The Future of Synchronous Online Learning with Michael Chasen of Class Technologies

Michael Chasen is the co-founder and CEO of Class Technologies Inc., the maker of Class. He is an entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to improving the way people live and learn.

Most notably, Chasen served as co-founder and CEO of Blackboard Inc., a pioneering edtech company with software used by over 20,000 institutions in more than 70 countries by 20 million teachers and learners worldwide.

Recommended Resources:
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell Podcast
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Freakonomics Podcast

Transcript

Alexander Sarlin: 0:05

Welcome to EdTech insiders where we speak with founders operators investors and thought leaders in the education technology industry and report on cutting edge news in this fast evolving field from around the globe. From AI to xr to K 12 to l&d, you'll find everything you need here on edtech insiders. And if you like the podcast please give us a rating and a review so others can find it more easily. Michael Chasen is the co founder and CEO of class Technologies Incorporated, the maker of class. He is an entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to improving the way people live and learn. Most notably chastened served as co founder and CEO of Blackboard incorporated a pioneering edtech company, with software used by over 20,000 institutions in more than 70 countries by 20 million teachers and learners worldwide. Michael Chasen Welcome to EdTech insiders.

Michael Chasen: 1:07

Thank you so much for having me. Very excited to be here.

Alexander Sarlin: 1:09

I'm really excited to talk to you today. You are a legend in edtech. Let's start with a little bit of your background. You were a co founder and CEO of Blackboard one of the largest most successful edtech companies of all time. It's been in private equity hands you left in 2012 You've been a CEO in a number of different industries. And you jump back at 2020 to start class technologies at the height of the COVID pandemic. Super exciting product. tell our listeners about your journey in the ad tech world.

Michael Chasen: 1:39

So my journey of Blackboard is very much like the quintessential startup me and my roommate from college Matthew Pinsky literally got a brownstone in downtown DC. And before that we had just gotten jobs out of graduate school, we were both working at KPMG peat Marwick, and their higher ed technology consulting. And we saw that universities were spending millions of dollars wiring the dorm room and the classroom to the internet. And there was no software that made that useful for teaching and learning. So literally on the one year anniversary of us working there, we decided to quit our jobs to start Blackboard to help institutions bring their courses online. We got a brownstone in downtown DC and started doing some prototyping work. Then there was a group of students at a Cornell university that had actually started working with Cornell and a few other institutions developing tools where instructors could put their course materials online, we ended up merging together with them and ended up bringing to market really the first LMS and Blackboard Learn. And you know, it's funny, because I remember in the early days, but we were then we started to try to go raise some venture capital, we're speaking with one of our early investors, they said, Hey, Michael, we've we've surveyed a bunch of schools and told them about your technology who said, Oh, that's great. What did they say? And they said, No one's going to use it features are Luddites, and they're not interested in this technology. The students aren't asking for it. By the way, it might be legal to post grades online, is the early what we're like, Well, we think that maybe the trend is going to come our way. Anyways, believe it or not that same venture capital firm ended up investing in us. I believe. From there, we started growing the company and was started as just the two of us, as I said, in a brownstone in downtown DC we grew to 3000 employees, I 20 offices around the world, we had 1000s of institutions using our technology, we even expanded beyond just teaching and learning till the entire institution put themselves online, I had the opportunity to take the company public in 2004, I was actually one of the youngest CEOs on the NASDAQ. But before like Mark Zuckerberg, and everybody went public, and also no old and no one cares about me anymore. But I used to be younger years ago, and revenue as a public company for seven years and then sold it to a private equity firm for just under 1.8 billion.

