Welcome to Students Incorporated, a podcast where we dive into relevant topics and issues
related to the world of business, technology, education, and design.
I'm your host, Mr. Jason.
Today's podcast includes student conversations, interviews with thought leaders, and inspirational
stories with an international flavor.
This podcast is created and produced with the help of students from the International
Community School of Bangkok.
In today's episode, we'll be talking about the importance of creating an engaging and
dynamic learning experience with Mr. Scott.
And I'll be having a short discussion with two of my students about user experience in
business and hearing some of their thoughts.
But first, let's hear our quote of the day and get some headline news.
Our quote of the day comes from John Dewey.
He says, We do not learn from experience.
We learn from reflecting on our experience.
John Dewey is an American psychologist and philosopher.
He was also a professor and considered to be one of the most prominent American scholars
of the 20th century.
Around the middle of his life, he focused on the learning experience, treating teachers
and the quality of education in order to give the young generation the best education possible.
He wrote books that are still quoted in reference today, those being How We Think, Experience
in Education, Artist Experience, and Human Nature and Conduct.
Dewey passed away in 1952 at the age of 92.
However, he left his mark on education, philosophy, and psychology.
His works influenced popular sociologists Emily Durkheim, Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, and
others.
Recently, a private space company called Relatively Space created the first 3D printed spacecraft.
This is the largest 3D object that has ever been created.
It's called Terron 1 and is 85% made up of printed material.
It uses liquid oxygen and liquid natural gas, which allows you reusability and facilitates
the transition to methane on Mars.
The second launch will be conducted from Launch Complex 16 in Florida.
Here's an update on the earthquake in Turkey.
Around 41,000 people lost their lives in Turkey, along with around 5,800 in Syria.
The earthquakes have displaced millions of people.
During a recent soccer match in Istanbul, thousands of sports fans threw stuffed animals
and toys onto the field to be donated to the many children who were victims of the earthquake.
Now onto a positive medical treatment breakthrough of a 19-month-old girl from the UK.
Her name is Teddy Shaw and has been cured of a deadly condition called MLD.
According to the UK's Independent, the treatment has a listing price of 2.8 million pounds
and is one-off treatment, meaning it is only done once.
His treatment works to correct the genetic cause of the MLD by inserting functional copies
of a faulty gene into the patient's own stem cells.
Those stem cells come from the patient's own bone marrow and then are fed back into
the body with the new genetic information.
Although expensive, this treatment worked and has given this little girl her life back.
She can now grow and live with our MLD.
Thank you for the quote in this headline news.
Let's begin our first segment with Mr. Scott.
Lyon will start us off with our first question.
Thank you Mr. Jason.
And hello Mr. Scott.
We are very thankful that you are able to join us for our podcast today.
Can you please introduce yourself and tell us how long you've been part of the Isis
community?
So my wife Christine and I came in 1996.
Christine taught health for seven years before we started having kids.
I taught middle school for seven years, mostly language arts and science.
And then in 2003, I switched to grade five.
I was a homeroom teacher teaching all eight subjects that all our homeroom teachers teach.
And then in 2009, I took this position, curriculum accreditation, professional development, coordination.
So all in all, 26 years.
Wow, that sounds really interesting.
So we understand your position is different from that of a classroom or subject specific
teacher.
Could you please describe your role and give our listeners some insight into the big picture
time of work?
Yeah, so my, my title used to be called the CAP coordinator, CAP, CAP, CAP stands for
curriculum accreditation and professional development.
So I coordinate each of those curriculum coordination is working with teacher teams, leading what
we call a curriculum steering team that's a group with administration and representative
teachers from each division.
We do things like defining the expected school wide learning results that I know you seniors
have experienced with your capstone stuff, the thing on the poster, right?
The ICS students becoming.
So we help define and monitor those.
Accreditation is a process where we join with other schools as a peer to peer quality assurance
program.
Now, that's a huge deal.
It's accreditation is what makes the universities you want to go to recognize us as a quality
school so they believe your transcripts really represent what you learned.
