Dana Stephenson & Dave Savory: Scaling Experiential Learning

Dana Stephenson and Dave Savory, co-founders of Riipen, discuss their journey creating a platform that connects students with project-based experiential learning opportunities. The conversation explores how work-integrated learning can bridge the gap between education and employment through flexible experiences that complement traditional internship models and help students gain valuable experience and transition more successfully into the workforce. Stephenson and Savory share insights on the evolution of experiential learning from limited co-op programs to a more accessible continuum of opportunities that help overcome barriers for both students and employers. The discussion also examines emerging trends, including the growth of dedicated experiential learning roles at institutions and development of regional learning ecosystems.  Transcript Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid. Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.  Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.  Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.  Julian Alssid: Kaitlin, it feels like every day we're hearing more about the challenges facing new college graduates entering the workforce.  Kaitlin LeMoine: It's true. Julian, some hiring managers say recent grads are unprepared for the world of work, and employers are increasingly seeking candidates with work experience, even for entry level positions. It's a pretty tough landscape to navigate out there Julian Alssid: Yeah, and that's where work based learning becomes so critical. More and more jobs require experience so so we have to build experiential learning into learners academic programs, but developing effective experiential learning programs at scale can be incredibly challenging for both employers and educators  Kaitlin LeMoine: Which is why we're so excited to have Dana Stephenson and Dave Savory of Riipen with us today. Ripen is tackling this issue head on by providing a work integrated learning platform and ecosystem.  Julian Alssid: Dana is Riipen’s, Co founder and CEO, and he launched Riipen with a vision to end underemployment by ensuring every learner can access authentic, project based experiential learning opportunities. And Dave is Riipens, co founder and VP of experiential learning, with over 15 years of experience and entrepreneurship and business development. He brings us to this important work.  Kaitlin LeMoine: Dana and Dave, welcome to Work Forces. We're looking forward to learning more about how Riipen is, making work based learning accessible at scale.  Dana Stephenson: Thanks, Kaitlin, thanks, Julian, great to be here. So as we dive in today, can you please tell us more about your respective backgrounds and your current roles at Riipen, and from there, we'd love to hear more about the problems that you're looking to address through Riipen.  Dave Savory: Sure. Yeah, thanks great to be here. Thanks for having us on. My name is Dave Savory. I'm one of the co founders of Riipen, and lead our experiential learning team. Really, in my day to day role, I focus on working really deeply with partners across a pretty diverse range of industries, in higher ed workforce, intermediary groups, government as well as funding partners. So really thinking through and excited to invest in really new models that can remove barriers and create more access to experiential learning programs, and so excited to share a little bit of that work today.  Dana Stephenson: Yeah, Dana Stevenson, Co founder and CEO of Riipen. We're building the world's fastest growing and largest work-based learning marketplace, connecting to students to companies through short term skills specific projects where students get experienced professional connections and find the jobs they love and employers gain fresh insights from the next generation of leaders and decision-makers and build and diversify their talent pipeline for upcoming roles in their in their organization. And we were an incredibly mission driven company. And I think, you know, the mission for us is really all about entering under employment globally. It's an exciting story of sort of where that came actually. The story really, really kicks off where Dave and I met back in business school, back in back to 2012.  Dave Savory: Yeah, we actually, well, we actually met in 2010 very serendipitously. We were in an orientation of our business school program at University of Victoria, we randomly sat next to each other and and instantly had a lot of mutual kind of values and alignments. And the following year, we actually had a course together where a faculty member came in and kind of ripped up the Harvard Business Review case and and brought in a CEO of a local mid sized company in the Victoria area, and basically said, hey, everyone this, instead of doing a case of a textbook, everyone's going to break up into groups and we're going to do a real project for credit on this company's kind of strategic crossroads that they were, that they were at, and Dana and I were in the same group, and we had quite a bit of work experience before entering our undergrad experience, and we just thought this was amazing in terms of, like, how to better engage with the learning and really apply the learning. And we had the CEO came in with a few team members. They presented their organization. We had a few kind of check in meetings with them throughout the semester, and at the end of the semester, the team came back, and they kind of did a Shark Tank kind of experience for every group, presenting their recommendations. And we just came out of that experience with just