Alexander Sarlin: 3:41

Yeah, I think of that moment as really sort of the dawn of modern ad tech, especially in the higher ed space. Tell us about your decision to jump back in with class technologies. It's an really, really interesting and really impressive product. I actually got to play with it hands on at ASU GSV. You know, you built on top of zoom. But you really taking it as you say sort of the last mile to make what is a teleconferencing platform into a virtual classroom. So what does that look like? So I found myself home

Michael Chasen: 4:08

during the pandemic, just as you know, I guess we all did. And I have three children. My younger daughter was in third grade. My son was in high school, my older daughter was in college and they were all home. And our classes were all online in zoom and Microsoft Teams and I saw that they were having trouble engaging in their classes. And when I asked their teachers, instructors why you're having so much trouble engaging with the students online, they said look, zoom and Microsoft Teams, these other virtual meeting tools, they're great for lectures, and they're great for group discussions. But a lot of what we do in the physical classroom, you can't replicate online, we do a lot. We take attendance. We hint that assignments, we give tests or quizzes. We proctor exams to talk one on one with the students. We approve presentations. We might use a textbook electronic content to the internet or watch videos as well as tracking student progress and grading things. And all of those things you just can't replicate online. And so my background is actually computer science that I on Blackboard for 17 years, I've been in the EdTech space for a while, I knew that zoom and a software development kit, Eric, the CEO of zoom is a very technology oriented Founder CEO. And so when he built his product, he actually wanted to be more than just a virtual meeting tool, but also a platform, other people could expand and build upon. Zoom had the most infrastructure back end, the highest quality videos, the most number of simultaneous streams, most schools had standardized on Zoom for their classes. So we decided to take zoom, and build on top of that add teaching and learning tools to the to the virtual meeting environment. And that was the beginning of class

Alexander Sarlin: 5:34

and give us a couple of examples. Because I didn't really know how to visualize this until I saw it in action. What are some of the things that actually happen in a class classroom versus a traditional Zoom Room?

Michael Chasen: 5:46

Well, lucky, really what we tried to do is replicate what those teachers were doing in the physical classroom. So now, right within class resume, what you could do is you have it's very similar to the Zoom interface. So of course, everyone's already familiar with using it. But what you can do is you can easily deploy content. So you can actually say, Okay, everybody, I want you to look at this document, and you can talk about the document more than a share screen, you can actually share the actual document or you say, Hey, we're gonna take this quiz now, or we're going to work on this assignment. And in fact, while they're working on it, you can see not only their face, but you can see what's going on on their computer desktop, to help them along, just like you're a teacher peering over their shoulder in an actual classroom, looking at the work they're doing on their desk, and you can actually help them a lot. We give teachers things like seating charts, to be able to organize the room, whether it's a class of 3050 100, or 300, they can easily find people and interact with them. We did a few other things, you know, we would hear that the teachers wanted their classes to be engaging, but the only thing we could do is share screen. So we made it that they could actually share a bunch of interactive files, whether it's Google Docs, or Microsoft Office docs, or a website. So they can actually load that and share that all within the Zoom environment to make it a more engaging experience. You know, we heard from a lot of teachers, hey, breakout rooms are great, we use them every day. But the problem is, when I set my students in breakout groups, I can't see what's going on in the different groups, if I'm not in it, we added an old Breakout Room view. So teachers can actually see what's going on in every breakout room at the same time. And they can see which students are participating who's talking who's not paying attention. And then they can go ahead and send content to the different breakout groups, they can say, hey, I want breakout group one to do this assignment of a breakout group to to take this quiz, or breakout group three groups for this website. And so all the things that teachers used to do to keep it engaging to make it interactive with the students and the physical classroom, that on Zoom, you were just limited to a screen share, we made interactive,

Alexander Sarlin: 7:29

yeah, then there's differentiation built into that too, because you're gonna have different groups doing different things at the same time with different assistants and all sorts of stuff. It feels very different than a standard Zoom Room, you multiple presenters is sort of a lot of things that are, as you say, sort of, they don't seem like massive changes, but they enable a totally different type of interaction. And you know, you recently announced an AI feature within class, which, if I have it correct, correct me if I'm wrong here, I believe it allows students to get to basically have an AI assistant to get questions answered in real time during synchronous classes without having to stop the class. And various things like that. But correct, I'm not sure I know all about this. When AI started

