Unlocking the Power of Accreditation: Advancements in Workforce Development and Online Learning

Why don't you go backwards and let's just talk about the IASET piece, if you can. What did we have to do to become an approved provider?

So how does the international side come into play? ISED is a U.S. government agency, correct?

So... When I say that we're an approved provider internationally, does that mean that our classes are approved in France or in Japan?

So let me use that as an example and go to the privacy issue. ISED has concern about the privacy of the student data information, correct?

Canada. has a law, PIPEDA, P-I-P-E-D-A, that requires a content provider to a school to have their data storage on a platform in Canada. How does ISET deal with that one? Any idea?

Okay, so that takes us to when somebody enrolls in a product from Learning Without Scars online. and we go through the enrollment process today, English, French, and Spanish, and we go to the shopping cart, we are able to have a team leader show for every enrollment, correct?

Where does that happen and how does that happen?

Who specifies that? The enrollee or the company or both?

Okay, so that's a manual step on our part, correct?

So we're working with an outfit called, a company called Zentoro to create a reading, a learning portal for learning without scars. And that portal can be used in a similar manner, which doesn't require any manual intervention on our part. Example, Dealer A. we can have that portal be available to the following managers and they can have their own password. The company has to tell us and that gets put into the portal. It's a little easier that way, isn't it?

Okay, so let's go back to the beginning. And you remember the days, and we talked about this the other day, actually, where you have pictures of your daughter. making binders of books. And you remember doing binders of books when you were a little girl. We started, I think it was 1992, where I started talking to the computer when everybody walked away from management training in the industry, the manufacturers, the associations, everybody, because it was too expensive. And that was the beginning. of when employee development, in my view, became a discretionary expense, which in my mind is absolute lunacy. But I sat talking to a computer with really rudimentary software, voice recognition, and I would talk for an hour and then go away because the computer was busy for the next two hours translating it. And we built three books, one for parts, one for service, one for selling and marketing.

Then we had dealers come in and We proofed the classes with them. They were consulting clients of mine in those days, and they were gracious enough to come in at their expense and listen to us and help us put the classes together. And that took us to what we had was a two-day format,15 hours, four four-hour blocks of learning, tying it to selling, operations, finance, and leadership. And in each four-hour block, we did two subject-specific classes, which we built. And then we morphed it into three years' progress, what it looks like when it's right first, performance excellence second, reach and market potential third. So that we had three two-day, eight-hour programs,24 classes. Then in the early 2000s, everybody wanted to go to webinars. So we built a bunch of webinars,45 to 60 minutes. And I hated those damn things, but it was a slide, text on the slide, and then me talking to the internet, couldn't see anybody.

And we morphed that into a situation where I used a high-definition camera. And the projector and we broke it up and I'd walk in front of the camera and talk to people for a while. That was a bit of a better deal.

What was also funny in those days, I started wearing Hawaiian shirts and that seemed to be one of the drawing cards. that, oh, I wonder what shirt the guy's wearing today or this month. And we did that for three or four years, but it became clear that the front of class, because I was doing it internationally, Europe, Asia, South America, Middle East, everywhere, and that got old real quick. So I started looking at how do we put it up on the internet. One of the things that I'd like to say or like to think. is we've always been kind of looking at technology and trying to be on the leading edge. I was on the Internet in 1972 when the data speeds were 30 characters a second,30 baud, which was ridiculous. And with the voice recognition via voice, it was a pretty rudimentary thing, but it worked. Today, Dragon is what I use, and it's pretty darn accurate. Everybody's got some kind of voice recognition, including your phone. But we keep doing that.

We keep using software. Our closed captioning is a software business called Veeds, and we can do that in 130 languages. Our Word document to audio tracks, we use a package called Speecholo, and that can be done in 130 different languages. We have film clips that I'd like to be able to do with an avatar and emulate our voice and our faces, anybody who puts on a class. So I'd like to think that we're showing the way with technology as well. And also that we keep ahead of the educational world that, you know, as an example, you've segmented all of our classes now to be, you know, eight to 15 minute segments. And we have little quizzes at the end of every segment so that it becomes. chunked learning, which has been found to improve learning and retention by as much as 50%. Makes sense. But all the way along the line, we've been doing this, trying to create a current product that's easy for people to follow.

And our latest example is all of our workforce development classes are five or six hours long. People found that long. They're working all day long. They've asked that we try and find a way to make it easier for them. And you came up with the idea we're going to set chapters and we'll have breaks about every hour in the reading list and the video program, et cetera. So that all the way down the line, our Internet-based learning is really seemingly where the education world is going to go.

Yeah, I'm pretty pleased with that too, Caroline. Adult education, we have two streams of learning. You made mention to the fact that the United States does not have a universal education approach like many different countries do. The states control that. So each state has a different set of rules. for academic credits, which we'd have to be in compliance with because we're establishing centers of excellence with Steve Johnson across the country and Canada. We do the same thing for Europe later on. But the workforce development classes consist of five or six hours. And I'm going to just briefly talk about the content. It's roughly two hours of reading lists with quizzes. It's roughly two and a half hours of video clips in segments with quizzes. And then it's pre-tests and final assessments and surveys for another half an hour to an hour so that each of the classes is a minimum of five hours. IASET, I believe, allows one academic credit for...

one CEU, and one CEU requires 10 hours of education. Am I saying that properly?

