BloomTech's Advocacy for Accessible Tech Careers with Mari Nazary

Mari Nazary is the Chief Experience Officer at Bloom Institute of Technology, formerly known as Lambda School, Mari has dedicated over 15 years to transforming the landscape of online education. She believes in making education a universal key, accessible and effective for all, without the financial burden often associated with higher learning.

Mari's journey in EdTech began with her role at Rosetta Stone, where she developed the company’s first online classroom experience. Her passion for instructional design and product development led her to impactful positions at Education First, Voxy, and DataCamp. In these roles, she spearheaded the expansion of learning products, significantly impacting millions of learners worldwide.

At BloomTech, Mari has been instrumental in redefining the education experience. Her initiatives include building a proprietary platform, reducing the cost per learner, and incorporating an AI tutor, significantly enhancing the learning process and improving outcomes. She oversees critical aspects like product development, data management, instructional design, operations, and customer support, with a focus on results-driven learning experiences that cater to a diverse range of students.

Mari's background as the daughter of Afghan immigrants in Queens, NY, has profoundly influenced her perspective on education. She holds degrees in classics, Spanish, and linguistics and is a fervent advocate for making tech careers accessible to those traditionally underserved by higher education. Living in Washington, D.C., Mari continues to challenge the status quo, ensuring that education paves a direct path to greater opportunities and success.

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Transcript

Alexander Sarlin: 0:04

Welcome to Season Eight of Edtech Insiders where we speak to educators, founders, investors, thought leaders and the industry experts who are shaping the global education technology industry. Every week we bring you the Week

in Edtech: 0:18

important updates from the edtech field, including news about core technologies and issues we know will influence the sector like artificial intelligence, extended reality, education, politics, and more. We also conduct in-depth interviews with a wide variety of Edtech Thought Leaders and bring you insights and conversations from edtech conferences all around the world. Remember to subscribe, follow and tell your edtech friends about the podcast and to check out the Edtech Insiders substack newsletter. Thanks for being part of the Edtech Insiders community enjoy the show. Mari Nazary is the chief experience officer at Bloom Institute of Technology formerly known as Lambda school, Mari has dedicated over 15 years to transforming the landscape of online education. She believes in making education a universal key, accessible and effective for all without the financial burden often associated with higher learning. Mari's journey in edtech began with her role at Rosetta Stone where she developed the company's first online classroom experience. Her passion for instructional design and product development led her to impactful positions at education first Voxy and data camp. In these roles she spearheaded the expansion of learning products significantly impacting millions of learners worldwide. At Bloom Tech Mari has been instrumental in redefining the education experience. Her initiatives include building a proprietary platform, reducing the cost per learner incorporating an AI tutor, significantly enhancing the learning process and improving outcomes. Mari's background is the daughter of African immigrants in Queens, New York has profoundly influenced her perspective on education. She holds degrees in classics, Spanish and linguistics, and is a fervent advocate for making tech careers accessible to those traditionally underserved by higher education. Mari Nazary, Welcome to Edtech Insiders.

Mari Nazary: 2:12

Oh, my gosh, thank you for having me. I've been a longtime listener. So it's exciting to finally be here

Alexander Sarlin: 2:18

I'm so excited to have you here. And you know, we've crossed paths many times in the edtech world. And I'm a big fan of your work. So I'm really excited to have you here. First off, let's start with a little bit of your edtech journey. You've been in tech over 15 years, you've been at Rosetta Stone education first, BloomTech Data camp, you've done so much interesting work. Tell us a little bit about your journey. And what are some sort of key steps that you think about looking back on it?

Mari Nazary: 2:46

Oh, thank you. So kind, edtech has transformed so much over that time period. Right. And you know, I'm definitely dating myself or the younger listeners out there. But I first started out at Rosetta Stone. And you know, the first sort of like milestone that I remember is the rise of online classrooms. Alex, if you can remember that far back, right. This is before zoom before Google Hangouts, there weren't really any video chat platforms that were designed for live synchronous learning. Everything was about web conferencing. So you would like dial in, right? Like WebEx, and those, Adobe Connect those types of platforms back then. And they weren't really thinking about education as a as a use case. And so Rosetta Stone, actually, at the time was pretty cutting edge, because they realized early on, right that they had this CD ROM that they sold, you know, on the kiosks at the mall, everybody remembers the yellow box, right? And they realized, like, wait a second, you know, language is meant to be a social skill, right? You're not learning in isolation, you're using it to communicate, and so you need to be able to interact with others, and how can we make that happen for this large market that we have. And so they invested in building their own online classroom. And so I somehow magically was able to work with that team. And oh, man, it was such a fun experience. And I feel like it taught me so much about this world, this new industry at Tech, right, the intersection of education and technology that I think before that really didn't exist. People just thought of learning online as, you know, a bad photocopy of physical classroom, right and didn't really leverage the technology side of it. And so that to me, was like the first sort of big unlock, and then again, dating myself again and here we go is you know, the mobile phones became ubiquitous right all over the world, especially Really in other parts of the world, right? Because here's, you know, in the US, we're very fortunate that most of us have other devices. Right. But I think mobile first learning started to pop up with, you know, Duolingo. And, you know, place I worked at Voxy where we, we built everything to be mobile first. And, you know, honestly, Alex, I think the mobile first approached has been maybe forgotten them a little bit and needs a little bit more spotlight. So I'm hoping people invest more here, especially with like, we're in the TikTok era, and everything has become so bite size in terms of content delivery, that I'm hoping to see more innovation.

