, but we've seen this proliferation, especially in the CTE marketplace, of just standards upon standards. And as you indicated, they're all different; they're issued in PDF format and Microsoft Word and… you know. So some standardization of delivery, you know, is probably something in the future that, you know, we need to get to in order for companies to better react to how to comply, or to meet the standard, and to write content to it. 

So, EdGate seems to be at the forefront of that movement which– it's exciting for me, you know, having been in edtech for a long time to see that, you know, that response. It's a very diverse marketplace; there's so much going on, but, you know, that's an important area. It's like the key component to all this content, and all of what's going on with all the 50 states is how do you kind of manage those standards better so that people can have access to them, right? 

Heather Talbot

Yeah, absolutely. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah. So, on the other end of it, when we talked a little bit about the CUI (Correlation User Interface) that EdGate has available, and you've seen some changes or some increased demand for that, what's going on there?

Heather Talbot

So, word on the street is that our clients need to make their correlation data more accessible, easier to access through a search capability, so that they can just, on demand, anybody can– and their end users or their clients on demand at any time, can go and take a look at where their content meets their standards in any state. And so, the Correlation User Interface is a delivery option. 

It's just a basic iframe; you can plug it into anywhere on your website. It's a drop-down search feature where they select their state, so if I'm a teacher in California, then I can select the state of California, I can select the subject that I teach, and the grade level that I teach to, and it will pull back the results of the California standards for grade six for, say, language arts, and it will show me all of the content that is aligned. So, it saves me a lot of time from having to go and search that out for myself if I'm a teacher. 

Rich Portelance

One of the things that I do want to talk to you about Heather is, you know, the use of technology, and we see a lot of movement towards AI in the marketplace, and tools like ExACT have some components of, you know, machine learning, AI, advanced analytics, and other things– other technologies that are embedded to make it move faster, to help it improve alignment, you know, all the things that we need to do. You know, we're using advanced technologies kind of as a broad bucket term to make the tool better and help our clients. What are you hearing on the street? What are you seeing out there? What are people asking for? And what are they using? Let's kind of go down there, and I think there are a couple more questions behind it, but let's just start with what are you seeing? 

Heather Talbot

There… I feel like because it's so new still, I feel like there's a lot of mixed feelings around the AI component in particular. Some people love it, some people are not sure about it. Some people have tried it, and it hasn't worked very well for them. And for EdGate, our… well, without even knowing it, creating an enhanced technology tool, really how that was going to play into today's world, is a beautiful thing, actually. I don't know that we really understood the power that was going to be able to provide to people way, way back when we started to create this tool. 

And just how it was built in order to save time, especially, without– I mean, we still have some people that we talk with that are doing hand correlations state by state, by state, by state. And so, with the enhanced technologies that have been built into ExACT, it saves them time from having to go one state at a time, and then by the time that work is done, the standards have updated, and they've got to go back, and they've got to realign their content again. So, some of the enhanced capabilities within ExACT are being able to do that global alignment. You can align your content to California state standards, and with the features that have been built into ExACT, it will go out and show you right away what the alignments look like in Texas or in Indiana, with just aligning it to California. 

Also, because we have a team that is constantly monitoring and updating the standards as part of, you know, keeping ExACT up to date, is keeping our standards up to date. Once that correlation has been done, the way that the system has been developed is that you don't have to do that correlation again. As the standards are updated in their Standards Repository, it will automatically update the correlations that our clients have created with the most current sets of standards, so they don't have to go back in and do that work again.

Rich Portelance

So, if you didn't hear that, I'm just going to repeat it, because that's really powerful. When the standard is updated on the state’s end, once we bring it in, it automatically updates all the alignments, so you don't have to do that again. Wow. It's a super powerful feature. So, you know, being able to cross over and use– now, there's a tool called Gap Analysis that helps with that process, right? To do more global alignments and be able to figure out where the gaps are in terms of the content, so you can update it and adjust it, right? 

Heather Talbot

Yep, that's correct. Yep. If they are using the gap feature, they can get a high-level view of, you know, the percentage of where there's some statistical reporting that they can see if they are looking at a specific state of how much of the state standards are being met, which will help them to either… Sometimes it's as simple as adding an activity to a lesson in order to make it meet that standard. Or sometimes they'll need to create new content in order to meet specific standards. But using the gap feature gives them that visibility to see that. 

