In this week's Week in Edtech, Ben and special guest co-host Hailey Carter:
1) Talk to Salwa Muhammad of Fourthbrain.ai about the upcoming 3-day workshop with Andrew Ng and other AI Education leaders
2) Discuss "Study Hall", new Youtube/ASU/Crash Course Collaboration (Youtube Blog)
3) Take note of a recent survey that expresses doubt about Edtech leaders (Edweek)
4) Compare Recent Reports on the State of Edtech Funding
- Reach Capital (US)
- Brighteye Ventures (Europe)
- Inc42 (India)
5) Explore the Push for the $60K Minimum Teacher Salary in the US (Edweek)
6) Look at the Race to Adapt to a ChatGPT World (Forbes, NYTimes) and Quill and CommonLit's Free Tool to Detect Cheating
In this week's Week in Edtech, Ben and special guest co-host Hailey Carter:
1) Talk to Salwa Muhammad of Fourthbrain.ai about the upcoming 3-day workshop with Andrew Ng and other AI Education leaders
2) Discuss "Study Hall", new Youtube/ASU/Crash Course Collaboration (Youtube Blog)
3) Take note of a recent survey that expresses doubt about Edtech leaders (Edweek)
4) Compare Recent Reports on the State of Edtech Funding
- Reach Capital (US)
- Brighteye Ventures (Europe)
- Inc42 (India)
5) Explore the Push for the $60K Minimum Teacher Salary in the US (Edweek)
6) Look at the Race to Adapt to a ChatGPT World (Forbes, NYTimes) and Quill and CommonLit's Free Tool to Detect Cheating
Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators, and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at the top edtech company. Hi, everybody, it's been Cornell and welcome to This Week in edtech. It is Friday, January 27. And I am joined today by a special guest hosts, Haley Carter, from Ed Tech MBA, also from Al ventures, Haley and I are actually putting together Ed Tech Summit in San Francisco and Boston coming up in February. And so it's such a joy to have you joining us on the show today. Welcome, Haley. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm excited to talk Ed Tech with you. And of course to throw these in person Bay Area and Boston ed tech summits coming up. Before we dive in, just tell our listeners a little bit about Ed Tech MBA. What's it all about? Yes, no, of course. So I am the founder and president of the EdTech MBA community, which is a global community of more than 900 graduate students who are focused on education technology. So these students really come from all corners of the world, Europe, Africa, the states and every student is, is really excited to learn more about Ed Tech and connect with Ed Tech executives. Super Well, everybody that's coming to the summit is coming for a bunch of learning, they're coming for community. And that's what we strive to do here on at Tech insiders. And with that, I will jump into the headlines. It's been a busy week, Haley, there's so much happening every single day, it feels like we've kind of emerged from Ed Tech winter, in terms of like news related items. And yet at the same time, there's all of these headwinds. One of the biggest news bombs dropped was ASU, Arizona State, YouTube and Crash Course, which is a course on YouTube are teaming up to create study hall to expand college guidance and credit. Tell us a little bit about what's going on there. Yeah, so this is remarkable. So through this partnership, there will be courses that students can actually receive college credit through on YouTube, which is really remarkable, it's a great way to really democratize access to education, and just looking at the kind of fee for students to actually receive the college credit will be $400, which, of course, there's a price to pay, but that's still less than 1/3, the average cost at a pub public four year university for a course. So it's a really interesting kind of new assessable model to higher education. And, and kind of the question I have here, which I'd love your perspective, kind of on is how is YouTube really benefiting here, because the article mentions that they actually aren't getting any of the student fees here, and there isn't any advertising on kind of that channel beyond CrashCourse. So we'd love to kind of hear your perspective. You know, one of my classic rants is that Google is the largest ad tech company in the world. And yet again, they're stepping into a space where there's some really positive benefit, potentially, to students in just that you just mentioned, but also, you know, you've got to wonder what is the business decision making behind this? Because there's a number of course providers, people like outlier, that offer these types of courses for a fee for service, who will be, you know, fundamentally competed with if not disrupted? And YouTube's not getting any of those revenues? And, you know, even stepping back further, think of all of the universities that are advertising on YouTube, are they going to still advertise through Google and YouTube, given that YouTube has aligned with ASU, a potential competitor? It really makes me wonder what the overall strategy is. And this attack and education continued to be a kind of nice to have public facing rounding error on the, you know, Google bad machine, or are they actually kind of changing tactics, and they're making a