Alexander Sarlin: 5:43

I think the b2c ad tech space is still primarily mobile first, especially language learning, but I think a lot of b2c but b2b Because of schools, they have to do, you know, Chromebook ready and all these different things. And it's been I agree with I haven't heard much about mobile first and a few years. And I feel like, we could go back and think more about that. Yeah,

Mari Nazary: 6:03

especially with AI. And of course, you know, then now here we are, right at the cusp of generative AI coming on the scene, oh, my gosh, so much potential. Like, it's just the beginning. You know, I've always said that the secret sauce of attack is to allow technology to do what it does best. So we humans can do what we do best. And so the combination of those two, is just so powerful. And I think AI is such an incredible unlock for educators. Everything from making learning truly personalized to individual learners needs, skills wants, right, and honestly, I'm not sure why educators are so afraid of AI, it's really going to 10x, what they're able to do, right, from content creation, to really supporting learners with just in time feedback. Like, I mean, it's just so exciting so much.

Alexander Sarlin: 6:59

It really is just this week, Education Week put out a big survey of teachers that showed that almost 40% of teachers have not used AI and don't plan to in the future. And only a relatively small percent are using it often, often often. But there's a big middle right there a good 45 50% of teachers are sort of starting to play with it in various ways. And you know, it's one of these glass half full glass half empty. But I am excited about these moments when educators realize, you know, how much efficiency, how much effectiveness, how much personalization to your point they can do with this suite of tools. And with this underlying technology, it's going to be an amazing moment. So let's talk a little bit about what you've been doing. Most recently, as the chief experience officer at Bloom Institute of Technology, also known as BloomTech, you've really been redefining the education experience. Tell us a little bit about your experience at BloomTech and how you were integrating AI into the platform and into the experience for students. Yeah,

Mari Nazary: 8:04

you know, Blendtec, everything we do is with one goal in mind, right, ensuring that our learners land a high paying tech job. And so everything we built there, we had to ask ourselves, is this going to help our grads get jobs? You know? And if the answer was yes, we did it if it was maybe not sure, right, you know, we deprioritize that we really focused on learner outcomes as our Northstar. And so we work really closely with our hiring partners to just really understand what are the skills that they need from our grads, and we've backwards designed everything to align with those skills. And so everything from what we teach it to how we teach it, you know, which modalities videos, practice extra ruler projects, I mean, live classes, which we call code alongs, because you're meant to be coding along right fingers on keyboard, with your peers and instructor. And so when we embarked on reimagining this learner experience, we realized we needed to solve two critical problems. The first one being learners are busy, right? We are human beings, we're busy. We have full schedules already, right? And we're trying to incorporate this, you know, new opportunity into their lives, right. And so most of the learners we had couldn't keep up with our full time cohort pace, and needed way more flexibility than we were able to give them. And so what we did was we took apart the core components of our learning model, we use the four Cid approach, by the way, Alex, and so we took those pieces apart and put them into different sets of learning activities that could be done at your own pace, but not the eight hours a day. That was a fixed schedule that we had with our cohorts and so that way, learners would be able to achieve the same outcomes and fifth The program into their schedule into learning activities could be anything from, you know, our on demand courses, videos, hands on coding projects, assessments, etc, to the live codons I just mentioned. So they could practice what they learned with it an expert instructor. And then, like, here's how we introduced AI. We wanted to give learners support right throughout their time, and not just when we had humans available. Right. And so we we created our AI, we call the balloon tech learn bot that's available. 24/7. And is there really to unblock learners? Right? You know, you might work nine to five, right? And you're, you know, you're trying to catch up after you put your kids to sleep, right? And you're, you're gonna log on, and it's late, right? We don't necessarily have our support staff available. How can you get unblocked and troubleshoot a technical problem, right, that's where our learned bot comes in. And really is there to be that extra support. And learners have been loving it using it, you know, frequently, like all the time. The second problem, I know, I went off on a tangent there. The second problem is that we realized our learners were just last night, we offered so many things to them. And they weren't sure how to navigate the experience and the programs. And so we realized we needed to build a more integrated and straightforward learner journey. And so we built a centralized platform, app dot bloom Tector, calm, to streamline the experience. And so it became this one stop shop for learners. So it's very clear to them what they need to do when to do it, you know, instead of relying on our staff, which they did at the time, you know, being like, where am I supposed to be? What's the Zoom link, where's the class, you know, like that sort of thing. And so, we solve it in those two ways, focusing on career readiness, and building our proprietary platform.