Rich Portelance

And because you work with large publishers and small edtech firms, you have a wide range of clients. Are you seeing some differences in the way they're approaching the market and all the, you know, this continued decentralization? And how do the small edtech providers kind of keep pace? Because they don't have the manpower, you know, a huge company does. What are they doing so that they can keep pace and actually still gain market share?

Heather Talbot

That is such a great question. Being able to do that global alignment process, especially if you have a team of one person that's doing your content correlations, or you're a larger company and you have 10 people that are working on it. I've spoken with people who have one team member who is doing the alignment work for all of the subjects. And then you have people that I talk with where they have a subject matter expert (SME) specifically working on that subject. So, with ExACT being able to do that global alignment process, I feel like that is one of the most key ingredients for smaller publishers to be able to keep up with the larger publishers, is that it doesn't take 10 people to do that work. You can do the work of multiple people in ExACT by being able to globally align your content by aligning it to a single state.

Rich Portelance

That's… I like where you're going, and I love your answer. When you were talking a little bit about the SMEs, and I think it's an important component, because when some people look at the technology, they get scared, right? And, you know, they– I've heard, and I think you have as well, we don't want AI alignments, you know, things like that, right? But it's truly not just an AI alignment when we do it, but we have SMEs in the background, and there's this constant improvement of systems in order to make those alignments as precise as possible, right?

Heather Talbot

That's correct.

Rich Portelance

If you look at that as compared to… you know, we were joking the other day about this kind of idea of “naked” AI or just, you know, straight-on AI tools that are out there and available, and there are companies that are using those to try to do alignments. In your perspective, what's the difference, and how does, you know, how should people look at that?

Heather Talbot

In my opinion only, there is a level of expertise and judgment decision-making that the subject matter experts have based on the experience that they've had teaching the standards in particular, and working with the content specifically. They just– they have such a deep understanding. 

And so, there's always a level of objectivity that can come into doing a correlation. Some subject matter experts would say that this standard does meet– this content item does meet this standard, where another subject matter expert would say, “Well, you're missing this one component specifically in that standard. So, I would disagree. I would say that it doesn't meet that standard.” And so, I feel like that's the most important part of the process that AI can miss.

Rich Portelance

Okay. And so, to hedge on that, you know, so if you're using straight AI, it's missing that subjectivity?

Heather Talbot

Yes. 

Rich Portelance

Heather, one of the things, you know, we were talking earlier a little bit about kind of, you know, looking into the customer world, and things that can help improve what they're doing, and I would like to ask you about the AutoAlign function within ExACT, because I've been told that's an important feature for publishers and for edtech providers. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is? It sounds like it's a complete automation, but I think it might be slightly different. 

Heather Talbot

Yeah, absolutely. AutoAlign is a… It's basically like a correlation recommendation engine. And so, what that does is it will– Based on the metadata that the client enters into ExACT, and when I say metadata, I'm talking about the lesson title, the subject or subjects, and the grade or grades, as well as a really good description of what that lesson is teaching about. This data, again, can be entered into ExACT in a spreadsheet, and using the AutoAlign tool, it will pull back standards that are suggesting that you align to that piece of content. There's still a human element involved, of course, because the person who has submitted the data into the system will review it and either approve or disapprove of the standards that have been pulled back. 

But, it will, right out of the gate, instead of the client having to do that work of, you know, going to the state, looking at the standards in ExACT, picking which ones, it automatically pulls those standards in. So they're front and center right there, and they're just going through the list and saying, “I agree with this one, I agree with this one, nope, this one doesn't make any sense.” And so, it can really– especially if you're working with a large amount of content, it can really get you a lot of the way there right out of the gate. And then, you can go in with the other features in ExACT, review, and make any other kind of edits. But it'll get you so close to a full alignment right out of the gate with the AutoAlign suggestion.

Rich Portelance

Now, a lot of the components and what EdGate does is all based on these 27 years of experience, and, you know, the viewing audience probably doesn't have a sense of kind of how it's all evolved, but there is a Concept Index and a kind of proprietary technology behind this whole thing that was invented a long time ago. There were patents on that, and it's kind of the underlying function or feature of ExACT. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I think it's good to get the history and understand how the platform was developed and how we still operate today. 

