TEL Education’s new Director of Product vision doesn’t do something halfway. When he decided he wanted to be healthier, he didn’t just go to the gym a few more times a week. He trained for and completed a Spartan Super (a 10k run with 28 obstacles) in 100-degree Utah heat.
When, in college, he found that he enjoyed working with kids in his church’s youth group, he dropped pre-law and changed his degree plan to education. And got a Master’s in Education Administration and a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership.
John wanted to make an impact on the world, and help students have the most opportunities to be successful. He knew that started with education. In this podcast with TEL’s Executive Director Rob Reynolds, John shares why he is so passionate about education and the doors it can open for students from all backgrounds.
Genuine Learning Experience in Online Courses
At the beginning of his career in education, John worked with alternative education programs. Many of them incorporated some online learning elements. But John struggled with the hands-off nature of the programs he encountered.
“What I noticed over the years is that those programs were very asynchronous,” John said. “Students were just told to move through, start here, go here, move through here, and then click submit, and you’re done” It wasn’t providing students with the support and learning experiences they needed.
So he worked to make sure students had ways to interact with each other and their instructors, even in the online curriculum. He incorporated virtual meet-ups and workshops to make sure students felt supported and part of a learning community. That was one of the things that drew him to TEL.
“And what I’ve noticed here at TEL is that, that’s something that we’ve pulled in with our coaching program. We have these student coaches who are going out of their way to meet with all the students,” John said. “That’s exactly where I see asynchronous learning going, where it’s not necessarily capital A, Asynchronous, where it’s maybe lowercase A with some support from the institution that the students enrolled in.”
Online Learning as a Viable Option
There is no question that 2020 pushed online learning into the spotlight. There was a lot of good that came with that, such as the flexibility it provided students and the increased comfort level throughout most administrations. But there were a lot of schools trying to use online learning as a duct-tape solution instead of a long-term opportunity.
“If districts are trying to continue pushing out this idea that virtual schools need to look a certain way, then they’re not going to be successful and students are not going to like it,” John said. Instead, using online curriculum as part of a blended learning solution can help schools incorporate the flexibility with the valuable connections and support students need.
“I see right now the bigger districts already doing this,” John said. “But I can see it going all the way down to even the rural districts where rural schools are trying to figure out a way to make their online learning programs more valuable to their students.”
Innovative Opportunities for All Students
As the Director of Product Vision, John works across departments to help us create a learning experience that is valuable for all students. That includes helping our partner schools understand all the features of the platform and brainstorming new ways for more students to find TEL courses.
You can follow John on LinkedIn to hear about the new projects he’s working on. If you are ready to provide flexible, affordable online college-credit courses for your students, contact us to set up a platform demonstration.
Education Futures Podcast 30: Creating Impact With TEL's Director of Product Vision
Full Transcript
Rob Reynolds:
Greetings everyone. This is Rob Reynolds, I’m the executive director of TEL Education. And I’m joined today on our podcast by one of our newest executive members, John Morrison. John Morrison serves as TEL Education’s director of product vision, and we’re really happy to have John with us. And I should correct that and say, Dr. John Morrison. So John, how are you today?
John Morrison:
I’m great, Rob. Thanks for asking.
Rob Reynolds:
Well, you’re very welcome and I really appreciate you joining us today, John. There’s a lot to unpack with you. You have a really diverse background in life and education, and I think that’s had a huge impact, not only on your development as a professional and as a person but also on preparing you to do some of the things you’re doing with TEL. So let’s jump in, I’ll ask the questions and you can give us some of the color about all of your experiences. So let’s jump into your own educational journey. Obviously, TEL Education is an educational company, we’re a learning company. And we really look for people like you who have diverse backgrounds and fairly extensive educational journeys so that they can bring a lot of empathy and experience into our organization. So why don’t you just tell us a little bit about how you got here?