Alexander Sarlin: 11:59

It sounds like you're using AI to supplement and enhance two really important aspects of the learner experience. One is adding flexibility, and creating a high quality instruction that's on demand that can be accessed. And that can be you know, personalized, and that people can ask exactly what they're struggling with. And it's going to address them exactly where they are, and supporting sort of the, what some people call the Student Success or customer success journey, which is, you know, I've signed up, but I don't know where to go on my first day, or I don't know where to find my glossary or to find the code alongs. So those are two powerful aspects of online experience or a hybrid experience. One thing that strikes me about your career that I find just so interesting, and I've had a little bit of this, as well, as part of why I really recognize it is, you've really had worked both in totally asynchronous environments, and totally synchronous environments, and sort of really thought about the overlap between the two were, what each of them do well, how they could work together. And hearing you talk about what you're doing at bloom, you know, makes me think I used Adobe Connect in my first, my first edtech job as well at Newton. But you know, we're always trying to figure out what do we have to do live? What what is useful to be social and to be group work? And what can people do you know, what kind of practice problems can they do on their own? Or what kind of coding can they do on their own? I'd love to ask you, because, you know, you're a data camp, which is almost entirely async, I believe, I think it's entirely async. Tell us a little bit about your sort of broad philosophy about synchronous and asynchronous learning, because we're in this world where we're bootcamps. And cohort based courses have huge benefits for learners. But at the same time, they just aren't always nearly flexible enough for the scale of learners we want. You've seen this close up in many places, I'd love to hear you talk about it,

Mari Nazary: 13:52

figuring out the right balance between when you can learn on your own versus when you need that expert or appear, right. I mean, I do think there's a lot of value in pure learning to a think I very much believe in the Flipped Learning Model. Because even if you think of the way we consume information today, right, not necessarily learning anything, I mean, although it is learning, right? consuming media and news and you're learning information, you're being exposed to new content. That to me feels like the right, focus for asynchronous learning, right, consuming information, videos, which I think have to be at the forefront of any asynchronous curriculum as you have to have a lot of video content, because I don't think people read anymore. And I myself am guilty of this. You know, I see a long email and I'm like, whew. So definitely meeting people where they feel comfortable. And so like asynchronous learning should be really focused on again, like being introduced to new concepts, new information, etc. But I also think, if you think of the four Cid model, one of the components is, is practice, right. And practice can also be done on your own right doing part time practice. So, you know, really learning how to get the syntax of a for loop down, right, like that's something that you can really hone in on and focus by yourself. Data camp did a great job of this. And we built all of our practice exercises mobile first, because we, we realize, hey, like, you can do this on your own, and you probably are going to be more likely to stick with it, if we're reaching you on a device that you can do when you have like these lols, right, these moments in time where, you know, you have a like a reflex to check Instagram, like, don't check your Instagram feed check, like, do something that's more learning focused. And so I do think asynchronous learning is great for learning the whole task, right? Being exposed to new information, what you're trying to do, you know, why is it important to learn how to manipulate data, right? That concept, you can learn through video content asynchronously without the human touch, right. And then synchronous learning, it's so important for the more advanced levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, right, like learning how to analyze information, synthesize information, that's when you need that expert in the room. Right? That's when you need that peer to be able to model that behavior for you. And so that's where, for example, BloomTech in a data camp, actually, we brought in some live code alongs, right. These are like expert led real world application of the problems and conflict scenarios that you're learning on your own asynchronously through videos, but seeing them maybe in a different context, right. So say, you know, you saw in your asynchronous video, an example of, you know, manipulating, like healthcare data, right? And then you're you go to a code along and your instructor is manipulating, you know, marketing data, right, completely different. But it's skills transfer. And it's your ability to really, truly hands on keyboard practice, and ask your questions in real time, right? See a human like an expert do it. And you might learn a different way to do the same exact thing.

