CSM

There are many programs to prepare people for the digital workforce, yet many individuals -- of all ages, young/old, rural/urban, in developed and developing countries -- lack skills and self-efficacy to access them.

CSM is a next-generation, self-paced, online course that builds High Performance competencies including: quantitative reasoning; applied literacy; problem-solving; independent learning; attention-to-detail; persistence; an intention to excel; and most importantly, self-efficacy.  CSM is aligned with the Common Employability Skills, and the CSM certificate earns math credit at many colleges. The same CSM course is taken by opportunity youth, and also by corporate managers with advanced degrees: CSM's high performance competencies are of universal value.

Used either standalone or as an equity component of existing workforce programs, CSM gives agency to individuals to aspire to and succeed at rigorous education and workforce programs. And CSM's cost, scalability and technology are well-positioned for use across the world. 

About 40% of adults in the US have 4th-6th grade math and literacy skills; a similar percentage have 7th to 8th grade skills. These numbers are typical for the developed world, and larger in the developing world. These low skills are just symptoms of deeper underlying issues in non-academic transferable skills -- what we call High Performance competencies -- including the ability to learn on your own, attention to detail, persistence and an intention to "knock it out of the ballpark". 

These low-skill individuals generally have low self-efficacy -- according to a recent Strada-Gallup poll, 49% of Americans don't believe they can benefit from postsecondary education. In the US, these factors characterize about 100 million people, and many, many more across developed, developing and underdeveloped countries.  

Workforce development in the US has recently focused on "last mile" solutions such as gaining industry and job-specific credentials, but a large fraction of the adult population doesn't have the ability to succeed at these programs. These issues are even more acute in many developing and underdeveloped countries, where the resources are a fraction of that in the US. 

There is a glaring need for a broad, highly-scalable, effective solution to the issues above.

The inexpensive, self-paced, online CSM Course used next-generation adaptive learning to simultaneously personalize instruction in academic (non-algebraic quantitative reasoning, applied literacy and problem solving) and how-you-learn, -act and -feel domains, building a broad range of High Performance competencies. CSM is low-bandwidth, operates on mobile devices, and takes generally 20-100 hours to complete.  It is taken by students with math and literacy as low as 4th grade level in venues including secondary schools, colleges, adult education, workforce development, and employee upskilling.

CSM requires 100% correct answers to fill-in-the-blank questions, teaching students what A-level work is and that they're capable of it, while inculcating a joy of mastery. When students learn a skill, CSM tells them the (often surprisingly low) percentage of college graduates that could do the skill, changing their perception of what they're capable of.   

The CSM Certificate, earned on completing the course, gains college math credit through a recommendation from the American Council on Education -- at many colleges, it satisfies the general education math requirement for an associate or bachelor's degree. The CSM Certificate also serves as an employability skills certificate through its strong alignment with the Common Employability Skills framework.

People who CSM has helped include:

• a high school dropout working in his father's store who thought that life had passed him by -- he went on to graduate as a Mandel Scholar in the top 5% of his class at Tri-C community college and then to earn an engineering degree at Case Western Reserve University.
• a single mom who could only work on the computer at night with her daughter in her lap, and who told us that her only other earned certificate was her (now non-functional) marriage certificate -- she now has a high school diploma.
• a 55 year old Certified Nurse Assistant who had been in the same job for a couple of decades and failed the GED 5 times -- within weeks of completing CSM, she became a CNA supervisor.
• a college graduate insurance company manager who wanted to go back for an advanced degree, but had been out of school for 20 years and wasn't sure that she was up to it -- who within weeks of finishing CSM, entered a JD program.

There are others that we know of who took CSM as undocumented immigrants at turnaround high schools, Native Americans in rural tribal locations who went on to gain their water operator's license, students in Rwanda who then were successful in a College for America program, adult education students in rural West Virginia, and many, many more. 

There are countless people being left behind in the new world of the digital workplace, and they are of every age, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, rural and urban. They live in developed and less developed countries. Perhaps they did everything right but were born in poverty, or made one really bad life choice.

What is common among almost all these people is that the public education system did not educate them well, and often left them with a crushing lack of confidence in their ability to thrive in education and work. They avoid engagement or quit at the first "speed bump" in postsecondary education.

CSM gives people the skills and self-efficacy to seize opportunities and overcome challenges independently.  They can gain college math credit without needing to struggle with algebra, opening doors to postsecondary education. They will develop the skill of learning on their own, not only in school, but on the job, as well. 

And finally, CSM includes the Career Strategies mini-course, that teaches the skill of making career decisions on a daily basis throughout out your life.  By building an internal career coach, people will both make better career choices, but also learn how to enter a trajectory of promotions and better jobs throughout their lives. 

