Week in EdTech 10/23/2024: Election’s Impact on Education Policy, College ROI & Student Loans, Freshman Enrollment Drop, AI Expands in Higher Ed, SchooLinks Raises $80M, XR from Meta & Apple, and More!

Join hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell as they explore the political and technological currents reshaping education, from college ROI and student loans to AI’s expanding role in higher ed.

✨ Episode Highlights:

[00:04:28] 🗳️ Election’s Impact on Education Policy
[00:12:11] 🎓 Debating the Value of College Amid Rising Costs
[00:15:12] 📉 Freshman Enrollment Sees Largest Drop Since Pandemic
[00:18:02] 🛠️ SchooLinks Raises $80M to Expand Career Pathways
[00:27:01] 🤖 Half of Higher Ed Adopting AI Tools for Outcomes
[00:37:05] 🕹️ AI Chatbot Linked to Teen Suicide Raises Alarms
[00:45:18] 🌍 Meta Orion & Apple Vision Pro Bring XR Back to Spotlight
[00:48:46] 📊 Anthropic’s AI Now Performs Autonomous Computer Tasks

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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.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: I think the Democratic Party, which traditionally was sort of the standard bearer for college as is, for college for all, it should be more accessible, but the system works. It's really good. I think they have started to really come around and say, you know what, I'm not sure the system works as is. And frankly, I'm really excited about that.

I think there's been too much apologism for the status quo in higher ed for far too long. So, you know, we saw school links. This week, raise an 80 million round all about college and career readiness, and you're seeing colleges sort of really get the memo in all these different ways that if they don't start to focus on their return and on their career acceleration for the students, they sort of have been given warning.

And I think that's actually increasingly true from both parties. I think either person, the election, that trend is going to continue where colleges are going to be under pressure to prove that these increasing tuitions that have just Forever increased are actually worth it.

Welcome to ed tech insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry and funding rounds to impact AI developments across early childhood, K 12, higher ed, and work. You'll 

[00:01:36] Ben Kornell: find it all here at ed tech insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.

And to go deeper, check out ed tech insiders. 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.

Hello, EdTech insiders, listeners. We have a special pre election episode for you all. We're going to be covering everything in AI, EdTech, the world of education, technology, et cetera, but we know many of you have a A certain presidential election on your mind in case you haven't been following the news.

So we'll dive into that and we also have some great events and podcasts coming up. So before we jump in, my friend, co founder, co host Alex Harlan, what do we have coming up on the pod? 

[00:02:35] Alex Sarlin: We just put out an episode with Brian Shaw, the CEO of Discovery Education, which is super exciting. They have millions and millions and millions of students.

They, he talked about the acquisition of Dreambox recently, which is a huge acquisition and all sorts of other things coming up. We're also coming out next week or beginning this week with a really interesting interview with Nathan Maynard. He's an entrepreneur behind a company called Hi Fi. Five, that's all about sort of redefining behavioral and school discipline with technology.

And he has a really interesting background himself brings a lot of really thoughtful ideas to this space that we don't hear a lot about behavior and discipline in the ed tech space. And that's a good one. How about you, Ben? Are there events coming up? 

[00:03:15] Ben Kornell: Yeah. So we've got a happy hour coming up in the Bay area.

So back home in the Bay on November 13th. That's Wednesday, November 13th. We're doing it with our friends at future of higher education. And then also we have on the week of the 18th, we have the Stanford accelerate impact summit and the Google learning in the AI era conference. So we hope to see you all there at those events.

We 

[00:03:43] Alex Sarlin: also have one upcoming. That's really awesome. It's all about impact in ed tech, how to measure it, when to measure it, at what stage of your life cycle as an ed tech company to measure it, what's the ROI on measuring it, but yet, besides obviously, you know, trying to do the right thing for everybody in your ecosystem, and that's with two real experts.

It's Natalia Kusarkova, who's the founder of ed tech impact wicket, which is a. Consulting firm, nonprofit, all about ed tech impact out of Europe and David Dockterman, who is otherwise known as doc, who is a lecturer at Harvard graduate school of education has taught generations of education and ed tech leaders and teaches whole class on impact.

So join us there for that as well. 

[00:04:28] Ben Kornell: Before we go on to the ed tech. Highlights and headlines. Let's just step back and talk a little bit about the election first. How are you feeling heading into November's deciding day? 

[00:04:41] Alex Sarlin: Well, you know, truthfully, I've been listening to, you know, podcast election news and certainly following it, but going out of my way to, Try to sort of avoid any emotional entanglement.

I don't have hope. I don't have fear. I'm like numbing myself entirely to the results until it's over. Because, you know, people say every time, this is the most important election in our lifetimes. It's like over and over again, especially recently. This is starting to feel like it's really living up to that promise.

It's just, it's two candidates with wildly different views of the world, wildly different, you know, sets of people behind them that would do wildly different things. And it's nervous making, it's scary. And so I'm trying not to be scared and trying to sort of focus on what I can control, which is very little of it.

