Week in Edtech 5/7/2025: Columbia’s AI Cheating Scandal, Duolingo’s AI Shift, AI Education Mandate, Google’s AI Overviews Cut Clicks 34.5%, Higher Ed Under Fire, and More! Feat. Brian Malkin of Rang, John Marshall of Brainfreeze & Scott Nadzan of Panopto

Join hosts Ben Kornell and Alex Sarlin as they explore the latest developments in education technology, from AI breakthroughs and policy shakeups to new funding rounds and workforce shifts shaping the future of learning.

✨ Episode Highlights:

[00:00:00] Silicon Valley debates the rise of “AI Slop” and the impact of vibe coding.
[00:03:36] Columbia student suspended for AI cheating tool raises $5.3M to commercialize it.
[00:04:56] Anthropic’s Drew Bent explains why code literacy now means editing AI-generated code.
[00:08:09] 200 CEOs and Code.org push for mandatory AI classes in high school.
[00:11:13] Federal government’s role in AI education policy under debate.
[00:14:04] Duolingo plans to replace contract workers with AI, triggering backlash.
[00:20:42] Higher ed faces political attacks; Harvard and Columbia push back.
[00:23:32] K-12 faces teacher shortages and $4.5B in proposed federal funding cuts.
[00:35:21] Google’s AI Overviews cut search click-through rates by 34.5%.

Plus, special guests:

[00:36:08] Brian Malkin, Co-Founder & CEO of Rang, on rewards programs to improve K-12 attendance.
[00:50:29] John Marshall, CEO of BrainFreeze, on AI safety and transparency in schools.
[01:12:31] Scott Nadzan, Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategic Communications at Panopto, on AI-generated video and the Elai acquisition.

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This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.

Chapters

• 0:00 Silicon Valley debates the rise of “AI Slop” and the impact of vibe coding.
• 4:07 Columbia student suspended for AI cheating tool raises $5.3M to commercialize it.
• 5:27 Anthropic’s Drew Bent explains why code literacy now means editing AI-generated code.
• 9:03 200 CEOs and Code.org push for mandatory AI classes in high school.
• 12:07 Federal government’s role in AI education policy under debate.
• 14:58 Duolingo plans to replace contract workers with AI, triggering backlash.
• 21:36 Higher ed faces political attacks; Harvard and Columbia push back.
• 24:26 K-12 faces teacher shortages and $4.5B in proposed federal funding cuts.
• 36:15 Google’s AI Overviews cut search click-through rates by 34.5%.
• 37:02 Brian Malkin, Co-Founder & CEO of Rang, on rewards programs to improve K-12 attendance.
• 51:23 John Marshall, CEO of BrainFreeze, on AI safety and transparency in schools.
• 1:13:25 Scott Nadzan, Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategic Communications at Panopto, on AI-generated video and the Elai acquisition.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben Kornell: There's a big, big debate in Silicon Valley right now around whether we're actually seeing a lowering of the bar and a diminishing of the expertise and experience. I think there's probably two things can be true at the same time. One is like I. Coding is more accessible than ever. That's a great thing.

But also maybe the frontiers of coding are even higher than they've ever been before, and people may not totally realize that.

[00:00:32] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at 

[00:00:47] 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 EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben.

Hope you enjoyed today's pod.

Hello EdTech insiders. It's Ben and Alex back again. With another episode of Week in EdTech, Alex, the world keeps turning and turning, but somehow it seems faster than ever. Are we going to spin off? That's the question I'm wrestling with today. How are you doing? 

[00:01:30] Alex Sarlin: I'm doing okay. I've been fighting a little chest cold, so you might hear a little phlegm during this call, but ignore that and I, we'll edit out any coughing fits.

Otherwise, pretty good. It's been amazing to just, I've actually been diving deep in reading a whole bunch of books about AI and just trying to make sense of this moment, like really get more context and it has been so fun just to sort of understand all the pieces and how they're coming together because the more every read, the more excited I get for where this all could go.

It's, it's really, really cool. We have a event coming up. Brent, what is the next event? I think it's happening just this week, right in the bay. 

[00:02:05] Ben Kornell: Yeah, so we've got our Big Bay Area, EdTech Happy Hour on Thursday the 15th. If you're listening to this, it should be right around the corner. We're doing Salesforce Park at Bear Bottle Brewery up on the fourth floor park Sky Deck.

It's going to be a blast with 200 of your favorite people in EdTech, and it's also a great way to reconnect after A-S-U-G-S-V and after the spring sprint. This is really a great time to toast and celebrate as we head into spring and summer months. And then on the pod, we've got a ton of great guests.

Who are some of the highlights? 

[00:02:41] Alex Sarlin: Oh my gosh, there's so much happening right now. I mean, we had a nice long form interview with Mike Yates. You know, we absolutely love Mike Yates. He runs the Teach for America Reinvention Lab, but we're also talking to Renaissance Learning. We're talking to buddy.ai, which is a learning companion.

We have OCO Labs, which does in-person AI facilitation. This week we just put out a great interview with Jeremy Rochelle and Betsy Corcoran, who started their own podcast, both EdTech and Education Research Legends and more. I mean, we've been recording tons of interviews and it's been so much fun.

There's just so much happening in the space. Yeah. Jerome Passi from Sizzle ai. We're talking to ClassDojo very soon. Obviously, just keep an eye out for the episodes. They're just gonna come out on a weekly basis for all summer. Tons of, tons of really, really good guests. So should we 

[00:03:29] Ben Kornell: jump into the 

[00:03:29] Alex Sarlin: news?

[00:03:30] Ben Kornell: Let's do it. Let's start with ai. What is catching your attention? It's been a really great week in AI I think. 

[00:03:36] Alex Sarlin: I think so. It's so funny. I mean, I do feel like there's been a little bit of a push and pull when it comes to education in ai, right? There's been a couple of these stories. This a young founder, I guess he wasn't a founder, he was somebody sort of who is considered cheating on all these coding interviews and then he turned his cheating into an actual product and then got some investment for it.

So there's a little bit of like a tongue in cheeky coverage of this Columbia student who basically has turned his own cheating into an AI company, which obviously brings up this whole concept of is AI cheating? There's been a view, interesting articles about that, and people are getting a little nervous about how much kids are using Jet GBT and integrity in class at the same time that big AI companies just continue to do these huge things.

We saw open AI this week, say they're actually. Going to not do the for-profit conversion that they were talking about, which is a big deal actually, because that's something that behind the scenes in OpenAI, there's all sorts of stuff happening. And we also saw a couple of articles about how the new Chad BT is hallucinating more including a big times article about how some of the hallucinations are even getting worse.

So some of these things that I think we thought had been put to bed, they also bought windsurf are starting to pop back up. This idea of hallucination and integrity issues, they don't quite go away. And I still think there's a little bit of a push and pull when it comes to AI in educational context. But what stood out 

[00:04:56] Ben Kornell: to you?

Yeah, what I'm following a lot is computer education and AI literacy and how that field is evolving. Uh, really provocative post from friend of the pod Drew bent from Anthropic, where you talked a little bit about how in the past 80% of a developer's job was to actually write the code and 20% was code review.

And now that has flipped to 80 20 the opposite way because you're largely reviewing AI written code. So he reframed coding almost as a literacy issue. Like your ability to read and edit is actually the kind of goal. And so what are the building blocks of coding that you need to be a good editor and.

Some of that means learning to code, because in order to edit code, you need to know how to write code. And so that might be nice and overlapped with ways we've been doing it now, but also bringing in code review much earlier into a software engineer's learning experience. And I think that that's a striking reframe.

And then secondarily, there's a bunch of articles, political movements. There's a letter from the tech industry to the US government all advocating for more AI literacy overall. And I think the argument goes 0.1, whether you are building code or not, you need to know how to interact with ai. And so this is almost like second and third graders need to learn basic math, basic reading and writing in order to function as human beings in society.

There's a real argument that this is a practical, I. Necessity. And then also the second bullet point is around global competitiveness. And there Jacob Cantor shared an article around the net new AI talent in the US is actually going down for the first time where we are losing out to other markets in the world.

And then I think the third argument goes to, we have many of these big solutions where AI is a big potential unlock and we need the next generation to be fully fluent in it. And I think that's a killer 1, 2, 3 argument. And the interesting tension in that argument is we've now seen a federal government that says there is no federal role.

In education, it's all at the state level, and yet they're doing executive orders around AI education. And so there's a question about ai and then there's a question around what is the role we need the federal government to play in this space going forward? And just to give a little bit of a contrast, in our past pods, we've talked about China and they're rolling out, but many, many other countries basically in the last month have articulated a desire for a K 12 inclusive AI experience.

So the UAE, there's countries in Europe that have articulated frameworks for this. So the movement to infuse AI education is full on in effect. And for our listeners, that's an EdTech opportunity as well as an instructional or pedagogical opportunity. So it's, in some ways it's meta. I. 

[00:08:09] Alex Sarlin: I really agree, and one of the things that jumped out to me this week in terms of exactly that AI literacy movement was we saw a letter come out this week with more than 200 CEOs signing a letter urging state leaders, to your point about state getting more and more power in terms of educational curricula and, and decision making, urging state leaders to mandate both artificial intelligence and computer science classes as a high school graduation requirement.

And it ties into the competitiveness issue that you just mentioned and the talent issue. It also by urging them to tie it into high school graduation requirements, I mean, that's goes right to the heart of a mandate. It becomes actually baked into the system and I. We've all been burned a little bit, I think, in the States by how slowly we really got computer science to become part of people's lives and how unevenly we did for young students.