The Digital Workforce Challenge is focused on those left behind in the digital revolution, where jobs generally require higher-level academic skills than the those that came before. While this affects most people, its effects are most acute for underserved populations.

We have developed a general, inexpensive, scalable solution that directly tackles multiple aspects of the Challenge, including preparation for the Future of Work, and reducing inequalities in the workforce by creating a universally-accessible onramp to tuition assistance and work-based learning. This solution can be used standalone, but also works well in concert with many education and workforce development programs. 

We are at sustainability (between growth and scale) with a mature product that has been tested in many different environments. Examples of such use include:

• An adult diploma program in Cleveland
• Adult education programs in 10 states 
• A community-wide initiatives in Greater Philadelphia in collaboration with Drexel University School of Education
• A program with Georgetown University for formerly-incarcerated individuals
• A community wide initiative in rural Colorado in conjunction with a local community college (which we hope to be a generalizable rural model)
• Energy academies in multiple states through partnership with the Center for Energy Workforce Development
• Multiple opportunity youth programs and turnaround high schools
• Multiple blue- and white-collar employee upskilling programs

We are in current discussions for use:

• in multiple Job Corps programs
• in a cybersecurity company for onboarding training programs
• across a large metropolitan school district
• a large national workforce development entity

CSM brings two key innovations: educational technology, curriculum and pedagogy embedded in the CSM Course, and a new business model for community-wide implementation. 

With its next-generation adaptive learning technology and performance-competency curriculum, CSM has both high scalability and an unprecedented range of users, from low-literacy adults and high school dropouts to managers with advanced degrees.  This broad user population allows CSM to be implemented in community-wide programs across schools, colleges, adult education, workforce development and employee upskilling, where everyone earns college math credit through an American Council on Education recommendation, as well as an employability skills certificate (CSM is aligned with the Common Employability Skills) leading to job hiring preference. 

In partnership with local entities, a community-wide implementation brings many benefits:

• economies of scale in both marketing and course delivery
• the leveraging of the social capital and networks of partners
• a single method to address many issues within a community, including: high school graduation, college access and completion, opportunity youth, career readiness, upskilling/reskilling of the workforce

More generally, CSM can act as a new equity strategy for workforce development.  The dominant workforce strategies -- sector partnerships, skills-based hiring, and work-based learning -- lack an onramp for the many underserved individuals who lack either the skills or confidence to take advantage of the many advanced workforce programs in their community. CSM can act as an equity bridge for both individual programs or many programs across a community, building both foundational academic and employability skills.

Adaptive learning is becoming a commodity in educational technology.  However, conventional adaptive learning is almost entirely directed at academic curriculum, while CSM's adaptive learning engine and pedagogy additionally address how-you-learn (metacognitive), -act (behavioral) and -feel (affective) domains. To our knowledge, CSM is the only such personalization technology in production settings. 

The CSM engine uses a variety of different artificial intelligence algorithms to guide students through the curriculum in the most effective way, in the manner of conventional adaptive learning. However, CSM extends the notion of adaptive learning in order to administer a wide variety of interventions from social/educational psychology to behavioral economics.  For example, every 10 minutes, custom algorithms calculate 2-4 strengths and 1-4 concerns for each student, communicating this information both directly to the student as well as to coaches, should they be present. CSM interventions deliver lessons, nudges, priming, and other responses, with comparable numbers of positive encouragements and constructive feedback.

As an example of CSM's unique methods, while a student is struggling with a lesson, CSM measures their frustration level through their online behaviors.  As long as the frustration level is moderate, this is used to keep coaches away from the student so that the student can develop persistence without interference, but if the frustration is at a high, chronic level, CSM alerts the coach with information to disambiguate causes for the frustration and to provide targeted interventions specific to the student.

Academic skills outcomes

Stanford Research Institute performed a national evaluation of educational technology in adult education. Compared with gold-standard programs ALEKS (McGraw-Hill), MyFoundationsLab (Pearson), GED Academy and Reading Horizons, CSM had the largest math and literacy gains, and the highest student engagement.

Use with students of low educational background

In an adult diploma program at Cuyahoga Community College comprised of mostly opportunity youth, a majority of these struggling students completed CSM, of which 28% signed up for associate degree programs at the local community college, of which 80% have either completed their degrees or have multisemester persistence -- both percentages listed are multiple-fold national averages.

Uses in employment settings

A large health insurance company uses CSM for employee upskilling. In post-surveys, over 97% of employees report that they found CSM motivating, challenging, and made them better at their jobs.  Similar numbers said that CSM made them more excited and more prepared for further education, and 10% signed up within a month for postsecondary tuition assistance. Surprisingly, of the participants, 25% had bachelor's degrees, and 25% had advanced degrees, taking the same course as the opportunity youth of the previous section: different people need different skills, but CSM's High Performance competencies are of universal value.

