Education Revolution: Shawn Boom Of Labster On Innovative Approaches That Are Transforming Education
An interview with Eden Gold
Technology is a tool, not a solution: It’s vital to see technology as a means to enhance education, not replace the human elements that make learning profound. The adage of falling in love with the problem, not the solution, is empowering.
The landscape of education is undergoing a profound transformation, propelled by technological advancements, pedagogical innovations, and a deepened understanding of learning diversities. Traditional classrooms are evolving, and new modes of teaching and learning are emerging to better prepare students for the complexities of the modern world. This series will take a look at the groundbreaking work being done across the globe to redefine education. As a part of this interview series, we had the pleasure to interview Shawn Boom.
Shawn Boom is the chief executive officer of Labster (www.labster.com), recently named to the TIME Magazine list of the World’s Top EdTech Companies of 2024 for providing improved learning through immersive digital experiences in STEM and healthcare. Labster prepares students for success from high school to career, offering 300-plus virtual lab simulations for science gateway courses and the UbiSim virtual reality (VR) training scenarios for nursing programs. Over six million learners in 3,000 educational institutions across 100 countries have seen breakthrough learning outcomes through Labster.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share the “backstory” behind what brought you to this particular career path?
My career in EdTech leadership has been driven by a passion for innovation and a commitment to lifelong learning, sparked by early influences in my life. As a young student, an inspiring teacher who competed in the Olympic marathon trials motivated me to embrace endurance sports, which opened my path to exploring anatomy and physiology. This led to a profound interest in STEM fields during my college years at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where a biology professor connected my athletic pursuits with scientific principles, encouraging me to major in physiology and spend extensive time in the human performance lab.
My transition into the commercial side of operations came through an internship with Sally Edwards, an Ironman Hall of Famer. Initially expecting to further my training in sports physiology, I instead gained invaluable experience in business, managing e-commerce solutions and learning product distribution. This experience was pivotal, steering me toward EdTech. I continued this journey at The Active Network, helping adapt their engagement platform for educational purposes, and later at Blackboard, where I spent a decade enhancing learning management systems to improve access, equity, and learner outcomes in education. Most recently I spent 5 years at Vanco building vertical software that helped K-12 and nonprofits engage with their communities.
Now at Labster, I lead a team that develops STEM and medical training simulations, merging my early passion for science with advanced technological solutions to educate the next generation of scientists to change the world. This role not only leverages my background and interests in educational technology, but also fulfills my personal commitment to enhancing educational opportunities worldwide. It’s a privilege to contribute to shaping future leaders who are equipped to tackle the world’s greatest challenges.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I am grateful to have traveled to hundreds of colleges in my career, ranging from four-year public and private schools, fully online operations, community and vocational, and adult education. One of my most memorable experiences was a series of visits to the Maricopa Community College system in Arizona, where we partnered to understand the unique and changing needs of students and their expectations of the learning experience. To truly walk in their shoes, I spent a day exploring the local neighborhoods on foot, riding the bus routes that students used to get to class and to work, and holding focus groups. I recall a tour of their nursing lab with manikins that would be used for patient care simulations. This firsthand experience of the student journey was enlightening and emphasized the importance of our mission at Labster to tailor educational tools that directly address the real-world contexts of learners.
Looking back on experiences like this has helped me fully grasp the possibilities and impact of immersive simulations in training healthcare professionals — a realization that has driven much of our product development at Labster over the past decade. We have the opportunity to change the way learning happens and to ignite people’s interests and understanding in ways never possible before. This makes me incredibly optimistic for the future.
Can you briefly share with our readers why you are an authority in the education field?
With over 20 years dedicated to supporting educators and administrators, my career spans a range of educational technology and service solution roles. During my nine years as a global vice president at Blackboard, I collaborated closely with educational professionals to address critical challenges such as accessibility, equity, and learner engagement. This position granted me deep insights into the daily operations and strategic intricacies of educational institutions, empowering me to develop effective solutions that significantly improve both teaching and learning environments.