I had the chance to sit down at A-S-U-G-S-V with Cameron Wilson, who's the president of code.org, and we had a really great conversation and I think they are incredibly well positioned and they're part of this, they're absolutely part of this movement with these 200 CEOs. They have worked so hard to put together computer science curriculum teacher training, the staffing requirements, all the pieces that are needed to take a relatively new subject that's very different than math and science and ELA and actually get it to work in the education.

And I think they've learned so much from that experience and they've built so much infrastructure from that experience and advocacy that they are jumping right on this AI train and that is really exciting to see. So we will put the link to that. I think what you're saying, Ben, is really right on that you're seeing this push and this beginning to be semi universal.

Agreement. I, I won't say universal, I nothing's universal in education, but a lot of people from a lot of different angles starting to embrace the idea that artificial intelligence, it's a competition. It's a bulwark against job loss. It's a way to be nationally competitive, as well as individually competitive.

There's a lot of reasons that AI should be part of the curriculum. And we also saw, you know, speaking of anthropic, we saw Anthropic announced this week, two big initiatives. One is about a science initiative about helping scientific research. Definitely really important. The other is actually about working with Apple to put together a quote unquote vibe coding platform.

And again, that speaks to exactly your other point about how coding itself is changing enormously. And the whole concept of vibe coding is really about coding from a place of not necessarily being, you know, deep, deep, deep in the weeds of the actual lines of code, but instead sort of orchestrating the code, pointing directions by having vectors sort of telling the code where you want it to go and guiding it without being all the way in.

And it's a lot closer to code review than actual line by line writing and bug checking and things like that. So all this is to say, I totally agree and it is really exciting. Federal government politics aside, it is really exciting just to see more and more momentum going to the idea that AI is really part of the education system and we shouldn't slowly write paper after paper for the next five, 10 years hoping to get it into the curriculum.

I think the speed of which this is coming in is very quick. 

[00:11:13] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I think the space that I'm in, this concept of vibe coating is quite controversial because the concern is that we're also just watering down. Expectations of what real coding is and that you end up getting to a place where you have a bunch of people that are like 80%.

Okay. The phrase that's being used now is called AI slop. That's the kind of buzzword is slop. And there's like all of this AI generated code content apps that only marginally work. And so there's a big, big debate in Silicon Valley right now around whether we're actually seeing a lowering of the bar and a diminishing of the expertise and experience.

I think there's probably two things can be true at the same time. One is like. Coding is more accessible than ever. That's a great thing. But also maybe the frontiers of coding are even higher than they've ever been before, and people may not totally realize that. That's why it was interesting to me to see two articles this week, one from Ethan Mooch about the jagged ai.

This idea that it's superhuman in some ways and in other ways, it's got less common sense than a kindergartner that really captured something I've experienced. What I love about Ethan is he often comes to AI from a gaming background where it's like, what games can AI play and win? And many of the benchmark moments for AI has been beating Gary Kasparov and chess, or.

Playing complex games and now it can play magic The gathering, and now it can play all these more complex games. But at the same time, if you ask it a very, very simple question, the logic falls apart. The corollary to that is that Duolingo announced that they are. Going all in. They are an AI company and they are essentially replacing their workforce over time.

It doesn't sound like it's layoffs or anything like that, but as attrition happens and as growth happens, their intention is to kind of build back through ai, and I think this is one of the first publicly traded companies to really go. Hard in on that. And it's an EdTech company. Oh yeah. One of our most beloved.

But the user backlash has been really strong and they've actually had some stock drops and so on. And there's concern, I think, about the jagged AI having all of these unexpected goofs, but I would say the Duolingo team has never been shy about bold proclamations. And so I think this is gonna make them in even more interesting, important company to watch over the next couple of years.

I 

[00:14:04] Alex Sarlin: agree. And, and I also think we covered early on in this sort of AI revolution days. Do you remember the moment when Chegg got, you know, it stock basically fell through the floor because they just, they mentioned, yeah, the earnings call that AI was starting to sort of, you know what's funny is even at that time, Chegg was already experimenting with ai.

They already had AI based features. It wasn't like they were caught totally flatfooted by it. But at the same time, they were a little bit caught flatfooted by it in that when they talked about it as a societal and business trend, they were sort of on the wrong side of it. And Chegg and Duolingo are literally, you know, I was just looking at the Oppenheimer report from last quarter.

It's like Duolingo is just the superstar comet through the roof in terms of business stock price. Earnings for EdTech and Chegg for a lot of different reasons is really the opposite. They've gone so far down, they really have struggled a lot. So I don't think lingo in the long term is gonna be penalized for embracing ai.

It also happens to be founded by a extremely sophisticated, AI based computer scientist. So they know what they're doing when they talk about doing ai. It's not like it's just something that came across the CEO's desk and he is like, oh yeah, ai, I guess we should have a story. They actually know ai and I'd love to hear your take on this, Ben, 'cause we talked about this a little bit with Ben and Ben from Whiteboard last week.

Duolingo also just announced as part of this, that in the last year they put together, I believe it's 150 new language combinations over the entire course of Duolingo history. They had like a hundred courses of 150 new ones this year. Basically being able to teach Turkish speakers how to speak French or Spanish speakers, how to speak Mandarin, all the combinations.

And it was entirely through productivity, through ai. So they're feeling it, they're running with it. They put together their Duolingo Max offering, which uses AI to do conversations. I think Duolingo is still like a case study in how to use AI in a really positive way. We debated for a while at one point about when Duolingo had come out with its AI features and they were charging more for them and they were charging more for them because of course there's a compute cost to do them.

And we were like, is that a good idea? How is that gonna work? But I know from everything I've seen, they've been on the right side of a lot of AI decisions so far, and I don't think that's changing anytime soon. 

[00:16:13] Ben Kornell: Yeah, it makes me wonder about. The technical change versus the adaptive change. It seems like the technical change is still far outpacing our ability as human beings to adapt.

And part of EdTech insiders is we're talking about technology, but then we're anchored in the education world and our systems are struggling to adapt. I know one headline that has stood out to me, it's really a series of headlines over the last three weeks, which is basically the defunding of higher ed research.

And the story really is a pinpoint story around Columbia University, Harvard University, and some of the elite universities and their funding going away. But the ramifications are that basically every state college, every college that has some sort of research. Funding. They are going really, really conservatively with their spend and with their staffing and so on.

And so as the research component goes down, one, like the undergraduate tuition and graduate tuition becomes even more essential to their business model and their survival. But also it raises questions around, okay, how are those institutions going to leverage ai? Are they gonna be leading the research or are they gonna be leading users of it?

And then of course, we're hearing staccato announcements from OpenAI, from Google and from Anthropic that they're doing university partnerships. So I feel like there's a meaningful way in which Higher Ed's transition is actually a meaningful character in this storyline of societal evolution with ai.

We've got a ton of other headlines to talk about, but I'm curious your thoughts of where we are in higher ed and that's your beat. 

[00:18:05] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I mean, I see that what's happening, especially with Harvard right now. I think we talked about this a few weeks ago as basically the sort of apotheosis, like the height of the culture war.

Great article this week in the Atlantic about how a lot of what the administration had been doing with Harvard, with the defunding and the sort of complaints and everything had been under the auspices of antisemitism because they had been like, oh, Harvard didn't protect its Jewish students in this particular situation during these Gaza protests, and that's why we're doing that.

And that cover story, which it was always, in my opinion, a cover story is really now starting to go away as Harvard pushes back, as it counter sues the administration, which it has done. It's basically drawing a line in the sand and saying, okay, we are the college that has the global brand that has the biggest endowment.

We're gonna push back, we're gonna fight you on this. And of course. The federal government is gonna do a nuclear war on them and has already done been doing that. I don't actually see this as the beginning of a trend. I think this is just, you know, we've seen the educational divide, basically college going people and non-college going people is the biggest political divide in in America right now and has been for a decade.

It's been just continuous it. That is where the parties divide. So when you have this administration declaring outright, no holds barred, scorched earth war on higher ed, especially Ivy League higher ed, and the biggest way they do that is by pulling funding as much as they can. I don't see this as like the beginning of a new era in higher ed, even though I agree with you that higher.

It will accelerate that. I agree with that completely, but I don't think it means that like we've turned the page and now higher ed is in a new place. I think they all realize very well that they basically just need to survive. Especially if you're not Harvard, you don't have an endowment like that where you can just sort of, you know, lean on it.

They just have to survive this laser beam trying to basically destroy their reputation, destroy their ability to, to sustain themselves. So I see this more as a, it's a long time coming where higher education in the US has been more and more and more aligned with one political point of view and one party, and now the other party is in.

Power across the board and is saying, okay, let's do everything we can to destroy it. I think as we just five years from now, when we have different political environment, I think a lot of this is gonna step back. That's my personal thing that isn't to disagree with you about that. AI, I think, is going to grow and grow in the higher education landscape, but I don't know.

I, I see it more as like, this is the climax of the fight between government and higher ed and it down. 

[00:20:42] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean you mentioned the K 12 and high school AI requirements, but on the culture war side, I feel like there's also been this drumbeat of defunding programs targeted at low income families or you know, DEI, framed cuts.

But there was one headline that almost imagine if the culture wars are happening at the higher ed point. They're also happening at the early childhood. So the Head Start program has been basically two programs that I care about. Head Start and Teach for America. AmeriCorps. Like there's basically, those are like at the two bookends.

You know, from what I have been hearing, AmeriCorps is gone. It's not coming back. It's totally gutted. But Head Start is on a comeback. The White House has reversed course on their proposal to eliminate Head Start. And you know, one thing that people have to realize is that. The framing of these issues in the culture war narrative actually obscures the fact that programs like Headstart are like vastly important and popular in all parts of America, all races, all backgrounds, but all low income communities, and there's a way in which the blunt tool of the current administration, it just hasn't really.