So when we get the accreditation, when we become the approved provider once every five years, every year they come in and evaluate us again. They do a checkpoint, correct? Yes. At that point, what do they do? Do they test drive some of our classes? How do they approach it?

And today we have 108 of those classes.

We also, do they look at our assessments as well?

Now, do we show that to the student?

Okay. So if they take the assessment more than once, for instance, we allow them to take the assessment twice, the final assessment, correct?

So they know what the correct answer is on the questions that they got wrong, correct?

However, with our learning management software, The order of the answers changes. The order of the questions change each time they do an assessment. Is that correct?

One of the things that's interesting in different states across the country, the state of Florida, as an example, requires that there be a proctor, somebody present, when the final exam is conducted, the final assessment is conducted. software businesses, different learning institutions that do this differently, and you can pay for a proctor. But part of that is interesting because cell phones, watches, those types of things have to be left out of the classroom anymore because of Google. You can find out on your phone or on your watch even what the answer to that question is. It's kind of interesting. So we have a time limit on our final assessment. Is that true that they have only one hour to do it? Correct. What happens if they run out of time?

So do they have to complete all 96 multiple choice questions to have a gradable final assessment?

So if somebody did of the 96, if they got 100% right on 80% of the questions and didn't do the final 20, they still passed, correct?

I got you. So that opens up the other discussion. We have technical schools that are putting our classes up as general education credits. And in those cases, we have to comply with not the IS at 10 hours for one CEU, but what the state indicates is face-to-face time and homework time. Correct. So we've redrawn based on requests from schools,14 of our classes for service and 14 of our classes for parts to each be six and a half hours of face-to-face and 13 hours of homework so that we can meet the 13 hours of face-to-face and 26 hours of homework for one academic credit at the state level. So we have two tracks, right? One's workforce development, which is ISET CEU-based, and the other technical school academic credit, which is state compliance available, correct?

So it's a pretty complicated world, isn't it?

What's interesting to me is the, in dealing with the different states and talking to different schools and saying, okay, fine, you know,13 hours face-to-face,26 hours of homework. How do you know they've done the homework? And they said, well, technically we don't. And I said, well, All of our reading lists that comprise two hours of our class have a quiz, three-question quiz. They've got to get 60% on that before they can go to the next segment. All of our homework, which is for the academic credit side, has a quiz as well. So every piece of our class has a determination whether the student learned or not. And one of the schools actually said to me, you're shaming us because we can't do that. We don't do that. Whereas we do. And I think that's important. You know, the example that I like to quote is Eric Lauder at MIT. He teaches a class called The Secret of Life. He's a brilliant guy with PhDs. He was the government, U.S.

government's head of the genome study where they broke down the DNA. But he also is an unbelievably good teacher. That's what got my attention because I believe the internet is allowing for the democratization of learning. You no longer have to have $50,000 to $100,000 to attend a university on an annual basis. You can go to your corner library.

Yeah, that's a point really well made. Where I was trying to go with Eric Lauder as an example is, If you want to get a degree from MIT, you've got to take that class. So you've got to be into his classroom. However, he has two or three cameras in his classroom. He has millions of people that are taking this class for free online. And I believe that's what the future of education looks like. We've got a lot of infrastructure to come up to. But students through the pandemic have been really seriously penalized. by not going to school. And it looks at socioeconomic patterns. If you were well off and you had access to the internet at home, you didn't really lose a lot. But the statistics are coming in now as to what the learning was like at 2022. It's the lowest math and the lowest reading that we've had in 20 years. So there's consequences to... how we have dealt with education over the years.

But it's, I believe that's important for us, like you say, to make sure that we're not presenting the material incorrectly, that's leading to the wrong answers, that we're not creating the question that's leading to the wrong answers, that we're truly trying to have when they finish with a class and they walk away, they have. new knowledge that they didn't have before they started. And everybody that I have on Zoom calls, and I've been doing this a lot for the last month, after they've taken a class, we have a chat about it. And we talk about the key learning outcomes that are part of IASET. And example, tele-selling are three Cs, using the telephone as a customer service tool, overcoming objections, asking questions, buyer's needs. Those are the five key. learning pieces. And when talking with the students about those things, they all learned something. They benefited from it. They were happy about that, but they all said the same thing.

Damn, there's a lot here. And that, that leads to the fact that learning is hard. It's not easy. We're asking this later generations to get into embark on a lifelong learning journey. It doesn't stop when you leave school. It just starts there. And that's alien to a lot of people's thinking.