big play for for ongoing learning? What's your thoughts? Is this just a one off? Or is this building up to a larger lifelong learning or higher ed goal? Yeah, no, it's so interesting, because higher ed itself is such a fragmented market. There's a stat out there that no one in higher education has even 1% market share. So it's so interesting to see YouTube which is the world's second most visited website kind of step into this industry and atmosphere where there is so much fragmentation and where the monetization for you to themselves is is kind of quite I should have at this point, but I can only hope right now that this is kind of a step towards really increasing affordability and accessibility of high quality education. And I think only time will tell kind of if it works and how much more they play into this space. And my hope is that they continue to do so of course, if it means that more students can receive higher education degrees at an affordable price tag, yeah, from an ASU standpoint, this one seems like a no brainer. They're improving their funnel of students. And, you know, previous shows, we've had guests that have talked about, you know, something like 20, or 30% of tuition costs go towards advertising to get students to come. So they can do this, and essentially have like a low cost pipeline of new students that's really compelling. And number two is, most universities are losing money on remedial courses and entry level courses. It's really not until the more advanced or grad level courses that you know, you start hitting breakeven. So there is a way to kind of deliver at scale in the lower cost way these intro courses, you've got both bigger pipeline, but also better efficiency. So you know, Michael Crow added again, last week, he was in the news with their partnership with dreamscape learn VR, this week, He's launching with YouTube, definitely something to watch. And meanwhile, on the on the Ed Tech landscape, there's an kind of landmark survey from market brief, which is at weeks kind of insider Business Journal. And the survey finds that something like 60% of tech employees doubt their managers ability to help the company scale and grow. As you were reading this, you're talking to a lot of leaders in the ad tech space, Haley, you know how much of this is due to the like, macro environment, and how much of this is actually a lack of capability or capacity in that tech space itself? Yeah, of course, this was an interesting why didn't really clicking into it. It's, it's fascinating music, it says that many of the drivers here are that the companies were actually just were kind of forced to grow too quickly, when when they received so much demand. And so much just, I guess, just so much demand, and really kind of onboarding new employees. And it meant that the employees were not necessarily the right fit, or maybe didn't have the perfect skill set. But the employers, of course, just needed these heads and these people to to really fill those seats when when there was all this kind of unmet demand kind of just skyrocketing during the pandemic. And so I think it's an interesting shift of the market. And the study calls out that the executives actually recognize that the majority of these employees probably aren't getting the support they need in these roles. So I think it goes back to the question of yes, there might be skills that that aren't currently present in these workforces, and how are upskilling and tech companies going to kind of enter this equation to help upskill those who may be entered roles that they maybe didn't have the perfect skill set for? Oh, that's such a great point. We need like Ed Tech upskilling companies to work with ad tech companies to upskill them. Yes. You know, I think there's three scenarios here. One scenario is we grew so fast that we are over our skis. And that is a classic Startup Challenge. So that's not unique to that tech space, I don't think the second is, we are a company that is struggling to grow, because ad tech is hard. And that's more of an ad tech sector problem. Because, you know, many of the companies are selling b2b, or they're either getting high churn and customers, it's just hard coming out of the pandemic, to grow edtech companies. And then the third is We literally don't have skilled people in key positions. And I actually think it's a little bit you know, depending on your company, it's all three. For those that grew really fast, we're seeing a contraction, and some of that contraction may be because people didn't know how to capture the momentum and sustain growth. We're also seeing companies contracting because you know, ad tech as a market is has been really tough. But I will say there's both on the technical side and on the growth and sales side I often see people coming in with like one of the three skill sets so you either know education, you know and have tech or you know business but there's a few people that do edgy speak techno speak, and this speak all three. And we're just a sector where you have these unique challenges of you've got to be basically be able to work across all those three need to be successful. And I've seen a lot in