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New Year, New Ideas with Google Part 5: Jonathan Katzman on YouTube Learning and Lisa Gevelber on Workforce Training

Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell Season 10

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Jonathan Katzman, Director of Product Management at YouTube Learning, drives initiatives that leverage educational content across school, work, and life. Before joining Google, he served as the founding Chief Product Officer of Minerva Project, a pioneering university and ed-tech company offering accredited degrees and innovative curriculum design. Jonathan’s career includes leadership roles in successful startups and major tech companies, showcasing his expertise in education and technology.

Lisa Gevelber, Founder of Grow with Google and CMO for the Americas Region at Google, leads the $1 billion initiative that has empowered over 10 million Americans with skills to advance their careers. She also created Google Career Certificates, which have enabled significant upward mobility for half a million global job seekers. Recognized by Forbes Future of Work 50 in 2022, Lisa is a champion for equity and inclusion, leading efforts like Google for Startups to support underrepresented founders worldwide.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:

  1. How YouTube Learning is empowering creators and engaging learners globally.
  2. The impact of Grow with Google and Career Certificates on workforce transformation.
  3. How AI-driven tools are reshaping personalized learning and career training.
  4. Insights into YouTube’s active learning features, including AI tutors and assessments.
  5. The role of global partnerships in creating equitable access to education and jobs.

Episode Highlights:

[00:02:19]
Jonathan on YouTube Learning’s global reach and its role as “school” in many countries.
[00:10:11] How active learning tools like AI tutors and quizzes are transforming YouTube’s educational experience.
[00:22:05] Lisa shares the vision behind Grow with Google and its impact on millions of learners.
[00:31:24] Insights into Google Career Certificates as an alternative pathway to well-paying jobs.
[00:41:50] Discussion on AI's role in workforce training and economic mobility.
[00:54:32] The future of education: blending informal learning with credentialed pathways.

😎 Stay updated with Edtech Insiders! 

🎉 Presenting Sponsor:

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] Jonathan Katzman: YouTube for most students, you know, it's like a very nice to have thing and can be a dramatic part of their education and some other countries YouTube literally is school. Yeah. So, you know, if you want to talk about a difference in covert, especially for some of the other countries, but India, Argentina, Brazil, I have heard from many country managers like YouTube literally in school for 90 plus 95 percent of the population, and that is something that is amazing that we're able to provide and it's like a huge difference from what's happening here. 

[00:00:35] Lisa Gevelber: So we're really excited about Google prompting essentials, and it's the 2nd course in our series. The 1st one was called Google AI essentials, and that's everything about what is AI and how does it work? And how do you have to be thoughtful about it? But how do you also really use these tools? What we know to be true is that the people who use AI tools get better results, and They can do things like get things done faster. 

And don't we all want to get things done faster? So we're really excited about putting these tools in everybody's hands. 

[00:01:07] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry. From funding rounds to impact to AI development across early childhood, K 12, higher ed, and work. You'll find it all here at 

[00:01:22] Ben Kornell: EdTech 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 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. 

[00:01:47] Alex Sarlin: We at ed tech insiders had the great privilege recently to be behind the scenes at Google's AI summit in Mountain View, California. We got a chance to sit down and interview. All eight of Google's learning leads across the organization. And these episodes are the full interviews with two leads at a time. 

Enjoy these incredibly interesting interviews. Honestly, these are some of the most interesting and compelling interviews. I feel like I've gotten a chance to do in my entire time at a tick insiders is just so full of rich and interesting dialogue. And so many of these Google leads have been at Google for a long time. 

They've seen the space. From a lot of different angles, these are really interesting and I think it's a fantastic glimpse into the future of AI and learning. Enjoy. In this next conversation, we are talking to Jonathan Katzman, the director of product management for YouTube Learning. At YouTube, Jonathan leads all aspects of YouTube's work on learning initiatives across school work and life. 

Prior to joining Google, Jonathan was the founding chief product officer of Minerva Project, Minerva became both a fully accredited university, offering both undergraduate and master degrees, and an edtech company. 

And Minerva Project worked with existing and new universities around the world to bring new programs to life based on Minerva's technology and curriculum expertise. 

Prior to Minerva, Jonathan was at a mix of successful startups and large tech companies. We're here with Jonathan Katzmann. He's a director of product management for learning and education on YouTube. YouTube is a very big place for learning. Thanks so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. My pleasure. 

Yeah. So first off, tell us how you got into the YouTube world. What brought you to this particular junction of video and education? Sure. 

[00:03:38] Jonathan Katzman: So I had a small startup back in the aughts way back [00:03:42] Alex Sarlin: when 

[00:03:42] Jonathan Katzman: and Yahoo acquired that startup and I spent a few years at Yahoo and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. 

And God, you know, if I'm going to go do something, I want it to be really important for the world, like really make the world a better place. I want it to be good for the world. I never really done anything in my career. I'm like, this is truly making the world a better place. So I want a big impact and do better in the world. 

And I wanted to do something that I knew I'd be passionate about for a very long time. And I talked to a lot of people throughout Silicon Valley. And basically every time I talked to an educator or doing it in this premix, anyone who was doing anything in tech at that point, I was like, came back, talked to my wife at the dinner table. 

And those were the conversations that stuck. And in that process, I met several people who were creating new online colleges, and one of them was Ben Nelson, who started Minerva, ended up throwing my hat in that ring and was the first employee at Minerva and helped ran all of our technology and product there. 

And really created that from scratch. And so now I get to say, I created a university, founded a university and then also built out Minerva project. And then as I was getting sort of the end of my time there, someone who's here today, Matthew Raskoff texted me one day. He's like, Susan Wojcicki is the CEO of YouTube. 

She's looking for someone to run learning on YouTube and she's going to reach out to you. I was like, okay, really put together in my mind. Right. What a big deal that was and in retrospect, it took me way longer than I should have to accept this job, but yeah, really amazing experience. 

[00:05:11] Alex Sarlin: That's incredible. 

We're big Minerva project fans and take insiders. We've had several Minerva alumni interns have been taking us in incredible directions. And yeah, we love Minerva. We had Ben as a keynote speaker last year at Boston. Yeah. So you come in as the head of learning at YouTube in the past, what did learning mean at YouTube? 

When you started, 

[00:05:30] Jonathan Katzman: yeah, and this is actually to connect the dots a little bit with Minerva. One of the things when I took the job was Minerva was all about. Science learning, active learning in particular, you probably heard these things if you hadn't never guessed on. I was like, well, if I'm going to go to YouTube, YouTube is like the opposite of that. 