How about you, Ben? How have you been holding up? 

[00:05:30] Ben Kornell: Yeah. Anxiety growing high, you know, trying to not get sucked into it. And also I think the realization that on election night, we probably won't know the results. And, you know, so just for our international listeners, the election is Tuesday, November 5th and where I think.

You know, this heads regardless of outcome is a period of uncertainty and unrest potentially. And so I think that's what folks are generally worried about. And what does unrest mean? And is it peaceful or is it violent? And what are the messages and the headlines? I think that it's just a big period of uncertainty coming up.

One thing for the education side of things, bellwether is doing a, what is the implication of this election? You can check that out at bellwether. org. They're talking to members of both campaigns, but there's a vastly different view on the role of the department of education, mainly that on the Trump side of things, that there's a view that the department of education should not exist, period.

And that's oriented towards a push towards state departments of education and local. Department of Education, and famously, there's been a movement around school boards and, you know, work to kind of counteract what they see as woke policies in schools and school districts. So, you know, likely at the federal government level, what you would actually see is a ramping down of.

Activity and a pushing out of responsibility to the States, whether that would be a full shutdown of the department or whether that would just be enacted in policy. And on the other side, you see a much more active vision for the role of department of education. And that would probably be a continuation of what we've seen in Biden.

But I will say over the last four years, we've just seen some policy missteps, some conflicting advice. And I think that's. That's especially true when you're talking about for profit providers in higher ed and workforce space and when it comes to federal subsidies, grants and loans. So I do think that there's a fair amount of uncertainty around what the policy implications will be on the education side from the election, but it seems to go in one direction like much more active, higher regulatory play.

And then the other one, uh, much more limited interaction from the department of ed. 

[00:08:01] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I think it's interesting to note how little Either of these candidates talks about education really in any context. There are a few sort of Hot button, the sort of almost signifier issues in education that people do talk about.

Sometimes it's the student loans, the fact that over the last four years, there's been all of this attempted forgiveness of student loans, which is now caught up in courts. And that's sort of a symbol of basically federal government's role in education, whether they should have a role or not. And that's been.

Controversial. You also see things like, as you said, local control, the idea of parents having more rights over their school's curriculum or local control, you know, certain types of topics not being able to be taught this concept of sort of protecting the community, quote, unquote, from outside influences, including this idea of wokeness.

And then, you know, Of course, there's sort of the campus protests and the, you know, the concept that higher education as a whole has been in the view of many in the country, sort of co opted by certain ideologies and the view of the other has been really at the forefront of sort of leading some of the social change that's been happening.

And in either case, it's been very chaotic. We saw heads of Ivy league universities get dragged in front of Congress and then several of them get fired. It's been a really tough time. I mean, one thing I. I have to bring up here because I've just talked about it a lot to individual people over the last few weeks.

And I just think it's important. It's important in understanding at least my concept of politics. I'm a big fan of the Jonathan hate book, the righteous mind. He's an NYU social psychologist. And his basic theory is that there's basically a different sense of what morality even is on the left and the right.

They have different moral. Precepts and I find that really useful because I tend to be an optimist. I tend to think that most people want, you know, similar things to one another. So this vast polarization that we've seen in the U S has been really confusing to me, but he talks about things like how in right wing morality, one of the core tenants is about protecting the community from outside influence, including, you know, disease or corruption or.

Degeneracy and, you know, that is such an obvious, you know, corollary to all of the immigration talks we've seen the way Trump talks about immigration and this like literally like Hitlerian, you know, vocabulary, but it's about disease. You know, people are bringing their worst and it's that your vermin and that's also true in a local level, right?

The idea of parents being afraid that their teachers are bringing in, you know, curricular or bringing in books about, you know, transgender. LGBTQ issues into the school and it's sort of infiltrating their community that they are trying to protect from outside influences that would, you know, may change minds.

It's like at heart, it is a moral stance, but it's one that flies exactly into the face of the, Sort of left wing version of morality, which is often about tolerance and equality and championing the underserved rather than protecting the status quo or protecting people, then it's a fascinating book. It's definitely worth looking into.

I just think it's really changed the way I see this. And I think it's very relevant right now, specifically for almost every education issue. I mean, even if you think about the student loan forgiveness, the student loan forgiveness, it's the federal government. Saying student loans proportionately fall on underrepresented learners, you know, first generation college students, many of whom have been carrying these loans that we know from the statistics that black and Latino students have much higher loans to pay off.

It's the worst conditions. This is really like a racial equality issue for the left. And they're saying people are burdened by this on the right. It's this issue. They see it totally differently. They see it as, Oh, you know, everybody's on their own and they're working hard. And if these people paid off their loans and these people paid off their loans, why should somebody else get a free hand?

