Carly Fuller is Vice President, Product Development & Innovation at EdisonLearning, an education management organization for public schools. With aspirations to become an educator from a young age, she began her career teaching math, tap, and musical theatre, as well as developing math curriculums. Carly worked her way up from a math department lead teacher at EdisonLearning to various product and leadership positions within the company.
In our conversation, Carly talks about her work at EdisonLearning to bridge the gap in education equity via accessibility, career and technical education courses, certifications, and more. She discusses the challenges of the edtech industry, including how schools don’t want uniform end-to-end solutions anymore, but instead prefer different tech systems that can all work together. Carly also shares the careful balance of staying compliant with online learning standards while innovating to meet the changing needs of students.
I always wanted to be a teacher or work in education. I went to Duquesne University for secondary education and mathematics and stayed to get my master’s in instructional technology. That opened the door to my interest in online learning. Shortly after college, I worked at EdisonLearning as a mathematics curriculum temp and a virtual math teacher.
That’s what exposed me to online learning in a practical and operational sense — the business of digital learning. I got to think about which designs in online courses drive student engagement and achievement, and what role the online learning platform plays in student and educator success. I saw how the implementation of our products can give students a greater voice and choice in their learning, and how it can be a catalyst for greater equity in the classroom.
I was lucky to grow in my career as a teacher before coming into product management. I started with the design and development of our eCourses curriculum, and as time went on, I took on more responsibilities. I moved into a client engagement role where I got to work directly with the customers who are implementing our products and think about their overall customer experience, and then eventually got into product development. Now, I lead the curriculum development, product development, and customer experience teams, as well as product innovation strategy for EdisonLearning.
As a teacher on the platform, you’re always thinking, “I wish I had a tool to be able to communicate in this way” or, “I wish I had a data dashboard to show me student mastery levels.” Both internal teachers and those teachers who utilize our product are that first line of defense when we think about the user experience, enhancements, and developments for the future. My own experience as a teacher on the platform, especially when I first moved into the role, really informed some of the things that we prioritized as updates. It also helps set a structure for focus groups, surveys, and user experience data that I collect to guide our overall product roadmap.
The challenge comes in with our proprietary platform, eSchoolware. It’s been around for over a decade now, and the idea was to create an end-to-end school solution where schools have one piece of technology that would do everything they needed — learning management for grade books, a way to deliver and author content, a student information system, a communication tool, etc.
Now, the market’s changed and schools don’t want that end-to-end solution anymore. They want products that work together in the greater school technology ecosystem. Rather than having one product that does everything, schools are saying, “My math teachers want this product, but my English teachers want this product, and we are using this student information system.” They just want all these systems to work together so teachers can use their preferred products, but student data is still safe and able to be exchanged between platforms.
Data privacy is always a huge concern for schools. If anything, COVID and the emergency remote learning really amplified the attention on ensuring students are safe and their data is protected. It’s interesting because though technology is advancing so quickly, educational policy and practices tend to move slowly. We’re seeing a lot of protocols and startup guides coming out with schools. They’re getting better at integrating those new tech tools into curriculums so that students and their families start to feel comfortable with it, rather than assuming it’ll be used for bad. Academic integrity policies are still going to be in place regardless.
There’s an organization called 1EdTech that sets the industry standards for how edtech products work together. It specifically sets the protocols for learning tools interoperability (LTI) and says, “Here’s the format, and here’s the language we needed to code these things in.” The work as a result has been building additional APIs, doing architecture upgrades, etc. It’s a work in progress. We’ve been able to make huge gains in the way that, for example, with single sign-on protocols within our platform. We can easily connect with other platforms and are building an API library so we can standardize the way we send or receive data from other learning systems.
One area that we’re still working on in our current roadmap is getting to that interoperability. We have some great features within our system that gamify the learning experience for students and personalize their pathway through lessons and their curriculum within eSchoolware. But some of those things that are differentiators for us are also the barriers to true interoperability, so that’s something we continue to work on.
One of the strategies is to look at barriers for students. We want students to have access to things like career and technical education, social-emotional learning, dual enrollment, and virtual dual enrollment for college courses, but we know that as soon as the student has to log into another system, we sometimes lose them. The first thing we did was start to build those single sign-on protocols within the system itself. That way, from a student perspective, they have a planner with all of their different courses in it and can get to everything from one page, even if it’s not our proprietary content.
The second strategy is making sure that key data — the things that a student, teacher, or school admin would want to know about student performance — is coming through to the learning system. The most important high-level data needs to be visible in our system in a secure way. The third part, which we’re still working on, is to have this data be embedded in our system.