healthcare around how they provide training for non healthcare people to do the health speak. And to understand health systems, they spend way more on one r&d And to professional development than any of us do in the education space, partly because their margins are higher, and they're their tam is huge. So it is a reckoning point. I, you know, it's fun that you're part of a venture capital firm, I will say, this is a moment where funders who really do have a portfolio of companies facing similar challenges can aggregate some of that training and professional development. So you know, that would be my hope to see. So speaking of VCs, what is our third headline? Really? Yes, our third headline today is a bunch of VCs came out with reports on kind of the state of Ed Tech funding and 2022 being in the first month year of 2022. So a lot of data kind of around the pullback of company valuations and investment sentiment. And one report from rich capital kind of was highlighting how there is a 37% decline and US ed tech investment from 2021 to 2022. So seeing that 8.2 billion in 2021, to now 5.2 billion. I think an important caveat, at least for for the US market is of course, the US VC funding landscape overall, dropped 31% in 2022. So I don't think ad tech is too much of a differentiator here and kind of how the market is looking. But it's super interesting. And if you want to dive into that Indian market as well and interesting, kind of report there. Yeah, I think the challenge with these market breezes, everyone's pulling different data and like, what qualifies as Ed Tech and what doesn't, but the overall trend is funding is down. And last year, funding was about half. And it's looking very similar that funding will be about half. What I find most interesting is that the US kind of is steady in terms of a market. And Europe, which had a big spike before seems to be holding some of its ground. You know, one of the kind of unlocks in Europe, I think has been the ability to grow. If you're in like France, for example, the ability to grow to another country in the EU, that also has a different language. People have kind of now kind of figured out how to architect software so that it can go across those borders. And those markets have realized that there is a role for private sector in in the education market. But I feel like India continues to be Wild West, just diving into that report like what what did you see what were your major takeaways? It was an interesting one test prep is definitely still that really highest funded edtech sub sector within India, that market did drop. But one, one market that actually rose in terms of funding and India was upskilling startups, which kind of goes back to your point on the importance of upskilling. All these employees that entered just all these new markets when there was that hiring demand during the pandemic. And those upscaling startups, the funding actually reduced 62% year over year. So in 2022, we saw 165 million really being deployed to upskilling startups when in 2021, it was just 61 point 3 million. So interesting shift there, but definitely still within a funding winter in India. So on top of all of this, we also had a great article out from Jennifer Carolyn, which it's called Five stats shaping my investment theses in 2023. And it's a little bit more focused on the US market. She talks about 1 million student decline in US K 12 Public Schools 35% fewer teachers enrolled in teacher prep programs in college men are dropping out at a very high rate 60% women and only 40% men today. And also she talks a little bit about the bands of chap GPT. The one that really struck me was American teenagers spend 11 fewer hours per week with friends versus a decade ago. One that just like makes me so sad, thinking about teenagers across American high schools, you know, per week, 11 hours per week fewer with friends, we are entering a kind of Gen alpha that is super technologically enabled. they're digital natives. They're fluid and fluid and AI. They are also incredibly lonely and isolated. And so I do think that there's a way in which our ed tech space is often looking at these technical challenges, but the adaptive challenges around how do we create connection? How do we give a sense of belonging? I think that that is one area that will increase. And if I had, you know, we'll talk about Chet GPT, in a second, I would have predicted that AI and ML would replace these like rote, monotonous roles and tasks, and in many ways it is. But if you actually see where a lot of the energy is, it's around creating art. It's around like, visualization, creative writing, etc. And so I'm hopeful that some of our technology products and our edtech companies can help, you know, Gen alpha, flourish, and feel connected 100% and kind of just looking at Gen alpha and Gen Z, I think continually we we see kind of increased mental health challenges, and just, it's so much more rampant across that generation, I think, just kind of spurred by the pandemic and, and really that online remote learning, which which took people out of that classroom and out of that social atmosphere. And so I think it'll be interesting to