It's like sitting back, you're watching like videos, lectures like this, like they literally like what we would say not to do. And there was several things I found at YouTube early on. One, if you look at the content on YouTube, the what we call edutubers, the educational creators, The content they make and what naturally becomes the content that becomes the most recommended because it's the most watched. 

Is the best content out there because well done and those educators actually know how to produce compelling content. They know how to break it up into bite sized chunks. They know how to walk you through different types of mental models. They know how to make it do dual coding, like all the things we talk about with teachers. 

They share their passion. They share their passion. Yeah. And the fact of the matter is, like, you're never gonna see a better lesson on, like, any math topic, right? Than, like, what, say, 3Blue1Brown, like, doing it on YouTube. Yeah. And That was already happening, and the biggest, if you the line that Susan always like to say, and the one that really grabbed me, she's like, we have the biggest library in the world. 

We have the modern day library about Xandria, but the books are all on the floor. How are we going to pick them up, enable people to find the right one at the right level? And as you go through it, and we get into the now, and now we have AI. So it's not just about. the finding the right book, the right video to watch, but also how to actually encourage that active learning. 

[00:07:11] Alex Sarlin: Yes. And even though the books were on the floor, so to speak, you still had people coming to YouTube to learn and vast droves. And what do you attribute that to, given that YouTube wasn't sort of optimized for, you know, sort of pedagogical learning styles? Yeah. 

[00:07:26] Jonathan Katzman: So I think a lot of it was just this content that was already out there and was truly better. 

And the fact of the matter is, like, if you were in high school or college and you didn't understand what was happening in class, YouTube really was the best resource and easiest resource to go out and learn that material. Yes. So it amazes me that when I went through high school and college, I didn't have access to any of this. 

I'm like, Oh yeah, this would have been really useful. Yeah. And this is just before I got to YouTube when the pandemic happened, we already obviously had a lot of educational content, but it really went on an exponential curve through the pandemic. And that's when people really saw the power of what learning could be. 

And we did some very subtle things during the pandemic to really help with that around slightly boosting some of that academic content, making sure if you're watching a piece of academic content, most likely the things that you'll see in the side panel of like watch next would be other academic content and not music videos. 

So there are some subtle things done, but we hadn't really put together a whole thing. theory about what learning on YouTube could be. 

[00:08:26] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, what did it look like when the pandemic came down, schools emptied out and people turned to online tools for learning and YouTube is sort of the go to online tool for learning, especially for students, but for teachers as well. 

And a place where teachers could publish for their own students. Like, I'm curious what it was like at that moment YouTube learning. So for the record, I was not yet 

[00:08:49] Jonathan Katzman: in the YouTube world. So I joined literally at the tail end of the pandemic. So still in work from home scenario before the full pivot. But from what I've seen and heard is that one, you know, it's actually interesting, even on the teacher side, there was a lot of teachers teaching teachers about how to teach online. 

So I think you guys saw even there, you know, there was such a cry and need for this content online as people needed alternate versus. Or something different than whatever they were getting via whatever online learning they were happening during the pandemic. 

[00:09:19] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, just to flashback to the YouTube creators, I'm a huge fan of many of the big YouTube creators, and I've actually shown YouTube videos for all the reasons you said to professors, and at one point had a job at Coursera training. 

new online professors to teach online. And I would show them YouTube videos because I'd say, look, these people have figured out how to get ideas across in a way that is incredibly engaged, although, you know, just the passion, the quick cuts, the mental models, the sort of, the metaphors. And I'm curious, you know, when you know that you have a set of educators or creators that may or may not be formal educators at any way who are doing this kind of thing, How do you work with them to sort of help more people understand how much you can do with video in education? 

[00:10:03] Jonathan Katzman: Yeah. So one of the questions Ben gum asked me all the time is like, shouldn't we be teaching all these educational creators, the science of learning principles, like they sort of seem to have figured it out. I don't think we need to teach them. They do like the good ones, like clearly I've done the research and you know, what's great is, so we have a partnership team. 

I think you guys have interviewed Katie Kirks previously. Yes. And her team really reaches out and works with these creators, helps let them know what are areas where we could use more material. We also try to find up and coming creators who want to get on the platform and help them succeed. And we often in America can put a very American hat, but you have to remember, YouTube is very global, and it's not just about what's happening in America, but it's how do we do this in multiple languages and other countries. 

And in YouTube, the other thing that happens, and this goes back a little bit to what you were saying about Covid too, is In America, YouTube for most students, you know, it's like a very nice to have thing and can be a dramatic part of their education and some other countries YouTube literally is school. 

Yeah. So, you know, if you want to talk about a difference in covid, especially for some of these other countries, India, Argentina, Brazil, I have heard from many country managers like YouTube literally in school for 90 plus 95 percent of the population and that is something that is amazing that we're able to provide and it's like a huge difference from what's happening here. 

[00:11:32] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It's incredible. And it's a go to place. I mean, I think what's so interesting about YouTube as a learning tool is that people go there for learning, but they also go there for entertainment. They also go there for sports. They also go there for music. So they're so used to going to YouTube whenever they have a sort of spark of curiosity and they need anything that it's sort of the go to place. 

And, you know. One aspect of it you brought up earlier, I'd love to just. Click on a little bit is that YouTube by nature is a little bit passive, right? It's why it's consumption based, but you've actually introduced assessments or, you know, some version of assessments into YouTube. Can you talk about that project? 

Sure. So when I first came on, I'm like, okay, 

[00:12:07] Jonathan Katzman: we're gonna make learning, learning active. So yeah, we started with literally the most basic thing, which is, I kid you not, multiple choice question. No, no, I get it. And at first, for various reasons, we decided to put them on the home feed rather than directly on the video. 

And it was partly like, yes, space practice would be good. You like, watch the video and you'll come back at some point and take the quiz. But it was also a way for creators to then even advertise their content because they could put quiz and be like, Hey, do you actually understand this material? If not, maybe you should watch this video where I explain the answer, right? 

And so creators actually really enjoyed that method of engaging with their community. And one of the real powerful things that does happen on YouTube. Is the creators and their fan base really do form a relationship. Yeah. And that happens in quizzes and posts. It happens in the comments. And this was another way we enabled those creators to reach out to their audience. 

