Ope Bukola was a product manager at Amplify Education and a product lead for Google Classroom for four years before branching out as an entrepreneur in 2020.
She founded a company to build African tech talent, was a founding member of Level, a multiracial network that invests in businesses led by Black women, and joined the Board of Zeta, a network of high-performing charter schools in the Bronx.
Most recently, Ope is the co-founder and CEO of Kibo School, which offers affordable, high-impact Computer Science degrees to students in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Ope Bukola was a product manager at Amplify Education and a product lead for Google Classroom for four years before branching out as an entrepreneur in 2020.
She founded a company to build African tech talent, was a founding member of Level, a multiracial network that invests in businesses led by Black women, and joined the Board of Zeta, a network of high-performing charter schools in the Bronx.
Most recently, Ope is the co-founder and CEO of Kibo School, which offers affordable, high-impact Computer Science degrees to students in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Rest of World: Reporting Global Tech Stories
Welcome to Ed Tech insiders. In this podcast we talk to educators and educational technology investors, thought leaders, founders and operators about the most interesting and exciting trends in the field. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an educational technology veteran with over a decade of work at leading edtech companies. Ope Bukola was a product manager at amplify education and a product lead for Google Classroom. For four years before branching out as an entrepreneur in 2020. She founded a company to build African tech talent was a founding member of level a multiracial network that invests in businesses led by black women, and joined the board of zeta a network of high performing charter schools in the Bronx. Most recently, she is the co founder and CEO of Kibo school, which offers affordable high impact computer science degrees to students in Sub Saharan Africa. Ope Bukola Welcome to EdTech. Insiders.
Ope Bukola:Thank you, Alex. It's great to be here. You are product manager
Alexander Sarlin:and product lead at Google Classroom, which is the most popular and tech tool in the US. And beginning of the pandemic, he branched off to start a number of different organizations, really interesting ones and lay working with African tech talent and level, which is a network of women dedicated to racial equity have been really busy. And now you're starting Kibo school, a new online university. So walk us through that shift from being inside a huge company like Google to becoming a really prolific edtech entrepreneur.
Ope Bukola:Yeah, you know, I have always had the desire to build, right. Like when I got into ed tech, it was because I saw this opportunity for education to really impact people like in Nigeria, where I was born and grew up. So I knew I wanted to build something. And in fact, now I'm getting more comfortable with telling the story. But in 2012, I tried to start an ad tech company, I had no idea what I was doing didn't build a team. It was just a cool idea. I like, you know, coded the whole thing myself. And that was a big failure. And it was a failure that taught me okay, you got to go learn how software is actually built. And I went from there to amplify and later to Google. So I always knew that at some point, I would get back to that. And I wanted to get to build something from scratch. And what happened was, you know, had an amazing I love Google Classroom had a really amazing run. But I sometimes describe it as when I joined it was a baby. And it was really fun, like growing a baby. And then it became a teenager. And I was like, Oh, this is it was still like loved my colleagues. But the challenges were different. And I wanted the starting challenges. So it felt like the right time.
Alexander Sarlin:And how did you come up with the idea of Kibo school directly?
Ope Bukola:It's funny because I have had the idea to build a university basically, forever. I was chatting sometime last year with a former boss at Google. And he reminded me that I mentioned wanting to build an online university during my interview with him. So it's, you know, for a long time, it's just sort of this, like harebrained idea, you know, everyone has, I don't know, coffee shop, bookstore, whatever the thing that you think you're gonna do, but you really are like, that's never going to happen. I've thought about it for a long time. But what changed a bit trite, but it was COVID. Right? We went through this experience where every single person had to learn online, almost everywhere in the world. So my cousin's folks, I was talking to Nigeria, were experiencing online learning. And even though most people had a pretty bad experience, right, like unplanned online learning, it still broke the veil a little bit, right, and made people consider actually that this might be possible. And I think it made the learners consider that and potential entrepreneurs like myself consider that too. So that's why the time you felt right.
Alexander Sarlin:I think it really broke down the sort of barriers to access for online education, people who are used to going to school in real life suddenly said, Oh, wait, there's all these opportunities out there. And you know, I can make it work, even if it's not working quite yet. They got sort of intriguing, and a lot of people jumped into it.