Michael Chasen: 8:05

becoming more readily available, we wanted to make sure it was used as a tool to improve the class. So the teacher and the students don't need to know anything about AI. And what we're doing is live during the class, we feed in everything that teachers do and say, all the documents that are shared into the AI now, and we essentially gave every teacher a teaching assistant AI. So now if a student has a question, they can of course, raise your hand and ask the teacher or they can first ask the AI TA and the AI teaching assistant will then answer first based on the information that's been presented in the class, but as well as it's more broad knowledge of the particular area and answer the question. So if it's something basic, let's say you're taking a science class, and you don't understand how photosynthesis works, and teachers already gone over it, you can just say, Hey, I teach you the system. Can you explain to me how photosynthesis works? Not only that, you can actually highlight something that teacher said and say, Hey, can you expand upon this in more detail? So now the student isn't interrupting the class, they can save the important questions for the teacher. But if it's something basic, or something they need more explanation on, they can go ahead and ask the AI teaching assistant. And it can answer the question in a way that's based on all the material that the teachers already been provided. And then we do a few other things as well, the AI teaching assistant will notice if you've come into class late. And if you come into class late says, Hey, Michael, I see that you 10 minutes late to class, we'd like me to summarize what you've missed. And we'll actually summarize what you've missed in being late to class. And then at the end of class, it'll actually summarize the whole class and create study guides for all the students. And the teacher can of course, turn this on or off. And actually, it was funny, we started showing this to some early faculty adopters. And they said, Well, you know, we need to be able to actually just during the class actively turn it on and off, because if we give an assignment or a quiz, we don't want them asking about this, like, oh, so we added the features in Lightroom classic and say, Hey, turn off my teaching assistant because we're about to do a quiz or a test. So it's funny, there's some things that you just don't think of, but we wanted it to really be very much added into the class and instead resource to the teacher and helpful to the students.

Alexander Sarlin: 10:03

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And it's funny because, you know, we see so many different generative AI features coming out right now people are all trying to figure out how to incorporate this very exciting new technology into their existing systems. This is such a feels like a very natural extension, and one that could have enormous impact on what a class looks like you can imagine, you know, students who want to extend or go deep on one area of what's happening classical Oh, that's really interesting, I really want to know more about that. They don't have to stop the class, they don't have to, you know, look it up after they could say, I'm going to in parallel to listening to the teacher, I'm going to go deeper on this thing and learn more about it and use the AI. And you're,

Michael Chasen: 10:38

of course, giving the example the students are trying to go above and beyond that we do definitely open up to that. But you also have to think more practically, with the students that want to raise their hand and say, I don't understand that, because that's embarrassing the rest of the class. And now it's a click of the button, they can have someone else that explains it maybe a different way. And then you can even say, can you explain that to me again, in a different way, and you have some side help, it's personal help for every student. And that's what I'm so excited about.

Alexander Sarlin: 11:01

And general AI is incredibly good at that I've been testing it on my own, you can ask it to explain something to you, like you're a fourth grader, like you're an eighth grader, like you're an 11th grader, and it really can do it, it actually can change the level that can use metaphors and analogies. So it's yeah, I'm totally with you. I'm 100%. It goes for both remediation and acceleration. So let me ask you about the COVID pandemic class was founded, as you said, while you were home with your family, we were all home during the pandemic and the whole world got this crash course all at the same time. And what online synchronous learning, you know, does look like could look like, as the pandemic has started to recede, a lot of edtech companies, you know, who had seen these huge spikes in user bases have started to come back down, the investment landscape changed a little bit, people are a little more hesitant, but class, you know, has 10 million users or more 1500 institutions, and it works across many sectors. It's K 12, higher ed workforce and government. And so what I'd like to ask you is, you know, in this sort of beginning of the post COVID period, have you seen some changes in your sort of mix of, you know, are you getting more workforce unless K 12? Or, you know, how is it sort of evolving as the pandemic emergency starts to ebb?