Alexander Sarlin: 17:32

is a terrific answer. A masterclass instructional design for synchronous and asynchronous. I totally agree. I love how you're bringing in all of these instructional design frameworks to it. And I completely agree, when I hear you talk about the sort of core goal of flume tech, and I know you've thought about this in lots of different contexts throughout your career, being getting students those high paying, you know, changing their life through skills, right, and getting them changing careers, or enhancing their career through skills, and they have a very clear goal. That's a really commendable way to look at education. It's very outcomes driven, it's very student driven. And it's really the heart of bootcamps. And your commitment to making you know, technical careers accessible, comes through in many of your jobs. In your biography, you know, you mentioned how your background as the daughter of Afghan immigrants from Queens in New York has really influenced your perspective on education, I'd love to sort of hear you make that connection between your personal background and how you see the students and learners you serve and how to sort of help them really move forward in their life and career. Yeah,

Mari Nazary: 18:39

I mean, shout out to Flushing, Queens, where my parents first landed, I mean, this is a story I'm sure so many people share, right? It's like growing up with immigrant parents first generation being here, helping them navigate this new world, right with a different language, different laws, customs, and being oftentimes their bridge, right between the Old World and the New World has definitely shaped my perspective, and is one of the main reasons why I've chosen the career I have. You know, I believe that I was so lucky that education unlocked so many opportunities for me, that I have to make access, like my personal mission. But yeah, like more specifically, I think the main barriers to education in these underserved communities all comes down to access of information, right. If you don't know what options are available to you, then how could you possibly take advantage of them? And so because of that, I've been a huge advocate of field marketing, which I see is just such a vital tool in bridging this information. Yeah. So you know, it could look like engaging directly with communities actively partnering with local businesses, community organizations, hosting events, workshops, participating In job fairs, I think you have to get involved in these communities because they need to feel like they can trust the information that's being given to them. And so I feel like a lot of times, the most powerful tool, I think, is our alumni network, right? If they see someone within their actual network, someone they know, that's gone through this program that's, you know, has changed their lives through what we've been able to do, then that is just such an amazing, you know, I guess, actual proof for them to believe in or we're doing,

Alexander Sarlin: 20:39

I think it's under estimated, I really agree with you that a lot of us in edtech, we make products that are meant to do exactly the kinds of things you're saying increase access, reduce cost, you know, make it sort of easier, smoother, more in the flow of people's lives, to learn to upskill to get their degree or reach their education goals, we should say. But one thing that I think we underestimate, and I think you're addressing it very directly there is just that some of the very people we want to reach most have sort of the least access to even knowing that this ad tech app or tool or bootcamp exists. So it's really important to, to get the get out there and find ways to be known. I mean, obviously, working through schools is one way that a lot of ad tech companies, you know, get in front of students, you know, even students who are very deeply underserved. But for b2c, like some of the companies you've worked for, that's just not always an option. It's really a some people have tried to work through community colleges as a way to reach students. And it's really interesting, I'd like to hear you talk about the other side of the equation, too. So you talk about, you know, access has been your goal as it is mine as well, you know, educational access is a core mission for me as well. And one aspect of it is awareness. And another is cost, which is another huge barrier to education, especially in the US. So loom Tech has really focused on reducing the cost per learner, both of delivering education and of, you know, charging the learners. Can you tell us a little bit about what you know, your experience at Blue tech or anywhere else that you've used to sort of make quality education more affordable?

Mari Nazary: 22:18

Oh, yes. I mean, it's so important. I mean, with you have to have both, right. Yeah. You know, our approach has been, how can we leverage technology for scalability? And how can we enhance our operational efficiency, because a lot of times, at these, you know, education companies, they tend to solve problems with people and people are expensive, right? And so, especially when you think of, you know, grading, for example, right? Assessment, assessment tends to always be the thing that people feel like a human has to verify. And so, what we did, for example, just one example of what we've been trying to do is we partnered with code raid, they're a small startup. And what they do is they create adaptive, or auto graded assessments, for coding that integrate with LMSs. And so we use Canvas flintec. And so we built unit tests for every single sprint, because everything we do is project based. And it made it so that we could really lower the cost of human grading, and focus on standardizing our curriculum, right, because that's the sort of con downside of having human grading. So the humans can not always consistently great,

Alexander Sarlin: 23:41

non calibrated, not

Mari Nazary: 23:42

calibrated Exactly. And so we partnered with code Gray, that's one example. So all of our assessments, again, we do have human graders, that's particular thing, because we do want to ensure that we have the right balance between quality feedback and quantitative feedback. So we have a mix. But we've significantly reduced the cost there. And other examples, like I mentioned earlier, is our Lauren bot, our AI tutor, really being the first point of contact for support, Ray, and it's been such a great catch all for common queries, questions, concerns, and you know, it's becoming more smarter and smarter, you know, linking with our knowledge base, so it's able to provide all the resources to learners that a human would normally point them to write on live chat. And so, you know, that allows our learning assistants who play such a critical role in our experience, to be able to focus on more complex rate personalized guidance, and do more quality one on one with these learners. And so it's really allowed us to scale both our curriculum but also our support. And you know, a rule of thumb for engineers is if you're going to do the same task more than once, then You definitely need technology. To do it, you need to write a function, right? So same rule applies here.

