EdTech Connect

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season when we're doing a series of interviews. This episode we're going to have part two of an interview with Jeff Dillon of talking about higher education technology. He is moving into EdTech Connect. If you listen to the first episode, you know that this is something that he is essentially retiring into this position and is very high on it, very excited about it, has a lot of great things to say about it. That's what we're going to get into in this episode. We're going to talk about what the basic idea of it, the kinds of services that it provides. I think you're going to find that this is something that is, while it's very focused in higher education, these are the kinds of tools that we need in a lot of different areas, a lot of different verticals. Who knows? Maybe this will give you a product idea that you'll want to walk away from this and launch your own portal of some sort. That's enough for me. Let's get back to talking to Jeff. We've talked thus far with the technology about the, we'll call it the front end process. Really, it's the registration and a little bit into the student management side. Is that where your focus is or have you also been looking at taking technology throughout, so also into remote classes and online learning and things of that nature? Yeah, well, with that Tech Connect, my focus is the entire enterprise. Any piece of technology anyone buys at any level, we want to inventory that and we want to rate that and we want to have a conversation about that because there's a model in higher ed. We have guiding organizations, we have Educause, we have the Hoog, we have any consulting company. There's higher ed specific consulting companies that are great, but all these models have the same, they use the same process, which is the university is always at the center. The university pays their annual dues to the company, to the organization, and then the university should delegate access to the community and to the data that they have from that relationship, but that's what often doesn't happen. So although you might be a member of Educause, you might not have access to the core data set, which I often don't if I have a CIO change, I have to ask again. So what we're doing now is anyone has a vote, if you sign up with your .edu account, you list your software and now the faculty member who's purchasing a hundred dollar piece of software or freeware to teach music online or to teach a specific discipline can kind of tell the world, hey, here's what I'm doing over here, which wouldn't be in the enterprise model from those other situations, but it's been going well because all these use cases are emerging that we didn't expect. We thought we would connect universities to each other based on the software they're using, right? For purchasing, for troubleshooting, makes sense. We're similar schools, let's look at similar solutions. What we're realizing is we're connecting universities to themselves. These large universities, university systems have to go through so many hoops to purchase something through for accessibility or for security. If they find out their systems already purchased something, that's huge. So they're realizing that through EdTech Connect that, hey, we already have that. I didn't know that. So that's what we're doing is helping other entities find, other schools find what's working elsewhere. Yeah, I think that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle a little bit is when you get to big organizations and particularly schools because you have individual departments that do feel very siloed and sometimes are either by design or just by the nature of the system. They do become very siloed because they do have sometimes very different requirements and needs that they're servicing. If you figure particularly like maybe a math department versus a literature department, very different topics. Sometimes you don't even have a lot of overlap on the students, but having that ability to know what, have that ability to say, well, what do we already have? What have we already gone through? Even if it's something that you have to go through that same process, knowing that your organization's gone through it, you can at least go to somebody and say, okay, when you went through this, what were the key steps that you had to go through? Sometimes it's as simple as like, what was the paperwork you filed? So I can go take a look at that and make sure we can basically source steal from that, update it, put the appropriate names and dates on it and make the whole thing move smoother. And it may be as simple as, hey, we already have it, or maybe at least we're going to go through this a little faster. And so that leads me in, because I think we're starting to touch on this a little bit, is you put out an article and have mentioned that one of your focuses is being able to democratize the higher education process. I'd like to actually get your, if you can talk about that a little bit, what do you mean by it? And then how do you see that EdTech Connect, and maybe even in your current job or I guess your soon to be past job, how that's something that you've been moving forward? Yeah, that's what I would like to talk about. One example where I could start that off is when we started building EdTech Connect, myself and four other people from all over the country started this. I think the origin story might help a little bit. It was in March, right before the pandemic. It was weeks before the pandemic, COVID-19 shut everything down and we were all working from home. I started prototyping this idea I've had for a while and I talked to some colleagues across the country to what really put me over at that point was I was asked by my school to find a cloud workflow solution. We have a legacy workflow solution