The Resilience Revolution: How Aperture is using Tech to Scale Social-Emotional Learning

Arham: So, to start off, JD, I want you to talk a bit about your title: “People-Focused Engineering Director.” Can you dive into that?

JD: Thanks for having me here today! I love that you called this out because it’s one of my favorite parts of what I do. The people-focused part of my role highlights that people matter. As engineers, we aren’t machines, we’re not a production line, we’re not just cogs working. It’s people who are actually doing the work. For me, the best use of my time is to ensure that the people I work with are thriving and that they’re set up for success to work well individually and on a team.

That means being challenged, having a collaborative environment where they get to have a voice, and when they use that voice, it’s heard and responded to. This allows us to have the best setup for individuals and for a team, which then produces a great output for the company. By putting people first, I’m still building a really good output for the companies I work with, but it leverages individuals for who they are personally and sets them up for success at this company and for long-term growth.

Arham: We’re going to talk a lot more about how you’re leveraging technology, even AI, to achieve the goal of developing more resilient students, educators, and eventually, communities. Before that, I want to introduce my co-host for today’s episode, Courtney from the customer success team at Zazmic. She has worked extensively with Aperture Education. Courtney, can you share some highlights from your experience working with Aperture Education and JD?

Courtney: Thanks, Arham. It’s lovely to join today, and I really enjoy working with JD and her team at Aperture Education. I’ve been working with this group for almost three years now. Aperture Education came to us through the Google Cloud credits program, and we were really happy to see their explosion and success because of that program.

They were founded before 2020, and I want to highlight how, during COVID, Aperture Education was a key component for a lot of students across the nation. They were getting requests even from government education programs to schools because of the needs students had during such a pivotal time in children’s lives. It’s been great to see the success and growth of Aperture Ed over the years, and I just really appreciate working with JD and making sure that they are finding success on Google Cloud.

My role as a customer success manager means JD can come to me with any questions. I work directly with Google as well, so she can reach out for service engagements or questions about the services they’re using on Google Cloud. I really love this company and working with JD. I also want to highlight that this company is women-led. It was founded by women, and I think that’s a really important highlight—that when we come together as women, we can create beautiful and wonderful things that help our nation, our community, and the children who need so much help in this social-emotional learning space.

As part of my job, we were really able to get Aperture Education immersed into Google Cloud because of an enterprise agreement we put together before JD took on this role, with her predecessor. It was called a subscription agreement, specifically in the education sector. This agreement truly enabled their growth and usage on Google Cloud. I wish Google still had this agreement in place; it’s no longer available, but I still enjoy working with this group as a startup and continuing to see their growth on the cloud.

Aperture Education had amazing growth through the use of committed use discounts that Google Cloud offers. JD took advantage of that. After the subscription agreement ended, we found ways to decrease their compute spend because of the great incentive Google offers with committed use discounts. JD can talk more about that in a little bit. JD, do you have any insights about working with a partner like us, with Google Cloud? How have you appreciated the partnership?

JD: Great question. This was a new space for me; I hadn’t worked with Google Cloud as a platform for a few companies. But coming here, I’d never worked with a partner with Google Cloud in the past, so this was a first learning for me. My predecessor raved about this relationship and connection, and it was really helpful to transition that from her to myself.

It just allows me to be really comfortable. If I don’t know something, I have a group of people who can help me answer those questions really quickly. We can brainstorm together, answer different things, because every platform always has its unique parts, its different details you have to know. I don’t retain all of that information in my head, nor do I want to. So it’s really nice to have others who know the specifics or details, or even things to pay attention to. Like you mentioned, when we were transitioning from one financial standing with Google that was going away, there was a big partnership here. We discussed our options: “Can we use the committed use discounts? What’s that going to do for us?” I even got motivated and driven on the right steps to take to make sure we’re set up for success with Zazmic. It was a really nice integration and partnership. It’s not needed on an ongoing basis, but it’s there whenever we need it, and there’s always a check-in to ensure we’re staying on top of the different things we’re actively using.

