[00:00:00] Ben Kornell: If you see your idea, your opportunity, the barrier to build was just so high before that the US Advantage. And you know, if you look at US pre-industrial revolution, we were a nation of small businesses. There's a incredible opportunity for us to have 1, 2, 3 person businesses doing all sorts of things that you never could have done before.

So I'm actually interested in the agentic package or suite that actually unlocks the solopreneur or the like micropreneurs out there. Because if you're a 20-year-old or 22-year-old, you've already seen a lot of people side gigging and doing multiple passion jobs. All of that stuff actually becomes sustainable if you've got an agentic army wrapped around you.

[00:00:45] Steve Shapiro: Full disclosure, our industry has been powered for 20 years by folks that were using machine learning to do scoring and feedback for student work. And 20 years ago it wasn't that good and it's gotten a lot better and since. It's been generative. It's been a lot better, but I think that the agentic approach is gonna blow that away in a good way.

And I'd say that that would also be the same for adaptive and personalized learning.

[00:01:14] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. 

[00:01:30] Ben Kornell: Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar.

And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from 

Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoy today's pod.

Hello, EdTech insider listeners. It's another week in EdTech. And this time we have one of the most special guests, a lifelong friend of the pod, even though we've only been around five years. Lifelong friend of the pod, Steve Shapiro. He is now in his long list of credentials from CEO, Founder, AI Innovator, a great guy to have a beer with.

He also has now EdTech Insider Week in EdTech co-host to add to his list of accomplishments. Welcome, Steve. 

[00:02:26] Steve Shapiro: Thank you, Ben. I feel like my life is complete at this point. 

[00:02:30] Ben Kornell: You complete Me too. I hear that. That's what you were saying and I am picking it up, what you're putting down. Well, before we dive in with Steve just a little bit, for our audience on the pod, we've got Aaron Cuny and Joshua Broggi as our guest for today's pod.

So please hang on for those interviews also coming out, we have got Greg Hart from Coursera. We've got Ariella Racco from CoLab Education, Dean Celaj from GoTeacher, Josh Jones from QuantHub. A raft of new podcast coming your way. All kinds of great stuff, great conversations, and then events. We've got our webinar next Friday that's gonna be on AI efficacy.

What does that even mean? And how are we instrumenting tools to understand what works and why, and how can our efficacy measures keep up with the rate of change of ai? It will be a great conversation. We've got incredible guests for that. And then a new one on April 10th, screen bans. Everything you need to know about screen bans what's happening.

We'll talk a little bit about that today too. But April 10th, show up to that webinar. And then last but not least, on Wednesday, the long awaited, the Golden Ticket to A-S-U-G-S-V Rooftop Party sponsored by EdTech Insiders will go live. So the only way you can a hundred percent guarantee your ticket is joining EdTech Insiders Plus as a subscriber, check us out on our substack.

You can sign up there That will help you join our WhatsApp group too. We can only have 400 of our best friends at this rooftop party. Last year we had a thousand people sign up and only 400 could come. So we hope that you make the choice to become an EdTech Insider supporter Plus member today. But we will see you all there.

Lot 

[00:04:15] Steve Shapiro: going on can just say about the party, because the folks at EdTech Insiders are such an inclusive group, but this party has become exclusive. It just is hard to get in, even if you're good friends with them. So sign up at the moment, you can sign up. 

[00:04:31] Ben Kornell: Yeah, and Steve's not even my friend. I barely know the guy, and yet he still somehow gets in to every single one.

Just kidding. By the way, if you ever wanna look for some epic EdTech insider photos, check out our photos from South by Southwest two years ago, and that was one of our, that was 

[00:04:46] Steve Shapiro: epic 

[00:04:47] Ben Kornell: insiders. Epic of glory. It was, and I co-hosted that party and it was such a great time. So Steve, lots going on in the world.

I'm sure you've had your finger on the AI and education pulse longer than really anyone that I know as kind of an original partner of OpenAIs. Tell us what you're seeing, especially with the big news coming out of the NVIDIA conference. 

[00:05:10] Steve Shapiro: Yeah, I mean, as most folks know, what happens at Nvidia trickles down to the rest of the ecosystem.

They're the big dogs now, and just last week, obviously their founder, CEO, he said like, this is the time where we're going from. Basically the agentic platform war is going from theory to land grab, and I think by that he's talking about the fact of like open claw is going to become sort of the windows of personal AI in some respects, and Microsoft is making a bunch of bets.

Meta is making a bunch of bets. Google's making a bunch of bets around that. That's just the fact that the last 18 months, a lot of us at the application layer have been talking about agentic and doing a lot of research and doing a lot of experimentation in pilots, but it's about to get real in a way that could be really good in some respects.

[00:06:09] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean like one of the big questions in the space is will AgTech AI play out the way that the LLM Wars played out, which was really, it's a battle of big tech titans and who's going to grab the market share? Or is this an area where actually specialization in verticals like AgTech finance, AgTech healthcare, ag agentic education, that there's defensibility in the workflows that are so specific to those industries?

As we think about this infrastructure layer where Nvidia sits, they win in all scenarios. On the LLM layer. The question is, as LLM commoditizes, do they have to move into that agentic layer to win or will they be powering these kind of sector specific ENT platforms? What's your read on how this will play out in specifically the education play?

[00:07:03] Steve Shapiro: Yeah, I mean, for the last five years I ran a company that was in the, you know, application layer space and trying to keep pace. When we first started, we were working with GPT two and kept saying to my team, but when GT three comes out, I am telling you it's going to have these extra capabilities and so we have to make sure we're not gonna be deemed obsolete when that comes.

And that kept happen and happening and happening. And I think that everybody at the application layer in any industry, but especially in our. Has gotta keep that in mind. But I actually believe that in this age agentic world we're entering that there's a lot of opportunity at the application layer. And I'm not sure about how the LLM, I mean, we'll try to get the LLM people drunk at A-S-U-G-S-V to find out what they're thinking.

But I think that there's gonna be a lot of opportunity at the application layer to do very specialized, customized work. You know, full disclosure, our industry has been powered for 20 years by folks that were using machine learning to do scoring and feedback for student work. And 20 years ago it wasn't that good and it's gotten a lot better.

And since it's been generative, it's been a lot better. But I think that the agent approach is gonna blow that away in a good way. And I'd say that that would also be the same for adaptive and personalized learning. 

[00:08:19] Ben Kornell: Yeah, there's a way in which it actually doesn't have to be an either or, like you could imagine sector specific and generalized agent flows because when you're using applied generative AI, the cost vector that you're competing against is often human labor.

So right now, like pre agentic revolution, and I'd say right now we're in the pre, if there is an age agentic revolution that's happening, it's early stages. I've had a couple a i agents do stuff for me, ended up being more work for me, then just doing it myself. But ostensibly, if we project out, it will get so much better.

The cost benefit is. Absolutely incredible with AgTech workflows as opposed to just simple generative tasks and the ability for it to also eventually like self modify, self-manage, self-regulate. As you start getting these swarms of agents where you can actually have entire systems being built and managed, that's when it really gets like mind blowing.

I think there's a lot of revenue and market potential to share. The real question too, I go back to my business school days, where is the leverage, at what layer to extract the value and what gets commoditized? And again, I feel like Jensen Wong is just gonna be so happy with where he is sitting because basically all the pricing power still accrues to him at the chip level, which I don't think any of us would've ever anticipated 10 years ago.

But man, that still, and you know, you bought Grock, which was so smart. So Open Claw is somewhat open source, but the Open Claw founder joined OpenAI. And part of why I think he joined OpenAI, and this is speculation, I don't have any insider knowledge here, but his view was open. AI's ethos was much more like break things and figure stuff out.

And some of the other models, Google and Anthropic in in particular, are much more cautious about opening up all your data flows to an agent. That to me signals a little bit of where open AI is gonna go. Anthropic has been, so B2B oriented, and Google has been AI everywhere. They already know a lot of the workflows, so I could see them doing more AgTech partnerships.