continue to see how different governments and how different startups think about improving mental well being, of course, kind of in our other news, don't need to dive into it. But Mayor Eric Adams of New York, promising mental telehealth support for all your high school students, I think that that will be kind of the start of a lot of others mayor's doing something similar, just kind of seeing what problems this generation is facing in terms of loneliness and mental health. Totally. Well, you know, one of the stats that Jennifer cited was 35% fewer teachers enrolled in teacher prep programs. We're now also seeing a bunch of chatter around $60,000 Teacher base salary minimum with the American teachers act. It's a bill that would incentivize states to raise teacher salaries. You know, you and I, both in classroom educators 60k minimum base salary, is this going to solve the teacher shortage? What's your take, I'm not sure if it's a silver bullet solution, but I definitely am in support of this moving forward. And it being one hopeful, hopefully piece of the solution, because I think an interesting factor in this article is one in five teachers in this country are forced to work a second job to make ends meet and and I was one of those teachers working a second job. And I think it's impossible to have these teachers in the classroom, worried about just making ends meet, and also being able to give 100% to their students. And I think kind of moving this bill forward. And it's going to be reintroduced to Congress. And so they're introducing many new pieces and parts, which we can dive into. But definitely excited to see this continue to kind of take more support and action in Congress on the $60,000. My thought is, okay, this is a start. But it is clearly not good enough. I mean, if you imagine that there's 180 days of school, and a teacher works an eight hour day just on the days where they're showing up and delivering, you know, clock in clock out, this basically translates to 40 bucks an hour, what you can do in most markets for 40 bucks an hour, it is kind of mind blowing that 60,000 is what we think is going to turn the tide. And on top of that, you know, most teachers work as much time outside of the class as they are clocking in and clocking out in the class grading papers planning, etc. And you also have like summer time, and so on. I really do think that we should be looking more at like 100k. And if you think about the our education systems and structures and the amount of administrative overhead, the amount of waste on many kind of like aging facilities or you know, bureaucratic reporting and programs, and I know this because I'm on the school board and, you know, in a small district, and we've had to cut a lot of that stuff out, there's an opportunity to really reimagine the role of educators as as $100,000 role where you're coordinating learner centered practices in the classroom, you have teacher's assistants, who are apprenticing to be the teacher, also supporting kids in small groups. And you could actually have a career pathway that not only is compelling, but it's like a clear slam dunk better than going to Chipotle, where you can be a store manager and they'll pay for your degree. Like we need it to be an obvious decision that teaching is a great professional move all the days in the 50s and 60s when like doctor, lawyer, educator, those were all considered to be, you know, really compelling career paths. One thing that I also think this news may not be clear to everybody in the public is the fact Federal government really has very little control over what happens at the state and local level it school districts, the very local level that actually set the salary schedule, it states that set guidelines and provide the funding. And so really all the feds have are just some carrots, not a lot of sticks to make this happen. So it'll be interesting to see how this one plays out. You know, whether it's Jennifer Carolyn's article, whether it's some of the work done with Linda darling Hammond at Stanford, or it's the work around American teacher at the crisis is here. And it's only going to get worse if we don't solve it. 100%. And I think two really interesting call outs also on this bill is that one, they're actually planning on setting aside funds for the US Department of Education to support a national campaign to raise awareness about the value of teachers, as well as encouraged teaching as a career. So you can only hope that Apple kind of move that needle forward. And people valuing teachers and seeing this as a career that that is worthwhile. We can only pray, of course, and then secondly, there are new changes kind of in the reintroduction of the bill that will actually help account for the cost of living, and so that states can apply for funding that will provide teachers with these cost of living adjustments, of course, I'm fully in support with your 100,000 instead of 60,000. But we can only hope that that these two modifications will also kind of help solve the current problem we're seeing have an incredible teacher shortage. Totally. And just as we kind of have a story every week around challenges in K 12 