And the audience really loved it because they actually do want to get engaged and they do want to learn and they want to go further than just watching the pure video. And we've moved on since then. So now we actually have the ability for creators to put those questions directly on the video. And we've also started doing AI generated questions, both in the home feed and in the video itself. 

And so we're going to get to this point very shortly, where you'll be able to come to any academic oriented video on YouTube and be able to have a series of questions. Which is a huge change, even though it sounds very simple from what YouTube was 

[00:13:32] Alex Sarlin: a few years ago. It sounds very powerful, though. 

Everyone's talked years ago to somebody who was at Lynda and LinkedIn Learning for a long time and he had been doing this one man fight inside Lynda to add assessments to the Lynda videos because everybody at Lynda was there to learn, but they had no assessment capabilities at all. And I think there's the testing effect. 

This is like a well known piece of the active learning literature, but it's a huge deal, especially for something like YouTube, which is so vastly. It's where. Millions and millions of people are getting their content, the ability to just retain it and come back and say, okay, what did I actually learn here? 

Let me make sense of it. We'll solidify that. It's going to change lives, especially for the students. You mentioned who were YouTube is school. Yes, 

[00:14:10] Jonathan Katzman: exactly right. And I think one of the interesting things for us is we always talk about some people come to YouTube because they have to learn something right for school, whether it's for work, right? 

Other people come to YouTube like just curious and I want to learn something. I always say like half the time my kids come to the dinner table and say I learned something. Half the time is at school and half the time is on YouTube. Totally. Something they were interested in. Yeah. And we want to keep learning fun on YouTube. 

Yeah. So we don't want to like have YouTube become like, oh, now you watched a video. You must take the assessment. Right. But when you want to get yourself into that experience, we want it to be there for you. 

[00:14:47] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It's really exciting. So tell us about some of the other things that you've been working on in the times, you know, post pandemic as the sort of global realization that YouTube is a place for true, true learning. 

What have you continued to roll out? 

[00:15:03] Jonathan Katzman: So just to take a few of the ideas. So the first is all along this view of, like, making learning on YouTube much more active. So one of the things we noticed is people paused on academic videos about twice as often as on the rest of our corpus. And we did some user studies, and it was clear that they were going off and doing research about some topic or some concept they didn't understand in the video. 

So one of the things we did is we now expose a list of all the concepts that are in the video. We use AI to tie in the definition of that concept with the video itself. So it's actually quite understandable, like, why we're telling you about this particular mini concept. And then from there and the practice problems, we now are launching the AI tutor as well that we call our conversational AI experience. 

Right now it's offered to premium and will then to hopefully knock on wood, get out more users. But that's where we're starting. And what's great there is not only can you take the questions that you got wrong or the concept you didn't understand, you could also just start asking your own questions and go even further than the video. 

And I can recommend other content that would be related or just directly answer your question. 

[00:16:11] Alex Sarlin: That's so powerful for transfer for sort of meeting learners where they're at, both from level and, and intention, right? I mean, I'm on this video because I'm trying to learn something bigger or something that it's connected to. 

I can ask how this video relates to the project I'm doing. So how have people taken to it so far? 

[00:16:26] Jonathan Katzman: Yeah. The questions that we see, like the transcripts where people really go deep and it's just unbelievable, you know, it's like everything from. Understanding material the way you would normally expect all the way to, like, explain that to me, like a Taylor Swift song, you know, in any other format previously. 

And so you really see this really creative use where people are really trying to understand how the material they're learning really works, which is great to see. 

[00:16:51] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. You said something on stage that I thought was incredibly interesting and really relevant to this part of the conversation, which is that we're sitting here in 2024, you know, end of 2024. 

Yeah. In a time in which, you know, people still think of AI as conversations. It's often text back and forth, even inside of a video, you're having a conversation back and forth. That's the sort of primary interface, but we're rapidly, you know, many different models have announced text to video capabilities. 

Nothing's quite, I mean, we're sort of on the verge of that. Tell us about, you know, your vision for a world in which AI can produce video. 

[00:17:25] Jonathan Katzman: Yep. So I think there's a range. It's not just video. I think it's also images. I think it's also things that might not, you know, powered by AI, but not necessarily look like a chatbot. 

Yeah. So I think in a few years we are going to see a very wide range. One of the things we're starting to explore, for example, Is do you want sort of like a visual representation of a human being could be the creator could be someone else that effectively acts as your tutor on YouTube and really understand everything you've learned and is able to converse with you, able to recommend content to you, you think that could be really powerful and you might interact with that avatar using your voice. 

Or it might be little videos, short videos that that creator gives to you. So I think there's a lot of different ways this could change in the future that I personally am very, very excited for. 

[00:18:13] Alex Sarlin: That's amazing. And it could serve as a sort of connective tissue. I mean, to your point about when you finish watching an academic video, you'll provide other academic videos within the recommendation. 

Yeah. But that, that could come through the form of a tutor being like, well, now we just learned this, you know, where do we want to go next? Do we dive deep or should we go to something? I mean, what a fascinating world that would be, especially again, for the people for whom YouTube is one of the primary ways they're learning. 

How realistic is this vision? Is it, do you think it's going to happen? We're big tech optimists at EdTech Insiders. I hear an idea like that and I'm like, I can picture it. It's got to happen soon within a place like Google, where it's sort of like, you know, dream factory. Do you feel like that's something that can actually, yeah, I do 

[00:18:49] Jonathan Katzman: think like over time, you know, whether it's going to be two years or five years, I don't know. 

I always go back to the, you know, we underestimate what you can do in 10 years, but you overestimate what you could do in one year and we'll get there. 

[00:19:01] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's incredibly exciting. So, um, These multiple modalities come along with another really core competency of AI, which is translation. You mentioned how YouTube is super international, and some of these creators are in one particular language or another. 

One example we always use is South Korea has a huge culture of online tutoring of sort of celebrity teachers, but the West has never heard of any of them because they're all teaching in Korean. Do you foresee a future in the future? There will be, you know, creators who will just cross boundaries because of the translation. 

So that's definitely 

[00:19:36] Jonathan Katzman: already starting on YouTube. So YouTube has a product that we call allowed. It's all built into studio now and allows you to multitrack audio. And we've already seen this as it's rolled out to creators. Creators love it because all of a sudden, you know, their English videos are available in Spanish and vice versa. 