And the big announcement on the Anthropic side is they're working with the PE group to create an AI services firm that spun out of philanthropic. So all that playing out makes me think that the education opportunities are really to sit with schools and districts, universities, and some workforce training partners, where you're almost like the subject matter expert.

And you're brokering the kind of agentic workflow development between the stakeholder who's implementing and these generalized LLM slash agentic platforms. 

[00:11:17] Steve Shapiro: Definitely. I also want to like mention Neal Claw, which is part of the same folks, but it's more like the security layer around what the agents are doing.

And I think obviously in education that's gonna be really important because you're not even gonna break in without the end users having that assurance around security and privacy. Because I think when people hear agents they hear, well that sounds really interesting, but I've also heard the story of them running amok.

Right? And we wouldn't want that, 

[00:11:49] Ben Kornell: right? And this idea that you actually have agents that are policing agents or like behavioral audit agents feels very sci-fi in another sense, those are maybe some of the agents we need most, given all of the human actions that we see too. So I think it's just gonna be a very interesting space to play out The kind of net net if the agentic revolution happens, and on a three year timeline is kind of what we're hearing from Dario Ammo Day and some of these other leaders, we're gonna see job dislocation.

We're going to see a massive change in the future of work. And in the news this week, we're seeing lots of labor departments across the world, grappling with that. First, in the US Labor department, there's new funding around AI preparedness and retraining. In the UK they're actually working with labor unions to do upskilling of labor unions.

There's this SCSP summit, which is really a workforce training summit that is fully funded by workforce, but it's focused on AI literacy and education. So I think there's big dollars because governments know that this is going to be become a big issue. We'll put some of those links in our show notes, but I am curious, given your experience in this space, what do you anticipate is going to happen?

How will this evolution or revolution hit? 

[00:13:16] Steve Shapiro: Yeah, I mean, in my former role at Prometric as the head of AI, we engaged, we had 400 B2B customers that are who's who of every. Certification and licensure entity out there. And I met with the heads of a lot of those organizations and they were definitely concerned even three to five years ago, concerned with, we don't think the funnel's vibrant of people trying to go into this profession.

Things like actuaries and CPAs and things like that. And that was even before their wrestling with the part of Vidia AI and agents could somehow pair the workforce in those industries. I think it's the age old question around new technology that you've always heard technologists say, oh, it's gonna create net more jobs, and oh, we have to reskill this whole population.

Whereas a lot of people don't share that point of view. And there's a lot of examples of. There's examples of that happening. But there's also horrible examples of like trying to re-skill auto workers at General Motors to like go back into the classroom where most of them didn't go to a traditional four year college degree 'cause they didn't like school, but they were really good at their job and they had a great job actually, and they were really good at it.

But then trying to re-skill them into some kind of more white collar job that wasn't their cup of tea. So like there's examples on both sides and I think we've got a way to go to see how it's gonna shake up. But one thing for certain, anyone been like you or I, or some of our close colleagues who've really immersed ourselves in learning how to use a lot of the latest and greatest.

Innovations that have come out. You find yourself saying, oh my God, that would've taken me a week before. That took me an hour now. Right. And I have a lot of people reaching out to me to like ask for consulting advice and I'm like, Hey, I could give you some free consulting advice because who would've taken me again a week to do the research and reach out to a hundred people in my network?

I'm doing much faster because I have the tools at my fingertips. So the displacement's for real. 

[00:15:27] Ben Kornell: Yeah. And Ryan Craig, our colleague over Achieve Partners, is really emphasizing the importance of apprenticeships now in that as we increase our efficacy and our efficiency. Tenfold, maybe a hundred fold, as you described, what gets sucked up, A lot of the entry level work gets sucked up.

And so at the same time, you need people who have some sector experience and knowledge to be the future leaders of those workflows. And so it really does present well for apprenticeships where people can immerse themselves in the work while being partially paid, partially getting job, educational credit, and then that allows them to better design new workflows with AI and essentially build themselves into a job.

I tend to ascribe to that view that that's gonna be the winning model, and I think Europe is far ahead of us on that front, but I also think there's a. Age of entrepreneurship that we could be entering. That's truly exciting. Where if you see your idea, your opportunity, the barrier to build was just so high before that the US advantage.

And you know, if you look at US pre-industrial revolution, we were a nation of small businesses. There's a incredible opportunity for us to have 1, 2, 3 person businesses doing all sorts of things that you never could have done before. So I'm actually interested in the agentic package or suite that actually unlocks the solopreneur or the like micropreneurs out there.

Because if you're a 20-year-old or 22-year-old, you've already seen a lot of people side gigging and doing multiple passion jobs. All of that stuff actually becomes sustainable if you've got an agentic army wrapped around you. 

[00:17:17] Steve Shapiro: I think you're right. I think honestly. I have kids in their twenties and like for their cohort, they are going to need that kind of pathway and they're gonna need that kind of support because it's not gonna just come naturally that you graduate college and you have three job offers.

It's gonna actually force people into entrepreneurship. I hate to use that term force. I actually am someone who was, when I was in my twenties, was sort of forced into it by, didn't like the big corporate life and so ended up coming up with something that was in the end much better. But in some respects, yes, I was forced.

So I think the downside of this job displacement is I think some people are gonna be forced into entrepreneurship. The upside is for a lot of them, that could end up being better outcome for their career journey. 

[00:18:04] Ben Kornell: Yeah. So interesting. And so you're not coming at this with all doom and gloom. I think you're seeing the opportunity.

Meanwhile, K 12 schools and the news are grappling with AI. We had a host of headlines. About on the one hand, and I think you mentioned this, 52 policy proposals around AI literacy at state levels across the country with this idea that AI is a capability set of the future. There's almost a sense of basic literacy in AI is not only critical to be a builder, but to be an effective citizen.

In 22nd Century America. At the same time, we're also seeing legislation popping up all over the place around screen bans and backlash against AI and ed tech. Given all of the pressures that schools are under, they already had like chronic absenteeism lowering enrollment. Gaps in terms of math scores and reading scores, adding AI literacy onto the plate.

Do you feel like this is something that our schools can handle? Is this something that's actually mission critical or are you a little bit more in the techno skeptic camp where we actually would benefit from a little bit more deifying, our K 12 education? I'm curious your thoughts. 

[00:19:23] Steve Shapiro: Yeah, I mean, I don't believe in the absolute ends of either of that argument.

So like I respect Jonathan Haight from NYU and the book that he wrote in the Cross the World Tour, that he's gone on around the cell phone and social media are really harming our teens and we have to do something about it. He's done a great job of doing the research, improving that. Obviously it's true.

That's something we all know. Complete absolute banning them from school doesn't see, feel to me like that's the solution. I think the counter argument is, is they've done early research to say for any of the schools where they've done that, they've measured their out of school time, that they're just like on the phone, like twenty four seven outside of school.

And that's not good either. So I think there's gotta be some happy compromise between that less screen time during school. Absolutely. I think it's good. But at the same time, using school as a platform for what your future skills that you need is important. And in this day and age of AI, could you imagine graduating even from high school and not like understanding fundamentally how AI works and how you can work with it.

Seems ridiculous. Like to go to college or to go into the workforce and not know those things. So I think we need to strike a balance, and I know that there's a lot of good, actually, I can't believe I'm saying this good legislation about it, but I do think we're in a period where obviously, although that is one of the places where there is bipartisan, some bipartisan agreement, which is so rare right now in our country.

We need more. We need more, and we need industry to play a better role. Industry just can't be around so that they can sell more tokens or GPUs. They have to take a bigger stake. So when you say 

[00:21:16] Ben Kornell: industry, are you meaning tech Tech or are you meaning ed tech or you mean 

[00:21:20] Steve Shapiro: I, I mean tech. Tech. 

[00:21:21] Ben Kornell: Mm-hmm. 

[00:21:23] Steve Shapiro: I mean, the people with the real dollars in our economy, I think they have a responsibility.

[00:21:27] Ben Kornell: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

[00:21:29] Steve Shapiro: I'm not a socialist, but I do believe that like. The, the wealth in the big 10 to 20 companies right now and the crisis that we're facing for future generations is too much of a crisis to ignore. And you know, you point me in the direction of like all the K 12 news and I, the news might be biased, but like every headline was so negative.