And then professional development in service days.
Whenever you guys get to stay home, but teachers got to come to work.
I coordinate and schedule those things.
So that that's kind of the big picture of my work.
Those are some very important duties, Mr. Scott.
Our next question connects back to the topic of user experience and design curriculum.
Are there any specific ways in which this is done here at ICS of students and teachers?
We have to take into account like our view of reality from a Christian perspective, because
our users are human beings and what you believe about human beings shaped how you interact
with everybody from your casual relationships to how you engage with an organization.
Or if you're a leader, how you shape the activities, the group you're in.
And so our view of reality is holistic.
We believe human beings are multi dimensional creatures, not just brains in a biological
box.
And so we believe we're relational creatures because God himself said, let us make man
in our image.
So there's a hint there that according to our view, God, God was in community from the
very beginning.
It's not something he invented when he made humans.
And so we take community really serious.
It's not just the school's middle name.
It's a core belief.
And so we also believe in human responsibility that when God said, let them rule, he was
giving us an assignment.
He made us different and more complex than other creatures because we had a specific
role to play in relation to the planet.
But then our view of reality is also realistic in that there's darkness in us and we corrupt
the things around us because we turned ultimate purpose and morality into a DIY project instead
of cooperating with the one who made us and gave us purpose.
But it's also our view of reality is that it's hopeful that God has intentions that
are revealed in that account of creation when he put us in charge and made everything good.
Even though we messed it up, he hasn't written us off and said, okay, well, forget you.
I'll go to another planet, right?
You know, he entered history, joined us in the project and said, hey, I have an ultimate
end.
I'm going to restore everything to the way I want it.
And I'm inviting you to get involved.
And so our education system at ICS is built on that kind of view of reality and human
beings.
And that's why the user experience, right?
The user are human beings.
And so we really take those things seriously.
And then another framework that we think about in terms of curriculum.
Let's make it real specific, right?
Curriculum is the planned learning that's always broken down in three parts, aims, assessments,
and activities.
Aims are the standards and benchmarks.
What do students need to know?
What do you need to be able to do by the end of a unit, end of a course, by the end of
your schooling and you graduate?
Assessments are how you prove you reach the aims.
It's your tests, your projects, and all that kind of your performances, right?
And then activities are what the teachers design or sometimes what teacher students
choose to do to get ready for that proof called the assessment to show you reach the aims.
So aims, assessment, activities, that's the industry standard in education called backwards
design that we follow for course development, unit development, and even right down to individual
what's a teacher going to do during one block that day.
In what ways can educators at any level design and create an engaging learning experience
for learners?
Are there specific formulas that can be utilized?
So what I just mentioned, the backwards design, three A's, aims, assessment, and activities,
planning those things in that order creates what we call a fourth A, alignment, so that
you should have confidence as a student when a teacher says, hey, we're going to do this
activity.
You should have confidence that that activity is preparing you for the coming assessment,
that it's not just something fun, that it's not just something the teachers trying to
fill time, but it's actually getting you ready for that coming assessment.
And when you hit that assessment, it should feel familiar, like, oh, yeah, this is what
we've been doing in class.
How do project-based classes like intro to marketing differ from lecture-based classes
in terms of the aims, assessments, and activities?
Yeah, so it's about that fourth A alignment.
So project-based classes are project-based because of the nature of the learning you're
doing, right?
Some subjects you study are more doing-oriented.
I mean, there's doing in everything, but you're learning more skills than there is content
or principles.
There's always both, but some are more emphasized more, right?
So in a project-based class like marketing, you're learning skills.
And so the assessment is going to be some kind of performance demonstrating skill.
So the activities are projects because that's got you practicing the skills over and over
as you move towards a common purpose for your project.
And so your performing arts, your visual arts, your PE and marketing and other classes that
are more like the whole goal is you're going to emerge being able to do things.
You're going to be more project-oriented, more activity, more physical activity-oriented
in your arts and PE classes and stuff.
As opposed to like science, which has skills in it too, but there's a whole lot more content
and your history and social studies, a whole lot more content.