and there's so many amazing cloud workflow products out there. I couldn't narrow the list down. There's excellent rating sites out there like G2. There's Educause lists and I used all that, but the list was still so big I didn't know who are solving the higher ed use cases. I reached out to my 23 campus network. I'm part of the largest system in the country. So if I was having trouble with that, I have a lot of experience, I was the right guy for it. Just to get to a short list, what about the people that are in a small college or maybe they're new to their job or maybe they're tasked with something just over their head, how do they find solutions? We all realize we find solutions from our network first, but there's a disparity in our network. I have a strong network, but I still couldn't find this solution. So I thought why don't we create a tool that can support this and scale that we could verify that you're a higher ed user and then we just get everyone to list what they're using and cross tabulate that with the Department of Education database so that we could use filters like the size of your school, your location to see if there's any trends with where things are being purchased. So we started prototyping that in March right before the pandemic. When I was doing it, I thought, you know what, CIOs are probably not going to like this. They might be indifferent to it, but it's a little bit of a Wikipedia feel, you know, if we're kind of crowdsourcing to an audience of higher ed users, but you know what, they're using it. Some are even using it to do their own IT inventory. So I think what they realize is they need to know what's happening on their campus and it's hard to keep up because companies are realizing that they can market right to faculty. They can give .edu pricing, free pricing. How many have ever heard that, you know, oh, we have 20 licenses of this that our faculty are using, we should probably purchase an enterprise license. So the companies are getting smart in how they market to higher ed and it's not just the enterprise anymore. So we can't get away that's getting democratized. It's just how do we provide transparency to that? And really it's not that hard. It's just we have an exclusive audience. So we have to make sure that you are affiliated with a higher ed institution. We just do that by an email address verification. But that's what sets it apart from maybe other rating sites. There's some amazing software rating sites out there. So it is a software rating and review site for higher ed only. So that's kind of the overview of the democratization of it. And so the whole idea is that the more participation we can get, the more trends we can see and the more useful all these filters we have will be. Because we found out there are a couple of use cases. I won't mention names on this, but we had a problem with some integrations with like a security piece of software and a cloud system, a big one of the big cloud providers. So anyone who had these two systems was having problems. So now we can use our database and find the people or the colleges that are using those two systems and communicate instantaneously and say, hey, are you guys experiencing the same problem we are? And so the organizations that do support this and have tried to do it, I think just haven't quite kept up. The platforms weren't really there. There's community groups, there's listservs, but the same question got asked over and over, which was, what are you using for this? How are you solving this problem? Why did you purchase this? And if you go back six months, you can find the same exact question over and over. But yeah, in a nutshell, that's what EdTech Connect is about. That's what, because I've personally I've done RFPs and product research across different lines of business and things like that. And that's actually a problem that is all over the place in a lot of different industries is that you do have these incredible review sites. And it's almost daunting to just start into looking at some of those sites, depending on what you're looking for. But even when there's things that you think would be more niche a little bit, like higher ed, you figure, okay, yeah, there's a lot of higher education, but there's probably not a huge amount of products. And then you go search, you realize, no, there are a huge amount of products in just about everything that you're going to look for, which does get you that point where you go, okay, it's one thing if I've got to evaluate, make a choice between three different options, it's a whole different thing if I have to evaluate across 100 different options. And particularly when so much of it is it's marketing material, you're searching websites, you're maybe looking at something here or there. And time and again, it does come down to sort of the, you know, after the first wave of just trying to make sure things are halfway legitimate is, okay, who else is using it? Are they comparable to us? And particularly in the education system, that's, I would think that's exactly what you're going to run into is, you know, it's one thing if I'm a huge state university, and the product I'm looking at has only been used by little small, you know, local community colleges, then what they tell me is probably not going to help a whole lot, or vice versa, you know, if I'm a little community college, and all these big universities are using it, I don't know that I'm going to, you know, it may not be a good fit. And so being able to not only see sort of those, see those trends, but also to be able to have essentially that almost that feel of like a community where you can reach out and say, okay, here's what we are, what are people experiencing that are like us, that are, you know, roughly the same. And so we can as close as possible, try to get apples to apples comparisons, and