Courtney: Yes, I love that. The fact that I’m kind of just here in the background, right? And if anything does come up, or if there’s an alert, you can come to us at any time. We work hand-in-hand with Google, so you basically have a larger account team behind you, backing you, and making sure you feel supported. I appreciate that as well.

What has your journey been like using Google Cloud? I know you’ve used different cloud platforms in the past, and you leverage Google Cloud, Compute Engine, and other services and products. There’s a benefit to those committed use discounts, and I was curious what your take is on how Google handles that.

JD: I’ve enjoyed getting to know the Google Cloud platform much more and its different aspects. There’s a bittersweet moment where some things I’m learning as I go, and other things I value right away in how they’re set up and what’s working for them.

Last year, we were on the subscription agreement, which gave us awesome benefits for being in the education field. It was a huge benefit Google provided, and the company really leveraged that. When that was no longer available, it made us really look and say, “Okay, where are we at financially? What impact is this going to have, and how can we set ourselves up for success going forward?” Zazmic actually helped me look at our options and suggested considering committed use discounts, guiding me in the right direction for us at the time.

It ended up being a space where we could make three-year commitments because our traffic is really consistent. We vary throughout the school year, with busy seasons and busy times of day, but the overall traffic is pretty consistent. We have years of data to confirm that consistency. So being able to say, “Let’s commit to that for three years; we know we’re at this level, and we hope to grow from here,” was key. If anything, we want to have more committed use discounts going forward.

I wasn’t really paying attention to the exact savings; I knew we set it up, and it was successful. I was looking at it month-to-month, which is awesome. But then Courtney came back to me and said, “Did you know how much you’re saving right now?” I hadn’t looked at it from that angle until she said that. It turns out that we’re saving 57% of our Cloud SQL costs by using these Google Cloud discounts. That’s a huge number! We’re saving significantly for our company by making that commitment with Google. We’re telling them, “Yeah, we’re sticking with you, we’re working with you, you’re a great platform, you’re working really well for us, and here’s our usage. We know our usage is going to be here or growing, so let’s commit to that.” We’ve been benefiting from that every single month, and we’ll look forward to doing more as we get closer to that three-year mark or as we continue to grow and want to add more committed use discounts to keep that discount as low as we can.

Courtney: You’re one of my prime examples when I talk to customers about the benefit of using committed use discounts. You’re my number one.

JD: It’s really useful for us, so I’m glad. Those numbers are much nicer when I add that 57% discount than before. The company’s definitely leveraging that benefit. Thank you, Google.

Courtney: Fantastic!

Arham: Now, JD, I want to talk about your joining Aperture. You’ve been here over a year. What was it about Aperture that really clicked for you when you got that opportunity?

JD: I enjoyed getting to know Aperture through the interview process, but what really drew me in was the product. Being able to work on social and emotional learning and resilience for students. It’s an area where I didn’t have that depth of emotional learning as a kid. I grew up in an environment where if you were happy or sad, and if you’re sad, you should be happy. That was the extent of emotional language in my household, and that was okay; that’s what I worked from, and I was still able to be successful.

However, I spent a lot of my twenties expanding my own emotional intelligence to realize that there are more emotions than two, and it’s okay to have them; they don’t have to carry judgment. So it was a really big push for my own self-awareness and building my own resilience. When I found a company that wanted to help provide that awareness and education for kids at different ages, so that they could have that earlier in their life… Because as soon as you have built out resilience, you get that for life; you don’t just get it for now. That’s a skill set that stays with you through hard times and good times.

Knowing that this was a company that really helped focus on a mission that I could get behind, and that I could be supportive and help these individuals—both teachers and students—be able to have this information to help leverage their own growth, knowing that growth is more than just academics, that there’s so much growth to an individual as they’re going through those school-age years, even beyond. I really loved being able to connect to that mission and now be able to bring my skill set of engineering and my skill set of working with people to this company to help continue that mission forward.

Courtney: It’s funny that you say that about when we grew up. That’s just how it was. And I’ve seen that through my own kids, being able to pinpoint, “Okay, this is how I’m also maturing” in my emotions.