You have literature classes, right?
So they're more lecture because they're more information-oriented.
And that's just natural because of the inherent structure of the subject you're learning.
So we've talked about the activities in each class and especially in a project-based class
where activities are prominent.
Speaking about assessments, could you share more about the different types of assessments
and which one is your favorite?
I love performance stuff.
I'm a performer by nature.
I have a minor in music.
I started as a music education major, so I love watching people do things and training
them to do things.
But in terms of assessment categories, ICS has four broad categories of assessments,
select response, extended writing, performance, and personal communication.
So selected response is it's your multiple choice, true, false, short answer stuff.
Kind of what you typically think of when you think of test, right?
And then extended writing, like the title says, it's your longer, it's your essays
and things like that.
Performance assessments could be performance oriented where they watch you do it and evaluate
your process, but it could also be product oriented where they looked at your finished
product like an art piece and evaluate that.
And that goes for projects too.
You may have a product at the end or you and the teacher may be evaluating yourselves as
you go along saying, what's the process we're using as we're moving towards this product?
And you may be evaluating the process and that's totally legitimate.
And the fourth type, personal communication is kind of what we're doing right here.
Just talking to somebody, having a conversation, finding out what they know and how well they
understand it.
It sounds really informal and you may wonder how you get a grade out of that.
That's always the million dollar question.
Is this for the test?
Do I get a grade?
But personal communication is a legit form of evaluating how well somebody knows something.
So moving along, we'd love to hear your thoughts about what the benchmarks make good educator,
teacher, and instructor.
I like to say that every true teacher has three loves.
They have a love of learning, a love of the learner, and a love of bringing those first
two loves together.
So a love of learning, it's like this, they're content specialists or okay, examples of work.
Mr. Darrell doesn't just teach science, he does science.
He does beekeeping, micro photography, and stargazing, right?
Your English teachers, Mr. Will, right?
He doesn't just teach English.
He loves reading himself.
He's into the literature.
Mr. George and Mr. Zach still play sports themselves, still study the game for their
own benefit.
Mr. Christopher, I just talked to him a couple days ago, he's working on an art piece of
his own right now for a coming show.
Mr. Christian, if you went to International Night, he had a trombone at his lips, right?
These are demonstrations, people who love the learning itself.
They love the subject.
But a teacher also needs to love the learner, the kids, the students, or colleagues, because
we're learning alongside of each other too.
They see you as multi-dimensional creatures with limitless potential.
They see you as huge potential for joy and discovery.
You know when a teacher lights up inside, they're watching your faces during lecture
or activities, and your face does something, we call it the light goes on.
And when a teacher sees that, the teacher gets that sense of fulfillment.
When they see the light go on in your head, and you're like, oh, I got it, they're watching
for that aha, because they love you and watching you grow and achieve and becoming more of
what you were meant to be.
But a teacher needs more than just those, because if the only thing they have is a love
of learning, they might make a good scholar, but not necessarily a good teacher.
If they love people, but they're not really into the subject, they might make a good social
worker or activity director, but not necessarily a good teacher.
A teacher has that third love of bringing learning and the learner together.
So they study pedagogy, the art and science of helping other people get it.
And so those three loves is what makes it a good teacher.
That's why I had a conversation with Mr. Brad recently.
Good teachers never simply recycle verbatim their old lesson plans from previous years.
They're always asking, like Mr. Brad was at our lunch conversation, talking about book
selection and how he really wants to reach more students.
He wants to see that aha go on and them really engaged because they want to.
So he was considering, should I be using this book or this one over here or a different
way to teach it?
Because that's what real teachers do.
They are constantly asking themselves, how do I bring what I love, the learning together
with the people I love together in that moment in the classroom?
Mr. Scott, given your current role, are there specific ways you assist or support teachers
in the area of creating an engaging learning experience for their students?
I work at the high level, the big picture level with teachers.
Mr. Mark Kooprider is more about coaching teachers on lesson prep and engagement and
stuff.