And, you know, for education in particular, I think it's really powerful because suddenly now, no matter what university publishes their courses, you can then get that content and whatever language is, you know, you natively speak in your home country. Yep. So that I think it's going to become an incredibly powerful tool to enable the amount of material to all languages and the people of all countries. 

Access to the greatest universities, the greatest edutubers, like it's all going to be there for them. 

[00:20:19] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, let me mention the greatest edutubers. It's, it's a really interesting world because, you know, when the market becomes global suddenly, right? When somebody in Boston is competing with somebody in Mumbai, competing with someone in Buenos Aires, and every video is equally accessible. 

I can imagine a world in which that really accelerates the sort of learning around what works, both what engages and what works. 

[00:20:42] Jonathan Katzman: Yeah, I do agree. I still, I'm very curious to see how this plays out. Having watched various videos from all around the world, just to use one example, if you go watch in particular, a lot of the test taking videos in India, There, it's just a wildly different style of teaching, like super fast paced, very much like here's the problem. 

Now you got to do it. Okay. Do it. And they talk about having doubts, which is not a term we use in America. Right. So there are these cultural differences that'll be interesting to see if they span versus the, you know, obviously a more traditional state lecture can, can get translated and carried forth. 

But then other people might be like, well, that's like, I don't want to listen to that. I want to listen to the very fast paced. Conversation we're having over here. 

[00:21:24] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if people will sort of find their style, right? Cause if, if people are loving a fast paced Indian video rather than, you know, the video made by their state, you know, somebody in their, in their state or their province, wherever they are. 

And then everybody's liking it. You have that sort of virtuous cycle of popularity and sort of surfaces in the algorithm. So do you foresee a future? I've worked at Coursera for a while. I heard, I saw so many things about doubts because the idea was the second largest, you know, company market for Coursera. 

Do you foresee a future where, you know, the AI could tweak something like that and say, Hey, if you're watching this from that, you know, if you're a non Indian watcher, it's going to say question instead of doubt, because I remember being caught on that too. Yeah. 

[00:22:06] Jonathan Katzman: I mean, it's only can, I mean, look, you can use the script now, right? Change that as a creator very easily. Exactly. So if we could do it there, we certainly can do it, you know, live 

as well. 

[00:22:17] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So then you push that sort of reductio head of sort, you know, do you see a future where your, your AI tutor can actually sort of edit or change the content of videos to what you actually Yeah. 

This is 

[00:22:28] Jonathan Katzman: something we think a lot about at YouTube and it's not a simple answer. Yeah. Like, so can it, will it be able to. Yes, there's a lot of really interesting marketplace dynamics at YouTube around. We want to maintain a very strong relationship with our creators, and we want to ensure YouTube is a great business for creators. 

It's like, if you read any of the literature, any of the statements by our creator community, they really view YouTube as a business partner, and we want to be that business partner to them. Yeah. And so then if we start modifying their content, even if they give us permission, Then we get into some very interesting conversations about how do we reward the creator? 

When do we reward someone else? And how do we do that? So we will eventually need to figure all that out if this is a real user value. Because the other thing we do see is that we give users more value. Then generally, it's better for the creators, because those users will spend more time watching video on YouTube. 

[00:23:23] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I remember I talked to John Reins mm-hmm . At one point, and he talked about how one of the really interesting innovations was the YouTube education player. Yes. Which takes out the Chrome, it takes out the ads, but it still remunerates the, you know, the creators. So this is 

[00:23:37] Jonathan Katzman: like a great example. Even when I was coming on board, one of the obvious things I saw was like, okay, YouTube does not work at schools 

Right, right. You go to school, your teacher, like not over 90% of teachers say they use YouTube in their classroom. So it's a hugely popular sneeze. Yeah. And. You watch this math video, or you watch the history video, and then all of a sudden you see an ad, and then you see, alright, Next video recommendation for Taylor Swift to member right like that's not really the experience you're going for as a teacher, right? 

So one of the things you did was work on an embeddable player that can especially for your audience If you're a tech company listen to that you can license that player right and get access to the entire YouTube corpus But pay us in a way that we can then enumerate the creators. And so it's a great win across the entire ecosystem. 

[00:24:26] Alex Sarlin: Huge. And it's one of these sort of internal, like, you have to understand the marketplace dynamics. I just mentioned to know how important that is. You know, the educators want to show YouTube without all of the, you know, distractions and the creators want their videos to be shown in classroom. I'm sure they're thrilled to have their videos shown in classrooms. 

But without, you know, causing distractions and without losing the revenue because it's being pulled out of the ads are being pulled out. It feels like there's so many amazing opportunities to sort of satisfy multiple stakeholders in this complex ecosystem. At the same time, you mentioned colleges, and this is an interesting one. 

You know, I mean, do you, we see a lot of edutubers. It's been a little less clear, you know, I think a lot of formal institutions of education with schools or colleges don't always have a sort of clear YouTube strategy. You don't hear that very often within, you know, University of, you know, Nebraska. Do you think that's going to change? 

I think it should 

[00:25:16] Jonathan Katzman: change, and I think the colleges that are really waking up to it do understand that their YouTube channels should not be basically a marketing brochure, but actually if they provide real content, that's actually much more exciting to prospective students. That makes sense. So one of the things we've done is we have a whole courses program now. 

So you could actually take what used to just be a plain playlist and turn it into what we call a course. And it doesn't have to be by university and any YouTuber can do it. In fact, any creator can do it. We have courses now on gaming and lifestyles, things of that nature, just like you would expect. But if you're a university and you want to turn that into a course, Then you're able to have discussions that are organized around those course topics at the course level events. 

So you'll have a tutor on that course as well. You'll be able to generate practice problems and quizzes on that. So you'll actually be able to have a very rich experience on that course on the YouTube. And then what we've seen with study hall with our partnership with the Arizona State University and complexly that company behind crash course is, it's actually a really interesting mechanism. 

Um, For students to find out about that school, especially students who might not have ever even considered college, learn about it, show they're interested. And then what is done is you can go for low, low price of 25 dollars, go and roll and start taking the class with a teacher using all the same content. 

And then if you're satisfied with the grade, you pay 400 and you actually get these credits that you can use at any college. Yeah, it's incredible. And so I think that model of both reaching out to students and then being able to credential on the other end and figuring out when to get people from YouTube on to the platform that you're going to fully assess the person on is going to become more and more powerful. 

[00:27:01] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. The study hall. Project is interesting in so many different ways. One of them is that it's a combination of formal and informal. You know, Crash Course is one of the most influential, fantastically made, you know, education YouTube channels by these sort of celebrity creators that the Green Brothers, but it's animated. 