I come from a K 12 family. My parents and I, my wife are all lifelong teachers. Like there is a lot of existential problems right now in K 12, and I think the entire community that includes the business community needs to be more focused on how we can help. 

[00:22:13] Ben Kornell: Yeah. It is one of those things where also we have failed as a unified voice to communicate about what quality looks like.

We failed to communicate. Standards of best practices that, you know, would guide educators, would guide parents, would create, I feel like, you know, I worked at Common Sense Media and I think they did a lot of great work pre AI to develop recommended best practices and the surgeon general Previous Murthy, the previous Sur Surgeon General, actually talked about like a surgeon General's warning for social media.

I think AI is a kind of new element here. One thing that I wonder about, just like when the.com boom happened, eventually no one calls 'em dot com companies anymore. The AI boom is happening, but eventually no one will call a company an AI company, or not an AI company. I think there may be some elements of like, Hey, eventually this is just gonna be in the sauce.

Like, let's not create these stark dividing lines of ban AI or yes AI or something like that. But I do feel like this kind of social responsibility, corporate social responsibility, it, there's a way in which these AI companies could lose the threat. They could create such a big backlash among families and workers and so on, that they actually undermined the economic potential of their own enterprises if they're too.

Catalytic and destructive. And you know, one of the things that you saw with the robber barons of the Great Industrial Revolution moment, and criticize it as it deserves to be criticized, but often you found them actually having to build full towns and full economies to support their railroads or.

Support their factories because they understood that this dislocation was so profound that the infrastructure itself had to be subsidized by their work. 

[00:24:14] Steve Shapiro: That's right. Not that I wanna do a shout out to Henry Ford now that I know about him, but the whole point of the way he paid his workers were so that they could buy one of those automobiles.

Right. And so kind of like recycling back in. So we have a sustainable economy and a sustainable middle class. I should have anonymized his name, but anyways, 

[00:24:36] Ben Kornell: get the point. Yeah, I mean, I think basically any of those folks now in the light of history really doesn't stand up to like social, ethical scrutiny.

But what you could see is that, and maybe it was purely from an economic vision, maybe it was something philanthropic. Something around a commitment to civil society. We will never know. But this idea that you actually need, there's a flywheel in an economy and that the, as you innovate, that you've gotta actually have it circulate through the economy to come back to buyers.

I will say, I, I just read 1929 about the crash. It's a really great book. It shows that at the instant of the crash, no one actually realized, oh, we're in this great depression. There were still like two years where they're like, it's gonna pick back up again. We're gonna be fine. And there was a sense of like, oh, we're just returning to normalcy.

But what had fundamentally shifted was credit had frozen and the ability to like borrow and the ability to transact business had basically been totally decimated. And it took time for it to play through the economy. And then what you ended up having is all of these outsized out and negative outcomes caused by a stock market for people who never even touched the stock market.

Because as people said, oh, the economy's bad, I need to save more, it created this like cyclical effect of, of negative outcomes. That's where we are with AI as an inflection point. It could be. Unlocking of bounty, or it could be this like crash into a very small group of halves and a struggling group of have-nots.

And those halves are gonna be under as much, you know, they're gonna be under pressure to retain their wealth because the have-nots aren't generating, you know, the economic gains. So. I digress, 

[00:26:35] Steve Shapiro: but I made me also think about, I'm curious if you've talked about this on your show, just about, there's been a few reports lately that have really been kind of downers about EdTech.

I think one was in The Economist, a few other places of basically saying, Hey, it's been around, you know, this long. Hey, they've deployed this many billions of dollars of capital, and hey, we're not seeing the student gains. As a matter of fact, we're seeing loss, learning loss and things like that. Have you guys covered that on this show?

Oh, 

[00:27:06] Ben Kornell: yeah. Or talked about that. Yeah. I mean, I think, gosh, you know, our WhatsApp channel blew up with some of that stuff where, I mean, I think. I have a different relationship with the press. By the way. One thing to note is EdTech insiders. We're not journalists, we're really the water cooler conversation to talk about what's going on.

So I have a huge amount of respect for journalists doing deep work. And at the same time, I think there's a lot of clickbait and like, you know, popular thinking around that's just lost all nuance and this kind of throwaway statement. EdTech has never done anything for us. The throwaway statements of screens are all bad.

I think what we all know as educators, as people who have really thoughtfully crafted programs and products, some of which include technology, some of which don't, like, we really understand the benefits and the potential efficacy of our, our tools and products. And yet the kind of big picture promise that society had, let's say at the COVID moment.

Really we've had a backlash. And what this is, you know, what the press does with education is it's a pendulum swing around optimism, pessimism. And what we tend to do is we build people up and then we tear them down. Inverse hero's journey, a la you know, Sal Khan or you know, alpha School or my own experience with old school.

So I think coming back to like where we are in this cycle, the like establishing what does efficacy look like and establishing measures that go beyond this brute good, bad bifurcation, I think is really challenging. One other thing that we had in our news that I just want to connect the dots on is really around school choice and the political play out on that.

So basically if you're in these camps that say all school bad, all screen, bad ed, tech bad, there's a big movement towards school choice as this appealing opportunity to put the power in the hands of. Parents and this week what we're seeing, uh, basically Texas just closed their ESA registration window, and it's the most successful ESA launch in the history of states.

Well over a hundred thousand people, 150,000 people signed up for ESAs. We saw Alpha School was one of the big winners on that with online homeschool options that they offered. And a number of people are, are using those vouchers just to attend the same school that they were already attending, but many are making switches.

But the most interesting story I saw was the backlash in Idaho. Where all of these ESA policies are also decimating rural schools. Because you, in rural schools, your critical mass is already dwindling because of population loss. Now, ESAs are accelerating that population loss, and so the ability to offer free public schools in person is becoming endangered because of these exact policies.

I'm curious, you know, you live in Providence now live for a long time in Boston, so these are areas where they haven't really unleashed the ESA Boogeyman, but I'm curious how you see this all playing out and what actually is the long-term policy point where this lands do you think? 

[00:30:24] Steve Shapiro: It's crazy. I mean, you, you've been involved in the charter movement for a while and you know that like this is about funds and you know, this is about government funds, which are generated by tax dollars and then redeploy and how we redeploy them.

Right. And it's hard to argue against some of the recent success, like you just mentioned in Texas, around these new policies around choice. Right now we live in a world where this country is controlled by the Republican party. It's, it's a Republican, it's been in their bag of policies for a long time.

They have the power right now. So I think you're actually gonna see more of it over this next three years or so. Met in Idaho soup last year at I-A-S-U-G-S-V to talk about my product and he basically was already like the canary in the coal mine about it to me when I talked to him. And I think that like we have to rethink about rural.

Policy and how we fund rural schools. I mean, that predates choice, by the way, and it's an issue that I don't think we've solved for yet. 

[00:31:32] Ben Kornell: You know, in the higher ed space, we're also seeing a lot of questions around the ROI of higher ed, and we're seeing massive unen enrollment, well, I wouldn't say unen enrollment.

Enrollment declines. So new student enrollments generally across the board are suffering. But there's been a few winners state by state as you see, and I'm really curious, especially as it connects to our conversation about workforce, as you see winners and losers in the AI era in higher ed, what are the profiles of those that are gonna win in that environment and those that are gonna lose from your perspective?

[00:32:09] Steve Shapiro: So when I was in college many, many decades ago. A SU had a reputation as a great party school. I was on campus over the last couple years and I came back and said to my wife, find me in a late university that gets the future better than a SU. They're not out there. So a big shout out, you know, to Michael and the whole team at a SU.

And I'm not just saying that 'cause I'm part of the A-S-U-G-S-V tribe, but like you have to be on campus and see what's going on and see all the labs and the way that students collaborate and the way the projects they're given. Those are future ready students, like at a mind blowing rate. And you know, a lot of other campuses.

