Week in Edtech 6/18/25 (Part 2): Featuring Special Guests Yesi Sevilla of Chalk and Ed Buckley & Marlee Strawn of Scholar Education

For this Week in EdTech Part 2, Alex Sarlin interviews two visionary founders tackling early education and classroom AI from the ground up—with a focus on teacher support, inclusive innovation, and practical AI implementation.

[00:02:12] Yesi Sevilla, CEO of CHALK on why early education must start with supporting teachers
[00:30:55] Ed Buckley and Marlee Strawn, Co-founders of Scholar Education on how AI-powered dog bots support students and teachers

🎧 Missed Part 1? Go back to hear the latest edtech headlines from AI to college guidance gaps.

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Chapters

• 2:43 Yesi Sevilla, CEO of CHALK on why early education must start with supporting teachers
• 31:49 Ed Buckley and Marlee Strawn, Co-founders of Scholar Education on how AI-powered dog bots support students and teachers

Transcript

[00:00:00] Yesi Sevilla: So if we can really affect children's ability to be proficient in those skills, the focus needs to be on the educator. And so that's what we do. We're focusing on the educator to improve their skills to make the learning environment for three to six year olds optimal. Because if we don't catch them at that early age, they're not really going to catch up to other learners and therefore be proficient.

[00:00:29] Marlee Strawn: My goal from day one with Scholar education is to make sure that we're leveraging data analytics and insights. So not just where do they struggle and what the outcome of the assessment or the conversations with Baxter Bott, but. What can we do? So actionable steps. So that's really what we do, is we'll provide things like what were the most commonly asked questions today.

Here's a summary of each student's conversation with Baxter and how they performed on every formative assessment, and here's what to do next. 

[00:01:00] Ed Buckley: But by building it into one platform, we realized we could not only. Keep that data on the journey, but actually start to use it right, and have kind of more of a synergistic effect.

So that's how we see the particular problem we're solving here, which is trying to do as many actions that were normally done by multiple point solutions in one place, because then you don't have that. Data loophole where they just fall into like, you know, never, never land. And so we're always looking to how to solve that problem.

[00:01:33] 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 

[00:01:46] Ben Kornell: here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod. Check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.

And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod

[00:02:12] Alex Sarlin: for our deep dive this week. Week and week in EdTech. We're here with Yesenia Svia. She's a dynamic TEDx speaker and a seasoned leader with over 20 years of experience in EdTech global biotech healthcare consulting, and higher education. We're known for her strategic vision and global business acumen.

Yesenia brings a unique blend of industry insight. Multilingual fluency and a deep commitment to inclusive innovation. Her ability to drive transformation, foster collaboration, and lead with purpose makes her an invaluable force in shaping the future of business. She's also the founder of Chalk, which is a brand new chalk coaching, a brand new ed tech company.

Welcome to podcast. 

[00:02:50] Yesi Sevilla: Thank you so much for having me here this morning, Alex. I really appreciate it. 

[00:02:55] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I'm happy to talk to you. So first off, you have a very varied background. You've been in ed tech, but also in healthcare. You've also worked in biotech. From your cross industry perspective, how would you define where we are at with ed Tech in 2025?

It's such a crazy time. How would you define ed tech right now and how do you feel like it's evolved in your time with it doing consulting and ed tech? 

[00:03:16] Yesi Sevilla: Yeah, so it's a, that's a very good question. And so I think that having that sort of really different background approach for me, the through line is innovation, right?

And so when we look at the different industries that need to embrace innovation, for me, the industries that you described in my background are the ones that I think are taking really good use of innovation or really need to take good use of innovation. Now and in the future, and the one that I think people have focused on, but only I think as a catchphrase, is EdTech, right?

So I think when we define EdTech for a lot of people, what comes to mind immediately is what is some new interface that could be put in front of a child to teach them how to learn. And I think that EdTech is so much more than that. I think EdTech should be anything that improves the learning environment for anyone that's learning.