It's really fun. It's very lively. I'm curious, you know, in the wake of that program launching, do you think that there's other interesting potentials to sort of take the, you know, the powerful Credentialing and brand and structure of a college and combine it with the sort of engagement and fun and excitement of the creator world. 

[00:27:38] Jonathan Katzman: Yes, absolutely. I mean, one of the interesting things there was. Crash course and ASU work together to both come up with the content that was primarily doing by the ASU faculty, but then the display of it and how to film it was driven by crash course and complexity so that, cause they knew how to make engaging YouTube videos. 

And so I do think that way of like getting the content out there into the world is going to happen more and more. And then I think at some point, colleges are going to be like, well, if you really did that on YouTube and really understood it and you could prove to us that you understood it. Conceivably, there's a way to like have them then do their assessments on the other end of that as well. 

And not for all the college, like I'm a big fan, like having done Minerva, like there's, you know, there's a reason to go many, many, many reasons to go to college, but to have some of that initial learning, show your interest, show why you're good for that program. I think that's going to become a really powerful way that colleges end up using this availability on YouTube. 

[00:28:35] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I totally agree. And the ability to as an on ramp to a university experience, which is often like. Blocked, right? It's like expensive application process, all these tests, the instead being like, I can come to YouTube where I am already. Anyway, I find something interesting. And then I'm suddenly on my path is just like a thrilling idea. 

So if they're higher ed administrators listening to this, which we know there are, like, how do they, I mean, ASU is, you know, so innovative always at the forefront of innovation, but how should they be looking for YouTube creators to partner with? Like, how would they start? 

[00:29:07] Jonathan Katzman: Yeah. So I think the start 1st of all, they have great content, and I'm sure they have professors who are great teachers. 

Yeah, and it's like a little bit of editing help. You could actually, like, turn a lot of those lecture capture into really interesting video post on YouTube and from what we've seen, the colleges that really understand, you know, yes, you need to show campus life. Yes, you need to show 1 off talks. But to actually put up, like, full courses and really show prospective students what they're going to get and also give back to the world so that people, like we said, in all these other countries, and when you turn on multi track audio and are able to put that into different languages, like it's a huge gift given to the world. 

And really can attract a lot of people and then it's not hard where you're like, well, if you're taking this course, like, you know, here's how you get from YouTube to my program and you can start having like, exactly like you said, these on ramps. into their own systems from that YouTube course. 

[00:30:01] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's incredible. 

And if you're a creator or an ed tech company, frankly, who's thinking about, Oh, well, YouTube is the biggest, you know, billboards, the biggest front in the world for where people are looking for things for every kind of thing. You know, how might you think about using your YouTube strategy in a way that benefits your company, but also maybe fosters that kind of really interesting partnership? 

[00:30:23] Jonathan Katzman: Absolutely. And we're seeing this not just with colleges, too. We're also seeing that. With professional learning. So we do this with our cloud learning here at Google. They also put on courses just like what study hall does. And this is all, by the way, using YouTube as it stands. There's there's no, like, special secret sauce, special, like, behind the scenes handshake, and this is like, literally everything is used doing everything that Google cloud learning is doing. 

Anyone who's listening to this podcast can go and look at. Understand how they're calling out the program at the end of the video, how they're putting links in the description, go and do all this themselves 

[00:30:59] Alex Sarlin: and turn on multiple languages, the language tracking. It's incredibly exciting. I mean, personally, I worked at skillshare for a while and was really excited about the creator community and skillshare because they would build this incredible relationships with people and. 

But the problem with that is that it was relatively small compared to certainly compared to a YouTube. So they'd be out there and they do these, you know, some of them would do this amazing content, but then they had to like, really find people and pull into it. It wasn't actually serving as much of the role as they wanted it to be, which is like sort of getting in front of people. 

Feels like YouTube courses could could take this to a totally different world. Are you starting to see creators really embrace it and sort of migrate from other platforms or just become creators? 

[00:31:40] Jonathan Katzman: Yeah. So we're not necessarily expecting to disrupt the online courses marketplace. That's you know, this is really about expanding the pie. 

Sure. And especially enabling all those creators who have not yet explored all the other online Of course, platforms and enabling them, especially if they already have a YouTube audience, they use this as another way to engage that audience and whether they like. Put that up for free and make money on it via advertising, but I put it behind channel memberships or if they do it as a paid course, there's a lot of different options we give to those graders to both make money and make a living and engage with their audience. 

[00:32:15] Alex Sarlin: So individuals who create YouTube courses have choices about how to gate that content. I didn't actually realize that. So how are people making those choices? It's really, I could see it being a lead generation for, for, for other things you do, or it being your full time, you know, teaching online, teaching role. 

I'm just curious how the emergent behavior is starting to happen with this, this new world. 

[00:32:35] Jonathan Katzman: So we already saw a lot of people that were doing effectively the lead generation on YouTube to other places. That was honestly one of the, like, you know, reasons why we decided to try this out and what we've seen is people are really starting to experiment. 

Right. And look at different ways of like, are they better off doing a paid course? Are they better off making this part of their general membership strategy? Or are they better off just making this a free course and they make money on it just the same way they normally make money on YouTube, but there's a new experience for their 

[00:33:05] Alex Sarlin: families. 

And you string videos together, so there's a little bit more of a, yeah, more of a structure around it, right? You would say, I'm going to teach you how to, you know, ace call of duty, or I'm going to teach you how to, you know, take apart a car engine, but it's going to be 10 videos and structured with assessments in between. 

And there's a lot more. Potentially, and 

[00:33:23] Jonathan Katzman: that's something we were also looking for and hearing from users as well, is, you know, there are times you just wanna go solve the one thing you needed to understand for class tomorrow, right? There's other times, especially later in life, where you really wanna understand a whole new topic. 

And having that longer structure is really helpful. 

[00:33:38] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Is it in a place where AI can now recommend courses if you're taking, watching a single video about something getting there? Not quite there yet, but it's an incredible world. Yeah. I've said this a few times, but yeah, you've said it too. YouTube is such. 

I think it's really underestimated as a learning tool, you know, public learn platform every year publishes the sort of top 40 ed tech tools and Google tools are often at the top, especially classroom. But I mean, If you walk up to any kid between, you know, eight and 18 and ask them, what, where would they go if they need to learn something? 