Alexander Sarlin: 25:06

Yeah, algorithmic thinking, right? I've always been amazed when working with engineers that I have a, they make everything repeatable and automated and design it as a tool rather than a sort of patch or a silly one off solution. I totally agree with you. It's really interesting. You know, I had a sort of formative experience in my edtech career about 10 years ago, where I got to meet with Michael Crow from ASU one sort of legendary ed tech president of LSU, he was the president of Columbia, I started Fathom one of the first early ed tech initiatives for bringing college courses online. And he talked about something that I hadn't really never thought about, and exactly what you're saying, which is the sort of core difference between the cost of education and the price of education, and the difference in that relationship. And he was talking about how to ASU, they would basically try at least, like almost any technology, they were just really would embrace and test so many different tech solutions, in order to reduce the cost per learner for ASU to actually get somebody through an entire education. And by doing that, they could keep the price per learner reasonable, and, and have more access and have, you know, high quality education at a lower cost. And, you know, that was a really eye opening moment for me as just as I guess, 10 years younger than I was now. And it strikes me as you talk about this, that it's so core to many people's philosophy, including mine, I think, and yours and his, that technology is incredibly good at reducing cost. It's a good at automating it's good at all the examples you just gave. And one thing that I'd love to ask you about is, you know, we're entering this AI era. And AI is an incredibly powerful technology. You just mentioned how the AI tutor, you know, saves all this time and energy and cost. And I think we're all as an industry trying to get our head around, you know, this seems like it could create incredible efficiencies, it seems like he could reduce the cost because as you say, people are expensive grading or one on one tutoring, or all these things cost a lot of money. And AI can do a lot of that yet at the same time. I think there's a fear in our industry of, you know, replacing too many people or the concept of you know, chatbots teaching really scares a lot of different people that

Mari Nazary: 27:18

you're sacrificing or compromising quality. Right? Yeah.

Alexander Sarlin: 27:22

So I'd love to hear your talk about this. It's such an interesting sort of tension between, we want to reduce costs, because we want to reduce price, and we want to increase access. But some of the things that do that are seen as quality reductions or things that might influence the teacher workforce and the educator workforce and drive people out of the profession. How do you square those in your mind? And in your work? Oh, well,

Mari Nazary: 27:47

I mean, I've always felt that you need both, right? I mean, that's why it's education technology. It's the intersection of the two and you can't just have aI teach people things, right. You need educators to inform AI. And so I don't see them as it's like a not a net sum. Like I think it's very much working together. And like I said, before, I've always said, you let technology enable us to do our best work as educators, right. And so, one of the things that I'm really excited about with AI is that, I've always believed that the more you personalize a product or service to its user, the stickier it is, right. And so when something sticky, it means you'll keep at it, right. And one of the obstacles as I'm sure Alex, you've experienced too, is, as educators we face like de motivation, like learners, just keeping engaged with whatever learning materials or whatever experience or program that you're offering them. Because they live in this world of nonstop distractions. We're competing with Netflix, we're competing with tick tock, right. So I really think personalization is going to be incredibly important because it's going to capture hopefully, learners attention for longer, and AI now has the potential to create these highly individualized learning paths, that while we can do them now, take so much time, right, so much time and so much effort and really figuring out okay, like, how personalized can we actually make it? And so I think AI is going to unlock all this by analyzing right a learner's performance, their learning style, their preferences, and tailor all of the educational content that's available to their unique needs. I'm just really excited about how much further we can take personalization with AI. And then yeah, I mean, we talked about, you know, the providing real time feedback and support with AI. I think that's what we're doing with bloom tech. And I think that's just the beginning. Because I do see AI based on the information we're getting from our for example, what we're doing bloom As we're getting so much information about when learners are using it, when they're frustrated, what don't they understand, and using that data to then inform the experience and improve it. It's so exciting, because we can start to predict where learners might struggle and intervene earlier, right? And give them targeted support more like additional resources and, and be much more proactive than we necessarily have been right. And then speaking to educators, oh, my gosh, I can help them so much, right? I mean, curriculum development, classroom management, so much that you can use AI for and we've been doing it at bloom tech, we've used it to really 10x, our instructional design and content development teams ability to really ship new learning materials, new content, and we use the script, for example, for all of our video transcriptions. I mean, there's just so much out there, and we're just getting started. It's just the beginning.