Equity and accessibility are the main areas of focus for all EdisonLearning solutions. We’ve focused on integrating diversity, equity, and inclusion practices into our eCourses Style Guide. Our instructional designers and SMEs are trained to write a curriculum that creates mirrors, windows, sliding glass doors, and open doors.
When students are in our eCourses content, they can see themselves reflected — that’s the mirror. They can look at other situations and cultures, which is the window. They can also see a new world to step into, which is the sliding door, and the open door means that a student can look into another world without closing other doors at the same time.
We reflect those principles in the images, language, text, examples, and readings that we integrate into our courses. From a technical perspective, we focus on meeting web content accessibility guidelines. We also have an integrated accessibility widget, which allows students to change visual settings so they can experience the content in a way that they can be successful. Beyond that, we also have course enrollment settings for individualized education programs (IEP) or specialized education plans. You can easily reduce the number of assessment questions that a student would see or set a different mastery threshold that the student must meet to unlock the next lesson.
We’re focusing on solutions that meet the needs of today’s students. In addition to maintaining and enhancing our own platform and courses, part of my role is identifying other solutions that will meet the needs of the whole child. For example, we’ve been adding career and technical education courses with industry certifications or virtual dual enrollment.
By giving students this range of options and voice and choice in their education, they don’t have to choose between a high school diploma and supporting their family. They can earn their high school diploma in the way that they want to. If they want to take accelerated courses, they can do that. Or if they want to earn an industry certificate, they can do that. Providing those options really speaks to equity, because a successful high school experience doesn’t have to look one way. It can look like whatever that student needs it to look like.
I would say there are three main ways. One is staying involved in professional organizations, attending conferences and webinars, and reading about new asynchronous courses. The way The National Standards for Quality Online Learning (NSQ) standards are practically applied is through a nonprofit called Quality Matters. They have a rubric where you can review and certify courses. Not only do we put our own EdisonLearning courses through that, but I’m a certified master reviewer, so I get to review other schools too.
I’m also on the executive committee for Digital Learning Collaborative. Some of our team members joined from different state DOE departments, so we get to hear their challenges and needs, where funding is trending, any new legislation, etc. That’s really great to understand, from a practical sense, what the challenges or the needs are in the greater K–12 market.
Fostering teamwork and collaboration within and across departments is so important. As an edtech company, we have a wide range of experience, including educators, developers, marketing, sales, etc. We’ve had where divisions were more siloed, but over time, we’ve found that these silos create operational blind spots or an inability to see upcoming challenges and brainstorm solutions.
Last year, we were re-accredited as a learning service provider by the Middle States Association. I led an accreditation team tasked with identifying the strengths of the organization and specific areas for continuous improvement. We came up with four that resulted in cross-departmental committees to analyze data and operational practices and make recommendations to the executive team.
One of the things we wanted to look at was turnover and employee retention. We have a committee formed of team members — some from curriculum, instructions, marketing, and sales — to drive improvements there. That cross-departmental work has been super eye-opening. We’ve been able to share data, best practices, tools, and protocols, and it’s not only helped make individual departments more effective and successful but created a greater sense of consistency and company culture across departments.
I really like the approach that our CEO, Thom Jackson, takes. He always likes to take it from the perspective of the students we serve and says, “At the end of every decision we make is a student.” I completely adhere to that philosophy. If we have competing priorities, whether it’s technology-related, curriculum-related, or even with our third parties, I like to look at it from the lens of the student and think if this enhancement is going to help students learn, stay engaged with their schooling, and prepare them for success. From there, it’s a balance of customer and educator needs, the budget, overall corporate strategy, and considerations of industry standards and academic expectations.
Well, AI is the big one. Right now, especially with the educators I work with, there’s a lot of concern around AI and plagiarism. I think that view is shortsighted, and I’d like to think of AI as more of a tool that can be used not only to help our customers and students succeed but also to revolutionize the way we do our work within the platform and to service students. This could be anything from integrating a chatbot that can provide on-demand technical and academic support to students.
We know our students aren’t always working at the same time that we’re logged on during business hours, so having that coverage with an AI tool to be responsive to students’ learning would be great. The possibilities are endless when you think about integrating that into an online learning platform.
It’s just granting exposure at all levels. Educators have different fears and reservations than our product developers do, for example. Product and even sales and marketing are early adopters because tools like ChatGPT help us do our work better. I think the more we integrate it into our daily work and professional development, the more comfortable educators get with the technology and the more easily it is to think about adopting it in our own instruction and curriculum.
Thinking about the future, I’m so excited about how it could change even the way we do quality assurance — to have automated AI testing engines that can move faster and predict the challenges that students might have or educators might have within a certain product is really exciting.
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