We're not a welfare state. This is not fair to people who have played by the rules. And it's like, You know, depending on your own politics, you can read it any way you'd like, but it definitely corresponds to this concept of sort of different versions of what people consider right and moral. And it just comes up everywhere, especially in the connection between politics and education.

[00:12:11] Ben Kornell: Yeah, well, I mean, just to double down on that loan question, there's also long been skepticism about the ROI of, you know, elite higher ed and the expense on the right. And they're like, you made the choice to get those big loans. Why should I bail you out? You know, my family went to the state school or the community college or did it the way, you know, there's a degree of, uh, feeling of personal accountability for choices that people have made.

And a questioning of like the ROI of higher ed. What I would just say, you know, we strive to be nonpartisan here at EdTech Insiders. I think what we also strive to do is find the area where there's so much common ground and education for many, many decades. Was the one area where both parties really could line up together and say, Hey, this is important for all kids in America and educators are super important.

And schools are super important. And I think this fragmenting fracturing around issues has really come at a cost. To the education system, I think higher ed is probably in the bullseye right now in terms of that, the politics, but, you know, like we were saying with the moms of liberty and the school board controversies and so on, it's certainly hit K 12 and then you also see in policies at the state level, moving towards education savings accounts in red states, where there's, you know, More of a sense of parent empowerment and unlocking dollars from the public system to go to parental choice.

So I do think that if you are an education voter and you're voting solely on education issues for this election, there's a lot to think about, but it's also, it has not been in the forefront for either candidate. And I don't know that the. Outcome of the election is going to change the overall direction other than like the role of the U S department of ed.

And so, you know, I think it's just going to be, this is where I call friends like Aaron Moat to say, Hey, what is going on here? And I think there's just an overall sense that if you want a federal role, you know, that's the democratic. Position. And if you want that, the decision making to be pushed out to the states, you would go on the Republican side.

And the last thing I'd say before we transition is it is unfortunate because I still do think that there's a lot of areas where we all agree. In the education space, college should be more affordable. College should be a welcoming to all K 12 should be, you know, age appropriate and safe. You know, there's like certain things that even in a righteous mind context, I actually think there's a lot of common ground, but that doesn't seem to be.

The place where our politics are today. That's 

[00:15:12] Alex Sarlin: yeah. Saying the least absolutely agree. I mean, I think one issue that I think we can, as just a sort of way out of this political conversation, we're striving to be nonpartisan, I think it's, you know, it's a really complicated space. The U S has such complicated politics around education, especially compared to many other nations that have these sort of ministries of education that They have their own issues, but it's so much more of sort of a national initiative to upskill or educate the population in various ways.

And the U S just by having this sort of mixed control, having a federal government, having state, having school boards, it just, it creates this. Complexity. It's amazing, but I want to just double click on what you're talking about with the college ROI, because this is also something that I think has increasingly become.

Actually a bipartisan issue. Apprenticeships. We've had Ryan Craig on the podcast several times is sort of one of the biggest champions of apprenticeships, but he often notes that apprenticeships are one of the most bipartisan issues in the country. Almost everybody agrees. The bills about them are bipartisan.

The bills that are passed in the Senate and the house. If you ask people about apprenticeships, even parents about apprenticeships, people are just absolutely believe that college should be more aligned to work. That apprenticeships are, you know, as valuable as a college education in many cases might be even more for what many say, and even though the actual perception of college is still quite different among the two parties, the Republican party in the U S tends to have a much dimmer view of college being basically worth the investment at this particular moment.

And they're worried about sort of ideological issues within that. I think the Democratic Party, which traditionally was sort of the standard bearer for college as is, for college for all, it should be more accessible, but the system works. It's really good. I think they have started to really come around and say, you know what, I'm not sure the system works as is.

Yeah. And frankly, I'm really excited about that. I think there's been too much apologism for the status quo in higher ed for far too long. So, you know, we saw school links. This week, raise an 80 million round all about college and career readiness, and you're seeing colleges sort of really get the memo in all these different ways that if they don't start to focus on their return and on their career acceleration for the students, they sort of have been given warning.

And I think that's actually increasingly true from both parties. I think either person, The election, that trend is going to continue where colleges are going to be under pressure to prove that these increasing tuitions that have just forever increased are actually worth it for the students. We saw Arnie Duncan come out with the college scorecard about exactly this, and you've seen, you know, people like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush be incredibly vocal advocates for a changed college.

Academic system and even, you know, Ron DeSantis. So really wacky time for that. What do you think about the sort of college ROI discussion and how it relates to this stuff? 

[00:18:02] Ben Kornell: My hope would be that this election, once it passes, could clear the way for, you know, because then you'll have a president for four years and you'll kind of know where things are going.

We'll clear the way for us to get back to some of these bipartisan things where you might have like a Rubio joining with some people on the left to say, really, our education system isn't working for working class people of all backgrounds. And this promise of college as a path to the middle class is a false promise as constructed today.

