SAI – Venture Pitch and Elevator Pitch

Hi Joyce, I think you have some great ideas here, but the cost of implementation is what makes me hesitant to invest in this. The pricing that you list, how does this get broken down? Schools today are very cautious with the way that money is spent and high costs are not something that is appealing to many schools. I also am concerned about the amount of choice that students have. Is there anything stopping a student from continually choosing the same medium? At this point, I am not sure if I would invest in this or not. I would need further time and answers to make a decision.

FEEDBACK: Hi Joyce. The presentation of your pitch is very well done. I thought you very effectively utilised images and icons to convey your message. Your use of statistics to support personalised learning is also very powerful. The breakdown of what you would do with the money through a three phase plan was another strong point of your pitch. While your pitch explains personalised learning as similar to the suggestion ads that appear when we visit websites, I did not fully understand how the learning would be personalised for students. How does the software personalise content that the teacher has selected? Furthermore, the images in your pitch were primarily of very young students whereas online or self-directed learning is often targeting towards an older student population who can work more independently. While I do feel the checklist element of students seeing clear progress through a course could be motivating for some students, I am not sold that choosing their topic alone will motivate students to learn. Finally, is the $1200 per year subscription fee per teacher? Per school? Per class? Would you consider a Freemium approach to attract teachers? I like the concept of personalised learning for students, but would need further clarification before considering investing in the venture.

Hi Joyce,

I enjoyed your pitch - the idea of personalized learning (more specifically adaptive digital tools) seems like the sort of thing that is within reach these days, so your venture appealed to me.  The venture pitch presentation was well organized and made good use of your research - you came across as an excellent champion for your venture.  I really liked your high-concept pitch - "choose your own adventure for education".

The concept seems quite original and it's likely that algorithms and the AI necessary to continuously assess student knowledge and then intelligently select the appropriate next learning step can be developed at this point.  But it will be time-consuming - your proposed 1-year development period may be unrealistic.  Much testing will need to be done before this product could come to market.

You were a little vague on the "magic" behind your product, which is fine for now, but it sounds a bit like you would be developing a whole new LMS, where a plug-in for existing LMS-s might be a better approach.

From a marketability perspective, I liked your use of a "three-pronged approach", but was a little confused about the payment for your service.  Based on your marketing strategy, it would seem that  schools and school boards are your target market, but what would the $120/month subscription cover? Is it a per-student fee, per-class fee or just a per-school fee?

While, developing this tool would give you a very serious competitive edge, I'm not sure you were comparing your tool to the right competitors.  My understanding is that your tool wouldn't necessarily be a content authoring tools, but a tool that helps locate pre-existing resources and tailors the selection to the needs of the student.

I think, in reality, your competition would be a collection of resources (podcasts, websites, youtube videos) compiled by an instructor and posted on any LMS.  Your competitive advantage would really lie in the adaptive presentation of content to the student making the whole learning process more tailored.

In terms of your venture plan, I have some doubts about the timelines you proposed and the amount of money you asked for.  You propose to bring together a team of data scientists and programmers to develop this tool - such a team would likely go through that initial investment long before you could even start marketing.  Think about the number of people that might be involved, and consider their salaries as well and any expenses you might incur in the process of developing this tool.

I would have preferred to see a pitch that plans for the need for funding for multiple years - it will take a while to reach profitability.  You claimed that investors should see a return on their investment within about 5 years, but that likely means no profit until year 4 or 5.

I think if you could plug some of the "holes" in your proposal, especially in your venture plan, I might be interested in investing.

Hi Joyce, I think you did a great job on your elevator and venture pitch. The PowToon videos were clean and easy to follow - I did find the audio a bit of a challenge to understand, especially on the elevator pitch. Overall I think exploring personalized learning is great starting point for a venture. As you mentioned in your venture pitch personalized approaches maximize student learning. I think SAI has great potential and would be really successful in the classroom. My only concern about the product is that it allows students to select learning mediums. While we all learn better in certain ways I do think it is important that we explore a variety of mediums to strengthen our weaker areas. Allowing students to select, for example, a podcast every time will not help develop their reading skills. As an investor I worry about the pricing model. Many public schools have limited budgets and it may be a challenge for them to purchase the software - $1200 a year per class adds up pretty fast. I think discount pricing or incentive strategies for school boards may be key to success. I think there is still a bit of work to do but I would still invest in this start-up as I think it has tremendous potential and would be very beneficial to students.