'cause I'm here in New England around a lot of schools. I live on the fringe of Brown campus and I do a lot of consulting for Cornell Ma alma mater. But like as u's, the blueprint. There are other schools, but they're the blueprint for like what a, a state four year school that just somehow has moved the needle on innovation and the way they do instruction and what their expectations are of the students.

Like they've figured out what the rubric is, right? For like when you graduate, I want you to have experienced this while you're on campus and be able to take that out into your career. 

[00:33:36] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I feel like they've been a model for really a decade or more. But what's interesting is the acceleration that is coming from AI around content generation, around interactivity.

They're also, those moves that they've been making have positioned them really, really well to capture this wave and really ride it in. 

[00:33:59] Steve Shapiro: Right? Like who was the first to like kind of deal with open AI so that like everyone on campus could like the equivalent of like an enterprise account or something. It was them, you know?

[00:34:10] Ben Kornell: Totally. We're at the point where we're gonna go rapid fire at the end here. We've got funding rounds, we've got lots going on in really across the space. You know, anybody who's feeling down about things like. It's great to see, uh, nectar who's been a on the pod raised $12.5 million to scale purpose-built AI infrastructure for schools.

Cory raised 10 million in user acquisition financing to expand AI powered EdTech platform globally. We're seeing a lot of people moving globally. Pratik Boob is set to back the Newton School of Technology with a huge grant, $2.9 million investment to basically launch a new AI forward. It's called Newton School of Technology School.

In prep, raise 1.5 million in their seed round. Gratis raised 600,000 euros for an academic guidance platform. There was a seed round around Rokus Techs technology and, and Columbia Business School did a partnership around over a hundred thousand dollars in non-dilutive grants. Like there's just so much activity as I went through the list, like one of the themes that I've been seeing is people are building so much faster now with AI tooling that their ability to take a smaller round and get a ton of leverage out of it is phenomenal.

We had Matthew Johnson from Oppenheimer, we had his report and overall funding in total is down, but number of deals is up and that's because everyone can make a much smaller amount of money, go a lot, lot further. I'm curious, as you saw this kind of scattershot of. Funding rounds, like any themes that you're seeing or any themes that you're seeing over on the VC side?

[00:36:01] Steve Shapiro: Yeah, I find that as I'm advising so many startups and I have for a long time that I recently changed how I am advising them because they have a ability to scale a lot easier with actually less capital and at least get to those proof points or inflection points a lot quicker without needing that a round or so on.

And that's, that's a good thing. I think what we're gonna see in 2027 and 2028, barring some macroeconomic things, is actually more like you already said in Matt's uh, report, there were more deals, maybe at smaller increments, but still that more deals is good news actually. And I think you're gonna see more and more of that.

And yeah, deal size might be smaller in general. But I think more innovators, you know, coming outta nowhere is good. 

[00:36:58] Ben Kornell: The last thing I'll say before we, we wrap is Bright Eye is launching a new studio, a 12 week residency for Founders. Bright Eye is basically our, one of our favorite VCs out there. They're winners over in Europe, and you know, if you have any playbook that you wanna follow, it's Bright Eye's Playbook.

They've been doing an awesome job, but they are building this great studio. I think they've got room for something like, uh, 15, uh, entrepreneurial teams in their cohort one. So check that out in our notes, and you can also find it on Bright Eyes Website and Notion Page. Well, we're gonna take it out. Steve Shapiro, thanks so much for joining us today.

Any final words for our audience before we go? 

[00:37:41] Steve Shapiro: Yeah, no, I'm an optimist, all of our ed tech brethren and sisters, like I'm an optimist about what the next 12 to 18 to 24 months is gonna be for our industry. So lean in. Lean into it. 

[00:37:54] Ben Kornell: Awesome. Well, thanks so much Steve Shapiro for joining us today. If it happens in EdTech, you're gonna hear about it here on EdTech Insiders, enjoy our interview.

Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. Today is a really special podcast for me, a long time friend back from Teach for America Days in the Bay Area. Aaron Cuny, who is now CEO at AI for Equity, but really who's been a champion for the last 20 plus years for all things innovative and impactful for education for kids from all backgrounds.

It's so great to have you here today. Before we jump in, let me tell you all a little bit about Aaron. He's CEO at AI for Equity. As I mentioned, AI for Equity equips leaders at innovative public school networks to lead boldly on AI. And previously he co-founded and led ingenuity prep public charter school where at risk student achievement ranked near the top of all school networks in Washington, DC.

He's a proud dad of two girls, a trail running enthusiast, and also currently residing in New Zealand honorary Kiwi. Welcome to the podcast Aaron. 

[00:38:59] Aaron Cuny: Thanks so much, Ben. Happy to be here. 

[00:39:01] Ben Kornell: There's so many ways for us to dive in and one thing I just recall is at the moment of ChatGPT inflection, I was leaning in, you were leaning in, there was so much excitement and opportunity, but also leaders scrambling for what to do.

And you ran in with the toolkit that you know really well around communities of practice. And so really what you founded out of that moment was role-based community of practice for AI owners, instructional leaders, talent leaders, data IT ops leaders, and you brought them together in dialogue and discussion.

Not saying we're gonna do this one thing, but really like. What's everybody seeing? What are our practices? Can you talk a little bit about how that idea came to be, and especially why you chose role base across networks rather than deep into networks or any other strategies. So I'd love to hear your reflections on that.

[00:39:58] Aaron Cuny: Yeah, right now there is so much talk about coherence in this space, and I think having had the experience of co-founding and leading a charter school, this was just something that I was sensitive to and had an appreciation for from the beginning. We know that the only real way institutional change.

Happens is when you get everyone rowing in the same direction. And so from the start, I think we've just tried to lean in on the importance of building the capacity of a cross-functional group of leaders. As we think about it right now, optimizing AI and instructional systems has real implications for the data team.

We're seeing this real leap in the ability of folks across school-based teams right now to build software, especially over the last few months. And that has massive implications for it and data security, and none of this skills over the long term without the right attentiveness to the talent work, the talent team really has to have a vision for.

And begin to screen for and select for an evolving set of skills and competencies. And so I think we've just been fortunate over the last few years to really learn with and from leaders across all of these communities of practice and try to help school systems then put the pieces together in a way that creates cohesion in the vision of how they're thinking about AI innovation.

And I think it's just provided, ha, having these communities of practice across functional teams has also just provided a really nice opportunity to cross fertilize 

[00:41:28] Steve Shapiro: that 

[00:41:29] Aaron Cuny: learning. There are 

[00:41:29] Steve Shapiro: regularly 

[00:41:30] Aaron Cuny: things we're hearing from the talent leaders that we tee up for our data IT and ops leaders the next day.

And so I think it just, it lends towards the cohesion in this work that we are all striving for right now. 

[00:41:44] Ben Kornell: Yeah. It's interesting because a lot of people talk about professional development, but community of practices are something distinct. How is it different than the kind of one and done PD training implementation?

How is what you're building fundamentally different and how do you sustain this model? 

[00:42:02] Aaron Cuny: Yeah. Again, think back to my own time as a school leader and the fact that very rarely I think, did any meaningful change happen for us as an organization because I or someone else on my team listen to a panel or even went to like a one-off professional development.

I think almost always, especially when the work required capacity building work, almost always like the most meaningful change came from ongoing support and professional development and accountability, all kind of centered around a really clear vision. One thing that we have learned from the data that we've been collecting through the AI Innovation Index is that there is this set of like executive controlled actions that can move fairly quickly.

If you have a C-suite that has the right conviction, they can roll out an AI vision, they can launch an AI task force, you can produce a policy. You can go out and gather stakeholder feedback pretty quickly, but some of the most meaningful work, I think, requires real adaptive change through multiple levels of an organization.

It requires building human capital capacity or norming teams around some evolution of a vision on how to do something. And the data we've collected from the AI Innovation Index shows that even in systems where that C-suite conviction is really strong, that work is progressing much more slowly, understandably, the complex work just takes time.