Ope Bukola:Totally. And it made everybody I think, reflect a little bit on just our learning experience in general, right. It's like, okay, so what was I doing in that large lecture in person? And what are we doing now on Zoom? And, you know, what are the pros and cons of both formats? So I think it just made us a bit more expansive.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, the pandemic has been a through line of many of the guests we've had on this podcast because it's just was such a transformative moment. You said, It might sound trite but living through a global pandemic is a is a pretty defining moment. I think for all of us. So it's it's been it's it's really changed the world and certainly changed the EdTech landscape. But I want to ask more about Kibo school. So Kibo school is really focused on bringing transformative education, especially in high demand topics like computer science, to populations that have often been outside the purview for many existing learning providers. So tell us about Hivos market strategy, why it's filling an important gap in the tech landscape?
Ope Bukola:Yeah, you know, we are providing affordable online degrees in STEM targeting African learners. And a lot of people don't realize this, but you know, Africa is the world's youngest and fastest growing continent. 60% of Africans are under 20 fives and one set that I love is like by 2050, a third of like, all the young people in the world are going to be in Sub Saharan Africa. So there are a lot of us, maybe I shouldn't consider myself us, because I'm aging out of the youth group. But there are many young Africans and that those numbers are only growing. But right now, only 8% of them, those who are eligible are in traditional university, right. So lots of demand for higher ed and the existing system just doesn't have the capacity to fill it. And so when you think about a region, that is the only one where the working age population is expected to grow, that's a ton of opportunity. And infrastructure is getting better. Our market strategy is really about both, you know, doing good and serving underserved markets, but also understanding that you can do really well, because this was a ton of non consumption right now, not just in higher ed, but in so many parts of the education landscape in Africa. So it's an amazing audience to be building for
Alexander Sarlin:you, that makes a lot of sense. And it really is amazing how many young people are entering the workforce from Africa and the Middle East. And just don't, you know, there are not that many options in the online landscape that are sort of devoted to them directly, in fact, very few.
Ope Bukola:Yeah. And I think just given where online learning has grown from and so much of what's happened in the US has been driven by the specific regulatory trends in the US that make it easy to get loans, etc. It's like the providers here have been laser focused on who they can monetize in the US and forgetting this huge working age population that's growing up in the rest of the world.
Alexander Sarlin:I was a sociology major in college. And one of the things I remember best was this idea of the demographic changes that have been happening over the last few decades where Europe, especially in Japan, and the US are having many fewer children, and helping them in later ages. And really, it's been in sort of population stagnation or even decline. Whereas Africa, the Middle East, South America, to some extent, has many more children at younger ages, and you get this enormous change in the global makeup of the population. And it's exactly what you're talking about there where, you know, the future workforce of the world is being born right now, often in the southern hemisphere.
Ope Bukola:Yeah, it's really exciting for those countries, right for us to kind of get the opportunity to drive future innovation. But it's also imperative that we educate and prepare that workforce, not just for Africa, but for the whole world because they're going to be the global workforce.
Alexander Sarlin:Absolutely. So you've said an explicit goal of offering degrees at a price point that is affordable to as many learners as possible in the markets that you're targeting. So talk to us about why you've made that choice to to focus on affordability, and what type of adaptations you're making to the traditional online degree system that will allow you to offer high quality degrees at lower price and lower cost to make.
Ope Bukola:That's a fantastic question. So first of all, you know, we're targeting a price point of about $2,000 us a year for students, and so about$6,000 or so, for a degree. And that price point it we are focusing on affordability, but to be honest with you, that is still targeting like an upwardly mobile middle income family, right? We're still not at a point where that's going to work for like the bottom 30 or 50% of Africans, I hope that we will be someday but but that's not where we're at. So it's still like a solidly middle income product. And then to the question about what changes you make to the degree system like I don't, I'm going to try to answer this without going off on a soapbox, but I get this question a lot. And I think embedded in it is this assumption that the current cost structure of higher ed makes sense, right? Like it cost what it costs because that's what it costs to deliver it. And I always say, well, it doesn't actually if you look at traditional US institutions, and like the hue huge administrative costs and like runaway spending on a lot of things that don't actually impact instructional quality. Well, it doesn't actually need to cost what it does. And I remember I forget when but you probably remember Alex, when Georgia Tech launched that like master's degree like 7k. I was so excited. I was like, you know, this isn't change everything, everybody's going to do this. And it hasn't happened in any other normal market. That's what would happen, right? Like this high quality, great brand. Why didn't others follow suit? So there's a lot of all that to say, like the cost structure is wonky, and probably don't want to have an hour long conversation about higher ed costs, although I could because I find that stuff interesting. But going back for TiVo, like, how are we going to do it, but there's a few leverage points, right. One is really rethinking the role of an instructor. So we're not, we believe that learning is fundamentally human. Our program is like not self paced like content focus, it's very much you're learning in a cohort. But when you don't have instructors lecturing, or delivery content, and you're still delivering a lot of that content asynchronously, you can free up instructors to do much more like intervention, like targeted data informed intervention, instead of like the stuff that takes up a lot of their time. So that's a big leverage point. I think another leverage point, honestly, is automating feedback, like the stuff that takes a long time, like grading, etc. So really using tech to enable that so that humans can do more human things. And then lastly, focusing really heavily on peer directed and peer led experiences, whether that's like your immediate peers or using near peers to have those like live sections and foster accountability, there's a lot of places where you can go and remove the heaviest costs. So yeah, we think we can really drive up like student instructor ratio without losing quality. Yes,
