Is Curriculum Misalignment Slowing Your Growth?

The following transcript has been edited for readability. Timestamps have been removed and minor transcription errors corrected. Speaker comments and context have been preserved.

Opening Remarks

Rich Portelance

As we're getting set up and people are coming in, just a reminder, we will be doing a webinar in  September as well. So, you know, check that out at the end of this. We'll have some dates. I believe it's going to be September 11th, 2025. And we'll continue this series in these discussions. Also, if you check out the EdGate YouTube channel, which is EdGate LLC, you will see the podcast interviews of all of our panelists today up there, and other panelists from the past webinars. So, please check those out. There are some wonderful conversations, some detail that really helps to give a better explanation to some of the topics that we're going to jump into today.

Another note that I will probably be repeats the end of the webinar, if you're interested in being a panelist for a future webinar, please contact us here at EdGate. The email is pr@edgate.com, and we would love to speak with you if you're interested in joining us.

Rich Portelance

Okay. Well, looks like we have a good number of people on the webinar, so we're going to get started here. 

Welcome to the June 2025 edition of the EdGate Powers Education webinar series. Today's topic is K12 curriculum options using advanced technology. I'm your host, Rich Porterance, and with me today are three exceptional panelists that I'm excited to have with us. Heather Talbot, who's the business development executive here at EdGate, Ashli Denton, manager of catalog operations at Edmentum, and Melissa Quinn, education specialist at News-O-Matic. Each of our panelists will have a chance to introduce themselves in a second. 

As I mentioned, today's topic is meeting curriculum adoption complexities using advanced technology. In today's hyper-competitive and increasingly desperate state-to-state market, meeting adoption requirements means understanding the nuances of each state's standards deployment and how to adjust content quickly and effectively to gain adoption. Increasingly, this means companies need to leverage technology in their process, and we are here to discover what's working, what's not, and how leading companies are solving these challenges. Without further ado, let's meet our panelists. First, let's turn to Ashli Denton. 

Ashli Denton

Hi, I'm Ashli. As Rich said, I am the manager at Edmentum for catalog operations. We manage the courses and careers platform. So, we take care of all of the standards and alignments that have anything to do with our content that's released on the courses side. I've been in standards and alignments now for a little over 20 years. So, it's been a long road of looking at standards and alignments and all the ways it has evolved in the technology that we've used and added on over the years. So, I'm super excited to be here today. Thanks so much for having me, Rich. 

Rich Portelance

Oh, thank you, Ashli. We're excited to have someone with your caliber of expertise and industry knowledge on the panel. Next, we're going to invite Melissa Quinn from News-O-Matic to introduce herself. 

Melissa Quinn

Sure. Thanks. My name is Melissa Quinn. I am the education specialist for News-O-Matic. I wear a lot of hats with the company, but basically, I was a school teacher for about 11 years. So, I definitely have lots of experience working with different states and their standards and different grade levels. And then I kind of just naturally flowed into this career here, and have been with News-O-Matic for over three years, and I just love what we do, and we do a lot. It's been great, and so thank you for having me today. 

Rich Portelance

Well, thank you, and having that educational background really helps in this field, and we're excited to have that perspective. So, thanks for joining us. And last but certainly not least is Heather Talbot from here at EdGate. Heather? 

Heather Talbot

Thanks, Rich. My name is Heather. I've been with EdGate for over 20 years now. Starting in client support, where I first began working in supporting our clients with some other teacher-facing products. Over the years with EdGate, I've worked in several different positions within the company. I feel they've all contributed to significant growth in my career, which is now where I'm at in the business development side of things, helping to grow our partnerships.

Rich Portelance

Outstanding. So, that's a great perspective and a different perspective than we've had here on the webinar before, because you're interacting with lots of different clients at different levels and sizes. So we look forward to, you know, hearing more about how you see the market changing, Heather, and thanks for taking the time. 

Heather Talbot

Yep. Thank you. 

Discussion

Rich Portelance

So, I'm going to start off with a question for Ashli. What I want to ask is about standards tracking, including CTE standards. Can you tell the audience about the process that Edmentum deploys, and what the major challenges are for you guys? 

Ashli Denton

Absolutely. So I have been involved in standards tracking for a long time at different companies, and I've seen it done in different ways. The last company I was working with several years back, they had a large group of contractors that monitored all of the different states and all of the different standards, so we are quite a small team. 

