Under Pressure Unpacking the Strain on U.S. Higher Education

Host  0:00  
Hello and thank you for joining us today on our 54th episode, for Filling Seats Podcast, brought to you by StudentBridge. I'm Jonathan Clues, the CEO and founder here at StudentBridge. I'm back in the studio today. Got a great guest with Marc Barron, Barron, who is the Co-Founder and EVP at CourseKey and, so Marc, love to hear from you. So please introduce yourself to the viewers and listeners today. 

Marc Barron  0:25  
Yeah, I'm a, I like to kind of phrase myself as a soft software person, which means we, you know, we look at creative ways for solving challenges. And right now, our main focus is solving solving challenges for you know, universities, colleges in the vocational and career space.

Host  0:46  
That's brilliant, excellent. And so today we're going to be talking dive into some real time data automation and how real time data and automation are transforming student success stories and strategies. And reality is that this is student success is huge. We work very much as StudentBridge on the recruitment of students, and it's like a relay race, and you gotta move the baton to the next thing, which is, can you retain them? Will they stay? Will they stay for the 4-5-6, years it takes so, so that's what we're here to talk about today. Let's just jump straight into it. Look what let's talk about, what you were to talk about, why was CourseKey created? 

Marc Barron  1:23  
Yeah, well, we were created because originally, when we were in college classrooms, we were told to put our devices away, and we realized that the strength of the device and everything, all the information that we can pull from it is is beneficial in the classroom setting, for obvious reasons. And so our our goal was to say, how do we get colleges and universities to accept devices in the in the classroom, versus just accepting it outside of classroom through like LMS channels and in other tech solutions? How do we get them to embrace it in the classroom? And we realized that we had to provide some some benefit to staff and instructors in order to do that. So we hit the ground running to find out what technologies did they use, what technology did they wish existed in the classroom? And we started building so that started.

Host  2:13  
And I know that you you serving over 300 vocational education institutions. So it's a fantastic number. How many are there?

Marc Barron  2:22  
How many are there? Oh, there's definitely, you know, I would say anywhere from 1500 to 2000 just vocational schools.

Host  2:31  
That's brilliant, brilliant. So we talk about Gen Z a lot, Gen Z being obviously typical undergrad versus a graduate, non traditional learner. Why do they require a different engagement strategy than previous generations?

Marc Barron  2:43  
Well, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. One of them we always hear, you know, millennials started analog and went digital, and so they can accept both forms and different types of channels, whereas Gen Z is native digital. But what does that kind of mean? Like, what does it mean to be native digital. You know, we kind of understand that they were born with devices readily available and accessible. Unlike, you know, millennials, where we were used to dial up, we didn't get introduced to computers until much later in life, whereas Gen Z was from the beginning since they were an infant. So you're too young to have children. I'm going to guess.

Host  3:18  
I would say I have a child

Host  3:20  
You look young on this podcast, but the my eight nine, I've got an eight, nine year old. She about to turn 10. They're definitely neonatious. So, I mean, they weren't born with a digital device in their hand. So we try and actually limit their screen time, as responsible parents should. But they are definitely very savvy about moving around on a mobile they've got computers from school, they bring home. It's pretty impressive to watch how they navigate these devices.

Marc Barron  3:50  
Yeah, and how they see they assume that every digital screen is a touchscreen, and they start to navigate and swipe accordingly right. And that's not the case. I don't, I don't look at a screen and automatically assume it's a touch screen, whereas my child does, right? But there's, there's some reasons behind this, which I kind of want to dive into a little bit more. I don't know if you've ever seen the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.

Host  4:13  
I've seen it advertised. Do you recommend I should watch it? 

Marc Barron  4:18  
Yes, because it dives into the psychology in like the strategy behind the Social Media Solutions, if we call them, our social media apps, and kind of how they worked with some of the top professors, from a user experience standpoint, a psychology standpoint, to create in a demand for their products. And once you understand that you are constantly competing with 1000s of engineers that are intentionally designing processes and technology and notifications to get your eyeballs to their platforms, when you realize that you are sitting as one individual, and on the other side of that device, there's 1000s of engineers focusing on getting you to focus on that device. When you understand the psychology behind it, then you understand why these, these Gen Z, why this generation is so focused on devices. And they operate on devices, and they and everything that they expect to do in life stems from, how are these social media platforms grooming their behavior, in their action? And I think that's fundamentally something that most schools, or at least forward thinking schools that I work with, they understand this, because once you, once you understand what social media did to us as humans, it then kind of sets the proper expectation for how do I leverage these things to engage with students with academic related activities versus, you know, some trend that's happening on Tiktok it influences how CIOs and and chief academic officers are leveraging technology to kind of influence academic behavior versus behavior on on social media platform, important context that people should know and understand, of like, what is Silicon Valley doing when it comes to changing behavioral patterns? 