In workforce development

CSM is used by the city of Washington DC's Infrastructure Academy for pre-apprenticeship in the energy industry. Passing rates of high school graduate youth on the industry-standard CAST test soared from 20% to 67%.  In conjunction with the Center for Energy Workforce Development, CSM is now taken in many energy academies, including in low-performing high schools. 

The primary risk relates to equity: consistently, research indicates that educational technology increases skills gaps, as lower-performing students typically learn less well through technology than in classrooms. CSM acts to ameliorate these risks by: 

• Instead of focusing narrowly on academic skills acquisition, CSM builds students who are better learners, directly targeting general learning strategies and mindsets, behaviors like attention-to-detail and persistence, and self-efficacy. Indeed, addressing these factors is prerequisite to improving struggling student performance, and in a national survey of opportunity youth, CSM had the highest math and literacy gains, far outpacing control students in classroom settings.
• CSM works currently with students from many different backgrounds: undocumented immigrants, students in credit recovery, Native Americans, and people of all ages and educational backgrounds. We have worked to establish a communication style and cultural framework that works simultaneously for all students.
• While we are still in development on this, in a study on adult education, CSM seems to work well with people either with some foundational English, or with recent immigrants with strong academics in their native language.
• Those with mild learning, intellectual and emotional disabilities are generally poorly served by conventional educational technology. CSM appears to work well with these students through its whole student approach and various pedagogical innovations, including: highlighting each student's strengths to themselves and their coaches; using algorithms that prevent students from getting "stuck" and needing constant teacher attention; and indicating how hard the problems are for all students (so they don't focus on their own struggles).

We expect to total over 2000 students in 2021, with an expected 10,000+ in 2022 from programs in current implementation/pilot/discussion. 

Our numbers in five years are highly dependent on two factors:

• potential large programs with strategic partners in both the education and workforce development worlds
• "takeoff" in our High Performance Community efforts

The large programs of the first bullet are expected to number minimally in the many tens of thousands of students, while the High Performance Community efforts could be significantly larger. 

Our impact is defined not just by the number of students served, but the degree of impact on each individual that comes through two different mechanisms.

First, the student is learning a suite of fundamental competencies that provide them agency in their lives. Even if they come from a previously failed educational experience, they will now have core quantitative math and applied literacy, learning strategies and mindsets, strengthen attention to detail and persistence, and enhanced self-efficacy. In addition, the Career Strategies module will provide them with an internal coach to help in career decision-making. These are all internal benefits to the student.

Second, our High Performance Community approach provides external benefits. In academics, CSM earns college credit, and often math credit that satisfies the general education math requirements for an associate or bachelor's degree. We have created articulation agreements for CSM with some of the largest online colleges (SHNU, Western Governors University and APU), and with important colleges oriented to adult learners (e.g., Thomas Edison and Excelsior). As we begin our High Performance Community effort, we work to define CSM articulation with local colleges -- e.g. in Greater Philadelphia, CSM gains credit with six colleges, which we expect to double.

In the work sphere, our goal is to gain hiring preferences for people with the CSM Certificate, based in part on CSM performance competencies' closely alignment with the Common Employability Skills. 

Combining the potential scale with both the internal and external benefits of CSM provides true impact.

Existing effectiveness metrics include:

• Stanford Research Institute found that CSM had the largest math and literacy gains and the highest student engagement in opportunity youth, compared with top online courses
• Cuyahoga Community College found that on completing CSM, 28% of opportunity youth signed up for community college, and 80% have completed their degree or have multi-semester persistence.
• Energy utility PEPCO (Washington DC) found that incorporating CSM into their training program caused passing rates on the industry-standard CAST test to soar from 20% to 67%.

We are constantly monitoring student success rates on CSM and have recently expanded our collection of demographics to better track success in different demographic groups. Every student on CSM is given an exit survey, and we try to establish personal relationships with program administrators and coaches to gain qualitative information about student engagement and success.

The most challenging aspect of our work is tracking the longitudinal effects of CSM -- this is both resource/cost intensive, and we face particular difficulties given the sheer range of implementation contexts (high school, college, adult education, workforce development, employee upskilling), each requiring a different set of metrics across both education and work. We will address this in two ways:

• Undertaking a more formal and intentional process to follow-up on students 
• Seekign partners for formal research grants (e.g. through the US Department of Education)

We are currently a B-Corporation and a Colorado Public Benefit Corporation. However, we have always operated with a strong mission-driven lens, and will be converting this fall to a nonprofit corporation.

Full-time staff: 6

Part-time staff: 1

Our team is "diverse" only on the gender axis, with 5 of 6 full-time employees being female. Furthermore, none of us come from socio-economically deprived backgrounds. 