JD: Yes, and it’s a constant learning space. We don’t ever stop growing and learning; it’s just where we’re at in that journey. And this just adds something to the kids’ journey at a different time than maybe I got it. You could talk to people all across Aperture, and we all have some story as to how we connect to the mission. A lot of people connect because their kids are in schools and they see the benefit right away. Some of us have stories like mine, where we didn’t get the skill until later in life, so we’re excited to help bring it forward. But all of us have some version of how we connect to this mission.

It’s really interesting because I have a technology background, not an education background. I’m used to working at companies that are very male-focused and male-heavy in terms of the quantity of people. So, as Courtney called out earlier, this is a female-led company. When I came to this company, it was very surprising how many women worked here. It’s drastically different from the last several companies I’d worked at because not only are there female-led, female founders, female executives, but it’s also found in all of the other departments as well.

Part of that is the nature of the mission. It is children-focused and has a mission that a lot of women can get behind—not that men can’t get behind it as well. But it was a change for me to come into an organization that was more women than men. It was noticeable in so many different meetings and situations where I’m used to being the only female; that shifted on me where there was maybe one or two males when there was a group of women in the room. So it was a very nice transition to see as well, which is a unique part of working at this company.

Courtney: I love that factor. Thank you again for highlighting that.

Arham: I’m sure everybody who’s worked on the product definitely has that sort of attachment to the vision. But even as someone who just found out about the company a month or so ago, just going through the kind of work you guys are doing, the outcomes the product is looking to achieve, I think it pulled on a few strings within my heart as well when it came to my own education. It’s something that’s connected to everyone’s life. So the stakeholders aren’t just the people working on it or even just the students who are part of it. It’s the teachers, it’s also the parents and the families of these people. So it’s boundless; it spreads across the globe.

Courtney: I would say that this is one of my accounts that I keep a close eye on just because I have a personal interest in how I want this to be so successful. I think we all come from a place of making sure that children are heard, and that their emotions and their needs are being met. So I have a couple of companies that I just want to make sure I keep an eye on and ensure their growth continues.

Arham: Wow, fantastic. So, before we move on to a bit on the technical side, for the listeners, can you roughly talk about what the DESSA system is and what you guys are doing?

JD: The DESSA is an assessment focusing on social and emotional learning. What it does is it assesses for resilience across six different competencies: optimistic thinking, self-management, relationship skills, social awareness, self-awareness, and responsible decision-making. We look across all of those competencies and provide a competency score for each, as well as an overall score for their resilience.

We do this in a couple of ways. Middle school and high school students can do a self-assessment, getting immediate data. We tell them their strengths, and they can set challenges to continue growing those strengths or focus on areas where they’re not as strong. This empowers them to be more self-led, especially as they reach an age where they can build these skills more independently, without being as teacher-driven.

The other side is for teachers. Think about an elementary school teacher with a class of 30 students who can’t do a self-assessment. We provide a successful environment for them to fill out this assessment for all their students at one time. We want to make that quick and easy for them, but also give them individual student data and a view of the whole classroom. After they take the assessment, they get data to see how the class as a whole is doing. Maybe they have strengths in certain competencies, or maybe the classroom is low in a particular competency, like self-awareness. We provide strategies they can use right there to integrate into their everyday teaching to help the entire class gain, improve, and practice that skill.

They can do that for a whole classroom or an individual student. We also set up the data so the school as a whole can look at how they’re doing, and the district can look across how the whole district is doing. This way, if something is missing at a whole school or district level, they can work on it. We also break it down to say, sometimes it’s not a classroom; sometimes it’s just individuals who need help and support in a specific area. They can really focus on smaller groups to build and develop that skill. The entire DESSA system is really focused on strengths. We are backed by that strength-based approach so that when we’re speaking to students and individuals, we continue to focus on their strengths and build them up, rather than tearing them down, by using the system.

Courtney: I love the fact that it could be automatic. You get that assessment pretty rapidly, is that correct?

