Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Can you discuss pricing for this K-12 data science training program? What kind of schools? Is this part of the curriculum now? Is data science being taught at a curriculum level? What’s the state of the union?

Josh Jones: I’d be happy to go much, much deeper into this area because it’s a passion point and it’s what I’m doing 24 hours a day right now. We were just in Virginia the last two days teaching 125 data science teachers from across the state. I’m in Chicago today meeting up with Data Science for Everyone, which is a nationwide initiative around getting data skills training in schools.

So there’s data literacy, data analytics, and data science. Data literacy is what everyone should have. These are just your core concepts; we want everyone to have those. So it should be class agnostic. If you go to college or the business school, they make you take a 100 level business course that’s just sort of a survey of the entire business landscape.

We deploy that as a supplemental product. Supplemental means it’s not the teacher’s primary textbook. They’re using QuantHub as an add-on or a tool or a bell ringer. Teachers that are using QuantHub in Math or Science are using it for five or ten minutes a day. So it teaches many of those same skills. A teacher can use that to make their life easier. They can self-teach if they want to bring themselves up, because in some cases they’ve only been teaching for a year or two. So there’s a professional development aspect of it. So there’s the QuantHub supplemental product.

Then there’s data analytics. Data analytics is a little bit more focused on the data field. This is typically deployed in a CTE career, and technical education. It’s about more of getting kids ready for a career. This is a little bit more focused, and it’s an entire curriculum. So, the teacher gets a teacher’s guide – what do I do in the class, classroom discussion and activity – the full spectrum. This is going to be priced more like a textbook.

Our other textbook is data science. This is typically mapped to a state standards of learning around data science. Not every state has those. So we can recommend based on what other states are doing or what industry partners are doing, but we can essentially deliver a data science curriculum – a full course curriculum.

So the pricing of the data literacy supplemental product depends on how many students and how big the course is. But typically, the price of a supplemental product is $20-$30 per student per year. We basically price that by looking at the price of other supplementary math and computer science products on the market, find what data we could get, and price it just right. We’re not trying to price like a low cost competitor. We’re also not a differentiated product. We’re not charging a premium. We are a for-profit company, but we’re very mission driven in our focus on building this data science-ready workforce. So our goal is for the price is to be fair, if you will.

In the same way, the textbook curriculum is priced a little bit more. In college, a full course is somewhere between $70-$100 per student per semester. So think of like you would any other textbook, only in this case, it’s a digital platform that’s adaptive.

Sramana Mitra: And what scale are we talking about? You said 3,000 teachers are using this. How many students are we talking?

Josh Jones: We are past 10K, not quite to 20K yet.

Sramana Mira: And what level? This is for high school students?

Josh Jones: High school.

Sramana Mitra: Final year of high school, junior year of high school? What are we talking?

Josh Jones: The eighth grade, and we’ve got a couple of seventh grade teachers using it. We use the Flesch-Kincaid readability score. We’ve taken our corporate training and adapted it to the high school classroom. So you have to bring down the complexity of the language. You can’t really get below eighth grade because the words themselves, like artificial intelligence will force it.

So, about eighth grade is really as low as we can go at this point. I realize there’re some initiatives in K through 8 in terms of data literacy initiatives, but we found that our platform works best at the eighth grade level. We still do our corporate work and want to continue to keep our connection to it and don’t get fully just into academia.

Sramana Mitra: So what is the composition of the business then? You have the corporate assessment test kind of business, and then you have this EdTech business. Is there another business in there as well? Or these are the two?

Josh Jones: Well, we’ve launched an internship program; it’s all really part of a continuum. Our goal is to go into everywhere, but prioritizing underserved areas and really create a data workforce pipeline. So how do we do that? Well, we’re training these kids with data skills and at the very basic level, it’s data literacy.

So a kid in a math class gets exposed to the QuantHub platform. They have the option to keep learning beyond what the teacher assigns. If they do that, they can go further and further; and they get points for correct answers. It’s a gamified platform, kind of like Duolingo.

Once they get to a certain level, our system marks them as an inspired student. Internally, it’s a scoreboard for us. We want to create more inspired students where we’re essentially saying, “Hey, we’ve exposed this kid to a possible career in data analytics or data science.” As that child moves forward in their high school career, they have the option to take our data analytics for data science class if it’s offered in their school and continue down that pathway.

On average, we’ve seen that those that are very confident in their data literacy skills are going to earn about 20% more than those that are not. If you look at a data science career in Alabama, for example, you’re going to make in the $40K range as a college graduate on average. A data analyst is going to make in the $60K range and a data scientist is going to make over a $100K a year. So, it’s a very huge bump to get them into one of these careers. It’s becoming more accessible because of the ability to work virtually and to not have to relocate. So there’s a very big economic development factor there.

Our goal is to help them along that pipeline, to give them the opportunities that they might not otherwise have. Along the journey, for students who are in the top of their class or their school, we ask their teachers, their counselors, and their parents for permission and communicate with them about our internship program.

We go to the corporate partners and say, we’ve got over 10K students. Would you like to see the top five students that score at the top of their class in data analytics skills, have completed this entire training that, by the way, your employees go through as well? We’ve interviewed their teachers, we’ve provided them soft skills training and they happen to come from an underserved community. So that’s a pretty valid, valuable offering.

In this case, the state of Alabama has offered to pay for that internship program. So, they’re actually funding us to hire people to do soft skills training. Our internship coordinator used to run the internship program at NASA and she has just been fantastic in putting all of this together. We did a pilot this year and are going to scale that up next year.

So I’m describing entirely different things to you. When you think about data skills assessment, upskilling, internship, but it’s all on this continuum. If an eighth grade teacher asks, what skills do I need to teach my students so that they’ll have a job in eight years? I can say, “Well, I can tell you what these firms are hiring for right now because they’re using our testing platform to assess those skills.” So, we’re able to communicate end to end and create this conveyor belt to high paying jobs.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones
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