Michael Chasen: 12:09

Well, let me actually first step back, because you have to understand just the changes that have been taking place during COVID, and then kind of post COVID. So, look, during COVID, every case, well, higher ed institution, and all corporate training went online. But then after the pandemic, there was of course, a change. Now, in higher ed, look, every institution before the pandemic had online learning, and certainly after the pandemic, there still have online learning programs. If anything, the students now expect there to be a larger synchronous component of those online programs. And they're more interested in taking online programs. So higher rate after the pandemic has seen an increase in online learning from where it was before the pandemic, k 12 is the really one area that of course, you had every K 12 institution online. Now, the vast majority of them are, you know, barely doing anything. But the interesting thing is they're keeping their toe in the water. Yeah, a lot of schools are using it to for some advanced placement classes, or for some tutoring, there are different states that are experimenting with having a fully virtual K through 12. School. So that really, you know, I put k 12, about maybe 1015 years behind where HireRight is today, but they're putting their toe in the water starting to use it. And then of corporate training, all in person corporate training went online during the pandemic, and none of it is coming back in person so that that market has continued to take off. So certainly kind of a difference in each of the markets. But we're seeing a lot of continued growth in higher ed in corporate training, and K 12, putting their toe in the water and starting to experiment. But I expect that to be a much bigger addressable market going forward in the future. Yeah,

Alexander Sarlin: 13:32

that makes a lot of sense. I agree. I think K 12k snapped back. But there's a little bit of a feeling of well, there may be another emergency or some students really preferred that. And, you know, what do we do with that? And you know, we'll see where it all goes. But it seems like there was still a sea change, even if you don't see it fully yet. So talk to me about collaborate. You know, Blackboard had a product called collaborate, as you mentioned, it had a suite of different or has a suite of different products. collaborators are sort of all in one platform. That's an immersive human experience, you know, quote, through your computer, tablet or mobile device. This clearly has some, you know, shared DNA with what class does and class acquired Blackboard Collaborate back from the sort of Blackboard anthology last year. This is a really interesting move. And obviously, you're at the center of this you've been in both companies you've really understand that tell us a little bit about give us some insight into that acquisition, sort of buying that technology out of the blackboard system, and what it means for class.

Michael Chasen: 14:27

I actually started the Blackboard Collaborate product. When I was running blackboard, I actually bought two other virtual meeting companies when button illuminate. And those are companies they very much will just like zoom, but focus in the higher ed space. This is of course, before zoom became the industry standard. So I bought those two companies, we combined that technology into what we call Blackboard Collaborate. And then often when Blackboard was selling an LMS to an institution, we would say, Hey, don't you think you'd also like to buy a virtual meeting tool to hold some of your live class online? Now it didn't have any of the enhance teaching and learning tools that class had we were really just a directory editor to zoom or Microsoft teams that had that feature set, but at a very great loyal install base of over 1200 institutions around the world that were using it. So an anthology ended up buying Blackboard ontology is a leading ERP company about Blackboard, I approached budgets and hey, look, I'm building a company that solely focused in the live learning space. I'd like to buy the Blackboard Collaborate and then merge this technology together with class to create a next generation solution that we call class to point out, we showed ethology, what we built they were very excited by it said, Hey, let's partner together, we'll sell you this company brings technology together, we want it then of course, we sell it. And we've also signed up the other LMS as well Desire to Learn Moodle through open LMS. All are really standardizing on our platform being the leading synchronous live classroom technology to use with their LMS. So it was a great addition. So we got some very talented people, we got a great install base and some good technology that we're now merging together into class, to have this next generation solution that's already starting to come out some of our releases, but we have class 2.0 planned for this summer.