JD: Yeah, you get the results right away. As a student, they get it right after. As a teacher, they get the results right after, but usually they do the whole class and then look at the results as a whole, just so they can continue to go through the process. But they do get the high-level results right after.

Courtney: That’s amazing.

Arham: Yeah, and you’ve been doing this for a while now. Could you talk very briefly about the kind of outcomes you’ve seen in districts and schools? What has been the outcome of using the DESSA system?

JD: The DESSA’s been around for a long time, and we’ve recently just renormed it to include post-pandemic updates. We’ve renormed it for the world we live in today, which has shifted since COVID, and that’s been really nice.

To speak to some of the things we’ve noticed: it’s interesting because we work with different schools at different times. COVID was a big push for us to work with more schools because they had a focus within the toolset to lean into the product itself and realize that there’s more than just academics for a student. We provide historical data to all these districts. Some schools have been with us for years. Think about a student who starts in second grade and works with this district throughout their school years. They get that information in second, third, fourth, and fifth grade. So they can see their own growth and development throughout their schooling. Teachers get that historical information about where the student was and where they’re going.

It allows districts to say, “Let’s make a big shift, a big change, but let’s know what we’re shifting, and let’s be able to measure it.” Sometimes you might have an initiative you want to do, but is it the right initiative? Are we actually making a change on that initiative? Our system helps provide data to say, “Yes, you are looking at the right thing because here are the results of the study that says, yes, that’s the area that’s best for your school.” You can remeasure that in a few months and see the change. We have PhD individuals in our company who do scientific research that verifies the DESSA itself, and also verifies the studies that come from that. We’ve proven that you can make an impact on an individual’s resilience in just a few months.

From a school’s point of view, they could test in, say, September or October—that’s our busy season. They could test then, get some data, and realize, “Oh, we’re a little lacking in a particular area here that we want to be better, we want to be stronger in this area.” They could set an initiative, and in March, they could re-assess and realize they’ve made a shift and a change for so many students across the entire site.

Arham: Incredible. I wish I had DESSA at my time. 

Courtney: Don’t we all.

JD: Joining the company, and even people that I interview and hire, they’re like, “Can I take the test? Can I take the assessment?” And I absolutely did. I absolutely came in and was like, “Let me just fill this out for myself.” And it’s really interesting to get that information. Sometimes it matches your self-awareness that you already have, but it breaks it down into categories that I don’t always think about. So it’s really fun, even as an adult, even though the assessment’s really set up for kids. I can still take it as an adult and get valuable information. I love it when a new individual joins and they’re like, “Can I take it?” Like, yes, please. Take it. Learn, continue your own development.

Courtney: I was just thinking that, I was like, “I wonder if they’ll let me take it?”

JD: We can talk about that, Courtney. We can talk about…

Arham: It’s interesting how, when we’re working within organizations, these are traits which are highly valued, but it’s not something, and not just for those organizations but generally for the success of any individual. But surprisingly, those aren’t cultivated and nurtured from an early age and, more importantly, monitored. Any sort of change has to be preceded by the awareness of what’s needed. So, yeah, it’s surprising this hasn’t been out there. You look like you want to say something, so I’ll let you go.

JD: I think it’s really interesting because the language used in education changes and varies. I talked to an educator last year, and she said, “This was what we were talking about 20 years ago. This is what we were talking about for 30 years. But this is the word you used.” So the knowledge of this particular area has been around—the idea of a “whole child” or “beyond academics.” We need a variety of skill sets to be successful in the world we’re in. Schools are aware of that. Teachers are aware of that. But it’s gone through cycles of what becomes the focus at that time, due to our environments and the language being used.

For example, I’m using the language “social-emotional learning” and “resilience,” but you might go to a high school, and they might use the language “college and career readiness.” We have the conversation to say, “Tell me what that means for your students.” They list out what they think it means to be college and career ready, and I list out what it means to be resilient. The overlap is significant. So it’s amazing how much you have to find the right fit for the schools using the current language, or the language for the state or district, because every state has different policies and different things. It’s really figuring out what’s the right communication to know that we’re talking about the same thing, because the value—you’re right—this is something educators know about; it’s needed and useful across everyone. But it’s finding the commonality in our language so that we know what value we’re providing matches what value people are looking for as well.

