Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
YouTube as the Ultimate EdTech Tool: Katie Kurtz on Youth, Learning, and AI
Katie Kurtz is Managing Director and Global Head of Youth and Learning at YouTube where she is responsible for developing the ecosystem to engage, inform, and educate kids, teens, and adults. Katie joined YouTube in 2019 after serving as Chief Product Officer at Noodle Partners, an online program manager designing and building fully online degree programs for universities. Previously she was Senior Vice President and National Sales Manager for Higher Education at Cengage Learning. Prior to that Katie was Vice President of Business Development at adaptive learning pioneer Knewton, where she led the platform's partnership strategy for three years.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How YouTube has become one of the largest learning platforms globally.
- The new educational features on YouTube, including quizzes, key concepts, and AI conversational tutors.
- Insights into YouTube’s Study Hall program, allowing students to earn college credits.
- The delicate balance between entertainment and education that creators must maintain.
- The future of AI and machine learning in shaping YouTube’s educational experiences.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:02:32] Katie Kurtz discusses her career path from Knewton to YouTube
[00:05:29] The rise of YouTube as one of the largest global learning platforms
[00:06:29] New educational tools on YouTube, including quizzes and AI-driven tutors.
[00:10:16] Study Hall: YouTube’s program helping students earn college credits.[00:18:06] YouTube’s “Player for Education” and its benefits for teachers and classrooms.
[00:21:31] The role of AI in transforming education on YouTube.
[00:24:02] Katie reflects on YouTube's responsibility as a leading educational platform.
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This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: This season of EdTech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M& A firm for education entrepreneurs, founded by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies. Tuck believes you deserve m and a advisors who work just as hard as you do.
[00:00:22] Katie Kurtz: It's a project that I think is near and dear to many of us who have often thought about equity and access in education, and the barrier to entry in higher education is something that a lot of us have spent a lot of time. I know that this is. Something that you both care about deeply as well. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do we see more people successful in that higher education space?
[00:00:48] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry, from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across education. Early childhood, K 12, higher ed, and work. You'll
[00:01:01] Ben Kornell: find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar, and to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back channel insights from Alex and Ben.
Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
[00:01:28] Alex Sarlin: We're so excited today to be interviewing. Katie Kurtz, who is the Managing Director and Global Head of Youth and Learning at YouTube, where she's responsible for developing the ecosystem to engage, inform, and educate kids, teens, and adults. Katie joined YouTube in 2019 after serving as Chief Product Officer at Noodle Partners, an online program manager designing and building fully online degree programs for universities.
Before that, she was Senior Vice President and National Sales Manager for Higher Education at Cengage Learning. And before that, she was Vice President of Business Development at Adaptive Learning Pioneer Knewton, where she led the platform's partnership strategy for three years, and where she was my boss.
Katie is amazing, and she has an incredible tenure in EdTech. We're so excited to have her here with us today. On edtech insiders, Katie Kurtz, welcome edtech insiders.
[00:02:32] Katie Kurtz: Thank you for having me. It's great to see you, Alex and Ben.
[00:02:35] Alex Sarlin: It's fantastic to see you, and you have had such an incredible career in EdTech.
You were at Knewton, you were at Cengage, and now you are at YouTube in the biggest stage in the world. Tell us about your EdTech career. How did you get into it and what got you to your current role as the global head of youth and learning?
[00:02:53] Katie Kurtz: Well, let's see, I started in the education space in test prep. I was working at the, at the Princeton review.
It was really early days of the internet. I mean, it's painful to say that, but true. And even though I wasn't working directly in the test prep space, I've always been in sort of business development and partnerships. It was such an interesting environment for really thinking about the user and the learner at the center.
It became this, I think, incredible incubator for everything that was going to happen later in the digital transformation of education around really putting the learner at the center. Because when it came to test prep, you didn't care about the teacher, you didn't care about the faculty, you didn't care about the administration, you just cared about the learner.
And their engagement and then measuring their success in their outcomes. So it was a great breeding ground for how to think differently. And my work there was always around the intersection of technology and engagement and how to meet learners where they were. So I would do things like create a series of iPhone apps.
