A Conversation with Josh Nichols, Founder of CrossBraining, Inc., about Online Learning
Josh Nichols is the founder of CrossBraining, Inc., an experiential learning and video assessment platform. He is a graduate of Spring Arbor University and a STEM/project-based learning educator for 22 years. Nichols is based in SE Michigan.
Grace Chung (BT): Could you briefly explain how your background as a teacher has impacted your vision for CrossBraining?
Josh Nichols (JN): I’ve been an educator for 20 years, most of that has been in the hands-on learning environment also known as STEM and project based learning. My whole career has been focused on the concept that we learn by doing. As a student, I struggled in the traditional learning environment, but thrived when I got hands-on experience. I have been fortunate enough to teach in an environment that encouraged hands on learning.
BT: What was your thought process in designing CrossBraining?
JN: I wanted students to capture and explain their learning. I experimented with iPads and Chromebooks and other apps to see how technology could help manage their learning. I started drawing out wireframes of what the app could look like based on different apps that were online at the time but never found the one that I wanted. Eventually, I was encouraged to build a working model! We piloted it with 500 teachers around the country and what the application does is enables students to capture, narrate and reflect on their learning targets through video storytelling. CrossBraining is based on a guardrail system where an instructor can assign certain tasks to complete in phases. Students then capture footage of themselves doing those specific tasks and then explain those moments back to the teacher with very little video editing. Finally, they answer questions and reflect back on that learning target in each specific phase while the application stitches all those phases together into a 45 second narrative video.
BT: Regarding COVID-19 crisis, time is of the essence for many educators, medical workers, and other professionals. Recently, platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok have been used to create quick videos and share effective safe distancing, quarantining, and cleaning methods to the public. On the flip side, there’s concern that certain content on a more effective platform that reaches a wider audience while showing the same step by step process. What do you see as potential drawbacks in those platforms versus something like CrossBraining that really delves into that step-by-step learning process?
JN: Most learning develops in phases and we’re in a moment now where that’s a challenge. Each of those platforms you mention work as a solution for different purposes. They're more of a free platform with many editing tools but CrossBraining gives the user guardrails and is more of an interactive platform between the instructor and learner. We’re working with a lot of challenges in universities because there's a shift in allowing students to go capture and explain these concepts remotely. If you’re introducing PPE to a large audience of front line workers during COVID needs to be communicated quickly, it makes sense to use social media. But say there’s a new donning and doffing method that needs to be taught to nursing students at home, they could use CrossBraining to capture and explain that remotely.
BT: Building off of that theme, what do you see colleges and universities doing with CrossBraining?
JN: CrossBraining is working with both on campus and remote colleges and universities. For example, many are using our platform for nursing programs, culinary, computer science to name a few. A lot of apps have screenrecording and video capturing features, but our app allows the instructor to put guardrails in place so that the students know exactly what to capture and narrate. The instructor breaks the content down into phases. The students capture, narrate and reflect in each phase. A Computer Science instructor might ask the student to capture specific code and explain why they wrote it the way they did. A nursing instructor might ask the student to capture multiple steps in taking blood pressure. All the videos the students make are stored in the teacher and student dashboard and become a portfolio of their competency.
BT: That certainly makes it easier from a learning and teaching stance by segmenting the learning process in shorter clips rather than having a one take shot that you have to rewind for each step.
JN: Exactly, we get a lot of feedback from instructors saying that it empowers the student to know exactly what they’re learning. It’s easy to make an edit or redo. For instance, if someone was taking blood pressure, their instructor could assign the student five tasks and ask them to create five 10 second phases. That’s giving that student very clear and concise instructions on what to capture video and add their narration. That way they're getting their learning target, narrating what they learned and matching their audio to that video learning that took place for the teacher. As the student is uploading those phases on the teacher’s dashboard, the teacher can see them accomplishing those tasks and can give them feedback. This process keeps the instruction precise and structured for both parties.
BT: That seems to be just a common problem in classroom learning, giving students a big problem and without breaking it down into digestible pieces. With schools moving online, it’s harder to interact with a group of students through a screen and check in with their learning every step of the way when you’re streaming a lecture for a few hours. What do you see as the biggest challenges that virtual classrooms will face as educational institutes from around the world move online?