Figure it out, where it's going to slice and where it's gonna renew. So hopeful news for our early learning people, for our folks who really care about teachers and the teaching corps, you know, teach for America. AmeriCorps has been controversial, so there may be some people in some corners cheering this.

You know, Linda Darlingham and her crew, she was one of my professors, really championed this idea that teaching is, needs to be more professionalized. And this idea that you can do it as a two year, you know, peace Corps esque commitment is not viable. But I think realistically, it's cutting a huge strategic pipeline of talent into education sector.

I think what we're even just talking about early childhood, K 12 and higher ed, in a weird way, moves by the federal government, have actually put a spotlight on the federal government's role in education. Whereas I would say during the Biden administration, we were almost exclusively talking about states.

So maybe with the exception of the FAFSA debacle. But I think that that is really what, what's ending up happening is this bouncing ball of it's on, it's off, it's on, it's off. It's just, I. Adding incredible uncertainty. Nobody knows where to go. And meanwhile, our world is changing with ai. 

[00:23:23] Alex Sarlin: I actually worry that with the K 12 space, I just don't think K 12 is as nimble in some ways.

I mean, in terms of, especially something like the teacher. 

[00:23:32] Ben Kornell: That's an understatement, for sure. 

[00:23:34] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, exactly. But like, I mean, I, I'm agreeing with you like the idea of removing Teach Amer or AmeriCorps or like closing up the pipeline of new teachers. If that were to change, if that policy were to change, if it were to come back or something similar to come back or other kind of teacher credentialing, you know, alternative credentialing programs for teachers were to be everybody, were to like jump into them and in four years that it's still, that's a lagging, you know, that doesn't just happen overnight at all.

We already have, especially, especially in special ed, huge teacher shortages. So I think that higher ed is just buckling down, getting in the foxhole, saying, okay, we are in a place where the government is openly antagonistic to us trying to do all this stuff. We gotta hang in. K 12. When it gets buffeted by these huge changes, it can't 

[00:24:17] Ben Kornell: spring back.

Yeah. Part of it is because there's a consumer component to higher ed. That K 12 public education is solely dependent on governmental funding. You know, we saw that the proposed 2026 federal budget would slash 4.5 billion from K 12, which in the scheme of a trillion dollar deficit, 4.5 billion is like a total drop in the pond for us.

In K 12, it's actually a huge amount of money, and it's also that money tends to be strategically targeted around science, technology, engineering, and math grants. It tends to be targeted around teacher development and then also around low income communities and at-risk communities. So I think there's a way in which we're.

The higher ed space is probably more in the public eye on the culture wars and reeling from these like big dollar swings. But I think the long-term consequences are pretty dire here in K 12. And by the way, you and I, we are the optimists. This is the optimistic pod, but I just think, I'm talking to administrators, superintendents, ed tech companies, and everyone is like.

Oh man, this is gonna be a tough ride for the next three or four years. And even if you get a new administration in there that has a meaningfully different direction, it's gonna take a lot of time to unwind or unbank all of these changes. I totally agree. 

[00:25:48] Alex Sarlin: Two things that should be said. I don't wanna keep harping on the higher ed, but the higher ed stuff is under attack from like every direction, right?

They're trying to pull tax status, they're pulling grant funding, they're trying to increase the tax on the endowments. They're trying to cap indirect research costs, which is the amount of money in a grant that goes to the school, you know, itself and to staffing. There's just like incredible. Amounts of things happening.

We saw Columbia layoff almost 200 people this week, and even the student deportation power, I mean, it's just like, you know the, it is like a machine gun. It's all at war on higher ed, especially elite higher ed, especially Ivy League higher ed right now. But I agree with you. I think K 12 is actually less because of just the way it's structured.

Less able to spring back from these cuts, even much smaller cuts. Right? $4 billion in K 12. It's a meaningful amount of money, but it's scary. I mean, look, I think the optimists in us, I, I won't speak for you, but I'd love to hear how you think about this. But, you know, the optimists in us, like when big changes happen, sometimes some of the negative things can be shaken out as well.

Right? Like maybe some of the benefits of this over time for K 12 would be that they, people start to think really differently about what the teaching profession looks like, like you mentioned with Linda Darling Hammond. And, and it's, it becomes less of a sort of, how do we just fill classrooms? Maybe there is a embrace of different kinds of technology, hopefully not just, you know, AI to solve everything.

I don't think that's necessarily smart, but a little bit of a more of embrace of ed tech writ large and a little bit more of a thinking about different kinds of. Ways to make it work with less money, but still focus on meaningful outcomes. Maybe there'll be changes in what the curriculum are and the, and the idea of actually starting to, just like we've seen in higher ed for the last decade, focus more on the subjects in schools that have more direct relevance to the job market or to the next step in people's education.

And maybe there'd be a little more thinking there. Maybe a little less emphasis on testing, like, I don't know, but maybe there's an opportunity here where when the system gets shaken up, I mean, I know from the political standpoint there's this push for vouchers, there's a push for ESAs, there's this push for this thinking about homeschooling.

But even outside of that, like maybe there's an opportunity for all of us in education and ed tech to think about, you know, what would we change about the education system if it was sort of pulled out from the roots. You know, this is maybe as close as it getting pulled out from the roots as, as we're gonna see.

I'd love to hear your respond to that before we talk about something else. I had one point about vibe coding I wanted to make before we totally, you know, end the episode. 

[00:28:16] Ben Kornell: Yeah, no, I mean, I'm generally aligned and this is where I'm not any smarter than the experts that are living this. You know, Matthew Rasco was on the pod and basically saying, we're negotiating a new social contract.

And with that there's fear and there's opportunity to. And you know, I think there's even open questions. At what level is that contract getting renegotiated? Is it at the federal, state, local level? Potentially all three. And the challenge I think, for everyone is that the attention span over is just so low on these issues that something that's really meaningful to us as educators or as students, may not actually be getting the kind of public engagement that it merits.

So that's the political dilemma of the moment. Yeah. I'm curious your thoughts on vibe coding. 

[00:29:10] Alex Sarlin: It was just a passing thought. But you know, I always try to find corollaries in sort of early internet for ai. As you know, I do it almost every week when I hear you talking about vibe coding simultaneously lowering the barrier to entry, but raising the standard.

It reminds me of the early days of DIY web development tools, right? Of Dreamweaver and MySpace and all of those moments where early blogs where it was like. Oh, it went from creating a website with something only people who really knew, you know, how to code could do, or people or companies could do to, hey, suddenly everybody can do it, but they look terrible, right?

I mean, these MySpace sites were, would have animated backgrounds with 20 colors. They'd have white text on yellow backgrounds, and it was like not very functional to your point about bio coding. But I still think it was a good thing. I think opening the barrier to entry there, allowing people to get their hands dirty, especially in an educational context, was really beneficial.

And I think those early days of just opening up the floodgates for development in some ways, I think led to this incredible increase in computer science. As a major. So I think the same thing's happening with Vibe coding with ai. It's like the idea that a college student or a, a high school student or just a new coder could create something meaningful, even if it's not professional quality, even if it's not actually robust coding.

I still see that as a really positive thing. And yes, I can imagine Silicon Valley companies are trying to say, well, let's not turn everything into slop. But I don't know, I think those moments when desktop web publishing tools started, I don't think that actually made the internet worse. I think it made it bigger.

And then all these incredibly sophisticated web design programs and sophisticated coders and sophisticated templates and material design and everything started and then we had this explosion. I feel like it's that step. That's all I wanted to add. 

[00:30:54] Ben Kornell: There is this like odd purity like stance here, and it's like, come on, you all have been breaking stuff and disrupting.

Okay, let's realize that. Vibe coding can also coexist with incredibly sophisticated AI computing and everything in between. It's an expansion of the field, not dissolution of the field. Before we head to our interviews, there were a couple announcements that caught my eyes one funding round and one acquisition first on the funding round Colegio, which they've been great fans of EdTech Insiders have come to many of our happy hours just announced around and they basically are part of this growing number of companies that are doing college and career pathway coaching and leveraging AI for that.

I think it's a really ripe field and it's one of those areas where one college counselor per thousand students is just never gonna get the job done, and it's a really great space for AI given the need for personalization and and aggregation of large amounts of data. And then the second is long longtime friend Aaron Feuer.

And the work that they've been doing at Panorama, it started with kind of social emotional learning and surveys and just understanding the kind of pulse of your district. They've now, with that incredible distribution channel, they've now morphed into an AI company and class companion. This acquisition really solidifies that, where basically provides instant feedback, all of the AI generative capabilities for the educators.

And this dovetails with my theory that a lot of the AI work that we're gonna see over the next year or two are people who have tremendous distribution advantage. Combining with these upstart AI enabled companies to bring it to the market in whatever channel that they are playing in. And I just think that's gonna be a really common theme.

So you have these AI native companies, school, ai, you know, brisk Magic School. They're going for the AI native LMS, and then you have these other distributed platforms where they're basically lopping on like a full suite of AI capabilities. 

[00:33:08] Alex Sarlin: Terrific analysis. I Nothing to add to that. I totally agree. And then just a couple headlines I just wanted to call out as we close, Google launched some interesting AI tools this week.

Three different AI experiments for learning language. We'll put a link to that. This one is about taking pictures of your camera. One is this thing called Tiny Lessons. Interesting. You know, Google does a lot of experiments so hard to know what this would mean. But there is a concept of maybe they're starting to play with IT space.

They also expanded audio overviews into 50 languages last week. And of course Google translated sort of best in class. So I think they're starting to lean into their language learning story. We also saw in the Google space a couple of headlines about AI overviews from Google now reach 1.5 billion users.