education. We also are having a story every week around AI and Chet GPT what's coming up on our chat GPT beat this week, Hayley. Yeah, lots of interesting articles. I feel like every day my inbox has dozens of articles on AI and education. But we're starting to see a lot of players kind of entering the space of detecting chat GBT in essays, of course, that kind of being a pivotal concern of many teachers, and just many in the education landscape of students actually cheating using chat GBT. So two articles here, kind of the first one being a profitable education race to detect it. And another one being how education nonprofits actually released a free tool to detect chat GPT generated student work. So it's really interesting to kind of see this arms race of both for profit players coming out, and nonprofit players coming out and and you can only hope that that will see high quality solution that that will help educators kind of solve that this pain point of ensuring student integrity and their work. Yeah, seeing all this, how does this make you think about the business side? I think we're all excited about the use cases and applications. But given that nonprofits are getting in the game, given that, like, you know, some guy in his mom's basement can create a chat GPT detector, where do you think the you know, from an investment standpoint, or from a business standpoint, where do you think the puck is going? Yeah, I would say, from an owl and kind of just looking at the overall kind of VC landscape. I think people were pretty bullish on backing maybe a potential company that would help detect chat, GBT and education. And I don't know if you saw kind of the Princeton student coming out with his version of a detector system. And he tweeted how pretty much every VC from the likes of Sequoia to general catalyst tweeted him back and emailed him to get a conversation and learn more. So there's clearly a buzz in the venture space of trying to figure out what is this AI detection tool that will kind of win the market? Or what is this AI and education kind of integration that will really shift the education landscape. But I was really surprised and interested to kind of see this nonprofit solution already launched, especially when Pac Pac and turn it in both haven't even launched their AI detection systems yet. So I think this is kind of an arms race that that time will be a big indicator here of if the nonprofit solution offers enough, of course, kind of integrations and high quality detections. And if it doesn't, then it will be interesting to see kind of which for profit players really win the market here. As I watch this space, I noticed a theme emerging there's the kind of hard tech AI, which is really like open AI, Google, these are really, really expensive. You know, supercomputer power required, capital intensive, but they're building the infrastructure around these large language models that enable the kind of AI to be applied across so many use cases. And I think there's not only are there big investors, there's big tech companies that are betting their entire future. I mean, I think Microsoft is now really, really tied to the future of open AI. On the other side, there's all these soft tech companies, which really are doing the lightweight applications of the heart or deep tech. And first, like when all this stuff came out, I thought, oh my gosh, there's a renaissance here. And Michael Moe, and one of his articles was like, you know, the next billion dollar edtech company might be like, six people, just creating an application of AI. And I think while that is possible, I'm also now starting to realize the defensive ability of any of these use cases is very, very low. So the Princeton student, because he was out first is getting all of the VC attention. But in like, a month, there's like 15, other competitors. And in a year, there could be 15,000 competitors. And so really, you know, for those who are thinking about leveraging AI as part of their product value proposition, you've got to figure out your MO, that's beyond just the AI use case, because that's so copyable. And once yours is working, other people are going to immediately see, oh, here's how that AI use cases solving this problem. And if I'm a bigger player, I'm either buying you really quickly at a very low valuation, or I'm just hiring three or four other people to go mimic that. And so, you know, I think the, from an investor community standpoint, there has to be this really thoughtful eye on not only like, is this a really important use case that solving a clear problem, but also, is there a path to kind of a winner take all or winner take most market dynamic. And I think Chad GBT detection, unfortunately, is not a winner take all moment, I think there's it's going to be incredibly fragmented. And you know, the efficacy of each one, they can all debate, which just makes buyers pause and use the latest free tool, it reminds me a little bit of Photomath. And I love the Photomath books. They've had, you know, one of the leading apps in the App Store for like six years. But this idea of photo detection of language and of math problems, and then instant