And Where I think that things get dicey is when we look at college as the place for American citizenship and like kind of creating the liberal arts ideal, which is like an informed and educated citizenry leads to a, you know, more successful country. That feels like there's a lot of debate around what does that really mean?

And, you know, is there a partisan angle on that? But if we clearly go to economic impact of higher education, the numbers are. Super clear on what's working and what's not working, and we have longitudinal data and we have near term data, and we also have kind of an exciting moment with stackable degrees and multiple paths and training and upskilling.

I mean, I actually think there's like even a repositioning of higher ed as a lifelong learning. You know, pathways and institution. So to me, that is an area of promise and possibility, not to like totally turn the page on all of that, but there is a really great, you know, funding round that came up recently with schooling, securing 80 million to expand college and career readiness.

And we're seeing a big boom in. College and career pathway programs. And I think it has to do with the old system, which is pretty dominated by a company called Naviance that works with college counselors. Students go through kind of a LMS type experience where they do, you know, career quizzes and to try to determine areas they might be interested in and some, you know, more corporate feeling training around like, Here's a college path and here's what it costs.

And here's something else. And here's what it costs. The reality is we've just have been understaffing and underfunding college counseling for a long, long time. Meanwhile, we've created this kind of four year college or bust system. When today the sheer variety of options post high school are exponential.

And so now you see a new breed of companies thinking, okay, how do we actually help People navigate that complexity and how do we help their parents plan for it? What are the financial considerations? What are the pedagogical considerations? And I think behind the scenes that 80 million valuation seemed shockingly high to me for a company that.

That is relatively new. And Katie, the CEO has done an awesome job, but I think it does speak to the market's realization that this middle layer or this like transition layer, isn't just an 18 year old to like 19 year old service anymore. It's really like from 14 to 55. And that's what I think is incredibly exciting about.

This moment and potentially, you know, us coming together as a country to support upskilling across the board. 100%.

[00:21:52] 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 planning the harvest, contact Tuck Advisors now.

It is really exciting. I mean, we've seen such mixed signals. You know, we've seen things like IBM put out a big announcement at one point saying they were removing bachelor's degree requirements from a lot of their jobs. The federal government. Back to politics, removed bachelor degree requirements from a lot of jobs.

So like there has been this sort of growing drumbeat over the last few years of people starting to say, well, maybe it's not college for all. Maybe it's not just, you know, always there's one path to success in America and it goes through a university. People have started to say that at the same time, you know, the overall landscape, there's still a meaningful college premium for many people.

I, Paul tough had a great book about the college years and the college premium. And he basically has. You know, look, reading of the stats is like, you basically have like a 50, 50 chance. If you go to college of getting benefit from it, depending on your school and your background, if you're going to an elite college, you have a very high chance of succeeding of graduating and a very high chance of getting huge upside from it.

But for most other colleges. degrees, many others. It's literally a coin flip. And he's like in a situation where it's a coin flip and you're asking somebody to spend a huge amount of money. It really, it's not crazy to be doubtful. So I think the ed tech sector has always been trying to help in this space, right?

I mean, we've seen multiverse launch an apprentice degree program in the UK, and I think they're bringing one here where you can actually graduate Through working, but, you know, you basically can combine work and academics to get a degree. That's really interesting. We've seen all sorts of different ed tech plays over the years to try to not disrupt, but, you know, provide additional pathways to success.

I'm hoping that things like that money into programs like school links and other sort of people who recognize that multiple pathway. Vision of what we should be all doing are going the right direction. I think it's probably a very hard time to be a university president or provost or, you know, right now between the sort of fear of a, you know, Gaza protest and what you unearth, you would do about it and having to have decide whether you're going to have a political stances and having all these people doubting your ROI and having freshman enrollment.

We didn't even mention this. Freshman enrollment just came out this week down. The biggest drop since the pandemic, the biggest drop in a long time. So they're really worried about enrollment and tuition issues that that affects a lot of different schools, especially for profits or community colleges, on the other hand, are going up.

It's such a weird time in higher ed. We also saw an interesting report this week about, it was an instructor survey they put out about how higher ed is using AI that we haven't mentioned AI yet, so this is a good time to get into it and they basically, you know, Found that about half of the respondents to their survey are saying that their institution does not use any AI driven tools.

So it's still not really infiltrated higher in a big way yet, but about 30 percent definitely do use them. And if the ones that do use them, they use them for things like predictive analytics, hugely important for college business, bottom line for AI driven feedback systems, adaptive learning platforms, even simulated.

Classroom experiences. That's about almost 40 percent said that, but that's interesting. So, you know, some subset of, of universities is starting to embrace AI in that way, but they have all the big concerns that you'd imagine academic integrity, data, privacy, training. It's, I think they're still missing the forest for the trees.

I mean, you mentioned liberal arts Ben before, and you know, people have been voting with their feet against. That sort of vision of a liberal arts education for a long time, you know, the education major, for example, but also majors like English and philosophy and many, many of the social sciences and arts have been on the outs for a long time, going down like crazy for decades.