Alexander Sarlin:I don't think that was too much of a soapbox. And you're really my language here. I am very, very excited to hear some of these innovations. And I agree, you know, when the Georgia Tech Computer Science degree, early online, computer science degree came out, I believe it was around 2014, or 2015, I had the same reaction you did, it was this is going to be the first shot across the bow of the higher ed system. And the idea that you can deliver a full degree at under $10,000, in a high demand topic, like computer science is going to change everything. And it didn't change the price structures. But what did happen, David Joyner and the set of folks who made that really amazing degree possible and are continue to run it today at Georgia Tech, it used to be with Udacity. Now, it's with tech alone, what they did do is they reached a very large scale, which is super interesting, to me, that's been the legacy of that as well as creating all these amazing new computer science graduates. But there's also significant proportion of computer science, master's degrees in the US come from,
Ope Bukola:I don't know that that's amazing. If they publish any numbers in terms of grads that you know, of,
Alexander Sarlin:I don't want to get the numbers wrong, but we can look them up. And we'll put them on the show notes. But it was a surprising ly large portion of people getting master's degrees in CS each year are getting them through that low cost, high quality program through Georgia Tech. And I don't even want to put a number down because I think I'll be wrong. It's higher than you might think. And you know, speaking of which, in the US, the number of computer science, undergraduate degrees per year, doubled entirely in the decade between 2010 and 2020. So that is a large growth, and you've seen it at the expense of some of the other majors. How do you see the rise in demand for Computer Science and Engineering degrees in the US and around the world? Why is that happened? Where is it going? And what role would you like people to play in it?
Ope Bukola:Yeah, that's a great question. And I certainly I think that rise is really exciting. And it makes sense to use that whole, like software's eating the world of tech data, and all those things are eating the world. These are the skills that are required. We don't have a ton of good data in Africa and the demand specifically, so I can't point to like, X number, but certainly, anecdotally, you see a lot more people looking at like not just CS degrees, but some of the alternative paths to tech, it correlates with all the other things that are happening in the continent, like massive increase in venture capital dollars funding, like mostly tech companies. And it's getting its high demand, if you think about 22% increase for those professions way higher than, than most occupations in Africa specifically. And I think the role that we can play and why it's important to equip people with computer science specifically is that it is it's this a gateway to working in any industry, right? It's not just about teaching people web element if you think about the sectors that are growing fastest and African economy, agriculture, infrastructure, even things like banking, and finance, mining, these are all increasingly tech enabled, right? So you don't just need people to build it for web and consumers, but you need them to build to refine all these industries. So that's why I think people has an important role to play is an even a different role than some of the more like, strictly vocational programs. It's like, how do we equip people with some of those fundamental CS skills that enables them to build for agriculture and build for mining and build for finance? Broadly?
Alexander Sarlin:That makes a lot of sense. So what I'm hearing you say is that computer science is sort of increasingly becoming a core literacy or a core set of skills that underlie a lot of different topics, and a lot of different career paths. So it becomes a sort of a skeleton key to enter a lot of different career pathways. Is that right?
Ope Bukola:Yeah, that's exactly right. And you know, what industry isn't being transformed by these trends? Dr. Webber, young Africans, it's like we all a lot of people still want to be a doctor. And like, we love health. And it's like health tech, people get really excited about like the transformations that are happening in health, like we have so few doctors relative to people on the continent and the opportunities to build tech that supports them and enables better health care for people. So it's like, this is going to impact everything. And so it's a core skill for everyone to
Alexander Sarlin:have. It's very interesting. And I think we've seen that change, really, in the last 1520 years, the idea that computer science and engineering has become such a core and vital almost a skill set to break into so many different types of fields. Because as health goes entirely tech and climate tech, and you know, all of these types of jobs that used to be somewhat analog are all moving quickly into technology. And every you know, students see that up close, and they're starting to really understand it at scale, quick update on the LM SCS program, it has had over 5000 graduates and has more than 11,000 students enrolled as a 2021, which makes it the largest computing master's program in the US. And we're all so you know, that is some of the legacy of that amazing program
Ope Bukola:at a master's level. That's like so impressed. That is so impressive.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, it really is amazing. So let's talk a little bit about Ed Tech in Africa. It's so interesting to me that you're targeting the African continent, it is an area of the world that has been really growing up in ed tech. But coming from a pretty low bar, there haven't been that many startups, there has not been that much funding in the past. So tell us a little bit about what are some of the opportunities and challenges that are unique to the African market, especially with regards to higher ed, adult education and workforce education?
