The Wagtail Marketplace for Games-based Courses - Sarah Toms

Hello, my name is Sarah Toms. I am Executive Director and co-founder of Wharton Interactive. And I'm really excited to be with you today to talk about how Wagtail has enabled us to build the next-gen games-based learning platform. Naturally, being that we are at this Wagtail conference, I'm going to be telling you how we have done it, leveraging Wagtails technology. We've extended the base capabilities quite a bit to give us what we needed. And also we have integrated Wagtail with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. I'm going to take you all the way through our journey and show you how we did it.

If you have any questions, if you need to reach out, find me on LinkedIn, and I would be delighted to go into more detail with you. So Wharton Interactive, we are part of the University of Pennsylvania. The Wharton School has a pretty incredible pedagogy. practice. We have been delivering simulations and cases. You know, we've been doing all the regular things that a lot of business schools do to try to get learners thinking about how to engage with the curriculum. And the reason why Professor Ethan Malik, my co-founder and partner in Crime, and I decided to create our team is we really wanted to think about how we could start to create platforms to help us supercharge

the delivery of game space curriculum into business schools as a first point and then thinking about other educational disciplines as we move past the business curriculum. Wharton Interactive's goals are pretty simple. Number one is transforming education through pedagogical innovation. So when we started Wharton Interactive in 2018 , Where we began was the pedagogy research. So how do we learn? How do we remember? How do we take the lessons that we learn in education? And how do we put those lessons into practice. And what we found pretty crazily is that a lot of incredible research is not actually implemented into educational practice.

So what that means is the way we really well and truly learn is not something that we actually see being done in education. Number two, democratizing access to education. So we know that even just a few weeks of really good business education, for example in entrepreneurship can change people's lives. You know, we there's been incredible studies coming out of Uganda and a number of other countries where three weeks of entrepreneurship education We've those folks have been followed years later. They are more likely to start businesses, they're more likely to hire others, they're more likely to have higher pay So quite literally, business education is what is helping

socioeconomic change happen in many, many economies. And last but not least, we are an R1 institution. We care about research. And as we start to collect data and analyze data about those who are coming through our games-based courses, We are definitely taking that information, anonymizing, and then figuring out how we're doing things and making sure that we are advancing research in this space. So the best way to explain what we're doing is to just go ahead and show you. Alright, so let me ask you a question. You've all been to school, you've all sat in, you know, a lecture hall like this one Is this the way that you think is the best way to learn business skills?

So, you know, when you're let's ask the question, what about technical skills or what about product development skills or team-based skills? Is this the best way in your mind to learn how to do those things? What about medical skills or how to fly a plane? And so what we do know, so for example, flight simulators came on the scene uh back in the 80s. They uh started to be used by commercial companies. This is how we started to teach pilots. And since that time, accidents caused by flight error have decreased by over 90%. And we're seeing the same in the medical space. So there's now a lot of VR-based

simulated surgeries and critical, you know, things that we're putting our uh medical students through and this is causing massive reductions in error when that same uh uh doctor or nurse is then in the uh in the operating room. So simulations, especially you know, hyperimmersive. Engaging, realistic simulations are really, really making a big difference in many, many fields and have been for decades. Now let's look at the business field. So business education, we have had the wonderful world of Harvard business cases for over a hundred

years now. They've done a pretty good job, you know, they're they're a way to engage learners. Um, and then we also have the more traditional business simulations. The one at uh the image here at the top is actually a very typical business simulation where you enter uh data into what I call a glorified calculator There is a case, you are engaged in a story, potentially, but you're hitting submit, and then hey presto year two happens. And that's just not the way the real world works. And then last but not least, we do have, of course, team-based, project-based work, which is also something we do a lot in business school. I love this quote. This is from my co-founder, Ethan.

So classroom education doesn't offer a chance to practice And practical experience usually requires students to act as interns in other roles that are below those of the leaders they aspire to be. And what that means is very often, especially when you're getting an MBA, a master's in business, you are learning skills that you're not really going to be drawing on, potentially for five years or 10 years. down the line. You know, so we're we're training the future business leaders of the world. And so the problem with that is when you've gone through that passive educational experience, All of that information that you're learning in lectures starts to atrophy over time. And again, you've all experienced this yourselves as well. You know, even a TED

talk that you've been really engaged with and enjoyed you're going to start forgetting key pieces of that information pretty quickly. And the reason why is you haven't had the opportunity to get behind the wheel Hold on to the steering wheel and actually drive the car, right? And so that's what we are trying to do at Wharton Interactive is build those vehicles that we can put our learners into and have them actually be the ones who practice what we are teaching in the lessons. And the way we're doing this is we have leveraged alternate reality gaming, we've leveraged role-playing games, we've leveraged again a lot of that pedagogical research that I would I mentioned earlier on.

