#Jake Whiddon

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Going From Teacher To Buisness Owner (with Ed Dudley, Jake Whiddon & Peter Liu)

Have you ever thought about starting your own school, start-up or just going freelance? As the educational landscape changes due to Covid, branching out on your own is becoming a necessity for many teachers. This week I speak with three people who have gone from being teachers to becoming their own bosses. Peter Liu tells us how he got the inspiration for his online education company, Jake Whiddon tells us why he founded his own school after fifteen years of working for other people and Ed Dudley tells us what kind of people should avoid going freelance.

Links

Ed in the Crowd -  Ed Dudley's blog

ETpedia Teenagers - Ed's book on teaching teens

Owl ABC - Peter Liu's Ed-tech company

Going From Teacher To Buisness Owner (with Ed Dudley, Jake Whiddon & Peter Liu)

 Peter Liu from Owl ABC on starting a start-up

Ross:  Peter, you started your own business a year and a half ago. Before you tell us about what it is, what made you want to start your own company?

Peter Liu:  My current co‑founder and I, we've been good friends for several years. He's also in education. He's got 15 some odd years of experience. We saw this trend of thousands of Chinese kids going abroad to study.

There was a study done several years back that showed 25 percent of Chinese students going to an Ivy League school fail, 25 percent. When I read that statistic, that blew my mind.

There's a gap in skills that Chinese students have, who are attending school abroad. There are tons and tons of services that help kids in China improve their English. They can help with their test‑taking of the IELs and the TOEFL. It only ever seems to go as far as your first day of university so you can get into school.

How do you actually stay in and succeed? I've been working at this education technology startup. We built a whole bunch of fancy tech. I worked very closely with the product and the engineering teams. I had a little bit of experience building an online product.

Ross:  This is almost like working in a startup prepared you to start your own startup?

Peter:  Yeah, you could say that.

Ross:  Did that take some of the fear out of it, as well?

Peter:  It's that and also our product is not technically that challenging. We're not building a technology company. We're building a services company.

Ross:  How has what your company does changed from what you originally visioned, compared with now?

Peter:  The biggest change was our business model. Originally, we were focused on a B2C model, basically, selling our services and our content directly to consumers. We quickly found that we don't have the local knowledge of how to message, how to create marketing channels to reach these consumers.

We made the decision to shift our focus to B2B, licensing our content and our teaching to other education companies so that they could do the heavy lifting of marketing directly to their students. They already have students who are, perhaps, learning English from them, but who need to build their critical thinking skills. That's where we come in.

Ross:  Can I ask you a question about money and stuff? Let me give you an analogy here. I remember once climbing a mountain. When you're climbing a high mountain, it's a little bit dangerous. You have a turnaround time. If we don't get to the top by four o'clock, we're going to turn around. Because if we're walking down in the dark, it's really, really dangerous.

Do you have that with the business where you're like, "If we're not starting to make money, or if we're not able to break even within 12 months or two years, then I'm going to quit this and go back to teaching English." How does that work?

Peter:  It depends what scale company you're doing, and also how disciplined you are with finances.

[laughter]

Peter:  Basically, how much money do you have in the bank, and how long can that sustain you? What is your burn rate? How much money are you spending?

Ross:  Cool. Can I ask you then what would you say if there's one thing I really wish I knew or I paid more attention to when I first started this, I should have done this. What do you think that would be?

Peter:  I'm a big proponent of the lean startup methodology which is, basically, applying the scientific method to operating a business. You form a hypothesis. You run tests to either validate or invalidate that hypothesis. Then you either proceed if you validate your hypothesis or you change course.

I wish we'd applied that methodology a little bit more rigorously to the early stages of our product development, because of the business environment that we're operating in. We were very cautious in marketing, and putting ourselves out there, and putting our product out there.

Ross:  In case someone stole the idea.

Peter:  Precisely.

 Jake Whiddon on starting your own school

Ross:  Hi, Jake.

Jake Whiddon:  Hi, Ross.

Ross:  You started your own kids' school recently. You've been involved in TOEFL for about 15 years. What made you want to open your own school now at this point in your career?

Jake:  Honestly, I felt that I had worked for long enough for big companies. I wanted to have some control over the output of what I was doing. I felt I reached, not a ceiling, but a point where there was nowhere else I could go with what I personally wanted to do with education. That's the reason.

Ross:  Jake, how did you choose the people to go into business with? There's so many people you know, but why did you choose the people who work with you now?