And there was an interesting article saying that those AI overviews, when you search something and it gives you an AI overview, it is actually also slashing the search click through. Which seems very obvious, but it's also a big deal. And we've talked on this PO for a while about how Google, I think one of the reasons Google's leaning into AI as hard as it is, is because this is the first thing in decades that truly threaten search.

And I think we're starting to see that happen. The other thing to call out is a couple of things from China, right? We saw a Huawei, which is a, a Chinese company that does chips basically starting to do its most powerful AI chip to directly compete with Nvidia. As we know from the government stuff, Nvidia is being locked out of the Chinese AI market, or at least there's a threat of that.

So there may be a real chip war coming there. We also saw Manis AI raise $75 million. That's a Chinese agent company, and we saw Alibaba. You know, I said this when Deep Sea first got a lot of attention, Alibaba put out an open source AI model that surpassed deep seeks model as the top ranked open source model.

And I, I've said this for a while, that Alibaba and the big Chinese tech companies are putting huge amounts of money into ai. And we should really keep an eye on them. So, so this is now along with Meta really fighting for the very most powerful open source model so that that's Quent QWN three Doesn't mean deeps seeks outta the running Deeps, seeks obviously doing all sorts of interesting things, but as always, Chinese AI always worth keeping an eye on because they're moving really fast.

We also saw the first AI degree this week from Bowling Green State. Very interesting. That's about it for us. We have some interviews coming up with some really great guests. There we go. Ben, you wanna take us out? 

[00:35:21] Ben Kornell: Thank you all so much for joining week in EdTech. If it happens in EdTech, you'll hear it here on EdTech Insiders.

Talk to you all soon. 

[00:35:29] Alex Sarlin: For our deep dive this week in week in EdTech, we have Brian Malkin. He's the co-founder and CEO of rang an education technology company that is on a mission to improve student outcomes and teacher retention through classroom rewards. And Rang is in 25 schools across 15,000 users and growing.

It's in its pre-seed stage. Welcome to the podcast, Brian. Hi Alex. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So the inspiration for Rang came from your own personal experience as a teacher. Tell us about your experience as a teacher and how it led to this concept of incentives to drive classroom behavior. 

[00:36:08] Brian Malkin: Yeah, thanks Alex.

So, yeah, I taught in Chicago public schools, spent time in middle school, high school, all subjects, and I used to use rewards. I would have dollar bills with my face on it, maing money, and I would go to the store every Saturday. I'd buy prizes out of my own pocket. I'd tally behaviors on a clipboard. And I would think of new and creative ways to just make my classroom exciting.

Because before you can get to AI and personalized learning and all these things that you read about, you have to have a base layer of engagement and frankly, openness to learning. And that's how I did it. And that's what I found actually how a lot of teachers do it. It looks different, I think, in different grade levels, right?

In the elementary schools it's more like sticker charts in the middle school looks a lot more like what I did. And frankly, in high school, you're hard pressed not to find something monetary that a lot of the schools used to build that engagement. And so I did it. I mean, I, I used rewards in my classroom.

The problem for me was that it just took a ton of time away from teaching. I got into the profession because I love to teach and I ended up spending a lot of time and frankly, money out of my own pocket on all this other stuff, and it burnt me out. And so. The mission of Rang and the goal of Rang is to help remove some of that cognitive load of behavior management from the teacher's plate so that they can be freed up to do what they do best, which is teach.

[00:37:26] Alex Sarlin: So walk us through what this looks like. What kind of rewards do you put into Rang? How do the teachers manage those rewards and how does it make it easy to do rewards programs without taking time away from core teaching? 

[00:37:38] Brian Malkin: Yeah, so how it works is we plug right into the student information system. So if you're a teacher using Ring, you take attendance in PowerSchool or Infinite Campus or Skyward, any information system that your school uses.

And as students and families improve, they get Rans and then they can use their rings in the Ring app to redeem for prizes that we're able to solicit from the community. 

[00:37:57] Alex Sarlin: What types of prizes do you tend to work in this context? 

[00:38:01] Brian Malkin: So we're based in Chicago now. We have 15,000 students and families on the app.

We work with all the pro sports teams in Chicago that give us tickets to their games. Concert venues. We also work with fast casual restaurants that give us gift cards and coupons. So we like to provide a variety of options for students and families. 'cause everyone has different interests, but it's nice for students and families to get some of the gift cards.

It's also nice for them to get some of the experiential rewards to be able to see and experience the city that they live in. 

[00:38:28] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So in your deployment so far, what have been some of the most surprising or valuable lessons that you've learned about student behavior, about teacher behavior, or, you know, what has sort of surprised you as you've started rolling out?

[00:38:40] Brian Malkin: Yeah, I appreciate that question. One of the things that we've learned is that rewards aren't for everyone. Like there are 10 to 15% of students and families that we work with that don't respond to ring. And we don't purport this program to be like a one size fits all approach. We're gonna come in with a bunch of rewards and all the attendance problems are gonna go away.

There are, you know, a good chunk of students, 10 to 15% of the population that no matter how many rain points or gift cards or tickets or whatever you offer them, they're not gonna change their behavior. And that's likely what we've found is because there's some sort of systemic barrier that's impacting how and when they're getting to school, for example, in the case of attendance.

And so what we do is we provide a small lift to a large number of students with an incentive that illuminates some of those high needs cases so that the school can sustainably deliver the home visits or time intensive, relationship driven bespoke supports that are needed to address those tier three cases.

[00:39:37] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that is really interesting. So. You're adding this additional sort of incentive layer. Some students can't or won't respond to it, but when you notice who they are and what's happening there, there's often additional issues in place that the school should be aware of because it might be that they're having transportation issues, or it might be that they're having to take care of a sibling at home and they're not being allowed to come to school certain days a week.

I mean, I'm, I'm making up reasons, but I, I'm sure there's a million such reasons, and I think it's a really interesting way to look at it. So you've mentioned attendance a few times, and I think that we should dig into that for a moment because we are post pandemic in this moment, in K 12 schools where there has been something of an attendance crisis in schools, a lot of districts are very concerned about student truancy and attendance issues.

What does that look like in Chicago when you've been talking to schools, talking to principals, school leaders, districts? How are they experiencing the attendee crisis and how do they respond to this type of incentive structure? 

[00:40:33] Brian Malkin: Yeah, it's hard. I mean, it's not only in Chicago, nationwide issue, as you point out, coming out of the pandemic, this culture of school just being viewed as optional with, there's a number of different causes that you can read about, you know, mom and dad or whoever's at home, maybe more working remotely.

And frankly, students have been learning remotely for two, two and a half years in a lot of cases, passed their classes. And sort of like if I'm a student now coming back to school, wait a minute, I just learned remotely and passed all my classes and graduated. Why do I need to come and wake up and go to school now?

And that's a problem not only for that student, but for the school that's funded on attendance for the teachers that have to make up lost learning time and give up their prep periods and lunches to catch those students up. And for the rest of the students in the class that are disrupted when kids walk in six minutes late every day.

For example. And so schools across the country we've seen are trying a number of different interventions. Rewards are certainly part of it. And you know, in many cases the school is bearing the cost of that and the time putting up school stores, buying prizes, figuring out how to design incentive systems to really address that behavior.

And so chronic absenteeism, I think is a challenge not unique to Chicago, and schools are very much trying to figure it out. 

[00:41:48] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and I can imagine this is such an acute problem for schools. We saw some statistics during the pandemic or right after post pandemic that over a million students had disappeared from the public schools, potentially on a permanent basis.

You know, were going to private schools, but many were just sort of out of the system. So this is something that's top of mind for a lot of educators. So we have to talk about, for me, it's a little bit of an elephant in the room, but I know it's something you think about a lot and I think it'll be a good conversation.

There has been a lot of debate over the last 20 years about different types of reward structures, and one of the leading theories in motivation is this self-determination theory that basically says that there's extrinsic rewards like. Money or tickets to the games, and that there are intrinsic motivation where people are coming to school because they want to or because they see themselves as a student.

And there's been furious sort of psychological debates about this. There's a famous book by Alfie Cohen called Punished by Rewards. And people land on every part of this spectrum about whether quote unquote extrinsic wards like monetary reward, restaurant gift certificates, tickets to games are in the long run positive for students.

I happen to be somebody who does really believe in rewards. I've read a lot about self-determination theory, and I still believe in rewards, but I'd love to hear how you think about this. 

[00:43:04] Brian Malkin: Yeah, I appreciate that question. And look, as a teacher, like my goal is always, and is always to develop an intrinsic love of learning for my students.

And to your point, there has been a lot of research on rewards. Before I even get into that, I should just say like, the goal of this program is. Is not to develop a reliance on the incentives. It's to use the rewards to spark habits of success that stick well beyond the incentive. But to your point, there's been a lot of research on it.

And when we read that research, you see that every behavior doesn't respond well or elicit a rewards response. But there are types of behaviors and studies that have been constructed in a way that does generate impact. And so characteristics of behaviors that should elicit a rewards response align really well with attendance.

And what I mean by that is that it's a more mechanical task. It's objective, it's clearly understood by recipients. How do I earn points? Attendance is taken every day and in high school multiple times a day. So there's like an element of. Immediate instant gratification that you can provide to students and families.

These are all characteristics of behaviors that should elicit a reward response, and that's frankly what we've seen in the data this year. We've had schools that have lowered their chronic absenteeism by 8% year over year. We've had schools that have increased their a DA, their average daily attendance by 3%.

I mean, you know, that moving average daily attendance by 1%. I mean, you have to move a lot of kids. And so, you know, we're learning a lot about how to design. An incentive system that can maximize impact. And we're playing with levers like reward value, uh, group rewards, individual rewards, different messaging strategies, frequency of delivery to optimize that.