Ope Bukola:Yeah, you know, it's it's definitely an exciting time to be building for Africa. And there's like a ton of nascent companies. And I'm excited to see like where we are in five and 10 years. In terms of opportunities and challenges. I think the opportunity is some of what we've been talking about, right? Just like the vast human capital that exists on the continent, and if 50 million people are going to join the workforce, like that's a huge opportunity if you're doing workforce development, adult education, higher ed. Yeah, a lot of like, right customers think there's sort of two big challenges. And in my view, and I'm sure others would add different things. One is still infrastructure, right? So the cost of data is really high. I just came home from to Brooklyn from like six weeks in Lagos. And when you think about what people actually earn, relative to what it cost to get a gigabyte of data, it's really, really high, it would be like, you and I paying hundreds of dollars a month for like a gig. So you're still in this place where yes, like connectivity is improving, but the costs of data are still too high. And that's gonna be a challenge for a tech entrepreneur. And then the ability to pay I think outside of the professional class, which is still really small people just don't have a ton of disposable income. You're talking, you know, GDP per capita, like, in some countries, just a few $100 and other sub Saharan African countries like$11,000. So not a lot of money to fund ed tech.
Alexander Sarlin:It feels so short sighted, sort of the global ed tech landscape to not put two and two together and say, Well, this is the future of the global workforce. This is the the biggest populations and fastest growing populations of young people in the world. And as a lot of other countries sort of aged out. You're gonna have it's a very important population. To reach so those obstacles the infrastructure and willingness or ability to pay obstacles shouldn't be hampering the continent, I would think that we'd be starting to notice that I'm curious if you see others thinking the way you're, you're thinking or if it still seems like a blind spot,
Ope Bukola:for sure. I think the people who are thinking that way are the people who have deep familiarity and lived experience with it, right? So I don't necessarily blame if you've never been to the continent, or you don't for me, you know, I have so many cousins, and they've all experienced, like, the university system and years of strikes, and like all the problems implicit feel very personal. And so perhaps it's just easier for me to access than someone who's like, trying to build edtech, and they just don't have that they don't have that context. It's a huge opportunity to you know, there's a book that I like called the prosperity paradox that talks a lot about innovation, lifting countries out of poverty, and the author's really focus on non consumption. And this idea that when you have markets where lots of people are just not consuming, because the existing products are like, Wait inaccessible, that's a huge business opportunity. And I think that's how it is in Africa right now is like this tons. Obviously, the humans are there, but there's a lot of non consumption. So if you're someone who really wants to focus on like, How can I build with an eye towards like, radical affordability, people pay, like private Secondary School is huge on the continent. That's an investment they're willing to make. But you know, it still has to be
Alexander Sarlin:affordable. I feel like there's some parallels with what we've seen in India over the last couple of decades, where they have huge populations of people who cannot afford a lot but are desperate for education and know that it's a real mobility pathway, and then a growing middle class. And you've seen an explosion of ad tech investment over the last few years to begin to address that market. I'm hoping that there'll be a parallel, do you see other parallels between African and tech? And no, we're talking about the whole continent, you can obviously talk about any one country. Deck and and what's gone on in India?
Ope Bukola:Yeah, I guess India or Asia in general. But they're certainly I think that there's some parallels in just user behavior. And like one, this notion that families like spend a lot of their are willing to spend like a good chunk of disposable income and education. So like I said, private schooling, at the secondary school level going to after school, that's really big there. The other thing that I'm starting to notice in parallel is in terms of like professional education and the professional class like being being very much strivers, like, if you look at a lot of Nigerians and other Africans on LinkedIn, it's like this Coursera certificate, this Udacity thing. So people are the professional classes very willing to spend on things that will make them stand apart. And I think it's a very similar situation in India, in some parts of Asia.
Alexander Sarlin:Absolutely. We heard stories in my time at Coursera, about Indian learners coming to job interviews with stacks of Coursera certificates, literally. I think there's a there's sort of a parallel to that kind of behavior in Nigeria and other effort.