And I think when we think of learning, I heard this phrase earlier this year, it's stuck with me, which is learning is pre-K through gray. That is the learning lifecycle that we're in. Most of us can remember when we didn't have every single tool in our cell phone or how to relearn how to do banking, or how quickly we now went from paying with cash to paying with a credit card, to now tapping our phone.

To what I did at an airport recently, which is use my palm to get into a convenience kiosk to get some water, and then walk out with no other transaction. So knowing that that's now the environment of learning, EdTech should represent any innovation that uses technology to connect learners. To that next piece of information, that next process or that next career.

And so that's what I think ed tech should be defined as. I don't know if we're there yet. 

[00:05:23] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's a great point. I've wrestled with this myself. You know, we've done this EdTech podcast for years and one of the things that we, that I wrestle with personally is, you know, would you consider something like YouTube EdTech?

It is the single first stop for learners of almost any age, especially Gen Z. When they want to learn something online, they often go directly to YouTube, or you could even say to to TikTok or Instagram. Most people wouldn't define those as EdTech because it's not their core functionality, but it is incredibly, it's used for education all the time, and I think that sort of informal versus formal split as well as the, as you mentioned, the sort of expanding age of of learners where they're using technology for educational purposes is just allowing EdTech to sort of expand and expand its scope, if we wanna define it that way.

You mentioned that ed tech is often defined. Student first, and that is definitely not what you're doing with chalk coaching. I think that's really interesting. Tell us about what chalk coaching is and why you're using, why you're, you're really considering the educators as your core audience. 

[00:06:22] Yesi Sevilla: So when we talk about ed tech and how it defines, so if you're, if you're always considering sort of the learner centric as your technology, you're missing out on a very important, um, part of the equation, right?

So if you're always really, really learner focused, you're missing out on that human component of education. So everyone is really fascinated with ai. I am too, right? Our world is surrounded by ai, but there is a human component to education, and what we know from science is that 90% of our brain is fixed in the ages of.

And so those synapses that have to be built for all of us to do all of the cool things after pre-K and after kindergarten that leads to all of the cool learning later is really set in this pre-K through, through six years old. That part of learning really happens between a child. An educator, we don't do enough with those educators in terms of supporting them, in terms of educating them in professional development ways.

So Chalk is a tech platform. So it's a software, it's a SaaS platform that has, its. Entire origin. Its roots based on scientific long-term research on how human brains develop to really improve and foster self-regulation, reading proficiency, math proficiency, and language proficiency. So if we can really affect children's ability to be proficient in those skills.

The focus needs to be on the educator, and so that's what we do. We're focusing on the educator to improve their skills. To make the learning environment for three to six year olds optimal because if we don't catch them at that early age, they're not really going to catch up to other learners and therefore be proficient all the way through gray.

To learn where technology's going. And we're in this figi revolution, right where the physical and the digital are interacting in a way at lightning speeds. And so we're putting a large group of our, of our global population at a disadvantage. And so how do we fix that? It's the three to six year olds, but it's the educator that's making the impact.

So putting AI type technology in front of a 6-year-old. Cool, but it's the educator that's gonna make the difference. 

[00:08:51] Alex Sarlin: And so you're doing this through classroom observation tools, through professional development platforms. Tell us how Chalk is approaching that. Supporting the educator of young, you know, pre-K to kindergarten basically, or first grade.

[00:09:04] Yesi Sevilla: Right, and so what it is was the long arm research was done at Vanderbilt University and through some grants with the National Science Foundation, a platform was built. It's a software platform. It's all web based, which is fantastic because there's no downloading software, there's no hardware, it's all.

Basically access through the web portal. You basically go to our website, you log in, and it is classroom observation, which is already occurring in in classrooms or should occur in classrooms as often as you need to. But it's real time feedback on observing a classroom and giving real observation feedback to educators in a way that they can improve, right?

