Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So that's definitely a big, big focus and it's something that is brought up to us a lot by professors as well, is that they love that element of it, that they're introducing tools that students are actually going to be using in their professional lives as well.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Welcome to the EdTech Connect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dillon and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds, innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax and let's dive in.
Welcome to the podcast Today everyone. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Merritt Meredith Bailey, founder and CEO of streamwork. Meredith brings a wealth of experience in product marketing, having worked with industry giants like Google, Apple and YouTube. Her experience in optimizing workflows for global media and communications teams laid the foundation for streamwork's mission to transform online learning and higher education.
Building on her extensive experience, Meredith founded streamwork Bridge the gap between in person and online learning. The platform brings the collaborative energy of real world peer groups into the digital space, enabling students to work together on creative projects with depth and authenticity. Streamwork is reshaping education by boosting engagement, fostering collaboration on visual and creative work powered by innovative features like interactive feedback tools, streamlined task management and and an auto creating system. So welcome to the show, Meredith.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Thank you, thank you for having me.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Sure. I've seen this solution. I'm really impressed with you doing this powerful collaborative platform. Can you talk? Start off with talking about your background with some of these tech giants and how that factored into your founders journey.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Sure. So I've been fortunate to work at a number of large companies within the tech space. So Google, Apple, YouTube also have worked at a few small startups and in all of those roles I focused on product marketing. So my goal and focus was to launch products into market and anytime you're launching products into market, there's a whole lot of coordination that goes with that. You have tons of different collateral involved so you might need a marketing video, your social graphics presentations, event brochures, etc. You're working with a huge cross functional team, you're managing a lot of different timelines across different versions of assets and you're managing a lot of approvals. And so my job was to coordinate all of that and It's a lot. And that process is something that you're doing on repeat every single time you're launching. And so a lot of my focus was just thinking, how can I make this simpler? What can I do to streamline this and automate it? So I decided to take the leap. I quit my job and I built streamwork to help fix that and to actually build a product that helped teams collaborate on creative, no matter what type of team collaborate on creative and collect stakeholder approvals and simplify that process. And as we've been rolling out streamwork, we've been seeing there's more and more use cases for streamwork and there's a lot of application for streamwork across all different types of industries. Education is one of our most recent rollouts, and it's been really, really exciting to see how streamwork is transforming the way that both students and instructors work in the classroom.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: So you're getting into my next question, which was, you know, what was the prompt to focus on higher education? Did you have some experience there or what? What drew you to higher ed?
[00:04:11] Speaker A: It was actually a professor that approached us there. It's a professor at Arizona State University. She was very interested in finding a tool that would enable her class to work together collaboratively online in peer groups. And so she is part of the school of art there, and they have a lot of different experiential type work that the students work on where they need to have different materials that they use to create art projects. She wanted her students have a really simple way to record the projects on their iPhone, then take those videos, upload them somewhere, have peer groups that could work together on those projects and weigh in and critique them and have really meaningful discussion about the projects and then have all of that auto graded. So really know the participation that was taking place, be able to assign points to that. And so we worked with her actually to develop this use case and she asked if streamwork could be adapted to do that. And we said absolutely. And so we've been partnering with her and since that time, actually partnering with lots of different professors from all different types of departments who work with all different also sizes of classes to help make streamwork be a product that enables their students to engage together in the classroom and then also enables the instructor to win back some time. So it's been exciting.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: So it sounds like the use cases are largely focused on the academic side of higher ed, because higher ed has the administrative side and the academic side. Can you talk a little bit about those use cases? I was familiar with the video collaboration part, but I understand you can also collaborate on text and documents. I mean, it's almost like it's a blessing and a curse. I feel like when you have such a powerful product, because how do you communicate what you do when you can do so much? Like there's tools that are just devoted to grading. Yeah. So, like, you have this included too. So how. What are those use cases, I guess, for higher ed that are the most powerful, like in the video sense, or the text for research or what are those kind of. What are you thinking?