like so much more enthusiasm around like, Hey, why can't more of our experience, our courses that we're doing, who all that all have relevant kind of real world applied projects that are built into them. Why can't most of why can't more of them be with real employers that are going to help us build our network, develop our skills, grow our portfolio and our resume of experience, and that was really kind of our light bulb moment for why we started to go down the path of building record. Julian Alssid: Yeah, that's so cool. So Dana, how has the experiential learning landscape evolved since you started? Dana Stephenson: Right? A ton. Dave's, you know, the story we just described takes us back to 2010, 2012 we were part of the University of Victoria. So Riipens, a Canadian company born out of the University of Victoria as a student project for students. But one of the main reasons why we focused on on this project-based experience model is that in Canada, maybe people audience may or may not know. But in Canada, Northeastern, the co op model that Northeastern and Drexel and universities in Cincinnati and the US are so well known for it among others. In Canada, Co Op is huge. Almost every student, every institution offers a Co Op program, highly sought after, really well funded, really one of the most amazing experiences that we've had. So when, when we first got into this space in Canada, experiential learning, work, integrated learning, was really all about the co op model, but in the programs that we're offering Co Op, by no surprise, just like we're seeing in the US right now, I think Northeastern is now harder to get into than Dartmouth, given some of the stats that we're seeing, unsurprisingly, in Canada, the programs that we're offering Co Op were highly sought after getting a lot a lot of a lot of enrollment. The challenge is, at the time 2 million students across Canada, only about 200,000 students were getting access to a co op, so a huge supply and demand problem. And we started thinking to ourselves that there's got to be really a better way. There's got to be a more flexible approach to help reach students earlier on and throughout their education pathway. Dave mentioned we had a lot of experience when we got into this, when we were early on going through our education pathway. So we had no problem getting our Co Op, but we were shocked to find out how many students were in their their third year and had no work experience. So I think where we see things evolve is that traditionally, when people think about work based learning in the higher ed context. They've been thinking about the more traditional Co Op model. They've been thinking about the more traditional internship model. But the evolution is now what we're really excited about is that more folks are really starting to see this on a full continuum. Learners have all faced different barriers. They might be in different geographic locations. They might have other jobs that might have to hold on, hold on to to help pay for their higher education degree or program, they might have loved ones that are taken care of, a whole bunch of different barriers. And so the beauty of having an entire continuum is you can meet the students where they are. We can have a whole bunch of different types of approaches, going from lower intensity, shorter duration opportunities that can fit within a course or fit in a co-curricular setting, all the way up to higher intensity, longer duration experiences like a full blown internship, Co Op or apprenticeship and everything in between. And that's part of the, probably one of the most exciting evolutions that we've been seeing over the last little bit.  Dave Savory: Yeah, and I just add to that, it's been interesting to kind of see just the evolution and the nature of how a lot of these experiences, like when we first started, a lot of the experiences that we were supporting, of course, we're an online platform, but a lot of the the educators and the employers that we are working with were doing in person kind of collaborations. And then obviously, as the as the pandemic happened, there was a massive push to remote and virtual collaborations between employers and students, which obviously has amazing benefits in terms of breaking down barriers for learners who are not in parts of the country that have access to a lot of employment or industry opportunities. And now we're kind of seeing a bit of a push back towards some sort of hybrid model where we're very focused on, how do we how do we take the best from the remote kind of virtual model, but then how do we actually layer in kind of a local or regional ecosystem element to it, so that learners are actually getting experiences with organizations that are relevantly close to them. And so we're seeing a really nice, just kind of trend of how some of these regional and and statewide ecosystems are starting to blossom.  Kaitlin LeMoine: So you've presented kind of all the it sounds like there's a full suite and range of offerings that you try to provide to both, I would imagine, kind of, it's kind of a three sided marketplace, right? So, I guess for employers, institutions and learners, you're looking to provide kind of a range of opportunities, work based, learning opportunities, or positions or projects. How do you go about doing that? Like, can we get a little bit into the nuts and bolts of like, of, you know, we're thinking about thesecurrent trends. How is your How are you building your company in response to those trends?  