And this was before there was an education. Part of the app store, but create iPhone apps that were designed to be like mini games that you could play to test your vocabulary when you were on the subway or the bus. Anyway, I, I spent quite a bit of time at the Princeton Review. I left to join Knewton, an early adapter, an early pioneer of adaptive learning, where I had the pleasure of working very closely with you, Alex, on one of my most favorite projects, the Knewton math readiness course that we did for ASU.
I left Knewton, I went to San Yidro, heading up the higher ed side. sales team for a while. And then I went back to work with my old boss, John Katzmann at Neural Partners as the chief product officer before ending up here at YouTube as part of really the first ever dedicated team with the task of building the first ever dedicated team to support the learning use case.
And so even though my journey has always been around that intersection of technology and user engagement and improving outcomes, the scale and Reachment of this platform is really mind boggling, and I've really never been more inspired by any of my work in education than what I've seen here. And just to give you a sense of the scale of the platform, we have billions that log into YouTube every month, and 93 percent of them say they come to the platform to gather information and knowledge.
92 percent of 18 to 24 year olds say they come to learn new skills. And the only thing that really connects all of those people all over the world is their intrinsic motivation, their desire to spend their own time learning. And it's been deeply motivating for all of us. You've been a part of this journey.
[00:05:29] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I often say that Google, including YouTube, is the largest ed tech company in the world. And it's often a rounding error for Google in terms of the ed tech tools and properties. But I really will say YouTube has embraced this role as a place where one can learn anything. There's self directed learning that you just talked about, but also this idea of peer to peer sharing and communal learning and social learning.
So it's really been incredible to see that organically happen. And now there's a big push with AI to really connect the dots across this incredible ecosystem. Can you talk a little bit about the tools and features that YouTube is Leaning into to really make the learning experience higher quality or better for the end users.
And how do you see YouTube playing into a larger Google strategy to support learning?
[00:06:29] Katie Kurtz: Yeah. And it's a, it's a great question. I will say, even though I joined to be a part of the first, you know, to really build out that team that was, I was going to, for the first time, put a little bit of intentionality around this.
It had been this incredibly organic, beloved user experience on the platform, but a lot of it had happened organically. And so even though I joined the team to be a part of building that, it took me a while to recognize YouTube as one of the world's largest learning platforms. It wasn't really until I was working at Cengage when I was working with the higher ed sales team and I was on college campuses every week, maybe.
Three days a week and I'd always try to talk to students on campus and I would always ask them like what do you do on the first day of class? Expecting to hear answers like well I you know get the syllabus and then I go to the library to see what used books I can buy and But they would almost to a person say I go to YouTube to find Creators in the content that are going to help me be successful in this course.
And that always stuck with me that we really think about YouTube learning as this sort of just in time. A lot of people think about it as like, I need a tutorial to help me fix something in my house. And that is absolutely a very true use case. And all of us, I think have had it at one point or another, but there are a lot of people who are coming to YouTube to learn in a much more goal oriented way.
And that's where we've really been leaning into what are the features that can help. So Support that learning journey when you aren't looking to do something just in time, but you need to actually help supplement what's happening. Maybe it's learning for work. Maybe it's learning for school. Maybe it's just learning for life, but it's something that you have a desire to go further in.
So that's really been our guiding mission is how can we empower these billions of learners to go further by breaking down barriers to high impact learning experiences. So we've started with What makes for a great learning experience. And oftentimes that is the ability to find the right content at the right time for what you need, but it's also, you know, not a passive viewing experience.
And so one of the things that we've been really focusing on is how do we think about making that a more active experience? How do we give a learner who's in a learning journey, a little bit of. A sense of progress, a little bit of a sense of testing their own knowledge, where are they in their journey?
And so we've introduced a lot of features to help support that use case. We've introduced things like quizzes that allow you to get a little bit of immediate feedback on how you're actually doing with AI. We've introduced something called real time concepts. We found that a lot of learners when they were in academic videos would pause because they needed to stop and get more information that was outside of just the video.
So. That's not a great user experience. We decided to bring that information right to them so that it didn't break their flow. They can get more information that corresponds to the video that they're in. We've introduced a conversational tutor, which acts as a kind of Socratic method to help you not give you the answer, but to help you unpack what it is that you might need to master that concept.