John Morrison:
Sure. So we can go all the way back if you want, all the way back to freshman year of college where I was thinking about getting into the law profession. I started taking pre-law classes at the time while I was also serving as a youth director at my church. And I realized over my freshman and sophomore year that I found more purpose and satisfaction in my time working with students, both in middle school and high school age. And so I felt like that was the direction I was going to take. So I decided to go the ministry route and decided to finish out my degrees from both OU and OSU in liberal studies, because, again, I was thinking I was going to go into some pre-law or pre-med program.
So I became a youth pastor and decided to work with students. And I realized that I was only going to have the impact that I wanted to have on just my own circle of students in my church, if that makes sense. So I was only going to have the total number of students that would be available in our little town there versus potentially having a broader impact on a lot of students for years to come if I were to be a teacher. So I decided to go through the alternative certification process in Oklahoma, and I took all the subject area tests and I ended up getting certified to teach English and math and history and science. And so I took a job. Yeah. Yeah. So I was a youth pastor for one year, right after I graduated from OSU. And I decided that I wanted to look into becoming a teacher and there was an open position in Cleveland, Oklahoma, in their alternative education program.
So I joined that team for a year and worked with a wonderful administrator at the time, and worked with alternative ed students, that was my first introduction to that community, of students that had rough home lives, situations that affected their educational experiences and whatnot. And I grew to really enjoy those students more than students that had affluent backgrounds. And so from then on a lot of the positions I was looking for had to do with students that had troubled backgrounds, or that were from low socioeconomic statuses. So I went from Cleveland to Norman to K12, and to Midwest City. I’ve been all over the place. I’ve served as a teacher for several different brick-and-mortar schools. I was a testing director and instructional coach and a principal for Insight School of Oklahoma.
And in the background of all of that, I decided that I wanted to move forward with graduate degrees. And so I pushed through and got a master’s in educational administration. And then I just kept going and got a Ph.D. in the same area, and decided that I potentially just wanted to see what broader impact I can have, not just on students, but potentially teachers as well, because if you can impact teachers, then you can potentially impact all the students that they work with. So again, in the background of all my decisions in my journey was how can I have the biggest impact on the biggest number of students possible?
Rob Reynolds:
Oh, that’s great, John. And that certainly aligns with, I know certainly my vision and experience and a number of other people who work with us here. I’m curious. So you started out, you’re obviously just a brick and mortars teacher and working with students face-to-face. You transitioned, and you’ve mentioned a number of institutions here, and I should mention to our listeners when John says OSU, he means Oklahoma State University, not Oregon State or anything else. And these towns and cities that he’s mentioned happen to be in Oklahoma as well, but you mentioned inside of Oklahoma. So was that when you made your first move really into more virtual environment with your students?
John Morrison:
Yeah. So whenever I was finishing up in Midwest City, Oklahoma, I was working at a low SES middle school there. I wanted to get into administration as I mentioned earlier, I wanted to see if I can have a broader impact. And one of the open administrative positions that was open at the time was a principal position at Insight School of Oklahoma, which was a K12 school at the time, the company is now called Stride. And I applied for that, but I wasn’t quite finished with my master’s degree, and I wasn’t quite certified yet, I was going to get certified six months into the position if they were to hire me. Right? But I, unfortunately, was not offered a position as the administrator, but they did ask if I would like to join their team as an instructor and also as a professional developer, which I thought that sounded interesting. So let’s just go do that.
So, that was my first foray into virtual education. I served as a virtual teacher for about four months before they moved me up into the testing director position for both the Insight School of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Virtual Charter Academies, which again, are both K12/ Stride schools. And so I ran the gamut in terms of experience with virtual. So I taught for the four months. And then I was the testing director for the spring season of 2014 or 15. And then after that, I moved into an instructional coach position, which was a regional position with K12/ Stride, where I was over 38 different English teachers in the central region of the United States. And after three years of doing that, I then moved into that Insight School of Oklahoma principal role that opened back up and I served there for a year.
