Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
How AI and STEM are Solving Teacher Shortages: Expert Insights from Stephen Jull
Stephen Jull was the COO/CFO and co-founder of GeoGebra GmbH (acquired by BYJU’S in 2021), and a limited partner at Emerge Education. With a PhD from Cambridge and over two decades of experience in EdTech, Stephen has led transformative projects in mathematics, STEM education, and AI-driven learning at a global scale. He is also the former interim CEO of Epic! and a dedicated advisor to high-growth EdTech startups.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How AI, human tutors, and learning communities can reshape the outdated education system.
- The role of technology in addressing teacher shortages, especially in STEM fields.
- Insights on creating inclusive AI to support neurodiverse learners.
- Key takeaways from Stephen’s experience building GeoGebra into a global education powerhouse.
- How emerging technologies like AI are set to revolutionize global education systems.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:00:22] Stephen Jull on the need for personalized learning to update outdated education systems.
[00:03:31] Stephen’s journey from teaching in remote Canada to founding GeoGebra.
[00:06:54] Lessons from GeoGebra's growth and advice for EdTech founders
[00:11:10] Insights into BYJU'S acquisition and its impact on global EdTech
[00:12:50] AI, human tutors, and learning communities transforming education
[00:15:32] The importance of inclusive AI for neurodiverse learners.
[00:21:26] Global leaders and regions driving AI innovation in education.
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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&A advisors who work just 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& A advisors who work just as hard as you do.
[00:00:22] Stephen Jull: We've always had really amazing learning communities, like everything from parent support to like networks of schools and just communities being involved. Schools are the hub of every community, of course. But what we've missed is this ability to differentiate. And that's, you can see where I'm going with this, that's the missing links.
We've got the missing link. And like, we've got it like, so now if we can capture it in a way and deliver it, you've got this incredible opportunity to have every kid, you know, every child find their passion every single day in every subject. So that's why it's going to change. I think that's why we're at this inflection point here.
[00:01:00] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to ed tech insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry. Funding rounds to impact AI development across early childhood. Well, higher ed and work, you'll find it all here at ed
[00:01:14] Ben Kornell: tech insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and author event calendar, and to go deeper, check out ed tech 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.
Today, we welcome Stephen Jewell. Following an early career teaching in remote communities of Canada's far north. Stephen earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Commonwealth Trust Scholar and has spent the past two decades building teams and forging strategic partnerships to deliver innovations in teaching and learning through technology at scale.
As COO, CFO, and co founder of GeoGebra GMBH. Acquired by by juice in 2021, Steven beat a path to sustainable growth on the four pillars of startup success, team technology, community revenue. And long before ed tech was taken seriously by BC and PE over a few hyper focused years, Stephen and the founding team relentlessly pursued a singular vision, ultimately reaching 500 million plus students and teachers, and shaping the dynamic mathematics and STEM education ecosystem worldwide.
Stephen has been delivering high impact growth at the C level for over a decade. Most recently as interim CEO at Epic, the world's leading digital reading platform for kids. Additionally, Steven is a limited partner at Emerge Education, Europe's leading pre seed and seed fund based out of London, alongside serving in an advisory capacity for high impact, high growth startups scale ups.
Beyond this, Steven is just a great friend and a great thought partner. We hope you enjoy this episode. Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. I am super excited. To be joined by Stephen Jewell today. We are going to talk about all things ed tech. Steven has had an incredible career and we're going to dive into his journey.
What's going on today? What's going on in the future in ed tech, but without further ado, I'm just so excited to have you here. Welcome Steven.
[00:03:31] Stephen Jull: Hey, thanks Ben. It's super nice to be here. Uh, you know, listened to many amazing podcasts and uh, real pleasure to be here talking with you today as well too. I'm one of those kind of, I think I would say within the ed tech space, one of the old guard.
Yoji. Nice one. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, kind of came to it as I sometimes say in earnest, because you know, as a teacher, you know, founder and teacher really, you know, and a true believer, like I went into education because it was either going to be. In the media, you know, or education, these are the two places.
I thought you could really move the needle on making change in community and the way the way the world works. Yeah. So I was a teacher, but not just a teacher, you know, in the usual kind of like thoughts of things of being a teacher. I ended up taking my first job in northern British Columbia. Up in the gas fields, which was a real experience.