Alexander Sarlin: 31:02

Yeah, I mean, we're only really a year and a bit into the generative AI era. And already, you're seeing tools that they make it much more efficient to make learning content. And then yeah, you know, add all these incredible potentials for the learner side, including personalization, I like hearing you talk about how education is sort of has this inherent motivation. Disadvantage, you might say that, you know, if you're Duolingo, or your bloom tech, or data camp, and you are an app on somebody's phone, that they could practice while they're waiting for a bus or while they're walking their dog or any of those things. What you're competing with is all of the other apps that people use on their phone, or anything else they might be doing on their phone, whether that's tick tock or you know, Instagram or Netflix or Wordle, or reading news. And inherently education takes some work, it takes focus, it takes thought it isn't always the most pleasant experience, we want it to be, but productive struggle is part of the story,

Mari Nazary: 32:04

growing pains, right? It's called pain for growing.

Alexander Sarlin: 32:08

So convincing people to do something that involves maybe a little pain to get gain versus, you know, retreating into a game is a tough thing to do. And I agree with you very much. I'm very excited about the potential of AI to personalize the experience. And, frankly, just to motivate directly, I mean, you can have personalized motivation, you also could have motivation in that AI might be able to make, you know, the most compelling video anybody's ever seen to teach, you know, the Krebs cycle. Because we've been trying it ourselves for 30 years, and you know, they tend to look the same. AI might be like, Hey, make this look as exciting. And as interesting as people's favorite tick tock video, I think they have more potential to do it than pretty much anyone else

Mari Nazary: 32:53

I know, especially since we're expanding into non text, generative AI, right, like more videos, more images. It's very exciting, like, what could it create for us?

Alexander Sarlin: 33:03

Exactly. So I'd love to hear you talk about that. You know, personalization is one incredibly important aspect of AI. But what about just AI for motivating learners? Generally?

Mari Nazary: 33:11

Oh, my gosh, it's so huge, right? I mean, there's so many different ways that you could leverage it, you just described a really interesting use case is building the most engaging, right, like learning material, and really personalizing it to that learners particular interests or, you know, strengths, weaknesses, right. But I also see it being in there are some good platforms that do this now. But keeping people motivated to keep coming back. And, like, we've tried this in a lot of different ways at Blue tech, and data camp and other places is like, you know, hey, you haven't logged on in like, or three days, like what's going on? Right? Like you're falling behind. And so, really helping learners stay on track. But in, you know, the most creative ways, and I don't think as humans, we've figured that out, you know, we've tried texting and push notifications, you know, like, almost shaming people and coming back, right? It's like, hey, you know, you haven't been here in three days, what's going on? Like, or, you know, penalizing them for not staying on track? And I'm just, I'm excited to see what AI will teach us. Yeah, about that.

Alexander Sarlin: 34:31

And then you've seen things like streaks on the sort of positive reinforcement side that people use for this. But yeah,

Mari Nazary: 34:37

we do that as well. Yeah. And then the other thing I would say that I'm interested in seeing is how AI will support peer learning. Because, you know, learning is a team sport, right? I think it's really important to build community and have social accountability, because that's also a really great motivator, right? Like you You may stick with something longer if you have a friend doing it with you, right, like your gym buddy. And so I'm curious to see what the rise of like collaborative learning platforms might look like, you know, matching learners who are maybe in the same part of the experience or even thinking of like mentorship, right? So maybe you have a learner that's further along, you know, that sort of knowledge transfer exchange. Could be interesting to see with AI. It's just hard to do that with, like, right now, right? We have to do that, like really one to one. It's too complicated.

Alexander Sarlin: 35:40

I mean, it's funny, I think of like, I don't know, if you are the listeners have experienced the donut app on Slack. Which is Yeah, right. And it's like, it's the simplest thing in the world, right? It just basically randomly pairs people and says, within a group, you know, and says, the two of you should have a one on one meeting, and we'll schedule it and make it happen. And then you check in here to help you schedule I think, and then you check in to say that you did it or not. And it's like, it's the gentlest, as you say, the gentlest, like nudge, towards a social experience. But I think because it's neutral, because it's not actually a person doing an introduction, because it's sort of this totally neutral, blind tech. I think it actually it makes it very easy to do you know, that there's no pressure, there's no anticipation there's not, you're not trying to please your mutual friend. It's sort of just like, Okay, let's try it. And it can create, really, you know, from there, people can really get to know a lot of other people. And it makes me think, you know, imagine an AI enhanced experience where people, as you say, are matching people based on where they are in an educational experience, what they're struggling with, it could also be their interests or preferences. It could be geographical matching. It could be you know, there's so many different ways. And then it could even go further than just putting people together could actually start the conversation say, Hey, you both really interested in The Fast and the Furious movies, and you're both using movie data in your projects. Like, I bet you'd have a lot to talk about, like, that's pretty cool.

