Inside the Inaugural Columbians in EdTech Showcase: Meet the Winners

Inside Columbia's First EdTech Showcase, Alex Sarlin sits down with the founders and leaders behind the inaugural Columbia EdTech Showcase to explore the startups, ideas, and innovations shaping the future of learning from AI-powered discussion tools to health education, learning science, and content curation.

🎙️ Featuring insights from:

[00:01:56] Pete Novak, Founder, Columbians in EdTech
[00:14:48] Dan Wang, Co-Founder, CAiSEY
[00:32:43] Kyleigh Sudlow, Lead Engineer, Puberry
[00:41:22] Andrew Cohen, Founder & CEO, Brainscape
[00:57:32] Kai Wright, Founder, Tangramio

Disclaimer: Columbians in EdTech is an independent community for individuals affiliated with Columbia University. It is not an official program of, endorsed by, or affiliated with Columbia University. For more information, visit ColumbiansInEdTech.org.

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This season of Edtech Insiders is brought to you by Cooley LLP. Cooley is the go-to law firm for education and edtech innovators, offering industry-informed counsel across the 'pre-K to gray' spectrum. With a multidisciplinary approach and a powerful edtech ecosystem, Cooley helps shape the future of education.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: Innovation in pre-K to grade learning is powered by exceptional people. For over 15 years, edtech companies of all sizes and stages have trusted Higher Education to find the talent that drives impact. When specific skills and experiences are mission-critical, Higher Education is a partner that delivers.

Offering permanent, fractional, and executive recruitment, Higher Education knows the go-to-market talent you need. Learn more at hireedu.com. That's H-I-R-E-E-D-U.com. 

[00:00:33] Pete Novak: In the university setting, and particularly in the Columbia ecosystem, there are a plethora of resources so that students can really experiment.

Folks are able to tackle challenges that positively impact lives that are not just very large VC-worthy categories, but could be niche topics that need solutions. And so what's really exciting is that especially students are working on so many different topics that are truly worthy and important, but they might be on just a little bit different scale.

All of that is considered, and so that, that's very exciting.

[00:01:16] 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. 

[00:01:32] 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

[00:01:56] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to Edtech Insiders. We have a really special episode today. We're actually speaking to a really amazing new edtech group out of Columbia University. They call themselves the Columbians in Edtech, and they just finished their first annual edtech showcase. And what we're doing today is we're talking to the founder of Columbians in Edtech, and then each of the winners of the edtech showcase, so they can tell everybody what they're doing, what their companies are like, and how they're growing their edtech out of New York.

First up, we have Peter Novak. He is a strategic business developer, advisor, and investor committed to supporting the next generation of learners. He is the founder, and he launched Columbians in Edtech, a community that brings together students, alumni, faculty, and staff across Columbia's schools. He also serves on the advisory boards of South by Southwest EDU, the CoDE Awards, Columbia's Tamor Fund, maybe that's Tamor, we'll talk about that, Columbia's Summer Track, and other organizations.

Peter Novak, Pete Novak, welcome to Edtech Insiders. 

[00:03:02] Pete Novak: Alex, delighted to be here with you today, especially with your connection to Teachers College and Columbia, so thank you for the invitation. 

[00:03:10] Alex Sarlin: That's right. I should mention that I am also part of the Columbia in Education community because I am a TC, Teachers College alumni.

That's where I learned instructional design and got into edtech in the first place. Thank you for mentioning that. I should have said that as well. So Pete, you have worked at Columbia to bring together a community of education innovators and entrepreneurs across the campus. See, there are graduate students, there are professors, there are students.

It's really amazing. What is the idea behind Columbians in Edtech and this edtech showcase, and what impact do you hope it has on the participants? 

[00:03:44] Pete Novak: Thanks, Alex. Well, we are, first of all, delighted that Columbians in Edtech community has just completed its first full academic year cycle. So we are a relatively new expanding community, bringing together students, alumni, faculty, and staff across the entire Columbia ecosystem, including Teachers College, Barnard, and Union Theological Seminary as well.

And just before anything else, I just wanted to give a shout-out to the co-hosts, our two interest group co-leads who organized this wonderful showcase, Juliana Hess and Lindsay Dang. So kudos, they put together a wonderful event. And in terms of this event itself, it directly aligns with our mission, which is to support and connect and amplify and share knowledge at the intersection of education and technology.

So this showcase really serves all those functions. First, the event helps provide feedback and a valuable practice experience for the presenters Second, it helps to facilitate connections and conversations. Audience participation was open to all, not just within the community. So we did that purposefully to have a wider conversation, a wider engagement.

Thirdly, it serves to amplify and celebrate the truly tangible developments of the Columbia community. So a little bit about the event itself as a framework. Presenting in the showcase was open to all community members. It is also important to note that we were not really looking to create a-another pitch competition aiming to convince, let's say, investors about whether it's the idea or the team or both, that they are worthy of investment.

Instead, we aim to highlight really innovative solutions, whether from fresh startups or even quite mature organizations that were led or founded by or have significant participation from the Columbia community. So we aim to highlight solutions also from a variety of corners of edtech, the reason being that the community really represents that wide range.

So early childhood development all the way to, to workforce dev. There's lots of activity within the community, and it's really exciting to showcase that. Regarding the impact, that's a great question, and this was our very first showcase. So naturally, for a community with such a diverse membership, the impact and the value for folks will really vary significantly.

So it could be simply receiving feedback on the product or finding the next collaborator or partners, commercial partners, or potentially investors, right? Uh, we did not track quantitative impacts at this point. We will do that in the upcoming iterations, and you can imagine that the relevance and the impact will continue to evolve as the event continues to evolve.

[00:06:56] Alex Sarlin: You know, one of the things that I, I appreciated most about the showcase was this incredibly collaborative feel because the Colombians and edtech community, as you mentioned, it's professors, it's alumni, it's undergraduate students, it's graduate students, it's people coming from Barnard or, or Union. It's really a, a big tent, and Columbia is a big community.

And this year's showcase featured a, a lot of different ideas, as you said, some mature, some brand new, and from different players. We had somebody who was a lead engineer who had come through the Columbia computer science program and was doing edtech. We had a business school professor doing a really interesting AI case study w-work.

There's really, really interesting things happening there. So what stood out to you and to the judges during the selection process of bringing in these ideas? And what characteristics do you feel like the winning ideas share in terms of, you know, their value for the edtech community? And they're very different, but what do they have in common?

[00:07:49] Pete Novak: That's also a great question, Alex. And I would say first and foremost, this was a showcase, not really a competition, so we welcome folks with all sorts of solutions in all range of stages, right? Ideas all the way to, you know, the product has been around for well over ten years, right? So what was really exciting is that this was a showcase that allowed for conversation, and folks really opened up in many cases about some of the challenges that they have had, right, as part of the Q&A.

So just the collaborative approach around the showcase was really, really exciting to see. In terms of what stood out, I think as you mentioned, it's, it's really the variety of ideas that came together. So really look forward to the next one because there are so many exciting projects that are out there.

Judges rated solutions higher, of course, that were well thought out, had clear impact or potential impact. The presenters had several minutes To showcase part of their solution, so to really demo it as well. And so I would say so many of these solutions were really meaningful in their own space. And so that was very exciting to see.

[00:09:01] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. So this year's winner, so we'll give you a little preview 'cause we, we talked to all of them for this podcast, and y- y- they-- Really interesting conversations. We had Dan Wang from CAiSEY, Kyleigh Sudlow from Puberry, which does health education and sort of sex ed, which is really interesting. We talked to Andrew Cohen.