At The Active Network, I led initiatives that directly engaged the K-12 and higher education sectors, developing a deep understanding of the community dynamics and the unique needs of these educational environments. This close collaboration with customers helped me to see first-hand the gaps and opportunities in how education is delivered and managed.
Serving as CEO and executive chairman at Vanco further broadened my perspective, as I worked directly with K-12 schools and nonprofit organizations to streamline their operations, enhance their educational impact, and enable community and family engagement. These experiences have been instrumental in shaping my approach to educational innovation, ensuring that the solutions we develop are both responsive and forward-thinking.
Since joining Labster in 2024, I am proud to lead a team composed of experts from various fields, including learning science, pedagogy, STEM content, engineering, art, user research, design, and customer success. Our team’s breadth of expertise and shared passion for education are crucial in developing innovative solutions that are not only utilized but also make a significant impact. This multidisciplinary approach is fundamental to creating products that genuinely enhance learning experiences.
Can you identify some areas of the US education system that are going really great?
Yes, the community college system. The latest data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Research Center released in May shows the second consecutive semester of enrollment growth following years of decline during the pandemic. While there’s an upward trend across sectors, the majority of growth has been at community colleges. That’s not to say that community colleges have recovered; enrollment is still down compared to pre-pandemic rates, but at least there is now a consistent upward trajectory. Community colleges are seeing demand from ethnically diverse students, from adults looking to upskill, and from people valuing the community college focus on career-oriented education and vocational programs.
However, a challenge faced by all higher education institutions including community colleges is with shifting formats. Some community colleges are shifting to offering more online courses and more career certifications that can enable ongoing professional development that allows students to ascend their career ladder in increments. In nursing, for example, a student may start out taking coursework to qualify as a nursing assistant, then return to the college to take more classes to become certified as an EMT, then progress to a practical nurse, licensed practical nurse, registered nurse, etc. And since the student may be fully employed or fulfilling family obligations while simultaneously taking these courses, the college that can offer more options for online, on-demand, or hybrid classes can pull from a broader student body.
Along with more formats, the university or college that leverages experiential learning, differentiated curriculum, and engaging courseware will distinguish itself to students and to the education market — and will come out a winner.
Can you identify the key areas of the US education system that should be prioritized for improvement? Can you explain why those are so critical?
Did you know that nursing isn’t recognized as a STEM field of study by most U.S. government agencies? It seems illogical considering all the science courses involved in earning a degree. As a result, nursing study programs and nursing students are excluded from many federal grants for STEM-specific research, for STEM scholarships, for STEM recruitment programs, and from opportunities like the White House’s billion-dollar investment in STEM. The Nursing is STEM Coalition recently launched an initiative to petition for universal recognition from federal agencies, starting with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Getting nursing on the DHS list of STEM degrees for federal visa provisions could help unlock more opportunities for international students and help to address the nursing shortage.
Please tell us all about the innovative educational approaches that you are using. What is the specific problem that you aim to solve, and how have you addressed it?
The world is calling upon our next generation to solve the biggest challenges of our time, such as climate change, economic inequality, tech disruptions, hunger, and disease. Yet many higher educational institutions lack sufficient resources — equipment, infrastructure, personnel, finances — to provide their students with experiential learning activities that stimulate engagement and spark enthusiasm in pursuing STEM fields. The lack of practice opportunities to reinforce learning, combined with uninspiring scenarios, hinders scientific experimentation and also creates equity issues in STEM skills development and career choices.
At Labster, our goal is to create and reinforce learning opportunities to help all participants succeed in STEM programs so they can change the world. We do this by providing engaging and immersive resources that meet today’s learners where they are and help them build competence and confidence in introductory science courses, often called gateway courses. Once they have passed these gateway courses, the possibilities for their future academic and professional careers open up for them. Conversely, if they scrape by with a low grade or don’t pass, they may never realize their true potential.
