Michael Vilardo paid $70,000 to watch boring Zoom lectures at UCLA.
That’s roughly the cost of a Corvette, except that a premium sports car would’ve actually taken him somewhere. Instead, after eight hours of mind-numbing presentations, he slammed his laptop shut and immediately opened Netflix.
Sound familiar?
That’s because your students do the exact same thing—except they’re escaping your carefully crafted lessons for TikTok. Vilardo, our CEO at Subject, discovered something during those painful pandemic days that’s transforming how our partner districts approach online learning.
Here’s what hit him: Education needs to take the lessons of high-quality streaming shows and meet students where they are to engage them.
What If School Hit Like “Mr. Brightside“?
After deciding to pursue his MBA at UCLA, the pandemic hit. Vilardo went from collaborative classroom discussions to expensive Zoom lectures that made paint-drying documentaries look thrilling.
But like everyone else stuck at home, he’d immediately flip to Netflix after eight hours of educational torture. (Tiger King, anyone?)
While enduring those $70,000 Zoom sessions, he had an epiphany. .
The Zoom lectures just weren’t connecting—but that didn’t mean connecting with educational content online was impossible.
Look at how many people binge true-crime documentaries or spend hours watching YouTube deep-dives about topics they care about. They’re obsessed with learning, but it needs to be delivered in a way that hooks into what interests them. Factory-made content with no emotional entry point gets forgotten. (You know, the same model that worked great when we were training kids to work in actual factories. In 1850.)
But personal connection makes it stick.
“If I asked you what you learned in school 10 or 15 years ago, you’d probably struggle to remember,” Vilardo explains. “But if I ask you what your favorite song from 10 or 15 years ago was, you’d be so excited and able to say, ‘Oh, I remember every word.'”
Think about that for a second.
You can probably recite every word to “Mr. Brightside” but can’t remember a single thing from sophomore chemistry. That’s not because The Killers are better teachers than your chemistry instructor (although their lessons about “jealousy turning saints into the sea” are pretty memorable). It’s because you chose that song. It meant something to you. It connected to your life.
Dare we say, it was “destiny calling” you.
His thesis: Education should feel as personalized as your Spotify recommendations. Not through vague “differentiated instruction” promises, but through genuine adaptation to each student’s language, culture, and interests.
This meant reimagining curriculum from the ground up. Online learning can and should reflect the high-quality media product that kids have come to expect from their digital content. Even more than that, it should reflect their cultural and linguistic touchpoints to truly connect with them.
If you love basketball, your geometry problems involve calculating shot angles. If you’re from Texas, your examples reference Whataburger, not some generic restaurant chain that no self-respecting Texan would acknowledge exists.
And crucially, if you speak Spanish at home, you can access everything in Spanish while gradually building English proficiency—because forcing kids to choose between academic success and their home language is like forcing them to choose between their brain and their heart.
They need both.
The Language Barrier Nobody Wants to Admit
After recognizing the potential online curriculum has in supporting student engagement, Vilardo discovered an even bigger issue:
For Subject to be truly accessible to everyone, it *had* to be multilingual.
“We quickly saw that a lot of students we were trying to help weren’t native English speakers,” Vilardo recalls about our early days at Subject.
Our team had built a slick digital curriculum, but missed a massive problem:
Intelligent kids were not failing because they lacked ability, but because they couldn’t demonstrate knowledge in English.
Just put yourself in the shoes of a 6th grader…
A brilliant 12-year-old who can explain complex mathematical concepts in Spanish sits silently in class, marked as “struggling” because the test is in English.
Their mother, a nurse who works double shifts to give her daughter opportunities she never had, stares helplessly at homework she can’t read. The teacher knows this kid is smart—you can see it in their eyes when concepts click—but the system demands “English-only” proof.
It’s insane. Like asking someone to perform brain surgery while wearing oven mitts, then blaming them when they can’t hold the scalpel.
The numbers are also just as aggravating.
English Language Learners (ELL) represent one of the fastest-growing demographics in American schools. Yet most districts still operate like it’s 1995, expecting these students to sink or swim in English-only environments. (Apparently nobody told them that “sink or swim” is a terrible pedagogical strategy—unless you’re actually teaching swimming, in which case please use floaties.)
Parents who desperately want to help their kids with homework can’t—because they don’t speak the language of instruction. Teachers watch brilliant students struggle to express complex thoughts through a linguistic barrier that has nothing to do with intelligence.