solving, that's now become commoditized. To the degree that, you know, as soon as they put up a paywall, users drop off and use the other free tool. And so they're figuring out okay, how do we add tutoring or, you know, like, guidance to help teach the core concepts on top of that, I think we're going to see the same thing here in AI. With that, we're gonna go to funding rounds and m&a News. Alex is not here today. But a couple that kind of caught my eye. I'd say first, I'm looking at class Sarah, raising 40 million in a series, a class era is a global LMS platform focused on emerging markets, and is 40 million in their series, a round, the largest and edtech globally for a company with no prior funding. And it was led by a Saudi based investment company. What I think is really interesting is you know, Mina, that's the Middle East and North Africa has been exploding in terms of number of learners. And now we're starting to see some of the business cases really taking off. So that was one that caught my eye. But what about you in terms of funding rounds? What are some that you were looking at Haley? Yeah, of course. So another interesting one Arctic shores secured a 5.5 million series A and this is for their psychometric assessment kind of looking at promoting greater diversity and equity and recruitment practices. So kind of in that future work category. And then also elucid dot kind of raising an additional 2.5 million from their existing investor, in elucidated is really kind of trying to build a content creation platform for elearning in particular, so kind of really growing that market to help authors of producing elearning content, which is an interesting one. And in healthcare ad tech, we also saw the Rohan getting 7 million in funding led by bloom ventures. I will say health tech is an area where we're seeing health tech at Tech converging and non ad tech investors coming in like blue. You know, there's a lot of upskilling potential there. What about m&a Anything catching your eye on the m&a front? Yes, super interesting one so go one acquired UK rival Anders pink and so this is kind of continuing go once pushed into the European market considering they also recently acquired the Swiss French ad tech Corp Academy. So it's really interesting to see go one which is the Sydney Australia based company expanded Ru is newer markets with clearly a big push in the Europe market with these acquisitions. Yeah, and this is one of those examples where the language barrier here to four had been a challenge for companies to grow. And now you're actually seeing companies using it to their advantage rolling up, you know, specialized language companies that then allow them to protect that market or gain market share, and really interesting to have one from Australia, all the way across to Europe. All right, well, we've given you the full rundown with headlines as well as funding and m&a. Now, it is time for us to introduce our guests. All right, everyone, it is time for our interview. And we are so blessed to have solid Nirma Hamid, founder and CEO of fourth brain joining us today. So what you have been an early Ad Tech Insider fan, we've been at all of the same happy hours together. And now AI is just like in the spotlight. And you've been working on this for a long time. So we're so excited to have you here to share your experiences. Thanks for joining us. It's great to be here. Thank you, Ben for having me. So I'm going to kick it off with the first question around fourth brain, just what you're doing. It combines two of the hottest areas in edtech, upskilling. And AI, what was your journey to start fourth brain? That is an excellent question. We actually started right in the middle of when California went into shelter in place, I think it was the same day that I decided to do this. But right around then one of the things I was kind of noticing is there are a lot of furloughs and layoffs and people around me getting impacted. And meanwhile, tech education, machine learning and AI specifically that I've been in for a while with roles at Udacity trilogy to you keeps growing right, the number of jobs kind of exponentially is growing. Meanwhile, the training or the education available is either stagnant, or in some cases, there are educators who are kind of leaving the field for industry. So it occurred to me that we really need to fill this gap. And that's something like that kind of keeps me up at night. And during COVID. One of the trends that emerged as I've been trying to get this hybrid learning sort of started from both my experiences in online education and in person, because I do believe the combination of the two brings the best of both worlds where you get accountability of in person with the flexibility of online. And generally that's a tough thing to get students to do those who are used to campuses kind of question online, those who are used to online don't want to have a scheduled time. But with COVID, that just became a no brainer. Like yes, of course, it's going to be online. And of course, I would love to meet people. So the hybrid kind of picked up from there, and it's here to stay. So that's why we combined this