We believe every student can benefit from Labster’s platform to accelerate foundational science learning through interactive and gamified science simulations. Our Labster library offers 300-plus virtual lab experiences in fields such as anatomy, biochemistry, biology, biotechnology, chemistry, earth science, genetics, physics, and so many more.
Within the healthcare industry, the extreme personnel shortage is well documented, but it’s not merely due to nurses quitting the workforce. We need to move more nurse learners through the education pipeline, and more quickly, but are hamstrung by a lack of instructors and preceptors, limited clinical placement sites, knowledge practice gaps, shorter attention spans, difficulty offering standardized training experiences, and nursing’s critical thinking skills needing practice and repetition to develop. Our UbiSim virtual reality training (VR) platform for nurse simulation addresses these institutional challenges by saving instructor prep time, widening clinical situation access, offering standardized controlled environments, allowing repetitive practice until mastery, and maximizing engagement. We help institutions overcome limited access to clinical sites for nursing students to develop clinical judgment and communication skills. VR not only reduces the burden of expensive simulation lab equipment, but allows programs to scale and standardize training scenarios.
In what ways do you think your approach might shape the future of education? What evidence supports this?
Labster has been singled out as a “top evidence-based edtech.” Not only do we commission independent research, but many higher ed instructors have done their own studies to demonstrate that students perform better in real science labs and score higher in tests because of their prep work on the Labster platform before and after using the lab.
With our immersive digital simulations, Labster enables the transfer of traditional technical knowledge as well as inspiring and engaging students in the development of what we think of as 21st century “soft” skills such as communication, collaboration, confidence, and critical thinking.
For example, a commonality across education levels we’ve seen is that when students are fearful about their graded performance, their anxiety level is so high that it interferes with accessing critical thinking. As a result, we’ve introduced self-paced practice areas within the Labster platform so students can have the opportunity to experiment with progressively graduated tasks, ungraded, as many times as they need, until they feel comfortable sharing their results with their instructors and other students.
This opportunity to build confidence by learning from failure is something that our nurse learners value in the UbiSim VR platform as well. It allows a safe environment for the practice and repetition that are such an essential part of mastering decision making, clinical judgment, and therapeutic communication skills without putting real-life patients at risk. This is especially important in training to deal with high-acuity but low-occurrence scenarios.
Case in point — Niagara College Canada studied the positive correlation between nursing students feeling psychologically safe and their ability to make clinical judgments during a simulated skills scenario including UbiSim. They found the use of VR can enhance students in their leadership, collaboration, and communication skills.
How do you measure the impact of your innovative educational practices on students’ learning and well-being?
In addition to supporting independent research and collaborating with customers on case studies, we also conduct regular primary research studies. We have active communities of Labster and UbiSim platform users, as well as our newsletter subscribers and our followers on social media. For example, our nursing simulation survey in November secured valuable input from nearly 1,300 nurse learners, instructors, simulation directors, and program administrators — 92% of whom were UbiSim customers. They provided insight into using immersive VR-based simulations like UbiSim to help prepare for the Next Generation NCLEX nursing licensing examination.
Last year, LXD Research co-authored a study with Northwestern and Tufts University researchers that found students’ intentions to enroll in future STEM courses and even in a future STEM career increased through their use of the Labster platform. Contemporary Biology I and Biology II quiz scores significantly improved, with fewer quiz attempts, when virtual labs were used more regularly.
At the University of Manitoba, the College of Nursing has been able to increase its Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program by 50% despite a critical shortage of clinical placements offering practical experience in healthcare settings. Their solution is to use 50% simulation to meet clinical time requirements. The UbiSim immersive virtual reality training scenarios are used by all 1,100 undergraduate nursing students and now account for 33% of simulation time in the BSN program.
What challenges have you faced in implementing your educational innovations, and how have you overcome them?