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Sure. So it sort of depends on what we are hearing from the universities. So when we have professors approach us, they talk to us about their needs for their class, the size of their class and objectives, and they also walk us through what type of creative content they need their students to work on. So Streamwork, as you mentioned, can. You can collaborate on any type of content, from videos to CAD files for architecture classes, PDFs, presentations. So you can really collaborate on any type of visual file together in the platform. And so when it comes to the classroom use case, it's really about talking with the professor about their objectives, what type of files their students are going to need to collaborate on, size of class, and then how we can set up the platform to accomplish those goals. For the administrative side, we do have many universities also approaching us about using Streamwork on the admin side. And there's been various use cases that we've been approached about that. A big one is faculty tenure reviews.
We actually walked through how faculty tenure reviews take place, and oh my gosh, what a process.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Isn't it?
[00:07:26] Speaker A: There's a lot involved in that, a lot of different collateral involved in that. Tons of people weighing in and reviewing the work and providing feedback. And so we've been working with universities to help with that process, too, to streamline it so that a faculty member who perhaps is up for tenure review, they can submit all of their materials into a folder in streamwork that can be routed to the dean, to the provost, to everyone that needs to weigh in, and they can leave feedback directly on the files. And when I say leaving feedback on the files, I can talk through that a little bit more with you, but it's literally leaving commentary on the files, drawing on the files. You're getting the comments exactly where, in context, where they need to be.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: So it's a workflow tool, too, that can be used so many places that seem very powerful. I'm visioning that this because I've seen this. I've seen your product. I was impressed with the solution. It's almost not podcast worthy. We almost have to do a webinar to show this because it's so visual, but maybe we'll do that. I think this might be a great tool because students can get familiar with this type of an interface or a creative dynamic that they're going to encounter after graduation. Is that intentional of you building something that. Oh yeah. We're familiar with collaboration tools because we use this in college. Have you thought of that, that aspect of it?
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Absolutely. It's a really important piece of this for us is making sure that students have access to next generation collaboration tools in the classroom. And a big part of this is getting access to that and working in them and then having that, you know, they will continue using this tool in their workplace after they graduate. And so what a fantastic thing to get exposure to it and to start working with peers within the classroom. And then that's something that's only going to continue once they graduate. So that's definitely a big, big focus. And it's something that is brought up to us a lot by professors as well, is that they love that element of it that they're introducing tools that students are actually going to be using in their professional lives as well.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Can you share any specific examples of how Streamwork has been used successfully in higher ed? Is there any benchmarks or metrics or anything like that?
[00:09:36] Speaker A: Yeah. So one class that's actually live right now is a Introduction to Photography class. And so this class, it's a smaller class, it's about 30 students. They're working in peer groups of five. And when I say peer groups, what I mean is that in the platform, the professor can basically restrict access for students to only their peer group. So the students do not see the work of all the other students in their class. They only see the work submitted by the peers in their group. And the beauty of that is students are working in smaller groups. They can collaborate together and have more meaningful discussion and critique within those groups. And so the way this class is structured is he set this up so that there's these smaller peer groups of five. And it's been pretty remarkable. The students are using Adobe tools, right, for the photography. They then bring their photographs into streamwork. The really amazing thing also for this professor in particular, is that their TIFF files, so the layers of the photos remain. So once they're in Streamwork, students are collaborating on the photographs, they're drawing on them, leaving comments, going back and forth. They can even take Those comments turn them into tasks that are then delegated back to the student for the revised version of the photograph. All of that lives in one place, that entire creative process. And at the end the professor can even download the files, those TIFF files, pull them back into Adobe and he can see the layers and they're still there. So it's really cool process where we can work with all those existing tools and we're adding that collaborative layer to what students are doing. So yeah, that's an example of how it's working today. And then to your question about metrics, we certainly see that students are much more engaged when they are using streamwork in the classroom. We see engagement scores increase. We also hear from professors that they love the fact that they win back time. We have an auto grading feature that you mentioned that grades really granularly based on what student activities are happening in the platform, based on their engagement. And so the professor, they spend less time monitoring when student assignments are submitted and those type of in, you know, the points they're receiving and instead can spend more time with their students on the creative that they're, they're working on. So that's, that's something that we hear a lot.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: You mentioned this Adobe, it's not integration, it just works well with Adobe, it sounds like because layers get imported either way. Right, is what you were saying.