And the ones that have been going up are health professions, business, you know, computer science, of course. And we're actually entering a period right now, I would argue, where AI potentially, if it is as big as, you know, some of us think it might be, might actually flip that around a little bit because coding as a sort of career or as a skill set that completely differentiates you, it is sort of assures a meaningful salary is starting to look a little shakier in this AI age and creativity and understanding and sort of understanding different styles and designs and ways of telling stories and, you know, the monomyth and stuff.

Suddenly might actually be back in style when you have these tools that can do so much of the actual tech work for you. So, I mean, this is a sort of weird thing to say in the middle of this discussion that I think the liberal arts may be on a comeback, but if I were a college right now, I'd be really thinking about what is the job world that all these students are headed towards and how is it actually Really being disrupted right now through AI.

I mean, the legal profession is being disrupted through AI. Law schools have been struggling for years for a variety of reasons. It's just a crazy 

[00:27:01] Ben Kornell: moment. And just to recap, you know, here, what we've covered, you know, first, I think it's the election and the kind of polarization, but then to the actual, like one area where I think everyone can agree is that the college ROI.

Is not delivering like it did 20, 30, 40 years ago. And we're seeing people who help folks navigate pathways in college having success. And we're also seeing that undergraduate enrollment is declining, perhaps because people are looking at either dissuaded by the ROI or are using alternative pathways.

But the fundamental question is, where is the ROI? And the classic thing to rely on is Teach everybody computer science or something like that. And yet we have at the same exact moment, a disruptive technology that has kind of two components. One is if you tried to take a computer science class at a university, the odds are it's two years out of date.

And Anytime you try to refresh it six months from then it will be out of date. And then two, how much are those careers going to actually be differentiated from a compensation standpoint, given the advancement in essentially low or no code tools and the 10 X ing of the average engineer. So, you know, might we get from a circular logic standpoint, Back to a liberal arts degree where critical thinking and like, you know, collaboration and core human competencies are actually the main differentiators.

From a job and career standpoint, I think this is both the dilemma and I think the excitement of the moment. And to me, it actually, you know, of course, I sometimes view these things from a business standpoint, the total addressable market of education, I think is vastly expanding because the need to skill and reskill is vastly expanding.

And therefore, Your number of customers and their ability and willingness to spend, whether it's through governmental programs or whether it's individualistically, it is no longer a K 12 four year higher education and some workforce ecosystem. We are now in the K to gray lifelong learning moment. You just also look at how investors are viewing things.

There's a pivot away from all B2B. Like sucking up the energy and let's just call it what it is. Like Coursera, for example, started as B2C. Most of their revenue is B2B, you know, K 12 companies that started as B2C often end up selling into schools, but there's an unlock around B2C now that our country has not experienced in the same way that so many other.

Developed and developing countries experience a very active B2C education market. So I think that's another exciting, you know, component of this evolution. 

[00:30:15] Alex Sarlin: There's an assessment layer that's still a little bit missing there. Cause I think in some of those, especially the developing countries, a lot of the B2C market, it revolves around standardized tests.

And that can be professional tests or college admissions or various things, but we don't yet have in the world yet. A sort of gold standard for a particular educational degree that you can earn purely on merit that is like, has an enormous ROI. Like it's just, it's not sure exactly what that is. I mean, that's what bootcamps sort of, we're trying to be obviously, you know, higher ed combines the signal of the diploma.

With so many other things, you have to get into it and you have to afford it and you have to make it through and you have to not have a breakdown and you have to not get arrested. Like, there's just like so much stuff in there, but, you know, ed tech has been trying to find that like the absolute, you know, gold standard for something where if you do this and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg, you are truly going to be, you know, well set up for the future.

And I think. Once that sort of comes into place, I mean, one of the things I love about work era in a lot of ways, they're really trying to be that they're trying to say we can actually score people on the most cutting edge things. It's also true of, you know, hacker rank and code signal and a lot of these tech tools.

But like, if it was truly accepted that, you know, a work era score of over a 70 in X, you know, fields means that you're, you can get a job in the new AI economy and if you're going to have a really comfortable life, then you could start to see a B2C ecosystem around that assessment and teaching people how to actually upskill even starting, you know, in elementary school.

The other thing I would say, Ben, about what you're saying, it's really interesting is that. It's hard for K 12 companies to go up into workforce. It's at least possible. And it could be really interesting for workforce development companies to start going down into certainly higher ed and even K 12. So I think part of why the investors are, have been sort of looking at workforce companies and worrying about the sort of benefits.

B to school model as a, as a blocker to growth is that there's a pretty decent case to be made that if schools or colleges got really serious about career prep, they'd go to, you know, Google. 

[00:32:29] Ben Kornell: And 

[00:32:30] Alex Sarlin: we've seen some of that and like, you know, they'd go up, they'd go up, they'd go look at what works for adults and then try to pull it in rather than the other way around.

