As today's guest, Grove Learning CEO Sean Strong, says: just because something's cutting-edge, doesn't mean it has to be a pain to use. That's the philosophy behind his company, which aims to make introducing VR into a classroom easy and efficient.
Julie: Hello, my name is Julie
Smithson, and I am your XR for Learning podcast host. Today on our
podcast is Sean Strong. Sean is the CEO and co-founder of Grove
Learning. Grove Learning is working to make VR more accessible and
effective for educators worldwide. Sean studied artificial
intelligence at Stanford University, worked at Apple and EdTech, and
has taught over 100 students how to code. Welcome, Sean. How are you?
Sean: Hi, Julie. Thank you so
much for having me. I'm doing well.
Julie: Great. Why don't you
highlight a little bit about yourself and Grove Learning, and the
mission that Grove Learning is bringing to education and learning?
Sean: Yep. As you mentioned, we
are Grove Learning. We're a management platform for Oculus Quest and
Go, specifically engineered for the classroom. We originally built VR
experiences. We created a math game called Space Gerbil and we kind
of realized in that process that actually bringing that to schools
was very challenging, and that for your average teacher -- who might
not be savvy with technology -- VR can actually be very hard to use.
And so for us, we kind of started Grove Learning with this mission to
really make VR simple for educators.
Julie: That's awesome. I know
that you started off -- as you mentioned -- creating the content for
a library to be used, I guess. And then you kind of had to take that
step back -- as you said -- to ensure that the teachers had a system
that they could use, that was easy to deploy in the classroom
setting. And maybe you can talk a little bit about the features of
your platform, and why it's so easy for teachers to pick up and use
Sean: Yeah. The core features
that we provided Grove Learning are just the things that teachers
kind of wish they had without Grove Learning. And so what does that
look like? That looks like you can start any experience remotely kind
of from a dashboard, right? So if I have 20 students in my class, I
can send them all to Julie's app, and they'll all start at the same
time, synchronized. That being said, sometimes students really enjoy
VR and they get a bit carried away, and it can be hard to get your
students attention back. So sometimes you just want to pause, right?
And with Grove Learning, you can just pause all the experiences and
kind of regain control of your classroom. We allow you to group
different students and so you can have five different students doing
experience A and five other students doing Experience B. We kind of
give you that granular control. So on one hand, we kind of allow the
teacher to be in charge of the experiences on the headset. On the
other hand, we tell them what exactly is going on, right? And so we
can tell them what application a student is currently in. We can
actually provide full video streams of all the headsets in a
classroom. And so you-- can we call it card view. You can think of it
as a kind of CCTV view, where you can see all the different devices
and what students are actually looking at in real time, which can
help teachers kind of know what's going on. Because otherwise the
status quo is, teachers generally just kind of lean down and listen
to headsets. And for us, we just found that listening wasn't an
effective enough management tool to really make VR practical in
Julie: So when-- if I'm a
teacher and obviously I need to have a little bit of curation and
knowledge based on what experiences to use in my classroom, there
obviously needs to be a little bit of analysis on, you know, which
student would do better in experiencing something than another
student. And there's a lot of conversation now about teachers and
their ability to evaluate the students and provide an individualized
learning experience. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how do the
teachers decide, or how does Grove Learning help teachers decide
which content to distribute to which students?
Sean: Yeah. And so I think from
our perspective, we really want to empower teachers. And so the way
that we view our platform is kind of an extension of the teacher. And
so we actually don't take any real stance on how a teacher should run
their class and how they should curate. Generally speaking, the
teachers who we've worked with in the past have a pretty good idea in
terms of what content they want to feature. The problem is that when
they try to actually run that content, they just end up wasting a lot
of time. And they don't-- they're not actually successful with it.
And so I think individualized learning and-- I mean, I studied
artificial intelligence, so there are a lot of interesting things
there. But I think for us fundamentally, teachers have done the same
thing for laptops, they did the same thing for iPads. And for us,
it's-- we believe that at this point, teachers are by far the best
arbiters of what actually is effective teaching. And we just really
want to give them that granular control over the devices, so they can
do what they think is best.
Julie: Maybe you can speak to a
little bit more about the setup. From what I experienced on your
website -- which is grovelearning.com -- it seems simple. It's very--
it's laid out very easy to read. But how simple is it?