Right now, I have two alignment specialists on my team, so it's just the three of us. And so, figuring out how we were going to monitor 50 states, as well as CTE, which I'll get into in a second, it's just, you probably already know, a whole other system of standards to deal with. We had to come up with some way to manage this with our small team. So, some of the great people I get to work with, my team is amazing, they came up with a standards tracker that we sort of fleshed out together. 

What information do we want on this tracker so that this can be a tracker that people can come to and get the most live, important, pertinent information about standards. So we track these standards through automated alerts. We use a system called Distill that we set up on all the different state standards websites that alert us to what's going on in the world of standards. We have basically a very well-oiled machine worked out now for weekly assignments that contractors work on. Really, it's one contractor in particular that handles all of the subjects besides CTE. And those are monitored based on their importance to the company, and then also monitored so certain sets are only reviewed quarterly, and certain sets are reviewed much more often. And then CTE in the last several months, our company has deployed, you know, all of these new CTE products. And so, as we had been trying to keep up with CTE standards, we found that keeping CTE on the standards tracker for all of the different subjects wasn't really working. 

So, you know, one of the challenges is just the sheer volume and variability of standards across states for CTE, especially with the frequency of updates that occur with CTE. I talked about this a little bit on the podcast with you, but sometimes something like culinary art gets updated this month, and another subject like agriculture might get updated next month, and so keeping up with all of that with just one row for CTE for a state wasn't working. So we recently deployed a CTE-only standards tracker where we have a separate contractor who is completely and solely devoted to keeping up with what is happening with CTE across the country. So, this tracker is broken down into pathways and clusters, and we keep up with what's changing when and try to keep it as alive as possible. 

Both of these trackers feed into a dashboard that can be used across the company. You can click on a state, a subject, or you can click on all the different ways to look at the standards. You can click on when standards are going to be implemented, and find out what's happening in the world of standards for that state. So, it is a daily ongoing process for us to track standards. It's a part of our job. A fraction of every day needs to be devoted to tracking standards. 

Rich Portelance

It's certainly a herculean task. So, thank you for that description because it was really helpful to hear how you're breaking it out. And you know, I think the number of standards that we have in our database is over six million. I think there's older standards too, but most of those are CTE. CTE standards tend to just flourish like wild flowers in the spring. So, I appreciate that you know the level of detail of the information that you provided. 

Melissa, you guys have a unique company in the sense that you're a news-based organization. Can you describe to the audience what News-O-Matic is doing on a daily basis, and where some of the most critical challenges are in that process? 

Melissa Quinn

Sure. So, every day, News-O-Matic publishes five news articles, specifically written for students in grades K through eight. And then each article is available at the five different reading levels and in five, which is actually soon to be six, different languages. And so, we have a team of writers and editors, translators, and educators. We work together every day to simplify these like really complex topics for students in a way that's both engaging and educational. So, really making news accessible for those younger viewers and readers. 

Every article includes multimedia comprehension questions, teacher-student guides, and readalouds. Our editorial team works on sourcing their own images and videos, and all of our content is vetted by a child psychologist. So, teachers don't have to worry about students viewing unwanted content. And then we also align all our articles every day to every state-specific standards, and ELA (English Language Arts), science, social studies, and then some states have SEL (Social Emotional Learning) standards. So, we do those as well. And then we also align all of our articles to the common core, the NCSS C3 (National Council for the Social Studies College, Career, and Civic Life) framework and then the NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) standards as well. 

And so we work hard to organize, you know, our growing collection of articles. So that's what you're seeing here, is like, our units that we have to help teachers find the content they need, because we just house it all in our web app, and we have over 15,000 articles because we've been around for over 10 years now. And so, we're constantly improving features, you know, improving our search feature, our assignment feature, and custom units. But, like, ultimately, I think one of the biggest challenges is really just accomplishing everything every day in a very short amount of time with a very small team, and it's the everyday thing. Five articles a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year. We don't take summers off or anything like that. So, because students can access our platform at home, they'll, you know, they're able to read over the summer. You know, we try to prevent that summer slide, I guess, as best as possible. So that's pretty much what we do in a nutshell. 

Rich Portelance

Well, that's really helpful. So, you know, having live news articles every single day, having those aligned, and then adopted at a number of different states, and you're in 30 plus states, is that correct? 

Melissa Quinn

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. 

Rich Portelance

So, you know, that's five times 30 when you're talking about alignment. So, that's a tremendous amount of work that wouldn't be possible without using some technology in order to accomplish it, right? 