[00:32:37] Ben Kornell: You know, this is part of my dystopian future where we all end up being more than our citizenship by country. We ended up being Googler people or meta people or Amazon people. And we fight our wars based on which tech ecosystem we're part of. You know, you have the elementary school run by the different like enterprises, but coming back to it though, I think the headline that you're saying, the lines are blurred.

Like if you take that to a logical conclusion, how exciting that could be. And you also. Are talking about new assessment modalities and frameworks that could be reinvented. And you could even imagine this being like a country's advantage is that they have a better assessment system than another. So their whole ecosystem rallies and generates talent and like human capital output in a different.

And higher success way. So I think that's a great segment, you know, just commenting on both possibility, but also dystopia to some of the more shocking news in our feed. This week. We saw a article in the New York times about a teen suicide where the teen in question had a relationship with an AI companion, I believe it was on character AI and decided to take his own life, which is a tragedy.

In and of itself, but it also speaks to something you and I've talked about, which is this dark side of the AI companion world. You know, I talked to Bethany over at atypical, I don't know, 18 months ago, almost two years ago, where I think the research that she was leading at Stanford shows that AI companions can actually be really positive and successful, like helping somebody who's been bullied deal with it and process it.

But she also shared that, you know, no matter what I thought, kids were already having relationships with AI companions, whether we knew it or not. And that many kids, and one of the conclusions from my conversation with her is that many kids, they're like first. You know, sexual relationship will be with an AI companion.

Their first like, you know, friend could, might well be an AI companion as a teen or preteen, or they may be processing really, really complicated. Emotions and feelings. And the companies that are building these AI companions are often not well equipped to handle that kind of use case. And, you know, one, there's a narcissism in your AI companion in that it tells you what you want to hear and it's meant to act as a mirror, but two, there's no.

Support systems that create the right guardrails or the right reporting mechanisms to intervene when something goes off the rails, the New York times just put in an article about this. And, you know, I think it is fair to say that many of the larger players like the open AI is Google and tropics. Do have triggers in their AI models, where as soon as somebody says something about, you know, a threat to their own life, they do, you know, have a more strong response in their AI chat bot, but I'm not sure whether that actually triggers any kind of human red flag or warning.

And, you know, you have to balance these data privacy issues with also like protecting human life. And so. The article though, points to a bunch of smaller companies that are building AI chatbots with far fewer guardrails. And this is one of the criticisms of open source AI is that you can actually. You know, have lots of people with very limited guardrails, creating very, very extreme chatbots that have negative social impact.

So, you know, uh, first and foremost, a tragedy for this person and their family, but a bigger, you've been saying this is going to happen at some point for, I mean, basically since chat GPT came out, Alex, you've been like, there's a dark side to this and here we are dealing with it. What's your take on. Where we are today and what we need to be thinking about and doing.

It's such a big question. I mean, 

[00:37:05] Alex Sarlin: at the risk of sounding a little tactless and unsympathetic here, and I don't mean to be, I'm very happy this didn't happen at a school or in a school. It is for sure thing. This is an incredibly disruptive technology and it's disruptive in a very specific way. I mean, this is the whole point of AI is that it's getting as close as it can to simulating human thinking and human personality.

That's literally what it does. That's what large language models, 

[00:37:33] Ben Kornell: artificial 

[00:37:33] Alex Sarlin: intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. And this particular brand of it is really, it's not the sort of, you know, super in the weeds, numeric kind of AI that we've seen in the past that can sort of go through all this. I mean, it is at heart, but it's turning that numeric data into things that feel like thoughts and emotions and, and sympathy and poems.

And, and so there's no question that we are at actually the very beginning of what could be like a transformative, I think for all of us, Humanity, honestly, phase where we basically have a sort of another type of entity in the world other than humans that can act like humans. We've just never, we've just never had that before.

It's the source of a million science fiction, you know, books and movies about, about aliens, but we've never had anything like that. And it's here. And, you know, when you look at this article, they talk about some of the, you know, safeguards that are in place in, uh, A tool like character AI, it literally says on the screen at all times, this is all made up.

It's not a real person. It's not a character, you know, they're these disclaimers, but it's like, we know from decades ago research that it is very, very hard to not anthropomorphize, they call it right to not sort of believe that something that's that looks and acts and sounds and talks or writes like a human isn't doesn't feel human.

And we've known it from so many different Studies in so many different ways. I mean, I remember the story about, you know, the AI scientist who created the Eliza bot, the sort of really early therapy bot, and he tried, he asked his secretary to try it and she asked him to leave the room because he was talking.

He, she was like, I need to really get into a conversation with this Eliza. like the most earliest sort of silliest conversational AI. And he was like, Oh my God, this guy, I think Joseph Weizenbaum, like, there's no doubt that this is going to be convincing to people beyond 14 year olds. People of all ages, of all backgrounds, this is going to be fancy.