I wish I could do that.
I love what Mark does.
But from my level, I help teachers decide course by course what to teach in the course.
And we as a private school have the awesome privilege, I guess, we're not bound to what
any particular government or state says you must teach.
We pay attention to those things.
But those government and regional documents that say, okay, a good science student should
know this, this, this, those documents are pages and pages long.
And there's no school that can do all of that.
But we have the privilege.
We can take those documents and cut them down to something that's actually reasonable and
doable for a teacher and the students in the classroom.
Perhaps with the exception of AP, because there's a test coming and we don't get to
write it.
So we have to have you ready for those.
But all the other courses, we can cut them down to something reasonable.
And that's one of the things I like guiding teachers to do saying, hey, we choose how
many units we choose which skills.
So I get teacher teams together and they coordinate and the teachers in higher grades talk with
the teachers in lower grades and have conversations to go like this.
Do my sixth graders really need to know this little discrete skill in math?
Or is it okay if we skip that because you'll cover it in seventh grade or eighth grade?
And then we can cut it back and create a reasonable amount of time.
I know as educators, we talk about covering all the content, right?
But it's more correct to say we uncover content for the students.
Covering is like hiding.
If you go too fast, you're hiding it.
So one of my jobs is help teachers slow down by getting a reasonable amount of expectations
in the learning.
That's great to hear.
So it's really great to know that the teachers in different grade levels work together to
create a more efficient learning curriculum for the students to learn and get their information
in the best ways possible.
So quick follow up.
How does this type of work differ from say older styles or methods of Dewey School?
Yeah, and some of those older styles are still around.
ICS is unlike public schools in the United States because we have the freedom to cut
things the government says to do, focus and go deeper.
Also, you know, in the 1970s, there was this trend in public schools and maybe private
schools too.
But education had this really bad attitude towards parents.
Education viewed itself so scientifically and students not as human colleagues on the
planet, but as empty biologic shells to dump information.
It was very behavioristic from a psychological perspective.
And parents were viewed as nuisances that needed to be kept out of the system.
ICS rejects that totally because we believe children are a blessing to parents and parents
have responsibility for education.
That's a Christian, deep Christian belief.
And so we're very explicit and serious about what we call the parent partnership.
We use that phrase a lot.
If you look on those posters on the wall that says ICS mission, you'll see those words
right in there, partner with parents.
Another thing that makes us different is in your US public schools from about the 1950s
prohibited even acknowledging God.
And so they gutted education and reduced kids to empty shells that we were just supposed
to stuff information into.
And we were no longer allowed to give kids a meta narrative, a grand story that gives
us a reason for what we do.
So ICS is allowed to hang on to that grand story, the biblical outline of history, its
beginnings and our destiny.
And that's what makes us able to give a richer, more holistic, more human education.
Thank you, Mr. Scott.
We'd like to end our interview segments by asking for some advice before we get to the
advice part in what ways is a good education transformers doing its future?
And then what advice do you give to educators about the topic of designing and creating
an engaging learning experience?
We take justice seriously, not just the skills and knowledge we want you to take with you,
but the habits you absorb from experiencing the classroom and experiencing conversations
between classes and all your activities.
Because the habits of mind and habits of heart shape your character, your character shapes
your destiny.
And so education is first and foremost, not about knowledge and skills.
Education is first and foremost about what you become.
And then in terms of like advice for educators, designing, creating engaging learning experiences,
this is not original with me.
In fact, most of what I said today, they're not my own ideas, right?
But let me end with this.
We need to remember we don't just teach subjects.
We teach heap remembering that is what helps us create a user experience, not just an information
download in the classroom.
Thank you for sharing your insight about the importance of an engaging and creative learning
experience and how that contributes to education.
And with that, we'll be right back after a short PSA.
Time Auto United Nations is happening from March 25 to 27.
The ICS MUN team will be attending this prestigious conference with three of them chairing the
conference and one being the head organizer.
This conference will have over 500 people in attendance from different schools and even
countries.