Host  6:11  
Yeah, right. You think of car thieves, and then you got these engineers trying to work out how to outfox the car thief, and you got engineers to outfox the people that put protection in your car, and it's the same, yeah, we're here as consumers, just clicking around. But there's, there's very many smart people in the world trying to create ways to create a behavior from us that will get and I was gonna say about, like you could talk about social media, and I know that's obviously a term that's been around for 20 years, but, but I was watching my kids play Roblox, and there's chat in there. I mean, like, you chat and socially, oh, obviously my friend here, that's social. It's not, it's social media. By the way we think of social media, posting a story or an article or doing something like, Look at me. But it's, it's still some form of social digital media. It's, yeah, yeah. 

Marc Barron  7:01  
And it's one of those things I'm glad you brought that up. Is this generation isn't just consuming content, they're curating and personalizing it so and their gaming interactions and all their other digital interactions, they're really looking at like extending their identity online. And one example was Fortnite. Okay, have you the game fortnight where never played it? Okay, it's in 2021 which is it's, it's gone beyond that. In 2021 they saw $5.8 billion in revenue. And it's a free game. And the reason why they've saw so much revenue is because in that game you can personalize your your persona. So you can change the skin the way that it looks. You can change and add dances. You can change the cars that they drive. And you can pay for those personalized approaches. And they're receiving so much money from the younger generation saying, I want to broadcast myself to the world with this skin, with this car, with this dance, and that is something that people are paying for so that, because now they're spending more times on screen. So they want to personalize and have they want to basically create a new persona online, which is much different than generations before them. 

Host  8:16  
Yeah, right. So I saw a study. I don't want to misquote data, but so I'm not going to give the actual data, but it was just talking about the high percentage of people now that actually expect a degree of personalization. Like, it's almost personalization becomes table stakes. It's like, if you're not doing it, yeah, no, no one wants to be thought of just the number they want to be thought so.

Marc Barron  8:36  
Exactly, yeah. So it's, it's, it's, they're completely it's one thing to say Gen Z is different, and Gen Z's digital first, but it's it's just you got to go a step, a layer deeper to understand, like, why are they different? And what are these other platforms that they use every single day? How are they being effective in in driving action or driving attention to those platforms? And then, if you can see that there's a successful model there. It's, How do we try to recreate that in the academic world? That's something that I think about every single day, and some of the leaders in the space, that's something that they're also thinking about. It's not just having a digital presence. It's more of like, how should I engage with these students? It's completely different. 

Host  9:17  
Yeah, the digital presence. I mean, 92% of purchase decisions are created on the digital presence. First the decision, the decision is formed and moved quite far down the buying decision process on digital channels before a human interaction even occurs. So that one so, so they require a different you got to engage with that audience differently. Let's just talk about the downside. But what happens when an institution an institution fails to adapt to Gen Z, whether it be recruitment or student success or what's the data showing? I mean, I imagine it's pretty straightforward and obvious. What are people saying if you fail to talk to this Gen Z, in a way they're used to talking what's happening? 