And so our theory of action on moving the needle is that in order for us to drive that change, we have to be in community with and supporting a fairly consistent. Community of school systems over time, not just over a period of months, but over a period of years. And these school systems need to be conversing with like-minded peers over a period of years for us to move the needle on some of that work that matters the most.

And so I think we've been fortunate to be in a position where we now have multiple years of sustained partnerships with a great set of organizations. And it has led to now having some school systems that have really been at this for a while, and I think are amongst a top set of innovators around the country and can provide some real inspiration to their peers, especially I think when the work is this emergent.

Having a real example, not just folks like me and you talking about what we think that things should look like, but having some real exemplars, school system level exemplars that folks can turn to and provide inspiration, we think is really critical. And so that's something that I think we've really tried to drive with the communities of practice that we've been engaged with over the last few years.

[00:44:49] Ben Kornell: I wanna get to the AI index, but can you give us an example of schools Network that has really leaned in and done really powerful work and like how does that show up? 

[00:45:01] Aaron Cuny: Sure. So, you know, I think about some of the school systems that have been with us from the beginning. Folks like Dream Northern California, kipp, Southern California, Edna, eight Collegiate Academies in Louisiana.

I think all of these are places where they've actually been able to move from. Some of that higher level work around just setting high level vision or getting the basic policy down on paper to a much more like nuanced exploration of both the opportunities and challenges of implementing things on the frontline.

So whether that be, I think about like Jenny Dougherty at KIPP Northern California who has just been in the weeds in the implementation of some student facing like AI curriculum powered products and the insights that she is bringing now around what successful implementation looks like and what it requires, the systems that she and Kip Northern California are developing to progress monitor the efficacy of the implementation of this technology in classrooms.

I think it's just certainly far beyond where they were a couple of years ago and far beyond where we've seen most other folks in the sector. Right now. And so I think that another thing that we have been talking about for a couple of years, but I think that some of our most innovative systems are just getting much more sophisticated around is managing for quality control in the age of AI.

Clearly there's so much upside opportunity, but to the point I just made a moment ago. If the proportion of people in your school network who can build software goes from 2% to 20% or 40% in the way we're seeing that trajectory happen right now, the implications of managing for quality control are massive.

And so we've seen the sophistication of some of the practices and systems of our partners get better and better over the last year to two years on that front. 

[00:46:59] Ben Kornell: And do you think that the arc of evolution is that people go from these subject matter leaders, these school system leaders go from consumers trying to figure out what's thoughtful implementation and evolve to builders?

Or do you think that there will always be an element of this is really just implementation on a consumer side, or what's your sense of where this is headed? 

[00:47:24] Aaron Cuny: Yeah, we have been working to build out kind of a schema for how we see this software adoption evolving in school systems. And we think that school systems are gonna find use cases for horizontal general purpose AI models.

There's gonna be things that that is best suited for. There's gonna be places where school systems turn to external, vertical solutions, and there will be places where school systems decide to design and build software themselves, either because of cost savings or because of the ability to just customize around workflows in a way that you're not gonna get with any sort of external product.

And so I think it's gonna be a yes and 

[00:48:05] Ben Kornell: yeah, build by partner. All three. Yeah. 

[00:48:08] Aaron Cuny: Yeah. In terms of all three of those pathways and kind of the proportion of each will probably evolve over time. It's probably gonna look different depending on the size of your district or your CMO. What your capacity is to build internally.

It'll be interesting for us to kind of track what that looks like. 

[00:48:25] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I mean, one thing that I love about what you've done from the very, very beginning is you have a theory of change around diffusion of innovation and around implementation that is pre AI informed like community as a practice. That's not a new concept, but what we found, any of the studies, the TNTP famous study, which was like PD that sit and get, you might as well flush the money down the toilet.

It's really in community, both internal to organizations and cross organizations that actually leads to the adaptive change versus just technical change. And the adaptive is the hard part. The technical is actually, ironically, a lot more straightforward. So now we have this massive technical change and there's this huge need for the adaptive supports.

One of the things that I am always surprised by is our philanthropic sector, our government sector, our budgets tend to focus on the technical change, like the what it is rather than how best to implement it. How do you see that playing out and do you think there's a case for a shift in prioritization given We've seen lots of technical potential fail on an implementation side, by the way, just for those who are following along at home, there's that great Khan Academy study where they tried to launch in India and basically same population two years apart.

Basically same product, one with good implementation and one with like anybody can use it and the implementation one incredibly outperforms because it is. Such a huge lever in our context. So with that clear bias from my perspective, how do you think it should be played out in terms of this AI transformation moment?

[00:50:15] Aaron Cuny: Yeah, I appreciate that question. I think this is true now, and it will become even more true in the coming years, that the gap between the technical capacity of the horizon and what's possible with the technology and the readiness of school systems to scale implementation of that in a meaningful and safe way throughout the organization, that that gap already exists.

It was smaller 12 months ago. It's growing. Yeah. It is only gonna get bigger. The, the evolution of the tech is gonna move faster than the curve at which folks are ready to implement. 

[00:50:53] Ben Kornell: So kind of like capability is outstretching capacity for change. And so we need to accelerate on that capacity for change.

[00:51:02] Aaron Cuny: Yes, a hundred percent. A term that I borrowed from someone who's written about this on Substack, Amanda Nu, she has applied this term that's used in economics to AI and organizations right now. And so she's using the term absorption capacity, and I really like that. We think that apart from some of the structural things that are in place.

Like the assessment systems, our accountability systems, those are, I think, gonna be structural barriers to the work in school systems evolving. But apart from that, the real barrier is just absorption capacity. And so how do you move the needle on absorption capacity? You need support. And thought partnership.

You need communities of practice. So we definitely think that we try to encourage a shifting of philanthropic resources to allocate more towards the capacity building work, whether that's work that A-I-E-D-U is doing, or leading educators or work that we're doing at AI for Equity. The folks that are building the capacity of leaders to manage this change process in their systems, I think that is what is going to reduce that gap between what's possible from an opportunity standpoint and you know, what we're able to execute on.

And then also reduce the gap between what will be an accelerating risk and school system ability to manage that risk. 

[00:52:32] Ben Kornell: So one theory of action. That I hear in philanthropic circles, but also kind of in the tech bubbles that you know, we jump into and jump out of is that it's better to start fresh like this kind of changing the old system to the new system is just too intensive from a change.

Cost better to de novo invent new systems that can start fresh and don't have that baggage. That's not where your head's at. Why? 

[00:53:01] Aaron Cuny: I think we would say we would probably echo in some ways what we are hearing from others in the system or in the ecosystem that it should be a yes and like would the education space benefit for more entrepreneurship?

Yes. Do we need the opportunity for more new school models to provide some inspiration? Yes. Because if we're saying that the primary barrier to change is absorption capacity and the lessons we have to learn about, you know, how to move a big system. To address that absorption capacity. Those lessons are gonna be very different than the lessons that we're gonna derive from starting a, you know, a hundred person charter school with a handpicked staff.

And so I think we need those models to provide some inspiration. But new school models are not a strong theory of change for how we address the absorption capacity issue in the school systems. We'll continue to serve the vast majority of kids across the country. And so my concern is that philanthropically, we're gonna get excited about new school models and overinvest there in a way that underinvest.

In building the capacity of the leaders who are serving the vast majority of kids across the country right now. 

[00:54:28] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that it is always challenging the nuance of these Yes. Ands, and I think it, you are a very credible voice on this 'cause you've yourself has started a new school network and you're working with schools that, you know, 30 years ago, 20 years ago were brand new school networks themselves.

I mean, KIPP Northern California is probably like 25 years ago, some 20, you know, like right around when we were teaching in the bay for TFA was when they were just getting started. So it is interesting to think about the absorption capacity almost as a factor of your size too. Mm-hmm. And the smaller you are, the faster your capacity, but then you're multiplying it by a much smaller, you know, factor in terms of impact factor.

Before we go, I do want to talk about kind of two of your big initiatives, the AI index and the HQ AI. Can you tell us a little bit about what those are and what your hope is for those as a vector for change? 