Alexander Sarlin: 16:01

I want to double click on this when you're saying that some of the other LMS platforms like desire to learn and others are starting to, you know, circle around this class 2.0 technology. Tell us a little bit about what that means. That sounds like a real harbinger of things to come in the live learning space.

Michael Chasen: 16:15

We are the premier synchronous learning platform for Blackboard desire to learn and open LMS. And of course, we work with Canvas as well. So institutions that have an LMS, they want to have a live component, we use LTI 1.3, we plug right into those LMSs. So now you could go into your your Blackboard or your desire to learn or your open LMS or your canvas by a one on one course. And the teacher might be saying, hey, seven o'clock this evening, we have a live class, click here. And it launches class for that synchronous component. And we fully synchronize with your LMS. So the class roster is automatically their attendance is automatically transferred. You can launch all of your LMS content in class. And like you can say, hey, we're gonna take a quiz right now. Bam, it'll it'll launch that Blackboard quiz, right within class, let them take it the grade goes right into the gradebook. So it's really exciting, we really bring a lot of that LMS content into the live synchronous environment.

Alexander Sarlin: 17:07

That is exciting. That's a really, really interesting strategic move. Can I ask this may be a little bit out of scope here. But I'm curious about how the AI tool that works within class might interact with the other LMS is or with even AI features within the other LMS is if desire to learn where to maybe it already has launched a sort of AI feature within desire to learn? Is there any way for you know that the AI there and the AI teaching assistant in class to sort of, you know, pass information back and forth, we're just

Michael Chasen: 17:34

actually in the beta with our own feature? Certainly. I already know that a lot of y'all maisons Desire Learn, specifically, has been doing and utilizing AI technology to do analysis of the student progress and other things like that from the product. Certainly from the sharing and analysis of data, you can apply AI and really help define its practices and engagement and even in maybe at risk students. And so yes, from from a data sharing perspective, certainly, then the AI of the LMS can access our data, as well as theirs to help put together you know, assessments of what's going on. I don't think we're yet at the point where our AIs are gonna have a handshake between them and figure out some some best practice yet. But you know, certainly at the rate that this technology is developing, maybe that's not too far in the future.

Alexander Sarlin: 18:14

Yeah. So AI community of practice where weekly the AIS meet and discuss individual surgeons come in. Not yet, not yet. So, you know, you have been in ad tech for longer than most of my guests, I talked to a lot of, you know, very recent founders who have just come into the industry, Blackboard is founded in 1997. Again, I consider that really sort of the dawn of the modern era of edtech. I sure our listeners would really be interested to hear your perspective on sort of how the EdTech space has evolved over this last, it's literally been 25 years since that, since that moment, when when Blackboard was founded, you've been in and out of it, you've seen it from lots of different perspectives. What is your sort of, you know, epic narrative of edtech over the last 25 years? How has it changed?