However, all of our employees are motivated by a desire to help those less fortunate than themselves, and a significant majority of the people that we have served have either been from underrepresented, underserved, and/or low-socioeconomic status populations.

We recognize this particular lack in our organization, and address this in a variety of different ways. The most important means is through constant and deep contact with our clients: both the students themselves, as well as coaches and administrators of programs, who come from a wide variety of backgrounds.  Our methods include: on every page we have a suggestions button (through which we receive constant useful feedback); every student completes a survey on completion of CSM which provides options for constructive responses; and we provide free check-ins for all coaches through which we receive rich, detailed feedback.

It should be noted that in a third-party national evaluation in comparison with gold-standard online programs from McGraw-Hill and Pearson, with opportunity and adult education programs in Chicago, Denver, and Cleveland with a large majority black and Hispanic population, CSM had the highest student engagement.

And finally, unlike most technology platforms, we have been highly attentive in our design to populations with disabilities (primarily learning, intellectual and emotional), and believe that CSM has a number of unique characteristics that address this population's needs.

CSMlearn is located in Boulder, Colorado, which is a largely wealthy, white, and highly-educated population. This presents limited DEI opportunities, especially for a company that does not operate virtually, so that we are unable to draw from a more diverse applicant pool.

To address these hurdles, we practice two strategies. First, we highlight our diversity and inclusion practices in all job descriptions, and place our job advertisements in places where we believe that more diverse applicants may view job opportunities.

Secondly, we also highlight our skills-based hiring practices in all job descriptions.  That is, CSMlearn does not have a long list of many requirements in our job applications, and whatever requirements are listed indicate the lowest educational requirements consistent with the job.  Many such requirements act as real or psychological hurdles to many highly-qualified minority and female applicants. 

We are quite intentional about this, and as we grow, DEI will be a core company principle ensconced in our mission.

Our primary reasons for applying are that early external funding could be used immediately for growth purposes, and there are strong reputational and social network benefits to winning the prize.

In addition, several judges are from Canada, and we'd like to extend our footprint into the country.  CSM is currently used by the Northwest Territories government for internal upskilling, and we'd like a better understanding of the opportunities and partners for working elsewhere in the country.

Finally, we noticed that several judges are from ServiceNow, and we're interested in learning from them the characteristics of their customers' workforce that affects the effectiveness of their workflow solutions. Ultimately, the effectiveness of ServiceNow workflows depend on how well it's used.  That is, when the users are employees with low-to-moderate education (for example, in frontline HR or procurement, or on a Tier 1 help desk), the overall outcomes of using the workflow is highly dependent on employee High Performance competencies. A key assumption of this MIT Challenge is that many employees are not digital workforce ready, and that employers don't currently have good ways of addressing this issue. 

CSM is a small footprint, inexpensive course that is industry-sector and business function agnostic that could improve the workforce characteristics of ServiceNow customers.  We're hoping that a relationship with ServiceNow could help us better understand the business needs of their customers so as to improve our product and positioning. 

CSMlearn services are currently used:

• in many states across the US in schools, colleges, adult education, workforce development and employee upskilling. Many of the implementations have been discussed in detail elsewhere in this application.
• in the Northwest Territories in Canada for employee upskilling of government workers.  

Over the last decade, there have been progressively mounting calls for employer participation in education and workforce development initiatives.  Examples of this include explosion of interest in internships, summer youth programs, sector partnerships, work-based learning, etc. 

Currently, this conversation is almost entirely devoted to academic and job-specific skills, but we believe that transferable skills -- as embodied in CSM's High Performance competencies-- are of substantially more value to both individuals and employers and should have more prominence in labor market discussions and efforts. CSM is by some margin the technological and pedagogical leader in building these important transferable competencies (that is, we have good problem-solution fit, in entrepreneurship-speak).  However, only to the extent that we can engage potential clients in this conversation can we shift to a more growth-positive product-market fit.

We are approaching this in a variety of different ways:

• through engagement with national organizations -- e.g., our CEO sits on the advisory board of the leading industry-led Coalition for Career Development
• through connections with national associations -- e.g., CSMlearn is partnering with the Center for Energy Workforce Development and engaged in conversation with other major industry associations
• through our work with communities -- e.g., like our partnership with Drexel University School of Education on Excel Together Greater Philadelphia, which has spawned many conversations with key local leaders

Yes, we do conventional marketing and business development, but expanding these conversations and partnership opportunities is an important part of our effort, and has yielded key revenue-generating business relationships.

Our general partnership strategy is described in the previous section, and we've have made substantial recent progress in execution in terms of national organizations, industry associations, and on a community basis.

We are beginning to explore, however, the possibility of gaining national partnerships from organizations that have existing relationships across many of the axes (national, industry, and community), and that can serve to both accelerate the individual conversations as well as potentially join them into collective discussions.