Arham: Fantastic. I actually did take a look at the 72 questions and went through all of them. So, I’ll link it down for anyone else who’s listening and wants to take it for themselves.

JD: On a good note, our post-norms brought that down to 55 questions. So don’t worry, we’re getting a little bit faster, a little bit shorter, but it goes really fast. Even though it’s 55 questions, it usually takes about five to seven minutes to complete because it’s just a quick question and the same answers every time. So, it’s a fast test, even though there are lots of questions.

Arham: You mentioned you work with over millions of students and several districts. You’ve almost made it a seamless network so that even if a child is moving from one district or school to another, there is a record available. So it’s a continued system where the child is almost being looked after by everyone. Having such large data sets, how do you work with that kind of data? And what technologies are involved in handling them?

JD: That’s a great question. It’s a question most large companies run up against, and we’re not as large as many, so we don’t have to be as crazy as some larger companies out there. But some of the things we look at: we really care about making sure that our data is safe and secure. We want to make sure it’s set up to be timely as well. We don’t want students and teachers to have to sit and wait for answers, information, and results. We want that to be really smooth for them.

So what we’ve done with our database is we’ve partitioned it. We’ve broken it down into chunks that allow us to really focus on a particular district or school one at a time instead of having to search through all the data. We can just go into that specific partition and search there, which limits our searches.

Outside of that, we’ve also optimized all of our queries to make sure we’re hitting the standards we want for success in these schools and districts. We have performance tests that we run regularly on our new queries to ensure we’re up to the right standard. We maintain these so that if something shifts, if our data increases, and our performance tests are failing, we can look at that right away before it becomes a slowdown for any of our clients. We get that awareness ahead of time so we can adjust the needed queries or the database setup for that school’s success.

Arham: Can you talk about how schools receive this data? How are they using it? Is this primarily for teachers? Can school administrations also make decisions based on this?

JD: The data as a whole, we need the ability to know the school, the teachers, and the students to be successful, to connect student to teacher, to connect who will be helping take the assessment, and who will see the data. So there’s a whole setup that happens initially for us to be successful in allowing the data to be transparent to the right level, but not beyond. For example, if I’m a third-grade teacher, I get the results for my class, but I might not get the results for the entire third grade because I don’t teach the whole third grade.

So we have a bit of setup that determines who is allowed to see what data. And, of course, we have administrators, whom we call program admins or site leaders, who can see perhaps the whole school or the whole district to make sure things are set up correctly, ensuring we’re not missing any student who doesn’t get an assessment, so they actually get that data, and we have awareness around them. Then, we ensure they get a look at the data.

The data is returned at every level. If a student takes a self-assessment, they get data for themselves. If a teacher takes assessments, they get data for one student or however many students they assess. So, data is given right away after the test. That data includes an overall score, broken down into three categories: “needs improvement,” “meets,” or “strengths.” It really says, “Here’s your overall score, but where does it fit in this general sense of characterization?”

We also break it down into those individual competencies. So, maybe, if I took the test and my teacher said, “Oh, JD, you came in pretty low, you’re in the ‘needs improvement’ section. What’s going on?” She could go look at my results and see which competencies I’m lacking in and say, “Let’s see what we can do to really help you out. How can we help build those strengths to be stronger for you?” So they can dive into that individual level.

But we also have the data set up so that the site leader or program admin can look at it at that level too. Maybe for the entire school, this one high school wants to look at the whole school and see where it’s at. They might say, “Ah, we can cheer this strength! This school’s doing really, really good with optimistic thinking.” So they have that data right away to celebrate within their school. But they also have the data where they say, “What do I want to work on?” They can break it down in a variety of ways: by teacher, by grade, by class. We allow them to filter the data in so many different ways because schools are also working on and implementing other things; they’ve got lots on their plate. So it’s about how they’re going to connect this data to the programs they’re already initiating. They might be looking at something that’s grade-based, so they might want to filter by grade, whereas another school might be focusing on something slightly different and want to filter their data differently and pull out insights that meet their other focuses. We want to give them that flexibility because schools have different needs and programs already set up, and we want to be able to just sneak in and make those better by adding a few strategies here and there and meet the needs they’re already addressing.