Mari Nazary: 37:07

I can even come with like prompts, conversations or icebreakers. Exactly. Yeah.

Alexander Sarlin: 37:11

There's so much potential. I love that concept. But I haven't seen very few companies do this so far. And I think this is a really nascent sort of blue ocean space is AI for truly enhancing, you know, social learning and connected learning in edtech. I know there are some companies out there doing it. I'm sure there are listeners being like, what about this? What about that, but there's just not that much yet. So I'm really excited to see where it goes.

Mari Nazary: 37:36

I know it's so cool. And we need it right? Because, again, motivation, I think, is the biggest detractor right now for everything we're doing in ad tech.

Alexander Sarlin: 37:46

So you know, you've been in the field, 15 years, you have seen the education technology landscape evolved from a number of different perspective from a number of different places. I'd love to hear you know, this moment. I know, we've talked a lot about AI, but even outside of AI, what it gets you most excited about the next few years, in edtech? You know, where are things? And I know, I could be part of it. But you know, where are things going that might really take us to a next level of influencing and affecting and supporting learners lives? Yeah,

Mari Nazary: 38:19

I mean, I won't repeat everything I've said about AI because I think it is incredibly powerful, right? Personalization, support. And, you know, even this collaboration in terms of pure learning, but one area, I really hope to see, like further integration is like immersive technology. So like VR, and AR, just like waiting for those to really arrive. You know, there are some more niche companies who are doing really interesting things, but it hasn't really been well integrated into these different learning experiences. And because I'm such a strong believer of learning by doing, I just see the potential of VR and AR just to transform learning from like a passive experience to an interactive one. So like, for bloom tech, for example. I mean, imagine preparing for the job search by going through a simulated job interview, right, or attending a daily standup or code review. Right? Like these are really important aspects, that we can't necessarily train people on how to do without actually doing them live synchronously, right with humans. And so I think there's a lot of potential with these immersive experiences, to really enhance her teaching methodologies. And I hope to see more of it, really, and if you know of any, please like, tell me because I'm very interested in what's happening here. Sure, we

Alexander Sarlin: 39:52

should have that conversation because there definitely are some interesting initiatives in that space from a number of different areas and I agree that for the most part, there tend to be a little bit of a point solution. And that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. But it's either there about a very specific topic or a very specific type of training. I'm not going to just list them. But there are a number of platforms, some of which we've interviewed on the show that we interviewed a company that all about sort of dei and inclusion training through VR is really interesting. There are interesting things happening. That said, I definitely agree with you that we are waiting for it to arrive, that there's this feeling of the promise of VR and AR and mixed reality. You know, it's now a few years into feeling like it's about to be here. I mean, but we still haven't seen really break through and sort of people embrace it fully. We've seen some colleges create these digital twin campuses and create, you know, virtual classrooms. But I think at heart, what I'm hearing you say, or how I'm interpreting, what you're saying is that education has this level of abstraction. It's like we want people to do X. So we're going to teach them some variation simulation, sort of simplified version of x, it might be a chemical equation to prepare them to do chemistry or a simulated, you know, answer a multiple choice question about how they would do XYZ, when really, you want to know how they would do it in real life. And it feels like some of these technologies, especially if you combined the AI and the sort of XR, VR AR stuff, have the potential to sort of cut out the middleman there. I mean, it's literally, you want to learn how to do the thing, put this on and do the thing and you try it, you might fail at it 10 times, and then you'll get it and now you've learned how to do it. And that's just like that learning by doing, you mentioned is so key. And we'll have tips along the way. And maybe there'll be a group helping you there's, you know, there's lots of variations of that. But it's an exciting idea just in sort of the broadest concept of education, technology and education period, honestly, that maybe we can get very, very close to what we're actually trying to teach, instead of having to sort of zoom out and do all these various levels of abstraction, and then have to motivate people through all those level of abstraction and make them frameworks and the periodic table in this marketing model. Instead of just doing it. It's a really exciting moment. I have a feeling in a few years, we'll look back and say yes, this was the beginning of that. And now we hope so. Yeah. I hope so too. Let me ask you one more question. And then we'll go into our final ones, which is, you know, you've been in a leadership role in a number of the companies you've been at, and you sort of overseeing a lot of aspects of what happens your formal title at bloom was the chief experience officer, which is a little bit of a unusual and interesting title. But it includes, you know, instructional design, it includes product development, it can include customer support, like the AI Potsie we're talking about data management, how do you think about, you know, putting all the pieces together to really create a comprehensive and effective educational experience? And let's use bloom tech as an example, just because that's where you've been doing most recently. But any other places? You've been? I'd love to hear that as well.