We've introduced courses, which allow for multi session learning journeys that Start with here are the defined objectives and learning outcomes of this experience. And then here are some tools and progress bars and celebrations and milestone markers along the way that can help you progress through that.
Of course, this is exciting to us in particular because it's like. It's the first time that we have allowed to have attachments that can support that learning use case. So when you're in a course, you could have a corresponding lesson plan or worksheets. And we found that users, when they are in a course, they rate those courses with these attachments higher in satisfaction than those without, which we feel like is a great signal that we're on the right path, that users want these higher impact learning experiences.
[00:10:16] Alex Sarlin: We'll be right back. This season of EdTech Insiders is again proudly sponsored by our M& A partners, Tuck Advisors. Thinking of selling your company? As experts in mergers and acquisitions in education and EdTech, Tuck can help. At Tuck Advisors, their motto is, make hay while the sun shines. If you want to start planting the harvest, contact Tuck Advisors now.
What's so exciting about hearing that suite of features you just named is that they're all really well aligned to the learning science, right? The testing effect, you know, we know that quizzing and retrieval supports learning. We know that pre teaching. Getting the concepts earlier and learning them in advance and sort of knowing what you're going to do is helpful as is just in time support, like the key concepts being brought up when you pause the video and everything is actually rooted in in learning science.
I think part of that comes from your background in test prep and education. One thing that is so interesting about YouTube is. It's, you just mentioned these amazing stats. It's clearly the sort of go to place for informal learning. And I don't necessarily mean informal learning, like fixing the sink, informal learning, like learning that is not credentialed, but it also ties very nicely into credentialed education.
You mentioned people do it to study for assessments. They do it to get through college classes, but you've also done some programs to actually help people earn college credit. Through their YouTube usage. Can you tell us about that? That's a really interesting sort of leap for the YouTube educational environment.
[00:11:49] Katie Kurtz: It is, and it's exciting. It's a project that I think is near and dear to many of us who have often thought about equity and access in education and the barrier to entry in higher education is something that a lot of us have spent a lot of time. I know that this is. Something that you both care about deeply as well.
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how do we see more people successful in that higher education space. And so this is the study hall partnership is one of these courses on YouTube that we have been talking about. I'd say in many ways, it's sort of the one that we think of as a real lighthouse of what is possible.
And so I'll just explain just a little bit of, of what it is. It started. In this really kind of wonderful way, we had a conference of a lot of learning creators who all come together. And because I had been in the higher education space for a long time, I invited a lot of old friends and partners from different universities to come and see if they wanted to get a little bit more immersed in the learning, you know, creator ecosystem.
And many of them turned me down and didn't come. The folks at ASU have a charter that is, you know, they measure themselves on how many people they let in and how many succeed versus how many people they keep out. And so they were very open to this idea of what is happening on YouTube that users love to learn there.
So they came and very serendipitously, some of the folks from ASU ended up sitting next to John Green at lunch. John, you know, Green is a very well known and beloved author, but also the co founder of Crash Course with his other talented author brother, Hank Green. Crash Course, if you don't know, is one of the most beloved learning channels in the world, not just here in the U.
S., it's 16 million subscribers, it is for any high school student, it is an essential tool in their toolkit of how to actually get through high school as a supplement to what they're learning in class. And they were talking about this challenge of the getting to the front door of higher ed and then being able to succeed once you got there.
And so they decided to kind of work together on something called study hall. And we came into this as a way to help support this effort. And really what Study Hall is, is a three part content series, which is a full end to end how to think about the first year of college. It starts with how to college, which is the sort of hidden language of admissions, which if you've grown up in a house of five generations of people who've gone to college, then it is a process that may not be as intimidating to you.
But if you haven't, then it is a process that can feel Almost opaque and very unwelcoming. So it starts with that hidden language of how to college and also why, what would you hope to get on the other side? The second piece is vast guides to majors and electives, which is once you get there, what will you study and what will that lead to?
And what are your, what are your interests and your passions and your skills? And how do you connect that to a job where you might be fulfilled? And then the third piece, which is where we think a lot of the innovation really lies is. foundational courses. These are first year college courses that were built in partnership with the ASU faculty and with all of the great producers and storytellers at Crash Course.