I mean, you probably have the stats on this, but I bet it, you know, nine out of 10 would say, of course I'd go to YouTube. And that's an opportunity for learning that is unparalleled. 

[00:34:19] Jonathan Katzman: Yeah. When we've done surveys, again, well over 90 percent of teenagers say they use YouTube for learning, which is amazing. 

And we know worldwide it's a huge number, and we obviously know what the numbers are. And it is this sort of like, it's sort of like the hidden tech company. It is. And it's obviously ensconced within the greater YouTube. sort of blinds people to it. But yeah, it's a, uh, it's a massive, amazing opportunity. 

[00:34:45] Alex Sarlin: It's right under our nose. Last, last question. I know I've kept you over time here, but Katie in our interview mentioned that, you know, there's sort of the informal learning that happens on YouTube when you want to solve something, but a lot of formal students, a college students will go to their first day of class and then come back and YouTube, use YouTube to understand, you know, the syllabus and the core ideas. 

That's a really interesting question. Use case for, for YouTube. But if somebody trying to sort of mix real life learning with YouTube learning, I'm curious how you think about that type of learner. Yes, 

[00:35:12] Jonathan Katzman: absolutely. So I've had a lot of students, people who've recently graduated college. They're like, Oh my God, I cannot have gotten through college without YouTube. 

Yeah. I hear that a lot. Shockingly. I also hear I built a lot of cabins, 

[00:35:24] Alex Sarlin: but that's a 

[00:35:25] Jonathan Katzman: different story for that. Like at least five times for the college students. I think the ability to really deeply understand the material and look, the fact of the matter is in a perfect world. I think we would all believe like, you know, the teacher in a flip classroom. 

I'm assuming I'm preaching to the choir here. Teacher is in a flip classroom. It's doing a lot more active learning where the teacher is acting as coach and facilitator and really helping you deeply understand the material. And having engaging interactions between students much more effective teaching than getting up during a lecture, because the fact of matter is like the average lecture or lecture is going to not do as good a job as like the best YouTube video, which might either be just another amazing lecture, or it might be someone who actually created a whole video about that particular topic. 

Yeah, and I do think that ability to go and learn in different ways. And instead of necessarily just reading the textbook, and especially now that you can be able to ask questions about it using AI, it's a really powerful experience. 

[00:36:27] Alex Sarlin: Big time. And combining with Notebook LM, where you say, Oh, here's my syllabus for the semester. 

And I mean, the sky's the limit. Well, this has been fascinating. I got to go create a YouTube course. I'm going to do it. Jonathan Katzman is the director of product for learning and education at YouTube has shipped incredible stuff and it's just the beginning AI is, you know, you can now ask your YouTube video, you know, what you need to know, and it'll tell you so pretty amazing stuff. 

Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. Thank you, Alex. In our next conversation, we had the great privilege to speak to Lisa Gevelber, who's the founder of Grow with Google and the CMO for the Americas region at Google. Lisa founded and leads Grow with Google, Google's 1 billion commitment to economic opportunity. 

Since 2017, Grow with Google has helped over 10 million Americans develop new skills to grow their careers or businesses. One of our most significant contributions is the Google Career Certificates, which provide people access to in demand, well paying jobs regardless of educational background or work experience. 

Since 2021, these certificates have provided significant upward mobility to half a million job seekers globally. In 2022, Lisa was named in the inaugural Forbes Future of Work 50, honoring leaders whose impact, reach, and creativity has the potential to affect millions of workers. Lisa also leads Google for Startups, which helps level the playing field for underrepresented founders across every corner of the world. 

She has been the chief marketing officer for the Americas region at Google for the past 13 years. And has over 30 years of experience in general management, marketing, and product management, including over 20 of those in Silicon Valley. Her career spans from early stage startups to fortune 50 companies, including Intuit. 

And Procter and Gamble. We're here with Lisa Gvelber, founder of grow with Google, which is Google's outreach to support workforce training. And while she can explain it better than I can, welcome to the podcast. So for those who don't know about grow with Google as the founder, tell us a little bit about how it works. 

[00:38:36] Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, absolutely. So grow with Google is Google's big economic opportunity initiative. And. Really, it's based on our fundamental belief that the opportunities that are created by technology should truly be available to everyone and. Our main program in Grow with Google is called the Google Career Certificates. 

And this is a program that'll train people regardless of your work experience or your educational background, all the skills you need for an entry level job and one of several really high paying in demand job fields, things like cybersecurity, data analytics, IT support, project management, and even digital marketing. 

And we're really excited because this program helps people go either from low wage work into a higher paying job or it helps career switchers. You know, there are not that many programs out there that within a short period of time, you can really completely enter a brand new field with a high quality industry recognized credential. 

And so obviously the Google career certificate program comes with a certificate from Google when you graduate for the program and really highly recognized by employers of all types. 

[00:39:43] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I'm curious. AI is both like content in the program, but also is it part of the process of the program? And how have you rethought the growth Google program over the last couple of years? 

[00:39:55] Lisa Gevelber: We've been doing a lot on AI, actually. So we were just talking about the Google career certificates. So maybe I'll start there. We've built modules into every one of those certificates that talks about how you would use AI in that job field. So if you're a data analyst, how does AI play a role in being a data analyst? 

If you're an IT support technician, how does it play a role for that job? So really quite specific to the job field, applied AI, if you will. So that's really important. And we see interest from people who've even been in the field for a long time. And learning how you apply, so that's, that's 1 example. The other is helping people learn basic AI skills to make AI really work for them. 

The thing about AI is it can be very useful, but really only if you know how to use it. And so what we're hearing from a lot of folks is that they're really eager to learn to prompt better. And actually, a few weeks ago, we announced our brand new course, Just in prompting, it's a short course called Google prompting essentials. 

It's available online on the Coursera platform, and it teaches you how to be smart about prompting, because we all know that the better your inputs are, the better output you get from these models. So we're really excited about Google Prompting Essentials and it's the second course in our series. The first one was called Google AI 

Essentials and that's everything about what is AI and how does it work and how do you have to be thoughtful about it but how do you also really use these tools. 

What we know to be true is that The people who use AI tools get better results and they can do things like get things done faster. And don't we all want to get things done faster? So we're really excited about putting these tools in everybody's hands. 

[00:41:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And I think you've reached over a million learners. Is that right? Through the career certificates. We, 

[00:41:34] Lisa Gevelber: we have reached Reached a huge volume of people with a Google career certificates. And we're so, so excited about the economic opportunity and mobility that that is delivering for people all over the world. 

