Positive Learning

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Why I built Positive Learning

As an administrator, the #1 predictor that my students wouldn’t graduate was failing Algebra 1.

Most of our students who failed Algebra 1 were learning their second language in addition to Algebra.

The products we bought weren’t doing the job, most were made for young students. My back ground in ELL, curriculum and instructional design, and special education pushed me to work with a smart team to find a solution.

Early ad 🫣

My life is radically different because I took this risk.

I will always be grateful and reserve the right to romanticize it**.**

My role at Positive Learning

CAO and Co-Founder

Source, hired, and managed a full time team of 4 people handling project management to CX, in very different points of career progression.

Ask Jeremy about why he called me the bulldozer.

Handled daily sales management and support including BDR’s and AEs (CEO was direct manager, but I handled metrics, hiring and firing)

Sourced, contracted, and managed 30+ 1099 creatives, teacher content writers, IDs, editors, and SMEs against tight timelines and strict quality. requirements. 😅

See the process I developed to helped to make it possible, and ask Dr. Bryan or Scott about working with me on this massive effort.

In 18 months, architected and managed the creation a full year of content for 4 grades aligned to CCSS, Utah State Core, and TEKS for a total of 390 unique fully illustrated lessons with voice over, with multiple on and offline components.

Interfaced with technical team and lead/co-lead product. Ask Adam about that. It was magic I’m still trying to replicate.

How we built Positive Learning

early PL.mp4

Positive Learning was venture backed, which meant a team to support in early prototyping.

Still very connected to education in Utah, I was able to quickly take iteration out to schools for feedback.

Much of our work centered on ensuring the voice over and highlighting synced exactly because students depend on us to know what words sound like before class.

Close communication with engineering let to better ways of doing the work.

Explaining they why behind current use cases lead to new ways of think of lesson planning (Spotify style queue) and better ways of correctly understanding students with accents.

Product research on early machine learning and voice recognition, early 2019 talking with the IBM Watson people I was already fascinated with the promise of AI to limit bias in assessing English Language Learners

In addition to product, CX and ID, for the first 18 months I also did all the alignments and crosswalks. Huge relief to hire brilliant educators to take that over!

Once we’d decided on the V1, worked some very long days and nights breaking a full year’s of curriculum into “primers” and developing systems and tools to be ready for our contracted teams.

In all we built 390 unique fully illustrated lessons with voice over, with multiple on and offline components, in 18 months.

What I learned building Positive Learning

How to work with a CTO, our full stack engineer was totally different than collaborating individual contributors at Imagine Learning. He had zero patience for stupidity or arrogance. The product and I are both better for it.