Melissa Quinn

Absolutely.

Rich Portelance

And I think I was remiss in saying to the audience, we're going to send around a slide deck after the presentation. So, the slide that came up, there are some other slides that we will share with the audience. We also have some other special items that we'll send along. And I've seen a couple of questions come in. If you do have a question, please throw it in the Q&A, and we'll try to get to it as soon as we can. Either we'll answer it live or respond within the chat. And if we want to respond live, we'll probably save it till the end if we have some time. And if we can't get to it on the webinar, we will answer your questions. All questions will be answered afterwards if they are not answered live. 

Okay, so over to Heather. You're bringing a unique perspective as you work with both Edmentum and News-O-Matic on a weekly basis, and then with many other clients in the industry. Can you address one or two of the consistently asked things that you were seeing bubble up, and how EdGate is addressing them? 

Heather Talbot

Absolutely. Two things really surface for our clients right now. Standards comparison is probably the hottest topic. Third-party reviews come up also. But standards comparison, I'll talk a little bit more in depth because that is the one thing that we're really seeing that is being asked a lot right now. It's just being able to look at the states side-by-side and see where those standards are the same. How EdGate has been able to address this is being able to provide a report that will give that side-by-side comparison. This report uses both our standards library accompanied with our taxonomies. So, in order to pull those standards into a report where they can see where standards are teaching the same concepts across states. And so just being able to provide the ability for publishers to compare standards, it gives them some valuable insight into standards coverage, content gaps, as well as helping to inform them during the creation of new content to ensure that it meets the requirements across multiple states. 

Rich Portelance

Thank you. Awesome answer and insightful of what's being asked today, you know, and that's why those standards comparisons are really important. As states get more and more unique in what their requirements are and making sure everything is met, so you can be adopted. 

I want to remind everybody of the YouTube channel for EdGate, where all the podcasts are. Each of these panelists was interviewed previously, and it's @EdGateLLC on YouTube. So you can check out those podcast interviews, and they're terrific, lots of good information there. 

Let's go over to Ashli. Recently, there was an article in EdWeek that Gina Faulk, here, the general manager at EdGate, talked about standards alignment and, more specifically, about AI. Can you talk about Edenum's view on the use of AI and alignments, and how you are all solving for these alignments? 

Ashli Denton

Absolutely. So, AI is a hot topic right now. And how you're how your company's going to utilize this new artificial intelligence to get work done quicker, faster, and scale the amount of work you can do, and see how efficient AI really is. So, our team specifically, we actually all three read the article by Gina, and we were all just like, "Oh my goodness, this is exactly how our team feels with the use of AI". And that is that it's a powerful tool. 

And our company, in particular, we are using AI right now. We've been piloting some AI-driven tools. These tools, right now that we're using, are internally created by our content engineering team. And these the tool that we're currently piloting is helping us with surfacing alignment gaps, it's helping us do mappings, and it's flagging inconsistencies. It's a beginning step. However, Edmentum has this policy that the human stays in the loop with AI-generated work. And so our approach in leveraging AI for efficiency and scale is that, one, we maintain transparency. So, all of our alignment reports in which the AI has been used, we call predictive reports; those are labeled at the top of the reports to give transparency to the customers. However, even those predictive reports have a validation effort by a human. It's a succinct review. It is not a full alignment review. It's not the level of alignments that you would achieve by a human doing the hand alignments themselves. Our direct alignments, however, your company chooses to align documents. 

However, we are careful to validate these AI outputs. One of the things that Gina said in her article is exactly what we're finding too: that AI, while it's helpful, is just an imperfect tool at this point. It may grow in years to come, we need it to learn more from itself, and so right now we have data that comes out of it where alignments are missing, that a human would have said, "Oh, no, this absolutely is misaligned". And then alignments are included that are not helpful to the client. They're going to lead them down a rabbit hole. And so, those are the egregious errors that we tried to remove from any alignment reports before sending those out for customers to review. 

Rich Portelance

Excellent. Thank you. And I want to address there was a question that came in. Heather, if you could answer this, does the ExACT tool provide the ability to do the standards comparison between two or more states? 

Heather Talbot

Yes, the answer to that is yes, it absolutely does. 

Rich Portelance

Thank you. Okay. 