Dana Stephenson: I will say one point of clarification. So we do offer a whole suite, but we're very vertically deep on the project based experience. And what's excited with the project based experience is that it can be 10 hours long completed over two weeks. It can be individual or group, or it can be 250 hours long can be completed over two semesters and everything in between. And that's really what gives it the flexibility, and really ensures that you can have these high quality experiences where students are focused on developing skills rather than some of the experiences that you do sometimes see out there. We all know that some internships are better than others, and you can really ensure that you're focusing on career relevant skills as part of that project and solving a real business challenge in your community or around the world. So we don't do traditional internships. We don't do traditional Co Op programs, just to be clear on that. But what's really exciting is most of our partners, actually, the vast majority of our partners, realize that the fastest way left in a world of really challenging supply and demand in the internship and Co Op space. One of the fastest ways to grow your internship and Co Op supply is to actually do more project based experiences that attracts more employers. They engage as a stepping stone. They convert those into Co Op and internship employers. And of course, it prepares your students to go land those so we're extremely complimentary, but we are very much focused on the on the project based. So how do we do that? We've got an entire you name it. We really are a marketplace on one side of the marketplace. We attract employers. We work with our partners to help them activate their networks of alumni, activate their networks of even Co Op and internship employers who want to, who want a wider variety and wider spectrum of things that they can do to engage students. We have our own channel partners with business associations and chambers and all sorts of organizations where we have a one to many approach to reach employers. And then, of course, we do our own outreach. We provide a platform that just makes it really easy for companies to come on and start to input all their ideas, all their challenges, all the goals that they're trying to achieve. And it starts to pump out a whole bunch of different project ideas that they can put into our ecosystem and make those available to our academic institutions. So typically, we've got anywhere from 3000 to 5000 live projects in the marketplace waiting to be matched to an educator to provide to their students at any given time. We completely oversubscribed that side. So we've actually flipped the supply and demand challenge, and the employers are now, rather than students competing for jobs in this marketplace, companies compete to work with students. The other side of it is we have our partner institutions, and they come on and it's really all the whole system here is very educator driven, so the educators get to be learned very early on. That if we can put the educators in the driver's seat and allow them to create the experience that aligns with their learning objectives, and then we can use the platform to help them communicate in that experience in a way that helps the employers and the educators be speaking the same language. Then we can make these really meaningful matches and get these projects that align with the business and talent needs but also align with the learning sections of the program embedded directly to the curriculum. So we that's sort of like half the battle right there. We just really build this marketplace offer the opportunities for these to connect at the right project, the right educator for the right students at the right time. And that helps with you know, the larger we grow, the more we scale up, the easier that becomes, the more valuable that becomes for everyone who's participating in our in our in our network. And then we have a whole suite of tools. So once you actually launch these project based experiences. We've learned from our partners that, how do I manage my students? How do I help make sure that my students are communicating well to the employers, having meaningful conversations? How do I track them through? How do I survey them before, during and after? How do I create opportunities for reflection on the skills that they're developing as part of these projects? All of that is built into the platform so that our partners can manage it. They can track it, they can measure it, and they can really see how much these interventions, these project based experiences, are improving students, retention, students, improving students, student success, student completion rates, and, of course, ultimately, student employment outcomes.  Dave Savory: Just build on that by really focusing on the project based model, we're really tapping into a pool of employers, primarily small and medium sized employers that aren't traditionally engaging in more formal kind of apprenticeships or internship or Co Op model, because they are a big lift and they're quite resource intensive for smaller organizations to to really support well. And so by working with employers who are kind of thinking through more, smaller, flexible, project based experiences, we're able to to engage an audience that isn't participating in some of those traditional models. And that's really helped us to grow that side of the ecosystem very well. Julian Alssid: It's quite an undertaking. I mean, it sounds like there's a lot of moving parts. And I'm interested to hear a little bit about I'm interested to hear more about how you actually build this. Dave, is this like, Do you have a team of folks who are developing these projects? How do you, you know, what's the level of involvement on the part of the employers and the other partners? And then I really want to hear about challenges. What keeps you guys up at night?  