Marc Barron  9:18  
Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot of different things, right? So if you're just using traditional channels, often times this, this generation is not checking those channels. So if you're just emailing, they're not paying attention emails, especially if they're generic, right? If now you can be a little bit more personalized in your email approaches, which, which is what I've seen some schools do so, for instance, they do this intake during enrollment to say, what type of Persona is this student, what type of learner are they? And then once they categorize those students based on their learner type, they say, moving forward, every type of engagement that I have with this learner type should have a very different tone. It should have a different frequency. It should have a different you know, the content should be shorter or whatever. So there's things that they're learning about the student upfront in the enrollment process that they're then using during the, you know, active student life cycle, which is, if I have an advisor reaching out to a student, it'd be nice to know, you know, the more information they have about the student in the forms of communication that they prefer, the more the more likely they are going to be to reach that student and engage with that student in a meaningful way. And so the state of Arizona kind of did, did something really awesome, which is they they used AI and SMS messaging, and saw a 50% increase in response rates from students, and that that messaging was was tailored, tailored to the students, so it was more personalized and and they seeing a lot more engagement in response rates from students. Like personalizing it, not just saying, I'm going to send this mass communications out to everybody. Once they started tailoring it to the different types of people on the campus and using different channels like social media and things like that, they saw a lot more engagement for the students. So if you fail to do this, you're going to see your click rates and your engagement rates continuously go down and down. And that's what some of the some of the executives that I meet with regularly, they say my open rate on email is like less than 20% now it's like 80% of the students aren't receiving the information that we want them to receive. And so how do we fix that? And it's using the channels that they like to use. Is how you I think, I think open rate in email has always been slightly blind anyway, right? Because, yeah, 

Host  12:19  
Your web client or your email client counts as an open. When you just even scroll past it, it's just open, but it doesn't mean there's been any engagement whatsoever. I mean, so even the 20% it's probably inflated, it's probably 4% actually opened it. The rest is just clicking through to get to the next message. 

Marc Barron  12:35  
So yeah, of course. And thinking about, like, the type of channel. So even with the email, right, if you're using just like email with a big with a lot of copy, versus email with some, like, short form video, that drastically changes things, right? Like, I've seen some schools that are user generated content is also up. And so I don't know if how familiar that that is to the audience, but it's, it's basically, instead of the school saying, this is the information I want to share with you, and have this like good production commercial, versus an ex student or a graduate saying, this was my experience at campus, or an active student saying, This is my experience come to the school the Gen Z, you know, generation is looking at that and saying, I trust that more than I trust this, this will 

Host  13:24  
That's the world we live in a student bridge. And so what, what I think you're talking about there is interesting, because it's actually a blend of two things that user generated. Is purely the production value. Yeah, then you've got the authenticity of the content and and people you I think, I think it's got away a little bit, actually, but they used to think that if you're filming on a shaky phone moving around, it was more authentic. And then you start seeing these terrible TV commercials of these are not paid actors, and it's the people talk about the new Buick car, and it seems so cheesy, right? And so what you find is that content has the right production value as well. So if you're looking at a sports star, right, and he's highly authentic, or she's highly authentic, it's different than being set up at a nice studio, having a film versus, hey, I'm in the locker room, right? It's actually the same person arguing the same content. It's just the way it's produced is kind of a different impact. Conversely, sometimes we do the shaky cam of a mobile phone and then try it could be too it could be too awkward. So we actually find that the production value as well as the authenticity of the way it's produced, and authenticity and what's been said on two different things that need to come together. But, yeah, 

Marc Barron  14:38  
Yes. Great point. A great point. Like, it matters. Like, one thing to say, Okay, we're just going to communicate to students with 15 cent, 15 second videos, like, maybe or eight second videos, because that's now the attention span. But you know, you have to be mindful with who's going to be in that video. How is it shot in, you know, what is the information that they're saying in that eight seconds. So all of that has to come together, and it's forcing schools to be a little bit more deliberate about how they engage with their students if they want the response that they're looking for. It's one thing just to have the activity, to say we're engaging and we're sending things out. It's another to say this is the impact that it's having on their behavior, and that's really what I try to focus on with my organization is like, how do we influence behavior in a way that we want to influence that behavior? And some might frown on that concept, but I think it's important, because that's what all these social media apps are doing. Like, when you know, I've met with the head of product at Tiktok, and that's what they focus on, right? Actually focus on, how do I make sure that people are looking at Tiktok first, and they're influencing behavior. And so when I talk with academics and people at schools, it's like, how do you influence the behavior that you want, and in a way that they're used to having that behavior influence? 

Host  15:55  
Do you get people to frown at you for saying, influence behavior? 