So, let we're going to jump over to Melissa. Continuously feeding news in real-time that is both age-appropriate and grade-level appropriate is a huge challenge. But you also need to take a look at the Lexile levels and meet the academic standards of each state that you are deployed in. Can you tell us about the technologies that News-O-Matic is leveraging to streamline your internal processes? 

Melissa Quinn

Sure. Absolutely. So, differentiation is really key in education. So, it's very important to meet the needs of all your learners, and for us, those learners aren't just in the US. We have readers in Turkey and Canada, as well as other parts of Europe and Asia. And then, we recently expanded our reading levels from three to five to really meet the growing demand for these high-quality instructional materials that districts are looking for. And we're currently using MetaMetrics to help ensure that our content is at the right readability for all users. 

And then another challenge, since you mentioned challenges earlier for us, is really making sure that our content is aligned to every state's specific academic standards for those four subject areas that we work with. So that would not be possible at all without the help of EdGate’s ExACT tool. So, aligning our content to each state's unique standards has been like really like the technology has been really helpful for us. And then, like, the best part is when the state standards change, which kind of Ashli had mentioned, they're constantly changing and evolving. It feels like every four years, they pick a different subject area. But EdGate keeps us in the loop on that. So, when they change the way… we can go into the next question that I had, but the way we correlate and align our articles, everything's just like a seamless transition from one standard type to the next, however many times they change. Our users would see in our dashboard that it has also changed and is automatically updated, and so I love that. That would not be possible without the use of technology like that. That would be a huge, monumental task for anybody to take on. 

Rich Portelance

Thank you for that. And a question came out of your answer, and Heather, I'll throw this to you. Are the current alignments in ExACT using AI right now, or are you still using your original algorithms? 

Heather Talbot

So, ExACT, we have also been working on incorporating some AI. We're still in the process of doing that because, as Ashli has mentioned, there are still some faults to it. It doesn't work perfectly, so we're currently in the process of looking into that. We're still leveraging the taxonomy, which is our proprietary taxonomies. That's like the magic sauce to our system to help our clients correlate their content. But in short, we're looking into it and trying to figure out how we can integrate it. 

Rich Portelance

I appreciate that. So, there's a lot of process that's going on at News-O-Matic, making sure that those articles are being adopted using ExACT and using some of those comparison tools. And, Heather, I really appreciate you giving us some description of how ExACT is processing those.

Ashli more with less is a theme that will resonate with our audience. Everybody who is on this webinar, I'm certain, has some need to, you know, distill and do more with less. Clearly, if you could have 100 SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) at your fingertips, you could solve most every problem. But that's not a reality. As the demands from each day increase while you are simultaneously asked to do more with less, how do you and your team respond? 

Ashli Denton

That's a great question. I think that's really the key question, like you said, that a lot of companies are just trying to respond to. Our team was actually double the size, you know, a couple of years ago. And with a company shift, we moved our platform, separated into courses, careers, and assessments. So our team was kind of split down the middle, and some of the alignment team went over to the other side to the assessment side, and we stayed on the courses side. 

And so, balancing precision and speed is really our constant tension. especially as state standards update on different timelines. We're focused on process optimization. We have to be focused on process optimization with a smaller team. We are daily leveraging technology to try to automate our routine tasks. We work with our content engineering team, and they are very open to hearing our woes and trying to help us break those down into tasks that can be helped by technology. 

Another huge, important thing is just open communication and clear priorities with our product management team. Our team has to stay focused. And so we get requests from every single area of the company. We get requests from product management, we get requests from the sales field, and so determining what we are going to do first and in what order is just a daily prioritization conversation that has to happen. So ultimately, we're very transparent with the requests that come in. We advocate for needed resources, and we do our best to celebrate the wins because you have to keep morale high when you are doing more with less. I think that our team has bonded quite closely in the fact that we've had to do more with less. 

Rich Portelance

I think that's a great theme. I'm going to ask Melissa, you know, the correlations for your team is an everyday process, as we talked about, as you're getting those news articles coming in. Can you describe how your team leverages ExACT and where you find human intervention is more effective? 

Melissa Quinn

Sure. So, every day we have all these articles, all five articles uploaded into ExACT's dashboard and then tagged with their concepts. Well, humans are tagging them with the concepts. But there are many different ways a correlator can accomplish this. I found the most effective method might just be even searching by a specific keyword or even just browsing by a subtopic in a subject area. You get pretty familiar pretty quick about where all the concepts are… not hiding, but where they all are. So the best part of ExACT is that we have the ability to adjust the correlations as needed. So, even though it's like… You know, we're tagging concepts and then all the technology behind the scenes that happens, and now these articles are aligned to the standards, so we can go in and adjust as needed. 