Ope Bukola:Totally, I think people want to stand out in the market, you know, especially when you have a market where there's high unemployment, everyone is like looking for a wedge in right. And whether that's like here, all the things I've learned on Coursera, or what this says about me as an independent learner, that I can do it, people really value those.
Alexander Sarlin:Some of our listeners may know about some other interesting and innovative countries in in the African edtech landscape like African Leadership University out of Mauritius and Rwanda, or you lesson in Nigeria, which has funding from the US and others or an ASA education in Kenya, as well as Mandela, which is sort of quasi African has offices in San Francisco and New York, as well as Nairobi. And it's all about building a engineering workforce internationally, focusing on Africa. But you know, my knowledge is pretty limited. I'd love to hear from you, who's who's been in this space for a while to tell us about, you know, these companies or any other companies in the ad tech space that are sort of that are addressing the African market, and that you think maybe our listeners should keep their eyes on?
Ope Bukola:Yeah, I mean, there's so many, I guess, like, I'll go in maybe categories that I think are really interesting. So you know, one category, of course, is upskilling. And those that are addressing this challenge have talked a bit about we have low capacity for higher ed in Africa. And then the other challenge, unfortunately, is that the existing solutions are pretty low quality. So a lot of university drives are not employable. And so I think there are a lot of companies that are focused on just that, like how do we rapidly upskill like, boot camp types like Moringa school, there's a company out School Africa that's just launching and they've had amazing traction and excitement around like a one year diploma program. So that space is only going to continue to grow. Because you do have a lot of like adult learners and folks who want to get into new work dosh I just blanked on the name of this company. But there's even a company that has like a sort of similar model, but focused on UX design in a comeback to me. So lots of really cool companies around upskilling. I, of course, love alternatives to traditional education. That's what we're trying to build at Kibo. But we're not the only ones. And there are actually a lot of people who are trying in primary and secondary schooling. So a venture in South Africa and and if you've come across them, and like I know, the founder of get smarter or so like, amazing, incredible team, and they are launching fully online high schools, they just launched one in partnership with a University in South Africa. And I think that's a really interesting area. To me, there's a company called Gatto, they're based in Kenya that are also doing online Primary School. So the notion that online can be a real option, not just in tertiary, which I think a lot of us can wrap our head around University aged students learning online, but primary and secondary. I think that's really exciting. So like, keep an eye on venture, keep an eye on adatto. And then another set of companies that I love, and feel free to interrupt me outlets, if I'm going on too long. These are companies that are doing like Secondary School supplements, but really contextualized for Africa. So you mentioned you listen, you listen to awesome, like their founder is just like, very impressive, very thoughtful, serial entrepreneur. But when they were starting, something that I thought was really unique about them is they do a lot of like content for for high school, like helping people prepare for jam, like these kinds of end of high school exams. And they basically would send you like a USB stick with a bunch of content loaded onto it, right? And that would be like, wait, what you're sending people a physical, like, why don't they just go to the internet, but it's because they know the market, right? And they know, even if you have access to internet, it's intermittent, it's expensive. You have to think about offline. So I think that they've pivoted the model a little bit. But yeah, but you listen to great, a great company, and they're creating awesome content. There's a new company, I do Koya, that just got like a decent amount of funding. It's also preparing secondary school students for exam and female founders. So that always also warms my heart to see like, female lead companies doing their thing. Yeah, so those are those are some of the areas that that I get excited about. It's like alternatives and workforce, skilling secondary and primary school online, and then some of these after school supplements.
Alexander Sarlin:Oh, that's fantastic rundown. And for our listeners, as always, we will put the links to every company that up I just mentioned in the show notes, so you can follow them in case you missed any of them as she was speaking. But I think that's a really great breakdown of the, you know, upskilling secondary different parts of the market will also link to the whole and IQ top 50 ad tech companies in Africa, which is an interesting place to research as well. So you mentioned this USB offline strategy idea for some of the tech companies in Africa and that they know the market, they know there's intermittent internet access. And you know, I think historically this has been a blocker to edtech companies and tech companies in general, really entering the African market, we maybe remember I think Facebook had a initiative a number of years ago to sort of try to bring access to Facebook, that org was bringing access to to Africa through blimps, if I remember correctly. But you know, when you look at the internet penetration across the African continent is there's a really wide spectrum of access in countries like Nigeria, and Kenya, and some of the Northern African countries, you get, you know, 70 baby percent access, which is pretty, pretty high. But they're 19 countries less than 20%, internet penetration, a huge variety. And even for the countries that have really excellent internet, there may be power outages or dark spots where there's no access as an entrepreneur working in the African context. How do you think about this discrepancy in internet access? And what would you say to other entrepreneurs who are thinking about entering that market?