Marc Barron  15:59  
I don't think so I so far, nobody has told me that, but I think it could be looked at in 

Host  16:05  
I think in life we influence but salaries influence behavior. Upside commission plans influence behavior. Exactly we influence behavior in everything we do. I influence behavior in my children, my wife influence behavior in me. There's always behavior to be influenced and and so, yeah, technologies move into that is clearly unavoidable. I mean, technology has the ability to to observe in a way that humans potentially could be biased in the observation, right? We're confusing the unbiased observations, so the ability to then use that observation to tune in the behaviors for the next person is only common sense, right? I mean, it just makes common sense. 

Marc Barron  16:45  
Yeah. So it's talking about behavior. I don't know if you've if you are familiar with the book atomic habits. Atomic habits was a really big trendy book the last couple of years on just kind of creating different habits daily for yourself, and how to do that when you know, like, hey, I want to be better at my my dental hygiene, right? Like, how do you do that? You make, you make your toothbrush more accessible. You focus on maybe just brushing a couple of teeth, not your whole mouth. Maybe you say, I'm just going to dedicate 10 seconds to it. Like, you make it easier, right? You go to the gym, even if it's only for 10 minutes if you want to work on your your your fitness, and then eventually you're like, 10 minutes isn't enough. I'm going to do it for 15 and so, like, it's the tiny changes that make a long term impact. And so that book was in that book was influenced by a book called Tiny habits, which was written by a professor who kind of talked about this behavioral model, and the behavioral model being, in order for an action to take place, people have to be motivated, capable, and they have to be nudged. And if you if something like nudged you to do something, and then you're motivated to do that thing, and you're capable of doing it, you're more likely to do it. And so if somebody said, Hey, Marc, I want you to knit me the sweater. And maybe I'm motivated to knit the sweater, but I don't have anything to knit, then I can't do it, no matter how much I want to, right? But I've always in front of me and I'm motivated to do it for whatever reason, I'm more likely to do it right. Maybe a sweater is a bad example, but it's the same, it's the same concept with students, right? It's like, I want you to do this thing, but if you're not prompting them to do that thing, they're not motivated to do that thing, and it's not easy for them to do it, then they're not likely to do it. 

Host  18:30  
We've learned two things already. Marc, first of all, you're gonna not what's one thing? You're gonna show me up on how thinly read and thinly watched I am. I don't watch the show you said. I haven't read those books, so they go on my Amazon wish list. So that, yeah, of course, that's cool. Now that makes sense. Look, I mean, look, humans don't like change, right? I mean, famous, and the number one thing that stops change is humans. So, so this the thing you just described, where you change habits. Bit by bit, our COO here at StudentBridge is saying, I don't think he invented it, but how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time, right? So, yeah, same thing. You got to create these small habits. It's about six to eight weeks for a small habit to become a habit, from what I believe, six months for bigger habits. And so you can create habits, small habits, much easier, 

Marc Barron  19:18  
Of course. And that's the thing is, and that's what we have to do with students as well. It's like, if we want them to focus more on academics, where traditionally they weren't, how do we kind of drip those things and get them motivated to do it, and then prompt them to do it, and then make it easy for them to do it? That's where the mobile first comes. It plays a big factor, like if they're able to do more things from their mobile device that are related to your school and your organization, then, and they're prompted to do that regularly, and you know, then they're more likely to do it. And so that's kind of the things that we focus on with our product lines, is making it easy, making it accessible, and then trying to bring in some type of the meeting factor. 

Host  20:00  
Have you seen some form of content that look so actually, I shouldn't ask a loaded question, because I I have a belief, and I'll tell you my belief first, right? That content in itself, though, has a right screen size to sit on. So look, you may be all right watching the Super Bowl on your mobile if you don't have a bigger device near you, yeah? So you're on the train, you're going to watch it on this, right? You're in the back of an Uber, you're going to watch it on this. If you're at home with your seven inch flat screen on the wall, you're not watching it on your mobile device, correct? True, true, right? And then the same, like when you want to watch a feature movie, a real blockbuster, yeah, probably the best place for it is the movie theater. Yeah, exactly. The audio, the popcorn, the sticking to the floor, all the stuff that makes the experience of going to the theater right now, when it comes out on Netflix or, you know, on a bit available and streaming, it's still a good experience if your TV is big enough, etc, etc, but you gravitate to the bigger screen. But then that's not the same with short form content. Short Form, if we went to the movie theater and just watched a bunch of short form content, it's a humongous, 40 foot screen, it would seem weird, right? Yeah, Have you seen content being pushed to Gen Z, or any, any, I know we talk about Gen Z like they're like different DNA, but so any, any, any digital user. Have you seen content been pushed to a mobile device? It just doesn't seem like it lives there.