So, sometimes the topics are broad. For example, Maryland state history was a concept, although I feel like we did change this, but it was just a very overarching concept; there are quite a few history standards that were associated with that one tagged concept. But, it didn't necessarily fit wasn't like the right fit for the article. So, we can go in and hide the article from specific standards, which I really like. So yes, technology is great, but then having a human component of being able to go in and oversee, finalize, change, and adjust, I think is necessary because I can't imagine how long it would take a single person to align five articles to each state's standards and all four subject areas five days a week. I just think it would be impossible. We would never be able to do that. So that's where that technology plays a really big role in our daily alignment process. What would probably take hours and hours and hours takes me, like, 30 minutes or so, just to align all five of our articles. And then we have it synced to our system. So, twice a day, the articles are automatically synced. So, teachers are able to view those correlations pretty quickly. And then even if I forget to do a correlation, maybe at night, and I have to quickly do it in the morning, I can manually sync as well with our system and EdGate’s, and it's working really well for us right now.

Rich Portelance

So, I'm going to pick on Heather next, because I think both you and Ashli were talking about some of the roles that technology is playing, and Heather, I want to back up and talk about the role that adoptions, you know, how technology is assisting those, and there's been some questions coming into the chat. 

When you look at when we first developed ExACT to address two main things, right? Standards alignments and reporting on correlation data. Since then, the capabilities of ExACT have changed significantly. So, now that the audience has heard a little bit about how it's being used, can you provide a glimpse of the future, the changes that have been made, and you know what we can expect from ExACT going forward? 

Heather Talbot

Well, yeah, that's an excellent question. ExACT has really expanded quite significantly over the years. It was initially created a while back as a DIY option, and more and more of our clients have made the decision that the DIY option is the best option for them. And so in many cases, we've oftentimes done an initial correlation. Our subject matter experts do the correlation for our clients, and then we've converted them over to ExACT DIY. And after some initial training, it can be overwhelming at first if you're used to doing it one specific way. And so with some initial training, they really start to realize how much easier this will make their life. And when Melissa was mentioning trying to align, you know, five articles across four subjects across 30 states every single day, that is a very tedious task if you're having to do that manually. So, we've really continued to leverage the interest and expand the tools and conveniences within ExACT. It's our clients, actually, that have really helped us to pinpoint their alignment needs specifically so that we can build upon ExACT. 

Some specific examples of this expansion work recently, there are multiple approaches to aligning content to standards, including the feature that Melissa mentioned, where if there are standards that get pulled in because that concept is being taught, but there's other concepts also being taught, but you don't want to see that you can hide that standard from showing in that alignment report. So, you can really get more targeted. 

The comparison of the standards side by side across the states is a new feature that we've added. It used to be that, because we had all the standards in our database, we could create those kinds of reports for our clients, but it was never accessible. The power was never in their hands. And so, now that power is in their hands. They can quickly go into ExACT, select a few states that they want to compare side by side, and generate a report within minutes. There are new ways of managing and organizing content data and metadata, there are new reporting options that have been included, as well as the ability to just download a standards file out of ExACT. It used to also be that the EdGate team would have to do that work for our clients. And so the things that they've come and asked EdGate for specifically, we've really tried to figure out how can we put this in ExACT so that they instead of having to, you know, go through the chain of command and get connect with their project manager to get these things, how can they just quickly go in and access, you know, what we have and just get whatever it is that they need? 

Rich Portelance

Standards authoring and taxonomy, too, correct? 

Heather Talbot

Yes. So, standards authoring is one of the features that we're still working on, but it is majority of the way done, and is now available in ExACT. You can create... some of our clients actually create their own standards, and so for our publishing clients that do that work, they can author, edit, and share across team members. It lives within ExACT, so instead of having to like pass around a Word document or a Google file, you can manage all of that within the standards authoring tool in ExACT. And then the… what was the other one that you said?  

Rich Portelance

Authoring of taxonomies. 

Heather Talbot

Oh, yes. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. So, all of that is on our future roadmap, but the bulk of the work is done. It's just fine-tuning it. You know, as our clients are using these tools, of course, we want to make it work how they need it to work. And so, there's some, you know, pivoting that needs to be done. But yeah, and whatever other feedback that our clients have, we also take that into consideration when we have our meetings about what the future of ExACT looks like. 