Jake:  It's really interesting. For a long time, I'd always wanted to start a business with another one of your ex‑guests called Dave Welleble. I realized that we were too similar. We were very similar. What I had to do was find someone who could complement my skills. I've got some skills that come up with creative ideas in trying to have operations experience.

I needed someone who knew how to network, do finances, work with people, and communicate better, and then that person came along. It's someone I'd worked with 10 years ago, and they just came out of the blue and said, "Hey, by the way, I'm actually looking for someone who can work together."

I think the best decision was finding someone who I knew well but can complement the way they work. That old adage of never work with your friends, I don't think that that's true. I think that you should work with your friends.

A point a friend was making to me the other day was, I met this person through working with him, not through being a friend. I knew I could work with him. I think that's worked really, really well.

Ross:  How did you go about getting an investor then, because, obviously, opening a school requires a lot of funds?

Jake:  You don't find people to invest in your school, they find you. There's a lot of people in China with a lot of money that they don't know how to spend. They need to spend it on something, whether it's a gym or a hairdresser, or something they want to do. For us, it was someone who knew they wanted to do something in education, but they didn't know how to.

They came to us and said, "Can you guys do something with education for us?" Which is what I find most people say. On saying that, though, people are still looking for investors.

The way it happens in China is you're just constantly networking. You never know why the person that you're talking to might be the person who can invest money in you one day. That's something to remember.

Ross:  What skills do you think you've learned in other parts of your career that helped you the most in running your own school?

Jake:  Well, none. No, I want to say none. No, I say that as a joke. It's amazing how little I knew. I mean, I ran five, four different schools as a [inaudible 08:20. I ran 12 schools as a regional manager. I ran 40 schools as a national manager. I controlled budgets of two million dollars. You know what? A lot of those skills didn't help me at all.

What they helped me with was operations. They helped me with efficiency. They helped me with things, like knowing that you're using classrooms at the right efficiency. You're using teachers at the right amount. You're utilizing people in the right way.

It didn't teach me how to run a business. With all the experience in the world, I have learned more in the last eight months of how much I didn't know.

Ross:  What have you had to learn when your started your business? Is there anything that you've never experienced before, or something that you felt, "Oh, this is something brand new to me, and I have to start learning"?

Jake:  I'm learning that without a big budget for marketing, for example, we can't go and afford a math/science and blanket. You have to think everything we're thinking. We have to flip it over and think about it from the bottom up. That's probably the first one. The other one is people don't want to work for a company that no one's heard of.

People want to work for big name companies. Who wants to work for a place that has only one school? Lastly is how much relationships matter. The relationship you have obviously with the customer but also mainly with everyone around you, everyone. The Fire Department, the Visa Office, everyone you have to have a relationship with.

You're constantly having to deal with each of these people. We talk about bureaucracy, but bureaucracy might be a good thing because, at least, it means there's some bureaucratic process. Here, it all comes back to relationships.

Ross:  Finally, Jake. What advice do you have for teachers thinking about starting their own school?

Jake:  Remember, that's my last advice. The industry is never as caught up as you are. Whatever you're thinking, the market is probably two steps behind you. The market needs to be educated to get to where you are first.

Ross:  Thanks, Jake. Bye‑bye.

Jake:  Bye, Ross.

 Ed Dudley on going freelance

Ross:  Ed, you obviously started off as a teacher teaching full‑time. Do you want to tell us about how did you go from teaching full‑time to becoming now a freelance teacher trainer and author?

Ed Dudley:  You're right. I began teaching full‑time. Then very gradually, I began to be invited to speak at local conferences and to do, perhaps, weekend events for teachers in the local area. Then gradually I was invited to do more work, which involved going to another country for a few days to do some teacher training. I would balance that with my school work.

I would rearrange my classes, or I would get colleagues to cover my classes in my absence, which was, again, a difficult balancing act. There was no masterplan there for me. I simply did it slowly and incrementally over time. The amount of teaching that I was doing gradually reduced. The amount of training and materials writing that I was doing gradually increased.

Ross:  There are a lot of teachers considering becoming a freelancer. Are there any tips or recommendation for this group of people?

Ed:  It has the potential to cause sleepless nights if you're going to suddenly do it cold turkey. I was in a position where I could try out freelance work, freelance life with a safety net. I tend to have the philosophy that if you focus on doing a good job on what's in front of you, then that will lead to good things in the future.

I've always remembered that it's important to be aware of what your strengths are. If I'm asked or invited to do something that I don't think is aligned with my strengths, then I say "no" to that. It can be tough when you're a freelancer to say "no" to something.