[00:55:32] Aaron Cuny: Yeah, sure. So we launched the AI Innovation Index in September. You know, prior to that point. We had seen lots of AI focused surveys of educators and students, but nothing that really tied together a coherent set of student staff and leadership metrics, specifically AI related.

That matters because we know in any like data set there is gonna be variance. And we know that leadership matters. And so when you have system level data from students and staff and you can tie that to what district or C-Suite leadership is reporting about the leadership work that they've executed on, you can start to draw out what are the aspects of the leadership work that are moving the needle most on how staff feeling they are empowered around AI and how students feel like they're developing agency around AI.

[00:56:24] Ben Kornell: And eventually, ostensibly, you could connect those two outcomes over time and look at what are the models that really had success, what were the factors that they did? So you're making something that. You know, not as transparent, much more visual and allowing people to understand and play around with what are all the levers we might be able to pull.

It's, it's really fascinating. And really healthcare is actually, this is a move that they almost always do in healthcare as they create indexes and then they adjust it over time as they learn new data. But it's a way of making practice much more transparent. 

[00:56:59] Aaron Cuny: I appreciate that last example. And you know, I'll just say that while we have started with a set of.

Student, staff and, and leadership metrics. We, the broader vision for the initiative is building free public infrastructure around AI innovation data collection, and we're working with a bunch of partners to think about as our own understanding of the technology and the work in schools and, and what matters for kids.

As that all of that evolves, how can we evolve the sorts of things that we are measuring in this public infrastructure to continue to gather meaningful data that focuses school systems in the ecosystem on what matters and gives us the opportunity to progress, monitor the efficacy of our investments and of our, our time and attention.

That's the AI Innovation Index. Lots more to to come on on that initiative as it, 

[00:57:50] Ben Kornell: yeah. Let's talk about the HQ AI. Yeah, 

[00:57:53] Aaron Cuny: sure. Yeah. A few weeks ago, along with a number of other wonderful organizations in the ecosystem, we launched HQ AI. You know, one way I've tried to make the case for this work and something that I will ask your listeners to go and try when we wrap this podcast, go into the general purpose AI model, foundational model that you typically use.

Find a long conversation that you have had with the AI, copy and paste the conversation back into the chat and say, what are the ways that I critically engaged with you in this exchange, in this thread? The data that we, and, and I think if you do that, you know, you're gonna find all sorts of ways that you demonstrated critical thinking.

Engaging with the AI, the most successful adults are leveraging the technology as a thought partner in that way. Right now, across industries, the data that we are seeing about how students are leveraging the technology does not evidence that same sort of critical engagement on average, that there are some equity implications that are particularly important.

Recent PEW data is showing that students from lower income families are more likely to leverage AI for task completion, to do the work for them than is. This is happening at three times the rate as students from higher income families. And so, you know, over the last couple of years, the ecosystem has had this emerging kind of focus on how to leverage AI to scaffold student learning, right?

How can we architect software. To improve student access to curricular content, for example. We think that that's super important and will continue to be, should continue to be a priority going into the future. And for students to succeed in the future, they're gonna mean need to be positioned. To effectively engage general purpose models that have not been architected, to drive them towards a specific learning objective.

We think core content instruction is gonna continue to be a place where students are doing meaningful thinking in the coming years, so over the next decade. And so because of that, there is a really critical opportunity and, and we think moral responsibility. To take these spaces where students are developing their thinking and to position them to build their capacity to kind of critically engage general purpose models that they are gonna see in the real world when they walk out of the school building, when they, you know, go on to university when they go into the workplace.

We wanna leverage core content instruction as a, as a space for them to build competency to critically engage these general purpose models. School district AI policies, I think have been vastly insufficient in moving the needle towards this outcome because they don't live at the task level. The right sort of guidance about how to do this does not currently exist in high quality instructional materials.

And so school systems have kind of been left to fend for themselves. So the initiative that we have launched is really trying to position. Schools to give students a durable mental model for AI, use something that travels across platforms, upholds rigor, and kind of outlasts, you know, whatever the, the current moment is in the, the technology.

Our theory of action is that the fastest path. Towards moving the ecosystem in this direction is getting this content into the published curriculum that is in front of the vast majority of kids in the country. Whether that is like quote unquote, you know, the traditional HQIM or the evolving hq, IM 

[01:01:36] Ben Kornell: meaning high quality instructional materials.

Yep. Fits for 

[01:01:39] Aaron Cuny: high quality. Yeah. Or, or the evolving kind of digital future of how these high quality instructional materials are kind of consumed and engaged in by students. I think if we don't do this, we're just gonna again, see this accelerating gap between what the lived experience is of adults and professionals, and then what the experiences that students are having in our ELA math, science, and, and history classrooms.

[01:02:05] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Yeah. This idea of AI where you are, I think really resonates the idea that being attached with high quality instructional materials where tasks live and learning lives. But also love your point about scaffolding so that kids eventually understand how to leverage generalized AI models to their benefit without like rampant cognitive offloading.

You know, it's a temptation that's always there, but like. You know, my hope for the sector is that we'll also be evolving our tasks that we ask kids to do, to a place where actually leveraging AI as a thought partner and enabler becomes one of the frictionless paths as opposed to just generating answers.

Okay. Well, unfortunately you have to wrap here soon. I guess question I'll leave kind of coming out with is what does the future look like? If you wave your magic wand, what does a English language arts class block look like in three years or in five years in one of the school systems that's in your AI for Equity cohort?

What's your ambition? 

[01:03:15] Aaron Cuny: Yeah, my hope in three to five years is that our classrooms are places where AI is being leveraged to scaffold student learning in the way we see happening and with some of the best, you know, emerging software right now in the space, the classrooms are also a place where students are learning how to critically engage AI within the kind, meaningful kind of content based thinking that they're doing.

Where the students are in the driver's seat and they have a mental schema. For how to do this. And they're making, you know, they have agency and they're making good choices to critically engage the general purpose models they're gonna see in the quote unquote real world. I think underlying all of this, I hope that we will have coherent technical infrastructure where both of these things are happening, both AI to scaffold student learning and student engagement with more kind of general purpose models, but this underlying technical infrastructure that's pulling all of that to data together in real time and teeing up for teachers in the moment.

Insights that can inform differentiation, that can inform, you know, the opportunity to highlight students that are doing well. And I think the last thing that will be really important is, I hope our classrooms are spaces where there is space for this social processing together to kind of make sense of, and make meaning of all of this.

Like spaces where students can talk with each other about like, what are we taking away from our engagement with this technology? Like where did the AI push my thinking? What did I reject? You know, in what ways is, do I feel good about this? In what ways do I feel like this is like actually undermining some sort of personal thing that matters to me, or undermining my, my learning classrooms have to be a space where kids can talk about these things with each other and with their teachers.

And so I think that is gonna be just as critical as the work that students are gonna do behind, you know, a computer or pen to paper, you know, on their own. 

[01:05:19] Ben Kornell: Wonderful. Well, with that, we will wrap up the interview. Aaron, if people want to find out more, what's the best way to reach you or find out more about AI for Equity?

[01:05:29] Aaron Cuny: Sure they can find AI for Equity online. They can find me on LinkedIn and you know, if there's anything we can do to be of support or if you have things you wanna contribute to the work that we're doing, you know, don't hesitate to reach out. 

[01:05:40] Ben Kornell: Thanks so much for joining us. Aaron Cuny, CEO, AI for Equity.

Thanks everyone. Have a great day. Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. We have a special guest today, Joshua Broggi, the founder of Woolf. Joshua and I have actually been talking about transforming higher education for years now, and he's one of the people that talks the talk, but is also walking the walk. And so I'm very excited for you to share everything that you've been working on.

Just before we jump in a little bit about Woolf, the mission of Woolf is to expand access to world class higher education that's globally recognized and transferable. Previously at the University of Oxford, Joshua served in the faculty of philosophy and the university's governing parliament. He also held a humble fellowship studying human progress and universities, and Woolf has been quite quite successful in enrolling hundreds of thousands of students over the years.

Welcome Joshua Broggi to EdTech Insiders. 