Heather Talbot

Yeah, absolutely. You're literally spot on with that description. We have created the magic behind ExACT. And really, when our subject matter experts are correlating content as well, they use a very similar process, and that is leveraging our taxonomies. We have one for every subject, so there's one for language arts, math, science, social studies, and so on. And those were created from our subject matter experts going through the very painful process of reviewing every single standard and every single state for the subject area that they are an expert in. And they have identified the concepts that are rooted within the standards. And so, our taxonomies are a derivative of the concepts that are rooted within the standards. 

If you try to match, you know, one state’s standard to another state's standard that's teaching the same thing by the words that are used only, it doesn't always line up, because standards are written so differently. But the concept that's being taught is still the same. 

And so, we've created our taxonomies based on the concepts being taught in the standards. And that is how our global alignment process can work: you use our taxonomies to also identify the concepts that a piece of content is teaching to. And by tagging that content, we call it tagging, by tagging that piece of content with the proprietary taxonomy, it will pull in any of the standards in any of the states, or even international standards where the concept is the same. So, if it's teaching about, you know… photosynthesis in science, it's going– and you tag it with a photosynthesis concept from our taxonomy, it's going to pull in all of the photosynthesis standards in any of the states that are in science. That one's a little bit of a tongue twister. 

Rich Portelance

You have to repeat photosynthesis three times for the audience.

So, you know, having this proprietary taxonomy, it sounds like a lot of work went into it over the years to develop those. And then, there's something called “metadata” that's associated with the standards that we put into our repository. There's a naming convention that I've heard us use about this, and the largest enhanced set of standards in the world. And this enhancement partially is metadata. Can you tell us what that is? What is the metadata and why is it important? 

Heather Talbot

Yeah, so the– which is, by the way, it's ongoing work. Our taxonomies, our subject matter experts are constantly… they're evolving all the time, because standards change. What's being taught is changing, and so we need to pivot with that. And so, the work on our taxonomies is ongoing work. 

And the metadata that is involved, as far as the standards go, we ingest the state standards exactly how they are represented by the state. So, their nomenclature can be different; some states have three levels of standards, some states have five levels of standards. We call it the “Parent-Children Hierarchy”. The top level standard is the parent standard, and then everything that might fall beneath it are the children's standards, and teachers usually teach to the lowest level child standard. But we tag all of the standards. We ingest the standard IDs, we ingest all of the text of the standards at every level, and then we go through the process of correlating the standards with our taxonomies. And so, all of that metadata lives in our Standards Repository, so that– and it's, you know, connected to ExACT. So, when a client is correlating their content using ExACT, and they pull in that standard, they're pulling in also those taxonomy terms or concepts that are attached to that standard.

Rich Portelance

Okay. So, you're getting a lot more than just the standard, and having that availability is really a huge benefit because there's a lot of add-in functions or features to those standards that allow it to be more pliable, flexible, and readable, right?

So if I'm a small edtech firm, and I'm trying to get my content aligned, it sounds like, you know, these services that are built in that have been developed off of, you know, the experience and by kind of hands-on, you know, from the concept and the taxonomy, to today ExACT, are of real benefit in terms of speed to market, right? That's one of the things that we talk about kind of internally is, you know, how do we help our clients get to market faster? If you look at multiple clients, you have, let's say 10 of them in front of you. Is there something common that most of them are doing on a smaller scale that would be helpful to know about if I'm, you know, a non-client?

Heather Talbot

I think that the commonality is the ability to do that global alignment process without… being able to align their content in less time is really, I think, the most common theme for any size publisher, is being able to get your content aligned to standards in general quicker and efficiently. It's not just about getting it done fast, but it's getting it done, you know, accurately. And so, being able to align your content to one set of standards, and then have it, you know, automatically feed out and pull in all of the other state standards, then being able to have visibility on that, and then being able to review that and go through all at once, instead of having to do it, you know, one at a time, saves any size publisher so much time. So, just being able to get it align– get your content aligned to all of the states and/or international much quicker helps, because all the adoption processes also are different. 

The timelines on them change. Sometimes, our clients have had to pivot within weeks. So, a state will put an adoption out there, and they will give them a matter of weeks in order to submit for that adoption. And so, if their content is already correlated in ExACT, they can just go in and take a quick, high-level look and see where do we meet the standards in this specific state. They can generate a report that shows that data, they could submit that, or they can, you know, some states have a customized report format that you have to submit the data in, but they can– all of the data is accessible in ExACT. So they can access that data to be able to submit that information much quicker to any state.