Dave Savory: Well, I mean, we do have a great team on both sides of the ecosystem, supporting educators and our academic partners, as well as our foyer partners. And on the employer side, we're really focusing on, we almost recruit and engage employers in a just in time, way based on kind of the needs and demands that we're seeing from our educators and our academic partners. We and we've learned over time that when they actually see a tangible opportunity at a institution that they recognize and it's a call to action of a real program that's accepting applications that helps small, medium sized businesses, any any business really be like, yes, I want to do that. Or maybe that's not a good fit, but I want to post my project into the ecosystem. And so the way matchmaking happens is it goes both ways, so employers are able to apply to an educators program, and vice versa. A lot of great a lot of our educators are actually really good at going into the employer side of the ecosystem, searching for projects that are aligned with their courses, and actually reaching out and being proactive to employers. And so we see success kind of both ways. We've also really been investing and leveraging AI in the Riipen system to just remove friction points for just saving time and helping employers, obviously, creating content and thinking of project ideas is, is it can be a challenge. How do I write a project that's a really good fit for for an educator, that would be a good project for their class? And we've always had really great templates built out, but really, in the last year and a half, two years, we've built into the platform the ability for employers to go in and just type out ideas that they're interested in doing and use our project AI tools to create a project scope that's really well defined and is designed in a way that can be embedded into into a course. And then we have kind of a an assessment of when they're looking to apply to courses, if their project is a good fit, green, yellow or red, and if it's if it's a great fit, that really increases the match rates, but it also helps employers think through, okay, well, what do I need to do to add into this project, or change the project scope to make sure it is aligned with what an educator, what an academic partner, is looking for? One of the one of the major challenges that we see has have always seen, is that there's no shortage from our academic partners and educators who want to deliver this kind of high quality, high impact experience to their to their to their learners.  Dana Stephenson: The biggest challenge that I think we've been dealing with really, from from from day one has always been I'd love to offer this for this my students. I see how this is happening out there, and other faculty members are doing this, but where am I going to find the time? Where am I going to find the connections? And how am I going to manage this? So technology can play a huge role in that we've we can help bring the connections. We can help remove friction as Dave, as Dave described. We can, we can, we can offer enormous amount of features to help with the management, but ultimately, that's only one part of the equation. One of the most exciting trends that I think we're seeing right now in this in this space, is the the fastest growing job title that we've seen out there is experiential learning coordinator or manager or director or work based learning manager or director or work integrated learning manager or director or coordinator. And some of these teams are actually growing quite big, and they really kind of bridge the gap between the academic world and the career services world. And these are the teams that we're often working very closely with. So often we'll work directly with faculty members, but as an institution, starts to really see the opportunity to scale this and go from five to 50 to 100 different courses at their institution and 1000s of different students getting these experiences on a semesterly basis. And there's there's this opportunity to build out a team like this that we can really work very closely with to run these programs on behalf of faculty members, and then there's a whole new cohort of faculty members who wouldn't have otherwise participated, who are now willing to participate, because there's someone on campus who's a staff member who really understands their institution, understands the strategic goals, understands what you know, is trying to standardize how things are measured, has a tool like Riipen that can say, hey, look, you focus on teaching and learning, and you focus on supporting the students. We're going to focus on managing the employers and managing the students through this project. And we'll all work on this together. And that way, really, you know, within an ecosystem, within an academic institutions, ecosystem really becomes this, this, this partnership between the experiential learning coordination coordinator, the faculty member, and Riipen, setting up the best possible experience the students and employers together. Dave Savory: Yeah, and just to together. Yeah, and just to kind of build on the from a challenges perspective, I know from a regional kind of ecosystem perspective, I mean, one of the main challenges is just breaking down silos across a lot of different stakeholders who are doing really great work and all have the right intentions, Across workforce, higher ed, government, policy, chambers of commerce, like, how do we actually, they're all doing pockets of this work really well, but how do we actually kind of break down some of those silos and bring bring these folks to the table under a more unified approach, to really drive the outcomes that they're looking for, their for their different stakeholders that they're serving.  