Marc Barron  21:28  
No, I haven't. And I think the the at least for the world that I live in, a lot of people are trying to go digital and trying to do more on mobile. So they haven't, they haven't overdone it. Yeah, they haven't figured out, like, Okay, well, if 100% of these things that I want to go on mobile, maybe I'm only at five of them. So I haven't seen what happens when they get to the to the least priority ones, where maybe that's not the best experience in mobile. I haven't seen that yet, just because a lot of the a lot of the folks that I deal with are have a big mobile initiative, but they haven't actually done it fully yet. 

Host  22:04  
So yeah, I think it's really interesting. Really interesting talking to you, Marc, because we live in a different world. At StudentBridge, we're here to market to students through marketing channels, to help recruit students. And what's been really interesting to us. Interesting to us is 82% of our experiences are actually delivered over a large device, desktop, laptop, yeah, not mobile. And so we did some research into this and looking at why. And it's back to the far the whole large emotional purchase mentality, then the swipes again. My eight, nine year olds can type really quickly on the touch keyboard, but when it comes to true productivity, we want to fill out forms that really matter on a good keyboard. We want to read small print. Hey, is there small print? Is there more information? So, so there's been a natural thing to gravitate towards larger devices in the buying cycle, but what you're saying is, once the relationship's there, and I can see it's not, imagine you're buying a vacation, right? Expensive vacation you might go, and I don't know if you're married or not, but assume you are, because you said you had son or daughter, son or daughter, yeah, go, go. Girl Dad, I'm girl, yeah, go. Girl, dad. So like, but like, you know, you buy that vacation by looking at it on different screens, and like, showing your your partner or wife or whatever it might be. And so you do that, and then you come back. But when you're on the vacation, you're not carrying a laptop around, so as the resort wants to ping your latest event, or you're trying to find out where somebody is, you're just swiping left, right. And so I believe phones are really good for that kind of snacking content as well. Like, yeah, of course, really good. But of course, it's the mobility of a mobile phone that means it's just always with you. It's always in your pocket, it's always in your hand. It's like your best friend. It's always there for you. It's dependable to that runs out battery and so so basically that I I can see where you hang your hat in this education relationship, why there's no content that doesn't work over mobile for us, this certainly is so it's really interesting, different things, 

Marc Barron  24:04  
yeah, and one thing is, maybe the nudge is through the native mobile device, and the actual action takes place on a desktop device, right? I've had that plenty of times where I'm like, nudged, oh, I got this thing that I got to do when I get home onto my computer where I'm more comfortable doing it, I'm going to do it. But this reminds me that I got to do it. Yes, that's it's being able to leverage those different channels in different ways. One is, again, it goes back to the the ability, the motivation and the nudge right, and those three things got to come together in order for action to take place. If the nudge took place on your mobile device, but you're you're more able and capable to do it on your on your on your laptop or your desktop, and you have the ability to do it now. You're going to do it now, right? And so that's kind of how all those things kind of come together the channel, I think.  Using the mobile channel is good for the nudge component. It might not be great for carrying out the action, but it's good to like influence the behavior. 

Host  25:09  
So look, uh, Microsoft study back from 2023 all those years ago, said Gen Z's attention spans just eight seconds, which is four seconds shorter already than millennials, yeah, which means that no Gen Z is listening to this part of this podcast, because they've already tuned. Yeah, they've already left. But, uh, but like, when you talk about that, that's again, that I like this idea, this nudge, because you're not trying to provoke the actual action there, and then you're just trying to stay stop. Of Mind, top of mind, yeah, you're trying to, again, influence behaviors. So the behavior is, Marc, get home. Do this, get any to do list and and I do see a big value in and I use it myself when my mobile experience is in tune with my desktop experience. So if I do something like bookmark or set a reminder here, and I get back to my larger screen to do the work, do the thing, it's in tune. So I imagine it's been quite big for school. Look, students have their cell phones and mobiles and course and class, but they will have 95% Gen Z own a smartphone. Yeah, I imagine a large percentage also own a larger device. 