So it's nine practices that when put in place. Impact directly students' outcomes. So it is touching the student in a way that improves their outcomes, but it's not, how many times do kids wash their hands in kindergarten? It's how much time you spend learning. It's how much time do children spend in constructive talking versus just listening.

It's how much time in the classroom is spent with positive reinforcement versus corrective reinforcement. It's the nine practices that through science, we know really impacts student outcome. So stop waiting for third grade assessment and start really impacting the younger, the younger generation. 

[00:10:26] Alex Sarlin: It makes a lot of sense and you know, one of your core approaches is you're ensure that innovation is happening in an inclusive way and that you're supporting these early education teachers in diverse settings, in multilingual settings.

As we know, the landscape of both students and educators is a hugely varied in the United States, you know, many different languages, many different cultures, many different relationships represented. How do you approach that when you're dealing with these, you know, very. Intense human relationships between teachers and young students?

[00:10:57] Yesi Sevilla: Well, I think that's a question for, for leaders in ed tech across any platform, right? So not just chalk, it's like any leader in ed tech needs to look at how do you ensure inclusive innovation and how do you make sure that whatever platform you're building, whatever technology that you're, you're looking at is, are you thinking about inclusive innovation?

And so I think taking a step back, what do I think inclusive innovation means? So for me, inclusive innovation is, I. Any value added change that's implemented to improve any human experience, right? So if you take that as a definition for inclusive innovation, then when we look at ed tech, we're looking to improve an educational human experience, right?

And so in the chalk sense, when we're looking at the educational environment of a three to 6-year-old, and we're looking to improve self-regulation, math proficiency, language proficiency. Whether we're talking about English as a first language or a mixed classroom, and when I mean a mixed classroom, I mean neurodiverse students, students with a second language, that's their primary language.

Then what are the practices that we can help teachers become proficient in? That means in a mixed classroom, they know how to capture all of those things, and maybe what it becomes is learning how to take a classroom and instead of everyone being in a row in little chairs, maybe put them in groups. And still reinforcing all of the things that they need to learn in positive ways so that your neurodiverse children are getting attention.

And your second language, English is a second language, students are getting attention, but these are some human practices that you're reinforcing so that it's inclusive, right? And then knowing that in different regions you're faced with different human populations. So human centricity is a part of inclusive innovation.

And part of that means also when I talk about ed tech and talk about the educators, that's part of inclusive innovation. Stop trying to create ed tech for a trend or ed tech because you think it would be cool to see robots in front of a classroom versus what do our teachers actually need? Are we doing the right kind of discovery?

So human centric design for education means are we doing the right kind of. Human-centered discovery with our teachers. Has anyone actually asked our teachers what they need, or are we forcing solutions into educational systems? Because we think it would be cool to have every child have an AI computer screen in front of them.

Now, it doesn't mean that that might not be the solution, but maybe we should design it with the teacher so that we know exactly how that interface should work. 

[00:13:36] Alex Sarlin: I've been hearing that, that a lot recently, which is totally valid. This feeling of how can we ensure that EdTech, we just did a, a webinar just a couple weeks ago about co-design in, in, in EdTech and how you can design solutions from the beginning in conjunction with students or teachers or whoever your, your core audience is, and it, it's such an important idea.

I have a hypothesis and I'm curious what you think about it, which is that education like healthcare is such a complicated ecosystem and I think one of the issues is. Often the decision points for entering a school system for CHOC or or any other ed tech platform, it often doesn't actually go through the teacher.

It often goes sort of a above and around, and teachers are are not always, and this is not how it should be, but teachers are not always at the center of that decision making process. So I think what ends up happening is that the educators, even though everybody wants, there's lots of reasons that the educators should be at the center of this process, but from a sort of.

Systemic procurement, financial perspective, they're not at the center of the process. Do you feel that, and do you think that's something that we should sort of work on changing? 