From a technology standpoint, to give you a little lens of what we look like technically through that whole process: We have an SFTP site set up to allow us to bring in data and do some of this rostering. Thinking about the nature of what we do, we’re able to have that data from student to teacher to classroom, and all of that data. We’ve got a rostering setup so that we can get the data on an ongoing basis through an SFTP integration. That allows the schools to continually push the data, so when a brand new student joins, they’re integrated right into our system. We also have it be self-managed as well; not every school is going to want to do that level. So we have the ability for self-management, where they can upload those files right into our web application.

We have two web applications that we maintain for our customers: a student-focused one and a teacher-focused one. The teacher-focused one is for teachers and administrators; all the data, reports, and strategies fall within that same category. Both are web-based and built off of Node.js. We use TypeScript and React as some of our main technologies. We use Firebase as one of our main authenticators, and then we use PostgreSQL as our main database for all the data we maintain. As I mentioned before, we partition it so we can easily find that data quickly, because it is a lot of data when it starts talking about schools, their students, and multiple assessments per student at different times.

Within that, we have lots of data that’s moving, coming from schools into our system, and then we’re presenting it. We present data that looks like a visual chart and has a table of data, with the ability for them to download it and manipulate it further, or integrate it into their academic program. So they could download it and upload it into their academic system as well. There are a variety of ways in which the data is presented and accessed.

All of this data is also really critical because it’s school data, it’s student data. We all really care about data being successful and secure for our kiddos. So all of this is done in a secure fashion. We talk about data encrypted at rest, data encrypted in motion. We make sure that we have good algorithms set up so that when you’re logging in, we’ve got a high standard of who can access the system, making it hard to break in. We’re monitoring and making sure that any attacks or attempts are known right away, and we can adjust and help support before it becomes an issue or anything exposed.

We do a lot of things to ensure we have data access controls, limiting who has access to the production data, which is our student’s data. All of our testing environments—like a demo environment we want our clients to see and interact with—none of that is our students’ data. So we do a lot of setup and data creation that is accurate to the environments we work in but is still scattered with information. We do that in a way that is not customer data, so we’re not showing, exposing, or sharing any of our students’ data through our testing platforms, demo platforms, or anything like that. We want to be really conscious of who has access to that, limit who has access to that, and even make sure when we do access the student data, we’re doing it in a really secure fashion, ensuring only the right roles are interacting with that data so we’re not oversharing or overexposing any students’ results.

Courtney: I have a quick question. I was curious about when you onboard a district or a school, do you have an onboarding process with them, like teaching them how to use it so they can get the best results?

JD: We have two different types of onboarding processes. One is getting you set up in the system, which involves getting your student data, teacher data, doing the rostering, and setting up how you want to use our tool within your school. We have an individual who works with the school and district throughout that process to help them get successfully set up.

The other type of help and support we provide during onboarding is to support them in learning our tooling, what we offer, and what we provide. We do a lot of professional learning in this area, for both administrators and teachers. We have several mini-courses and video walkthroughs explaining what the system means, what you’re leveraging, and what you’re getting. We do that for the different roles within the system, and they’re available day one, so administrators can get a little ahead before they bring the teachers in. Teachers can have access to resources at their fingertips. They also usually have someone within our company they can talk to, email questions back and forth, and say, “Okay, I’m getting ready for this rollout within the district.” We work with them, and we host the knowledge share and the initial meeting to walk them through it and tell them what it is. We can be the knowledge experts in that initial rollout. It varies based on the size of the school and district and their needs. Some prefer the more asynchronous version of information, and others prefer hands-on support, and we allow for both. We want to support them in whatever works best for their needs.

Courtney: That makes sense. Thank you for sharing.