Marc Barron  26:14  
Of course. Yeah, we did some studies a couple of years ago where it was of all the schools that use this, and you know, you're talking about hundreds of 1000s of students, I think it was 98% of them had three or more devices. Wow, the mobile that's a tablet or that's a desktop and or laptop, right? They had three or more devices that they could access. So I don't know if we want to adopt this, because I don't know if students will have the devices. We said, well, why don't you just ask your students and see if they have them. And sure enough, after a few schools doing that survey, they realized, okay, yeah, having access to a device is not as challenging as we thought. You know, there's this is equitable things like that minute. It just so happens that most of the students have some device, unless they're completely like, against devices, right? Which is, which is different. 

Host  27:06  
And I don't see that when you see 95% it's like, Who's the other 5% but they could be underprivileged, underserved, yeah, it could be their anti device. So, like you say it could be anything, right? Because, yeah, and then, and then you said something quite interesting there, that the three or more, what's happening with tablets. Are tablets still prevalent? Are they kind of mostly small screen to big screen? Or there's still a room for that kind of 14?

Marc Barron  27:31  
Yeah, they're still prevalent, depending on the program, depending on like the type of student. So for instance, I know some some nursing programs are really heavy on the tablets because they have, you know, when you're in, like, chemistry classes or classes where you have, like, certain types of, you know, chemical compounds that you need to draw out, like, simple desktop isn't good enough. Sometimes you got to draw things. Sometimes you got to annotate things. So, like, certain programs require that touch screen a little bit a bigger estate, exactly. So it really, you know, it's, I've seen it pretty, pretty frequently in a lot of these schools. Most of them issue, you know, laptops, but I do see a lot of students having some type of tablet device just because the real estate's a little bit bigger, while still giving you the touch screen and drawing capabilities that most laptops don't offer. You made me smile earlier in the podcast when you said about kids don't understand it. I see my kids do this. They go up to screen that isn't touch screen. It's almost like blown their mind, like, what? How do I navigate? They don't know what they're doing. So they think it's broken. Yeah, the thing is broken. My daughter will go and touch my new Mac, and I'm like, don't that thing doesn't swipe, get your fingers off it.

Host  28:48  
What we've definitely confirmed today multiple devices, devices are important. I love the nudge. Talk a little bit more. You know, start kind of like seeing at the end of the show now, but like, talk to me a little bit about some takeaways of what you've learned through your years. Of course, key and founding the company, like, what mission are you trying to serve? And give me some case studies if you can?

Marc Barron  29:12  
Yeah, I mean, so we're trying to the entire goal is everything that you used to do in the classroom, in a learning environment that was a paper process needs to go digital, right? There's a, there's a lot of reasons for that. One, it's the manpower. It's the compliance component behind making it, you know, having a paper process for 1000s of students and, you know, hundreds of employees, where things can get lost. Things can get improperly documented, and you don't have a lot of analytics behind what's happening on paper, because somebody has to take that paper, turn it into something digital, log it into a system, and then maybe eventually run a report on it, and then do some analysis on it. What we found is all of that process and all the people that it has to go through in order for you to finally get to some analysis point that takes too long. It's, sometimes it's, you know, it's delayed by weeks. And no longer is that analysis relevant to you, because now you're dealing with a new thing today, right? And so a lot of that analysis doesn't take place. And what happens is students are impacted. Instructors are impacted. Schools. Impacted. Schools are impacted. If students don't know that they're doing they're not doing well, they're going to assume that they're doing well, right? If you're only reporting on on their grades and or assessments once a month and or their attendance once a month, you know they just have these assumptions that I'm doing better than I am, and then they find out midway through the term, I'm actually not doing well, and I have to try to catch up, right? So a lot of what we do is try to make sure that everything that was paper or antiquated process or manual process that introduces some compliance risk. Let's mitigate that by going digital. Once you go digital, then it starts to get fun, right? Then we can start to serve up analytics to you and tell you, like, what's happening in an in a in person learning environment that you didn't have visibility into before because somebody was manually entering it data a week, you know, a week behind. And so we try to give school leaders, program directors, you know, executives, optics into what's happening on campus in real time. And 