And we've integrated it all into a platform that we have developed by ourselves. So we've developed from the ground up called Alternate Reality Courseware or ARC. ARC, like I said, the Wharton School, my team, me and Ethan, we have designed and developed this gaming platform. from scratch. It has got a narrative, so we are immersing learners into a narrative where they play the starring role. We are able to create many different game cartridges that immerse our learners into many different worlds. So for example, this one, so it is a headless gaming platform that allows us to create different visual, different, like I said, immersive worlds

This one here on the bottom right is our mission to Saturn. So you are placed on a team with four to five other learners. You're actually assuming a role This game takes place in the future. And what you're learning is organizational leadership, you're learning competitive strategy, you're learning high-performance team. uh capabilities, all of that in this incredible uh six hour simulation, business simulation. As you can see here, we also have a It's uh gamified, so we we do have leaderboards, we have all kinds of scoring, etc. happening in our Gamespace platform. So here's an example. I'm going to take you through one of the games that we've created and then I promise I'm going to be returning back to Wagtail.

I just want to tell you a little bit more about what we're doing so you understand sort of our business case, if you will. and then how Wagtail has helped us to really create a marketplace that quite literally the entire world is is leveraging to help improve their educational outcomes. So we have a game called the Entrepreneurship Strategy Course. It uh runs for three weeks. We have three three week options and we have three day intensive options. So the three-day intensive you're immersed for three half days versus the three-week is happening over the course of three weeks. We are teaching all these different learning outcomes, so everything from building a founding team, approaches to finding product

market fit Pitching and selling to customers, managing entrepreneurial finances, and scaling and growing a company. So what we actually have happening in this arc is an entire MBA course In a game. Pretty amazing. Let me show you what it looks like. So you are placed on a team with two to five other players. And those are real people. You are going to be receiving lessons from Wharton faculty. This happens to be Professor Mollock, a professor of entrepreneurship at Wharton. We also have famous uh entrepreneurs, investors, other experts who are speaking about the different lessons that are coming to life in the game.

So just like if you were taking a massive online course or you were doing some other online class. you are still getting video lectures and video lessons. The difference is we are drip, drip, dripping these lessons to you and they are integrated with just in time practice. So you're coming into that game that world that we have created for you and you are having to implement all those decisions, all those lessons that we're giving to you right into the game. So we've created um simulated inboxes where non-player characters are coming to life such as the uh original inventor of the technology. So we've created a high-tech startup that you're running. You've got Early customers who you have to negotiate with, you have investors that you need to

pitch to You've got a bank manager who's got loans for you, but only if certain things start to happen, you're going to have to test your product. You're going to have to figure out how to do hypothesis-driven design. and understand your product market fit, do you need to pivot, etc. etc. All while managing and being a member of a founding team. So we know in entrepreneurship that over 60% of the reasons why entrepreneurial ventures fail is not because the product wasn't good or the competition was too intense. It's because of problems with the founding team. So a lot of the entrepreneurship game also focuses on the team. You're able to go on personal leadership quests. Where you work with a nonplayer character who will be

your executive coach, for example. So lots and lots of incredible opportunities within this GameSpace course. What we've done is we have created a fake, like I said, tech startup called the Cross Morphic Sensor. You've just taken a leadership role, and so we are immersing you in this game as the star role. And then everything uh really um unfolds from there. The other thing my team did was um completely, you know, fill up the world. So the Googleable world. When we started creating this game, you could not Google cross-morphic sensor. That's why we we picked it. If you Google it now, you will see lots and lots of results.