Arham: You mentioned earlier how there’s constant work being done on improving the DESSA assessment. You made it slightly shorter and added a DESSA mini. I don’t know if that’s an older thing or something you recently introduced. I’m wondering what that development process is like. Who are you getting feedback from, and internally, how do you decide where to take this assessment? What is essentially the goal for making this better?

JD: I’ll speak to the minis for a minute so everyone has context. We have the DESSA assessment, which we’ve talked about, maybe 72 questions, or 55 questions, but we’ve come out with a DESSA mini. That’s not new; it’s before my time, so I can’t actually speak to when that came out, but it’s been out for a while, and we’re really grateful for it. It’s a 10-question mini-assessment that lets us do a quick check-in. For example, a teacher with 30 students can do the DESSA mini, 10 quick questions with each student, and that will highlight students who may need to dive in. We can then take the full assessment for just a few students to really break down what that student might need help and support in across those competencies. Instead of teachers having to take the larger assessment all the time, there’s this easy mini they can take to get information and then have a stepping stone into, “Okay, let’s get more information for certain students.” It’s really nice to have.

The more recent thing I mentioned briefly earlier is that we’ve done post-pandemic norms, which is really nice to be able to connect our data directly with the current environment we’re in, not the environment pre-2020. We’ve done that for middle school, and we’re actively changing that for high school. We’re testing it right now, which leads to your question: we do active testing. As mentioned, our R&D department is full of individuals with PhDs. Some tech companies’ R&D department is the engineering team, right? We are a little different. We have an engineering team, and don’t worry, we also want to push the bounds of making sure we’re on top of new technology and what we’re using. But then we have these PhD individuals who are focusing on scientific research to make sure that we’re set up for success as well. I love this part of our company because not many companies are that backed and that are proven in what works and what’s successful for our students today.

One of the things we’re doing to help with these norms is integrating the ability for us to test right away with our students and get some results immediately. Think about it: a student taking the 55-question assessment. We add one, maybe two, questions to the end. Then we can look at their research-backed DESSA results with these two added questions. We get data right away to see if these are the right questions and if they’re matching the right norms. We can use our own data set, our own millions of students in our system today, every school year, to get data really fast, improving the speed at which we can do this research and continue to stay on top of being research-based for our students and districts. This is a new thing for us, having quick, easy access integration. Before, we were conducting studies where we had to pull teachers and students separately, have them do a second test, and so on. This has made it really seamless, easy, with very minimal time for our students and teachers, but it also provides so much valuable data for our research team to use and move and really focus on different research studies at a fast pace.

The R&D team is thrilled to make the data collection part, which is usually the largest part of their research, really simple and smooth. They then use the results of that and integrate it back into our roadmap. We get the results from the R&D team, what does that mean for us, how can we use that information to be successful within the platform? That’s where the engineers really come back in and say, “Okay, knowing this information, knowing what the customers are asking for, let’s combine that into a successful, seamless technology platform for them and for their success.”

Courtney: It’s incredible how fast you guys are able to spit that back out. Fascinating.

Arham: At the core of this is actually the importance of having technology, because that’s what allowed the DESSA to scale to millions of students and people all over the, not just the United States, but I’m sure it’s gone beyond that border as well.

JD: It’s a really good call out that you say that because lots of different school-based assessments and programs are paper-based. They’re “scan, fill in the bubble, put it in the machine,” right? And then the pandemic happened, and kids went home. How do you get them a scan form and have them fill it out and get it back and put it in the machine? Over the pandemic, lots of systems, even the standardized academic tests, ran into this problem of, “We aren’t set up to be remote.” We weren’t technically based so we could say, “Yeah, you could take it with paper, or you could take it with an application.” We were ahead of the game on that front. We are technology first, not paper first. That really helped us set up success for all schools. Are you in-house? Are you at home? You can take it from either location. So we were set up for success, whereas other products and systems had to try and make that transition and support getting to that during a pandemic, which is really difficult timing-wise. So that was just a win that we were already ahead of the game to stay technical upfront.