And I think, you know, we've learned a lot, but we also have a lot of opportunity there. 

[00:44:56] Alex Sarlin: I happen to really agree. I think there's, it's often this sort of false dichotomy that comes from this concept of, you know, extrinsic rewards, diminished intrinsic motivation, but in the real world, often. You really need some kind of motivation to sort of move into the realm of even beginning to engage.

And I think attendance is a fantastic way to do it. If people aren't showing up at school, they have no way to make friends or to build a relationship with teacher or to get excited by the subject or anything. You build a passion for learning, you know, when they're not there, they can't do any of that.

So using extrinsic rewards to jumpstart those relationships, as you called it, build habits of success. I think that's a great way to put it. Makes a lot of sense to me. We've also seen some studies, I believe there's a famous study by Roland Friar from Harvard years ago that basically said that monetary rewards had a hugely, IM positive impact on learning.

So there's a lot of debate here, but I, I think you're doing something really, really interesting with this. So let's talk about where you're at as a company. You know, you mentioned that you're in Chicago, you have 15,000 students, you're building and iterating and growing. What do you see for the next year as you move beyond the pre-seed stage?

[00:46:00] Brian Malkin: I mentioned we're in 15,000, you know, students and families. We have two product lines. One is for high schools where students get rewards. The other is for K to eight schools where the parent or the guardian gets rewards both for attendance improvement and for us, given that the rewards are working and we have a lot of strong impact data coming outta the last couple years, we wanna grow that impact.

And so we wanna be in more schools and, and the constraining factor on our growth is not the demand. We have a wait list of schools that want access to ring. For us, it's the supply of rewards. I mean, we have a limited supply of tickets, gift cards, experiences that we can offer. And while we're continuing to grow that supply, that's helping us grow into new markets.

And so it's really nice to see the interest from schools and it's very validating for us. And a lot of our focus coming into the fall is. How can we build up, you know, the anchor sponsorships like we have in Chicago in some of these other metro areas to test this model in other cities too. 

[00:47:00] Alex Sarlin: So for listeners listening to this, if you have ideas for reward structures that might be supportive for RAN in Chicago or other areas, or if there's investment that could help them expand their rewards, definitely good thing to keep an eye out for.

I think. Brian, you're doing something really interesting here with this. So last question, it's what I, you know, I always say you can't get at a conversation in 2025 without talking a little bit about ai. You are doing systems design, right? I mean, rewards, structures and creating incentives. Systems can be complicated.

It can be personal. It can involve connecting big numbers of students and teachers and parents to points and currencies and reward structures. I'm curious how, and you mentioned having impact data already, which is obviously fantastic. How are you thinking about data analytics and AI in improving and building out additional reward systems over time?

[00:47:48] Brian Malkin: Yeah, it's a great question, and you're right. Can't get out of a conversation without talking about ai. So one of the things that we're really excited about building right now for our schools in the fall is a new goal setting algorithm that can read the student's historical attendance behavior from prior years, and then set personalized goals for that student.

So what I mean by that is like we look at, you know, Friday before spring break, over the last three years, how did you perform? And then we use data on incentives, value brands that have worked well with other student populations that are similar to you. And we prescribe a goal that's ambitious, but attainable.

If you're a chronically, chronically absent student, your goal will look different than a student who has perfect attendance. I mean, ring is inclusive of all students, so everyone's included, but we are going to now have the ability. To apply a bit more rigor and data to the goal setting on the front end, which is really exciting.

[00:48:43] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I could see a world in which in AI helps, you know, match, make between goals and students and families and different rewards. I, you may already be doing some of that as your reward systems and your prize inventories get bigger and bigger and more complex. I think it's really interesting to see how, what rewards matter to students and what drives what kind of behavior and how you can manage, you know, that shift to, hopefully to intrinsic motivation over time where students start to come to school because they like it, which is what we all want.

This has been really, really interesting. So, last question, just, what would you tell school leaders right now who are thinking about attendance? You know, as you've, you've gone and talked to a lot of different people. What do you feel like is the most powerful way to think about how attendance should be addressed systemically?

[00:49:32] Brian Malkin: Yeah, I think that you gotta think about the why, and there are underlying reasons why certain students are not attending that incentives might fit really well for, but there are other pockets of students that might require other interventions in other programs. And so the schools that really do the best with R recognize that this is part of a broader absenteeism strategy and really do the work behind understanding the reasons why students and families are not showing up to school.

[00:50:01] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, sort of getting to that root cause of what's underlying the issue. Fascinating. Oh, we'll be following your progress very closely from MedTech Insiders. It's really, I, I find what you're doing really interesting and very exciting. Thank you so much. This is Brian Malkin, co-founder and CEO of Rang, which is improving student outcomes and teacher retention, which we didn't talk about, but that's really interesting as well through classroom rewards.

Thanks for being here with us on Weekend EdTech, EdTech insiders. 

[00:50:28] Brian Malkin: Thanks Alex. 

[00:50:29] Alex Sarlin: For our deep dive this week on weekend ed Tech, we are talking to John Marshall. He's the CEO of Brain Freeze by Area. Brain Freeze is a new ed tech entrant in the teacher's tool suite space doing really interesting work. I had not heard of them frankly until A-S-U-G-S-V and then spent some time at their booth and was really impressed and excited by what they're doing.

So John, welcome to the podcast. 

[00:50:52] John Marshall: Great. Thanks for having me, Alex. Really nice to be here. I appreciate the visibility. 

[00:50:55] Alex Sarlin: Of course. Yeah. So first off, for our listeners who don't know Brain Freeze yet, you're relatively new in the ed tech world, tell us about what it is, what you're doing, what you're offering for teachers and what makes you different from some of the existing incumbents in the space.

[00:51:08] John Marshall: Yeah, I think to tell people, if you don't mind, I'd like to tell a little bit more of the background. 'cause I think it all weaves together. Yes. So I built a couple of large enterprise companies. The first one was a company called AirWatch, which provided mobility solutions and we helped enterprises, schools, everybody roll out iPads and iPhones back in 29.

2010, 11, 12, 13, 14. And so we were an enterprise software company that grew literally from a couple hundred people to 2000 people, 20,000 customers around the world over the course of three or four years. And we solved the problem for everybody from the every three letter agency in the government to every retailer, but also for the largest school districts and small schools around the world.

So everybody from L-A-U-S-D to the small independent schools. And the problem they had at that point was rolling out mobility, bring your own device for teachers, et cetera. AirWatch was all about mobile security. Linking things into the corporate infrastructure. At that time, schools had to roll out new wifi systems.

They were in the beginning stages of linking all these systems together. We worked very closely with Apple to help essentially kinda roll out and further refine things like VPP, the app program for schools, even some of the teacher tools that are out there. So many of the programs that are there today in mobility are things that we helped innovate in a previous company many years ago.

I then helped build a company, which I took several of my employees and we built a company in data security and data privacy called OneTrust. So I served as co-chairman of that and helped fund that company for many years. And that company was all about data privacy. Data security. Again, today it's around a $500 million company, a big business and enterprise.

So those were sort of two previous companies that set the stage for where we are today. I was not expecting to build a third company. I got into really learning about AI and I was fascinated. And what I saw in AI is I. A lot of the same complications that happen with cloud or mobility where you have this groundbreaking technology.

But the challenge is gonna be the same challenge. The challenge is how do you integrate it? How do you deploy it, how do you manage it? How do you keep it secure? How do you put guardrails in place? All those types of infrastructure things, which we're very much from our enterprise playbook. So I started a company called Area, which is focused on the enterprise.

So we have several hundred employees. We build everything. So you can bring your own models, create prompting studios, you can put in your own guardrails in place, all advanced security protocols, et cetera. And I have kids now, so. I was a bit frustrated that some of the solutions where I didn't see solutions in the marketplace that really had the same focus on data, privacy, security, enterprise orchestration, enterprise integration that I thought was needed.

So I basically took our platform and I created a white label version of it called Brain Freeze, and there were a couple of main reasons I created this white label version number one. I learned the hard way in the past that if you wanna provide education pricing, you really need to do it under a separate brand because it just complicates your life as an enterprise.

It complicates your life selling to the government when you try and provide really discounted pricing for education. So kind of scars on my back. So I created this so that we could provide something that was incredibly affordable for schools, districts, individual teachers, et cetera. So it was very price driven, but also very feature driven.

We wanted to make sure. That we could spend a lot of time and really talk to the teachers, talk to the educators, talk to the administrators, talk to the parents where we were integrating to the current existing platforms, the student integration systems, the LMSs, et cetera, and do it in a way that was sort of, I.

Separate from the enterprise software, so we were speaking the right language so we get all the benefits of this enterprise innovation that we're doing the same, that a large bank or healthcare or whatever company would take advantage of. Bringing that into the education space and then helping everything again from an individual teacher to a homeschool, to a school that has private school or to an entire large district.

And we do this natively in every different language, whether it's in Arabic right to left or double bite. Again, these are all types of enterprise things that we brought to the table. So a long intro, but it sort of paints the full picture of why we're, yeah, 

[00:55:32] Alex Sarlin: no, and I think it's actually a really good way to explain the story because one of the things that really surprised me when I sort of was getting a demo of Brain Freeze and looking at how it works is that we've interviewed many, many AI native companies.

We've talked to a lot of people, and many people feature really focused on the front end, the actual functionality for the end user, for the teachers and educators. How many different tools there are X, Y, Z. And you take a totally different approach. You're enterprise first. You're very backend thoughtful about privacy, security integrations as you mentioned.

And I think that is a really sophisticated, frankly, take on the AI education ecosystem. And that's exactly what I wanted to sort of dig into. So I think you're going right there already. So tell us a little bit about what you have learned coming from that space of actually rolling out enterprise level systems like devices and privacy.