Kaitlin LeMoine: So one thing that strikes me is this balance of what sounds like a really hands on and like customized approach, in many ways, with some amount of standardization as well, like around you know, I would imagine, in order to ensure like quality of the types of project proposals that are coming in on the employer side, and then what the learn, the quality of the learner experience that you know that occurs as a result of the connection between the instructor and the employer. So I'm just curious, how do you, how do you balance that customization, standardization, tension or and do you see it as a tension?  Dana Stephenson: I guess we've taken a hybrid approach. When we actually first launched Riipen, it was all standardized. You know, when our partners, our academic institutions, came on board, they launched experiences. They launched it the Riipen way. When our employers came on they launched it the rRipen way. Everyone was joining Riipen and getting matched, made on Riipen. They ran it the right, really, really the Riipen way, and that was super successful at reaching scale, as we mentioned, standardization really helped with removing friction reaching scale, which really helped us solve the chicken and egg challenge and the cold start problem that a lot of schools have when they want to get an ecosystem off the ground. But then it became very clear that every institution that we work with is very unique. The students that they serve are unique. The employers that they engage with and serve, and you know, the challenges they want, they want to support in the community, are unique. So they're sort of becoming a whole wide variety of different ways that our partner institutions wanted to run these programs, what they wanted to measure, what was important to them, how, you know how to set up these programs, both from a curricular or co curricular way. And so what we essentially ended up launching is this hybrid model where each academic institution that we work with can launch their own private, branded portal that is completely configurable. Can they can set it up the way they want to set up. They can set up the nomenclature. They can set up how they want to what skills they skills they want to measure and track, you know, how they want to survey their students. They're reporting everything. And they can bring in their own employers, and their own employers really live within that ecosystem. So they're constantly building up their own vibrant ecosystem. But what we also heard of our institutions is they did not want to lose access to the marketplace, because that was incredibly valuable. So the hybrid world really came from us being able to still have the more standardized, open marketplace where all of our partners live. And so any employers who come from our network, when we're bringing them in, they're coming into the standardized marketplace where they can launch their projects super quickly. They can get them off the ground. They can really build the scale of the opportunities available. That's how we can make these project based experiences abundant, and really sort of flip the supply and demand challenge. But each of our institutions now can launch their own custom configured portal the way that they want to run it, and then we seed that ecosystem. We're able to seed that ecosystem. So, you know, another challenge before we did this was, you know, helping schools start their own ecosystem was really challenging. They all face their own chicken and egg. They all face their own cold start problem. But then with the with this ability to have the hybrid, we could seed that ecosystem with more than enough employers get it off the ground, and then once it gets off the ground, you'll start to quickly see that many of our partners, they'll flip from 80% of the employers coming from our ecosystem and 20% from their own networks to the complete opposite. 80% are these employers who are from their own local community, using our tools, coming back year over year over year, and they're less reliant on our open marketplace, but they still always have that so they want to launch a new program in a new area that they haven't done yet. Don't worry, we can help you get that started as well.  Dave Savory: Yeah, and on, on your the point of your question about like, support of the learners and the employers once they're actually in an experience, we've had over 275,000 students now in the US and Canada go through and complete a work based learning project and and we've learned a lot in terms of, no matter who's running the experience, what are the key things that need to happen in order to set the experience up properly, in order to source the right employers, in order to set the right expectations, in order to support learners, connecting to those employers, and making sure that the little things are happening in terms of signing NDAs, having kickoff meetings, having those those milestone check ins, getting the right information from the employers and actually utilizing and maximizing kind of the opportunity right through providing feedback and reflection and helping learners build a portfolio that can help them articulate that experience and the skills that they learned. And so those things need to happen, regardless of who does it. And so we've kind of taken a philosophy and approach over over time, we've actually built out a specialized team at Riipen that is is focused on being in the weeds, kind of support experts in managing these experiences on behalf of some of our academic partners. And or we're working with schools that have that function built up already, and they've been investing in that experiential learning management element. And or working with faculty who have been doing this for years, and they have a really well defined system. And so before we kind of launch any partnership, we really want to make sure that everyone understands kind of all those key things that need to happen to make sure that we're going to be driving the outcomes that everyone's looking for.  