I mean, he was talking to Daenerys Targaryen. He was talking to a fictional character based on a, on an actress who based on a character, you know, but there's no video involved. There's no speech involved, especially maybe mild speech, but like, this was mostly a text conversation with a picture and still created that level of deep emotional attachment.

And basically love. This is the beginning of this. So I mean, the reason why I say sadly that I'm glad this didn't happen in a school is that when this does happen in a school, which will happen, something that is connected to school, somebody will use a ed tech tool to fall in love with a companion or they'll something will happen.

That is sort of within a school ecosystem on a school wifi something. And suddenly people are going to have to grapple with the really scary externalities of this technology. I personally think that they're not, you know, that they don't outweigh the positives, but you know, it's not the easiest thing to make sense of.

Who knows, but I have seen this coming. I mean, there's no question that we're going to see not only suicides, but we're going to see, you know, what they call it in Japan, the like otakus, they have a few different names for basically a hermits, recluses, people It's completely detached from the regular world because they are living in a world that is either AI based or virtual reality based or likely both.

It will happen. It will happen in a huge scale. And that is really scary. 

[00:40:45] Ben Kornell: You know, I think your prediction that there's something unstoppable or it is predictable that there's going to be negative teen outcomes when using and a technology that intentionally anthropomorphizes itself and interacts. Like, I think there's an inevitability to that.

What I think has to happen is one, we have to. As a country adopt an age verification system like many in Europe do around video games and other things, there's something, you know, so one of the things I've learned at common sense is, you know, it's not banning or restricting technology, it's just important to wait.

Intel, a person's cognitive development catches up to what the technology is playing to. And so much of the strategy around tick tock and YouTube movies. For people who really care about like kid safety is not don't ever do it It's just wait till they're 14 wait till they're 16 wait till they're 18 We tell their 22, you know and so that people can develop the like self management tools and the reality versus non reality tools to self manage So first and foremost, like all of these platforms like character AI should be adopting real age verification that then they can restrict some of the features and tools for, you know, people who are in this under 16 age demographic.

And. You know, it starts with platforms admitting that they have users as young as six, seven, eight years old on these platforms. Number two is there does need to be, like, just like in a school where you have, like, a mandatory reporter. Relationship where if I say something to a teacher or an adult that says I'm going to have self harm or there's something violent or dangerous at my home for Once you have age verification for people who are under certain age, maybe it's under 18.

Maybe it's under 16, whatever When there's a certain Action that takes place on your platform, you should have some sort of mandatory reporting requirement, and that could be reporting to their parents. It could be to a local official, whatever it could be. But, you know, I think there's a data privacy and freedom of speech and, you know, a conflict here, but we've got to work out.

We've worked it out in schools. To where you can't just say anything and not have an adult report on it for a response that kind of construct should be at play here and that then goes to the point where some somebody does have a negative outcome, but they've been age verified and there has been proper reporting.

Then you can at least say we set up these safeguards. We took the actions that were required and yet this one was an inevitable or unstoppable event. But today we're just throwing up our hands and saying, well, nothing we can do about it. And ultimately our kids are actually the guinea pigs on the forefront of this technology.

Let's just be real. Like 50 percent of the users of so many of these platforms, Or more are kids. And so we just need those kind of safeguards. And they've already been the guinea pigs for the social media, for social media and what's coming out about that. And short form video and, and tick tock addiction.

And by the way, just overall, is our society being well served? By having kids brains wired the way they are wired at, you know, eight, nine, 10 years old on many of these platforms. And so it's not a, don't ever do it. It's just a wait. And this is where like all the cell phone advice just says, just wait until eighth grade, wait until freshmen in high school.

Right. And so I do think, you know, on ed tech insiders were generally optimistic about the role technology can play. But yeah, this is one of those areas where it's like if we can't come up with common sense policy and regulation All the upside will be lost for these negative downsides that we are not protecting against and you know Schools will be right to ban things and schools, you know, parents will be right to ban things So I think that it's just, we got to get ahead of it.

We got to move faster. 

[00:45:18] Alex Sarlin: It doesn't help that we have like a gerontocratic government that doesn't understand this stuff at all. That has absolutely no lived experience with social media or, or, you know, hardly the internet at all. And, and certainly not. VR and certainly not AI, because these are so brand new.

It's just like, there's such a disconnect between the people who would be responsible for these types of clever, you know, thoughtful regulations, like the ones you just named and the incredible power of the companies making this. I'm character to that character. AI was just re bought by Google. It's at a huge tech company.

You know, I think Google is a fantastic company. I don't think they are in the market to hurt anybody. That's their sort of core mission statement. But. At the same time, you know, you're just setting up these constant battles between the institutions, whether it's schools or parents or governments that are responsible for the safety of kids and these big tech companies, which tend to be very well resourced.

I mean, I think the ideas you're saying here make a lot of sense, and they could be, you know, at least a mitigating factor. There are a couple of other things that happened this week, and I know, you know, this has been, this is a fun episode. I just, it's fun to just get deeper into these things, but I feel like there's a couple of things I'd love to just touch on.