That's when you talk about solutions that have been around over ten years. Brainscape, a hugely popular app that does flashcards that's wor-- been around for fifteen-plus years. It's, uh, but it's grown and grown, and they've added all this AI. And finally, Kai Wright from Tangramio, which is-- has a platform that transforms fragmented online content into unified learning experiences.

So we're talking to all of them. Really interesting, coming on different parts of the entrepreneurial journey. But, you know, you have this goal beyond even this year's showcase to sort of raise the visibility of the edtech world to the Columbia campus and to undergrads, to people who are just trying to under-- you know, who are thinking about what, what they wanna do in the world, and they've, they've been in education for a while, for either as a ed- as a professor, as an adjunct, as a lecturer, as a student.

I'm curious what you see beyond this year's winners. What trends do you see in the edtech landscape in general right now from your position at the head of this Columbia community? What gives you optimism about the future of edtech and education innovation? 

[00:10:19] Pete Novak: Well, first of all, I'm quite optimistic, and the showcase definitely gives me a lot of optimism.

You know, in the university setting and, and particularly in the Columbia ecosystem, there are a plethora of resources, great resources, so that students can really experiment. And not just students, just as you mentioned, Professor Dan Wang, right? 

Yeah. 

It's a safe bubble with resources and support for guidance to accelerate the development, right?

And so what's really exciting in this community, and I'll, I'll start with that, is folks are able to tackle challenges that positively impact lives that are not just very large VC-worthy categories, but could be niche topics that need solutions. And so what's really exciting is that especially students are working on so many different topics that are truly worthy and important, but they might be on just a little bit different scale.

And so all of that is considered, and so that, that's very exciting, right? Everyone needs help. I'm also excited to see, and, and I parallel that with what I saw in the showcase, is there's this trend to consider how AI is and if it is and where it is relevant, right? AI is a wonderful tool. It's a great feature, but it's not always appropriate.

So in the case of CAiSEY, it's virtually all about AI, but plenty of other platforms and solutions, it's not about the AI component, right? It's still about what type of technology is relevant. And so I'm very excited to see that maturity, and it's not all about the hype around AI, right? It's let's be careful how we use the technology, that it's appropriate.

And so that was very exciting, uh, for me, and I, I just start to see that trend in general. And so I look forward to how the showcase evolves in the upcoming years and how the Colombians in Edtech community can provide even more support for alumni, for students, for faculty in order to advance the education space.

[00:12:34] Alex Sarlin: Mm. Absolutely. And you know, we've seen, of course, for a number of years now, all of the innovation in tech generally and in edtech coming out of California, right? We have the Stanford community, Berkeley, a lot of schools that create a lot of edtech there, and then at UC San Diego, and of course, the ASU+GSV conference in San Diego.

But we've seen a real growth in what's been happening in, in the East Coast. B-Boston has had the Learn Launch community for a while. New York edtech Week has grown every year. And I feel like what you're doing with Colombians in Edtech is really helping ground and, and continue to accelerate the momentum in New York, which also has a, you know, a great founder ecosystem, a lot of funding around the edtech world, and not just sort of fintech or advertising tech or marketing tech or medical tech, some of the other things that you see a lot out of New York, and media.

So I, I'm curious, just last question for you, you know, what do you see as the role of New York as a sort of player in the Colombians in Edtech community? 

[00:13:32] Pete Novak: Let's see. If you mean New York as a city, right, or the geography, New York has a certain vibe, certain energy, right? New York is such a unique city with such a global background.

So if folks are looking to find solutions with such a large market, they will find problems that need solving. And so being here in New York is something that is very important. It is very important that Columbia is so closely integrated into the New York City ecosystem, and the same thing applies for the edtech community.

Now, of course, alumni are, are everywhere, right? But as a starting point, there's certainly the energy and the international and the globalization and the diversity component that's such an important part of this community. 

[00:14:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I really agree. So without further ado, let's jump into our conversations with the winners of the first annual edtech Showcase from the Colombians in Edtech community.

Pete Novak, thank you so much for being here, and let's jump into some of these winners. Appreciate your time on Edtech Insiders. 

[00:14:47] Pete Novak: Thank you, Alex 

[00:14:48] Alex Sarlin: Our next winner of the Columbia Edtech Showcase from the Columbians at Edtech is Dan Wang, who is the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School.

He's also the co-founder of CAiSEY, a voice-first AI discussion partner that deepens student learning. Really interesting. He has received multiple awards for teaching classes on technology and strategy, and his research studies how migration, activism, and entrepreneurship shape human progress. He earned his PhD from Stanford and his BA from Columbia.

Dan Wang, welcome to Edtech Insiders. 

[00:15:26] Dan Wang: Thank you so much for having me. 

[00:15:27] Alex Sarlin: Congratulations on the win. I'm sure people don't know enough about CAiSEY. It sounds like you're doing incredibly interesting work and bringing this pedagogical stance, all your teaching awards, to your work at CAiSEY. Give us the overall vision.

What is CAiSEY, and how are you using AI to deepen student learning? 

[00:15:45] Dan Wang: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure, and it was a real honor to hear from so many folks who are building novel, interesting tools that I think are really gonna make a huge difference for not just students, but teachers and everyone, all the stakeholders around them in the educational ecosystem.

CAiSEY is an AI-powered tool that slows students' thinking. It's the only one that I can think of that forces students to engage in their own self-reflection, using their voices in a real-time discussion to get real-time feedback, to hone their thinking, to practice concepts, to apply insights that they've either read about, prepared for, or heard about in class so that they can be more engaged in the classroom.

And the idea largely grew from a friction that I anticipated having as soon as ChatGPT came out in November 2022, which was that Students would prepare for a discussion in my class by having AI summarize what they were meant to read or what they've learned about in class before. And I don't blame them.

I would do exactly the same thing. It's so tempting, and it's really efficient. And so I saw that as a huge opportunity to actually explore how we can use technology to re-engage students, to give them a different type of experience. And after about a year and a half of experimenting, the prototype that we landed on is what we today call CAISEY.

And what's novel about it is that it forces students to use their voice to engage in a real-time immersive discussion with a knowledgeable discussion partner that is able to push back, it is able to give feedback, and is also able to kind of tempt the student to go deeper in their thinking as well. And so the result of that has been really tremendous in not just my class, but many classes around the world.

And I'm really, really happy to be in a position where I can learn more about AI and these experiences, and also bring some of these new learnings to instructors all over the world. 

[00:17:47] Alex Sarlin: It's an amazing idea. So you're talking about slowing and deepening student thinking, and I think that's very directly an antidote to what people are most worried about with AI, that it speeds up thinking, it speeds up performance, but it makes shallower thinking.

People will sort of skirt along the top of lots of ideas, summarize them, get synopses and AI takes on things, but not actually engage in the thinking themselves, which we know is so important for pedagogy. By the way, before we go further, I should also mention that CAISEY is spelled C-A-I-S-E-Y, if you are looking it up right now.

So it sounds like CAiSEY, but it has the AI right baked into it. So tell us about how this actually looks in practice. You have a student sitting down, you teach at Columbia Business School. Let's say they've just read a whole bunch of case studies or a whole bunch of different articles about what's happening in a particular type of business strategy.

They maybe have read them, they maybe have synopsized them. How does CAISEY help them slow down, engage in that sort of metacognitive productive struggle, actually make sense of the concepts rather than just sort of jump off without really knowing? 

[00:18:50] Dan Wang: Absolutely. Let me first set the context by telling you what they used to do.

So how I used to have students prepare is following the set of steps that you just so aptly laid out, which was to have them read, to have them think about the reading, which is usually about a business scenario. In many cases, it's real and happened in the past. Sometimes it's fake, and students might know that as well.

But the scenarios push the students to use their judgment to ask them, "Based on what you've learned and based on what you know about the facts in this case, what would you do about a given question?" And often in the kinds of classes I teach, these questions range from, would you actually develop a new product to explore this new market, or would that be too risky?