And I'll tell you, like, that's real living when you're living in isolation in temporary towns that have been put up real fast and, you know, people are just, you know, making an honest buck trying to get by and the kids are up there, isolated with them. You're teaching them portables and you've got to make it work.
Right. And that was a real challenge. And that got me super excited about the North. Having never lived in the North before and ended up then spending some time in the Yukon. I spent four years in the Yukon teaching in even more isolated communities and that's where I learned everything I need to know and everything I apply still to this day in education around the need to be adaptive, you know, have a thick skin, personalized learning in a meaningful way.
I've seen a ton of failure up there and also a ton of success coming out of a lot of pain, you know, in schooling. You know, I think that's really the, in the foundations. You know, skipping kind of ahead from there, it was, it was a kind of a jumping trajectory unpredicted through into a master's degree and then a PhD at Cambridge over here in the UK.
And that led to, you know, developing my first kind of, you know, application in supporting kids learning through digital technologies. That's where it all kind of began. Biggest project I should probably cite with a couple of my great friends and colleagues, Marcus Hollenworter and Michael Borchards, two amazing guys who I met while I was at Cambridge doing some research and supporting some work in Africa at the time.
And we all got together and decided to work on Marcus's project, which was called GeoGebra. It was his PhD project. And we were able to turn that into this. Transformative application and service, not for profit and business that enabled kids all around the world and teachers all around the world to have access to the world's powerful mathematics software, completely free of charge with a mystery business model that we invented at the time, and it allowed us to do some really good work.
It was a joy. It was like 10 years of just putting your feet on the floor every day and making, you know, the math world go around.
[00:06:25] Ben Kornell: I'd say that's probably what you're most well known for. And many people don't realize it's a 10 year journey. And there's many ups and downs that you had on that. Obviously a successful exit and, you know, a lot of people focus on the kind of highs, but what was that up and down journey like?
And it sounds like part of it was just enjoying the people you were working with in the journey itself, but any insights or takeaways that you have for founders in our community. From that journey.
[00:06:54] Stephen Jull: Thanks for the question. Because, you know, I feel like those were like the heady days, pre Chromebook, pre Google Classroom.
You know, Apple really wasn't even looking at education at the time. Microsoft, you know, had nothing going. They were just about to launch Windows 8. So those were like, you know, crazy early days. It was like, you know, the Wild West was people were just setting up, you know, the people just laying the rails, basically, and setting up the first kind of villages to kind of think about how we're going to create this ecosystem.
Yeah. It was mostly fun, I have to say, because you had this opportunity to be a tiny little startup, you know, working with some of the biggest and most important companies in the world. And they were thrilled to be talking to us because we were working on something very specific, in this case, mathematics, and they were working on something very different.
General, which was, you know, how to deliver operating systems and hardware and software to the world, and it was like a perfect kind of, you know, mix of opportunity for the young and focused and the old guard at that time, you know, the operating systems, you know, looking to kind of change the world. So. It was a lot of fun.
I have to say, Ben, of course there were hard times, you know, and people say to me, like, you know, and everyone knows this and you know, a ton of founders. I mean, the best thing about a founder community and a group of people building a company is that it's always an honest relationship. And so my old colleagues are like my brothers and sisters, you know, like we were a family and we talked openly with each other and that's what made it like a journey together.
Really.
[00:08:25] Ben Kornell: So at that point, you know, in the Geogebra journey, you got acquired by this gigantic emergent behemoth by Jews, and we're kind of thrust into the middle of probably the most Dynamic company, but also at a dynamic time, you know, right. This was actually before the pandemic, but right into the jaws of the pandemic.
Awesome. In the middle of this kind of emergence of India as a, like a mega world tech platform, and then you've got your like North American roots, but you're also running things out of the UK. So all of these dynamics converging, what was that experience like? And how do you think about that journey? You know, kind of part two.
[00:09:07] Stephen Jull: Yeah, it was a really interesting time, too, because, you know, I knew Baiju, like, himself before, you know, we were, GeoGebra was even thinking of an exit. Even at the time, too, I'd stepped back from my frontline work at, at GeoGebra, and I think it was like 2018, 2019, and I was, Doing some work with Kozla's, you know, at CK12, another great project, you know, a long time friends of Nero, et cetera.