Rich Portelance

So, as you know, we kind of look at, you know, you're gathering feedback, and I'm curious about smaller ed tech companies, how they react to the changes, and keep pace, because really, you know, a big company like Edmentum, we hear Ashli talking about having a small team, but you have some contractors and you're putting together systems. Heather, what are you hearing, you know, from the smaller companies, and how are they able to keep pace? What are they doing to stay up to date with all these changes and the decentralization? 

Heather Talbot

Yeah, absolutely. Smaller companies oftentimes have smaller teams, and so they need a more efficient way of being able to keep up with that endless cycle of standards changing. Oftentimes, in conversations, it's expressed that this work of keeping up is more reactive. A client expresses a need that they have a state adoption is released, and they need to pivot, and that pivot usually needs to happen relatively quickly. So using a tool like ExACT can provide a space where this work can be more proactive. All of the standards are located inside ExACT. Publishers are able to access all of the current standards in that centralized location, and then they can also create an alignment to the standards ahead of adoption cycles, as well as easily identify gaps in curriculum for any given state, so they can plan out future curricula as well.

Rich Portelance

Thank you for that. I appreciate it. I'm going to cut over to Melissa, and I want to talk about, you know, we're talking about smaller companies that are being nimble. What advice would you provide to a startup company in this space regarding streamlining the alignment process in order to gain market share? 

Melissa Quinn

I mean, ultimately, I would recommend working with a company such as EdGate to assist with those alignments, especially if you are doing multiple subjects, grade levels, and states. I know when we first started the alignment in 2022, maybe something like that, we realized that we can't do this on our own or just with one person. And so we had to look into something. So, we met with EdGate, and we talked about all of our possibilities, and so we went with, like, okay, well, we can do some of it ourselves, which is why we went with the ExACT tool. So, just really leveraging, you know, your proprietary technology has really been just a huge game changer for us since we are a pretty small team, and it has allowed us to stay up-to-date with those ever-evolving state standards. So yeah, I definitely recommend finding a good partner. 

Rich Portelance

Good partners are important, and that's why everybody's here today. We found that, you know, working together is the best way to do this, and I know EdGate has been doing this for 27 years, and getting the feedback from folks like yourselves is absolutely critical. 

Ashli, early in your career, you were introduced to the world of curricular alignments, pre-Common Core. Some may say that history repeats itself, and here we are just 20 years later, having moved to a centralized standard system and just as quickly moved away from it.  From your vantage point, how has technology played a role in helping with those transitions, and how has the tech changed as well?

Ashli Denton

Yeah, we talked about this a little bit on our podcast, and I found this super interesting, just in how early in my career, alignment work was manual. It was spreadsheet-driven, it had a lot of cross-referencing, and then of course it had a lot of human error. The ability for human error to be added in as humans were just working with spreadsheets, and emailing them back and forth with alignment in them. So, as technology has advanced, we've moved to centralized databases and standard repositories, which have made tracking and updating far more efficient than where we used to be years ago. I think the challenge of the technology taking over and becoming a big shift in our current culture of content development and standards tracking, is just the need for quality. And back in the spreadsheet days, even though there was probably human error and how things might have been pasted in the wrong cell, the alignments were highly interpreted by experts, and they were likely much better than some of the things that are coming out of technology today. 

So, I think another big shift from the use of technology is that we're getting better at this at our company, but Heather just alluded to it, which is moving from being reactive and manual processes to being proactive and data-driven decision-making. So, technology hasn't just sped up things; it's made alignment more transparent and more scalable for us. It's allowing us, I say allowing, because we are currently going through the growing pains of being a more proactive team in getting out alignment reports, getting alignment information to our product management teams way ahead of the game, so that they can make decisions for what content decisions they need to make. 

If you don't mind, I could take a stab at this question that was in the chat, and someone else can please jump in too. But I was reading about how national curriculum providers might need to pivot as standards have changed from this national set. This kind of flows into what we were just talking about, how things have changed. I remember when, you know, I spoke about it on the podcast, but how when Common Core first came around, you know, there were mentions of it several years before it came around, and at the time we were all doing only state standards, and we thought that will never happen, and then it happened, and we've now moved kind of away from a national set of standards. 