And so these are all judgment calls. What students would do is that they would finish the reading, they would write down their thoughts, and they'd come to class ready to discuss. And so much of the learning comes from class discussion. They're ready, they're motivated, they hear from each other, they get challenged.

And running a discussion among 75 people is no joke for the students, but especially for the instructor. There's a lot to keep track of, but it's also so energizing as well. So you can imagine how that experience for the student would be extremely shortcutted if they didn't have all the facts in their brains, and if they haven't really had an opportunity to really engage deeply on thinking about their own opinions and their own assumptions as well.

And immediately, that's what I and many of my colleagues saw was the effect of AI. It wasn't so much that students were learning more efficiently, I'm sure some of them were, but actually the classroom experience diminished for them, and that's really worrisome when you can see that immediate effect And so what CAiSEY does is that it asks students to do something really, really different.

They can read and use whatever AI tool, I don't police this, to read their case. But what CAiSEY does, it forces them not to copy and paste and engage with another AI, but it actually adapts to their own learning, and so it pushes back. It's a debate partner. So if there are contravening positions on a given judgment-based decision, then students will begin with their view.

CAiSEY will illustrate why a opposing view might be more effective, and they have a back and forth. Now, I thought that these kinds of conversations that I would ask students to engage with would last maybe on average five minutes. But what we actually found was that students would go about 15, 20 minutes on average in talking to CAiSEY, and they would mid-conversation when CAiSEY, which we've done, asked them to-- whether they wanna wrap up, they'll say, "No, I wanna keep going."

And so it's the only tool that I can think of, as one of my co-founders, Jill Cohen, says, that students ask for more of. And the result of that is that even compared to pre-AI, when students come to the classroom, I have to be on my game even more because they're sharper, they're more focused, and they're more motivated, and they often reference these conversations as well.

So that's been an immediate effect in which I can see, at least in this kind of sliver of experience, that there can be a real complementarity between AI and also the classroom 

[00:21:57] Alex Sarlin: It's fascinating. And, you know, one of the real benefits of AI, I think, as educators and edtech people, one thing we, we sort of all understood but maybe haven't really implemented yet, I think you, you are an exception, is that idea that AI can adapt so much to what people are doing, and we've been calling it personalized education, individualized, differentiated.

But I think the use case that you're talking about there is a little different, which is that AI can be intelligent, right? It can be a, a true intelligence that can actually raise your intelligence, debate with you, challenge your assumptions, get you to stop and think deeper. That's never been true of edtech before, right?

You don't en- debate with a textbook. So I think it plays to one of AI's great strengths, which some AI tools don't. And I'd love to hear you talk about that. You know, how do you train your tool, CAiSEY, to be a debate partner that actually spurs students to be more pedagogically sound, more thoughtful about their own approach?

[00:22:51] Dan Wang: Yeah, that's an excellent question. It is the aspect of developing CAiSEY that I am most proud of because it was a su- sincere team effort. Creating a tool like CAiSEY is not something that can be vibe coded in thirty minutes. From the demo, it seems like it could, but there are so many nuances to human conversation, pedagogical instinct, and also what makes something pedagogically legible that it requires a lot of iteration.

So I'm so proud of our team of engineering experts and educational experts who have contributed to this and all the many, many users when we were first developing this, who lent their time to actually using the tool, allowing us to observe, and then actually seeing what works and what doesn't work as well.

So the training involves actually taking years and years of notes from many discussions that I've carried out, that my colleagues have carried out, that others have carried out, and codifying them into a set of instructions. What powers CAiSEY underneath is a set of instructions that's broken into several components that define the persona, the purpose, as well as the conversational guide rails that actually enable CAiSEY to have a conversation that feels very intentional.

Students are well aware it's an AI. Don't get me wrong. I mean, occasionally students might say thank you or good night to CAiSEY, which is always funny when that happens, but to me, that's a signal that this is an experience that's engaging. And so because of those instructions mixed with the native voice model that we use, which comes from OpenAI, there is an element of not just personalization, but also kind of adaptive feedback that students get that's unique.

I love that you mentioned that as well. If there's a persona that I would put on CAiSEY as a default, it would be something akin to an adversarial empath. It's a peer. It's not an instructor. And as a result, we've determined through empirical verification based on a lot of research that we've done, not only internally, but also some that are under review at, at various peer-reviewed outlets, that personality matters a great deal And we see that it has these behavioral effects on a student's thinking and lasts for a long time after even that first conversation.

And so that's, that's kind of how it works under the hood. 

[00:25:06] Alex Sarlin: That's really, really interesting. I, I totally agree that personality matters a lot, and one of the things that has always driven me a little bit crazy about the default model, the general purpose models, is that when you get into a learning discussion and you start, you know, asking it questions or you start really engaging, it loves to sort of like take over.

It loves to sort of talk a lot and then offer you really very specific suggestions at the end of its responses. Say, "Okay, I just told you all this stuff. Do you wanna do this or this?" And it like, it really takes a lot of the agency out of the conversation. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how what you're doing with CAiSEY is different than a conversation with a Claude or a conversation with ChatGPT.

How does it feel different and how does it work to get to a deeper level? 

[00:25:47] Dan Wang: There's a few things that are represented in CAiSEY that would be impossible to achieve if you and I were to use our own kind of personal ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini accounts to try to simulate the same conversation First are the set of system instructions that I just mentioned.

These are kind of instructions that are built from decades of research, from social psychology, from computational linguistics, sociology, that all speak to how to, in many ways, have productive disagreements, and also how those types of principles can be adapted to a conversation as well. The system instructions also contain a lot of technical detail that are specific to governing the behavior of large language models.

That's something that a user does not really have much control over when they're using their personal accounts from a generic chatbot as well. And the third thing that's represented is the instructor's voice, and that's something that's really important here. A core element of CAiSEY when it's deployed in a class like mine, which is about business strategy, or in a class on accounting that might be taught in a different business school, or in a class on veterinary science, which is a use case where we've also seen CAiSEY as well, is that the instructor's voice is really important, and it's important that it's there.

Now, the voice is not literally the voice of CAiSEY, of the instructor, but the kinds of pedagogical ideas, the instructional insights are fully embedded by the instructor's direction into the conversation. And students are very much aware that this is, this is a, an academic curricular experience that they're engaging in, and that complementarity is apparent in that as well.

And so inasmuch as CAiSEY's a tool to help students slow down, deepen their thinking, enjoy the friction of learning, also a tool for instructors to think about this new mode of learning, this new modality that they can be creative with as well, in which they can express themselves, and it makes them reconsider some of their ideas as well.

And so it's been a real joy kind of building for instructors. Most of CAiSEY's actually for instructors, a lot of the tools that we provide to them. 

[00:27:54] Alex Sarlin: That's really interesting. I love that phrase, "Enjoy the friction of learning." I feel like that encapsulates something so core about what is important about learning and what we-- is sort of our challenge in the AI era, is how do we not only engage in friction, how do we have that struggle?

How do we have those takes and those complications and, you know, wrestling with concepts, but in a way that's actually engaging and fun and enjoyable. I love that. Quick question for you, and then I, and then I wanna zoom out and talk about the Columbia piece as well. Is there a multiplayer mode? Do you envision or do you already see a place where you have, you know, three students debating and CAiSEY is in the room?

Because that sort of pro-social AI is another really interesting trend we're beginning to see. 

[00:28:32] Dan Wang: Yeah. That's probably among the top requested features that we have. We had a prototype of something like that, and we're still experimenting. Going from a one-to-one conversation to a one-to-many conversation entails various logistical challenges, including making interruptions natural, including making crosstalk, which seem kind of counterproductive, actually rather important to the course of a conversation as well.