Rob Reynolds:
Oh, that’s great. So that’s a nice, interesting transition and, but in doing that, you’ve got an awful lot of experience in different areas. Now I know most recently, before you joined us, of course, you were leading the virtual school for the Noble school district. And how did that come about, and what was that, and what were they trying to accomplish with that?
John Morrison:
Right. So as I was finishing that one year at Insight School of Oklahoma, I reached out to some people in Noble because that’s where we live, we live in Noble, Oklahoma, my wife and I. And I learned that they were wanting to establish a virtual program within their school district, within their brick and mortar school district. And I wanted to become more involved with the community since we live there, and that’s where my daughters go to school. So I decided to transition out of my position with Stride and move into that position at Noble, where I helped the assistant superintendent, and a few other principals and directors establish that program, which we didn’t have a lot of students that first year. I think we may have had 50, I think across second through 12th grade. But last year we had, I would say across the entire program, we have probably 300 or so.
And it also served, right? And the program also served as the backup to students whenever COVID hit and quarantine hit. So we had a program in place that was ready to go, right when all of our students in the district got quarantined. And it was as fluid as it could be. And we had all sorts of districts reaching out to us asking us what we did, and it was all just because we had prepped it the summer before, the 2019-2020 school year.
Rob Reynolds:
Yeah. That’s amazing, John. I know in other cities that we’ve talked to and that I’ve worked with, where I’ve worked with administrators in those, biggest challenge most of them had was they didn’t already have a program like that in place. And so starting in, the end of March and trying to, A, just figure out what you’re supposed to be doing for the fall, that you may not make the full determination on until June, or the beginning of July. And then trying to decide how to deliver that when you didn’t have something in place, was a major challenge, I think that’s probably the euphemism we’ll use there, and it didn’t always go well. So that really kudos to Noble for putting that together and doing that, and for you leading it. Now, it’s interesting because you got into the virtual space before COVID and the pandemic hit, and then you led a group through that. So in your experience over the last several years, what changes have you seen in general in online learning and remote learning through your own experiences?
John Morrison:
Right. So going back to, when I first started teaching in 2006, Alt Ed programs, or alternative education programs, they typically use some online learning platform like A+, or some of the others. And what I noticed over the years is those programs were very asynchronous in that students were just told to move through, start here, go here, move through here, and then click submit, and you’re done, right? What I’m noticing over the last few years is programs that adopt some online learning platform, or online learning system, they’re trying to couple it with opportunities for students to have genuine learning experiences with potentially other students, or potentially seeing a face of a teacher behind a screen on a Zoom call, or Google Meet, or whatever. Right? That’s very encouraging because, at the end of the day, we’re wanting to make sure that students have an enjoyable, valuable learning experience. And oftentimes if they’re just set aside to just read on their own and do their own stuff all the time, they’re not having that experience that they deserve. Right?
So in Noble, we were going out of our way to try to host workshops and host seminars, and invite students up to the building once or twice a month to mingle with one another. And we would have tutoring sessions that were always going. Every day there was a teacher that was available to meet with students on a one-on-one and a Zoom call. Right? And what I’ve noticed here at TEL is that, that’s something that we’ve pulled in with our coaching program, where we have these student coaches that are just going out of their way to meet with all the students. And if we didn’t have that component here, I would definitely pitch that as one of my very first ideas, because that’s exactly where I see asynchronous learning going, where it’s not necessarily capital A, Asynchronous, where it’s maybe lowercase A with some support from the institution that the students enrolled in, if that makes sense.
Rob Reynolds:
No, no, it does. And that’s great. And I do think that is the evolution. It’s asynchronous plus modified blended support, learning opportunities, et cetera. And there’s a model in there that I think we’re showing and some others are as well, is really successful for students and ends up in a very positive learning experience for them. There’s a lot we can do with it. And again, as I always say to people, it’s not for everyone, and yet it needs to exist for those who need that and prefer that. And so it is a, as it evolves, I think it’s becoming a really solid channel for that group. And those are the kind of advancements that you’re talking about, making that happen, making it become respectable and really a solid choice. So you’re now the director of product vision at TEL Education. So tell us a little bit about what that entails, what that’s about, and generally, how that’s unfolding for you?