[00:14:41] Yesi Sevilla: Absolutely. I feel that. I see that and we should absolutely change it. And I can tell you from a real life experience, I can tell you that right here in Tennessee, the decision on what kind of observation tool preschools have been mandated to use was made by the Department of Education in Tennessee, and no teachers or administrators or principals were consulted in that decision.

I mean, that's, that's the fact of the matter. And so we need to make that change. But the way we're gonna make that change is for innovators and people with solutions to speak up louder, to show proof. And like one of the things that Chalk is going to be doing for this next academic year is low cost. Cho.

We are going to be launching, and I'm proud to say it on your podcast first, we are going to start launching chalk for a dollar a user. And what we're gonna do is to get out there to show the science, to show the efficacy, and to gather data that says if you are going to really affect academic outcome of students, you need to start early and you need to do what works for the human brain of the human child earlier.

If you wanna affect third grade student outcomes, you need to start at four years old. You need to start earlier, but we don't have access to that necessarily before pre-K. So if you want to affect third grade. Call me in your preschools and I will give it to you for a dollar a user and we will build the data together to show that there is no reason to not be doing the right thing.

[00:16:15] Alex Sarlin: That is a very appealing price point. And is is sort of your theory of action there, that by lowering the price so much you allow. The decisions to feel like no-brainer you does, you don't have to have individual teachers sort of ring the bell and saying, I really want this. Why, why am I not using it? Or vice versa.

To have top-down decisions like the one you just mentioned where, you know, an ed tech company goes straight to a procurement and they say, okay, let's do it, and then the teachers have to sort of buy in later and they weren't part of the decision. Is the idea just to like it's both sort of make it just, yeah, please tell me.

Yeah. 

[00:16:46] Yesi Sevilla: It's both because in a lot of instances when you've got a department. Saying, I'm gonna make the decision, but I need to be a cost conscious decision. I don't want them, especially in the next academic year, to have to choose between school lunches and tech. So I'm gonna say, you don't have to make that decision, here you go.

It's a dollar. And then for teachers who have to use the mandated tool, but want a tool that actually makes change, and they say, well, I've got a parent that's willing to give me a dollar. I'm gonna say, okay, if your parent sponsors you for a dollar. Here's our technology. You can use the mandated technology for the minimum amount of work that you need.

Here's my tool for a dollar for the rest of the year to, to really get the data that shows what you need to do to impact the students. And I'll help you build the data together. That's fantastic. 'cause our data will, it belongs to the teachers and so they'll be able to show actual effective change. 

[00:17:42] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.

And, and, and I can imagine in a, in a kindergarten classroom, you may be talking about, you know, 15 students, so the teacher and parents can come to the administration and say, we, we've already funded this, so now we just need approval and data approval and all of these things. By sort of moving the, the money out of the way, I hopefully that can really smooth the process and get, get powerful ed tech in front of the Yeah, 

[00:18:03] Yesi Sevilla: and, and the, by moving the focus onto.

The teacher's practices and de-identifying the student data, we're not actually capturing the private data of the student, and so those don't become data points that are necessarily sensitive. And so on chalk, we don't capture the sensitive student data. And so that de-identification of data then becomes very powerful because you still have quantitative data, but you don't have student name, you don't have student image, you don't have any of that.

[00:18:36] Alex Sarlin: Yep. Which is obviously, you know, a big blocker to adoption in, in many districts for good reason because there's all these policies in place to protect student privacy, but it also becomes this maze to, for, to run through. Yeah. I wanna ask you, we have a few minutes left and this is so in, I mean, it's really interesting.

I, I love hearing you talk about how to sort of break in into this space in a different. Through a different lens and try to sort of allow the teachers to be central to the decision making process. It feels really important. But one other thing that's interesting, we've talked to many, many, many founders on this podcast, all different backgrounds and stripes.

But I think, you know, I'd love to ask you about your experience coming into the ed tech field. You've been in a lot of different spaces. As a female founder, and I'm curious about your, how, what your experience has been in terms of talking to districts and and customers, what it's been in terms of talking to investors.

