Our case study this week focuses on a BC based start-up that ticks a lot of boxes for us here at The Potentiality. It touches on the core competencies of Thinking and Learning, Communication, and it’s a nice blend of competition, education, and entertainment – what we call edutainment.

Education and Career Exploration with ChatterHigh

Through my work at BCIT I have become keenly interested in technology-enabled systems that help students explore their options in education and potential careers.

About two years ago I met Lee Taal and started exploring his tool ChatterHigh, a website that provides interactive quizzes, competitions, and a discussion forum designed to help students discover post-secondary and career opportunities.

Lee started ChatterHigh on Vancouver Island, and has grown the site over the last two years to a point where they’re making inroads into Alberta and the US.

I invited Lee for a chat about what makes ChatterHigh unique and for his take on bridging the career gap for young Canadians.

Part 1: Tell us about ChatterHigh. What’s your Unique Value Proposition and How You Deliver?

Without ChatterHigh, institutions are generally limited to posters, brochures, magazines in career centres, presentations and career fairs. All of these methods are costly, hard to measure methods of creating engagement with their information.

ChatterHigh provides a digital medium that encourages students, parents and teachers to explore information useful for planning the next stage in their lives. This is done through a daily informative quiz and competitions on the site.

Organizations pay ChatterHigh for the ability to provide questions for daily quizzes. Lee says he deliberately sets the fees low to encourage more questions in support of learning outcomes on exploration. Each question links to answers on the organization’s website. The questions are given to students as a nine-minute daily quiz, and there are points and rewards for correct answers and completed quizzes.

Essentially, ChatterHigh turns career and education exploration into a game.

Part 2: The Challenge. Tell us About the Challenge You’re Addressing.

With students often hyper-focused on their social environments it can be extremely challenging to engage them in meaningful conversations about life after graduation.

Lee says that through presenting to thousands of students over the past two years he has found that excepting a few high-performers with specific goals most students will list generic careers – the same lawyer, doctor, fireman careers we listed when we were kids, even though a myriad of new options exist.

The challenge of course, is that it takes a sentence or two to make clear why something is of value. So, to connect in a meaningful way you need to have a ‘conversation’ if you hope to get through. If you can’t do this face to face, you must get between their nose and their phone.

This is where we see the key value in ChatterHigh. By involving students in friendly competition and providing real rewards Lee has created a platform that does what many career counsellors and career centres can’t. It engages students where they play, We see ChatterHigh’s real value proposition as that gamification. It engages students where they play.

But beyond engaging students there’s a very real challenge in helping students prepare for jobs and sectors that didn’t exist a few years ago, or don’t yet exist.

If a man walked into my grade 10 class back in ‘87, pulled out his crystal ball and told us that in 10 years all known knowledge in the history of the world would be on our phones in our pockets, we would have not understood what he was talking about. Yet, I have been working in that space since the mid-90’s and could not have taken a course back in high school to teach me what I know now.

Similarly, if you listen to Elon Musk (founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceEx), we will be living and working on Mars in 10 years. Which course will you take today to teach you what to do out there? The point of school is not to build a list of things we know how to do, but rather, that we learn how to learn, to become adaptable.

If a student can become aware of a career option or post-sec program that is of interest, they start to get vested. They will pick programs that make sense and the competency of learning starts. It doesn’t actually matter if they end up changing their path as long as they have built the competencies they need along the way. Exploring the options is key to creating that awareness.

Part 3: The Potential. How does ChatterHigh Build a Stronger Community?

I like the idea of the K – to – Career continuum. Building interested, informed and adaptable young adults is a logical outcome for our education system.

If students are given the opportunity to explore specific careers that are viable and provide a means of satisfaction and income, the system will do well and students will more easily get vested because they can see the opportunity first hand.

The trick comes back to how students, parents and teachers become aware. ACE-IT and other innovative programs have been around for a while, yet I have been in schools where students have not heard about it. This may not mean that it has not been told to them, or details available in brochures, it just means the message wasn’t absorbed.

The Closer: Where from here?

I’m personally a big fan of what Lee’s created. It has caused a stir, which I believe is due to it offering a tool for communicating with students that isn’t necessarily within the comfort zone of educators and administrators. Lee believes some educators need time to adopt the concept, and notes a growing number are building it into curriculum and using it themselves to keep abreast of changes and opportunities.

ChatterHigh connects students with an engaging means to explore education and careers, and has the potential to balance the prestige gap facing career-focused training that is contributing to the skills mismatch in Canada.

By leveraging the competencies of Learning and Thinking and Communication and providing an opportunity to learn through competitive play Lee has built something with the potential to better prepare our students for lives after high school.