alternate mode of really practical applications. And then what it means to be a machine learning engineer have a career in AI. And that's what kind of led to fourth brain. Incredible, and you just started touching on it on kind of leading to careers in AI. And your website mentions that 97 million new jobs will be created and 2023 because of AI and machine learning. I'd love for you to expand on this. And then we can dive a bit more in kind of careers you're seeing and where the opportunities are here. Yeah, absolutely. It's 97 million jobs will be created by 2025, I believe. And I think the source is either BCG or Gartner. But really what it looks at is both new jobs created as well as those that are impacted. So there are several different fields. I think the top five are healthcare, financial sectors, quite a few of these that are going to get impacted by AI. So people's roles are not going to be the same. You have to know some applications and really understand it. It's a huge number. And I think what happens if it doesn't get filled are these roles don't really move over, we'll see a little bit of a stunted growth, which you don't want to see necessarily, right. So it's not just like, What's the trend that we're kind of seeing now, especially this year, I would say towards the end of last year, is before, as soon as you hear AI and machine learning, people kind of think, I don't know how to code. I don't know the math behind it, it's not for me, I'm just gonna sit here and hope and those days are gone. And it doesn't, you don't have to be that technical to get into it. There are so many non technical applications. And there will be tools that are meant to be that way, in a lot of ways to kind of digress a little bit. It's like web development back in the day, you have to know HTML, CSS to do it. Now you don't have enough tools, anybody can pick it up and do it. That's a very simplified version of this, but essentially, the impact and being able to utilize it I think Chad GPG gives us a great application or use case of it. But that's kind of how it's gonna get impacted. Everyone in there and domain knowledge and expertise is going to be important. So when we talk about that many jobs and how it's sort of like growing, I think the year over year growth is around 30%. And if anything that has kind of increased over the last decade, so I'm sure we'll see that growth rate becoming higher as we go over time to. It's fascinating. Right now everyone is talking about AI, not just technically, but also ethically, you know, ethics are taking center stage. And there's many examples of really positive use cases, as well as some of the worst case scenario use cases, in addition to upskilling, your teams and students, your learners around the technical elements of AI, how do you approach the ethical side? That is such a great question. So going back a little bit to the origin story of fourth grade, is when I first started, I talked to a lot of employers because they were still talking about not having enough machine learning engineers, right. And there are a lot of programs that are out there not necessarily degree programs, although they're coming up now. Whether they were online programs, MOOCs or something else that we're teaching, pretty good quality program. So one of the questions I asked a lot of employers, as we were kind of doing our research is, why do you not hire are? Are these programs not teaching enough of it? And like the questions that the areas that they kind of highlighted at the time, were, in addition to the technical skills, they needed people to kind of hit the ground running. But outside of that communication skills and collaboration skills were super important to them, too. Understandably. So because this was around COVID remote work was becoming the norm. And a lot of managers were also talking to you about like, how do I help people without micromanaging, so the communication, like they just wanted to make sure nobody was kind of hitting their head against a wall. Collaboration became important too, because just outside of like, pods, or when it used to be that if you're an engineer, if you're an engineer, you don't necessarily have to communicate with other groups, the product manager did it for you, like those kinds of walls are also broken down, you have to be able to speak to both. The reason I mentioned this is ethics and AI is the third one that we teach in the course. And it didn't necessarily always come up in these employer conversations, but it came up very heavily on the student side of things. And that was because they were seeing an impact of you build something, you build a model, you deploy it, if you didn't pay attention to the bias in the data, there were examples of you'll remember, I think, in 2021 2022, of models being pulled because of that, because they were kind of propagating the bias and sort of mitigating. So our students, so we kind of took a bottoms up approach, if you will, in some way. So we very much highlighted you might have seen the center site, the three pillars outside of technical skills that we pay heavy attention to is communication, collaboration and ethics in AI. So