John Morrison:
Sure. So, first of all, I do want to say that it’s the coolest job title I’ve ever had obviously. And I think it’s just one of the coolest job titles that exists. If you have vision in your job title, you’re really fortunate. And several of my friends are just jealous about my job title. So again, I’m the director of product vision, and I have several roles. My role here is fairly complex actually. One of my responsibilities is internal, and that’s to work with all the teams here at TEL, with the curriculum team, with the academic services team, and with our sales team, to ensure that internal communication is as seamless as possible. Secondly, I am on the academic services team. And part of what I do is I float from team to team, to monitor and develop and report on various projects at different intervals.
So we have several different things in the pipeline right now that we’re working on that I’m tracking, and I’m giving our chief academic officer updates as far as those go and working with our CIO in terms of what technological advances we’re having within our platform. So, that’s really fun. I really enjoy that. A big responsibility I have, and it’s not necessarily written in the job description as far as I remember, and that’s to just like to think and dream, and try to innovate as much as possible with new things, with new sorts of products and new sorts of systems. And I love being tasked with that to try to stay as innovative as possible in an innovative company. So I think that covers most of it, but yeah, I just, I love what I do.
Rob Reynolds:
No, that’s awesome, John, and we appreciate your passion. And as I always say, and other duties as assigned, right?
John Morrison:
Right, right. Yeah.
Rob Reynolds:
So I want to segue just briefly, but to me, this is all part of the story, certainly the Dr. John Morrison story. I think everyone who’s an educator, or in the education space, understands that what they really bring to the education experience is the entirety of their own experience. And every teacher, everyone who’s ever taught anything knows that. It’s you’re teaching some kind of a subject matter, but you’re bringing your own experience with that into it. And that’s what engages the students. You certainly have a broad background, but even as you come to an organization like this, one of the interesting things that you’ve been involved in, certainly of late, is pushing your own goals and your own personal experience boundaries by participating in some physical endurance events.
And I think that’s really something fascinating about you. Can you talk to us just a little bit about that and how you think that help those experiences that you’re getting on your own and their learning experiences, they certainly are, are helping you develop as a person and as a professional, and maybe giving you new insights into things in a role like you have today.
John Morrison:
Sure. Okay. So this answer will get a little personal, I hope that’s okay.
Rob Reynolds:
Yeah. Absolutely.
John Morrison:
Okay. So I grew up incredibly poor, very, very poor. Most of what I got for birthday presents typically ended up in pawn shops for the most part. And my parents, neither parent had a stable job, it was always fight or flight, but I felt like it was always fight in my situation growing up. So there was just a lot of trauma there, just dealing with the insane poverty that we had. So anyway, as I grew, as I got older, I determined that my way out of that cycle was education, making sure that I did well in school and then went on and went to college and had a degree, a piece of paper that said I would be able to do something where I could make more money than what my parents made, if that makes sense.
So for me, whenever I started really working on myself and looking at the different things that I needed to deal with and overcome over the last several years, I realized that I really struggled with self-esteem, low self-confidence. And just also, it’s weird because it’s like, whenever you deal with ADHD, or any internal monologue that is always just combating your ability to do things, making you feel like you don’t have the capacity to do something, it demotivates you to want to do that thing that you think that you can’t do, if that makes sense. So, there was a good period of time there where I just was not a big fan of myself, and I let myself get out, I let my health go to the wayside, I gained 60 pounds or so, I was just bored with life to be honest for a while there.