Rich Portelance

So, one of the questions that comes up is, you know, I know we provide free access to CASE IDs. How does that help our clients, you know, manage some of those processes?

Heather Talbot

It's still fairly early in the process, but the whole purpose was to be able to streamline the interoperability between platforms ingesting and/or showing standards, because we mentioned very early in the conversation that state standards author standards in very different ways. Their number structures are different and they have a variety of levels of standards. So CASE (Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange) was created to help streamline that interoperability. And so, it… I'm still not 100% sure how that helps in presenting the data specifically to a school, but, I do– what I understand is it helps it be easier to ingest in a variety of platforms. So, if a publisher sells their content to a district, and they need to ingest it into a system in some way, having that CASE GUID or CASE ID, I believe, helps streamline that process. 

Rich Portelance

Makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. You know, having some common denominator, right, that they can latch on to and then they can pull the data in, right? So that's just one more way in which EdGate's trying to make things a little bit simpler as we see the changing demands. And another thing that, you know, you and I have spoken about before is these third-party reviews, which seem to be on the rise as more and more states are asking for it. How is that shaking out? Are you seeing that continued trend, and is EdGate helping with that?

Heather Talbot

Yeah, absolutely. We definitely– That is on the rise. And it is basically just that a publisher is aligned; they did the correlation work there themselves, but some districts or states require an outside party to do– to review that work and confirm that work. And that's oftentimes where we see the most aggressive timelines to submit for adoptions is getting that third-party review. And it's so… EdGate partners with several different companies that– we do that work pretty much year-round for, and we just go through the process of reviewing the work that the clients have already done. We provide them feedback where we might see where they don't fully align to a standard. Some states require, like I mentioned earlier, 100% meeting of the standards in order to be adopted, and that's really aggressive. So, we take the time to review the correlation work that our publishers have already done, and then we provide them detailed feedback. We don't just say yes, it meets this, we agree with this, or no, we don't agree with it. If we don't agree with content or a lesson meeting the standard, we will explain specifically why, where, and what part of the standard has been missed. And sometimes, we often can provide a suggestion on, you know, if you just added this or changed this in the lesson, then you'd meet that standard.

Rich Portelance

It's a lot of work. 

Heather Talbot

It is a lot of work.

Rich Portelance

It's a lot of work to get compliant. 

Heather Talbot

Somebody's got to do it! 

Rich Portelance

Someone's got to do it, but, you know, it just kind of shows the trends that are happening in education today in this diversified approach and, you know, how companies like EdGate are trying to meet the demand and help our clients be able to sell their content into schools and let kids learn better. 

Heather Talbot

There's a lot of pressure on publishers. There's a lot of pressure on publishers to meet very different demands depending on what state they're trying to get into. And so, we do try to make that process as painless as possible.

Closing Thoughts

Rich Portelance

And I want to remind everybody that June 12th, 11:00 A.M. Pacific Time, 2:00 pm Eastern Time, we're going to be having a webinar. Heather is going to be there, Edmentum is going to be joining us along with News-O-Matic, and we're going to be talking about some of these topics in a little bit more detail. 

Heather, you know, I really appreciate your perspective, and I know that you're just a genuine person who wants to help out and do good. Is there anything else that you think that we missed or you would like to share, you know, regarding the marketplace and what's happening in some of these trends? 

Heather Talbot

I think we covered a lot of ground. I would just, you know, be open to… if anybody is listening to this or has additional questions about anything that we discussed, or anything that we didn't discuss, EdGate tries to be really flexible, because all of our clients have such different needs and such different times, that we have a great team of out-of-the-box thinkers. And so, we really take the time to talk with people, learn about what it is that their specific need is, and if we have something that is currently in place that we can help with that need. 

Or, if it's something new that, you know, we are confident we can do, we just haven't done it in abundance before, but our team is very, very out-of-the-box creative, and we really do support– And oftentimes we joke, no one client relationship is the same. Every relationship that we have is very different. Our clients have very specific needs, so we just make sure that, you know, we listen to what it is that their need is, and really focus on trying to help solve that problem.

Rich Portelance

Well, that's a terrific way to close out this interview, Heather. Thank you so much for your time today, and I look forward to talking with you soon. 

Heather Talbot

Thank you! Yep. Thanks, Rich