[00:12:09] Speaker A: So the original file, whether it's a video, Adobe Illustrator file, whatever it may be, the original file gets uploaded to streamwork. You just drag and drop it in and then you can collaborate on it. And then once you download it, you're actually downloading the original back down.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: So it's, it's pretty, that seems pretty powerful to me. And so what I'm wondering is like, I wouldn't call it an integration. It's just, it works well together. But do you have any other systems you work well with or are integrated with at the university level?
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Yeah, we integrate with a lot of different systems. We integrate with a lot of the top project management tools like asana Monday.com we integrate with major communication tools like Slack, which some universities are using Slack even in the classroom. And so that's been a big one. We also, we are currently building out our LTI integration which is our, it's highly requested. Every school we're talking to is asking for that LTI integration. And that is something that I think is going to only make this more seamless. What schools are doing today. We have a number of schools who use, you know, their LMS or their lectures and then for the section of the class where students need to submit creative work or submit a presentation and collaborate on it, they just drop in a streamwork link. Students click that and then they go into streamwork and submit and work in there and then go back to the lms. The LTI integration is just going to make that even more seamless.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And for those listeners who don't know what that is, that's the connection that allows the systems to talk to your lms. So it's the standard protocol for learning management system integration. So it's going to be amazing.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: We're definitely excited about that one.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. Everyone asks for that, you know, no one wants to log into a different place if they can get it through their lms because they're already in there so much, you know. Well, the grading part, like I've talked to a couple grading companies in the last few months, that's all they do is automated grading. Tell me, like with grading too, there's grading and then there's feedback. Can you talk about the difference between those and what streamwork is powerful with or what you're focused on with the grading?
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Definitely. So this is one of the big things. That original professor that approached us, this was really important to her and we found out through many more conversations that it's important to all professors. They are looking for tools that enable deep discussion and meaningful feedback. And with streamwork, we can really enable that. So in streamwork, what you're doing is, let's say a student uploads a video and the peers in their group are leaving feedback on that video. So they're leaving commentary, real time commentary on the video. They're drawing on certain time codes on the video to make it very clear what their feedback is saying. And they're going back and forth in a real time discussion. No matter where the students are located in the world, they're able to do that in streamwork, that back and forth commentary. Students aren't able to leave a comment that's something very simple like looks good just to win a point in a way. Students aren't able to fudge this. They have to leave something meaningful because we have this streamwork set up where you can take the comment and the student turns it into a task and assigns it back to the person who submitted the work and that person who submitted the work has to respond to it. So it's very difficult to create a task out of something that says, hey, looks good. The task actually has to be something meaningful that the student would take action on in their revised version. And that is something that this professor, she really loves. She uses streamwork in all of her classes now. And that comment to task piece is something that she grades on very heavily in her course. And you can do that with our gradebook. Our gradebook is fully customizable to the course. You can set deadlines for when work is submitted, when revised work is uploaded. You can even get as granular as setting points for the amount of comments that are left on other students work, the amount of tasks that are created from those comments and that whole sort of participation within that. And you can. Professors can set whatever amount of points they would like to each of those actions and they can set the due dates custom as well. So it's something that's really powerful and that's been built in close collaboration with professors because at the end of the day we want to make sure it's the tool that serves their needs and that is going to solve their problems. So that's been the focus.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: That's a great example. You mentioned earlier about giving the instructors faculty their time back. It's a more efficient process to really manage their classroom. Do you find that maybe translates to being able to cater to different course sizes, larger courses, and affect learning objectives in any way? Have you had any of those comments about affecting class size?