What needs to be in place if you're a school leader right now and you're saying, I keep hearing about ai, I wanna buy an AI solution, I wanna make sure my teachers are on the cutting edge, but I also don't want to accidentally put anybody at risk or put personal information out there. What are the kind of conversations you've been having that, where do leaders come in or districts come into this and how do you help reassure them and what have you built to make sure that everything is in place?

[00:56:42] John Marshall: Yeah, I think the number one thing you just hit on is transparency. Because people want to see what's going on and they wanna feel confident about what's going on. Now in education, they want that. There's no mandates in, in banking. You have something called FINRA where you have to keep seven years of data and they went through a hundred million dollars lawsuits with all the banks because of people texting or using WhatsApp, kinda off the books, if you will.

That doesn't happen anymore. In healthcare, you have hipaa, so you have regulatory environments. In different verticals, there are protections in place and there are laws and mandates around what grades and ages and what kids can do and permissions. But there's nothing that really says that. You have to have full transparency of what's going on in a system.

And I think with AI, that is really important. So the logging component and that detail where somebody can see what's going on and they can make sure, both from a security permission where you don't have a clever student. That wants to try and figure out braids of other kids or answers to something or whatever.

So you have the traditional sort of clever students or hacking, right? So that's one bucket. But I think also you have this problem with AI of what I would call over permissioning, where people start to get access to maybe more data than they should, whether it's access to information in other systems and administrative systems and those types of things.

Or then you have things where you have not appropriate for school or not appropriate for work. Things where you've seen and heard things. Where now with AI images, you can say, well, let's just take an easy one, make somebody's face look like something else. Maybe it's not really, really blatant, but it could be a form of bullying, right?

There's obviously much worse things that you could do. We've all heard about something that happens with a popular musician or words or something like that, but it could be very harmless where somebody's just trying to do a prank and it creates something bad. In that case. Would you be able to stop it?

No. But would you be able to have a full log and sort of remediate and whatever? Yeah, perhaps so. I think it starts with transparency. It starts with that level of enterprise kind of logging and feedback of what's going on. I. The security around making sure that things are not over permissioned. And then because we have that security, our solution is not really just meant for teachers.

So you mentioned there's a lot of teacher tools when people say, are you another teacher tool? I say We're not. We are more of. A tool that can work across all aspects of the school. Hmm. And if you really think about it, a school has a lot of things, characteristics of an enterprise, right? You have an admissions process, you have bus drivers, you have security, you have maintenance, you have finance.

You have all kinds of things that are very similar to a normal business. So we're not just focused on how do we help a teacher solve a math problem? Right. I believe over time the LMSs will do a really good job with that. There will be the con Amigos and others that have a really good baseline where they focus on that.

But where we can help is not only on all the teacher edge cases, but we can also help on all the other things. How can you improve parent interaction? How can you improve maybe an afterschool program, logistics? There's a million things that happen at a school that AI can help with, and that's where we can help broaden the equation.

And I think it's really important on the teacher side to think about where the LMSs and those will integrate. I call that sort of the embedded ai. Those platforms will all have more AI over time, but what we find, especially in project based learning or inquiry based learning, as some people may call it, is that the traditional LMSs may go down a curriculum path.

But let's say you have a student that goes outside, they find an anthill during pe. And they want to start talking about ants. Previously, if a teacher wanted them to make the math subject in the afternoon about ants, they'd have to like scramble and create some lesson plan and whatever. Go to teachers, pay teachers and try and find something.

It's, it's a mess. Now, if you're doing skip counting or you're trying to work on fractions, or you're trying to work on counting by tens, an anthill could be the best real life example of how to count by tens, hundreds, thousands. And you could basically go into AI and you could say, create a lesson plan for me that's focused on third grade or first grade math with ants, blah, blah, blah.

And boom, you could do something, create a worksheet. And that is now how the power of these types of systems should work. I think give on to Caesar with Caesars, the LMSs, the core curriculums, they're gonna drive a certain amount, but when it comes to how do you really help and how do you help a teacher kind of do these real-time things?

AI is bar none. One gonna be a watershed tool. 

[01:01:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's a great point. We have seen a little bit of an evolution for some of the AI native tools where as they add use cases, they tend to address more stakeholders within the ecosystem. Some teachers, admins, parents. Mm-hmm. Specialists and of course students.

And what I'm hearing you say, which I think is really interesting, I don't wanna put words in your mouth. What I'm hearing you say is that transparency, auditability a focus on, you know, security, privacy integration, the, all of this piping and thoughtful compliance allows schools and districts to start to adapt a platform like this.

And then once they're in, there's a million use cases, right? There are so many ways to use ai. 

[01:02:07] John Marshall: You're exactly right. I think when you start talking, if you took a hundred teachers in a school or a district, you'd be able to have the normal graph. Some have never done anything. You have a lot that have done the chat, GBT, and then you have some that have really gone above and beyond and found their own platform, their own solution on the web.

They're doing their own lesson plans, they're there. But what really happens is once people start learning what they can do, then the creativity starts. And I think it's also understanding where AI is best. AI is best at taking repetitive tasks. Or like a research task or a needle in a haystack task and you know, really accelerating that.

You know, I think there's this misinformation about it's gonna take over the world right now. Yeah. Maybe in five years or 10 years. Right now we're in the moment here, and the moment right now is how do we help teachers, administrators, parents, whatever, do small task better and then spend more time aiding students?

The other big thing that AI is going to do is it's really gonna give you the power of one-to-one education. And I think we got a lot of that with mobility and what's happened over the last 10 years with these apps. But it's gonna be a step further. A lot of the one-to-one has been focused on if you have a whole class on fractions, how do you do more fractions in this area for this group that's behind?

And how do you do more something advanced, but it's sort of along the same line. Think about if a student is really disinterested in fractions, but now you can overlay that with their favorite football team, a baseball team. You can make it about cooking. There are a lot of ways that you can teach fractions, and if you can do that in a one-to-one way with ai, where you can learn the interests of a student or a teacher or a class, or this school is located in Colorado, so they talk more about skiing.

This one's then, you know, they talk more about hockey. This one is somewhere else, or this one is a religious school of this sector, which has been a very interesting use case where some schools they want to. Build layers of curriculum. So you might have a standard state-based curriculum, but then they might have something at a school level, or because they're a religious school of some sort, they wanna layer that and sprinkle that in on top, which I thought was fascinating.

So you get this benefit of AI where you can keep making things more and more relevant to a school, a district, an individual, a parent, a homework assignment, and that's the next power of that personalization, where you can get a lot of that through the ages of what's happened with mobility. But this is exponentially better, 

[01:04:34] Alex Sarlin: that interest-based tailoring or customization, or relevance based customization, as well as you mentioned, project based learning and group based learning, the idea of being able to change what's happening in the classroom in relatively real time based on what students total real time.

Yeah, it's an incredibly exciting vision for. Generative AI is new, you know, it's only a couple of years old, but we've already seen a few companies start to land, grab and start to build big contracts. You are relatively new in the space, but you've grown very quickly. You've gotten a lot of traction. And I'm curious, you know, as you go have these conversations with districts and leaders, they're interested in ai, you have these two pieces of your story, the safety, privacy, transparency, auditability, and then the, wouldn't it be amazing if you could have the anthill and the football team, and I'm curious, you know, how that message resonates and sort of what you attribute, whether it's some combination, you know, what do you attribute the growth of area and brain freeze too?

Is it the vision of how spectacular things could be? Or is it that rear guard action of don't worry, you can do this. It's not risky. 

[01:05:35] John Marshall: I think right now I will say that there's definitely a land grab that's happening, but also in the early days of a market, what I've also learned is there's a lot of shuffling around.

And I think there tends to be a lot in the first year or two where people are still open to trying other solutions. Before I kind of answer your question, as I go through a lot of these tech shows, what I find is, especially right now with AI is there could be a hundred individual point solutions doing something.

There could be an AI solution on how to manage your school bus fleet, right? I don't think that's gonna be a standalone platform or tool in two years time. It's gonna get absorbed into something else, right? So I go back to this concept of embedded AI where the current existing platforms that schools are using will have more and more ai.

So you don't have to go by a bunch of platform things to necessarily do what they will eventually do that sometimes they're a bit laggard. So I think what will happen is a level of the accordion has spiked out dramatically in the last 12 months, and it will continue to spike out even further, probably for another 12 months because of the amount of money that's flowing around and how easy it is to get money right now in ai.

What will happen is, as you know, as there's consolidation and traction, then the accordion of all these solutions, there's either consolidation, they fall off the big, get bigger, so that will start to happen. But I think we're 12 to 24 months away from that. And I think when, you know, in reference to contracts and big contracts, I think the contracts that are out there at a school and district levels are still for small pieces of the pie.

You know, typically when I've seen markets that get more maturity, even in education, you tend to get what we call RFPs. Or requirements documents that are 20 pages long, you get into these competitive battles, that's where you separate down to the top five or six players and then the top three or four we're not even at the point where schools, I believe, have built in their full requirements.

So I think schools right now are looking for people that they can learn from. Mm-hmm. That they can learn from, that they can trust. I think there's other players in the market that have gotten traction because of regional presence, or they were earlier in one area or one space, or they maybe had broad web marketing or whatever it might be.

So there's, there's some level of activity that's already happened, but I don't know. Those will be the winners necessarily, or us, you know, could be a completely different set of players or disruption that happens and it will happen over the next 12 to 24 months for sure. What does that translate? If I'm on the other side of the equation?