[00:41:45] Alex Sarlin: One thing that I find really fascinating about the grow with Google platform or grow with Google concept is that you create the content, but you also provide sort of wraparound services in various contexts too. 

So there are some people who see prompting essentials. Oh, I should take that. I'm going to take that and I can do it completely on my own. And there are others who might not have heard about it or might not have the supports to make it through that or to know how to use it in their career. And you actually sort of cover both use cases. 

Do you want to talk a little bit about those kinds of supports? 

[00:42:12] Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. Actually. So we do a whole bunch of things, not just to give you the skills to do well in the job, but we do a bunch of things to help you actually get a job. And I think that is actually one of the biggest differentiator. 

So in the Google career certificate program, we have an entire employer consortium. So. Thousands of employers are our graduates, which includes actually over 150 big national employers. So that's the first thing is that we have a lot of employers who have jobs waiting for you when you finish. We even have our own job board, but we do a bunch of things to help you get a job. 

So. We provide job specific templates. So if you took the career certificate in it support or in cyber security, we help you understand what a good resume looks like in that job field. We also have this very cool tool called the interview warm up tool that helps you practice interviewing. Cause we know that's doesn't always come naturally to people and that practice does make a difference. 

And then we do a whole bunch of things within the certificate where we talk about real job scenarios that you get to practice. We also help you create assets that you can take with you to an interview. So if you're doing the UX design certificate. You create a website and a web app and you can bring a portfolio with you to a job interview and even the same for data analytics. 

Actually, you do a project as part of the course, where you actually do a full data analysis and create data visualizations for it using publicly available data sources. And then you have that. As proof of what you know how to do, you can bring it to an interview and talk through the analysis and your visualization. 

So we really do kind of try to provide a whole suite of support for people, not just for learning the skills to be successful at the job, but also in helping people get the job. And I think that is a real differentiator. And then, of course, employers know, the Google career certificates, we've been around for a while now, and they've hired lots of folks who have them. 

So they know the quality and rigorous. And so that really helps as well. 

[00:44:01] Ben Kornell: You know, I have a question about the A. I. Both. That's the content of your courses. But are you starting to use A. I. In generating the courses or in the interactivity of the kind of user experience? And how do you imagine that evolving going forward? 

[00:44:16] Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, I think we're all going to actually learn a lot over the coming while about how to use A. I. As we interact. Our certificates have always actually been hands on and always the premise of our program is it has to help people Not just earn a certificate but be successful in the job And what that means is you have to have passed all of the required assessments within 80 or higher So we kind of we hold a high bar and that's important for the learner because they want To succeed well in real life scenarios, and it's important for the employers because they know if somebody makes it through the course that they really are ready. 

But I think this full space is going to evolve a lot in the future. 

[00:44:53] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and Coursera itself has put some AI features in, including career coaching features or academic coaching features that I'm. Given how I think none of the top 10 Coursera courses are Google certificate courses, I'm sure that's a big part of their strategy as well, which is really exciting. 

So how did you get interested in this particular area of education, sort of workforce training or economic mobility? What brought you to this world? 

[00:45:16] Lisa Gevelber: Yeah, for me, it's really been a personal passion. So my dad and his brother were the first person in their family to go to college. My brothers and I put ourselves through college and I really believe that We need to create a world where people have easy access to ways to advance in their careers and lives. 

And I mean, having a college degree is for sure life changing. We at Google believe it shouldn't be the only way to change your life. And so the whole idea behind creating the career certificate program originally was how can we create an alternative pathway to great jobs? You know, in the U S about two thirds of Americans don't have a college degree, but that shouldn't stand in their way. 

Okay. We need to make sure those folks aren't locked out of good jobs and providing affordable, accessible, high quality training programs for people to access good jobs is just an incredibly important societal thing. And we think we're helping to solve that societal challenge. And my whole team gets up every day, really motivated about that. 

How do we make a more equitable world by helping people access better jobs? And interestingly. We are seeing a lot of people use these certificates to do career switching. Yeah. So it's not just for people who are entering the workforce for the first time. It's actually works great if you're in a job, but actually you are interested in a completely different field. 

The reality is, even if you have a college degree, society is way past the point where you can learn everything you're going to need to know for your career. In those handful of years, when you were like 18 to 22 years old, we need ways for people to switch careers as well. And the Google career certificates are really good solution for that too. 

[00:46:52] Ben Kornell: It seems like a very important time to actually have these credentialing programs, given the kind of predicted disruption of job fields and the need for worker adaptability, you know, I'm curious about global versus U S. And, you know, as you think about the expansion and growth of your program, how does the global marketplace evolving differently or similarly to the U. 

S.? How do you think about what you're doing here impacting people around the world? 

[00:47:20] Lisa Gevelber: Yeah. No people, even since we first launched our very first career certificate, people from all over the world started using it, even before we were really telling people about it in different countries. So it's always actually by nature been a really global program. 

And now it's available in lots of languages. It's available in obviously English, but Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Arabic. Gosh, I never remember all the languages, but it's available in a lot of languages on the Coursera platform. And so it really has from the beginning been a very global, globally appealing opportunity. 

[00:47:56] Ben Kornell: I'm curious about like your partnership with Coursera, you know, Google could have done this all on their own and stood up a learning, you know, portal or something like that. But instead you decided to work deeply with Coursera and obviously we're Alex having worked at Coursera, we're fans of Coursera. 

Why did you make that decision and how has that partnership worked for you? Because, you know, I think many have struggled to scale these types of programs in the past. 

[00:48:21] Lisa Gevelber: And of course, there's been actually a terrific partner for us. They have incredible reach. And our approach from the very beginning was if we were going to successfully create alternative pathways into good jobs, we really needed to take an ecosystem approach. 

That's why we partnered with employers from the very beginning. It's also the reason we partner with educational institutions. So. Obviously, the certificates are available online and Coursera for anyone to use at any time, but more and more we're seeing even educational institutions, bring it into their coursework as an offering for students. 

Originally, we were focused on career and technical high schools and community colleges. But actually, there's tons of interest now from regular high schools and also from university systems. So previously, we've 

announced partnerships with the entire public university system in the state of Pennsylvania, the state of Nebraska, huge systems, public university systems in the state of Texas. 