Michael Chasen: 19:01

Well, I mean, first of all, it is completely changed from when I started as I began this podcast and explained that no schools were interested in our technology. And in fact, early on, when we would sell an LMS to school, they would say, Well, my teachers email the students, the students email in the homework back, we don't need an LMS. Now, of course, that's ridiculous. Every school almost 100% have an LMS, or an online environment to share the course content. I think 100% of schools are going to end up having class or technology like class where they have a virtual classroom environment, to hold their classes online on, you know, at some point, so I think the industry has continued to utilize technology, but here's what I'll share with you. There are certain times when the industry goes through this period of hyper growth or hyper change, and and certainly early on in the early 2000s. That happened with the the LMS. I think we're at that point again, and I think there's two technologies and both are actually I think indirect are a direct result of, of COVID. Look, you can't put every student in the world online and not expect there to be dramatic change. The analogy that I give is addicts. into my kids the other day that when I was younger, we can only order Chinese food and pizza to be delivered. And they're like that, why those two very specific and yet very different food groups to be delivered to your house because of course, my children think now you can order from any restaurant anytime of the day. In fact, we literally ordered Benihana to the abaci Grill, literally, they will make it and deliver that to your house through Uber Eats. And that's what the issue is. So similarly, they spent now almost a year and a half to get online classes, it actually normalized online education for them. So my children, they're almost indifferent to whether they take an in person class or an online class, in fact, their expectations going forward, it will just be a mix of both. And they're both equally as good. That I think is going to forever change the landscape of online education, then when you take that, and you put on top of it, the fact that now you can hold education in the way that people want to learn this live learning environment. You know, I was saying earlier that, you know, I used to think that the future of online learning was going to be schools using an LMS. And students would do self paced learning, and the teacher would pop in once a week and check and how it's going, because you could possibly put an entire institution online, and oh, my God, we could put a whole institution online and a live learning environment. But we could put every institution on the world online, and they can all hold classes at the same time. The scale of the technology today is really just so incredible. But of course, we were putting them online in virtual meeting rooms. And the idea behind class was to take that last, that last mile, put them online in a virtual classroom. Yeah. Then the last trend, of course, you're now seeing is AI, which is going to lower tutoring and teaching assistants and actually make education I think, more effective and more customizable, responsive to the student. So the three trends you have our students be much more interested in adopting and utilizing elearning online learning, in fact, treating it as the same as in person learning, you have now an environment where you can replicate the physical classroom online, and you have AI that can then create more customized learning provide additional resources, and I think also, at the end of the day, help lower the cost and access to education, those three things coming together, I think are going to change the face of AI over the next two to three years, maybe even over the next year. And we're just happy a class to be playing a part of

Alexander Sarlin: 22:06

that. So I really admire that narrative. And when you'd mentioned these periods of hyper growth, it really does feel like we're entering a totally new era of educational technology, where it's just going to do things you just couldn't even imagine. But with the combination of live learning, and you know, live and asynchronous, both being available, content being online, the ability to you know, to add these kinds of teaching assistants or smart teachers or tutors everywhere, it's really amazing. We speak on the podcast a lot, we're very optimistic about the EdTech space, and it feels like this hyper growth is right here. At the same time, in this sort of post COVID period, there's been a little bit of a, you know, a pendulum swing, you know, these generalist investors who are all piling into ed tech, in the middle of the pandemic are sort of heading back out, you're seeing some, some of the big companies starting to using layoffs as lots of stuff. And we're very optimistic, but I'd love to hear you, you know, you've seen all these swings back and forth. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about the sort of the schism between the a little bit of the perception that you know, VCs are sitting on their money, they're a little nervous, what's going to happen with the economy, and then these incredible technologies that I think are about to, you know, accelerate edtech to a level you've never seen, it's a funny sort of push and pull. How do you see that

Michael Chasen: 23:19

this is completely normal, like you take 10 steps forward, you take five steps back at the end of the day, we are significantly further ahead than where we were pre pandemic, with the technology with the adoption with the with the future possibility holds. So you know, the difference I would say is that usually you're always taking a couple of steps forward, and then one or two steps back just the same way that the stock market slowly inches up, going forward. And Ed Tech was the same way, the differences during COVID. I think we took 100 steps forward. So is it a big deal now that we might be taking 20 or 30 steps back to even it out? A little bit? No, I think that this industry, even different than other industries is going to see some continued incredible innovation, primarily from the investment that was made during COVID. Also, primarily from now the new advancements in AI, I think it's going to disproportionately affect in health education. And we have those two forces combined, you can expect this industry to continue to go through, you know, hyper growth, even if there's a little bit of a pullback right now.

Alexander Sarlin: 24:13

Yeah, I appreciate that perspective. And I'm sure our listeners do as well. So you've just mentioned a couple of, you know, major trends that you've seen in the ad tech landscape, you know, the rise of live online learning, as opposed to asynchronous coming out of the pandemic, the AI space. I'm curious, you know, from your perspective, is there a trend that you see coming that sort of is a little bit under people's radar is there's something that may be starting to inch into the space, and it might really make a difference, but people don't quite see it coming? I ask every guest is that you know, is there a trend that is sort of around the next corner? When I say that I'm curious what jumps to your mind, having been in this space and talking to so many people at different different stages?

