AESOP Academy Board Meeting — April 17

What not informal — we will once we have a formal board, executive board, not just an advisory board. So I'm just going to start with putting this down and letting everybody do some stuff. Hi, everybody. I'm Scott Schindler. I am old and I think tired. I'd rather be at the gym and the pool doing aqua exercises, which my mother turned me on to. But here we are talking about how we change the world. I think everybody is fairly well versed on what we're attempting to do here. So I won't go into wax philosophic about it. And I'll just let you introduce us. Ervin, why don't you tell everybody who you are and why you love being here?

All right, very good. Thank you for being here, buddy. Amanda.

Thank you, Amanda. Mr. Lightcap, Dr. Lightcap.

But we're not going to find anybody born in AI, so everybody's coming from somewhere to AI. Cyber, cyber, cyber, cyber — that's where we are. We'll get a lawyer in here sometime, right Peter? Mike, Mr. Madero.

Welcome to the new corporate reality. All right, George.

Thanks, George. K.J., Ms. Kimberly, you ready? Did I scare you? Dr. Haywood.

Thank you, Dr. Haywood. While I'm thinking about it, our Discord link — which is our forums — is in chat. It's an agenda item I'll bring up again later. But if you would, get into Discord and post into the advisory board chat group your name and your LinkedIn link so that everybody can follow you. Mr. Amir Habib.

Thank you, Amir. And our distinguished guest, Mr. Peter Vogel — thank you for joining us. So where we are right now. If you're at a computer, open your browser, go to esopacademy.org. We are at about 25 courses right now. We are in four languages: Hindi, Arabic, and Spanish — we only have one course in those four languages, our foundations course, but we are in four languages. I intend to add Chinese traditional and Korean soon. We have up to 13 languages built into the course generator I built. Why Spanish? American schools — and globally, other than Chinese, it's the most spoken language in the world. Why Arabic? A lot of funding coming out of Saudi Arabia. And Hindi — huge opportunities for technical citizenry in India and Pakistan. Right now I've got about 80 total courses in the build order. Any questions about the languages or courses?

Parent-teacher dashboard — if you get a chance to see it on our root page, there is a parent-teacher dashboard. The homeschoolers are going to be a big market for us. As a teacher or parent, you can add your student's ID. There is no login. I do not collect data. There's nothing in this site that collects data. If you purchase a certificate at the end — which we'll talk about — then we'll collect data, but there's nothing in the training or the site for collecting data. You can be assigned an ID. That ID can be added to the parent-teacher dashboard, and then you can track students' or children's progress throughout the courses and assign homework as well. I have not tested it at all. It is built. I have no idea if it actually works. That's why there's a big red blurb at the front of our website saying we are in development. Running and gunning. I think the parent-teacher dashboard is going to be a really valuable piece in the homeschooler market if we can reach them.

Both.

And to show you're all aware — my good friend who's a stranger on Discord, as well as my new marketing team said, "this looks like it was built by an engineer." And they were right. There's no header, there's no footer, there's no mission statement — some of these things are missing. Yes, please keep telling me because I am an engineer and the site works. So I've done my job.

All right. The ADA policy just got posted this week. Mike Allen, who is kind of leading the ADA effort, thinks there is value in the ADA market. And I am going to start today to build a reader into the site — you'll be able to go to the homepage for the blind or visually impaired and click it and it will read the homepage or the courses page or the course content. That is on my to-build list today, and then I'll be working with Mike and his wife to figure that out.

We do have a privacy policy. Unfortunately right now it's buried in the AI policy, so you wouldn't see it.

Oh, okay. Thank you. Things I would never even think about. You need to have it on the footer of every page so that everybody will know it applies to that page.

Thank you. I have time, I will make availability. Standards and review process — for the K-12 piece, there is now a national standard. It is posted on our web page. AI has already mapped all of our courses against that standard, as well as the international standard UNESCO. So you can start to see how we meet the standards.

We're going a step further — something I think no one has ever done. We're going to build an auditable page that shows where in our courses we meet the standards. And so when a human comes to review our courses, which is still a requirement, they will be able to go to that audit and just track and check off "yep, it meets the standard" as opposed to having to read the material and figure out where and if it meets the standard. I think that's something AI offers us that has historically never existed, and I'm very, very excited about it. Dr. Lightcap, I thought of all people it might be you or Ervin that had something to add there.

Actually, yes. Ervin, do you have something?

If we build and offer the cert as opposed to a third party?

That's an international standard.

I'll make sure you stay on top of us for that then. My plan is to do something different, and everybody I've told it to is arguing against it, but the idea is that you can take the course and take the final test — all free. If you want the certification after you pass the test, then you can pay $20 or $50, whatever we decide as a team. I don't think people should be paying for something they don't have or can't get value out of in front of an employer. You should be able to know that you've learned and passed the test and then determine if that certification is valuable to you.

That's the reason I ask. The free model is to make it ubiquitous. The certificates gain value because of usage. But that means getting into high schools and junior highs.

And that's kind of how my intent to make this free is to make it ubiquitous. The certificates gain value because of usage. But that means getting into the high schools and junior highs.