Mari Nazary: 43:03

Yeah. I mean, I think you kind of touched on it in the question, I think that in order to be a good leader, you have to employ a systems thinking approach to everything you do, and make that a way of life for the teams you lead. So, you know, in more concrete terms, you have to understand all the pieces of the puzzle how they work together, so that you can deliver the product or experience, you know, in our case, the learner journey, and not just focus on the individual pieces in isolation, which I think, unfortunately, a lot of teams do, right? They're like, Oh, well, you know, I'm responsible for, like, dashboards. And it's like, wait, you need to understand what data you're actually presenting here. Right? It sounds like, it's like listening to a song and only focusing on one instrument, right? Like, no, you want to listen to the whole composition of the, you know, symphony of music that you're hearing, so you can't lose sight of the full picture. And so I think on a tactical level, to me, it means two things, one, having a really deep commitment to a user centric design philosophy. So this means you have to start with a clear understanding of your users and our case, our learners, their needs, challenges or aspirations. And the journey is not just a path, it's an ecosystem of experiences, right? Each having to play their part or contribute to learner success. So from the moment they apply to our programs to the moment they write their first line of code, even when they go on their first job interview, right? You have to dissect this journey into phases, pinpoint the critical milestones, and really align each of the teams right or especial designing or technology teams, ops, coaching, support all of them accordingly. So that it's clear who does what and why. And one of the things that we do, I think, really well, Blendtec is we always ask who the captain is of each part. So that we don't use owner, we use the term captain, because a captain steers the ship is not necessarily the only one doing the work to get the boat in that direction. And so, yeah, like, you have to understand your piece of the journey, but the whole journey together. And so a lot of times, you know, my teams will hear me in planning sessions like, Okay, this sounds like a great project. But you know, what problem are you solving? How will you know, when it's solved? You know, show me the impact on the learner journey, map it out for me. And I think now they've really sort of learned to think that way. And it helps clarify so much just by going through just those simple questions. I think that's the first step. And then the second, I would say, is really making sure everyone is rowing in the same direction. It sounds very simple, right? And I'm sure it's very obvious. But just because people understand the system, they may not know what they're working towards. And they may not be working towards the same goal, right, they might have different goals. And so what I've really tried to do with my teams is make a single sort of transparent roadmap that anybody can view at any time where each team's goals and projects are really clearly outlined with dependencies and metrics, due dates and Captain. So it's never a question of who's doing what and why. I'm a huge Asana fan for this. And you know, what we do to really kind of get people aligned is we meet regularly to report on the progress, give teams opportunity for clarification, get unblocked if they need. And I think it's really helped us move so much faster, and give teams a lot more confidence in their work. So I'm all I've met Alex, getting this setup takes time, right? You invest a lot, and really alignment and clarity. But once you do, wow, magic happens, everyone is working. And you become less involved, because everybody knows what's expected of them. I love it,

Alexander Sarlin: 47:14

the idea of sort of centering the user and their learner journey, and every decision being made in relationship to what you know, and are serving for the end user feels, you know, it's easier said than done, as you say, but it's if you can really, really center that as how you make decisions. It's incredibly powerful, very product, mindset. And I can imagine how powerful that would be for everybody. And I love the captain and rowing metaphors as well, I think that that is really useful. We are almost at the end of our time, I want to just ask you, I'm going to count the VR XR answer as your answer to a trend that you see that you'd like to see arrive, because I think that was a really good case for that. But I want to ask you about one resource that you would recommend for people who want it doesn't have to be it can be more than one, you know, that you would recommend for people who want to think more and dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed today. Whether that's edtech, BloomTech, that type of product approach, you know, the alignment approach, you just said, Where should people look? Oh, well,

Mari Nazary: 48:14

apart from this podcast, I think what I've been trying to do is just stay on top of the latest trends in AI. And so I signed up for the AI for education, blog and newsletter. So I get that regularly. And then there's so many great product resources out there that I think as educators, we may not follow these, we think oh, product is technology. But it's like no, it's about the learner journey. It's about the journey. And so it's really important for a tech leaders to be great product leaders. And so I would recommend Lenny's podcasts which I'm a huge fan of and have been listening to for a long time now. Because it's just it's fantastic, right? Like he has so many different guests that appear and you learn so much about how different organizations are approaching the user experience. So I think those would be two I recommend. Fantastic.

Alexander Sarlin: 49:10

As always, we will put links to those resources in the show notes for this episode. That was the AI for education blog. I'm reading that one as well. And Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, Lenny's, very famous and well known product leader who's real thought leader in the space and we will definitely link to that as well. Mari Nazary, Bloom tech and data camp and education first in so many different amazing ed tech journeys, Rosetta Stone. Thank you so much for being here with us on Edtech Insiders.

Mari Nazary: 49:40

Oh my gosh, it was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Alexander Sarlin: 49:42

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