Michael Chasen: 24:53

I think it's going to be the realization of a lot of the data behind unconventional wisdom and let me explain a little bit more detail. I think now as more education has moved online, and now you have the AI that can do an analysis in a way that wasn't before, we're going to discover a lot of things that maybe cause us to look at things, 90 degrees, or maybe 72 degrees, just different from the way that we looked at them before, and never even thought of analyzing it in this way. But AI has now brought this to the forefront. And it's that combination of two things is the combination of more education online, and like class, your whole synchronous class online. So now we're collecting all the live learning data, and now apply AI to this, I think we're gonna end up using this data for more than just oh, let me try to identify at risk students are living try to identify best cases for engagement. I think that we're going to be answering questions that we are not even thinking of the question right now, I think you could get a good sense of that. If you I would recommend people to check out Malcolm Gladwell is everything from the tipping point to outliers, kind of looking at data in slightly unique and different ways, something he does naturally as a writer or the books freakanomics. I think you're gonna see those types of stories, where they were very specific and say, Hey, we looked at this data in this interesting way. And look what we found. You were never even asking this question. I think that that's now going to be the prevalent way to look at data because of the power of AI and online learning.

Alexander Sarlin: 26:11

That's a powerful idea. You know, we've talked a lot recently about this company, teach effects relatively new company, what they're doing is taking the learning from online live classes, and analyzing it and basically giving teachers insights about who talked the most did students talk equally? Did the genders talk equally? Did the teacher talk for 30%? Or 40%? Or 10% of the class? How many open ended questions were there? They're starting to ask questions like you say that were not asked before in class, nobody had the data to analyze that. And suddenly we do. And it does feel I love this idea of unconventional wisdom, it does feel like you know, one step in that direction, just something comes to mind. For me For what it's worth. You know, as an instructional designer, one thing we are always asked is, what is the optimal way to group students? Is it a homogenous group, a heterogeneous group? Is it students who have complementary skills or complementary, you know, personalities. And honestly, we don't know, there's never been enough research to really know this. But I could figure this out. And it could be really interesting to start to think about optimizing collaborative learning. It's something that I just don't think people talk about nearly as much as they could. But obviously, that's just one of 100 kind of questions that might be asked in this new era.

Michael Chasen: 27:21

I do recommend people if you're if you're not an avid fan of the Malcom Gladwell books, or his own podcast view behind Freakonomics, a bunch of other books that kind of look at the, you know, unusual, economic, socio datasets in different ways. And I just think you're gonna see, you know, they're kind of unique writers looking at it that way, I think you're gonna see an explosion in the data analysis done that way, because of online learning and

Alexander Sarlin: 27:43

AI. That's exciting. Do you expect that type of questioning to come from within companies or from researchers or journalists or sort of outside observers?

Michael Chasen: 27:52

I think across the board, we're doing it as a company institutions are forming their own AI boards to start doing it. I mean, that's why I'm so excited. But the prevalence of it, everybody's doing it.

Alexander Sarlin: 28:00

Yeah. It is a really amazing moment. We very much share that idea. So we will put links to the resources that Michael is recommending in the show notes for this episode. That is the suite of Malcolm Gladwell books, his podcasts and Freakonomics. And Freakonomics also has a podcast and that sort of NPR show, right? Yeah, I love this idea of you know, with this new type of data with this new type of intelligence, where might education go? What kind of questions might we ask that we've never even been empowered to ask before? And how can live learning be optimized in these incredible ways? Michael Chaisson, CEO and founder of class technologies. Thanks so much for being here with us on ad tech insiders.

Michael Chasen: 28:39

Thank you so much for having me and I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

Alexander Sarlin: 28:43

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