we encourage our students as they're kind of developing their projects to really ask those hard questions and ask that question around, like, how is my particular model going to mitigate bias and solve this problem of black box, whether it's the data source, whether there are checkpoints in place and ask those hard questions. So we have a culture of bringing in guest speakers in our classes who are experts in their fields. And it's sort of a open q&a whenever they come in. And every single time that I've attended, or students always ask about ethics in AI to the experts in the field. So they sort of have to kind of pick up and take notice of it. So even if you're not thinking of it at that high level, but you have to because if your models don't work, that's going to be a pretty big business loss when you have to pull models out, and recreate them or rethink where the data structures are coming. This bottoms up approach of the people who are actually building them. If they think about it, I think that's actually a good way of kind of surfacing it to folks to say, hey, you do need to think about it. And it is just as much as a moral or philosophical question as it is a business question. Fascinating, incredible. And kind of stepping back here, how do you see AI playing out specifically in the learning space? So thinking directly and Keynote, higher education classrooms? For example? That is such a good question as soon as Cheju VDk. But I got so many requests around this to say, how do we rethink it? It's an exciting development. I mean, you guys are also in the tech space. For me, it kind of reminds me of situations where I remember in high school and this is because my education system took a really long time to catch up with not that old with us logbooks and at the time, I remember thinking, I will never ever use this. Like we already have scientific calculators, we already have computers, like it may not be in every household where I was studying. But it's sort of like that, like we spend so much time trying to look this up, which I could have done in such a short time using calculators. Similar things I think came about when, for example, Internet became more available and people didn't have to memorize essays if you remember days of like rote memorization that went away, because you could just look it up or the dictionary went from hardcopy to being more easily accessible, right? So these are all developments or tools that just made it so much better. I think this will just force people to think about what types of questions were actually asking students to do. And it's becoming more of a critical thinking analysis because it's not like the AI tools that are out there are coming up with things on their own. They're kind of surveying and And in a more structured, nice format, repeating the data that's already up there, it's up there taking what people have already figured out, and then giving it to you in a much nicer, concise manner. So if we see it from that way, it's like, okay, it's just gonna make if I'm trying to do a project where I start from step zero, and it's going to take like, three days to get to step 5123 is done right now, because it's so easily accessible. So the starting point has just moved over. So just gives us years I think back or years of the future sort of ever hustle at our fingertips, where it kind of makes me feel like we've just moved the starting point further by using these tools. So that just means we get to see innovation, that without AI would have been in the future, but we get to see it in our lifetime. So that's kind of how I like to think about it with education applications, is it should almost be a filter, like as we're kind of developing assessments or content. The filter is if someone can use an AI tool to answer this question, that's not the greatest use of our students time. Let's ask them a different question. That's not something I can solve, right? That, to me is like the possibilities are endless. And it just makes so much more room for creativity and innovation, than doing stuff that we're more manual or repetetive that I can kind of take over. It's so encouraging, and so fulfilling, just to hear how you're thinking about this. And also just the idea that the learners themselves in your program are thinking about the ethics, the application, the possibilities, just makes me very excited for this 97 million new jobs, incorporating ml AI, etc. And that you're on the front edge of that. Sawa. Thank you so much for joining for our listeners that want to learn more about fourth brain, how can they find you? Yes, so they can check us out at fourth brain.ai. And we have a very exciting project or program coming up in the next month that you'll see more about on the site that is specifically about AI for decision makers. So non technical, not just for engineers, like we've done in the past directly and output from surveying or graduates and employers in this space. So I'm excited for people to check that out as well. So yeah, you can find me at www dot fourth brain dot Yeah. Thanks so much. So it's great to have you today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.