Hi Joyce, I really enjoyed watching your pitches. They were organized with all the relevant information presented in an interesting way. Your use of Powtoon was really effective. As a user of Articulate Storyline and Captivate, I really like the idea of having resources recommended to me. This would save educators a lot of time, however, making learning personalized does take a lot more time and I'm not sure you clearly addressed how this would be done in a shorter time frame. You mentioned the Personalized algorithm, but the content still needs to be created and/or curated. Setting up a personalized course would be difficult for the average educator, since most are not instructional designers or curriculum developers. I love the idea of 'Choosing your own adventure story', but you need to ensure that the material is presented in an engaging way to capture the students attention. Providing training for teachers could help address these issue. As an investor, it was hard to visualize how your platform would be easier to use. Both Captivate and Articulate Storyline have a steep learning curve, so having a demo like Brenda mentioned would be useful. I would also question how the learner is being assessed on their learning, especially at a young age. eLearning tools typically provide quizzes or simulations, but applying the knowledge is usually missing or at a very surface level. How could educators integrate this software in their everyday classroom activities effectively, especially if every child is learning different things at different times? How can they bring it all together in an applied learning activity for all students to learn from? Creating more online learning courses/activities and leaving out the applied learning would be a hard sell in education nowadays, especially when many educational institutions are understanding the value of play and are now looking to develop MakerSpaces. Overall, a very well-thought out pitch, but I would need the above questions answered before investing.

I really liked your pitches, Joyce! Very well done: detailed, creative, great design! However, I would not invest in this venture. I would prefer to invest in a product that has been developed already. I want to see it in action and decide whether it I think it is going to be successful and bring profit to me. Also, you are focusing on personalization and use two authoring tools (Articulate Storyline and Captivate) as competitors, where main focus is on rapid content development, not personalization, with a long learning curve. I think this may scare teachers away the moment they hear it. Although I worked on a personalization topic for our group project, and I feel there is a great potential in it, I think young learners may not know what they might be interested in until the opportunities are introduced to them. So, letting the system suggest options for young learners based on their current interests does not sound like the best possible educational experience for me.

SAI seems like a solid idea in principle. Personalization really helps push learning forward. However, I don't think I would invest because of the time commitment it would really take to setup and the unforseen costs in development. I think some adventurous teachers would go for it, but I don't think most would. In addition, most classroom teachers aren't employing articulate and captivate. It's more instructional designers. For this product you would also have to host it in an LMS, which means building the LMS. (D2L is actually doing this: https://www.d2l.com/resources/videos/personalize-learning-experience-release-conditions-intelligent-agents/). Building and running LMS services is a much bigger task and might not be your intention. So I fear it would quickly become far more expensive to achieve the goal.

Your SAI (Students as Individuals) pitch is very detailed, well thought out and professionally presented. I like that the software uses personalization algorithm to tailor the learning to each student’s interests but stays within the content established by the teacher. The personalized learning statistics you cited help greatly in selling the product. You have a good knowledge of your competitors and what gives you the edge over them and you mention you have set designed SAI so that there is minimal effort required by the teacher in terms of set-up. Although it is not designed yet, a demo would be beneficial in helping a venture capitalist make a decision to invest.

Your venture is quite interesting but I am unclear about the $120 – who is paying this? Personalized learning is certainly an important area to develop in education today and I believe technology is a critical tool in the development of this area of education. As a teacher, I feel overwhelmed with the idea of learning a new software program as the time it takes just does not exist. With a venture like this I would need to use the program first before I decided to invest in it.

Both pitches were excellently done with detailed information on the business plan and the future success of the venture. I do have a question on the pricing, whether that is $120/month per student, per teacher, per school etc? My other concern is the amount of time that it would take for the teacher to develop the course using the SAI user interface (UI). I am a developer as well, so we share the immense amount of time that it takes to gather resources and put material together. I'm not sure how well the SAI UI would be compatible with materials and resources that the teacher already has to cut down on the development time. I'd need more clarification on these concerns before choosing to invest in this venture. Great work Joyce!