So, I think we, as a company that serves a lot of different states with content, being a national provider in a lot of ways, decisions have to be made to make things customizable by state. So, that's what I would say for national providers, is they've got to be able to provide customization with their content so that districts, state-level decision makers can move things around as they need to to make things fit for their state, and maybe have activities that they can add in and move around and just build the course. And people who can help them do that, because a lot of people, a lot of companies, and a lot of state decision makers need that extra help just reorganizing a course so that it works for their state. But I think that's the way that you stay in the game is make things customizable, and you make customers, you know, very valuable in getting them the things that they need to provide the best experience possible for their learners. 

Rich Portelance

You know, I want to point out and thank you for answering that question, and I appreciate the question coming in. If you go to the EdGate website under the standards section of the site, there is a comparison chart, and this is a free resource. It's really helpful. So, when we talk about, you know, this change over from Common Core to a decentralized standard system… Oh, thank you. There it is. So, you can compare every state individually. You can break it down, and you can kind of get a sense of, you know, if you're going to Nebraska, how close it is to the language arts common core and what tweaks you may need to make to your content. So, you'll have a sense of those comparisons of the standard. So, it's a free resource that you can look at and utilize. We encourage you to do so and provide some feedback to us if you want to see something else. We love to, you know, be the standards experts and help out people, and if you see something or think of something, please let us know. 

I want to talk to Heather because I want to kind of look at that, and how we started at ExACT, and I think it's worth looking at that history, and how the ExACT tool came about. If you can talk about it, I think it relates to what Ashli just spoke about, and this decentralization.

Heather Talbot

Absolutely. I can speak to that. Thanks, Rich. The spine of our system, both behind ExACT and then, is also applicable to all of our standards, which are our taxonomies. These taxonomies are developed through the process of our subject matter experts studying the standards from each state and identifying the concepts that are rooted within the standards. And oftentimes, there can be multiple concepts being addressed in a single standard. So, through this process, we're also able to identify where there's commonality across the standards. And if we're able to connect these concepts between content to standards, and standards to standards, especially across multiple states, then the correlation process could be more efficient in time and cost. And that's part of what makes EXACT both unique and powerful. 

Additionally, because of that connection of content to standards via the taxonomy, whenever the standards change, and they're updated in our database, the content correlations are updated as well, keeping them current in real time. So, anytime standards are changing, we have a team that specifically is monitoring the standards changes, and making sure that we ingest them into our system, as well as being able to provide access to future sets. So we also work with standards that are adopted, but not yet implemented, up to 2 years in advance. The only standards that we typically tend to stay away from are the ones that are not fully adopted, because they change often, even in draft form. The draft forms can change several times before they're actually fully adopted.

Rich Portelance

There we go. Thank you. So, Melissa, let's talk about the pressures and demands you see that states are placing on publishers, and what are some of the ways you and your team meet those pressures by leveraging technology? 

Melissa Quinn

Sure. I've already noticed some states have implemented stricter guidelines or have increased the rigor for adopting their digital curricula. I've also noticed states seem to want, I think this was mentioned before, more personalized content platforms, really customized to fit the needs of their students, and that varies widely across the country. Our products are actually quite perfect for all those districts because we do offer that engaging content, which is produced daily, and it's available in our safe and secure database. So, with our, you know, within our digital platform, students have the ability to read in different languages, because we get that a lot. We find that teachers are always looking for just really high-quality materials in different languages. We have a Spanish immersion as well. With just a little click of a button, you can have the entire site turn into your Spanish version. 

And then our whole platform helps support every school's unique curricula in all those subject areas. Unlike other curricula, we are very dynamic. So, we are constantly changing brand new content every day, like something that you maybe a basal reader couldn't do because that's published, you know, and here once you once you publish it, that's it. So, I like that we use the technology that we are able to constantly change and evolve. 

And then we also started leveraging other things, like our active learning slides is new. So teachers can display content on smartboards or Promethean boards. So, they don't have to have a one-to-one, especially in those younger grades. So now with these downloadable and customizable PowerPoints and Google Slides, it just gives more options for teachers to leverage our content. 

And then we also have, well, basically keeping up with the demand of these districts can be challenging. But then we offer custom units, so educators can pick and choose different articles they want in one unit, and then push that out to just their own district. I did an entire custom unit for New York City that went along with their actual curriculum, which they were using, and so just to fill in the gaps. So, we have that ability to customize, and then we also have we have the data tracking as well. We were asked to do that. So, we've been constantly improving our data tracking. I know someone mentioned earlier, like we used to have to do it ourselves and print the data and send it off to our customers, but now they can go online and do that themselves. So, that's kind of just a few ways where we're helping to keep up with the demand and hopefully exceed expectations. 