These are competitor websites. We even spoke to Wharton Magazine and they were kind enough to put a uh an article in their archives um on our um founder of the company even though she's a non-player character darla Xavier who uh evidently graduated from our Penn Engineering School. So like I said, everything starts with the lesson. And I also mentioned that we have these incredible folks who provide more dimensionality because It's not just about the lessons coming from Wharton faculty experts. It's also from people like Yuri Kim, who is a very well-known venture capitalists

who's also going to be providing more insights, more information about why the lessons that are coming to life in the game are so important. So as I mentioned, we've got um these different um we've got these different screens, we have uh everything from dashboards, etc. And even the ability to interact with non-player characters who we've hired, these are Philadelphia actors who will interact with you and there's rich branching storylines that come to life And you can make lots and lots of decisions. Again, pitching, nested learning objectives. So we are giving just in time feedback to you, where we are providing all kinds of information about

you how well you're doing. And this is something, you know, this dynamic learning analytics is incredibly important. And it does get down to the individual learner as well as the team. Leaderboards, as I said, and then lots and lots of personalized feedback about how well you've done. Here are areas where you did really well. So for example, your pitch deck in this example, you got nine out of 12 Here's why you didn't get the full points, things to think about in the future, etc. etc. So let's rewind back to the beginning of 2020. So this was the point where I was getting Very, very close to having the ultimate reality courseware platform just about ready for us to start building our first games on. And um

I brought together a number of uh different um vendors and I basically pitched this idea to them. I'm like, listen, we already have, you know, a number of our simulations uh sitting on Legacy systems. We had created Simple. world, which is an open source simulation platform, and we had some simulations coming out on there as well, as well as ARC And I I wanted to be able to create a simple, frictionless way for customers to be able to come and say, yep, that's something I would like. And this is this is what I would like to work in. Problem was we were getting ready to kick off this

work together. We were planning on flying all of these incredible technology partners. um to uh Wharton here in Philadelphia on March 16th, 2020. And we all know what happened then And so we had to move the conversations into BlueJeans. So we were working with Torchbox, who are doing all of our Wagtail integration. OSF who are doing our Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and then our different simulation platform providers such as Link and Loop. So what we ended up doing was getting together, thankfully, with tools like Miro, with you know really sharp, agile processes. We were able to keep building together very efficiently and were able to successfully launch our platforms

Now I should say that we are providing to different folks. So we have individuals who can come and gain Wharton Severe. Certificates, they're able to do open enrollment in our alternate reality courses. We also have a number of on-demand classes that I'll show some examples of in just a minute. And then we have this class of verified instructors. So these are folks who have come and identified themselves as you know teaching courses. um working in corporations and and being in charge of retreats, all these types of incredible people who are working on innovating curriculum. And they want to run their own private courses with their own private game running.

So they're going to invite their learners, and so they need the ability to create a class and invite learners and other instructors. So this is what we ended up coming up with. So working with, like I said, all of our amazing technology partners from Torchbox to Lincoln Loop. We have been able to create a game space catalog on Wagtail. We are using a headless integration option with Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We are the first in higher education on the globe to launch an e-commerce site on Commerce Cloud. So very, very proud of that, Mark. And then

we uh cybersource integrates with uh I'm sorry, Commerce Cloud integrates with Cybersource, which provides all of our credit card uh options. And we uh across the board from our website into our games platforms, we are using all zero so we've got single sign-on. And what that means is we've been able to deliver this incredible capability where you can log into our website create you know if you're a verified instructor you can create a class if you are an individual learner you can enroll in one of our game space courses and you're able to just do it all with you know one click and move all the way through our um our customer journey, which I'm really, really proud of

So here's an example of our website page, which has got a lot of information about, for example, our entrepreneurship strategy course. It's on this page pulling a lot of data from our games platform to let you know when that next games run might be. And also a lot of information from Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which is giving you details about the price of the course, et cetera, et cetera. And last but not least, we have integration from Wagtail to LinkedIn so that our learners who have purchased the certificate course are able to actually post

their certificate. in their LinkedIn feed, which also helps us with that network effect, that you know word of mouth, but also onto their profile as a certification that they have received. So all that is coming from the power of Wagtail. So just showing you some images here, and then I'm going to do a real quick demo. So here the first screen there was our we've got our two different catalogs This is the one for classes and groups. So this is the for if you're running private group of learners, this is the experiences that are available. When you become a verified instructor, it

unmasks the prices for running the experiences. So these are hidden until you become what we call a VI. It also gives you the ability to add the experience to a class and also to read all and peruse all of our train the trainer material for our our you know our instructors. So this includes playbooks and documentation and also a lot of train the trainer video material so that folks become experts themselves and are, you know, feel really well versed in the experience and that they can take this to their learner audiences. Once a class is created, we have dashboards and then that open button here allows learners with

