Michael Ioffe is co-founder and CEO at Arist, the text message learning platform. Michaels inspirational story began with a simple realisation; that digital learning was broken and ineffective. So he created Arist to make learning personal and frictionless, one text message at a time. They started with a project teaching entrepreneurship to teenagers in Yemen, a conflict zone half a world away from them in the USA. Michael has been selected to be one of the Learning Technologies 30under30.
Michael Ioffe is co-founder and CEO at Arist, the text message learning platform. Michaels inspirational story began with a simple realisation; that digital learning was broken and ineffective. So he created Arist to make learning personal and frictionless, one text message at a time. They started with a project teaching entrepreneurship to teenagers in Yemen, a conflict zone half a world away from them in the USA. Michael has been selected to be one of the Learning Technologies 30under30.
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Stella:Hello, it's Stella Collins from Stellar labs here for another one of our podcasts from the learning technology conference here in London 2020 and I've just bumped into a young man called Michael Ioffe. And Michael is one of the 30 under 30 which has been organized to support younger people who are moving in different parts of learning and development and to just support them with a bit of mentoring opportunities, to have conversations. So Michael, tell me a little bit about it. You probably know far more than I do.
Michael:Sure thing. So the 30 under 30 program is organized by the conference and it brings together 30 up a nd c oming learning and development experts on both the v endors side and also on the practitioners side. It's a phenomenal group of people. And I think I'm actually the youngest member of the cohort; I'm 20, but it's a great group.
Stella:Okay. And I see that you're actually already at the age of 20. You're already CEO of a company called Arist. So first of all, just tell us a bit about being a CEO at the age of 20 and Arist.
Michael:Sure thing. So I guess some context on how Arist got started and that'll explain how I'm in this position. My background is in the nonprofit space. When I was 15 I started a nonprofit called tile.org, which is now one of the world's largest conversation series. We have 4 50 locations in 50 countries. One of our locations was in a conflict zone in Yemen and I started realizing that most students in Yemen don't have access to the internet and thus can't take video based courses. So I started creating text message courses for them because that's the only digital medium that they had access to. And we very quickly started realizing that along with being very accessible text message courses are also extremely effective with completion and satisfaction r ates of over 90%. So it started off sort of as just t his fun topic project and i t very quickly grew into a really, really powerful learning and development tool that's now being used by over a dozen fortune 500 companies globally.
Stella:That's fascinating. At stellar labs, we love a bit of technology. We also love face to face training as well and we're always looking at evidence based stuff, stuff that works. So tell me a bit more about how you design a course using text messaging and why it works.
Michael:So we're based of and inspired by research from Stanford and U Penn and there's actually been a pretty decent amount of research over the past decade or so about text message based measures for behavior change and for learning. And unfortunately none of that research has been implemented into practice. So our learning platform helps learning practitioners create text message courses, which consists of an image, a 1200 character. So it's about two screen lengths, explanation of a concept or case study, or an assessment of some kind. So if I'm an employee, every single morning I'll get my daily texts, I'll read it, complete my exercise or assessment and I'm all set for the day. And in anywhere from five to 30 days worth of text messages, we're able to cover a comprehensive harassment prevention course or an onboarding course or any sort of compliance or professional development training.
Stella:So it's very much around the knowledge based element of it? You're not really doing skills training as such. It's the awareness and knowledge based stuff.
Michael:Actually, a pretty significant portion of our model focuses on the actions that a user takes after they receive a text. One example is our GDPR course, a simple course that we just developed, encouraged users to go find a random company's GDPR policy, examine it, reflect on it, and then text back what they learned. And then, you know, we actually do have courses on public speaking and a lot of more skills focused.
Stella:Okay. So in the public speaking course for instance, you'd actually suggest to people that they go and actually present somewhere?
Michael:Yeah. So, we give them a short snippet, explaining some concept or case study that they should internalize and then the exercise encourages them to do a very specific task that will help them build their confidence or build their public speaking capability.
Stella:Okay. And what do you think it is about the text messaging in particular? Cause that's something that we could all adapt into our training, I'm sure.
Michael:Exactly, yeah. Text messages are frictionless for us. We care deeply about completely frictionless learning and because text messages are delivered directly to user's phone, you don't have to do much to learn and you can just open your texts, read it. A lot of our users read it on the subway or on the tube every single morning. And they love that because it's very, very personal, very, very intimate and easy medium to interact with.
Stella:So I can definitely say it's easy to interact with. I can definitely say it's easy to access. How can you be sure that they have taken the action? How can we be sure they have actually learned? Cause for me, learning is something that is quite a complex process. I would not be certain I could genuinely learn something from just receiving a text message.
Michael:So that's where the daily action and response comes in. So users have to text back what they've learned or apply to a multiple choice assessment or a short answer assessment, every single day. And then we can also do learning check-ins if you will. Five, 10, 30 days after the course is done. We don't believe that we're a one size fits all solution. Right. This is a terrible way to learn particle physics. But it's really, really great and really, really effective for specific types of training.
Stella:Okay, fantastic. And what some other things have you seen at learning tech that you think are interesting or innovative?
Michael:Oh wow, that is a great question. So there's a few really cool language learning apps that I bumped into. I actually haven't spent a whole lot of time in the exhibition. I've been mainly chatting with people about text message learning. So, I don't think I can answer that question very thoroughly, unfortunately.
Stella:Okay. That's all right. I haven't been to the exhibition either yet, so we're both there. We can visit later. What's some things that you, even as a young person, that you haven't learned yet, but you would really like to learn?
Michael:Got it. There is a lot. I think I could talk about that for a while. So I'm a huge architectural history buff. And with architectural history, the more I learned about it, the more I realized how the liner, so, you know, most of my research and most of my study has been in architectural history after 1919 after the Bauhaus was formed. I'd love to learn a lot more about architectural history pre 1919, especially in Europe and particularly in London and Vienna.
Stella:And how do you go about learning that?
Michael:We actually have a course on Arist on architectural history. We adapted a Wellesley course into a series of text messages. I mainly find myself just going on Wikipedia and sort of going down rabbit holes on Wikipedia until I've sort of reached the end. So, that's always been a great tool.
Stella:So you're very much a modern learner from the sounds of it.
Michael:I love learning. I genuinely enjoy it.
Stella:And where do you see your career going?
Michael:So Arist is a social enterprise. For every course that we sell, we donate one to a student in need. So our primary goal is to donate a million courses by the end of 2021. So I would love to, once we hit that milestone, either move on to my next project, whether that'd be an architecture and learning again, we'll see. We'd love to scale up Arist and have an impact on a meaningful number of people and then just go from there.
Stella:It's been really, really interesting talking to you. Thank you very, very much. Look forward to seeing you at conferences here again.
Michael:Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Stella:Thank you for listening to today's podcast. Please share it with your friends and colleagues and visit our website, stellar labs.edu to learn more about what we do and how we do it. Tune into the next episode.