If I'm a school or if I'm a district right now, you gotta be a sponge. You know, you should be a total sponge. And there's actually nothing wrong with even having two or 3 0 3 is a lot, but narrowing it down and saying, Hey, we're gonna work on these two solutions and do a three or a six month test with 20 teachers on two different solutions.

And then seeing which ones you really like that have the best integration to your current technology. Which ones have the best usability? Which ones are this, that, and the other thing that really has to normalize is cost. And I think we're about to update our pricing so that it's been very bifurcated and we were just learning a bit as well.

But you know, there was a concept of, oh, the teacher pricing and then the student pricing. I think that's all very confusing. The bottom line is the pricing should be very. You know, I'll say reasonable and consistent no matter what type of user you are. Mm-hmm. You know, whether you're a teacher, a student administrator, there should be access to parents.

So I think there's a pricing reconciliation that has to happen in the next three months that will really impact the market as well. And that tends to have a competitive impact too, because when you go out and you set pricing at one level and then the market normalizes a bit, maybe at a different level, it can also impact what you're doing.

So there's a lot of movement and moving parts that are about to come in the next six to 12 months for sure. 

[01:09:21] Alex Sarlin: Really, really thorough analysis. And I, I agree. We just saw, uh, Panorama education acquire class companion, one of the early AI feedback tools. I agree with you that it's gonna continue to expand.

At the same time, I think the incumbents and some of the people with traction are starting to realize that there is a lot of churn in this space and there are a lot of people doing interesting things that they could bring into their, bring into their suites and, and accelerate their own development.

[01:09:45] John Marshall: There's one other variable, I hate to say it, but you know, when I built my first two companies, I didn't have kids. And lemme tell you what, as a parent now and wanting to help teachers and educators, you know, this is a very personal thing for me now as well, and I see how hard teachers work. We always appreciate that, but to a certain extent, when you're 20 something and you're building a company, it's just, you know, ignorance is bliss a bit.

So now I'm really passionate, I want to help educators and I think AI can be a great normalization and be a great way that can help. And, and we're focused on bringing it to. Teachers, administrator schools in a very affordable way too. So that's why I want to drive that pricing to be extremely affordable for the industry.

[01:10:26] Alex Sarlin: I think you are elevating the conversation with Brain Freeze Bay Area by focusing on, as you say, so many of the aspects of what makes schools like enterprises the the need for compliance, security, regulation integration. Some of the less sexy stuff, but incredibly, incredibly important. The plumbing. The plumbing.

[01:10:43] John Marshall: I don't know. I've spent my whole life doing enterprise plumbing, if you will. You know, my daughters think I'm a plumber at home, so I feel like that's really the secret sauce is for anybody. You have to have the technology behind it. To make an elegant teacher solution, but it's not just the ui. And I think, you know, obviously our UI will always get better, but it really has to be everything that's below the waterline.

Yes, 

[01:11:05] Alex Sarlin: yes. I think that's a really interesting approach that we haven't seen that much of in the space so far because you don't have a lot of people with your enterprise background. I really appreciate where you're coming from and I very much gonna follow your progress in this space. John Marshall is CEO of area.

That's A-I-R-I-A enterprise AI full stack platform that has created brain freeze for schools. Check it out. You mentioned in passing you can create your own models. I did not dig in on that, but I definitely want to In the future we should talk. 

[01:11:33] John Marshall: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot. There's, you can fine tune your own models, you can add your own S SLMs to the platform.

There's a lot that you can do. It's very exciting and I think a lot of that would be good for almost a higher education or a high school type. Discussion because the new kid, the bar has been raised where now middle school, high school kids are gonna be using Python building prompts, testing, building their own fine tune models.

And that's a whole nother vector that we could dig out on on the 

[01:11:59] Alex Sarlin: future. Yeah, a hundred percent. And that AI literacy and, and AI projects is, is about to explode. We just saw executive order this week from the federal government on it. But you're seeing it in course every different direction. I look forward to future conversations 'cause I think there's a lot to dig into here.

Check out Brain Freeze by Area. John Marshall, thanks for being here with us on Weekend EdTech from MedTech Insiders. Awesome. Take care. Yep. For our deep dive today, we are here with Scott Nadin. He is the Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategic Communications at Panopto. Scott, welcome to EdTech Insiders.

[01:12:31] Scott Nadzan: Thank you so much 

[01:12:31] Alex Sarlin: for having 

[01:12:32] Scott Nadzan: me. 

[01:12:33] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so Panopto has been a leader in video platforms. Originally, it was doing a lot of lecture capture for a long time, and now it's moving as is the world into generative ai. And you have a new product called ELAI maybe pronouncing that right. Tell us about how ELA AI worked, how the acquisition worked, and what you're doing.

[01:12:51] Scott Nadzan: Yeah. Yeah. So we say Eli mean, absolutely. Panopto has always been focused on helping organizations capture, manage, and share knowledge more effectively over the years. But over the past few years, you know, like many, we saw a shift in how people really wanna create and consume video, right? So generative ai.

Is a natural evolution for us because it addresses one of the biggest barriers for our users. It's time, the time that it requires to create video at scale and the amount of resources it does take. I mean, whether you have video editors, specialized software, or an army of video editors, I mean, to be able to create content consistently because of the appetite for those short video snacks, it's really hard to keep up at this point.

So generative AI is again, a natural evolution and a hand in glove fit for us. And Eli stood out as a leader in terms of ai, video generation and audio generation, just because, you know, a lot of their technology aligned really perfectly with our vision in terms of enabling simple, elegant video content creation for anybody.

But again, the big thing, and I'm a content producer still at heart, is you need to make it faster. You need to make it easier, and it has to be scalable in these organizations. So I think that this, I. Really came out of this shared belief that AI should empower all of our customer base and obviously our future customers, regardless of skill level.

You do not need to be a hardcore video producer, as I always say, to create these impactful video pieces and experiences. So integrating a lie into Panopto has really allowed us to open up a lot of new doors and a lot of possibilities, and in a very short time. You're gonna see the seamless experience that really pairs this AI generated powerful content creation, which we're already pretty good at in terms of, let's call it the quote unquote old fashioned ways with our best in class video management system.

And that's what makes us different. 

[01:14:43] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So for those who may not be as familiar with Panopto market model and business model, you're in both higher ed. K 12 and corporate, right? You have some clients in all, is that correct? 

[01:14:53] Scott Nadzan: Yeah, absolutely. Most of our customers are focused on using penopto to support learning and communication.

So most of our customers, where we started was in higher education. We do have some K 12 customers, and of course many corporations. If you really look at how they operate, they operate like a modern university trying to engage, inform, and educate their audience. So we absolutely do have corporate audiences, which is using video just as much, but in different ways, a lot of times in an education.

[01:15:18] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So walk us through what this looks like within the Penopto suite of products. So if a professor at a higher ed institution, or if a learning and development lead at a company says, okay, I'm gonna really lean in and use Eli to put together my video library on top of what I've already been doing.

What does that look like? What do they have to lean in and do? How do you make it user friendly and not need production experience, and how does it feed into the broader Panopto series of tools? 

[01:15:45] Scott Nadzan: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think the one thing I always say is you can kind of remove the need for lights, camera, action, and that's kind of what I.

An average user does not wanna deal with whether it's a faculty member or a staff member in an uh, corporation. So really, you know, the first thing, like anything is getting your account logging in. And I think the one thing a lot is easy to use, dashboard allows you to do is kind of come in and use a template, like many systems to say, Hey, we have something to get you started.

Basically the interface is very much like PowerPoint, so you'll feel very comfortable as a educator coming in there. And there's three kind of pathways. I always say people use this and I think instructors have been sitting on PowerPoints for a really long time, and Eli has this great tool where you can import your PowerPoint and it imports every single thing, like the text, the objects, the images, and the speech notes into independent objects in a lie.

So you're basically making your PowerPoint come alive. So one way is a faculty member comes in and just says, Hey, I have an old video, I wanna upload it, turn this PowerPoint into video in seconds. And then that's one very common way, right? Because it's a very comfortable interface, it's a comfortable file that you've worked with.

But maybe you just wanna use that file to do your introduction to the course or how the best way you wanna use Blackboard, or talking about how they're gonna be submitting assignments as a team. It doesn't always have to be some sort of high production value content. It could be very operational content that you need to use in every class that you use.

So one way is using PowerPoints and and converting those PowerPoints in a video in seconds, which is great. The other really simple ways that we see is also using the AI storyboard. And basically what you can do, just like other systems, is prompt Eli. So you could say, can you please create. You know, a video on hydrolysis and just an intro video because I want my students to have a different voice than mine.

I'm gonna lecture for the next hour. Well, why don't I make a video really quick this morning to kind of introduce hydrolysis. So like you can go in, prompt a lie, it's gonna give you an outline for your content, and then you get to kind of go into and pick and choose what. Information you bring into the video.

Eli has this text of video editor where the text then just goes into an editing interface and you turn that video into basically scenes and you can export that in minutes. And the real difference there is after prompting Eli for some information, it will create eight slides for you, let's say. And then you get to choose an avatar.

It could be your own custom avatar or an avatar that you like, or you do not need to use an avatar, but you get to just type what the avatar says in the voice over of the video. And that's really the power because I feel like educators are usually great writers and they've spent most of their life investing in how to communicate.

Writing and using a keyboard. So one of the great things I like about is a lie is you have this avatar, you have this voice that you can command in any language with any words. And I think that's where faculty members see the power is. Again, they don't need to be on screen. They don't need to do voiceovers.

They don't need to do three takes or 10 takes. They could just go in and write, or again, rinse, re using recycled documents that they've uploaded and upscale them, let's say those PowerPoint documents I talked about. So those are two main ways that I think people use it. And then again, like templates that are set up by your organization, you can kind of pop in and just build upon templates.