And so I was just like, we all are just getting to know everyone in the ecosystem. And I met Baiju for the first time back then. And I was impressed by, you know, of course the acquisition happened afterwards because, you know, like most acquisitions, it's always about relationships and the product out to you and has a great impact.
And GeoGebra fit that bill. But the relationship I think really synced nicely. And I think that to your point around geographies and locations and different cultures of building and learning and ecosystems, education and ed tech is one of those things. And I'm sure you appreciate this too, is like, it's kind of a universal, it's like health, right?
It's like, it's like healthcare, maybe a bit like finance, but finance, but not really, but education and healthcare are very, very similar. So when you talk to someone, you know, in another geography about, What you're building an education and EdTech, it usually kind of syncs up pretty nicely. And Baiju at the time, like the thing I liked about him is like, he was like the Alex Honnold of climbers.
Like if we were climbers, we were all still on the ropes, right? You know? And he was free soloing, you know, and, and doing some stuff that just, you know, Like I'll say Alex one more time. Like he literally broke the glass ceiling. Like we're all kind of like clinging to, you know, the half dome, you know, with our ropes on, and here goes this guy free climbing at crazy pace, raising capital, you know,
[00:10:53] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I think it's the speed too.
It's not just the no ropes, but it's also the, like, ability to summit a mountain that, you know, for many, even in the olden days seemed unsummitable. And now with, you know, take you years, it was just this rapid.
[00:11:10] Stephen Jull: Yeah, no, I think that's the exact summary is that that's what it felt like at the time. I think every single founder that was acquired, you know, every company during that period, we all felt like, wow, that guy just did this.
And now we're all going to just do that too. Like we're going to be part of that, you know, that, that crew. There were heady days too, like that was like, you know, kind of super fun. And those early stages were groundbreaking. We all know that there's a continuing story, you know, in that, in that domain. But at the time it felt like this was, you know, we'd all sort of joined this, this new level, this new echelon of what was possible for education, for ed tech to be that considered that valuable to be taken that seriously.
By venture by government, just by people, you know, like people are paying attention.
[00:11:56] Ben Kornell: So, you know, this is really positioned you with a unique perch to look at education, both retrospectively currently and going forward. And now you're actually putting out some really compelling and also challenging perspectives on things like neurodiversity or AI in the education system.
And so I'd love to just spend a good portion of the interview diving into those. So first off, you've highlighted the outdated nature of our education system. I think everyone knows that we're 100 years behind because we're teaching like it was 50 years ago, and we need to be preparing kids for 50 years from now.
So there's a 100 year gap. How do you see AI, human tutors, and learning communities working together to dismantle this industrial era model and create a more sustainable future? Flexible student centered system that you write about.
[00:12:50] Stephen Jull: Yeah, what I'm exploring here, you know, as we support companies and look at next steps for education.
You know, the thesis is, as you've just pointed out, it's widely recognized, right? And I think we've been talking about this for a long time. Yeah, so we all know this, like education was built in a different era, like an era that none of us. It's kind of like bizarre to even think about the time that when it was actually established that it's still the same functioning.
Yeah. You know, sort of system, even the infrastructure is still there, you know, to hear, come over to England sometime. I'm sure you've traveled here, like some of these buildings, actually the Victorian buildings, you know, like, just to be honest, my kids go to schools and Victorian buildings, which is not a bad thing
[00:13:29] Ben Kornell: might be generous to say it's like 50 years ago.
That's actually being really kind.
[00:13:34] Stephen Jull: Did I say that, but I should, I should just, you know, preface that by, or not sort of postscript that by saying, I've always said that great teachers, master teachers can teach in a barn, you know, like, and I believe that too. So we're in oil fields
[00:13:47] Ben Kornell: in Northern Canada.
[00:13:49] Stephen Jull: Thank you.
Brilliant. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So I think the missing link that we've had all this time, we've always talked about differentiation, personalization. How does a teacher, you know, typical US, UK, Australia, Canadian, actually many parts of the world teach 30 kids. Uh, you go into certain Africa, how do you teach a hundred kids, you know, with one person?
The biggest thing teachers have always said and parents have understood and systems have kind of backed is that it's very difficult to teach 30 kids with one person. You can't differentiate for 30, right? It's just impossible. So you group and you stream and you do all of these strategies, which. Try to chunk it into manageable size groups, but that's just really a kind of a what we'd all agree is, you know, a less than beneficial way of sorting and seeing children, you know, people right with creative opportunities into categories really early on, and that has massive implications for their sense of self and their learning going forward.