And these are some of the most common first year college courses on campuses across the country, but some of the most gating. So you think about college math readiness, intro to human communication. And the way it works is that all of the video of those online courses lives for free on YouTube, and if you are interested in going further in that experience, then you can pay 25 to access a cohort of fellow students, of ASU faculty member, all of the assessments and projects and assessments that go along with it, and then if you pass that course with a grade that you're satisfied.
Then you can choose to pay for the credit for that course, which is transferable to hundreds of universities around the country. But you don't have to pay that until you are sure that, you know, you are confident that you can do the work and you're ready to apply those credits. And we've tried to help support this by taking that really complex enrollment process that usually is about a 40 page.
Enrollment process, we brought it down to about seven clicks between YouTube and the Google Classroom in order to get into this environment. We've helped with, you know, streamlining as much of this so that the cost is now 75 percent less than other college credits typically are. We've introduced things like Google DeepMinds Hallmate, this conversational tutor designed specifically to help you, again, kind of unpack when you get, when you get lost along the way.
And we're, it's early days, but we're excited to see that 150 different institutions are embedding this content within their learning management system. And a hundred different universities have accepted these credits. I mean, I think of it as like, There are thousands of students who have now actually completed their first year college course.
And all that that means is a milestone on your higher ed journey, your belief in yourself, your confidence that you can do the work, that you belong. And they never had to apply for financial aid through a FAFSA. They never had to do any of the things that are the barriers along the way that help kind of hold you back.
Anyway, we're really excited about it because we think there's the possibility that this is a model that could be extended to lots of different
[00:17:02] Ben Kornell: use cases. So you're talking about really incredible current use cases and potential use cases where the learner is really driving the experience and. I can see in higher education, so many opportunities, the kind of economics one on one dilemma of how do we give everybody econ one on one in a high quality way, and that's scalable.
There really doesn't need to be bespoke production of such a course. across the world. Another huge user group of YouTube is educators in K 12 classrooms. And for, you know, one of the interesting pieces of your title is youth is called out. And, you know, what we've seen so many times is big tech focusing on adult learning and upskilling use cases, but also YouTube is leaning into educators as a way to reach younger kids.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you support educators and And the thinking around how educators can benefit most from YouTube learning.
[00:18:06] Katie Kurtz: I think it really crystallized for us during the pandemic when, you know, in January and February of 2020, there were like 300 videos uploaded to all of YouTube with distance learning or remote learning in the title in March of 2020 alone, it was 23, 000.
So we just knew that, like, we knew that the need was profound and we knew that there was a lot more that we needed to do to support teachers who are, you know, In many ways, the unsung heroes of all of the foundation. And if YouTube video can be so valuable to them and the incredible work that they do, then we wanted to find a way that we could help support that.
But it needed to be appropriate for the For the formal education space. And so when we thought about that, we really needed to build something that worked for all of the constituents. We needed to build something that worked for teachers, that worked for users, but that also worked for creators. And so we, we created something called the player for education, which is a built for purpose video embed player.
And we think of it as, is really, it's meant to be delivered through third party education platforms and apps. that are learning management systems that are used around the world, but it is built for purpose for the use case of curating YouTube content within your lesson plans and your homeworks. And we think of it as like addition by subtraction.
We've tried to remove all of the things that we think are not appropriate for a classroom experience. So that would be advertising, you know, any kind of distraction at all links back to YouTube, other videos, but we've tried to keep those features that we think are actually. Enhance the learning such as transcripts and playback speed, which are important accessibility tools as well.
But we've also created a mechanism to make sure that all of the creators whose content is so valuable to teachers can also be. properly Monetized for them because there is a misperception that YouTube content is, you know, sort of OER free content But it actually is the ads that allow for this flywheel that supports that high quality educational content to be created So we license it to the third party ecosystem and all of that revenue all of that revenue goes back to the creators but we allow the teachers to curate the content that is most valuable to them and we're Again, kind of early days and in how we have brought this to market, and we have a number of partners that are innovating around it and thinking about how they can apply assessments and interesting features to help support that experience for teachers.
[00:20:35] Alex Sarlin: It's a really thoughtful innovation. And, you know, as anybody who's ever tried to use a YouTube video in a learning environment, and then. It ends in the, you know, the ads come up and all the suggested videos next come up and this student is completely distracted. I know it is such a core use case. Like you say, addition by subtraction to make it friendly for an educational environment.