And this was while I was going through all these different positions and while I was getting a master’s and a Ph.D. in the background, because I knew that I needed to continue working on myself, but internally I wasn’t having the really important deep conversations with myself that I should have been if that makes sense. So over the last year or so, I decided to just really go after everything that I felt like I was struggling with, and that included my health. So since January, it’s July, right now, since January, I’ve lost 55 pounds. And part of my process there was to keep myself motivated with different things that I was working towards. So whenever I weighed around 250 or so, I signed up for a Spartan Sprint. And if the viewers, or the listeners, have never heard of Spartan, Spartan is a very rigorous obstacle course sport where you run a certain distance, three miles, seven miles, 13 miles, and you go through 20, 25 or 30 different really tough obstacles. If you’ve heard of Tough Mudder, they’re in the same vein.
So anyway, I was incredibly overweight and I signed up for a Spartan Sprint just to keep myself motivated. And since that day when I registered for that, my health has been a very top priority for me and I’m continuing, I probably jog or run four to six miles a day, and I’ve recently added in weights to my regimen. And I just completed my second Spartan Race, which was a Spartan Super, which was a 10K with 28 obstacles in Utah, in hundred-degree heat. So anyway, I feel like that’s a reflection, whenever you start working on your health, you start working on other things as well. So I feel like my self-esteem and my self-confidence are moving along parallel with my health at the moment. And that’s where I’m at. Hopefully, that answered your question.
Rob Reynolds:
No, it does. And thank you for sharing that, John, because it really, I think, speaks a lot to you about you and your character, and what you’re all about, and why learning is important to you, and education is, and working with other people. I think one of the things that I always tell people is, I tend to categorize folks into two categories. You’re either a knower or a learner. Knowers tend to think they got what they needed and they’re set, right? And there’s really no reason to ever challenge themselves, to have this constant sense of curiosity, et cetera. And one of the things I always look for in good colleagues and employees, et cetera, are people who, that curiosity still burns, that desire to do more on many different levels. It can just be you’re challenging yourself by becoming a good outdoor chef. It can be entering Spartan Races. All of those things are just a sign that you’re not comfortable with the status quo. You want to move forward. You want to keep learning and keep experiencing.
And I think that’s just an incredibly valuable part of the overall learning process. And so I’m inspired by what you’re doing. I think that’s really, I think it’s powerful, and just going to keep serving you in such good stead over the next few years.
John Morrison:
Definitely.
Rob Reynolds:
Hey John, what is it, and you’re still fairly new here, so what is it about TEL that is interesting to you, about what we do and who we are?
John Morrison:
Yeah. So I used to work with Erin Starkey, who is now the director of The Edupreneur Academy, which is a partner of TEL. And she put TEL on my radar last, I think September or so. And she told me to look up, look at the website, look at what’s going on here, and what the mission is of TEL. And I fell in love day one, especially with the idea that what we’re trying to do here is offer affordable college credit to, I don’t know, I guess communities that aren’t as served as they should be if that makes sense. So you have these affluent communities that they have all these different opportunities to get into college and take college classes and have dual credit, all that sort of stuff, but money is not necessarily an issue for them, so they can just easily get into that. Right? For me, whenever I was growing up, I would have loved to have had an opportunity to enroll in a college course and get college credit for $200. Right?
Rob Reynolds:
Yes.
John Morrison:
And that really struck me. And the fact that it’s so seamless as well. If I were a high school student and I decided to sign up, I could get rolling on a college class within 30 minutes, which is insane to me. And then I potentially could even pay for it if I were in high school working at McDonald’s, or whatever, and I could start putting myself through college, right? My avenue, whenever I was in high school, was to just do the absolute best I could with the classes that were given to me, and then try to do really well on the ACT, and hope that my ACT score was going to pay my way through college, which it did, but if it didn’t, and if I were in a different situation and had to pay my own way, I potentially would not have gone to college at all. Right?
So I would have loved for an opportunity like this to exist for me. And so it’s a, I always have issues with the word, it’s vicarious. So it’s like I’m looking for an opportunity to serve students that are potentially in my situation now in their lives like I was whenever I was in high school. And I know I might never meet some of the students that we serve, but knowing that I’m helping an organization like TEL serve those students is very satisfying to me. And it really hits on this professional purpose that I’ve been looking for. Because for me, I’m always looking to connect my personal purpose and my professional purpose. And I feel like I have an opportunity to do that here, with what we’re trying to do as a company. So the affordability, the accessibility, and making it equitable across the board, those three things just really hit me when I hit the website.