There's a lot of pressure on us to take every opportunity that comes our way. It is important not to bite off more than we can chew as well, and to make sure we do a good job by saying "yes" to the things that we're confident we can do well, and "no" to the things that we don't think we can do well.

Ross:  What do you think are the advantages of the freelance life?

Ed:  The key advantages, that if you have the mentality or you have the personality that can deal with the uncertainties of the freelance life.

In other words, if you're not too freaked out by the fact that you're not quite sure what's going to be happening 12 months from now, then that gives you an awful amount of freedom. It gives you a chance to focus on your own professional development.

I find that I'm able to do a lot more reading. I'm able to find time to plan my work with much more freedom and less frazzledness than when I was balancing my training work with my full‑time job. It gives you a chance also to make last minute decisions as well.

Very often, you'll find that an opportunity comes up at very short notice to travel somewhere and do some work. You have this really exciting opportunity to go somewhere you've never been before, to work with people you've never met before. That's an incredibly stimulating and enjoyable way to work.

#career #career advancement #teacher management #start ups #freelance #ed-tech #Jake Whiddon #Peter Liu #Publishing #Edmund Dudley #ETpedia #management

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App Based Language Learning (With Jake Whiddon)

As the coronavirus causes more and more schools, more students and teachers are turning to apps to fill the gap. Ross and Jake Whiddon talk about the potential of apps for language learning, the limitations of current software and how apps will influence classrooms in the future.

App-Based Language Learning - Transcript

Ross Thorburn:  Hi, everyone. I'm Ross Thorburn. Welcome back to "TEFL Training Institute Podcast." This week, I'm talking with my friend Jake Whiddon. Jake's a diploma in TESOL qualified teacher. Over the last year or so, Jake has been working for a company that develops language learning apps.

As the coronavirus is causing more and more schools to close, and more and more learning switching from offline to online, we'll find that language learning apps are going to be playing a bigger part in teachers' and students' lives than they were before.

In this conversation, Jake and I discuss some of the advantages of language learning apps. How they affect the classroom? Where they will be going in the future? Enjoy the conversation.

Ross:  Welcome back, Jake.

Jake Whiddon:  Thanks, Ross. Good to be here.

Ross:  Jake, you are now working for a company that does language learning app. Let me just start off talking about what are some of the potential benefits of using an app to learn language.

Jake:  Probably, the biggest benefit is the idea of learner autonomy and motivation. If you hand over the power for them, and the control that says, "You can now take control of your learning." You have an app. You can open it. You can play some games. You can see some feedback. You can see how well you're going.

It's, sometimes, a little bit more motivating, than if you have to be in a class. All your peers are around you. The teacher's telling what you're doing wrong or right. This is a very personal thing. That's one of the biggest benefits of having an app or online learning does.

Ross:  I was thinking about this recently with work, and with Katrina was doing in Chinese in front of a group of about 30 people on a conference call is still pretty nerve wracking. Comparing that to standing up in front of 30 people, and speaking my second language, it's much less scary.

That's one of the things that people don't talk enough is how much that takes away that the fear within you. You don't have all these eyes on.

Jake:  Exactly. We should make the very distinct difference. Online learning is still engaging with someone. App based learning is you and the app learning together. Getting feedback, trying things.

Ross:  Let's talk about that. You mentioned their feedback. Answering a question and getting immediate feedback. If you're in a class, I feel the normal way that would happen, would be the teacher gives instructions for an activity in the course book. The students spend the next 10 or 15 minutes doing the activity. Then, the teacher goes through the answers with them and...

Jake:  Exactly, It could be the next day. It could be, "Here's your homework, go home and do it." I've got to hand it to the teacher. I have no attachment to what I was doing, once I get my feedback.

In an app, if you get something wrong, it tells you instantly I got it wrong. Usually, might give you the right answer. It's very meaningful instant feedback, which is more valuable. It's not like, I'm going to get a high score in my test. It's right now, I want to get this right. It's a very personal thing.

Ross:  There is a huge difference in ownership there. One of them, I'm passive and I'm waiting for someone else to tell me whether I got it right or wrong.

Jake:  Which is crazy. Naturally, in your daily life as a child, I'm going to go try something. Climb a tree, I fall off. [laughs] I try again. I'm on my bike, I fall off. What do I do? I jump back on the bike. It's only once, we get with language learning or with classrooms, where we seem to say there's a separation between, I've done something and I'm going to find out whether I did well at it.

Really what technology is doing, and software is doing, is it's enabling kids to get back into that really pure way of learning. I got it wrong. I'll try again.

