New Learning Times - Interview with Founder and CEO Katy Kappler

Katy Kappler is Co-Founder and CEO of InScribe, a platform that helps institutions scale high-quality academic support for their students. She has spent 20 years in educational technology, creating solutions that serve millions of students and educators each year. Kappler’s work has received multiple CODiE Awards. While at Pearson, it was recognized as one of Fast Company’s Top 10 Most Innovative Education Companies. She graduated from Brown University and has an MBA from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

How did your education and previous professional experience shape your current work at InScribe?

I was lucky to start my career at eCollege (then Real Education) which was one of the first Learning Management Systems in higher education, and arguably the first LMS to embrace software as a service. This was in the late 90s and early 2000s when online learning was just beginning to take shape in higher ed.

eCollege supported the vast majority of fully online programs across the United States and it was exciting to be at the forefront of this movement, helping to shape the technology and pedagogy that would support its evolution. Although these were the early days, it was clear to me that online learning represented an amazing opportunity to democratize access to higher education with its ability to bring learning to the student, anywhere and anytime, not to mention the possibility to scale that delivery and drive down the cost of education (unfortunately, there’s still a lot of work to do here).

But the truth is online learning is tricky. It can be isolating and it’s difficult to get students motivated and engaged in the same way you can in a classroom or on campus. Retention is hard.

After working at eCollege, I knew I wanted to focus on solutions that would address the challenges of online learning. I wanted to create software that would allow online students to interact in ways that supported them, felt natural to their learning process, and made them more likely to succeed.

How do you hope your work at InScribe will change the way educators approach their teaching?

My friends know one of my favorite sayings in everyday life is, "It takes a village," and education is no exception. Teaching and learning are inherently social activities and yet most instructors today still go it alone. They create content, deliver instruction, evaluate performance, provide support… it’s an incredible (almost impossible) amount of work. At InScribe we believe that at least one piece of this work, providing student support, can be done more collaboratively.

Our platform gives instructors an opportunity to connect across traditional classroom boundaries and work together to answer student questions and share supplemental resources. InScribe captures student and instructor interactions and makes them reusable, so instructors don’t have to answer the same questions over and over, term after term.

I would love to see more educators embrace a collaborative approach to student support. I believe that working together in this way will not only improve student outcomes, but will also improve the experience of instruction and give our educators precious hours back where it really counts.

What broad trends do you think will have the most impact on learning in the years ahead?

I’d say the forces that will continue to push hard on higher education are cost and accountability. Students, parents, and employers will continue to press institutions to drive down the price of learning while ensuring that they are delivering on the promise of their degrees. The intersection of technology and collaborative instruction is one of the ways higher ed will respond to this demand.

Take, for example, Arizona State University’s Global Freshman Academy (full disclosure: our product is one of the technologies ASU is using to support this initiative). GFA offers open access to ASU’s freshman year courses. Everything is available online for free. In some courses, thousands of students are supported by a small team of coaches who work together to help them succeed. Students who do succeed can decide (after they get a passing grade) to purchase ASU credit at a discount to on-campus rates.

Think about that. No barriers to entry. Only pay after you succeed. Credit at a discount.

I believe we’re going to see many more institutions start to experiment with new models like the ASU GFA. Models that open up access and find innovative, flexible, and scalable ways to support their students.

In addition to InScribe, are you working on anything else?

Beyond InScribe, I spend a lot of time supporting and promoting the amazing edtech community we have in Denver and across Colorado. This includes co-organizing monthly activities for the EdTech Colorado meet-up and the annual Startup Weekend education event each summer. Ultimately, my goal is to bring together educators, entrepreneurs, students, and other thought leaders to discuss trends, challenges, and opportunities in education.

I’m also the mother of two wonderful girls, ages four and eight, which keeps me on my toes! It’s been a treat seeing their love of learning develop and getting to indulge my own curiosity in the projects they bring home. Last week alone we learned how to create a 3D model, examined a butterfly wing through a microscope, and invented a new recipe for chocolate caramel cookies (they were actually pretty good).

Who are the most interesting people you are following on Twitter?

I love the work that Michael Feldstein and Phil Hill are doing. They always have great insights and talk about what’s happening in higher education with an honesty you don’t get everywhere else.

Speaking of honesty in education, it doesn't get much better than Audrey Waters.

Outside of education, I follow Kimbal Musk, who does a lot of wonderful work out of Colorado around increasing access to sustainable, healthy food. And I’m a bit of a science geek, so I follow lots of science publications (but they don’t qualify as people I suppose): Scientific American, Wired Science, and National Geographic.

This article was published in the Gottesman Libraries Teacher College at Columbia University.