And so we are actually playing around with a new kind of model that we're hoping to, to access fairly soon, call it an interaction model or interactivity model, that makes these kinds of group-based conversations much more natural, and we're excited to integrate that as our next step. I think that is absolutely one way to extend a lot of the application here, and that would kind of enter all of us, you know, instructors, stakeholders, education technology specialists, into a whole new world of learning as well.

It would take the Oxbridge tutorship model and envision it a whole different kind of multidimensional experience. I don't even have the metrics to be able to think about what that looks like, but I'd be excited to try it. 

[00:29:40] Alex Sarlin: It sounds amazing. It really sounds very, very exciting. And then l- let's talk about the Columbia piece.

You know, you, you were-- the Colombians in Edtech is this really engaged group of people in all sorts of different parts of the Columbia ecosystem. I, myself, was a Teachers College graduate and spent a good amount of time at Columbia, as well as we talked a little bit before this, my, my parents were Columbian Barnard graduates.

You have a similar story. We both have very deep Columbia roots. Tell us a little bit about your relationship with Columbia and what the Colombians in Edtech group has been doing to spur innovation in this really amazing university setting. 

[00:30:13] Dan Wang: Yeah. Working with Colombians in Edtech has really been a joy.

It's something that I've only recently been in contact with, but the leadership has just been terrific in terms of organizing folks. I think Pete has done a great job of mobilizing, getting out there. I've come to know him. He's actually learned a quite a bit. He's, he's pretty much an expert on, on CAiSEY these days as well.

And so we're really grateful to the group too. I think the group speaks to the distribution and also the concentration of talent and interest in this area as well, and it hasn't really even kind of like cracked the market share, as it were, of folks who are interested in these types of technologies and also approaches across Columbia as well.

But yeah, I come from a family of Columbians as well. My dad got his PhD from Columbia in the history department. My mom got her master's from Teachers College as well. She specialized in ESL and linguistics, and so teaching and research run in my family quite a bit. I then later went on to go to college at Columbia, uh, Columbia College.

After my PhD, which was on the West Coast, I, I came back almost 14 years ago to teach at Columbia Business School, and that's been a really different type of experience. The business school has a whole set of principles and goals, its own semester system, its own kinds of technology systems as well that are suited to its needs and its unique kind of programmatic ob-objectives.

But it's just been such an energizing experience year after year, having to adapt to that type of environment, being shaped by it as well, and now having the privilege of, of shaping it through technology. 

[00:31:48] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. And it, it's such an amazing group, and it spans, you know, undergraduate students, graduate students, professors across, you know, Columbia has so many different areas and schools.

Obviously, Teachers College, it also has a seminary, it also has a, a business- amazing business school. It, it has, you know, veterinary science. It has so many different aspects to it. So it's j- it's really cool, and I got to sit in on a little bit of this edtech showcase. It's just amazing to see that energy sort of being harnessed.

And Pete Novak, who you're mentioning, has done an amazing job as well. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this conversation. Everybody should be checking out CAiSEY because I think there's something really, really, really powerful about that idea of enjoyable friction and, uh, you know, w- and dialogue.

And, uh, Dan Wang is the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School and the co-founder of CAiSEY, a voice-first AI discussion partner that deepens student learning. Thanks so much for being here with us on Edtech Insiders. 

[00:32:41] Dan Wang: Thanks so much, Alex. 

[00:32:43] Alex Sarlin: Our next winner of the edtech Showcase at the Columbia University with the Columbians of edtech is Kyleigh Sudlow.

She's the lead engineer at Puberry, a gamified AI-powered health education platform for K-12 students. Kyleigh joined the company as a software engineering intern while studying computer science at Columbia, and she now leads engineering and product development for Puberry. Before technology, she was a professional ballerina with the Boston Ballet.

Definitely the only ballerina turned edtech person we have ever had on this show. Amazing. Kyleigh Sudlow- Oh ... welcome to Edtech Insiders. 

[00:33:21] Kyleigh Sudlow: Thank you so much. 

[00:33:22] Alex Sarlin: What a background. Happy to be here. Yeah. So first off, tell us about what Puberry is. You can hear that sort of Puberry, puberty, health education in the name.

Tell us what it is and what you're doing for K-12 students. 

So the main problem we're seeing are many health topics for the K through 12 age range are

very uncomfortable to discuss. I'm sure you can relate, as I can. Those puberty, mental health, menstrual, sexual health topics can feel very awkward, and students don't often know where to go for reliable information. And increasingly, we're seeing more students turning to social media like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for this type of information.

On top of this, schools are asking to deliver more health education curriculum, but they're often lacking the time to create the curriculum, lacking modern curriculum tools, and engaging resources as well. So where we think we fit in in our unique solution is we're obviously a tech product. Students are already learning digitally in schools, and they crave interactive experiences, I find, to help outperform static worksheets and, you know, boring tasks like that in school.

So the gamification aspect of our app helps to create engagement more, you know, higher retention, and the technology helps meet students where they already are Why us specifically? We are medically verified content, engaging, age-appropriate for all grades. We provide a separate portal for kindergarten as opposed to obviously 12th grade or 10th grade.

We also have platforms for the students, teachers, and the parents to help keep them all connected. And we just make this implementation easier for schools to help bring the comprehensive health education to the students. 

Health education is so important, and yes, as you say, it's sometimes uncomfortable, it's sometimes awkward to be, what, you know, doing health education with teenagers, but it's definitely not something you wanna outsource to social media of all places to learn about 

health.

A hundred percent. It's a scary place. It's a lot of information. 

A hundred percent. Yeah. So you are one of the winners of the edtech Showcase this year. This is such an interesting edtech company. What do you think made the Puberry stand out among this year's showcase winners? What got the judges excited, and what sort of got you visible for this type of award?

I hope a lot of things helped us stand out. I think just to mention at, in the

showcase, we did go last, so I honestly didn't have much hope. It was a long two-hour thing, so I wasn't sure where we would land. But we have a lot going for us in terms of real-world impact. Puberry

is not just a concept or prototype. It's already being used by New York City public schools. We're also launching small programs for schools in Greece to help get a taste of what-- Hopefully, they sign long-term contracts with us, and that's because our founder, Denise Chameleos, is Greek, so she has a lot of contacts over there.

And as we're working with the New York City public schools, we are going in to help onboard teachers and students, so we get to have the real user feedback face-to-face and see how the kids and teachers are actually using it and take their feedback and actually apply it in real time. We're also solving a very tangible problem, as you have been mentioning.

Everyone understands that health education is important, and many people can relate to gaps in their own education growing. And just to reiterate, we really focus on user experience because as much as kids are familiar with technology, there's a lot of specific things you have to find when it comes to the user interface for kids to be able to use a website.

'Cause that's

why we try to take a very modern approach to our design as well, so that they can relate it to more apps that they're using on their parents' phone and stuff they're more familiar with. We find a lot of challenges when it comes to the user experience with kids. 

I have to also ask about your amazing background.

You were a ballerina in the Boston Ballet, and you went to computer science and then have become the head of engineering. Tell us about this transfer. 

[00:37:48] Kyleigh Sudlow: Yeah, sure. So as you said before, going to Columbia to study computer science, I was a professional ballerina with the Boston Ballet. I trained, like, since the age of five, and COVID obviously influenced a lot of our life decisions at the time and back in 2020.

So I moved to New York. I applied for this great program called General Studies at Columbia, where they help people with non-traditional paths to higher education. So I graduated with my CS bachelor's last year, actually, and I joined Pewberry as an intern while I was still studying. At the time, I was obviously looking to gain some hands-on startup experience and software engineering experience.

I never expected to actually end up in this position to be leading engineering, but it's been amazing, and I've learned so much. I think What's surprised me the most is how quickly I've been able to grow as I've been given ownership over basically building the entire Puberry web application from the ground up.

And obviously, in a startup, fast-paced environment, I'm n- you're not always necessarily confined to your own role. So I've gotten to experience a lot when it comes to the business side. I've had the opportunity to pitch to investors, do demos like this showcase, and it's really helped my professional growth, obviously.

Like, not every day does a software engineer get to pitch to investors. You know, normally we're behind the scenes. So it's really awesome experience for me. As much as it makes me a little nervous 'cause I feel like I prefer to be behind the computer. But- ... it's been really good for me overall, obviously.

And I've really enjoyed the mission aspect of Puberry as well. I remember thinking when I was looking for an internship to begin with that I really wanted to work somewhere that was gonna leave an impact, and leave an impact on children is really a big thing to be able to say. And working on something, something directly impacting students is super meaningful.

Every feature has a real learner on the other side. And as I said before, the fact that we get to go into these schools and converse with the kids and kinda see what they're feeling. Like, they love our blueberry character, and they get to choose characters when they sign up. And they're, like, begging for plushies and new designs and outfits for the characters.

So it's super special to get to work for a company like this. 

[00:40:17] Alex Sarlin: Amazing. When you look ahead to two years from now, what do you hope Puberry has accomplished, both as a company and in terms of educational impact? 

[00:40:27] Kyleigh Sudlow: Oh, gosh. Big question. I really hope that we can scale to be able to get to schools across the United States, of course.

And now that we have some traction in Europe as well, I think that would be a huge goal for us, to be able to supplement health and sex education around the world. As we've been talking about, like, we all experience those big gaps when it comes to sex and health ed. So if we can help fill those gaps for schools all over, that would be incredible.

[00:40:59] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic. Kyleigh Sudlow leads engineering and product development at Puberry, which is a gamified AI-powered health education platform for K-12 students. 

And they are recent winners of the edtech Showcase at Columbia University. Congratulations, Kyleigh, and all the luck to you and Puberry. 

[00:41:19] Kyleigh Sudlow: Thank you so much, Alex.

This was so nice. 

[00:41:22] Alex Sarlin: For our next amazing founder from the Columbia community, we're here with Andrew Cohen. He's the founder and CEO of Brainscape, a web and mobile education platform that helps millions of people study more efficiently. Brainscape allows students of all ages to create, share, and find great, smart flashcards for any subject, and to study them using a fun social experience scientifically proven to boost retention.

We've also known each other for a long time. We were, uh, w- in the exact same cohort at Teachers College in Columbia. Andrew Cohen, welcome to Edtech Insiders. 

[00:41:56] Andrew Cohen: Good to be here 

[00:41:57] Alex Sarlin: So congratulations on winning the edtech Showcase. Brainscape is a tool that has been out in the world helping millions of people for a number of years.

Tell those who don't yet know about Brainscape what it does and how it was born out of the Columbia community, as well as what makes it different from other flashcard apps out there. 

[00:42:13] Andrew Cohen: Well, you did a great job in the intro of describing what it is in a nutshell. I think a lot of people kind of anchor us to, you know, Quizlet, Kahoot!,

lots of other study tools that are out there for web and mobile. Brainscape's real differentiator is that we are laser-focused on helping you retain information over the long term. So, you know, a lot of other tools out there, they might be able to help you take your notes, break it down into ways to understand it better in the short term.

Maybe you can transform it into a podcast or a quiz, make it a little bit more fun, perform a little bit better on the test tomorrow. But if you're preparing for the medical boards or you're learning a language really seriously, you know, as an adult, a deliberate learner, if you're prepping for law school, you need more of like a Fitbit for studying, something that's gonna really help you push your goals over a long period of time and use the science of learning to make sure that content is sticking and compounding on top of each other, rather than the typical pattern of cram for a test, like you might do in some other tools, forget the information, and move on and have to relearn it again later.

So Brainscape, yeah, particularly is differentiated by the cognitive science and the effectiveness of our study platform. 

[00:43:26] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So tell us a little bit about those cognitive science principles. You use a number of different sort of instructional design and learning science principles to make that exact outcome you're talking about, so that it's not just short-term retention, it's actually consolidation long term.

People can actually make sense, build schema, and sort of make sense of the information in a way that actually will help them over the long term, which is, at the end of the day, usually what we actually want from our learning, especially as you mentioned, if we're serious about it and not just getting through the next quiz of the week.

What principles are you using? 

[00:43:57] Andrew Cohen: I like to call it the holy trinity of the learning intervention process, which are active recall, metacognition, and spaced repetition. So active recall is essentially what you do on a flashcard. You're thinking of the answer from scratch, whether it's just a vocab word, whether it's an entire process, right?

Describe how photosynthesis works. Or on multimedia it could be, you know, reciting a song, it could be identifying an image. But you're doing it from scratch, not just by recognition like one might be doing on multiple choice. So it's the most powerful form of retrieval practice. The second pillar, metacognition, right?

Thinking about your thinking, reflecting on how well you know something. Brainscape is asking you, upon showing you each answer, on a scale of one through five, how confident were you? How well did you know this? And that forces you to reflect upon the strength of your knowledge, which in and of itself is something that's gonna strengthen your knowledge more effectively than just passively proceeding to the next question.

But then third, and probably most importantly, we use that metacognitive confidence assessment to determine how soon to show you that flashcard again. So if it's a really hard question, you gave yourself a one, you might see that word or concept again in just a minute or two. But if it was something you knew perfectly, you give yourself a five, we might not ask you for months or, or ever.

So what you're doing is you're optimizing your, your personal study stream, uh, to keep every piece of information right in the zone of proximal development, which is just long enough that you would've otherwise been about to forget it. And if you can keep everything there, then you're gonna not only learn faster, retain longer, but you'll also stay motivated because things are more engaging.

We also wrap that in a whole bunch of, you know, motivation science, social learning theory. You know, you can see kinda leaderboards of, of where you stack up. You can even create a mix of content across all different subjects that you might be studying. So it's not just for studying one subject, but you can sprinkle in personal trivia or jokes or things from your, your Spanish class and your science class and your history class or whatever is in your personal brainscape, and that concept of mixing up, uh, different subjects is called interleaving And interleaving has been shown to, you know, be more realistic of what you might encounter in the real world, but the real, real world doesn't warn you you're about to, you know, work on geography knowledge, right?

Somebody might drop a, a question or a fact at any, any moment. But it also keeps you more engaged. So active recall, metacognition, spaced repetition, social learning theory, interleaving. And if you're making your own flashcards manually, the hard way, you're using elaborative interrogation, which is yet another way to really internalize and own that knowledge because you're synthesizing it yourself.

[00:46:48] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It's a beautiful spectrum of different powerful instructional design principles and techniques that all come into play there. It's funny, I was, I was catching myself using elaboration as you described that because, uh, AMS, your holy trinity, are my initials, so that's a very easy thing for me to hang that on the active recall metacognition spaced repetition.

I'm like, "Well, that-- I'm gonna remember that one." Fantastic. It's really interesting. So Brainscape has been out for a while, and you've been building a user base, you've been building loyalty and excitement for a long time. I'm curious, you know, language is obviously a go-to subject for flashcard learning.

I'm sure there are lots of language learners of v-various types on your, on the app in the community, but what are some of the other topics that you see being frequently learned in this way with all of these instructional design principles? You mentioned the medical boards, but I'm just curious because you've been, uh, you've been working with so many users over the years.

[00:47:39] Andrew Cohen: Yeah. I mean, I, I think we resonate the most heavily in very knowledge-intensive subjects that have some sort of an ex-exam or assessment at the end. Uh, so medicine obviously, right, you're prepping for the boards or even before medical school, right? You're gonna, you're gonna take the MCAT, and that just requires a tremendous amount of biology, chemistry, biochem, even physics and, and psychology now, that you just need to, to internalize these concepts.

And we often, especially for some other, you know, professional certifications, right, you know, welding and, you know, anesthesiology or, you know, these finance or, or accounting or, or, you know, random kinda law specialties, we a-assume that these people who have been out of school for a long time and then going to change career are just magically great students.

And we give them, you know, three books this thick and say, "Here's your, your test prep material. Just go ahead and study this and, and, and cram it, and then you're gonna have this exam." And it's incredibly anxiety producing You have a highlighter, you've got notes in the margin, you're doing whatever. But to remember that, oh, the, the content on page 117 was really hard, and I'm probably gonna be right at the, the fringe of forgetting it, you know, next Tuesday because that's how strong that knowledge was, and I have to go-- remember to go back to page 117 and reread what I, what I highlighted.

That's just impossible and it's cumbersome, and Brainscape really just solves that anxiety for somebody that has a lot to retain. So the number of, of subject areas is tremendous, but we've even seen it sort of coming do- down into, you know, high school and even younger for, you know, the AP exams in the US.

I was just in the UK for three weeks. We've been blowing up among GCSE and A Levels prep because those are summative, knowledge-intensive, high-stake exams that you prep for, for, for a year or two. So we've got entire schools that are deploying Brainscape across all of their students through the faculty who are curating and creating the content for and with the students.

So yeah, anything that's knowledge intensive, maybe not as much, you know, something like philosophy or math or, you know, that are, that are very reading comprehension intended or, you know, math where there's just really, really good adaptive math software out there. So I wouldn't really try to shoehorn it into Brainscape.

But that said, I just visited a school where the most prolific Brainscape using department was the math department, and they were taking screenshots of test questions and pasting them onto the question side and the answer side with the explanation, and having students use the flashcards that way and rate their confidence.

So I suppose skills-based subjects as well as knowledge-based subjects that has just a tremendous amount to remember. But again, we shine where the number of things that you have to learn are in the thousands. If you've got, if you've got a 30-question vocab quiz coming up tomorrow, sure, we might be slightly better than Quizlet, but we're probably gonna be less fun.

Like go use Quizlet, go use Kahoot, it'll be a blast. But if you've got a lot to remember, Brainscape's your tool. 

[00:50:31] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Yeah. I remember studying for the GRE and having like a vocab pile of flashcards, you know, this big, I wish Brainscape was around then. That was obviously before when going to teacher's college, before you had, before Brainscape existed.

The other thing just to highlight, I think, you know, highlight pun intended there, is that highlighting and, and rereading are actually proven techniques not to work. I mean, this is one, one of the, my favorite papers in learning science is this Dunlosky paper from Kent State, and it looked at all these, you know, study techniques and all the ones you named that are baked into Brainscape are on there as effective.

And things that people think are effective, like rereading, looking over or looking at page 119, again, highlighting and thinking that you're gonna remember it, none of those actually have anywhere near the kind of outcomes that you see. 

[00:51:12] Andrew Cohen: Yeah. They create the illusion of knowing, right? That you got pretty colors in there.

All these different principles that have come and go as the fad, you know, learning styles or like the whole child reading movement where it turns out, oh, actually physics or, or, uh, phonics is in fact important, or you've got, you know, inquiry-based learning and, you know, then students go off the rails and you realize, oh, some explicit instruction turns out to be, to be positive.

So I think all those things in, in common, including highlighters We want to believe that they work. We wanna, you know, read, read the science selectively because they are less effort, and we wanna, we wanna believe the things that are easier, that feel better. But the science of active recall, spaced repetition, and metacognition have, have just stood the test of time for really 150 years since the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve first came out.

[00:51:59] Alex Sarlin: That's right. And you were in the UK for three weeks, but right before that, you won the edtech Showcase at the Columbians in Edtech. I think it was the first annual edtech showcase coming out of that really exciting group. Tell us a little bit about your relationship to Columbia, to the Columbia edtech community, and what it means to be a winner coming out of this showcase, especially for a veteran product that y- has been changing minds and lives for a long time.

What, what does it mean to you, and what does the Columbia community do to support entrepreneurs like you? 

[00:52:28] Andrew Cohen: Well, Columbia Teachers College is actually kind of where Brainscape was born. You know, I came into my degree with Brainscape as originally a personal project that I, I made while I was living in Panama, working on some controversial World Bank projects and had to get very good at Spanish and banking and, and law and all these things very quickly.

But it was really Columbia that helped me with the tools to understand the cognitive science behind the principles that I'd stumbled upon and helped give me the tools for, you know, whether it was beginner programming or whe- whether it was the micro media course to, you know, how to, how to create a, a website to showcase this information.

And just using every, every part of my degree, every, every course to work on a little bit of the Brainscape mission, right? Just kinda choosing my own course projects. And the fact that it was so flexible, the fact that, you know, it gave me the ID card to allow me to go across the street and talk to the psychology department or, you know, engineers in the computer science department and sort of comparing notes on what I was building, was just a tremendous playground to then, you know, validate that I am in fact onto something, that it was worth, you know, kind of going on And, you know, raising money from friends, family, and fools to proceed making every mistake in the book.

But just having the Columbia community, a name and everything, of course, behind me, it opened a lot of doors, and I'm just glad to be continuing to participate in the community now almost, what, 18 years later or whatever it's been. 

[00:53:54] Alex Sarlin: Incredible. Yeah. It's such a long time ago, but I remember talking to you at Teachers College, and you were talking a lot at that time, like you said, about metacognition, about this idea of confidence.

Like that one thing that was explicitly missing from almost every learning app was that metacognitive reflection layer of being like, "Okay, I, I might know this, but I don't think I know this very well. And if I give that information back to a system, it can use that data in really interesting ways." It's the M in the, in the trinity, and it was the real insight that I think helped spawn Brainscape.

[00:54:24] Andrew Cohen: Amen. 

[00:54:25] Alex Sarlin: We're almost out of time here, but for those who don't know about the Colombians in Edtech community, you know, a lot of universities around the country are starting to, because there's so many students are coming out actually really interested in technology and in impact, so they're looking for ways to use technology to make meaningful impact, and they've had this long educational experience.

So a lot of people are really interested in edtech, but they don't always know what it is. They don't know the field. They don't know that they can be entrepreneurs. They don't know there are accelerators and investors and this whole world. I'm curious what advice you'd give to a, a student or somebody who's thinking about going into edtech right now.

[00:54:59] Andrew Cohen: Don't do it. Just kidding. You know, unless, unless you are-- have a lot of grit and you're willing to be open to a world of hurt and learning from, from thousands of mistakes and being told every day that your idea will never work, and nobody will ever pay for it or buy it, or how are you gonna compete with Google or Kaplan or Duolingo or Quizlet or, or whoever the company is.

You have to really, really believe because you're gonna be going through the gauntlet. So that's number one. If you don't really love this idea, if you're not willing to, to pursue it for, you know, what might be 10 or 20 years and become your identity, then maybe, you know, keep looking for what you're doing.

But if you have that as a prerequisite- ... then, you know, just remember everybody around you is, you know, until they want you to succeed, even though, you know, they, they say they don't, they're willing to help. And so you have to just be asking for introductions. You have to be asking for advice. You have to be extremely, extremely hungry, and you have to be not afraid to share your idea.

The, the biggest fallacy as a first time entrepreneur, and I made it myself all the time, is, well, I can't tell people my idea because somebody might steal it, right? Somebody's, somebody's gonna go start that company. Nobody is gonna drop everything that they're doing, jump off the cliff and give the passion that you're giving to your idea to do a great job with it.

And if they were, and you're worried that they're gonna do a better job than you, then maybe you weren't the right person to be the founder anyway. No big company is gonna do that because nobody, you know, moves fast enough. So yeah, just put yourself out there and the universe will deliver if you, if you keep pushing through and, and getting up every time.

[00:56:36] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. That's terrific advice. It, it does-- It definitely takes grit. It definitely takes faith, but I think at the end of the community is incredible. And you know, somebody who's been spending years, both of us, but you know, I've been very, very actively spending years talking to people at every corner of the edtech community.

It's the, the nicest. It's just a group of people who truly care about the world, who truly wanna make it better, all the way up and down the stack from the dorm room startup to the giant edtech companies. I just find it an incredible community. So I, I love your advice to get out there, connect with people, ask for intros, find out what mistakes others have made so you don't have to always make them yourself.

Fantastic. As always, it's always really fun to talk to you. Andrew Cohen is the founder and CEO of Brainscape, uh, recent winner of the edtech Showcase at the inaugural Colombians in Edtech. That's Colombians, Columbia University, uh, Edtech Showcase. Thank you so much for being here with us on Edtech Insiders.

[00:57:30] Andrew Cohen: Beautiful. Thank you guys. 

[00:57:32] Alex Sarlin: We are here with Kai Wright. He's the founder of Tangramio, an edtech platform that transforms fragmented online content into a unified learning experiences. Kai has taught as an adjunct lecturer at Columbia University for more than 10 years while serving as a media and entertainment executive, bringing together expertise in education, technology, and strategy.

Kai Wright, welcome to Edtech Insiders. 

[00:57:59] Kai Wright: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you about the future of education 

[00:58:04] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. So you have a really unusual and interesting background. You've been at a lot of different interesting places in advertising, in media, and you've been lecturing at Columbia.

Tell us about your story about how you got into the education space and why that is a sort of natural pivot for your work that you've been doing in other fields. 

[00:58:23] Kai Wright: Yeah, absolutely, Alex. I was the type of person that loved to be at school . Whether it was clubs, whether it was sports, just any excuses I had to hang around school.

I mean, I loved being home, but I also loved being in a learning environment. And I've been very fortunate to take that mindset, what I would say a growth mindset that I had at a very natural age, into adulthood. And so I went to Columbia and got a master's in communication. That was my introduction into the New York scene.

I lived in the Midwest in Chicago before that, and I just didn't wanna leave school. So I became a course associate, and I then became a lecturer, and now it's almost fifteen years later since initially stepping into the classroom from an educator side. And then more recently, a year ago, I decided that I wasn't done with education.

And so I started a executive MBA program at Columbia Business School. And so now I have a very unique role of being an educator and a student, and that's one of the things that really made me consider the future of education and whether or not we are using the appropriate tools for the type of learning opportunities that content presents as people love video and audio through podcasts and are really trying to transcreate media through NotebookLM's of the world.

So Tangramio was kind of that next manifestation in my education journey to figure out how to take my consulting background of working with big Fortune one hundred companies like Amex or Bank of America, Ford, and really figuring out how do we kind of build some tech that solves a problem within education of how do we really put together quality content and high quantity of content.

We have no shortage of great content that's being created by humans and AI, but we have a curation and a filtering problem that is going to keep getting worse and worse as more and more content gets generated. So that's a little bit of my background, Alex, in terms of How I got started in education, where I am as a student back on that side.

And then why Tangramio kind of made sense at this moment in time of where we are with content. 

[01:00:46] Alex Sarlin: So tell us about how you do this work within Tangramio. You mentioned sort of videos and podcasts, but there also is AI built into it. There's also sort of some learning science baked into it, where you're structuring all of the different media content in one place, you call it a tangram, and then tracking people's engagement with it.

It's a really interesting approach 'cause it pulls all this different kind of multimedia content into a very structured experience, and then it provides sort of metrics on the other side so that the people who create that can understand exactly how the learners are moving through it. But I'd love to hear your description of how you came up with it and what you're hoping to achieve in the edtech space.

[01:01:24] Kai Wright: Yeah, absolutely nailed it in terms of the description. So in order for me to tell you how I came up with it, I gotta start this story three thousand years ago. And I just wanna tell you about what a tangram is. So most individuals encounter a tangram when they are a child. It is a popular game. It was invented in China three thousand years ago, and it is based on the ideal that you can take seven tiles, which are different shapes.

Some are a triangle and a square. You can combine them or remix them hundreds of different ways. And so I use it as a metaphor for being able to mix different formats and mediums of content, whether it's video, PDFs, whether it is images or audio, and allowing the remixed versions of that content to then unlock new meaning and new value for the individual that is curating.

So that was the basic premise, is we have so much great content And it is only proliferating. I came across a stat a year and a half ago that kind of stopped me in my tracks as ChatGPT was taking off in terms of reaching five hundred million-plus users. I think now they're twice as much, almost a billion users worldwide.

They were one of the fastest-growing new technologies, and individuals were making projections about what impact that was going to have. And one impact was that AI-generated content would make four times as much content as human-generated content. And so we haven't even started to scratch the surface. You think about newsrooms and how it's gonna impact news, right?

You have, like, earnings seasons that happen four times a year, all the earnings calls. Someone has to listen to them. Someone has to make sense of the analyst questions and then wrap all that up in news. That's something AI can do, and it can do it quicker than a human. It can not only make a article that's text, but also produce a podcast that's five minutes or ten minutes within one minute of the call ending.

And so, you know, we're gonna get to this place where we have more automated content that's being created. And so I looked at that trend and said students are also trying to learn in formats that work best for them. So whether someone is in media studies, whether someone is in medicine or finance or journalism, individuals love to find content on their own in the learning process, content that fits their vibe.

Sometimes the vibe is they wanna take a walk or they're commuting, so they want audio. Sometimes it is they wanna see something visual, so they go to YouTube, or they're looking at TikTok or other type of short form information that they can follow along with. And then some individuals, very rare these days, they wanna read, right?

So we used to have a textbook for every class. One of the major trends that I've seen within education is a lot of classes don't have textbooks anymore. A lot of individuals don't read full books. They read only a chapter at a time. So we're starting to make content more digestible, make content more fragmented across different types of platforms and mediums around the web.

And as much as that's great for the learner, it creates a lot of challenges for the educator because we have no transparency into what students do. And when we think about, as you put it, kind of the science of learning the pedagogy, right? We know that the more a student interacts with content We see this in STEM, whether it's, you know, physics or labs, other types of things where it's interactive, the retention is much higher.

So we don't want individuals to just passively consume things. We want them to have some type of experience with it. And so Tim Graimel kind of created that platform to be the convening point for all the different fragmented content across the web that professors can now have some transparency to know, like students spend X amount of time, here's the types of interactions that they're doing.

You referenced Alex AI. If a student ask a question of AI, since it's built into the platform, then the professor has visibility to see what that question is. So we're not asking students to modify their behavior of how they're using in different tools around the web. We're just creating a central hub And analytics on top of it, and transparency for professors to make sure that what they intend to be learning outcomes and goals are actually being achieved, and they get that calibration in real time rather than having to wait all the way until the end of the semester when they get an evaluation.

So it's kind of constant fire hose of data that a professor or teaching assistant course associate that they all can look at, recalibrate, figure out, "Oh, did what I teach last week actually land? Was it sticky?" Or are students looking for things using AI that's further ahead, and the pacing may be too slow.

And so there's a number of different modifications that a professor can make, but overall, students have a much better experience than going from tab to tab or app to app, downloading all these different things. Just one unified experience where they can be social with other people. The other challenge is people consume content, and it's a very lonely kind of experience where you go in a classroom and you have thirty, forty, a hundred other people who you're interacting with.

So how do we bring that sense of collaboration and community to the prep experience also? 

[01:07:16] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's really interesting, and I think one of the things that jumps out to me about how these tangrams are structured is that you have a combination of content that could be seen as passive, right? If it's a YouTube video or a podcast, it's, it's still meaningful content or a PDF or a textbook page, but then you combine it with active elements like reflections and responses and AI prompt ability, and so you're basically turning a set of what could be passive content into an experience that is designed to be active, and it's sort of curated by a professor or potentially by a student themselves to be active.

So I like the approach of turning passive content that students are already engaging with, that they already might find interesting into something that actually gets them to be interactive back and forth rather than it being like a playlist. It's not a, it's not a playlist, it's a sort of set of different content that comes together and that you're actually engaging with on an ongoing basis.

And I, I'm curious how you see that. 

[01:08:14] Kai Wright: We describe it as a slideshow meets a playlist. You have to do something in order to initiate it going from media to media, but we want it to be as simple as that kind of ideal that people have in their head of a playlist. It follows pedagogy in that it has three things that it offers to people.

So when we talk about learning outcomes, it's not from the standpoint of the more time someone spends with the subject, the more likely they are to retain something. We know that kind of time on task, there is not really a correlation to retention, for instance, or performance at the end. Within any given classroom, let's take New York State, for instance, where I taught at Columbia, a university will have about 28 to 32 contact hours with students.

That means you're sitting there, you're lecturing, they're interacting. But a student might spend twice as much time actually prepping. That's one of the dilemmas that we face is we often prioritize participation, and a student may only participate for one or two minutes in terms of speaking, but they might take an hour, two hours in order to read a case study or to go through videos or other analysis to prep for that class.

And so we wanna put the attention and the priority back onto the preparation, which is the activity that is a great signal for whether or not someone's gonna perform and retain. But we didn't wanna put the pressure on a professor to have to come up with quiz questions or have to go into Canvas or Blackboard or another Brightspace platform and start to code, uh, new pages that are interactive elements.

So we've kind of used AI smartly so that every piece of content, they can just hit a button It'll read what that content is, watch the video, kind of decode comments and other contextual clues on a page, like a news article, for instance. And it will suggest, here's a poll that individuals take. Here's multiple choices, an open-ended question you should ask individuals.

So it's also an aid to professors to be able to add a layer of interaction to any piece of content so that there is the deeper learning that is happening rather than just the passive exposure that individuals are getting. You know, but we fought against AI. We, we kind of pivoted a couple of times. You know, initially, Alex, we thought maybe this would be a great platform for music artists because they have fans, or sports artists because they have fans, and, you know, this is a way for content creators to bring their different assets together from across the different platforms.

But education felt meaningful, and it felt urgent because two billion people, that's twenty percent of the world's population at any given time, is actively in a state of learning, whether they're changing jobs, whether they're getting retrained in their current job, whether they are in K through twelve or higher ed, or just learning a new hobby.

People have a learner mindset, and we really wanted to build a tool that supported anyone in their learning journey. 

[01:11:32] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's interesting to hear you because as I, I agree, as you look at how these tangrams work, I can imagine different use cases, like, as you say, music artists or, or various types of things.

You-- the, the idea of bringing together all this different mixed media content into a single s- place, a sort of one-stop shop that's organized, that's structured, that becomes interactive, that has AI sort of baked into it. It's a powerful use case for lots of different scenarios, but I think education is a fantastic one.

Obviously, we're very happy you're in edtech. So you, you know, you have very deep Columbia roots, right? You mentioned you have been at Columbia for many different types of educational experiences, not wanting to leave the classroom. And, you know, o- obviously Tangramio is one of the winners of the co- the recent Columbia Edtech Showcase from the Columbians in Edtech.

I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about your experience with the Columbia University community. It's obviously you've been at, at multiple schools within it. You've lectured there for ten years. What is the value of a community like the Columbia community when it comes to entrepreneurialism, when it comes to innovation, and, and especially in regards to education technology?

[01:12:35] Kai Wright: Columbia is-- it's a tier one research school . So it, it not only forces me to think about what's a new technology to bring to market, but how do you prove that it actually works? And so what's the data behind the learning outcomes? Right now, we are in the process of doing a pilot for the next few months with a few professors so that we can show that there's a correlation between prep and the performance at the end of a class, as well as the valuations that individuals will get in terms of higher student satisfaction and more clarity, really, with students on how much time it takes to prep.

Sometimes they see a syllabus, and they can't tell. They're like, "Oh, there's these hyperlinks. I don't know how long this video is. I don't know how long this PDF is." Maybe they think it takes an hour. And so we know students struggle with, like, time management, and so a system like this helps to just make the learning environment more approachable so that students can do all the things they wanna do between clubs and activities and then, of course, the classwork that they, that they have to turn in.

You know, with Columbia, it also gives a backdrop of support. I was very fortunate to participate in a number of pitch competitions as well as feedback sessions with Lang Center, and I've been impressed over the almost twenty years of being part of the Columbia community of how they have invested in entrepreneurship.

I think they are, according to PitchBook, one of the top five universities after Stanford and Harvard, and I think they may be number, number three or so, uh, don't, don't quote me, maybe MIT is somewhere in there, in terms of producing entrepreneurs. And so they've made a very deep commitment, I would say especially over the last five years, to create an ecosystem where individuals can have the support that they need.

And then was very fortunate to meet individuals like Pete Novak, who started Columbians in Edtech, and I see finance as a major industry that a lot of individuals, just given the backdrop of New York City, that a lot of individuals at Columbia tend to go into. But entrepreneurship and education I think are quickly rising as New York City has so many great universities that are located here, national, you know, award-winning high schools that are located here.

And so Education, you know, ever since I think I was a little child, it's something that I loved. My mom worked at Columbus State University, so I would spend my summers and other times during the year, like, playing around the university, going to their summer camps, doing different things. So it feels appropriate for me to be within education, and it's an environment that I feel quite comfortable within.

And now to be able to build technology that helps with the infrastructure of education is a challenge that I'm excited about. I think there's so many AI tools that are generating content. We really don't need more content. What we need is quality curation and filtering tools. And so I kind of look at it not quite as ambitious as Google with indexing the internet, but having the simplicity of Google in terms of people just taking hyperlinks to the things that they think are the best representations of a subject, and being able to quickly aggregate their point of view and put that out for other individuals to be able to see.

So maybe in the future, Alex, we'll let people get paid to be curators, and I think it'll open up a whole new channel of expression and creativity and commerce so that if someone may be a fitness coach and they have a workout routine and Spotify playlist and YouTube videos and nutrition plans that are great, you know, we can kind of expand beyond the, like, higher ed lens into people that are just great at curating and providing a set of tools for other individuals so that they can monetize it and they can get paid.

So I'm excited about kind of the economy that can be created around these types of shared experiences also. 

[01:16:48] Alex Sarlin: I agree. Yeah, the, uh, c- the curatorial economy that comes out of the, the four times as much AI content that's gonna be around as human content, which is already an incredible amount of content being created every day.

So when you have so much content, finding the quality, weaving the parts together, and then maybe using AI to, to synthesize and, and summarize and synopsize, you know, all the different pieces into a concrete learning experience, very powerful model. So congratulations again on, on winning the Columbians in Edtech edtech Showcase, uh, the very first one.

And Kai Wright is building Tangramio, an edtech platform that's taking a 3,000-year-old idea, the tangram, and piecing it together to create incredibly interactive, powerful, unified learning experiences. Thanks so much for being here with us on Edtech Insiders. 

[01:17:36] Kai Wright: Thank you for having me, Alex. 

[01:17:38] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of Edtech Insiders.

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