Ross:  Another benefit here potentially, is that with the classroom version of it. The 10 questions that you have to ask, all the kids in the class are getting the same 10 questions. They might be too easy for some students in the class. They might be too difficult for others. That can become demotivating for everyone except the kids in the middle, right?

Jake:  It can. Where are you trying to get to here, Ross?

Ross:  Presently, the thing with the app, or the software or whatever, is able to push questions just at the right level of the students where they're able to get most of them right. But no...

Jake:  From my experience, I've been lucky enough to meet a lot of developers. Everyone says that they have some sort of algorithm that feeds back and allows kids to see what they got wrong. In reality though, Ross, I don't think that that's exactly what everyone is doing.

The simplest form of it is that, "I got this wrong" and the algorithm would know, you got that wrong, and it will feed it back to you. Apps like Duolingo do that.

I don't know if that completely is what we're talking about when it's this magic formula of AI, that everyone talks about when they're marketing their products. That's where it should be going. It will go eventually, that each child will be on a personalized learning journey.

Ross:  Kids are already on a personalized learning journey anyway, in a class. It's just the teaching doesn't match the learning...

Jake:  Exactly, exactly. What's happened now is that, we can have kids learning on an app and have data on every single interaction. You can get data on, if there's different games in that app, you can find out which games that they were more motivated by. If there's a quiz in the app, they can see the results on the quiz and which games were more likely to lead to a higher score in the quiz.

We can see which language points lead to a higher score. If you kept on playing, which games motivated you to play more games later. All these different granular pieces of data that help with the educator ‑‑ it could be the teacher or the facilitator or the company ‑‑ to make sure those kids are actually moving forward their language learning, which then leads to efficacy, which we've never known before.

Anyone who's listening has been a teacher in a classroom, they all leave, and they think, "I don't know what my kids really learned today. I know what they said in class. I know what they appear to understand. I know what they got in their test. But I don't know what they've acquired. I really don't know."

Ross:  Taking a couple steps back, you mentioned the different types of games, different types of interactions that might happen. You have some example? Obviously, a lot of this is based on a lot of multiple choice questions, right? But presenting those in different ways.

Jake:  Yeah, it's really fascinating. Something that I've learned from the coding is one fascinating thing. All the coding is the same, it's multiple choice. You get an app like Duolingo or any of the apps and it's usually, here's four choices, A, B, C, D. Tap the right button, right or wrong.

What I've discovered from where I'm working now is that you can have those same four choices in a variety of ways, which I never realized. Rather than having four colors, just statically on the screen, those could be bubbles floating around the screen. Then, someone has to actually think about it, I can try to touch it and find it. There's more cognitive process happening.

It's still an A, B, C, D test. The gameplay is more engaging than just seeing four things on a screen.

Ross:  This obviously feeds back into the motivation of the students. It's just like being in a language class where if you're doing interesting activities, that's going to keep you motivated and engaged, minute by minute. It's the same on an app. If you're doing the same multiple choice questions, it's going to get pretty boring.

Jake:  Often now, apps break into two types of learning games. They'll call them accuracy games or experience games. An accuracy game means there is a right or wrong answer. If you get this wrong, it's going to affect the accuracy of your score. There are other types of activities, which might be a song playing, and you just have to hit the words, but that's an experience game.

That's input and seeing what happens. But, you're focusing on the input, being not wrong or right. If the word comes up, you hit it. If you don't hit it, it doesn't mean you're wrong. Some learners do better when they're doing experience games a lot. Some do better from accuracy games.

What you could have is a different path. Some kids might like to see a song, a dialogue and this type of game. What will happen is, we can actually personalize journeys on the language they're learning and on the game type.

Ross:  Obviously, teachers in classes will be able to relate to this. You can see different students engaging more with different activities in every class.

Jake:  Some apps allow you to send out homework. The kids will do something on the app. Then, the teacher can see a whole class aggregate score. They'll know, how well they're doing with a certain lexical set. Say, it's colors. There's a 90 percent on blue, green, red, yellow, but orange, it's a 40 percent. What am I going to focus on in the next class?

Ross:  Focus on orange.

Jake:  I'm going to focus on orange, right? Now, the teachers are empowered by the data to be better teachers. They can focus on exactly what the kids need to know and not what they should know.

Ross:  Find out where the learners are and teach them accordingly. If the app's giving you all this data on where the learners are, that's going to let you do a better job.

Presumably also, there's another layer to that. You're talking about the app giving data to the teachers to help the teachers teach the students accordingly. But also, the app's going to use that data to teach the student to...