For Vilardo, this oversight in the education system is personal. His own mother was an English learner, who couldn’t help out with his English and reading homework growing up. A Colombian citizen who went from community college to the Ivy League, he understood viscerally how language barriers create artificial ceilings on potential:
“To be able to help students master their potential and not be limited by the language they speak is so important. I really believe that’s something that’s really driving a lot more equity in society and helping a lot of our [partnered educators] have more success.”
When your mom fought through language barriers to give you opportunities, you don’t forget what that struggle looks like. You build another system that ends it.
Four Steps That Proved the Hypothesis to School Districts
So how did Vilardo turn his $70,000 Zoom nightmare into a solution that districts are adopting faster than kids abandon homework for TikTok? His master plan came down to four deliberate moves.
(Hint: It involves treating education less like a factory assembly line and more like actual entertainment that happens to teach you stuff.)
- Embrace multilingual learning as core infrastructure, not an add-on.
Most platforms treat translation as an afterthought—a compliance checkbox for ELL requirements. We built our Multilingual + AI Learning Support as a second major product, recognizing that language access determines whether parents can help with homework, whether students can demonstrate their actual knowledge, and whether learning feels inclusive or alienating.
- Make content localized and culturally magnetic.
Let’s say, Texas: “If you’re [teaching in] there, make specific examples to Salt Lake Barbecue, or Whataburger,” Vilardo notes. This isn’t pandering—it’s recognizing that relevance drives retention. When students see their own experiences reflected in curriculum, engagement transforms from forced compliance to voluntary exploration.
- Free teachers to become coaches, not content deliverers.
“We do all the admin work for them, the lesson planning, the grading, the feedback, the scope and sequence measurements,” he explains. Tech handles the repetitive tasks while teachers focus on what actually matters: individual student connections and emotional support.
We even submitted a presentation proposal called “Teacher to Tony Robbins: Rethinking the Role of Educators,” because that’s the transformation we’re enabling in the classroom. Teachers become motivational coaches and emotional intelligence developers rather than information broadcasters.
- Design assessments that go beyond multiple choice.
While traditional platforms rely heavily on multiple choice and true/false, we require authentic demonstrations of understanding through speaking assignments and creative applications. “We have a huge focus on building out more speaking, audio, mix and match submissions,” our CEO adds. “Not just true, false, multiple choice.”
Proof That Personalization Pays (Literally)
Can you think of the last time a student voluntarily spent 35 minutes on educational software?
A lot of teachers tell us they can’t.
But our partner districts are watching it happen daily. The data gets wilder from there, making even skeptical superintendents do a double-take:
- 35 minutes per day of voluntary platform engagement (That’s longer than most adults’ attention spans for anything not involving true crime documentaries)
- 80-90% of students prefer Subject over any other provider (The other 10-20%? Still trying to figure out how to log into an assessment platform built in the 1970s)
- 125% net revenue retention — districts aren’t just renewing, they’re expanding their usage faster than you can say “budget committee”
- $50,000 in additional funding when just five students stay in school instead of dropping out
“If you had a bad product, they show you by not renewing,” Vilardo says, citing that districts treat Subject as ROI, not cost.
Districts see results, states take notice, and suddenly the path toward better education nationwide gets a little clearer.
But the spreadsheet victories pale next to the human ones:
- Parents who couldn’t help with homework for years suddenly become study partners.
- Teachers escape the Groundhog Day loop of repeating the same lecture three times daily.
- Students who previously felt invisible—wrong language, wrong references, wrong everything—suddenly see themselves as the main character in their own education story.
The old “click for credit” stigma of online learning? Dead. Turns out students actually engage when content speaks their language (literally), references their culture, and treats them like individuals rather than widgets on an assembly line.
Vilardo’s vision extends beyond the current success:
“We envision a world where education feels completely personalized to your localized experience and preferences, so you feel like you’re opting into your favorite song.”
That world isn’t some distant utopia.
It’s happening now in our partner districts, where multilingual support and cultural adaptation are curriculum foundations.
Where every student, regardless of the language spoken at home, has equal access to demonstrating their brilliance. Where teachers coach instead of broadcast. Where parents participate instead of spectate.
The revolution isn’t coming. It’s already streaming, and educators deserve the best tools to take advantage of that online engagement. Unlike Vilardo’s $70,000 Zoom education, students will remember what they learned online as well as their favorite song.