This conference will be a great opportunity for the students to debate, become globally
minded and represent ICS.
We are back with part two.
We just heard about user experience in education with Mr. Scott.
For this segment, my co-host and I will be having a short discussion about user experience
in business.
Machi and Pukow are joining me in this conversation.
So what are your thoughts about user experience in business?
Yeah, so as a small entrepreneur of a very, very small business, user experience, I want
to say that is very important in terms of getting someone to convert and buy your product
or services.
So user experience is basically all about customer journey.
The moment they, for example, if you run ads for your website that you sell online, the
moment that your user scrolls on Facebook and sees your ad, stumbles upon your ad, what
motivates them to click on your ad and actually watch it until the video is done?
And then what motivates them to click on your website and then check out your website?
Actually clicking at your card and then completing the purchase is all about like design and
how you motivate your customers to buy your product.
And this is very important because if the user has a good experience about your store,
then obviously he'll convert and he might even convert in the future, which means if
you have a good user experience, then you're basically set for success.
What are some of the difficulties in creating an experience in business?
From my experience, if you don't put yourself in the shoes of your customer, you start to
lose, I guess, that feeling of what would I do as a customer?
And you really start thinking of only yourself as the business owner or the, you know, I've
got to make these sales, I've got to make sure that I can make payroll.
So you just start thinking about only things from your perspective.
If you can first start with that idea of I'm my own customer and I will walk into my business
or I will look at my website or look at my mobile app, whatever your business is, and
just put yourself in your customer's shoes and walk through the whole experience with
their mindset, you'll start to discover things that you want to change, like drastically.
For example, just in my own retail coffee business, I often will go into my shop and
walk in, I'll look at the doors, I'll look at what's on the walls, I'll look up what's
on the shelves, I'll look at the menu, I'll observe how my staff greet me, and then I'll
walk to the counter and I'll make my order and I just observe how that full experience
goes.
Inevitably, I often just run into things.
I'm like, oh, I've got to work on this or I've got to do a little bit more training
with my staff or that part of the shop is dirty, it needs cleaned up.
So from that perspective, you have just a really different perspective regarding your
customer.
If you can put yourself in your customer's shoes, that would be my first advice to anybody
thinking about that in business.
So yeah, I think what Maciej said about how can you retain customers really quickly in
one of my classes here, I talked about customer retention and some of the statistics.
It's five to 25 times more expensive to get a new customer than it is to retain an existing
customer.
And so giving that customer a great user experience, especially from the first time is super important.
I'd like to hear Maciej's thoughts about this too.
What do you think about putting yourself in your customer's shoes?
I really agree with what Mr. Jason said because many entrepreneurs, especially when starting
out, they're unable to visualize themselves in the place of the customer.
So they're not able to understand the full customer journey that a customer faces.
So they don't know like what kind of design or what kind of services will be best for
the customer in order to make sales.
And another difficulty when it comes to creating a good customer experience is that most people
fail to choose a specific market.
For example, if you want to design a product, you have to choose where you want to sell
this or market this product to the rich people or the mass market, right?
But many entrepreneurs, especially when starting out, they try to design a product in a way
that it reaches everyone, both the mass market and the upper middle class and the more wealthy
people.
So when you try to do this, you end up not making sales.
Why?
Because when you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing nobody.
In business, you need to have a specific target market that you want to focus on.
And when you focus on that, you're able to actually design your product or services in
a way that can maximize their experience in the best way possible.
And that is what allows you to convert.
Yeah, I agree on that.
As far as market segment, these are things that we learn in business school, looking
at the buyer persona, who are actually your customers and then thinking about things from
their perspective.
We often lose sight as business owners about this fact because we're so busy trying to
figure out how to run our business.
We often lose sight of our customers.
Now the difference between UX and UI, these are kind of like buzzwords out there in the
business world.
A UX means user experience and that involves everything.
So if you think about a user experience, you think about our users are humans.
We have five senses and for a digital product, it's a little more difficult to engage the
five senses, but for physical products and retail type businesses, they are able to cater
to the five senses of a customer, whether it's seeing, tasting, everything, smell.