Ope Bukola:You have to build with access in mind, right? Like it can't be a forethought. It can't be like a thought somebody to come back to later it has to really be primary. And even in the question you asked Alex, you did a really good job of pointing out the nuances, right? So hearing 80% penetration is one thing but it's really different to understand what it's like. So, again, going back, because I'm still jet lagged from Lagos to talking about my trip, when you in Lagos, you have to have backups. Right? So it's like I've got like my primary internet source. And then I've got like my MTN here in case that goes out and my Airtel so you because you know, I need to be on all these zoom calls for work purposes. So just knowing that, like, that's the lived experience of your users, and that needs to impact how you built for us at Kibo, for example, one of the things that that does is you really have to go async first, right? So we know that live experiences are important. They build community, they build persistence. But you cannot say, Okay, we need you to be, you know, there's some online kind of models that are like, it's six hours of live instruction. And when I hear people say that as a benefit, In what universe like, are you going to be on the internet, getting live instruction for six hours, even in Lagos, which is like the big city and the best connected, it's like just not going to happen. So you have to like, design your learning model to understand that there's a big need for asynchronous. And then of course, offline and mobile. And as an early company, this is something like we're even really rethinking, which is, when students go get their learning content, we still need to do better support for offline were like, whether it's Internet being intermittent or spotty, like can we make sure you can get your learning content offline is critical. And that seems
Alexander Sarlin:to dovetail with what you mentioned earlier about some of the strategies for Kibo being that the instructors can work as facilitators or as on demand data driven tutors that I can imagine that would work very well with the model you just mentioned, if a if a student has access to async material, which they could get offline. And then as they're making their way through, you can find issues, you know, or have have a ways for students to get help on any kind of hurdle or get, you know, live tutoring or bring questions to a live session or even do it through a different communication tool is that some of what you're thinking about?
Ope Bukola:Exactly, exactly. And then we're also even thinking about, I'm a big believer that even though we're online, you have to have local presence so that you get what it's like. So we are talking to folks who run like hubs, like kind of co working partnerships where at least you know that okay, even if I'm only in live class, once a week, there's a place where I know like the power will be consistent, the internet will be consistent. So really, helping set students up for success by thinking about infrastructure is critical to our work. And I think for anyone who wants to work successfully in Africa,
Alexander Sarlin:I love that you were thinking about in person learning hybrids, or you know, giving access to learning spaces. It's been it's interesting, you know, when to you made its deal with we work a number of years ago to sort of offer co working spaces, I think that was a really an innovative move, but because it was with WeWork, which sort of became the poster child for problematic working people sort of began to throw out the baby with the bathwater of that idea. But we've seen, you know, companies like Holberton school, which does really innovative things with in person or via mutual colleague, Ray Batra with his country, as companies shift up that is all about, you know, bringing people together to learn and to get help in a in a centralized environment, but have access offline. So I love that you're thinking about that I would love to follow the progress on that idea.
Ope Bukola:Totally. You know, like, I think embodied community matters a lot, right? Just because you're doing the instruction online doesn't mean like, we're still humans, and we need to see and be around other humans. And even like within Africa, right, like the local context changes a lot. So helping people just be able to gather is really important to me.
Alexander Sarlin:I really agree that you mentioned, you know, that it's important for anybody working in this context to have an offline and a mobile strategy. And one thing that has always been really interesting to me about the African tech landscape is that Africa sort of did this leapfrog technology move where, because there was not as much wired internet, they became a big pioneer in mobile adoption, and in sort of innovative uses of mobile technology, especially in finance and banking, and fintech, where Africa was way ahead of the rest of the world on on mobile banking. Now, we all have chime and things like that, but they're doing in Kenya 1015 years ago, even I'd love to know a little bit more about your thinking about that. And what is the role of mobile in your strategy with Kibo and and how in general, how might other tech entrepreneurs think about mobile first strategies?