Sean: For us, one of the key
value adds for us is that setup time. And so if you look at, again,
the classroom with 20 to 30 VR headsets: to get everyone up and
running for the first time can often take anywhere from 10 to 20
minutes. It can take a long time, actually, when students aren't
familiar with VR, they're not sure what's going on. And we can bring
that generally down to about five minutes. And for experienced
classrooms, it's even less. And so for the repeat user the setup is
very simple, you can just turn on the headset and it'll instantly
launch the experience that you want. And it'll also lock you into
that experience. And so if the student tried to exit and let's say
they wanted to watch last week's soccer game, they wouldn't be able
to, because with our software, we can kind of walk a student into a
particular experience. And we can make sure that that's done on boot,
so right when you turn on the device or wake it from sleep. And all
of these kind of small things add up to just saving teachers time in
the long run. The initial actual setup on the device -- so loading
the software -- can take take a bit of time, but we generally do that
over a phone call and we're there to help through that. For us, we
really find our value add in that repeat usage, when you're using it
every week or every day and you get to save those 10 minutes every
single time you're on a class.
Julie: I think that one part--
the part where you say 20 minutes down to five minutes launch time, I
think that's a real clear ROI for teachers to understand how
impactful this technology can be, and breaking down that barrier that
many teachers probably have a fear of. "How am I going to launch
20 headsets all at the same time and and be able to do that?"
Maybe you can speak to any technical assist that you provide, or your
suggestions to the teachers or schools to make sure that they have
the tech help that they need to launch this. And then I'd like to go
into the conversation of hardware and not management.
Sean: And so the way that we
kind of view our software is really we can just empower teachers
directly. And so, we have technology integrators that we're working
with. We have teachers who just reach out, explaining their tough
management problem. In terms of technical support, we're pretty
responsive there and we try to help people out. But I think our
philosophy with it is that interface should be so intuitive, that a
teacher doesn't really need training. You can kind of just figure it
out, where if you click on a device, you click "launch" and
it kind of just happens. And so for us, our design threshold is we
want a user who's actually never used to VR before to be able to run
a classroom with VR. And just because the technology is cutting edge
-- the Oculus Quest is amazing -- that doesn't mean that managing it
has to be so technically complex, as well. That actually can be quite
simple if given the right interface, then kind of layers of
Julie: That's awesome. I think
that [chuckles] even just having this conversation relieves that
stress of being overwhelmed as a teacher, and having to deploy
something that may not even take as long as it takes to set up. And
it needs to have that usability and functionality in the application
to be able to deploy so easy.
Sean: Exactly. Just because
something's cutting edge, doesn't mean it needs to be painful.
Julie: Right. Maybe you can talk
a little bit more about the hardware. I know that your application
works right now with the Oculus Go and with the Oculus Quest, which
both fantastic pieces of hardware that bring anything to life. But
maybe you can talk a little bit about the approach to how you advise
hardware purchase and management within the classroom as well.
generally speaking, schools can go about different ways of obtaining
the hardware. Some schools have grants, other schools have kind of
tech budgets that they can spend. We also work with universities and
other kinds of players. And so actually obtaining the headsets, we
don't really take a strong stance there. Generally speaking, I think
people end up getting the headsets off of Amazon. But it's up to the
individual. For us, we kind of step into the equation once they've
made that decision they want VR, and actually they've already
purchased some headsets, and now they've run their first class and
they've realized that they're spending a lot of time on this kind of
management question. I think that that's kind of where we step into
the equation. Before that, Julie, I don't know if we have a strong
opinion either way. Just honestly, whatever makes the most sense for
the school is generally what we recommend.
Julie: The fact that it seems so
easy -- again -- it's just-- it's something that I'm not even used to
in our conversations, because we have so many situations around the
world that are not adopting this technology as quick as we wish they
were. And things are changing, obviously. I would love to jump back
into Math Gerbil -- one of your content games -- and maybe you can
tell us a little bit about that game and the gamification behind it.