If you walk through any retail type store, especially if you go to one of the big malls
here in Bangkok, you'll smell things or you're able to go in and sample things.
So there's a lot of user experiences happening that sometimes we don't even know or recognize
as customers.
So as far as user interface goes, that's more on the digital side where you're interacting
with a digital product, a website, a mobile app, where are the buttons placed on the screen.
For mobile app development, the screen resolutions are quite small.
So it's really important how you design and lay out your colors, your buttons, everything
for the interface so a user can flow through that process and have a good experience, but
also know what to click on next and where they're supposed to be directed to.
So that's really quickly kind of the differences between user experience and user interface.
Do you guys have any tips or advice about designing a good user experience within the
business context?
So when it just started out with my small business, I ended up spending hours and hours
on trying to perfect this one page in my website and that page ended up not working very well.
So I had to redesign the whole thing, remake the websites many, many times and that process
alone just took months before I even like get to start making sales.
Are you familiar with the Pareto's law, Pooka?
The what?
So it is also known as the 2080 law.
So basically, this law says that 20% of your work accounts for 80% of your productivity
and the other 80% of your work accounts for only 20% of your productivity.
So when designing user experience and user interface, it's important that you spot the
20% that is accounting for 80% of your productivity and double down on that so you can focus more
on what works and then the other 80% you do less of that so you're more productive with
your time.
So you save time, you move quickly if there's anything you need to change and change quickly
and then get ahead with scaling your business and making sales.
Yeah, I agree with the 80-20.
I think it can be applied to just about everything in life actually.
Regarding tech businesses, many subscribe to the idea and methodology of lean or agile
development which basically means they design, develop and push their product to the customer
quickly in order to get user feedback.
They collect that data and then off that data and feedback that they get from users, they
can make the product better.
They do this so they can make it better for the future versions and updates that they'll
push to the customers.
This initial product is sometimes referred to as an MVP which basically stands for Minimal
Viable Product.
Maybe even referred to as the beta version.
We've heard it called that before.
Maybe you're familiar with that term, a beta version of software or beta version of the
app.
Unfortunately and sometimes this first version is full of issues which gives a customer a
bad or non favorable first experience.
However, as a customer sometimes we don't mind if the experience is not totally great
because a lot of MVP products or beta versions are free for us to use during that first kind
of initial stage of release.
Just look at the popular chat GPT-3.
These versions are all learning versions.
They're free for most users to use if you can get on and get an account.
The software is learning about its users and we are learning about it and it's still free
to use.
And just a side note, it is now chat GPT-4.
I don't know if you knew that.
A new update was released just this month in March.
And finally I'll go back to what I began with which is to put yourself in the shoes of your
customers.
That would probably be the biggest advice.
Be your own customer and walk through the operations or functions of your business as
your own customer.
When you do this you will inevitably notice ways in which you can enhance the experience
and make it better.
Every business is different so the experience will be different depending on that business
but don't lose sight of the customer.
To end I'd like to thank Maci and Pucow for the short discussion on user experience in
business.
It's a very broad topic that could be the focus of an entire podcast series actually.
However we are out of time for this segment so thanks again.
As we end this episode we'd like to say a special thanks to all our listeners for their
support and encouragement.
Also if you haven't noticed our little podcast has inspired others.
Check out episode twenty two and a half and listen to some little voices from our school
interview a local author about her life career followed up with a reading from one of her
books.
Our next episode will focus on the topic of what will be your legacy and we welcome a
very special guest Dr. Nerissa who is the CEO and founder of Kogo Pay and was recently
a panelist at the Bloomberg APAC summit.
We will also be talking with our very own Mr. Mike about the importance of service and
social enterprise education.
As always this podcast will not be possible without the hard work and support of our international
student production team.
All music and sound effects are courtesy of Pixabay.com a vibrant community of creatives
sharing copyright free images videos and music.
And we are signing off until next time.
For Students Incorporated because your voice matters.