Rich Portelance

I really appreciate that. And I just want to remind everybody that on September 11th, we'll have the next webinar in our series. So, please keep an eye out for that. We will send around slides that support some of the things that we talked about today. So, that will come. I think there's an infographic that we're going to send out as well. And if you have any more questions, please put them in the chat. 

I'm going to ask one more question for everybody, and then I think we're going to wrap it up. One of my favorite questions, I was talking to Ashli on our podcast about it, so I'm gonna repeat that. You said to me that if transparency matters, understanding alignments, and the gaps that exist in content from state-to-state adoptions. If you could wave a magic wand, what would you wish for in order to improve existing processes? 

Ashli Denton

That's a great question. I might answer it a little bit differently than I did on the podcast, but I think that… you would think I might say that I wish that AI would come to the place where when we ran a set of standards against content, it would come out perfectly. I think that's a grandiose wish to get to that place where AI is able to do that. 

But I think what my current wish would be just in the current moment, you know, we're doing day-by-day. So my current wish, you know, if I could wave a magic wand today in the situation that we're in, would be for there to be a better understanding that alignment expertise is valuable and it produces really quality alignments. You might have to wait a little bit longer than what could be produced by technology. I think technology and humans can work together beautifully to produce great alignment reports. But, this desire to go faster, faster, faster, faster, and faster in today's time would be something I would like to speak up and say, “Hey, if you can just understand that humans are going to provide a great enhancement to technology, and that the quality of what's going to come out of the reports you receive are well worth the short wait beyond just a computer spitting something out”. 

Rich Portelance

Thank you. I appreciate the answer. 

I'm going to put Melissa on the spot a little bit. Do you have a magic wand? If you had some piece of technology or something you could see or have that would improve the efficiency of your team, what would it be? 

Melissa Quinn

My goodness. I mean, our team's we have to be pretty efficient at this point because we do a lot, and we have a very, very small team. I know from our editorial team's standpoint, I think just in general, making things a little bit easier in our back office, I would say. 

We have an older system, and you know, as technology evolves, we have to implement some of the new technology into our older technology, and it's challenging at times. Our developers are fabulous. They're great at what they do, and I just know what's on their plate, and I always apologize. I'm like, “I know this is going to be more than what you can handle right now, but I would really love it if you could do this for me”. So, I think that just improving some of those back-office things would be great for us. 

Rich Portelance

I think that's an amazing point that you made, because I think for everybody, if you're involved in technology and you're involved in processes, being able to wave a magic wand and say, “Oh, this fix is done”, or, you know, “This update that I need to the system so I can get to the next thing is done”. As great as developers are, they have priority lists, they try to go through, and they're trying to knock it off, and boy, if I could jump to the front of the line today to get this done to my customer, it'd be great, right?, 

So, Heather, I want to ask you about the idea of AutoAlign, and where you see it helping companies the most, and what do you see as best practices today, because that's an important function, right? 

Heather Talbot

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. AutoAlign is a tool that's in ExACT that can be used to import content metadata, and the tool will actually suggest concepts from our taxonomy that are relevant to the content. So, the client would import the lesson metadata. When I say metadata, I mean the title, grade, subject, topics, keywords, descriptions, and anything that is about that lesson. And the more specific the better, of course. And then the AutoAlign feature suggests concepts using that metadata as its guide. The client then has the ultimate say, though, because the client reviews the suggested concepts and adds only the ones that they feel are applicable and relevant to their content. And then in turn, the content aligns to any of the standards in ExACT that share those concepts. The benefit, of course, is that this process quickly gets a list of relevant concepts without first and foremost having extensive knowledge of our taxonomies. And then second of all, without having to search the taxonomy for the best concepts. 

Interestingly enough, we actually have a client right now who is not experienced with standards and alignments. And so they're actually using the AutoAlign tool to help train themselves on how to do those standards alignments in general. 

Rich Portelance

Well, that's a great use of technology right there, to understand how to do this and get better at it. 

Closing Thoughts

Rich Portelance

Well, I want to thank our panelists today. Everybody's email will be linked in the PowerPoint presentation that we'll send out to the audience. If you have a question for one of the panelists, I'm sure they would be happy to answer. So, thank you very much, Ashli Denton, Melissa Quinn, and Heather Talbot. I appreciate your time today, and I hope everybody has a great day