So, cutting to the chase here, I think we've always had, you know, motivated, loving. Interested teachers in schools. Like that's something we can't disagree with. We've always had a really amazing learning communities, like everything from parents support to like networks of schools and just communities being involved, schools are the hub of every community, of course, but what we've missed is this ability to differentiate.
And that's, you can see where I'm going with this. That's the missing links. We've got the missing link. And like, we've got it like, so now if we can capture it in a way and deliver it, you've got this incredible opportunity to have every kid, you know, every child find their passion every single day in every subject.
So that's why it's going to change. I think that's why we're at this inflection point here.
[00:15:32] Ben Kornell: So you're talking a little bit about this burning platform and essentially why we also, it's an economic imperative to basically prepare kids in a different way for the future. You also caution how we've approached this and even in your comment, you mentioned most schools in the US, Canada or the UK, but potentially around the world.
One thing I found really interesting is your focus on neurodiversity. And as we think about systems that scale either physical systems or technological systems, there's a bias towards Neurotypical, you know, student. And as we know with the books, like the end of average, there's this kind of design flaw in many of our systems.
That assumes scalability needs to have uniformity of the user. But you push that even further. You actually are kind of positing that neurodiverse training and inclusiveness actually makes our systems even better and more scalable. This is not a challenge to design to overcome. It's actually a challenge to embrace.
Tell us a little bit more about where that's coming from first. And then, you know, we have a lot of listeners that are pretty practical and they're building tools. Like what does it look like to embrace neurodiversity as a design principle?
[00:16:48] Stephen Jull: Yeah. Yeah. You know, neurodiversity has become something that people are talking about a lot these days, you know, and I'm so happy about this.
Of course. I mean, there's a lot of ways of thinking and knowing the epistemologies of education and community and Culture that are coming to the fore. And it's just, it's just brilliant. It's like freeing people up to really pursue their, who their true selves are in learning and otherwise. And neurodiversity is one that's been a little late to the, you know, the table and the conversation, but they're here.
It's here now. Like, if we're talking about it, why am I so interested in neurodiversity? Um, aside from, you know, the idea of like conclusion and that really, it occupies a pretty good chunk of our. Yeah. Population like 15 percent of, you know, our population is some kind of difference that. It's either visible or invisible.
Diversity is in that category. From my teaching background, I accidentally kind of fell into the special ed kind of category of things because I'd had some early experiences working with very difficult kids as you, you know, in the gas fields and of the North. I developed a thick skin really, really early on to kids who thought differently, had a different view, like whether that's social learning, how they felt they should spend their time during the day.
Sometimes that was related to neurodiversity, sometimes it was not, you know, sometimes it's just related to difference. But I think it, what it does is it reflects on the idea that with individuality comes opportunity. And this leads to, you know, this idea of why neurodiversity is such an important. thing to consider here in building AI models, it's because, I mean, without disparaging, you know, all of my average friends, including my average self, you know, my average family and, you know, et cetera, the people I enjoy the most, I find most interesting are the people who are going to be a little bit, you know, thinking about things obliquely.
Not thinking in a linear way with the rest of us. So I think that's incredibly powerful. And my biggest concern about AI models, to be honest, I haven't had that opportunity to really drill down to understand how LLMs are being trained in relation to neurodiversity. But I do recognize that they aren't explicitly being trained with that view in mind.
And so my worry, I think, is that wouldn't it be a loss and a missed opportunity right now to have incredible Personalized learning opportunities with models that don't think and or recognize, you know, things that are other than neurotypical ways of knowing and thinking. So I think that's where it falls for me.
That is like, I'm actively keen on seeing that explored, you know, within the LLMs and the products that, you know, tech are building around it.
[00:19:30] Ben Kornell: And there is a way in which I think how we architect our systems has. Up to this point, not embrace neurodiversity as an asset. We almost build the, you know, here's the main core.
And here's the main corpus of curriculum. And then let's adapt that to neuro diverse learners. But if you took a different standpoint and say, how do we actually from the beginning? They'll neurodiversity into our product. You can actually have what we might call, you know, neurotypical students actually really benefiting from being pushed in terms of neurodiverse ways and.