JN: The biggest challenges we are hearing is that instructors don’t want to lose the personal interaction that is so important in a learning environment. They are looking for ways to help enhance the personal relationship from a distance. We believe that video and audio coupled with bi-directional feedback helps fill some of that gap.
I think it's a combination of a few things. So our company has always been a remote company, but my wife's a teacher, I have a daughter who's still in school, and a friend who was sent home. And then when COVID hit everyone right off the bat, there’s all of these anxieties, and different factors affecting equity that we need to consider. We've looked through it and we have to look at it at all of the angles. We have to ask ourselves if these kids are sitting at home with guardians. Are those guardians at home, are they frontline workers? One of my family members, he has three kids and they're both frontline workers. And so if I'm a teacher and I assign an assignment to that home, I have to have that type of empathy and ask how do I get them the instruction that they need when they don't have help at home until later at night.
BT: As a former educator, do you have any advice for teachers and students adapting to online learning?
JN: What we're in is not simply remote learning– it's emergency remote learning. The first thing is to make sure your students are safe by checking in with them. Learning has to take a back seat while we address some of the anxieties the students are facing. There will be an adjustment period before students acclimate to a new way of learning. Once the students are ready to learn online, they will need to have a schedule in place and understand what the expectations are. There’s also a new player in learning that was never involved every single day–the parent. I had parents come into my classroom, but it wasn't every day, all day. Now they're also there at home helping their kids absorb information from the teacher. So how do we get this new incredible asset that typically isn't there in your classroom involved? We need to rethink and find how to innovate that new asset and include them in the learning with the students. The most important advice I have is to overcommunicate.
BT: Right now, there all sorts of educational forms that aren't really easily translatable online for trade schools. Do you see CrossBraining offer solutions for learning in the current environment?
JN: Our customer base is K-12 and we have colleges and universities. We have a partnership with GoPro and we just created a free lesson site, https://lessons.crossbraining.com/lessons. And we merge our lesson site with their #HomePro challenge. And the idea behind it was we're getting in the education space by providing projects that parents and kids can do at home with materials found from home. This is very project-based learning, STEM oriented, a place for them to go and become builders and creators and makers. We've partnered with a couple educators, partnered with Go Pro, created this quick site so that parents and students can go onto the site and click through easy lessons tackling these fun challenges. Anyone at home can create and design a plan of how you're going to attack these project challenges, then you're going to build that thing. Every kid needs to learn how to iterate and go through a design process. That's a skill set that you can take on for the rest of your life. With our site, the design process is something that they can do at home. There’s going to be iteration and a final product like the design cycle. We have over thirty online right now and we're adding four or five a week. Where I'm going with this is that there may never be another time in their life where they have parents or students have this much time off. And I think it's a wonderful time to be at home and create and do the things that you normally just don't have time for in our fast paced world. Some people are learning how to speak new languages, pick an instrument, etc.
Right now, the education system has been completely disrupted. We can survive or thrive out of this and I think it gives the education system an opportunity to be incredibly innovative. Our company is trying to help support some of those issues that it's running into and that we have a product in place, but it’s just one platform that fits is one of those puzzle pieces. It's going to take multiple products and projects throughout a student's learning to fulfill their knowledge. If there are educators out there that are trying to find a platform that has a lot of guard rails, [CrossBraining] was created by educators and we are looking to work with other educators to continually innovate our own product. We love feedback and want help solve some of these problems while also looking forward. And we believe we have a product that's, it's in that space that allows that to take place.
BT: BT’s readership also includes inspiring student entrepreneurs. As someone who has started their own company and product, do you have any advice to students who are thinking about innovating education? What avenues of growth do you see in the future that you would advise students to look into?
JN: My number one advice to someone that wants to be an entrepreneur or is to find a mentor, someone who has been through this before. You really have to be able to keep your head in check and a good mentor will help. If they're creating software, definitely create their own wireframes and take it to a consumer to do customer discovery with it. It takes a lot of patience, but you get a lot of feedback early on. It's okay to be super embarrassed about your minimal viable product. Also, really flush out your idea and how you're trying to solve a problem. By doing that, you learn about it. When you put a minimal viable product out into the market, it's just really scary because your consumers are going to see bugs. They're going to see stuff that you'd never want them to see. But at the same time, they're going to help you flush that out faster so that you can come out with your version one. This is just part of the process.