So that's what it looks like. And in the end. I would just say really outside of creating personalized content and some animations and a lot of the things that you can do in PowerPoint, I think the great thing is that we integrate with learning management systems and having that backend of Panopto building bridges between content management systems and learning management systems in corporate and education is really key because again, no matter what, all this stuff is just tools, right?

You can make really cool video, but again, you gotta get it in front of your audience in these learning management systems. So I think that's one of the benefits of putting Eli and Panopto together. 'cause we've done all that building for over 15 years. 

[01:19:21] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So I mean, two, maybe try and synthesize some of the different groups of things you're saying.

One is that it builds on existing behavior, right? You're already integrated with LMSs. Yep. You're able to take existing material, like PowerPoints that people have had in their computers for a long time and turn them into videos. Then it makes videos sort of as accessible as slides and PowerPoint in that it doesn't require exactly.

I say lights, camera, action doesn't require a setup or a green screen. You don't actually have to be on camera at all, which I think is a really interesting aspect of AI video in general. You can sort of make anybody speak for you. You have translation as you mentioned, and you have the ability to sort of move the video around edited use, prompting and animations and all sorts of things to make the video sing.

So it's basically a way to make high quality instructional video without needing necessarily to practice to be on camera, to put your face out there and use it in any context. Do I have like some of the big ideas there? 

[01:20:15] Scott Nadzan: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, again, the last thing you said of not having to always put your face out there or your voice out there.

I mean, again, there are some folks that wanna do that, but there are absolutely folks that do not wanna do that. And that's not what they consider as part of their job as an educator, right? But sharing their voice and sharing their knowledge is part of their job, and that's something they spent their whole life on.

So yeah, it's kind of building on how they were retaining or storing knowledge and trying to unlock that for this new generation of viewers, which have different behaviors, honestly, as we all know. 

[01:20:43] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And the AI storyboarding is an interesting idea as well. So, you know, it makes me think, let's zoom out a little bit.

We're in this sort of multimodal moment. We talk about this on the podcast a lot where LLMs only came out a couple of years ago, but already it feels like we're really now moving to the next generation of media, omni modal LMS with video, with sides, with music, with games, with interactives. And you have been in the video space for a long time.

If you could put on your sort of see the future hat for a moment and say, okay, three years from now, the ability to make video with ai that's totally convincing. That feed stars, you know, any people that's translatable, that's personalized, all the things you've saying. What does that look like? How do you see video, especially in the education and training environment, how will it change in this AI era?

[01:21:30] Scott Nadzan: Yeah, I mean, one thing, you're right, you said a word change. I mean, we know it's gonna keep changing and I think, I feel like I've been through so many disruptions as being in this business for 20 years. You know, whether it was the first idea of just taking old legacy content and, and turning it into digital and, and sharing that back.

And then obviously lecture capture and constant streaming of content. And now we're in this micro learning phase because of the. Pervasiveness of social media and the behaviors that come out of watching and consuming content like that. So I think there's a lot to tackle, first of all. So if you ask me, I think we or I would be looking at a few trends that can go an array of different directions.

I would say realtime personalization is really important. I think there's ways right now to do a lot of manual personalization or use some sort of technology to personalize content at scale. But I think that you're gonna start to see AI start to leverage these things where I use the example of like uploading a PowerPoint and saying, Hey listen, we wanna be able to.

You know, edit this PowerPoint right now, one person, one time. But what if you could do that for your entire PowerPoint library and then also maybe upscale in different ways, right? Leverage some of the power of these technologies to modernize some of this. Do some fact checking, and then you also can input the system and tell, you know, make sure that the system knows who your audience is, right?

That's one of the challenges in educator. I mean, I teach a class at Syracuse University still, and there's a few things that change. The technology changes and the students change, right? So this whole idea of personalization, of content and that content for the person is really. Really important. So whether it's their role, you know, the type of how they've progressed through the course, some of them advanced faster or slower, like we need to know.

The faculty member cannot know all of that, an educator. So I think some of that is really important. And then when you get into multimodal, which is truly a, an incredibly exciting opportunity, is where you blend like video, text, voice, and interactivity into this coherent experience, right? So you think about what happens in a physical classroom, that's what happens in a physical classroom, right?

So how do we morph that? I. Experience, which, which students want, which parents want, which businesses want them to experience, right? How do you morph that and put that into a digital experience so you can kind of do more and, and help these students in their digital lifestyle, right? And in their flow. So I think like using, again, video text's, voice interactivity into this coherent experience, AI is, that's really where it's gonna benefit.

And I think you get into very interactive realtime adjustments and training modules or courses which can be supported. Not, again, you're not replacing a faculty member, but really choose your own adventures in terms of interactivity, like books I used to read. You need to bring that into education. And then lastly, all this stuff sounds cool.

Personalization, interactivity, but doing that. Takes time. Right? So the biggest thing is gonna be how do you do this at scale content automation that is accurate, that people are confident in the students, the faculty members, the staff members, the trainers are confident in and automating these. The video creation based on all the metadata you have, based on all the captions you have, based on all the performance metrics of videos that you have.

How do you leverage all that data with ai, right, and software, and take all those assets and. Generate real insights from that and real recommendations to help people engage their students better, to help people teach their students better, right? Because I'm a faculty member and there's lots of tools out there, and it's great.

I've lived through many of them and many of them die in the end. The ones that we all use are simple, they're elegant, and they actually improve the experience, right? Mm-hmm. So I think that those are the big trends. Personalization, I know I talk a lot, uh, interactivity and again, content automation at scale, engaging content automation at scale without lights, camera, action.

So I think like going from this very static medium of like images and lecture capture of kind of just, you know, a little bit more, I'll call boring, you know, video, you're gonna start to see Panopto being positioned, you know, right at the center of a really exciting transformation of what video becomes inside of corporations in higher education.

[01:25:24] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's a really exciting vision. I think you're saying two things that create a really interesting sort of dialectic in this space, which is that video will become more real time, more interactive, and thus sort of more of a living object. You know? I mean, when online education went towards video, there's some improvements with that, right?

There's a voice, there's a person. It feels more humanistic. Yeah, but it's also totally static. You're sitting there watching someone who recorded this some amount of time ago who may or may not be a very good presenter, who may or not, may not speak your language. There's lots of limitations, and then there's more different kinds of, more interactive content that tends to be lower fidelity like.

Texting or you know, forums or things like that. And it feels like what I'm hearing you say is that these two can really come together and you can have real time interactive video move at scale. It can be updated at scale, right? If a company has a new policy, they can exactly type it in and suddenly all the videos can be updated to to match, which is a huge pain for anybody who, who does video libraries.

It's like excruciating to have to review these. I think 

[01:26:17] Scott Nadzan: that is one thing that's hard to quantify, but you only feel that as a video editor when you start using one of these tools, and I will say this seriously, is when somebody says, Hey Scott, you made a mistake in this one part of the script. Right? Or, you know, we really would like that person to say X, not Y.

And then you alls you're doing is changing words. Just like you're changing words in a Word document or Google slot document. That's magical. That's a magical feeling. 'cause you just saved yourself hours of times. It's usually not minutes. It's usually hours of times of going backwards and making sure lights, camera, action was done properly.

Everything sounds the same. So yeah, you're spot on right there. 

[01:26:52] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, but it also has to be simple and usable, right? It can be sci-fi and exciting and feel really interactive and, and really next generation. But it also has to integrate with your existing workflows, integrate with your tools, be simple to use that you don't need a huge training course or, or lots of hours of, of prep to be able to do it.

So I'm excited for what Penopto is doing with, uh, with the acquisition of Eli, the Gen AI video studio, because I feel like you have been in. Video for education, you know, right up at the front of it for quite a long time. And I think it makes a lot of sense and it's exciting to hear that you're thinking really proactively about what video's gonna look like, you know, in the future.

[01:27:26] Scott Nadzan: Yeah. No, thank you. We are really excited. We've been excited since, uh, 2007, and I think the next two to three years are gonna be extremely exciting when you get into seeing where video's gonna go and seeing where our, you know, the students and the staff members that are coming into these classrooms and boardrooms, what they expect and how they expect to learn on the go and flexibly and, and again, be engaged.

Right now it's like we're engagement farming, you know, using video and it's not easy. So that's gonna be a very interesting challenge, but there's gonna be a lot of great solutions out there that, you know, help us do that. And I, and I know Panopto is gonna be one of them. 

[01:27:58] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, absolutely. I haven't heard that phrase Engagement farming, is that like a social media phrase?

You know, 

[01:28:04] Scott Nadzan: I think 

[01:28:04] Alex Sarlin: like 

[01:28:04] Scott Nadzan: it's one of these things where if you look at, I, I watch a lot of sports TV and, you know, these anchors that yell and scream. And honestly, I always think like they're just engagement farmers. They're just trying to say something that keeps people engaged. And, and honestly, as a educator, sometimes in a classroom, I teach a class, I feel like I just one day was teaching.

I'm like, you know, I'm, I'm trying to find these sound bites that get students to look up, right? Because they are not used to sitting and, and watching and listening for an hour and a half or three hours. And I think as somebody like myself who does a lot of social selling, I feel like yes, I'm an engagement farmer no matter what I'm doing, whether it's teaching or teaching somebody about Panopto or Eli and, you know, I want people to look up and, and, and in the end I would say all this AI stuff is great and we talked about this, but I also believe people buy from people.

And I think, you know, that's part of our job as sellers and marketers is getting people to look up, engaging them. You know, people are still gonna help do that. 

[01:28:53] Alex Sarlin: This is Scott Nadin. He's the Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategic Communications at Panopto, which is just integrated Eli's Gen AI video studio.

Thanks so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. Thank you for the opportunity. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.