[00:16:59] Speaker A: Yes. So in terms of class size, Streamwork works in small seminars to large lectures. We have, as I mentioned that example earlier, the photography class is about 30 students. We also have classes with hundreds of students where the peer groups are larger. They can be 10 to 15, 20 students. And there's even a TA managing each peer group. So the setup kind of depends on the professor's needs and objectives for the course. In terms of professors sharing that they're getting time back, that's a big piece of it. We hear that almost every course that runs streamwork, in the feedback that we receive at the end, the professors are sharing that with us. The big way they're saving time is with our gradebook. So it's their ability to step back and say, hey, I don't need to worry about the administrative side of this tracking. When students are submitting, you know, are they submitting their work on time, looking at, you know, the details of do their comments, you know, do they have substance or is it an actual critique or not? We are monitoring that through the task allocation and the way that our gradebook is set up. And so in turn, professors get to spend more time with their students. So we actually see Them, it's pretty cool. We see them jumping into the peer groups, they are responding to commentary, they get involved in the discussions that students are having. Professors are often the ones also creating the tasks from the comments and assigning them to students. So we see all of that back and forth in collaboration happening. And the other part of it that's really exciting that we see is this collaboration effect where once students start receiving comments from others in their group, they go and they start commenting back on their peers work and everybody starts getting more and more involved. And so you see this flutter of activity and it's really cool and it's kind of a contagious thing. It's awesome.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: That's great. What is your vision of the future for online learning? I mean, a few years ago we wouldn't really have envisioned that this is really possible. It's happened so fast. And now we have AI. So it's a future question for you that's kind of open ended is like, you know, do you have, do you see AI in the mix if you're using it right now or in the future? And what's, what do you see coming up?
[00:19:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I certainly see AI as part of this equation. The way I like to think of AI is how can we apply it to the workflows and the current product to make it work even better for students and faculty. What aspects of the product can we supercharge for them and take any manual element out of it so it makes it even simpler. And I think that's something that our team is taking a hard look at that what we can do there in terms of our vision. We're just really, really excited to be in the education space. I think these first universities in here and the classes that are coming on board, it's like, it's just a really cool, wonderful thing to see the students collaborating together, to hear the feedback we're getting from professors about how easy this has been to roll out and how involved they're seeing their students. And especially in an online setting, what we're really doing is we're mimicking that traditional peer group experience that students used to have pre Covid right where they're in the classroom, they're working with a group of peers on a presentation or on a visual project of some sort.
We've taken that experience and we brought it online into streamwork. And so now that can still exist. And it's just a really cool way to kind of bring that experience into modern day. And then, you know, from here our vision is how can we make that even better? And how can we equip students even beyond the classroom so that they are leveraging this type of next gen technology not only right now, but in the future?
[00:20:37] Speaker B: It really is a powerful product. I would encourage anyone to that's interested to check it out. We'll put links in the show notes to Meredith profile and to stream work. But one final question to wrap it up here. Meredith is for a lot of listeners are upcoming founders and really have ideas. What is some advice you'd give to a tech founder that wants to be where you are?
[00:21:03] Speaker A: I would say just look out for in your everyday life, what are the things that what could be improved? Right. There's bound to be something in your life where you're doing a repeat process or that is a pain point that you have and most likely you have this individual kind of knowledge and understanding of that pain point, especially if it's something that you're dealing with on a daily basis. And if you start chatting with other people you might find out that they have that same pain point and that there, there's a spark of an idea in that and that's something worth looking at and pursuing. I think one of the biggest. And Jeff, let me know what you think too. I mean you're a founder as well. Like one of the biggest aspects of being a founder is persistence and not giving up. There's a lot of up and downs and so it's just a matter of finding the idea, testing it with others, understanding if it's valid and something to solve. And if it is, don't give up on it.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: I love that advice. And yeah, since you asked me, I think maybe tell me if this resonates with you. But you be flexible what you, what you're going to build in the beginning, it's probably not going to be like that in a year or later. You, you have to kind of see, maybe you'll be lucky and be kind of close to what you think the market is looking for. But things change and you got to be flexible and persistent too.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: Just like you said, a hundred percent. I agree that it changes. I've had so many products I've worked on in the past where we were even getting close to launching products in the past and then we had to scrap it and do a, a 180 on it. And that's just the reality of it. And it's, it just goes back to making sure that you are solving a problem, a real problem for your customer. And how are you going to do that in the best way possible for them.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: So I wouldn't even thought I'd be doing this podcast two years ago, but it fits into what we're trying to do is connect higher ed with the best technology out there. So it's one of the funnest things I do now.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: It's really cool that you do this.
I love it.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: Well, I'm going to close it out and thank you for being on the show, Meredith.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Thank you, Jeff.
[00:23:03] Speaker B: We wrap up this episode. Remember, EdTech Connect is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechconnect.com your hub for edtech reviews, trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