You know, I think this is also a reflection of the industrial era where it's all about the efficiency of the conveyor belt of stamping learning in the brains of kids. As we move to competency based, where meaning making and metacognition is far more important than the actual fact that you're doing it.
Memorizing we're designing in constraints that no longer apply. So I thought this was a great point. And for those of you who want to hear more about this, you know, Steven, it's going to be on a panel we're doing at New York ed tech week, but it's also doing some talks at university of Pennsylvania and the graduate school of education and Wharton, and I think this is one area where I think that you're tapping into something.
That could be potentially game changing. Okay, so now last question, you are unique in that you've almost from the get go had a global perspective on what's going on in education and you've seen scalable businesses and strategies around the world as you look out on the landscape today, what's giving you the most inspiration, um, You know, which countries or regions do you believe are best positioned to lead the education revolution with AI and emerging technologies?
Who are the organizations or leaders that you're looking at?
[00:21:26] Stephen Jull: Yeah. Another kind of like thought exercise I'm working on right now is like this concept of like, who dares wins. I mean, over here in the UK, this is kind of like vernacular for those who are willing to really stick their neck out and take a risk, you know, are the ones who ultimately are going to win.
Right.
[00:21:42] Ben Kornell: And that's much of our current education system where it's all like, play the party line, play the game, get the credential, like go through, and we're actually seeing a flip in our world. We're actually risk taking risk is a strategy to de risk over long term, which I don't think most learners or career pursuers understand, but I'm, you know, as educators who've had pretty nonlinear paths ourselves, it is amazing.
The opportunities that open up for us because we have a non typical trajectory.
[00:22:14] Stephen Jull: Yeah, I think that's exactly it. And again, the AI is presenting us with that first time opportunity to do all of those things we've just talked about. But the constraint is, as you've just pointed out, is. Where is this going to happen?
Where are we going to see the biggest moves first? And how fast is it going to happen? You know, what are the risks that are gonna be played out? And, you know, and so who's hedging, who's risking, who's following? And I think I have my thoughts on where we might. See those early movers and, you know, there's the, I guess, like the safe ones, like the Finland's and Singapore's of this world that have always been risk takers and thinking about education slightly differently.
I mean, there's context in each of those locations that allow that to happen. Of course, too. There's other places, too, that have had active strategies around adapting, you know, and including AI within their long term plans, like the UAE and China, and that's been even pre LLM launch, you know, for the public domain.
I'm not saying necessarily that's where we're going to see the biggest moves, but I think where we see the biggest moves is where we see the systems and organizations where, you know, the opportunity is allowed to run and now I have to say that there's a lot of justification in being careful in education.
I mean, you've got kids. I've got kids, you know, we live in communities and Moving fast when kids are in play is, you know, that makes it even trickier terrain. So I'm risk averse, just like most parents when it comes to my kids exposure to new things, et cetera. I want to make sure I test them out a little bit too.
So I think it's kind of like a, as Ethan Mollick says, there's a jagged frontier, both in AI innovation and development, but I think also in how this gets deployed in large scale or in small scales. I'll finish on saying like going from the macro to the micro in my household with my own kids. I got a 14 year olds all the way down to five, you know, they all play with various AI models and we do it collectively as a family.
We do it at the kitchen table and we're doing homework. We do it for fun. You know, we want to know something, you know, we, we talk to the models and they talk back to us and it's kind of joyful actually. And you could see. You know, I can see like if I think for teenagers now, I mean, you've got a teenager in your house and I do in mine, I think what a wonderful time to feel like you've got access to the world in a disruptive way.
That could be really productive. And so let me finish there. I think that's to your point. I think, how can we do this in a disruptive, productive way? And, you know, there's a
[00:24:42] Ben Kornell: way it would
[00:24:44] Stephen Jull: totally. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I think it's, it's an exciting time, isn't it? To be in this space.
[00:24:50] Ben Kornell: Well, you know, whenever I need a pick me up, you are one of those folks on my speed dial where I think you've seen it all from Geogebra to Baijus to the Yukon territory.
And what I always come back to is your optimism and your sense of the overarching arc of humanity, which is Upwards and onwards. And so great to have you on the podcast and to share that with the world. Steven, Joel, thank you so much for joining EdTech Insiders today.
[00:25:19] Alex Sarlin: Thanks, Ben. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders.
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