also to get the heads up, like you say, when sometimes you have these certain mixes of technologies or software, I don't know how many times I've seen, you know, organizations go into choosing something, and then somewhere down the road, they find out that, oh, this other thing that we use, that may be completely unrelated, generally speaking, doesn't work. You know, for example, you may have something where, like in a university that you've got a some sort of a class registration piece of software. And it's awesome, unless you have this specific student management piece of software that for some reason, they don't, you know, work together. Knowing those things are huge. And those are the kinds of things that sometimes are not brought out until you really start beating the bushes and digging in and finding organizations that have done it. Because you have to you have to have find somebody that's essentially found that same match. And if it's a, you know, if it's a more popular or a project that's used more often, then you're going to be more likely to be, you know, comfortable with it. Okay. A lot of organizations have used this. So it's probably not going to, you know, have a conflict because we're, unless we're using some really, you know, out of the blue, you know, outlier type products, then you're going to be a little more comfortable. It's almost like, you know, like if you buy a car, if it's a major manufacturer, then you know, you're going to find parts. If you get something that's, I don't know, a kit car or something that's very specific or unique, or even like a super high end car, then you know, you're going to have a harder time because there's just the market's not there. You don't have as many people that are effectively, you know, testing it out and using it. So that's, I love that idea. And I think it's interesting, you mentioned that CIOs might not like it because it is an interesting, there's pros and cons to that because what you're, you know, what you're really doing is giving them, in a sense, it's almost, it's not quite like a vendor management tool, but it is somewhat because at least then they can get somewhat of, you know, sort of get their head around, what do we have? What are all the things, you know, an inventory base, if what do we have in, you know, that's being used, particularly with all these little departments where it may not bubble all the way up to the university administration levels where they can actually view into, here's all of the stuff that's going on on our campus because it's just, you know, the scope of what they're dealing with. And so it points out gaps or knowledge gaps or, you know, ignorance that they may have about what's there, which could be a little bit uncomfortable, but also tells them to get a heads up. And particularly, I love that you brought out the fact that, hey, if we've got, you know, we find out that across the campus, we've got 20 or 30 license to this, then this may be an opportunity for us to just go get an enterprise license and it works for us. And it saves, it may, you know, allow us to shift a little bit of where the funding goes. It may allow us, it's going to allow us to save a few bucks maybe. It may allow us to get more for what we're paying, you know, maybe something that, hey, if we've got this many licenses, we've got some leverage. And so we can maybe push back on this vendor and, you know, have them maybe customize it or do some things that are little more in line with our needs. Yeah, you brought up a point I wanted to touch on is earlier on in that is we often don't know what we're looking for, right? We don't know what to search for. The search terms we're using are different. You might be searching for something like a virtual classroom or simulation-based learning or interactive learning or, and essentially, a lot of these products are kind of doing the same thing or they're flexible enough. And so that's kind of built into that how we can kind of control our own search terms on this platform. But you don't know what you're looking for. So what we want to do with the site too is kind of tell those stories of these companies that are doing great things for higher ed. So we ask them right off the bat, if a vendor wants to sign up and claim their listing, how much of your business is focused on the higher ed? They have to give us a number, either revenue or customer account percentage. Who are your clients? They don't give us that. We determine that. So the client list on their page, they claim their page, is always a subset of the client list because we're going to say, hey, we're using that tool. We're using that tool. So when we look at a software detail page on our site, it's kind of what I've always wanted to look at to get to my short list. Client list, your devotion to higher ed. And then let's tell the story. I discovered a company that does video, preps students on how to do video interviews and how to interview in the new age. And they're doing some great stuff that you would never know to really to search for that. Soterios Johnson And that will do it. We're going to pause here and we'll come back in our next episode and continue our discussion with Jeff Dillon of EdTech Connect. And we're going to dig a little deeper into how this service works, how this platform works. And again, I'm picking his brain partially because there are tasks we do where something like this is very useful. And at least knowing the solution that they provide may help you figure out the steps you need to take to either research some software, create an RFP or similar sorts of situations you may find yourself in. I hope you took good notes and if not, you can always check out the show notes later. But as always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast. 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