Jake:  Exactly, right. Number one, the app already will feedback and ensure that the child, the learner, keeps getting better at that one particular language point. Parents have more information now.

Parents used to drop their kids off at offline schools. Two hours sit outside. Come out and they have any idea how well they're going. Everyone's had a parent‑teacher night. Parents meet the teacher. They discuss how well they're going and the teachers feel uncomfortable. They don't really know every detail.

Ross:  They have 16 kids in the class. You've taught them for four hours. You're really giving feedback on the kid at the back who doesn't talk much, it's impossible.

Jake:  How exciting is it, that parent‑teacher night, now can happen every day. Not just every day, every hour. Anytime the child interacts with learning, the parent can see exactly how well they're going.

The exciting part will be once those apps link parents and teachers up to social media. They'll say, OK, my child is struggling with, this sentence or the past sentence all orange. They'll be able to click on it and find out what all the other parents done who've had that same problem? What do the teachers recommend?

The solution for the problem will be instant. They won't need to drop their kid off at school anymore because that learning was become part of daily life.

Ross:  You hit on one of the things that probably makes a lot of teachers nervous. The idea that apps could replace teachers completely. What's the role of the teacher?

Jake:  The role of the teacher would change. We already have seen this in STEM. We used to have science lectures, no one does science lectures anymore. That was a thing of the past, that's died. Now what you have is, everyone sends out what you have to learn. You watch a video and when you come to class, guess what you do? An experiment with the teacher.

That's all that will happen in language learning. It will catch up to the rest of the world. You'll learn all the stuff. You'll get all your feedback. When you come into class, the teacher will have an activity for you to do. Really push you in the class to use that language.

How can I help you interact better with people or communicate better or use your creativity or it's not just the language anymore? It's all that stuff that surrounds it.

Ross:  This reminds me a lot of an ex‑colleague talking to me about the community aspect of learning a language and that being the thing that keeps learners coming back. If you don't have that sort of interaction with real people, it's really easy to give up. That's the case with apps. If there's not that community aspect, then people tend give up pretty easily.

Jake:  Think about it, no one learns a language to speak to themselves.

Ross:  [laughs]

Jake:  Like in the classroom, no one learns a language to speak to a teacher, you learn language to speak to other people. Offline schools will develop into places where kids and adults can go in, use the language to interact in the community, but the learning will happen with technology.

Ross:  I feel here it's useful to unpack the word "learning." When we think about the word "learning," we assume that memorizing the words, which is a lot of what we're talking about can happen on the app. Whereas, there's a deeper level that needs to happen. That's the thing that happens in the classroom communicating with real people.

Jake:  I don't think we'll use the word "class" anymore. The idea of class needs to go because of class implies learning and the teacher. The relationship shouldn't be teacher‑student. It will become, "I've already learned this stuff, I need places to use it and keep developing it."

Language doesn't exist in a vacuum without all the other experiences around it. Teachers' roles would expand into making experiences around the language.

Ross:  Those are the most interesting parts of teaching. Designing the interesting communicative activities and tasks. Talking about culture, facilitating discussions, that's a lot more interesting than holding up the blue flashcard. Getting students to turn it back to you.

[crosstalk]

Jake:  Can I add the point that what's exciting is, as data and coders and language learning have become best friends. What's the code? It's a language, right? Due to social media and Internet and all these connections, all those barriers have been broken down. Now we have computer scientists talking to linguists talking to psychologists.

What will happen to teachers is, they won't be thinking about, "This is the grammar point I need to teach today."

They'll be talking to psychologists, they'll be talking to other discourses and making that class a more valuable experience for the kids.

Ross:  You mentioned, psychologists and language teaching and programming. One of the bits where that comes together is, finding the sweet spot of challenge and using gamification. That's a bit of a controversial issue.

Jake:  The word "gamification" is controversial because gamification can be along the lines of gambling. That's what they base it on. Challenge level and finding the challenge level is what motivates people to keep coming back. If something's too easy, you get demotivated. If it's too hard, you don't come back. You need to find that sweet spot of where's the challenge level?

Essentially, that's gamification. Gamification is finding the spot where it's not too hard. It's not too easy. It's just at the point where I want to keep going. There's so many advantages.

If you can find the spot where kids or people are motivated to keep learning, isn't that a good thing? But, then they become addicted to the platform that you're using to teach them to do that, that could be unethical, especially when money's involved.

Ross:  One more time, that was Jake Whiddon. Thank you very much for listening. For more podcasts, please go to the website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com. We'll see you next time. Goodbye.

#ethics and issues