Host  31:22  
So that's, that's the digital push, right? So, yeah, pre digital.  And I don't mean like, the last 510, 15, 2040, years. I mean digital, digital has been around a long time. But, like, it was very anecdotal. Like, I do this, I think it works a bit like, bit like billboards on the side of a freeway. I do it because I kind of have a rough idea that 20,000 cars go by the average consensus, 1.3 people in a car, whatever it is. And so I've got an audience about this, but you can't actually tell the person was down the radio looking out the window. You can't tell. And so it was like, it was kind of like data was almost meaningless. It was like a it was a number, but there was no context around it. And I think that the move to digital, this is where we we really see it ourselves. It sounds like you see it is. It's closing the loop really quickly, because you can measure such interaction like did a person scroll up, scroll down, but it's down the screen now you can't tell us on clicks a video and walks off and makes a in England, a cup of tea, America, a cup of coffee, you can't tell that to the email open rate. You can't tell Well, that was them swiping through, and the mail client counted it as an open but it wasn't so there's still gaps. But yeah, I think when you watch behaviors, when you when you monitor behaviors and really observe, that's when it's really key 

Marc Barron  32:38  
Exactly. So just going digital allows you to start tracking things at a faster rate and allows you to have visibility and things you didn't have visibility into, and then you can start to be creative with, like, Okay, now that I know these things about my students and or my campus or my instructors, you know, if I want to change some of that behavior, how do I do it? And then how do I measure it? But giving you the ability to measure it regularly and often, drastically changed how the schools operate, and it impacts student retention metrics. Like you focus on retention on the front side of the funnel, which is admissions. We focus on retention during the active student populations. At the end of the day, they want to see them to graduate, right? Because if they get they graduate, they go out and they get good jobs, they say good things about your school, and they're contributing members to society, if they drop out, then there's this negative, you know, there's this negative reaction to your organization or your school, and then, you know, they don't go out to the market, and it just has a trickle effect. And so giving them those those tools to measure how things are doing, and giving them the ability to react to that is making all the difference with student outcomes. At least as far as we've seen so far, I can see that. 

Host  33:46  
So you you said something kind of interesting that that look watching these outcomes and then watching the data. How are our colleagues? Your colleagues are different to my colleagues in education. How are they doing, avoiding analysis paralysis. I mean, do they look at the data and freeze? Do they are you making it easy? Is there some business intelligence behind that? In front of the data, you've got the data underneath, and then they let us interpret this and make a suggestion. How are they kind of using that data to really form the future? 

Marc Barron  34:16  
Yeah, so first, in our, in our, you know, development process, we try to understand, what are you doing right now, and how many steps does it take? And then, what is it the what is the ultimate goal? When you run this report, when you pivot the data, like, what are you looking for, right? Yep. And if it takes you, you know, aggregating data, having a lot of people enter it, and then having somebody run the report, and then having a business analyst, analyze it and then tell you a story. What if we just told you that story when you logged into the system? That will cut down all of your time that it takes to get to that point. And now your energy is focused on, how do we change this outcome if we're not happy with it? So now the energy goes from, let me figure out what's happening to how do we make changes to what we see happening? And so our team tries to serve the data to the to the practitioner, to the stakeholder, in a way that they were doing it before, but just with many steps ahead of that, and that way they can spend the time, because they know their schools better than we do. They know their their demographic better than we do. And once they have the data, they do a really good job at changing the behavior where they want it to be changed. We just try to give it to them in a faster, more meaningful way. 

Host  35:27  
Well, great Marc. We're up against time, but again, thank you very much for being a guest today on Filling Seats podcast. It's been a pleasure having you on thank you for your insights, and that's Marc from CourseKey, who has got a great career going and well done on the recent business transactions as well becoming a bigger force to reckon with.

Host  35:53  
Thank you to our audience and listeners and viewers. Thank you again for joining us. As always, we know your time is valuable, and we're glad you spent this time with us. If you'd like to find out more about today's podcast and any other podcasts, of course, go to www.studentbridge.com where we have a ton of resources on there, white papers, webinars, podcasts for you to find, and Marc's details will be on there too. So without further, without holding some any longer say thank you for joining, Marc, thanks again. From sunny San Diego, yeah, and well, I look forward to seeing you soon. 

Marc Barron  36:25  
Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the conversation. It was, it was a great conversation, and thanks to the listeners. So hope to see you again soon. Great. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye.

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