We don't have to discuss them so much, but I know one of them, I know you have a lot to say about. One is that, you know, in the last couple of weeks, OpenAI has announced a couple of products relatively quietly. That are sort of either experimental or sort of just starting, they basically announced this swarm project, which is basically a multi agent version of open AI that that would allow, you know, you to have multiple basically, you know, autonomous.

Helpers. I mean, that's what agents really are in, in, in AI terminology versus, you know, they're not co pilots that, that sort of work with you. They're agents that go do things for you on your behalf. They're autonomous. They make decisions. So a multi agent that can go and sort of actually execute on many of the things you might want to do in an AI.

That's a very interesting thing to say. So keep an eye on, they also came out with a search GPT, which is their version of AI generated search. And, uh, you know, we've been talking a lot on the podcast over the last few years about how to me, AI is really the only technology that's come down in the last two, you know, two decades that actually has a chance of displacing, you know, search as like the primary.

Way that we engage with, with the Internet and technology. So open AI is chasing down Google and perplexity and some of these others. So worth looking at. And then some interesting XR news. We, we, you know, we used to talk a whole lot about virtual reality, extended reality, augmented reality on this show.

And it went pretty quiet. I think that, you know, it was yet another. Moment where people said, Hey, hasn't quite lived up to what we were thinking. We haven't seen a transform schools or our society yet, but I did the sort of Apple vision pro demo recently. And if you haven't done that, I highly recommend it because it is very clearly a vision of where this field could go.

It's fascinating, but the vision is not that new anymore. The newest one is this meta Orion system, which is getting a huge amount of buzz as really sort of redefining and up leveling what VR could be. We just should keep an eye on it. Cause I gosh, Ben, can you remember the last time we've talked about VR, like on the show, I think it's been like probably six months at least, but I think there may be some, some interesting things coming back.

VR has always been amazing in ed tech. I don't, nothing against it. It just hasn't been sort of like the hot flashy new thing for a while. It seems like maybe it will be again. 

[00:48:46] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I think across everything that you talked about, one is also anthropic announced computer use mode where it can almost take over the use of your screen and perform actions for you.

So if you, like, let's say, opened up a spreadsheet and said, I want you to organize it this way and this way and this way. It can go into the spreadsheet and actually make those changes for you. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds really promising. And, you know, a lot of my spreadsheets, I do run through chat TPT these days because it's ability to sort, compile and create data insights is really strong.

On the XR VR front. I think what we've experienced is that the wave of adoption of the virtual reality or augmented reality devices has been the barrier to use. But now we're seeing, you know, the slow, but sure, like adoption of those things and meta coming out with a new quest headset, Apple being in the market for a while allows developers to catch up.

And then you also have met as new, you know, VR glasses. So, you know, what we often find is that there's this like. Enthusiasm about the tech and then there's a reality that it's actually about the use cases and so there's like a flip to say, oh, we're now starting to find some use cases and we're going to be.

Implementing those. And so I do, you know, I'm longterm still optimistic about people being able to flip into AR or VR when needed to, you know, have an experience or to, you know, interact with something particularly with learning is also back to my earlier point. You know, you just need to watch, like, what are the teenagers doing?

That's probably the trend of where it's going to go. And there's a, there is a much more immersive gaming ecosystem that's going now. 

[00:50:40] Alex Sarlin: I totally agree with you about it. The last thing I'd say is, you know, both the vision pro and the Orion are basically augmented reality glasses. That meaning you can actually see the real world and which matters because, you know, I, I, the work like Chris DD at Harvard has been writing for a long, long time about how.

Augmented reality, not virtual reality is really the transformative technology because it allows you to overlay educational content, for example, over the real world, rather than sort of separating yourself completely from the real world. There's lots of discussion and debate about this, but it is interesting to note that these sort of really high.

Caliber high resolution AR glasses. Very, very user friendly. I mean, with the Apple one, you literally, your eyes are the cursor, whatever you look at gets selected. It's pretty wild. It's just interesting to see that it's augmented. That's, that's really a jumping off at this moment. 

[00:51:29] Ben Kornell: Yeah, for sure. Well, this has been a great episode just to get some depth.

We talked about the election. We talked about transformations and pathways in higher ed. We talked a little bit about the dangers of AI and the possibility of augmented reality. It's happening in edtech. You're going to hear about here on Edtech insiders, and we would love to hear from you become an Edtech insiders plus member, and you can join our WhatsApp community.

This is where we really have the day to day dialogue on lots of these issues, and you get to have early access to all of our events. We'll hope you join. That's at our sub stack page. Just go to where they do subscriptions. Hope you all enjoyed the show today and we'll see you next week. If it happens in edtech, you'll hear about it here on Edtech Insiders.

[00:52:18] Alex Sarlin: 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 sub stack.