Julian Alssid: Well, you've sort of, you've sort of gone there., Dave. The next question, the one that we like to ask all our guests is, how can our audience become forces in, you know, authentically integrating work based learning experiences into educational offerings, from from short term programming to long term degrees, and whether it's folks who are already involved in those efforts or who want to become involved, you know, what are the first steps.  Dave Savory: I would recommend, if you're not ready to kind of launch a wide scale kind of program, don't be afraid to just get started, even if it's a small implementation. Don't let perfection kind of be get in the way of progress. I think that's the term. But often, with a lot of programs that we talk to their forming committees, and they're doing research, and they're figuring out how to do this and what that impact is going to be, and how to budget and resource and those things all need to happen, of course, but that shouldn't be in lieu of getting started. There's cohorts of students going through their programs every every semester that that that's happening, and they're missing out. And so I guess the message there would be, don't be afraid to get started, even if it's in a small, kind of controlled area that can then inform how you're going to invest in this work. Further.  Dana Stephenson: The thing I'll add to this is really adopting a yes and mindset, or a both and mindset. I think one of the things that a lot of higher education institutions often will get tripped up on is, you know, should we be doing internships, or should we be doing project based learning, or should we be doing simulated experiences, or should we be doing, you know, authentic, real, live engagement projects with real employers. And, you know, going back to the whole continuing continuum conversation right from the beginning, we're big believers that it's like, yeah, it's a both and and it really shouldn't be a debate between one or the other. It really should be. Let's try and invest in all of these types of experiences. Meet the students where they are, have them scaffold them throughout their entire education pathway, so that when they get to the more intensive experiences, they're really set up for success or when they're ready to enter into the workforce. They have more than enough experience. They've been through the challenges they've experienced a whole wide variety. Have a lot of career, career clarity and exposure to industry, and they're the best set up to land meaningful employment post graduation.  Dave Savory: And don't forget to engage the small and medium sized businesses a lot of our institutions, which is great, but a lot of them tend to go after the large kind of Fortune 500 type logos and employers, which we should obviously do. But there's a wealth of opportunities and possibilities with with organizations that are in your regions, in your backyard, that might not have that large employer brand presence, but they can provide really amazing opportunities for your partners,  Julian Alssid: Which is where the vast majority of people work, in smaller companies.  Kaitlin LeMoine: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. It is really that you're the growth that Riipen has experienced is remarkable, that your the reach is really noteworthy, and we appreciate being able to dive more deeply with you all today about you know some of the ins and outs of how you how you've made this happen. As we close out our conversation today, how can our listeners learn more about Riipen and continue to follow your work? Dana Stephenson: Riipen.com is the first place that you can come explore. We actually have an open marketplace. You can explore live engagements of app. What are employers posting onto the platform? What are our experiences that post secondary institutions are posting onto the platform? What kind of workforce programs are being developed and launched on the platform? We've got a whole spotlight area and wall of love where you can hear from our partners and their experiences with this. We also have an annual impact report, and so we encourage everyone to come and sign up. We did our first inaugural annual impact report last year. You can check that out. We will be releasing our new one in the in the coming months. So there's a sign up for our newsletter and our annual impact report to stay engaged. Dave Savory: And we also attend a lot of conferences, so I really appreciate you having us both on today.  Julian Alssid: Appreciate you being here.  Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you both.  Dana Stephenson: Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.  Kaitlin LeMoine: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to workforces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We're also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell, you can listen to future episodes at workforces, dot info or on Apple, Amazon and Spotify. Please subscribe, like and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.