Rob Reynolds:
That’s great, and I appreciate you sharing that, John. We’re certainly glad to have you on board. So in my last question for you, as you look out at the landscape and you look forward, you got a lot of things going, a lot of things you’re watching both here, but also in the general education space. Any particular trends that grab your attention, or things that you think, wow, that’s really cool, and that we need to investigate that more?
John Morrison:
Sure. And this goes back to what we’ve talked about a little bit, I have noticed, or I am noticing, that school districts are taking the SEL, the social-emotional learning component, more seriously these days because of COVID, students are more stressed out than they’ve ever been, and they’re concerned about safety at school, not just from COVID, but from other terrible things that can happen, right? So teachers are going out of their way to create safe spaces in their classrooms and to ensure that their students are okay. And one of the things that I was trying to do whenever I was a principal at Insight is pull in this thing called capturing kids’ hearts, where one of the primary goals of the teachers is to know their students and know them well. Right?
So I do feel like there’s a big change coming in terms of relationship-building between teachers and students. And I’m certain that there are going to be just new programs and new initiatives and new approaches that are going to be on the horizon with that, which is very exciting for me personally. I’ve also noticed that there’s a big adoption of gamification where teachers and school districts are trying to figure out a way to make their curriculum as enjoyable as possible for students. And they’re trying to tap into the intrinsic motivation that students get from playing video games, like Fortnite and [crosstalk 00:25:23].
Rob Reynolds:
Right.
John Morrison:
… and just these different games, right? So they’re trying to figure out a way to weekly, or monthly, gamify what they do at their schools, where students are earning points towards something and earning rewards and whatnot. That was one thing that we try to do within our virtual program at Noble, which I don’t think we did very successfully, but I think that they do have a plan moving forward to make that bigger and better, but I can see several different programs and initiatives coming down the pipe with gamification as the header. And then I guess lastly, I would say, just returning to what we talked about earlier, is just a blended learning approach where districts are starting to take virtual learning more seriously, because it is now a viable option for their community, whereas it used to not be, right?
And I think it wasn’t a viable option for districts before, because of what virtual learning look like, or what they perceived it to look like, or what it needed to be, where it was basically just put the kid on A+, give him a username and password, get him in some sort of program where he just sits there and just sit and get, he just sits there and gets the information, then he just takes a test, then he’s done. Right? And I always go back to a quote when it comes to this sort of thing, and it’s from Henry Ford. It’s, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’re always going to get what you’ve always got.” Right?
And so if districts are trying to continue pushing out this idea that virtual school needs to look a certain way, then they’re not going to be successful and students are not going to like it. Right? So I think the blended learning approach where they are grabbing a platform, an online learning platform, LMS or whatever, and they’re offering it to their students, but they’re trying to, like you said, couple it with some other maybe synchronous experience for the students to actually enjoy what they’re doing in a blended learning program. So I can see, and I see right now the bigger districts already doing this, but I can see it going all the way down to even the rural districts where rural schools are trying to figure out a way to make their online learning programs more valuable to their students.
Rob Reynolds:
Yeah, no, that’s awesome, John. And again, thank you for all that information. And more importantly, thank you for joining us here on today’s podcast, and for joining us at TEL Education, you’re an invaluable member of our team, and we look forward to seeing all the many great things that you do for our students and parents, and schools and institutional partners over the coming years. This has been a great interview. And I thank you again, John. We’ve been talking to Dr. John Morrison for those who were listening. He’s the new director of product vision at TEL Education. And it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. And John, thank you for joining us.
John Morrison:
Oh, thank you. Love it here.
Rob Reynolds:
All right. Great. Hope everybody has a great day.