Ope Bukola:This is interesting worth pointing out because sometimes I think when we're talking about the continent, there's so much like deficit thinking and we forget about the areas that things are really, really have leapfrogged, you know, I joke like, aren't that many things in Nigeria where I'm like, this works better than the states but it's super easy to send money to other people like to count number in a way that like, I don't know, Zala whatever. Still hasn't it hasn't quite made it z here. But in terms of mobile for us, we I think a lot about mobile as an onramp. One of the challenges honestly to doing like a CS degree, is that the computing tools still aren't built for mobile. So you can certainly do like some introductory material. But it's really hard to be like a proficient builder without a laptop. So I think that hinders some of what we can do in terms of like the actual coding itself. But certainly a lot of the like, videos, some of the other content delivery, really thinking about optimizing them for mobile. The other thing that our team has been talking about a lot super early is like, how do you find mobile first tools, and even things like IDs, or like, there's some new mobile IDs that are being developed, but they're still not offline, it's like, you have to kind of be able to do both together like mobile and offline, and they're not always the same. Or thinking about it a lot. I think, if you if you want to be successful, especially with shorter learning content with like workforce, and adult learning has to be a really key part of your strategy for our niche. It's like, ultimately, like students are still to complete this degree. And I need a device, that's a laptop, because that's what the industry is using. But almost anywhere else, you gotta go mobile, you gotta go offline.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, that's a really fantastic answer. And I think you're hitting on some of the nuances of especially of CSS and stem training, when it comes to mobile, you know, some companies have come up with some pretty interesting strategies to sort of combine mobile and laptop learning Code Academy and data camp. There's a few that have sort of been trying to be really innovative. I'm trying to remember one more that I'm sure will come back to me in a moment. But so for those of you who don't know, the acronym IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, it's basically the way people code and, and implement and execute code on computers. And you can do it through a sort of Yeah, I don't know, do you do hear an engineer do How to explain.
Ope Bukola:Add great jobs. Yeah. But you know, it's like, you know, we write text in like a text editor, like, if you think about IDE is it combined a lot of things that you need to execute computer programs. So there's a code editor, which is like the text editor, but for code, and there's also like an interpreter and something that actually runs that program itself. And most IDs that are well known are one they run on your local machine. And they definitely are like, desktop. But there's a ton of innovation happening, right with like Cloud only IDE is we use one in our classes called Restlet. That is really, really cool. They actually they work okay, on mobile. But I think that's the next frontier is like fully mobile development.
Alexander Sarlin:I really agree. I'm glad you mentioned rep lead, because that is one of the most interesting IDE and tech startups out there doing some really interesting work. The one I was thinking about was solo learn. Solo learn also does some really interesting mobile coding strategies, the Code Academy Go app. It's interesting how people have tried to crack this problem with computer science people. You don't want people to type long, complicated things on mobile, because we all know, typing on mobile is painful, but coding is all typing. So a lot of what starts to happen is that some of the mobile app affordances are things like, you know, drag and drop or
Ope Bukola:yeah, my old colleagues from Google, there's an app called grasshopper that is like a sort of intro to JavaScript mobile app that that's like very similar. Affordances. And which is what I was saying earlier, like, right now, I think mobile is a great on ramp to programming. And so we have students in our class, who are using mobile, even though we're like, you can do some stuff on mobile, but honestly, to do the projects like these, like kind of complicated projects, like you're just not going to be able to type it all on your small screen.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, you sometimes hear about people writing their mobile first novels and in never know what people will do on their phones. But no, I think it's really interesting finding. So I wanted to ask a little bit about you know, you've been at at amplify, as you mentioned, and at Google Classroom, and you know, Google Classroom is such an interesting player in the EdTech space, it is in a humongous majority of classrooms in the US are almost ubiquitous, and eight of the 10 top apps used in schools. I just learned this last week, our Google Apps is really running the gauntlet in school. And but people don't often even think of them as an edtech platform. And right, you know, I'm curious about your experience at Google Classroom serving, you know, 10s of millions of students, and what lessons you might provide to other ad tech founders of all sizes that they might learn from sort of the growth and how Google Classroom evolved.
Ope Bukola:Yeah, it's a product that is near and dear to my heart and a team that I love. I have many good friends. And I learned a lot there you know, went there after amplify and it was a great place to learn how to build at Google scale and even you know class when we were tiny compared to like, Docs and Drive and some of the other folks who are in our, in our area, but one key thing thing that I learned from that experience is it's important to solve one problem really well, my old boss and a joke that really people loved classroom because it made it easy for teachers to make a copy of a Google Doc for every student, right? So it was like this six click thing of like, trying to tell second graders to like, click the Share, and then add the email and then put it into this dry foot. Like nobody could figure that out. Right? And it's like, we turned this monstrous process into one click, and teachers loved it. So that's really what bootstrap that entire product. So really think about like, what is going to be something that you can do really well that like, either saves your users a lot of time, or really delights them or improves their learning efficacy. So classroom, it's like, yeah, solve one problem really well, you can actually get really far because people used to be like, Oh, is this an LMS? And we would say, you know, we're not an LMS. Partly because there's so many things LMSs do that Google Classroom did not do. And even over the years after we've added so many features still didn't do. But it was a good lesson in knowing that you don't have to build all the things right, you just need to solve one problem or a really core set of problems elegantly. And in spite of like, not matching up to like the canvases of the world, we still made a ton of traction.
