The ENF Podcast Episode 3: Interview with William Minton, CEO of Canopy Ed

By Zainab Cheema 

In this episode, I am joined by William Minton, the founder and CEO of Canopy Ed, an Ed Tech company. Canopy is a platform for learning designers who want a simpler way to create and share engaging, self-paced courses. In our conversation, we talk about the teacher quitting crisis, the proper role of Ed Tech in education, how technology can help with diverse and equitable learning, and how Canopy can help teachers and learners. Here are some excerpts below. Get ready to be inspired. 

Q. What are the biggest challenges facing the education industry in our current post-COVID era?

“I would say by far, the biggest issue facing the education sector in the United States is teachers deciding to leave the profession and people who are not teachers are not looking at it as a profession. Stress and anxiety among teachers are rising, and satisfaction is going down. People aren’t feeling like they’re getting what they want out of the profession and they are looking to leave. The people hiring teachers are not making it look like it could be an attractive career choice so you have fewer people going into it. Some people will take about EdTech’s ability to teach on its own but really, if you don’t have good teachers, nothing else is possible. We need amazing teachers to love teaching and who want to deeper their expertise with it and stay in the field. We want capable people to choose it as a profession. That is the foundation of a solid education system. We’re seeing all the trends going in the wrong decision.”

Q. You’ve worked as a teacher and coach; you’ve worked as a blogger about different educational institutions around the world. From your experiences, what do schools and educational systems need to be doing?

“Systems that have had effective reforms and are doing really great are systems that invest in the recruitment, preparation and support of their educators. They also set expectations but also give school-based leaders and teachers flexibility in pursuing those education. In the US, our reforms are more about setting the incentives and believing that a market system will automatically orient to meeting those objectives. A lot of the time, it’s about figuring out the best practices and then mandating that best practice across the board. We’ve tried this way of doing things for the last 20 years or so. As it turns out, it doesn’t work as well as recruiting and supporting educators and giving them training and preparation.”

“To encourage people to go into education, stop asking ‘what do we want our students to learn’ and start asking the question, ‘how does learning happen?’ If you ask the how question first, then you can insert the pieces of what you want the students to learn. It’s about making the shift from what you want them to learn to how you do want them to learn.”

Q. Tell us about Canopy Ed. What kinds of problems does it solve, and how does it approach learning from the process-oriented perspective that we just discussed?

“With the Canopy learning platform, we’re trying to provide a Canva for learning design. Canva makes design accessible to anyone: instead needing to learn technical skills for using the Adobe suite, now anyone can use Canva and create a pretty solid looking piece of graphic design. We are doing the same thing with learning design. We simplify the learning design process so that its accessible to almost anyone.”

“We make it really simple to create dynamic and engaging learning experiences. We do that by consolidating almost 20 different engagement tools. Now, you don’t have to go to one app for one thing, another app for another thing, and yet another app for another thing. In Canopy, all these things are just one click away on the creator’s dashboard. Click on what you want, and you can embed a Youtube video, put a question in it; record a Screencast; insert discussion threads; Google Docs can be embedded. There are over 20 different tools, and they are all accessible via 2 clicks.”

“On the learner side, everything is organized in a single tab. You can access any resource or assignment from an entire course or from an entire year. They can all be on one tab and you can access any resource or assignment through two clicks. That helps learners stay focused. We are trying to realize the promise of technology of doing more with less. We are helping to create more dynamic learning experiences, and you can do it in less time while tracking learning progress and making your feedback more targeted. We’re simplifying learning design and allowing people to easily add in these dynamic options and tools. We’re making it easy. We hear it from our users all the time—that they ended up creating a more engaging lesson than they set out to create because of how easy the interface is.”

Listen to the full conversation by clicking on the audio link above or finding us on Buzzsprout, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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