no more logging additional logins. uh to step in and into the gaming platform um seamlessly and experience it. So let me just uh quickly switch screens here and just show you a real, real quick demo So this is an example instructor who has created a customer centricity simulation, and with the click of a button, they are able to move into the game itself. They're able to see players who have been added to their class. Those players are also able to move seamlessly into the game once the instructor moves it to play. The instructor can invite other learners and can

invite other instructors, let's say TAs, to the class as well. I also wanted to show you we do have a free game on our website called Blue Sky Ventures, which teaches entrepreneurship mindset. And here you are able to just Move through because it's a free game and this is pulling from Commerce Cloud. You won't be asked obviously to go through the credit card steps. So we've now just in the background what Wagtail has done is it's reached out to Alternate Reality Courseware Platform. It's created a new run for this learner. And it's allowed them to then say, okay, we are ready to start the experience.

So as soon as I do start the experience It 's enabling that run for me and allowing me to step seamlessly into the game with no additional login required. So really super straightforward. fast track capability that we have been provided with. I just wanted to show you on the Wagstail side some of the things that we've built out to enable all of this business capability. So first and foremost, we have our customers. And here we have the distinction between educators and learners. So this has all been customized for us. If we have an educator who has not yet been, so this one is pending

becoming a verified instructor, we can simply go in and click inspect. And this is all test data, so I'm not uh masking anybody who uh wouldn't be uh want to be masked, but uh sorry, Peter Andrew at Torchbox. But here we have somebody who is requested to become a verified instructor. If I click on verify instructor what 's going to happen now the next time Peter logs in, he's going to see all of those capabilities, being able to add a class, being able to see all of our teaching and instructional materials , etc. So that's on the customer side. We've also created a PIM. This is the integration with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, where we have experiences.

And for example, if I go into this experience, this is one of our alternate reality courseware experiences. And we are able here. To click save and what you'll see is this notice that we've got two certificates. So it's done that save and it's gone out to Salesforce Commerce Cloud and it's pulled that information. We also have our certificates here, our different audiences, because we have different audiences that we are servicing, such as academic, corporate, and executive education, etc. And then all of our resources for our instructors and our learners are provided here. So when you are in

our website You're able to see all this information. This is provided to you in what we call our engagement layer. And you're able to get to these resources from not just the dashboard, but also from within the experiences if you are a verified instructor. So really, really incredible capability that we were able to build in a little bit less than a year, I'd be very, uh I'm very excited to say. So what we've seen is 100% completion rate. We've had seven continents experience our games with tens of thousands of learners from around the globe. And 98%

saying that they learned something that they couldn't learn in class. Within 12 months, we were able to grow to 1,300 verified instructors. And we also now have a new game which is called Machine Learning for Business Decisions, which actually allows you to step into Jupyter Notebooks. So from within the alternate reality courseware game, the game is providing you all the support and the know-how and the lessons. And you, the learner, you're going to have code and hundreds of thousands of real data, of record uh of rows of real data from Evite, and you're going to learn how to build tune analyzed and understand XGBoost. It doesn't matter what the machine learning algorithm is, it happens to be a popular one, but

Once you get your sort of your sea legs with this one, you're going to be able to go on and take that know-how to many other machine learning algorithms. So Machine Learning for Business Decisions is an on-demand game on our website and it costs $24. 99. And I'm going to skip over that because we're running out of time. If you look at our website, we also have a really cool trailer there as well. As I mentioned, I already mentioned our Saturn parable, our free blue sky ventures. Please do come and play it. We have been receiving just incredible praise. We've had folks who have come back and played our games not once, but two more times. So we're really, really excited about just what we're on to here

with respect to what we've built at Wharton Interactive. I do want to say my my, it's not just special thanks, heartfelt thanks. These two groups, the Torchbox team, the Lincoln Loop team, we would not be where we are today without the incredible expertise. from all the technologists and product people, the digital marketing team from Torchbox. I mean just incredible. And I really and truly feel like they are an extension of our own team. We have been able to build basically a gaming team here at Wharton. I feel very, very lucky for that. We have interactive fiction writers and games developers and pedagogy experts and QA people. We are going to be expanding and bringing more technologists to us.

So please do reach out on LinkedIn and I'll be posting new job ads in the coming months. So on behalf of Wharton Interactive, thank you so much for your time. Please reach out. And it has just been such a pleasure to be here. And I am such a fan of Wagtail. Thank you.