Alexander Sarlin:Absolutely. That's great advice. I think of that as almost like the worksheet problem, right? It's like it's so cool to teachers. Right? And it's something they were very comfortable doing in an analog environment, but somehow is harder to do with just to hand out worksheets, so that you know, are those prompts each student to fill out? So that, you know, it makes sense solve real problem?
Ope Bukola:Yeah. So related to that is just the importance of listening and building with your customers. I definitely had moments over the years where I'm like, man, we can be doing this really cool thing. And like, why aren't we using AI in this like, fantastic way. And it's like, actually, this is how the majority of classrooms look, and the majority of teachers teach, like, listen to them, hear what they're actually struggling with, and build for that. And it can be a tension, right? Because sometimes I feel, I might think that those educational practices aren't innovative and forward thinking and like, Should we be pushing more interesting pedagogy. But we met educators where they were and tried to solve the problems that they really had. And I think that's how you get to Google Classroom scale. You know, the trade off is like, you might not get to be as innovative as maybe you could do something really niche, but you're not going to get 50 or 100 million users on it. So
Alexander Sarlin:yeah, it makes sense. But one of the things that Google Classroom did do that I felt like sort of matched both the real problems and the pedagogical need is the introduction of rubrics for those of us in the education world, we spend a lot of time trying to push the idea of, you know, standardized really well grading through rubrics, and a lot of teachers have trouble making them or don't use them consistently or just have never bothered with them. I've always been impressed at how Google Classroom integrated rubrics, it's something that is both solves a real problem, which is quick, scalable grading, and also actually improves pedagogy, you know, if done right. So I've loved that.
Ope Bukola:Exactly. But that came four years into the product, right? It's like in the beginning, if you're going for scale, which maybe not every it's okay not to be going for scale. But if that's what you're thinking about, then you have to think about solving really core problems for the users right now.
Alexander Sarlin:That's a great point. Yeah, it's true rubrics are not the first thing that Google Classroom did, by any means. It was after a lot of solving a lot more basic problems for their learners. It's really interesting insights. This time has flown by. But I want to ask you the final questions that we ask all of our podcast guests. The first is, you know, what is the most exciting trend you see in the Ed Tech landscape right now that you think our listeners should keep an eye on? I'll start there. I love that question.
Ope Bukola:I think the thing that is most exciting to me is this idea that we are building like global classrooms, and you can truly learn together with people from all over the world. And I think it's apparent in products like school house, like Khan Academy is like new tutoring platform, or even Galileo, and they're doing like their local dojos. But I'm just I'm so excited for the future of education that is really truly global. In primary school, you will actually be learning with students from other countries. So super nascent, like lots of people kind of trying to build these new global schools and I can't wait to see them all succeed.
Alexander Sarlin:That's a terrific answer. I'm excited for that too. And what is one book or blog or twitter feed that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dig deeper and learn more about the topics we talked about in the podcast today?
Ope Bukola:This is a really hard question because you asked for one and I was like, I can't do it, I can't do it. But this is broad, but I think it's worth sharing with this audience. There's a publication I love called rest of the world like, rest of world.org. They do a lot of amazing reporting on technology that is not focused on the west. So lots of really interesting content on Africa. Lots of really interesting content on South Asia. And I think I'm guessing most of this audience are, are Americans are in the West. And so it's really easy to be hyper focused on what we see as the trends here. So yeah, I just encourage you to read rest of the world sign up for their newsletters. I'm always delighted by the things I get to understand about how technology is being used in different parts of the world.
Alexander Sarlin:Great suggestion that I'm gonna visit that site for the first time myself later today. We will include that link in the show notes. As always, I sounds like a really interesting perspective. Okay, it's been fantastic. Thank you so much for being here with me on edtech insiders.
Ope Bukola:Thank you for having me. I love what you're doing. This is becoming one of my favorite podcasts. So an honor to be on it. Thank you so much.
Alexander Sarlin:Thanks for listening to this episode of the EdTech insiders podcast. If you liked the episode, remember to subscribe on Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're listening on Apple, please leave a rating and review so others can find the podcast. For more ed tech insiders content subscribe to the Ed Tech insiders newsletter at edtech insiders.substack.com