[01:06:39] Dr. Joshua Broggi: Ben, pleasure to be here. Always good to catch up with you. Nice to see you. 

[01:06:42] Ben Kornell: Before we dive in too far, maybe you could just explain in your own terms, what is Woolf, why did you start it, and what is the kind of problem that you are trying to solve? 

[01:06:53] Dr. Joshua Broggi: I started Woolf with colleagues from Oxford, and it has a little bit of an Oxford flavor to it, so it's a collegiate higher education institution.

It's a degree granting institution with degrees from bachelor's all the way to PhD. So we cover everything from soft, humanities, psychology, social studies, as well as advanced synthetic biology. But we've got deep strengths in technology and business, and as a collegiate institution like Oxford or Cambridge.

It enrolls students in its colleges. And so each college delivers the degree program with a slightly different flavor and students have a slightly different social experience depending on their college. But the central administration manages all of that. And maybe one of the unique things about it is that we're quite global.

So we've got colleges with faculty that are all over the world and we're quite tech forward. So we've built a lot of advanced software to manage the bureaucracy of the institution from a quality assurance standpoint, so on. But at the end of the day, it's a higher education institution. It has a lot of students doing amazing programs, and really we seek to make sure that students leave with a great education.

[01:08:00] Ben Kornell: And Woolf was originally accredited in Europe, but are you accredited in the US now? 

[01:08:05] Dr. Joshua Broggi: So we are still primarily enrolling students in Europe that receive ECTS degrees. Those are recognized in countries around the world, including the United States and in Canada. It's the equivalent to US regional accreditation.

We are now moving into the United States, and so we are beginning that process and that is very high on the agenda. We'll have our first students in the next month or so who will be receiving Title IV funding. But yeah, it's new for us and we are very much in the early days of our US expansion, we have many American students, but they're all technically enrolled in Europe until now.

[01:08:40] Ben Kornell: And some of your innovation has come around accreditation. Specifically getting credits for intellectual work that students are doing in the workplace or online or in other forums or forums and building that into the degree pathway. Can you talk a little bit about some of those innovations that you've pioneered?

[01:09:03] Dr. Joshua Broggi: Yeah, there are three things to think about there. The first is the entrance door into the program and how that's managed. The second is how do you capture and understand what students are learning along the way? And the last part is the exit door. What did students actually learn? So when it comes to the entrance door, we have three ways that students come into Woolf.

The first one's really standard. You maybe have a bachelor's degree and you just straight up go enroll in a master's degree. The second is a little bit more complex, which is the recognition of prior learning. And so we basically give people life credits and we have a pretty advanced process for understanding the portfolio of somebody's experiences, gaining evidence around that and saying, well, you have.

No finished bachelor's degree. You got part of one maybe, but your life experiences actually fill up the gap and so you can get in that way. And then the last one is maybe you don't even have that and it's a performance-based admissions. And so we've got folks that that never went to university but have technology experience or they think they can hack it.

They've got a little bit of technology experience and so on a performance based submission, they can just begin the program without full matriculation. And then they're formally matriculated once they demonstrate adequate progress according to special regulated guidelines. So that's really about the entrance store.

Where things start to get very interesting is for folks that come in with life experience, we can also exempt them some of the credits. So their actual progress in the program is advanced on day one. And I think the most interesting and unusual and powerful way we do that is with a platform that we have called Study Track, where we basically take data that we've accumulated about people that have been learning and other non-accredited programs that we have mapped onto accredited programs.

And we use that evidence to help give them recognized prior learning. And so many people come into Woolf having completed, say, a Udacity nano degree or a part of a bootcamp or something like this. And we've already done the hard work of mapping all those learning experiences. So for example, who just launched a master's degree with Udacity today, and many of the students have completed a nanodegree that is cross-listed already into that program.

We've done the mapping. They can get credit for it on day one. So you enroll and on the first day you discover you're already 10% done the program or something like that at the exit door. Ultimately, everybody has to. Really leave with the right level of competence. And so no matter what kind of entrance store you came through, we have to know as an institution and certify that somebody really has received a great program and gained the skills and knowledge and competency.

And so we have very granular understanding of, of our students and can really present them along the way with how they're doing in terms of their competency development. So a lot of that relies on technology and we've built a lot of technology to support students on the entire journey. 

[01:11:55] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I'm curious, how has AI been an accelerant in your ability to deliver across all three of those phases?

[01:12:03] Dr. Joshua Broggi: It's very early days, and we're learning a lot as an organization. We've been using AI for a number of years and we have a lot of academic freedom in our colleges, for example. And it's one of our big goals to have curriculum that is up to date. And there are times where our faculty will submit five to 10,000 curriculum changes per week.

Now we manage curriculum change pretty quickly and we map every single new piece of curriculum, whether it's a book or a PDF or a new exam or a big project. We map it onto the intended learning outcomes of a program. We write dozen pages of reporting about it. We estimate how long we think a reasonable student with that kind of background, with spend completing it.

And so we'll write 10, 20, 30,000 pages in a week reviewing curriculum. And that process was really hard five years ago, and it's gotten a lot easier, and the quality of the process has gone up a lot. And so faculty are able to innovate more quickly in terms of what they submit to the central administration and how quickly they can get programs approved.

That's just a small example, but we've basically built AI into quality assurance at every level of the organization. We can generate for a student on a moment's notice, an exact report on their current level of competence relative to their goals, whether it's at the course level or sort of the first year of a course degree program, or at the entire degree program itself, and help keep them aligned with where they need to go.

[01:13:31] Ben Kornell: Because you've built this like, uh, pretty comprehensive competency-based model where it's both around entrance, accreditation and then ultimately graduation and matriculation. You've had to hold a higher standard in terms of academic rigor than maybe even in legacy colleges, universities and organizations.

So zooming out in the landscape, there's a lot of questions around, is academic rigor still the high bar that it maybe once was? Universities more broadly. And then second, the university or higher ed business model is under extreme pressure where you're seeing lower enrollment costs exploding. And so it's creating some perverse incentives around lowering rigorous standards in order to admit as many students as possible and so on.

Yeah. So amidst that kind of environment, how are you thinking about playing a strategic role in shaping what 22nd century universities look like? 

[01:14:34] Dr. Joshua Broggi: So quality matters a lot. The difference between getting a badge or a certificate that says you have mastering AI in a weekend versus having a master's degree in artificial intelligence is really big, and that is ultimately rooted in whether or not we as an institution know that we should have given the student the credits that they got and issued the degree that they got.

So we have to have a very high confidence bar around that, and we do very intensive work to make sure we understand what we're giving a degree for. That starts with the curriculum and it ends with the student's actual competency. Now. Many institutions today have very large administrative apparatuses, and that is largely driven by the desire to produce great services for students and to protect students that they are at an accredited institution.

And the answer to every accreditation processes, there's a dedicated committee to that and will review the paperwork and write a report and pass it to the next committee. And the result is it is very expensive in the United States to get a degree, and part of that expense is there to protect the student in terms of quality.

And the student though, may face a lifetime of debt burden. Mm-hmm. While paying for the protection. And so the risk reward ratio on quality has gotten a little wonky there. And at the same time, the first thing that Woolf sees when we launch a program that's maybe been previously running somewhere else and we bring it into Woolf and create a new degree, is the shock of faculty at actually what was going on in their programs.

The shock of administrators. So we have like the complete bird's eye view of everything and it's always a real surprise to institutions when they come into Woolf at what's going on. There are many pockets of excellence in institutions and many pockets of, of failed oversight. And all of that disappears once you have tools that give you full visibility and limitless ability to check on the relative quality.

So I think that the quality bar goes up and artificial intelligence makes that massively less costly as an exercise, which is great for students and institutions. 

[01:16:40] Ben Kornell: One of the things that we had talked about that precipitated this podcast was also there's a way in which you have a direct to students relationship, but you're also partnering with institutions like this.

Yeah. Some institutions you partner with to create a degree program, but now there's an opportunity to actually run pretty comprehensive backend for physical universities and well-known university brands that really are seeking that operational excellence and potentially some of those cost efficiencies so that they can continue to do what they're great at, which is serving their unique communities.