You mentioned Hallmate as one way in which you're incorporating AI into the YouTube education suite of services. But given the moment, given how, you know, how seriously Google is taking AI, how quickly it's integrating AI into. all of its product lines from, you know, mail to docs, to the phones, to everything.
I imagine that YouTube as thinking a whole lot about AI and hopefully about AI in the educational use case. What do you think is going to change in the next few years around education on YouTube because of the innovations we've seen with generative AI?
[00:21:31] Katie Kurtz: It's such a great question and I, I can only even begin to imagine what is, what can be unlocked.
I think what I'll say is we've already started with a number of experiments that we are doing in a very, I mean, they're incredibly exciting, but they're also incredibly thoughtful and they're small and we are testing and we're iterating and we're trying to see what actually moves the needle in terms of outcomes.
And so I'm, I'm really quite pleased with the way that we are introducing AI. We're following as we always do. Like respect the user and put them in the beginning in the first place where we start, like, what are the problems that we can solve with AI that are going to meet user needs? And that's why you're seeing things like real time concepts.
That was a problem that we could see very clearly. Like. Students are interrupting their own flow and we can help improve that in creating more interactive experience. That's why we've introduced conversational AI tutor as a way to help create a sense of interactivity and To help get you unstuck without giving you the answer But I'll also say that in many ways, you know machine learning has been a huge part of YouTube for a very very long time It's the reason why we can deliver the right content to you at the right time It's It's the reason why we can create a transcript of the video.
It's the reason why we now having, you know, very sophisticated dubbing techniques. So, so we've always been comfortable in that space of machine learning, but we'll continue to follow our mission, you know, empower billions to go further by breaking down barriers to high impact learning experiences and using AI where we think that we can create that more, that bridge to a higher impact experience.
I'll give you one example that we're. pretty excited about, which is we, Dan Schiffman is a wonderful NYU professor with a fabulous channel called the Coding Train, and he's been working with our team here with some of our Google teams on something called SchiffBot, which is a Chrome extension that is a conversational tutor that is based on Dan's voice.
So that Dan is actually the person who is helping you when you're working alongside his video. And it was very much rooted in the challenge that he sees. When people are learning coding for the first time, there is a need to ask questions. And so already the engagement we're seeing on, on shift bot is incredibly exciting, but it's small, it's thoughtful.
We're, I think we'll continue to look for the places where there are problems to solve, and we will add those solutions as we think are going to actually move the needle.
[00:24:02] Ben Kornell: This is so awesome. It's like we could talk all day about the opportunities going forward for YouTube. I think one, just as we wrap, one major takeaway is we're so grateful that there's someone like you in the beast of YouTube.
Just like any great product, when you find product market fit by chance, it turns out YouTube is the world's largest learning platform. You've got to bring the right leaders in to nurture it and reach its full potential for everyone. And it just. So heartwarming to know that you're working on this and you're bringing all of your expertise in this space.
So on behalf of EdTech Insider community and family everywhere, thank you for your service. And also, you know, the old Spider Man adage goes, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. So we're going to be cheering for you and our hopes are very, very high.
[00:24:57] Katie Kurtz: Well, that is so kind of you to say, but also I would like to make sure that I, I am just representing a really impassioned team here of a lot of people across YouTube who care so deeply about this.
And so we will take those well wishes and we will try to do you proud.
[00:25:14] Ben Kornell: Wonderful. Well, if there are new announcements or launches, please let us know because our audience, if they want to hear about what's new in edtech, they come to edtech insiders. Thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:25:25] Alex Sarlin: Katie Kurtz is a Managing Director and Global Head of Youth and Learning at YouTube.
Thank you so much, Katie, for being here with us. Hi, Katie. 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 EdTech Insider, subscribe to the free EdTech Insiders newsletter on Substack.
This season of EdTech Insiders is brought to you by Tuck Advisors. Have you received a UFO, an unsolicited flattering offer, and need help determining if it's real or a hoax? Reach out to Tuck Advisors ASAP confidential at tuckadvisors. com. This is how many of Tuck's client relationships begin.