And we have an incredible examples of high schools also building it into the curriculum. My favorite is the Anaheim public schools where this past year in 2024, about 800 high school seniors graduated, not only with a high school diploma from Anaheim, but also with a Google career certificate. It's 

[00:49:31] Alex Sarlin: amazing. 

[00:49:32] Lisa Gevelber: It is amazing. It's so exciting for those kids and whether they decide to go directly into the workforce. Or whether they decide to go to either a community college and get an associates or a four year school, this will serve them well. As a matter of fact, all of our career certificates are recommended by the American Council on Education for college credit, which is kind of like AP credit. 

Every school decides whether or not they grant it just like AP credit, but most community colleges actually give recognized ACE credits and the Google career certificates are worth anywhere from, I think, eight to 16 credits, depending on which certificate you do. So. Gosh, that's almost, that's potentially up to a semester's worth of credits just from doing the certificate while you're in high school. 

And that can certainly save you a lot of time and money. 

[00:50:15] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So we're in this moment where people have been figuring out that there's been a college for all movement for a long time. It's starting to lose some of its luster in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. And I think Grow with Google was really out front in the sort of certificate alternative pathway movement. 

As you said, you know, getting a Google career certificate doesn't mean you're not necessarily, it doesn't mean you haven't already gone to college. It doesn't mean you won't necessarily go to college, but it does provide, it sort of breaks that monopoly on mobility that, that universities have had for a long time. 

How do you see this moment? Do you feel like the world has started to embrace the perspective that you sort of were out front of, uh, you know, five or six years ago? I don't know when it, whenever it started. 

[00:50:55] Lisa Gevelber: We launched Google in 2017 and our first certificate in January, 2018. [00:50:59] Alex Sarlin: So six years ago. Yeah.
[00:51:01] Lisa Gevelber: 100 percent see people embracing this in all kinds of ways. 

You know, even if you look at light cast data, which is valuable source of data around the labor market and earnings for various careers, you can see that even for a lot of careers, if you compliment your four year college degree with a high quality industry recognized credential, like a Google career certificate, you can actually become much more employable at dramatically higher wages. 

So I was a psychology major in college. I think on average, psychology majors are making 39, 000 a year when they enter the workforce. But if you complement your psychology degree with a data analytics certificate or an IT support certificate, you start to trend toward 50, 000 a year, and you might get a different kind of job. 

[00:51:44] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. 

[00:51:45] Lisa Gevelber: So I think more and more, both students and, you know, And their parents and the educational system realized that part of that there's more opportunities actually to prepare yourself for the world of work and help scan help yourself stand out as a candidate for various jobs that even compliment an outstanding for your college degree. 

[00:52:05] Ben Kornell: So whenever you have a program like this, it's like having many children, all of your certificate programs, do you have a particular favorite course or favorite program or something that's new and cutting edge that you would like our listeners to check out? 

[00:52:19] Lisa Gevelber: So first of all, I love the prompting essentials courses. 

This is our newest course that came out a few weeks ago. And I really think it makes a giant difference when you know how to prompt well, I think you just get the AI tools are phenomenal. And when you learn how to use them, you really do get the best results. So I, I, of course, highly recommend that 1. It is a relatively short course. 

It's like 5 hours. Anyone can do it again. That 1 is online on Coursera called Google prompting essentials. So that one I think is terrific. I mean, I love them all. I can't, I can't pick one. And then the other thing I would say, I don't, that your audience might be interested in, especially if they have family friends or family members who are teachers, is our Gen AI for Educators course. 

[00:52:57] Alex Sarlin: Oh yeah. 

[00:52:58] Lisa Gevelber: This is incredible. I'm so proud of this work. We built it with MIT Rays. The whole idea of this course is that Teachers who use AI can benefit in a whole bunch of ways. One way is obviously they can create cool and interesting lesson plans and materials or customize existing lesson plans and materials they already have. 

My favorite example is always like, hey, can you take a science lesson and teach it using sports analogies? [00:53:20] Alex Sarlin: Like 

[00:53:21] Lisa Gevelber: the AI is just a really helpful hand in doing those kinds of interesting customizations or creating assessments or worksheets. But it's also really helpful for teachers. We know our teachers work so hard on average, 54 hours a week and only half that times with students. 

So they also have this relatively large administrative burden and AI is great for that too. Like it can help you write the class newsletter or summarize the week's lesson for the kid who was up sick all week, like all these things that really can be a great assistant to teachers. And more and more, we're seeing teachers who are interested in that. 

As a matter of fact, at Google. We look at some of the most popular queries and we, if you look at queries for AI for blank, interestingly, one of the top queries, actually the top query recently is AI for teachers is actually the top query on Google for AI for blank, blank, whatever. That's 

[00:54:09] Alex Sarlin: amazing. 

[00:54:10] Lisa Gevelber: Teachers are really interested in 70 percent of teachers. So they don't yet have an easy way to learn AI specifically for the teaching use case. That's where we made this course. Again, it's called Google gen AI for educators is from Google and MIT. And they can find it for free. It's absolutely free. 

It's a two hour course. Many school districts will even give you professional development credit for it. And you find it on the Google for education website. So we hope lots of teachers access that. So if anyone of your listeners has a friend or family member, who's a teacher, we just highly recommend that they check it out. 

[00:54:41] Alex Sarlin: And, and just final question here. That's really exciting. You've also devoted money to AI education for teachers. I think it's the AI opportunity. 

[00:54:48] Lisa Gevelber: Yeah. So our philanthropic arm at Google, google. org. Created an AI opportunity fund. We're really proud of that. And it helps people using the Google AI essentials course or the Google prompting essentials course, or the gen AI for educators, depending on who the person is, we're making it available to teachers and nonprofits and small business owners through the google. 

org AI opportunity fund. And that's, that's something we're also tremendously proud of. 

[00:55:14] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's really incredible work. We're both, we looked at each other when you said that AI for educators or for teachers was the number one query. And we're just like, that's incredible. I mean, we've been so excited at how much Google has embraced learning and education as one of its core use cases for AI and as one of the global leaders in it. 

It's just sort of. You know, it's just been amazing to it. And I think you've been at the forefront of that for a long time, even before this generative AI movement. So this is amazing. Thank you so much. This is Lisa Gvelber, who is the founder of Grow with Google. Thanks so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. 

[00:55:48] Lisa Gevelber: Yeah. Thanks for having me. 

[00:55:50] 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 Insiders. Subscribe to the free EdTech Insiders newsletter on Substack. 

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