Your comment of, you know, seeing somebody in a grocery store that you taught brings me back to my grandmother who got a master's in 1915, taught in a one-room schoolhouse for years. And I'll never forget her 80th birthday. We were all there. It was kind of a celebration. But there was half a dozen of her students who hadn't been with her for 60 years. And they still showed up. And, you know, I'm looking at this and I was younger there. Granny was born in 1890. So I'm 56 years younger. And that's that struck me. That really struck me. So a lot of times I ask people, can tell me who your grade three teacher was? And everybody pretty much can tell me. Then I say, OK, who was the prime minister of Canada when you were in grade five? And nobody can remember. You know, where's the important person? It's the teacher. And then the other thing that it takes to, and this bothers me, end of year performance reviews.

About two months ago, when America started going through the interest rate increase, trying to kill inflation, et cetera, I remember a front page article in the Wall Street Journal that said, companies are going back to annual performance reviews to determine which people they're going to let go. To me, a performance review is helping the employee learn what they need to do to get better, not to get rid of them. We've got an upside down story here. Like to your point, it's not a gotcha. We truly are concerned that you learn something. And that's important to me.

So stop there for a second. What you're saying is teachers in California, no matter how many years they've been teaching, have an intervention with somebody in the classroom who evaluates their performance and ties it back to goals that the teacher and the administrator develop. Is that true?

So for us, ISET is our administrator that once a year they review us, our performance. Do they go over what our learning outcomes are as well? Do you have a discussion with them every year?

So every fifth year, it's a very intense. How long does that evaluation period take? Is it hours or is it days?

Right. With IASET, if I remember right, we can look to see if a company, a school, an association, an entity has ever been approved by them. Is that correct?

And so when I go through and look at IASET to see if, you know, manufacturers, Caterpillar, John Deere, associations, the AED, the NTDA, If they've ever been, I can find out yes or no, correct?

That's where I'm going. I've checked with the manufacturers. None of them have been there before. None of the associations we work with have been there before. We're the first ones. Hopefully, there'll be more. But this is a bit of a bone crusher in the amount of work that is required to become approved, isn't it? It

So what do you see coming that we haven't looked after? We've got all these classes. People give us suggestions as to what they'd like us to add. They critique us on what they don't like or what they were surprised with. What would you like to see us do that you and I haven't talked about yet? If you had a magic wand, what would you do with Learning Without Scars from this point forward?

So let's talk to that for a second. The state of Idaho offers a $7,500 scholarship to any high school student who wants to take advanced placement or college prep or college classes when they're in high school. And the vice president of workforce development for College of Western Idaho, which is one of our centers of excellence. is excited about embedding that in the high school. So let me just put another little elevator on that. I think there's 400,000 high school students in the state of Idaho. And I was just looking at a study across the United States that there's 10 states that have 30% or more of their students in high school at a 3.0 or higher grade. In talking with The workforce development boss in Idaho, she's wanting to embed at least 30% of the high school students that have 3.0 and higher in this program.

And if you think about the continuum of a career, I don't know how a 17-year-old or an 18-year-old can determine what they want to do for the rest of their life. There's just too much out there. There's too many choices anymore. But if we start them in high school, and give them the opportunity to learn at their pace. And in those cases where Elon Musk just hired somebody who's 14 years old, the first scientist in his company that is that age, who's graduated from university. You know, there are some really, really special people out there intellectually. Stephen Hawking is one that comes to mind, but there's many. And what Christie's trying to do is attract the child, the student in high school and get them pushing themselves to learn more. And that leads us to summer employment. That leads us to apprenticeship programs. That leads us to career development for people.

And it's not just about helping them get better, but maybe it's you're not in the right application. Maybe you should be working in accounting rather than in sales or in. service rather than in parts, et cetera. And we typically don't do that, nor do we do a good job at that. And we're starting to see stress between the silent generation and the baby boomers, me, you're a millennial, I guess, right? Or are you a Gen X?

Yeah.

Well, the interesting thing is Gen Z and Alpha, the other ones, they don't understand cursive. There's a comedy act that I was just watching. They don't understand cursive. They don't know what an envelope is. A paper map? Don't do this to me. And this comedian was making the point, it's okay, they'll take over the world, but we can easily get it back because we'll do our battle plans in cursive and we'll put it in a letter and they won't know what that is. This whole thing is changing. It's fluid. And that makes it exciting to me. So, you know, I think we've done a reasonably good job in communicating here in our evolution as a learning institution, our position and thinking relative to how we want to proceed. You want to wrap it up with a bow and give me some closing comment that's... An epiphany striker?

I agree with that. You know, there's a comment. 1963 is when I took my SAT exams. And 1963 is the high watermark for grades or scores on the SAT. And ever since then, the SAT, well, today, the SAT and ACT aren't required at many universities because they find it to be discriminatory for whatever reason. We seem to have been dumbing down education rather than ratcheting it up. And what you're talking about is taking more skills into lower ages. so that people get exposed to more learning more quickly.

I agree with you. I think, you know, expecting the best, you will get better results. You know, thank you, Caroline, for the time. And thank you, everybody, for listening to another Candid Conversation. We hope you enjoyed this and listening to our evolution as a learning platform and look forward to having you at another Candid Conversation in the near future. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo!