How To Build A Scalable, Standards-Aligned Ecosystem That Teachers Actually Use

Travis Barrs of Discovery Education discusses how K–12 is shifting from tool access to learning impact, focusing on building scalable, coherent learning platforms. This involves budget realities, teacher workloads, and consolidating tool sprawl.

Key points include the return of core curriculum funding, the necessity of standards alignment, and balancing Discovery's diverse brands (DreamBox Learning, Mystery Science, etc.). The underlying architecture emphasizes seamless identity/access, roster sync, LMS integrations, and cross-product analytics for targeted student support. Organizational design uses a "quartet" model—product, design, engineering, and curriculum—to embed pedagogy and rigor from the start.

AI implementation follows a measured roadmap, prioritizing teacher workflows (lesson planning, assessment, recommendations) before student-facing tools with strong guardrails. Internally, AI aids in prototyping, documentation, sales, RFPs, contract review, and curriculum drafting, all under strict governance. The future is focused on hyperpersonalization, workload-reducing classroom assistants, and provable efficacy.

To find more episodes, visit method.com/insights/podcasts/

Episode Resources: 

Method.com

Travis Barrs on Linked-In: /in/travisbarrs/

Carol Rego on Linked-In: /in/carol-rego/

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Transcript

Welcome & Edtech At Scale

Josh Lucas 0:01

You are listening to Method to Build What's Next. Digital product perspective. Presented by Global Logic. At Method, we aim to bridge the gap between technology and humanity for a more seamless digital future. Join us as we uncover insights, best practices, and cutting-edge technologies with top industry leaders that can help you and your organization craft better digital products and experiences.

From Access To Impact Post‑Pandemic

Carol Rego 0:27

Hey everyone, and welcome to Build What's Next. I'm your host, Carol, a principal and PE lead here at Method. Today we're diving into the world of ed tech, a sector that has moved far beyond textbooks and into the realm of complex digital ecosystems. Our guest is Travis Fars, the Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Discovery Education. Now, if you or your kids have been in a classroom in the last 20 or so years, you likely have heard of them. But what you might not know is the massive technological shift happening behind the scenes. Discovery Education, I want to make sure I get these numbers right, serves 4.5 million educators and 45 million students worldwide. And they are currently navigating one of the most interesting challenges in software, which is how do you take a portfolio of distinct high growth products and unify them into a cohesive platform without breaking what makes them special? In this episode, we are going to talk about not only that, but their unique model for product teams, the reality of deploying AI in schools, and what it really takes to build a future of learning at scale. So, Travis, welcome to the show.

Travis Barrs 1:35

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Carol Rego 1:36

Yeah, always happy to talk to you. Um, for our listeners, can you share a little bit more about yourself?

Travis Barrs 1:43

Yeah, absolutely. So uh thanks for having me here. I I appreciate that. Uh again, Travis Barrers, really long title, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer. I was going for as many letters as I could get uh here at DE. Uh I am originally from Texas, uh, live in Atlanta. I commute back and forth to Charlotte for about seven years. I'll be in uh DE at seven years this April. Uh my roles here have changed uh throughout the years, predominantly on the operational side. I lead uh a team we call technology and transformation. Um, I'm I'm I'm sort of a branding marketing guy, so I call it TNT, of course, which is great. That is everything, soup to nuts. It is engineering, it is data, it is our AI team's product curriculum, immersive technology, and then all the rest of the technology, corporate IT, security, um, et cetera. And so my focus here at DE is pretty simple. It's scale the impact, it's drive innovation responsibility. Obviously, we'll talk about AI a little bit more, what that means, especially in the ed tech landscape. And then, of course, make sure what we build genuinely earns instructional time in the classroom. We don't want to put things in front of teachers and students that don't drive value to the goals and what they're aligned to. And so strategy without sort of an execution is just a deck ultimately. And so we look to ship, uh, ship good products.

Carol Rego 2:56

So yeah, I love that. And I think that's why ed tech is so special because it has that impact piece in it. And so while yes, we will be talking about, you know, uh technology and digital problems that other technology companies might have, I think that's really what's gonna make this conversation unique is bringing it back to that impact piece.

Travis Barrs 3:15

Um it is very unique, absolutely.

Carol Rego 3:18

So love it. Uh so cool. So let's start with uh the landscape. So we are very squarely, I would say, in the post-digital classroom world now, right? Like we have moved past the uh pandemic era where the mandate was get every student a device. And now that we're here, um, I'm curious, what is the biggest challenge uh that you are hearing from school districts asking you to solve today?

Travis Barrs 3:42

Yeah, and I mean, we should not not cut around uh uh, you know, the real story of COVID. It was dramatic, obviously, for everyone. Um, you know, teaching, uh, we have teacher shortages all over the place. We have learning loss at levels we've never had before. I remember at the beginning of COVID during March of 2020, talking to my boss and saying, we may never ship books again. We'll just do digital everything and get to that access point, right? Like we just got to get access to these things. And so when we talk about what districts are trying to solve right now, we've moved beyond access. Now there's too much access out there. Now the shift is impact. It has to be able to deliver the goal, the outcomes that a district or state are trying to drive. Um, my wife, for example, is a fifth-grade teacher in Georgia. And so at one point during the COVID pandemic, I think she had like 40 different tools. It's like, that's too much, right? But during that period with hundreds of billions of dollars of funding, these schools and districts just snapped up everything they possibly could. Um, you love to say they spent it on teachers. They didn't tend to do that. They did things like obviously digital resources, but then HVAC and stuff like that too, right? So you sort of have that balance. But that was the priority. During COVID was devices, continuity. And now districts are asking is this driving measurable student outcomes? Does this reduce teacher workload? Can I justify this in a flat budget environment, which you sort of see now as just you saw that spike during COVID of budgeting, and now it's just back to kind of where it was, right? So, you know, in a world where you have 45 different tools, people aren't looking for 45. They're looking for the 10 that work the best, right? And that's where uh that's where we are today. So the biggest pain point, instructional coherence, under constrained budgets, right? Districts are facing flat to low single-digit budget growth, cost inflation, enrollment volatility, uh volatility, teachers' burnout, shortages. I have a there's a I know of one person in particular who is teaching without a degree at this point, right? So, and then pressure to demonstrate that ROI, which we do as well. So, not just a challenge of content, it's a challenge, a challenge of engagement as well.

Carol Rego 5:44

Definitely. And I'm wondering, too, how has shifting from more of being a supplemental resource to core curriculum affected the way that Discovery thinks about your products?

Core Vs Supplemental Funding Shift

Travis Barrs 5:57

Yeah, uh it's been an interesting shift, especially when you think about funding. So, you know, prior to the pandemic and during the pandemic, you starting to see all of the billions of dollars. The education market in the US and in K-12 is about $11 billion. And that's split between core, uh supplemental intervention assessment, those different buckets there, right? Um, for years, the core funding was going down and supplemental was going up, and that happened sort of the peak of COVID. Now that we're sort of flattening and leveling back out, we're right back into core curriculum being funded more. And so maybe just really quick, a quick, you know, description of what core and supplement are and the differences, right? So, core, think about it, the main standards aligned program used to teach a subject for the entire year. So it's adopted at a district or state level. It covers all of the required learning objectives, it sets the pacing and the structure of the daily instruction for the teacher, and it's used by all those students. So it's the backbone of instruction in our educational system. Think about what we grew up with textbooks and big assessments and all that stuff, right? Supplemental, on the other hand, are the things that sort of, well, they're supplemental. They are additional tools that are used alongside the core. The whole goal there is to target very specific skills, gaps, enrich skills and um, you know, way more flexible to use, cheaper, easier to purchase. They support things like differentiation and event intervention. My kid is right here, right now. Here's how you get them to the next stage. They don't replace the core at all, they just enhance it, right? And so for it's it's basically the booster or the support system for instruction of what supplemental are. And so the shift is super real. Districts are consolidating vendors. They're not looking for, again, 45 different tools and 10 different vendors to work with. They're looking for an ecosystem, right? They're looking for one place to go to to be able to answer all these things. And ultimately, DE is about that. We have the ability to offer both core products, supplemental products, and a little bit of everything in between there, too. Um, fewer logins, unified data, integrated assessment and instruction. And then more importantly, these days is alignment to state standards, right? If you're a teacher in Georgia in fifth grade and you're looking for science standards, you don't want content that's specific to Tennessee or to Texas or Colorado. You need just the stuff that's relevant to you to teach. So for us, it's not about like pivoting and abandoning an engagement all in on. It's standards, alignment, efficacy. It's gotta work, right? The stuff's gotta work. Uh, the data integration can't just be delivering content ultimately. And then how do we get a workflow uh integration there? How do we get embedded fully in daily instruction?

House Of Brands, One Platform

Carol Rego 8:33

So that's great. And speaking of products and ecosystems, uh, I think another piece that maybe not everyone knows is discovery education is a house of brands, right? So you have uh like dream box learning, mystery science, et cetera. How do you balance those unique value props while unifying them under this cohesive brand and platform?

Travis Barrs 8:56

Yeah, um, it's tough. Um, I think part of it is understanding exactly what they each do. Um, they are very distinct, different products, right? Between experience, which is sort of our core platform, our flagship offering. That's a cross-curricular uh tool that has everything from different types of content and structural strategies built in, assessment built in, formative in there. Um AI teacher tools were starting to roll out, which again, I know we'll get to. Dreambox is a math supplemental product, it is beloved in that space. Mystery Science is uh one of the most beloved science uh supplemental products in the market. Mystery science is a teacher-led um uh program, right? So we give free trials to teachers. They're year-long, they use them, they become, they love them, and then they pass them on and they refer them to other teachers. Eventually a site buys and eventually a district buys there, right? So it's that referral model that makes that really, really unique. And we have other products too. And so they're all just different. And so I think one of the challenges you do when you acquire a bunch of companies, we've acquired six or seven of the last four or five years. Sometimes you sort of go down that path of we got to integrate them all like right away, really, really quick. The the answer really is like, but they're different and they're intended to be different. You know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't buy a happy meal and it's a burger and it's like a frisbee. No, you want fries with that, right? And so, you know, pairing up mystery science with experience doesn't really improve either one of the products. So, why would we do that? They're distinct pedagogical identities, they have very loyal teacher faces and super different usage motions, right? You know, enterprise usage versus product leg growth. So the balance is all the key. It's preserved the front end magic, it's unify the back end infrastructure, single sign on, super technical stuff, right? Single sign on, shared data architecture, cross-product insights. You do want to be able to go somewhere and see everything if you have multiple products there. Um, but teachers need to be able to choose the tools that they trust, right? And so all of those things woven together, super important. Unification shouldn't be about reducing friction necessarily. Um, it's it's it's that plus uh you know, racing differentiation and just making it a really good use case for teachers and students.

Carol Rego 11:04

So yeah, and I mean we could probably do a whole separate podcast on just go to market strategy in general because we totally could, absolutely. Because you have different buyers too, as well, right? Like you have a school system, sometimes you sell to individual teachers. So that that's also really fascinating, too. But you started to talk a little bit about like insights, for example. So I want to touch on data for a little bit because you do have access to um a variety of data sources. What are some ways that you're able to use that information to help your end users, whether it's the students or or the teachers?

Data, Identity, And Interoperability

Travis Barrs 11:36

Yeah. And so I think this is one of those places where, again, I just referenced it. This is where a lot of the MA acquisitions and integration stuff start to fail because you you try to just force it all together really, really quick versus understand that the front end can be totally different than the back end, right? You know, we can have a whole bunch of platforms that are um, you know, everything is sort of woven together internally, but you have a different experience from them. So no, no, necessarily, it's not necessarily about forcing rapid tech consolidation or disrupting teacher workflows. Um, there are definitely different data models. Dreambox is a very heavy data product. There's an adaptive engine there that when you're when your kid gets logged into a specific level, the engine understands where they are and can move them to whatever next level they need to be. So super, super complex there, right? So the smarter approach to thinking about all of these ultimately is like identity and access layer. It's it's how do they get logged in, right? It's a unified login, roster sync. I mean, think about it. The way you're enabling these, if it's a per student product, you have 26 kids in an elementary classroom, depending on where you happen to be. And then you've got that across six or seven classes in a grade, and then you've got five or six grades, and you do that across the 100 and or what is it, 130,000 schools across the US, it gets really complicated. So that sync of all the rosters is really important. And then of course you have to integrate to the LMS itself, Canvas, Schoology, Google Classroom. Um so sort of start there at the identity and access layer. That's really important. And then from there, it's interoperability. It's like if you have uh four students that are using four different DE products, that's not four different student IDs. That's one student ID. So you have to have one tool or one system in the background that aligns and makes sure that you can connect the dots across all the different products, shared dashboards, cross-product analytics. Teachers want to be able to see, and districts want to be able to see uh how is Timmy doing in math today? Okay, this is where he is right now. Great. Assign this lesson in Dreambox, that'll help him get to the next level. Um, talk about science. Well, science is not just science, actually includes social studies as well, literacy is baked into it also. So you need to be able to see when science, where they are across all of these different things ultimately. And then, of course, the last phase of all of this is just UX harmonization. It's just how do we get them all to sort of look and feel similar? Again, all of these products have different feels and um, you know, the experiences are completely different intentionally, but you do want them to look like one company, right? You know, you do definitely want to get to that.

Carol Rego 14:01

So absolutely. And I think one thing looking from the outside end, people might take for granted is that tech part of ed tech. Like there's a lot to solve there behind the scenes to make the user experience seamless, everything you just talked about, and also to be able to show that ROI that the administrators are looking for too. So um so we've talked a little bit about like the uh technology side of bringing products together, but I also want to talk a little bit about the internal ways of working. So one thing that's really unique at Discovery that um I was really interested in is uh, you know, when we typically talk about product, we talk about three legs of the stool, right? So product management, engineering, and design. But at Discovery Education, you've introduced a quartet. So yeah, um we got we got a fourth leg of the stool or a fourth pillar, and that is curriculum. So can you talk a little bit more about that?

The Quartet: Adding Curriculum

Travis Barrs 14:58

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, most software developers are producing a piece of software, they're not actually putting the content in, also, right? You know, so YouTube, you're building something in the background. It's not a ton of content in there, but people can put their content in it. We're doing it all. So we're building the product itself, the platform it sits on, obviously, all the engineering, the design, the UX components there too. And then we have to throw something into it. So the way I describe it to people is, and my view is probably more simple than it should be, but this is how I think about it to keep it straight. If if a product manager is trying to build a box, this is what I want to go build, this is what I want it to do. And a designer tells that person, this is how you should build it and how the experience should be. Then I've got engineers building a box over here, and then I've got people filling the box over here. That is the core of the quartet, right? It is how do we build the box? What is the box? Who builds the box? And then what do we put in the box ultimately? Um, you can actually sort of go beyond that a little bit if you want to get really crazy. We have other teams internally that are building the tools that build the box, the screws and the hammers and the, you know, all that sort of stuff there too. And then if you want to actually add more legs to the stool, then you've got things like product marketing, right? That are there too. And how does this play in the market ultimately? And so the thing that makes this unique beyond just being content, of course, is the curriculum, right? It is pedagogy. It is not necessarily what you're teaching, but it's how you teach. And for curriculum to be sort of on an island out here and not associated with the entire product development cycle is a huge miss for curriculum companies. I mean, you have to have that integrated all the way in there, right? I mean, a product manager, uh a designer, and a curriculum specialist need to be, I mean, hand in hand as you think about how do you design a product differently or develop things, add features or functionality. The curriculum piece ensures a couple of things that's really, really important. So again, people don't want to see everything. They want to see what's relevant to them, right? So the standards alignment. If a fifth grade teacher in Georgia only sees standards that are applicable to a fifth grade teacher in Georgia, right? Instructional integrity. Um, you love to just say you could just put them in front of a laptop and just let them roll, right? But you do actually have to teach them how to use the products. And good products are built that you don't necessarily have to teach them, but there still is the instructional integrity in the background, right? We're trying to accomplish goals, doing different things. Um, efficacy. An engineer or a product manager isn't going to think about how to measure results actually all the way through, right? How to deliver the results, maybe, but how do I actually know that's working? Is our test scores going up? Are they passing their quizzes? What are they doing? Um, super important. And then the last one is, and probably as important or more important than ever, is the political regulatory defensibility component of this, right? We are in a place where there are 50 different states, a few territories and things like that there. Um, it sounds silly, but almost none of them teach things the exactly the same way. So you'd love that you went to 50 different states and they all teach science or math the same way. That's just not how it is, right? You know, there are different views there. And unfortunately for us too in this space, and another thing that sets ed tech apart is every two to four years, that can change again. So we're going into other cycles, right? Um, we we've gotten to points where we've built books specific for states that are intended to last six to seven, eight years, maybe. And we get new standards a year later, right? I mean, that is the that is the landscape that we're dealing with. And again, curriculum leaders know that. They understand that. And that's how we build um, you know, products that that that um can stand the test of all of those different things and those complications that we see.

Carol Rego 18:29

So yeah. I mean, I think kudos to the team as well, because I think it's you know, doing digital consulting, it's easy to say there's a certain way that an organization is supposed to look and feel and run, but like being able to step outside that and say, well, this is what makes our business different and this is how we need to adjust the way that we work to be more efficient and to meet our users' needs. That's not done as often. So whenever I hear or see those little org design changes that really make a big difference, I always I I love to nerd out on that. So that's pretty cool.

Travis Barrs 19:03

Well, I love it. Uh yeah, no, we do too, right? And and and then it's kind of a living thing. It changes. I mean, just like the landscape changes, one of the big things right now for us is um is future readiness, right? Uh, you probably uh you may have heard me say this when we've been meeting and other things. Like there are 50 states, there are red states, there are blue states, there's not many purple or lavender-ish states there. You can be talking to someone on either side of the political spectrum and they can completely disagree on almost everything. But then somewhere in there, the one thing they agree on is kids need to have jobs. Like they may not go to college, they may need to go right into the workforce. That's sort of the fifth pillar and you know, one for the thumb of curriculum these days is careers and workforce readiness, right? So just you have to add that in there too. So again, that's why bringing curriculum into the mix is just really, really critical. And and career readiness extends across all of the different subjects, right? I mean, you can talk about STEM careers and how that looks in science or um obviously literacy, math, critical to to to to uh future readiness, and depending on what job you go into, of course. Um you just gotta have curriculum there, you know. I mean, they gotta be at the table. Um, and then you've got to have the other folks to be able to integrate the technology piece, right? It's not just tech or ed, it is ed tech.

Carol Rego 20:13

So awesome. One more, one more question on on this point. Um so I know traditionally, like in uh agile fashion, you would expect maybe like the product and engineering folks to want to move fast, break things, iterate, whereas curriculum in true pedagogy form is more interested in rigor and accuracy. So there's inherently going to be attention there, which not necessarily a bad thing. Um, but I am curious, how does your how do your teams work through that?

Healthy Tension, Governance, Autonomy

Travis Barrs 20:46

Some better than others, I guess I would say. Um, you know, and then you have outside real, you know, uh expectations too to match at first, right? We're we're we're owned by private equity, right? You know, private equity and other businesses thinks um to a degree sometimes that AI can do everything. And so it's like, no, this is why there's a there's a reason why it matters that we do this still with the with the human there, right? So so the tension's healthy. It's really, really good to have that tension in there. Engineering and the technical folks want to go fast and they want to have really quick, rapid prototyping and go into it. And then the curriculum folks tend to demand the rigor. I mean, they want to be able to uh make sure that they're delivering the outcomes, and and that sometimes takes a little bit more time there. So the answer isn't necessarily compromise, it's just sequencing, right? It's just how we lay things out. There are four learning content, content uh concepts are rigorous, validated, stable. And then there's the workflows around that, right? Iterative approach, agile approach, what you mentioned. You sort of separate what students learn and the precision required with that, with how students interact with or teachers interact with the tool itself. And then that leaves room for iteration there too. One of the problems for us internally is because a lot of our teams have been here for so long, they feel so connected to the product development. life cycle too, and they all have opinions, of course, right? And so for us, governance has been super critical. So rolling out models like Bane's rapid or uh we have a DAC uh model, you know, modified RACI effectively instrument uh implemented too. So help really clarify the decision rights and prevent all that paralysis, right? We we had to get to a place where we had a whole bunch of people making decisions about things and really nail down specifically, no, no, you're the person, right? And they'll know and then they'll be informed, et cetera, along the way. And so systems like that, processes like that, and of course the tooling and the background supports it, um, have just improved obviously all the uptick and all the development we're doing, but the coordination and has relieved some of that tension between the teams. So yeah.

Carol Rego 22:44

Yeah. And I I mean I think the type of decision being made probably depends on which of these frameworks you end up leaning on. I know one we've talked about too is um like giving the teams as much autonomy as possible where it makes sense. So the whole like one-way door, two-way door situation. So if it's a two-way door where the decision is reversible, like try to let the teams work through it themselves. If it's something that is you know one way door really hard to come back from okay let's elevate it. Let's talk through it more at a at a leadership level.

Travis Barrs 23:16

So um and and and I do think the size and the structure of the teams matters to you right we've had historically really large teams as you've seen in different buckets and and areas and um you know there's that whole Amazon two pizza team model, right? It's a it's a small, agile team, but for us that quartet is that team right there's quartet leadership within each one of those. It's not great if we have to have people within the pod structure go outside to make decisions. Like they need to be able to make decisions within that structure. And so again the models are just critical to being able to do that.

A Measured Roadmap For AI

Carol Rego 23:48

So that's great. All right well let's get into AI since we both alluded to it several times at this point we'd be remote this is only my sixth AI conversations Travis we gotta talk about it. And I think as as we both kind of started talking about earlier like with ed tech being such a high impact industry um it it causes people to be passionate about it, right? And uh everyone's got an opinion and so I know when it comes to AI and education there can be a mix back. There's some folks that are advocates some folks that are skeptics how does discovery education build a product roadmap that accommodates and balances these different degrees of acceptance well and again I mean it and it's not just state by state or even district by district.

Internal AI: Productivity And Governance

Travis Barrs 24:40

It can be literally school by school have different views. I mean there are some schools in large states that we know that you know in districts if you go to this district, you know, I I don't want anyone to have access at all. And then you go to this one over here and it's like I want my teachers to be able to do very specific things. And then if you go to this one it's like we're giving it to kids and they can do whatever they want, right? I mean it's all across the spectrum. And so I would say just generally it is it is certainly accelerating um but it is very cautious a very cautious approach you know to to where people are going. And I think we've sort of taken that position internally too. I I mean I I I tend to again I probably abuse this with you I tend to use Apple as an example of certain behaviors in in terms of product development they're almost never first to anything but then when they do come in it sort of changes how you interact with things it changes the way a phone looks to you or a media player or whatever. And so I'm certainly not comparing us to Apple by by any respects, but our approach has been kind of guarded and measured. It's been let's make sure that I say all the time it's it's not AI for the sake of AI's sake. It is let's find you know the right usages and the right things that add value for teachers and students and then let's roll that out. Right. So in district levels we're seeing in a lot of places super high teacher usage. Some of it's unofficial just asking their personal Chat GPT accounts for different things. There's there's barely any I would say formal student deployment at this point. I mean again it's kind of district by district along the way uh very strong uh interest in teacher proficient uh facing productivity tools so I think we all agree again with teacher shortages and people coming in with less experience than ever what we're seeing is help my help my teachers plan a week of lessons um you know out uh and and that would have taken again married to a teacher right that could take a week or longer um one of the things about oh I she'll she'll hate this but like hard to take vacations sometimes because she's like I got to do lesson plans for the subs and that takes forever right to do that kind of thing. And so looking for those teacher facing productivity tools. But at the same time the districts are asking is this safe? Like should we allow our kids and teachers to use it? Is it FERPA compliant? You know, does it actually reduce teacher workload? Does it actually improve student outcomes? And so we've been trying to figure out what the right winning roadmap is for AI. And certainly I would say we're we're definitely not the first to this right you know from from this but I do think that our approach and what you'll see from us um really starting the spring and into the fall and back to school is is what I would say is sort of the winning roadmap. It is teacher workflow first. It is lesson planning it is assessment drafting it is where are my kids at ultimately you know along the way and that journey and how can I recommend content or lessons that makes them you know improve or find those outcomes. And then it's student facing AI, right? Like with guardrails. Like you're not going to be able to avoid them getting into that. And so for us, we've used it from a perspective of not necessarily creating content but helping them along the journey. So for Drainbox for instance when you log in if you don't see a bunch of lessons or instructions for how to do a lesson will give you the ability to interact with an AI that's super protected and really strong guardrails to help us a child through that lesson. This is what you do next. And hey uh Mr. Bot, what happens now? Well then you do this too and sort of walk them through that. We don't necessarily need to create a whole bunch of content. We have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pieces of content within all of our products ours is making sure the right content comes forward and that students understand how to interact with it to get the outcomes that we want. So awesome then flipping it around a little bit um can you talk about how Discovery education uses AI tools internally this is I mean to me you know as someone who sort of owns the budgets and all of the other stuff in the background for these teams this is the big one. I mean it's just thinking differently about how you work um internally I think you know we think AI should do a couple things. It should accelerate prototyping like we should be able to generate really quick um iterations and cycles on on an idea and figure out really fast if it's going to work or not. You know, historical uh teams are always not great at things like documentation. AI should be able to help that automate documentation understand where we're going customer insights we have a ton of data I mean 20 plus years of student and teacher data, you know, with within all of uh various different systems and stuff. So uh being able to enhance that so we understand exactly what's happening within an account with it with exactly what's happening within a student. And then of course for for our perspective too like the go-to-market personalization of it I mean ultimately it's like what what what are our users we're interacting with and you know how can we fix that too and we can do that internally. So you know there's some pretty high leverage use cases too for some of the non-technical sides things like sales enablement obviously train your sales reps get them rolling you know on that path um creating RFPs contract language obviously that's pretty significant support tickets you know triage along the way and then of course back to the rest of my world here curriculum drafting assistance right I mean we we should be able to import or ingest state standards or district standards into a system that at least spits out a draft, you know, way quicker than having a team of writers in a room just iterating on different things. So you know these are the types of things we're seeing our engineers are I would say definitely ahead of the curve certainly internally on this. I mean we're using Claude um you know Claude code Claude co-work for multiple different things. It seems like every other day I get someone coming to me and saying look what I did in Claude right um our general counsel sent a note to us earlier this week she's like I built four apps in Claude this week and it's like oh geez right so that's that's that's kind of where we're going down that road right but the governance matters and the hygiene of the data matters and privacy controls. I mean that's the next stage of this too is beyond just the internal productivity use cases that is you know how how do you answer how my data is being used, right? You know, ultimately and so that's one of the barriers that we're sort of answering on the external side too.

Carol Rego 30:32

So yep. And I will say I know when we first started working with y'all we did what we call a modern product assessment which you know it's a self-assessment that tracks uh the team's ways of working through SDLC AI was one of the um focus areas and the sentiment score for AI internally was quite high which uh we don't always we don't always see so that's a good sign.

Travis Barrs 30:54

It's a journey right I mean we we I I know we talked about this when we when we went through the exercise like we I think uh we're probably not different than any company at this print period of time. Like you have these phases right the first phase is this is going to take my job right like they're just gonna replace me ultimately and I think yeah that's probably where we started along the way and it certainly depends on the different functional brute. The now phase that we're in is I I don't even know what it can do. Right. Like how can it help me? And so the enablement piece and just making sure they understand you could do this instead like you don't have to read that contract anymore. I know you love to but you don't you could just shove this thing in there and have it suggest ranges you could build a custom GPT or an agent or or or whatever along that that says these are our contracting standards and it just does the work for you, right? Building quotes for sales reps. I mean all these different things. So uh we we definitely shifted the the paradigm but yeah I am pleased that we've made that journey because earlier it was a little sketchy but I think when we got you guys involved it got it picked up better uh than it did before. So yeah.

The Next 3–5 Years: Hyperpersonalization

Carol Rego 31:55

Well I'm glad because we really enjoy working with your teams. Um just to close out this section with everything moving so fast and AI and Gen I'm curious what's your take on where do you think it's gonna take ed tech in the next three to five years.

Closing Reflections & Teacher Realities

Travis Barrs 32:11

Yeah so I have a I have this this dream um a little bit and everyone tells me I'm crazy about this. But one of our characters' names is disco. And so I have this dream of sort of a disco clippy situation, right? Where a a teacher or a student can access and interact with this thing within the product. And in a teacher's case, you know, it can be tell me exactly where my kids are, uh, create an assessment, lesson plans, whatever um for students, I want the interface to look cool and like me and what I want. And so I think first big shift is just hyperpersonalization. I mean it is just at scale super adaptive pathways. They're not just novel things they are actual expectations. Like when I log in, I understand that you have it built to look a certain way but when I log in I see only the things I want and only the things I need at that right exact moment. And that's a student or a teacher or a district admin, right? Somebody that's going into our admin world. They only want to see their things. And so I think hyperpersonalization is is sort of one of the real keys there, right? Teacher assistance and bots back to Disco Clippy a little bit I I do they they are out there already um we have a little bit of a version on ours but if you think about even on our side the the different types of use cases for for this for a teacher for us, it is of course create lesson plans. It is of course make subplans um it is of course tell me where all of my kids are and all the different subjects for us because we're believers real big believers in the careers and workforce development space we have a program called Career Connect. It's another thing well hey I'm teaching meteorology this week do you have any meteorologists that we could speak to cool let's connect you through a career connect and now great we booked it we put it on your calendar I mean there are so many different ways in there to sort of interweave all of the different things that all of our products and services can do but having an automated personalized approach you know from that, you know, is is just really cool. And I think there's a lot of different um really good use cases for that there too. And the last one again is just efficacy. It's just how does this work? Are we actually driving outcomes here? Um districts just aren't spending like they used to be I mean again flat to flat to a little bit maybe a little bit up here ultimately I do think it's similar to some of the engineering conversations we've had. I think we've had engineers say you're gonna replace me with a bunch of bots. And I think the reality is that's not actually what we're gonna do, but we may replace you with an engineer that uses AI. And I think that's the same case with teachers, right? I mean I think we're gonna get to a place where these are built and they are super uh useful and adapted to what a teacher needs to be able to to do as part of their job. And teachers that use AI are are just going to be more effective. I mean they're gonna be more effective all of those work life balance things kind of can start to go away and that teacher burden comes down which will help um lifestyle and all that other stuff. So yeah amazing Travis thank you for taking some time talking with us and dropping that that uh that wisdom at the end there is there any any other closing remarks that you wanted to share with uh our listeners uh you know I mean I I would just say again the market is is interesting I I'm our daughter is out of K12 now but I mean it's it's a really tough environment. Um you know I mean I'd say for the teachers specifically it's a really tough environment what we're throwing at them the different types of expectations we have for them are are pretty wild. And so I'd say um to all the parents out there of kids uh be sensitive your teachers are going through some stuff your kids are going through stuff too right and so um we're trying to figure out it's not just engagement or anything like that or efficacy. We got to have both, right? It's it's got to be able to drive outcomes ultimately the vendor consolidation is real trying to try to make sure that we get integrated platforms. But again at the end at the end of the day it still always comes back to curriculum integrity. And I think DE above of everything else has been known for high quality instructional content period not above how good our tech is or anything else. Our teachers love to use our products and to continue to put types of uh content out there that that drive those outcomes that people want to see is something that we'll just continue to do.

Carol Rego 36:04

So awesome yeah I mean so just a couple of things that I've heard that really resonated with me is is the story behind impact and efficacy and how it always has to come back to that. And I think also a really interesting piece here is like a little bit of friction is a good thing. It helps teams work through the hard problems and like if if you're not having those types of conversations then you're probably just ignoring the hard problems to be honest. So I love that the team is open to that. And then also finally bring back Clippy.

Travis Barrs 36:35

Bring back Clippy. I mean come on maybe not an actual paper clip but you know uh disco's pretty cute so maybe we'll do something like that.

Carol Rego 36:42

So I love it. Well again Travis thanks for joining and and thank you everyone for listening and we'll catch all next time on build what's next.

Josh Lucas 36:51

Thank you for joining us on Build What's Next Digital product perspectives. If you would like to know more about how Method can partner with you and your organization you can find more information at method.com. Also don't forget to follow us on social and be sure to check out our monthly tech talks. You can find those on our website and finally make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss out on any future episodes. We'll see you next time