This is the next item on the agenda. There is a public web page on our site right now covering all 50 states and where we are in the accreditation process with each state, when their deadlines are, and our current status. There is also a military tracker — where we are with every military base regarding offering soldier transition training, starting soon. And then a section not yet public showing where we are with the accreditation of each course with regard to a human review of the standard.

These pages exist because AI is magical at creating them. They would have taken months to build previously. There's also a QA function. The QA function actually allows you to look at all test questions on all our courses and review them, change the answer, change wrong answers to make them better quality questions. AI is not going to be really good at judging whether a question is good, or whether the wrong answers are wrong enough. So we will need some type of process to go through, and it has an audit tracker so you can see who said this is good or bad, or that it's been approved.

Exactly. And the adaptive testing where it changes the next question based upon how you answer. Not my bailiwick. I'm going to need your help, we're going to need AI's help, and we're going to need a human reviewer — probably Ervin and Dr. Lightcap for now — to figure out if we've got the right answers.

So next agenda item: join the forums. The link's in chat. And take a course. Come to our site, join one of the courses, take the course. I don't care if it's AI in photography, AI in psychology, AI in whatever — take a course so that you know what we're delivering. So you can come back and say "oh, I learned something."

I am adding one thing to all the courses today. Based on my conversation with George, I'm going to go add a story to the front of every course that explains the value of that course and what you should expect to see in it. Completely narratively driven. I'm very much into narrative learning.

Yay. I hired a marketing team yesterday. I'm meeting with them today. They're going to be building our brand on LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. I have never used Instagram in my life. They're also going to be helping us with investors. They are used to doing investors but not nonprofit investors — donors with no financial interest. That is a new space for them. So we'll see how it goes. It's coming out of my pocket and it's expensive. Any thoughts on that or an alternative? Marketing is not my specialty.

So summarize again — what's our next step?

I think you're right. I don't think any of us have the skill to do it — we'd all be trying for the first time. We probably want an expert. I'm working on that for the team.

I think that's on me. Given what Dr. Haywood just said and what Amanda just put in chat, I need to define for the board our initial targets. Then that gives you all the opportunity to come back and say "what about this?" I haven't done it. So right now it's amorphous. That's my fault. Let me go define a document for us to talk about what my initial thoughts were, and then what Dr. Haywood and Amanda added weren't even on my mind. Thank you.

I do have expectations of myself for perfection in most things, and so thank you. It's so unlike IT and cyber folks. Right, Dr. Frenzel knows all about perfectionism.

We really have some talented people here. We lost a prominent cyber leader who was in our first board meeting — he just has too many initiatives and couldn't continue. But he contributed feedback in the first meeting and really appreciated it. That's the expectation here. If you come today and that's the last day you come, that's the last day you come. Eventually we'll get to our locked-in advisory board, our locked-in executive board. We're not even a nonprofit yet — my accountant can't even form the nonprofit until May 8th.

I just added a link in chat — this is where I really need your help this week. Our page on LinkedIn. We need to get 150 followers on the page so we can build live events out of the page, live LinkedIn events, because I'm going to start doing a weekly podcast on AI and trust — getting educators and technologists involved to have more visibility. I want you guys to be involved. Right now: follow the page, and then get your people — if you manage teams, if you have family on LinkedIn — just follow the page. Get us to 150 people, and then we'll worry about natural growth from there.

We need to have our marketing messages — our elevator pitches. We don't have them. That's another gap that got brought up.

They're going to come in and say, "you need to have your mission, you need to have your statements." Not a marketing guy. But once we have our four social media pages going — once a week, go in there and make sure you're amplifying those messages. Repost, like, whatever. Don't get on Instagram if you don't want to be on Instagram.

But the biggest piece today — absolutely the biggest message today — find two more people. This week, find two people that are believers in AI, that believe in our mission, and convince them to join and contribute something. I want to build this organization word of mouth. I don't know if you all know Khan Academy — one of the greatest things that exists on the planet. They built their global education platform through word of mouth. That's what I want to do for the world as well.

There's so much hate for AI. On our Facebook posts there is so much return hate for AI right now — and it's the majority. People saying "I'll never teach my kid AI, it takes jobs." So we have to be a really positive influence to overcome that. It's going to take time.

No — give them 30% more tasks.

We might not be able to feed the world. We might not be able to solve water problems. But we can bring education to people to allow them to rise up. We just have to solve part of it. Somebody else will solve another part of it. We've got to contribute. There are too many people out there not contributing to anything but themselves.

So guys, please get into the Discord. We're going to be communicating there all week long. I'm going to go to each advisory board member that didn't make it today and make sure they're in the Discord and have conversations. I'm going to post in there and onto our LinkedIn pages our progress and changes. I've got some takeaways today to go build some marketing messages and targeting messages, and I'll be asking you guys questions in the Discord about that as I go through it. Please engage.

I really enjoy connecting with all you guys. Yeah, Discord. I've got an extra room here in Colorado if you guys want to get out of Texas or Wisconsin or wherever. Come visit. You guys have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for your time. We'll talk soon. Take care. Bye, everybody.