Arham: I’m wondering how Aperture is responding to this surge of AI and generative AI that’s coming up. And what are some of the fears your team is discussing at this point?

JD: And you’re 100% right. This is easy access to people now. If you haven’t interacted with AI, you probably just haven’t known it at some point with lots of companies. But it’s useful for you as well. So, I’m just going to put a little plug out there: go play around with some of these AI tools. They can be really useful to leverage in your day-to-day work-life, like, “Write me this really quick email.” I give my quick ugly draft, and it makes it pretty. And I’m like, “Thank you for taking my emotion out of my business email. I needed that today.” It’s useful, and it’s out there for all of us. The nice part about that for kids is they’re getting it from the get-go; they’re getting it from the start of their education. They’re going to have access to this, which makes it tricky when you start talking about plagiarism, and how do we now support homework assignments and things like that when we have access to this tool? But it’s a tool that we want kids to also use because they’re going to leverage that for their life. If we get them to leverage it early, then they get to have the skillset and the mindset of how to interact with that. And it will help us develop what that looks like over years and years to come. So I’m excited about that.

From our company’s perspective, we definitely want to pay attention to this area and field, and what that looks like for us. There are some pretty classic AI integrations, like a chatbot where you get information timely on the website itself. There are opportunities for us to consider that and how we would do that differently for a student or a teacher. So we’re actively exploring those potential opportunities within our platform, but we want to make sure the scope is limited to the research data that we have. Because we’re research-backed, we really want to leverage that and not lose it by integrating an AI platform that doesn’t stay within our existing research. We don’t want them to stretch our research into something that’s not quite there. So there’s some work there and some boundaries that we want to set up to make sure we continue to maintain our value set for our company itself. But there are other areas too.

If you start thinking about machine learning, which is a subset of AI. It’s a space where we have data for resilience, broken down by competencies. But there’s so much academic data out there. Our company recently partnered with another company that has other types of assessments. So we’ve got access to even more data that we could, if a district wants us to, have an even bigger picture look at a student. Let’s have it be a space where you can see your resilience right next to your English score, right next to all these other different types of assessments they’re doing along their educational journey. Then use that data to leverage what might be useful for that school, for that individual, given all of that information.

Once you start looking at all the information, once you start combining a lot of types of data, the information that AI and machine learning could really come up with isn’t something that we could do ourselves. They can look at that at the individual level, they can look at that at the classroom level. That’s what we really leverage machine learning for: being able to say, “Dump the data, research this data, go through this data, compare it to all the other data, and what is important for this situation?” Then provide that information. That’s something we’re early on with. We want to move in that direction. The company wants to move in that direction. It’s our conversations, it’s our thinking: how do we do that? And we’re moving down that pathway now. Hopefully, we get there in a timely fashion, and that works for the industry. But the industry is a tricky one when it’s technology, right? I think that’s a space that probably other companies are also looking at because it’s such a new tool, and it’s a tool now that’s at our fingertips. Our company, as well as other companies, want to really set themselves up for success in providing as much information to our customers as possible. I hope that other companies are also thinking about that and looking at ways in which they can drive that mission and that vision forward. I think with this particular industry, AI and machine learning are going to be a needed aspect of it here shortly to stay in the race.

Arham: JD, it’s been a great experience talking to you. I remember you were worried whether we’d be able to fill the hour, but we’re actually at the hour. And it’s been a pleasure. I absolutely enjoyed this conversation, and I hope everyone listening did too. Thank you so much for your time, for sharing all your insights and everything Aperture is doing. I think it’s awesome; it’s impacting millions, billions of lives by extension. So yeah, thank you so much, Courtney, thank you for co-hosting with me. Wouldn’t have been this if you weren’t here. Thank you everyone for listening. JD, any last words?

JD: I just want to say thanks for letting me be part of the conversation. Thanks for letting me speak to things that I have passions around and things that I love as well, and being able to speak to the company. I appreciate the opportunity, and I love that you’re doing this for your company, and I hope it’s successful for all. So thank you very much.

Arham: All right. Thank you. Thank you.