Can you talk a little bit about that journey that led you to this path? How is it going? How are you thinking about what that pathway looks like for a bunch of colleges and universities in the us? 

[01:17:29] Dr. Joshua Broggi: So we are very interested in bringing small brick and mortar colleges in the United States under a Woolf umbrella, and empowering them to be excellent at what they do and maintaining their unique brand and, and style and flavor while benefiting from the administrative.

Operations of Woolf as an organization. So it's not like an OPM model where we bolt on a, an external program or something like that. We are interested in the deep operations of organizations so that they're competing on quality of teaching and research, student provision, and not competing on how excellent their bureaucracy is.

We are very good at bureaucracy administration at Woolf, and that's where we think we can provide a kind of shared back office service to institutions. So it's like an Oxford model in the sense that we are interested in having many colleges come under the hood. It's a little unique in so far as the colleges are geographically distributed across the United States, and we're very comfortable with that.

We've got a pretty broad distribution today on the European side with colleges roughly representing many different countries. So it's a model we're familiar with. It's special that we're bringing it into the US and that it will be brick and mortar institutions in all those cases. 

[01:18:44] Ben Kornell: And just given the student demographics that you've had in the past versus going forward as you have the brick and mortar, will the majority of your students be taking online?

Will they be taking in-person classes? Will it be hybrid? A little bit of both. Like how do you imagine that mix evolving? And then also I'm curious about your kind of, when I say this from the American perspective, international students versus US-based students, how do you imagine that mix to evolve over time?

[01:19:15] Dr. Joshua Broggi: Well, I think the most important thing is that institutions are able to evolve, and right now they have a lot of barriers to evolution. It's very, very hard from a process perspective. I can remember wanting to launch a new degree program at Oxford and knowing just like the number of years of political and social capital it would take to get something like that off the ground for us as an organization with, you know, thousands of curriculum updates a week, new degree launches happening more or less constantly.

We're really good at that, and that is the kind of support that we want to bring to institutions. We don't know how the world is going to evolve. It's going to change. I, I think that most students will take some online learning on their campuses, but they need to live somewhere. They, they need to have colleagues and, and they need to have a social life.

And so that's a really important and critical part of the experience. Having faculty mentors that they see face-to-face is also really important and formative. I went to a liberal arts college, so I've got a deep appreciation for that. On the other hand, when it comes to like expert teaching and mentorship, you kind of roll the dice.

And so when you roll the dice, you go to a campus and there are some experts in the area that turns out to be your area of interest. And there are some like, you know, not so expert, but they're willing to cover it on the side. And what's great about a network that brings together many institutions is that you don't have to roll the dice.

You, you can get the expert you need on a topic and they can continue to support you. And so that quality of matching between your interests and what you need to study and where the expert is, is something that you get in, in a network effects situation where many organizations come together. So I think that's really valuable for students.

You want to have the high fidelity experience of being on a campus and being with people. You also want to have a high fidelity experience of matching to the right person and, and getting the best teaching. 

[01:21:07] Ben Kornell: One scenario is like, I'm looking for expertise, and that expertise is highly distributed. And therefore I don't need to make geography a constraint on accessing that expertise.

The other angle here too is maybe this one location has this incredible program in this certain area, but the kind of basics of Econ 1 0 1 or these other like generalized courses, that I could probably get a pretty good quality experience, even if it is online and you know, delivered Distributively. I can also access that in much, much more affordably and reliably.

So you almost hit both ends of the barbell there. 

[01:21:47] Dr. Joshua Broggi: That's right. Yeah. You know, it's really important that each institution's capacity gets extended and it's not enough to bolt on a kind of external service with external student recruiting, external faculty, external curriculum, and it comes in, it provides a little revenue to the organization and you unplug it and it's all gone.

You, you have to get deep inside and change the bureaucratic processes and capabilities of the institution. And that's a lot harder. It's a lot trickier. It's something we're very good at. And so we've done that with our 25 plus colleges. There's credit mobility between those institutions. There's credit mobility between their life experience in those programs, and there's credit mobility between other things that they can do kind of off platform where they go and and have workplace experiences or do projects that can then get mapped onto their degrees.

And so coming into an ecosystem like that, you want two things to be true. You want it to be true that you're on a campus, you're at this brick and mortar institution, it has a culture, it has an angle, it has a, a deep community and presence in your life. On the other hand, you also want it to be true that there is something great, that it means that you're part of this bigger institution and the resources and alumni networks and job placement facilities and so on of that really do extend the capabilities of each college.

[01:23:09] Ben Kornell: Hmm. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Alex and I, since the beginning of our podcast, we've talked about the world of a stackable degree where you get the Lego kit and it all comes together today, and you have to buy the full kit and you have to build it their way. And there's another world where you could have your Lego pieces from different sets that come together to build your degree.

And really what you need is the, you know, bureaucratic infrastructure to credential that and. Thankfully you've dived into probably one of the most unsexy areas of education to really work on that plumbing and really work on that infrastructure. One of the biggest headwinds that keeps people away from that is just an unwillingness to change often from these institutions of higher learning.

As you're experiencing this now, are you seeing that people are more open to these new models and and changing? Have you gotten less headwind given the evolution of the last couple of years, or is it still really painstakingly challenging and there's only a few bright lights? Like how is it as an entrepreneur in, in that space?

[01:24:18] Dr. Joshua Broggi: I would say that as an entrepreneur, this is not a space you wanna move into unless you're very passionate about it, and, and I'm really passionate about ensuring that the future of American collegiate education is strong, and I think it faces two major headwinds. The first headwind is. Already fully existent.

The kind of cost model doesn't work. You take in students and you lose money and you try and make up for it on a lifetime of alumni donations. The way institutions tend to think about it is, well, we bring in a student and 30% is covered by endowment and donations, or something like that. What it actually means is you're losing 30% on every enrollment and then you, you try and harangue people for the rest of their life in order to make up for the difference.

And that's a tough model that's really hard to survive. And as the. Bureaucracy has grown and student enrollments have decreased, the cost is is really high. So that's the, the current state that would be hard enough if that were all that face these institutions. What now faces them is a growing problem with artificial intelligence where the whole model of education is changing in some very big ways.

And the nature of work is changing. And so what you need to prepare people for in the world has changed and how knowledge management actually operates has changed. And that's super tough. And so executing two of those solutions at the same time is really a lot more than many institutions can bear. And they don't have the resources and depth at this point to be able to do that.

So. Those institutions that do want to become part of a, a broader Woolf University can have some of that solutioning, baked in from day one, which is a big advantage. Are people more willing to do it? We, we have seen a lot of willingness from institutions, so I'm in conversation with a number of boards and presidents right now, and I think it's a very exciting time.

I think people are relatively clear-eyed about the challenge in front of them. Stakeholder management is always tough and people need to safeguard their institutions. They've got a duty of care and they need to steward that institution and it's alumni relations, and so we understand that. And so that has to be preserved and guarded and protected.

I think if they don't change and adopt something though, they'll go to zero. And there are some institutions that would rather die than, than change. But for the ones that are, are prepared to change and, and most are, I think they're clear eye about the challenge and changes will be required to be preserved.

[01:26:49] Ben Kornell: Hmm. Well that is also a clear-eyed answer, so we'll end on that. Thank you so much, Joshua, for joining us today. If people wanna find out more about Woolf University, what's the best way 

[01:27:00] Dr. Joshua Broggi: you can email me directly, Joshua@woolf.university. You can also go to woolf.university in the news section. We've also got a request for proposals from boards and presidents can be confidential about this new Woolf University that we are rolling out in the United States with colleges.

And delighted to hear from folks we're in conversation with. Many, always happy to be a friend and an ally to institutions. 

[01:27:24] Ben Kornell: Wonderful. Well, thanks so much. Joshua Broggi, CEO, and Founder of Woolf University. Thanks so much. 

[01:27:30] Dr. Joshua Broggi: Thanks so much, Ben. 

[01:27:31] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.

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