We recognize that classroom instructors are overwhelmed with new edtech choices. We know that the adoption of any educational technology innovation needs to be perceived by the instructor as something that will make their lives in the classroom easier, not harder. Any reluctance to adoption is probably not a dislike of the tool itself, but rather from a concern over the investment of time to learn and implement the new tech effectively. That’s why we make sure that the Labster platform integrates seamlessly with the most popular learning management systems (LMS), and works on the most commonly used devices, from desktop computers to Chromebooks and iPad tablets, accessible to the widest number of students.
Keeping in mind the “Law of Unintended Consequences,” can you see any potential drawbacks of this innovation that people should think more deeply about?
When we speak with potential customers at nursing institutions about integrating virtual reality scenarios into their curriculum, we are often confronted with doubts around VR related to headaches, bandwidth, high cost, and extra classroom space requirements. But these lingering fears are generally unfounded or easily mitigated due to improvements in VR systems over the last decade. For that reason, our UbiSim virtual reality scenarios for nursing training run on commercially available VR headsets and controllers from Meta.
What are your “5 Things I Wish I Knew When I First Started”?
Embrace the unconventional path: Every experience, whether it aligns with your initial goals or not, offers invaluable lessons and opportunities for growth. Be open minded and look for the possibilities on the journey.
Technology is a tool, not a solution: It’s vital to see technology as a means to enhance education, not replace the human elements that make learning profound. The adage of falling in love with the problem, not the solution, is empowering.
Stay grounded in user needs: Customers are hiring us as solution providers to solve a problem and evoke (or avoid) emotions. It’s our job to stay relevant by continuing to evolve our understanding of the customer context.
Leadership is a T: Bringing value requires a mix of vertical specialization in skills with horizontal capabilities to understand and collaborate in various contexts across disciplines and stakeholders. Mastering the art of this is key to being effective in driving change and creating value and connections for communities and teams.
The soft stuff is the hardest: Many organizations and leaders fall short in achieving robust results because they concentrate solely on the outcomes. However, the real value is created by people and teams. Truly transformative results occur when these teams are not only aligned with a clear and compelling mission but are also fully equipped with the necessary resources. It’s about unlocking the potential and the ‘magic’ that emerges when people feel supported, valued, and connected to a greater purpose. This approach fosters a culture of engagement, innovation, and continuous improvement, which is essential for sustainable success.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My mother always imparted a powerful piece of wisdom that shaped my approach to life: “It’s okay to break the rules, as long as you’re prepared to face the consequences.” This mantra didn’t just give me permission to experiment; it instilled a sense of responsibility to weigh my actions carefully. It empowered me with the courage to venture where others might hesitate and to challenge the status quo confidently. This guidance has been a cornerstone in my life, encouraging me to innovate and lead with boldness, while always considering the broader impact of my decisions.
We are blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
I would greatly value the opportunity to have breakfast with Michael B. Horn from the Christensen Institute. His work extending the late Clayton Christensen’s theory on disruptive innovation has deeply influenced our approach at Labster, where we strive to transform education through accessible, immersive STEM and medical simulations. Discussing the ‘Jobs to Be Done’ framework would provide invaluable insights, enhancing our efforts to meet the evolving needs of learners and drive forward our mission to democratize education.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I can be reached on LinkedIn to discuss educational developments, especially as they relate to immersive digital learning experiences. I can also be contacted through the Labster website, blog, LinkedIn or X (Twitter).
Thank you so much for these insights! This was so inspiring!
About The Interviewer: Eden Gold, is a youth speaker, keynote speaker, founder of the online program Life After High School, and host of the Real Life Adulting Podcast. Being America’s rising force for positive change, Eden is a catalyst for change in shaping the future of education. With a lifelong mission of impacting the lives of 1 billion young adults, Eden serves as a practical guide, aiding young adults in honing their self-confidence, challenging societal conventions, and crafting a strategic roadmap towards the fulfilling lives they envision.
Do you need a dynamic speaker, or want to learn more about Eden’s programs? Click here: https://bit.ly/EdenGold.
Education Revolution: Shawn Boom Of Labster On Innovative Approaches That Are Transforming… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.