My personal view is that gamification is obviously part of the
analytics that go into educating a student, and then recording back
what they've done or achieved is analyzed into that personalized
learning situation. So maybe you can talk a little bit about your
team and how you approach some of this content and the gamification
Sean: I guess. To explain the
full premise of Space Gerbil is a pretty complex endeavor, so I'll
try to simplify it, but-- which is part of the reason why we realized
it wouldn't work in schools. But what we found was, it was kind of a
multiplayer VR game, where some students were outside of VR and some
students were in VR, and the entire premise was around getting this
space gerbil home to the rocket ship, and you'd use math functions to
get them there. I think what we realized in that development process
was we actually weren't sort of factoring in analytics, we were very
basic about it when we were building it. So we just didn't really
factor in teacher perspectives enough. We didn't really think about
what does this look like on the ground of an actual classroom with an
actual teacher leading this with actual students. I think for us, we
were kind of in our-- because again, our background is all very
technical. And so we were thinking about "Wow, we can do all
this on the headset, and the connection between the phones and the
headset." And we just didn't really take a ton of time to look
at, "Okay, what does this actually look like in the classroom?"
And when you actually look at how it gets implemented in the
classroom, you realize that there are these just other problems --
like management -- that need to be solved first if you're going to
have widespread adoption.
Absolutely. So let's go back and talk about multiplayer games then. I
think that's where really the future of entertainment, obviously a
lot of people agree the same thing. Future of entertainment, but also
being in the classroom and having that multiplayer experience. Does
your Grove Learning application host multiplayer experiences? Is that
an example -- the Math Gerbil -- that you can do that?
Sean: Yeah. So, in terms of
multiplayer experiences; bluntly, right now, Julie, we-- there are
actually a lot of really compelling single player games on the Oculus
-- or in other areas -- that individuals use pretty successfully in
classroom contexts. I think I would agree with you that in the long
run, these multiplayer games make the most sense. I can tell you from
a development perspective, it's quite challenging to build a
multiplayer game. And then especially for education, because now
you're dealing with student accounts. And again, just think about the
management question. If you have 20 students in a class, does
everyone then spend a couple of minutes logging in in VR? And then
once they've logged in in VR, you hope that they entered in the right
username and password and then they join. And then a lot of schools
have bandwidth problems, so what happens if one of the students
disconnects? And so for us -- again -- it's an incredibly exciting
space. And we just found -- in terms of our existing usage - that
most of it is actually surrounding with single player applications,
which is different than what we thought initially. Our initial
thought building Space Gerbil was "Oh no, multiplayer is a
feature." I think it is, but it just needs to be done in an
intelligent way, that -- again -- is sort of class-centric.
Julie: It's so interesting to
hear your perspective of somebody who is developing something for the
classroom, but with all of these different approach tactics, which
makes things-- broken things down a little bit further, obviously,
and from your perspective, to tackle these barriers and challenges of
dealing with classrooms and teachers, and that sort of thing. So
that's-- it's great that your team has pulled this together. And I'm
really excited for Grove Learning. Is there anything else that you'd
like to share about Grove Learning, or how to first approach Grove
Learning, or introduce Grove Learning into their own education
systems as a possibility of using as their management tool?
Sean: Yeah, I mean, if you're at
all excited about Grove Learning, I'd recommend you go to
grovelearning.com. Just read through our site. If it seems exciting,
it's pretty easy to create an account, it's pretty easy to put a call
with us. And then over the call, if you have a device, we can just
set it up and get you managed in 15 to 30 minutes. And once you see
what it does, then you can see if it makes sense for your specific
use case. And again, we don't want to force anyone to use our tool.
It's really just trying to find those use cases where we can save
teachers that precious time. Because for us, if you save 10 minutes
of class time, it's not only 10 minutes of teacher time, but if you
have 30 students in that class, you just saved 300 minutes of student
time. That's five hours. And so for us, that's kind of where we drive
our purpose, is how do we make this amazing technology with VR
accessible for schools? But how do you also make it efficient and how
do you also allow teachers to -- again -- do what they do best? And I
mean, a lot of teachers here in the United States -- at least the
master's degrees -- there's a lot of training that goes into that
role, in order to do it well. And for us, it's just allowing teachers
to really rock back, and do what they do best, and not have to worry
about these kind of simple problems that can be solved with software.
Julie: Well, with that, I think
that's a great way to end our podcast. Thank you so much, Sean, for
joining me on the XR for Learning podcast today.
Sean: Thank you so much, Julie.
I hope we have another one.