What do you think that the EdTech ecosystem can do to con, to support and continue to really accelerate our support for female founders in the EdTech space? 

[00:19:31] Yesi Sevilla: So. Two-sided question, right? One is female founder and one is EdTech. So female founder, we get less than 1% of the funds, so please fund female founders.

We get no funding. We have to overperform over, prove ourselves, and to the point where I get the most gracious, beautiful no in the history of no. I win pitch competitions. I win judges prizes. I, I have a giant check somewhere here in the room for $10,000. But I get told I can't fund you. 'cause my check size starts at 2 million and you're only asking 500,000.

I get told. So I, so then I say, okay, well give me 2 million. And they're like, well no, 'cause then the valuation would be off, so I can't give you 2 million. So it's ridiculous how much little funding a company like ours is been able to raise because we're debt free and we've already built our technology with grants and I'm like, what?

I'm debt free and the 2.8 million needed to build our technology is debt free because I got grants for it. I don't understand. So yeah, women need to be funded. Thanks. Uh, and uh, I am wearing the necklace for a reason. And then you talk about EdTech, and again, 

[00:20:45] Alex Sarlin: you should describe the necklace for those listening on 

[00:20:48] Yesi Sevilla: the podcast.

Yeah. So I have a necklace that says, and, and it, it's an amazing necklace that is part of the hype women movement. And it's all about all of the things that we can be. That are inclusive, right? So I'm a woman and a founder and a CEO and an ed tech and a mom, and all of those things, right? So we can be all things and other things.

And I have a chronic disease and all of those things, right? So how do we build ed tech that helps students? And the educator, right? How do we build software as a service? So this is a SaaS platform that at the current moment doesn't have an AI component, but we have. The plans for the AI component once we have data at scale to prove out the theory, right?

But right now everyone is so excited about EdTech that can produce 10 times the ROI in four years that they look at my platform and they say, oh, it's not gonna make a 10 x in four years. And my answer to them is Right. But my, my. Primary competitor is a $60 million a year company. So I'm not sure what 10 x in four years means to you.

Right. So the biggest hurdles that we face, I think right now is in ed tech is this misconception that doing good and doing the right thing for students and educators is uninvestible. That's the barrier that I'm facing right now because I think people wanna chase, investability and sexiness and not the right answer for the student and the educator.

[00:22:34] Alex Sarlin: Very, very well said. And I think that you're, you're have your finger on something very important in the EdTech space. I mean, we're coming off about a decade more, a little more than a decade of really significant venture investment in, in EdTech, and I think there's a case to be made, and I think you're, you're, you're saying it very clearly that some of the.

Tropes of venture investing, the 10 x returns, the $2 million checks, and there's no reason to do anything smaller. The, you know, focus on growth rather than impact in many cases, just because that's how it's baked in. There's some issues there, there's some, uh, mismatches in those different ways of seeing the world.

And I, I think you're, you're making a very good case for it.

Get past this moment. Like, you know, you, you mentioned grant funding as obviously that's another way for startups and, uh, ed tech companies that are trying to make a big difference and do what you're trying to do to get funding. But do you see a world in which there will be a angel investors? Is it different types of government grants?

Is there a way for, is it outcome space contracting where a school could start doing things for a low cost and only when it starts working, does the money need to start coming in? I mean, I know this, this is like the, the trillion dollar question, but I'm curious how you think about it. 

[00:23:46] Yesi Sevilla: Well, I think a couple of things is is having investors be more inclusive as well, right?

Having more people understand that they can be investors. So I really, really like this idea of growing the type of investors out there. So I really love this idea of having more inclusive investors, right? So having VC firms and family wealth firms and crowd investment and people becoming part of.

Investment consortiums, but I also think that these VC firms that want this 10 x return in four years, they need to really look at the world we're in right now, the economy that we're in right now, and think how do we get away from I need 10 x in four years and more. I need stable investment with a sustainable business, and that we need to start looking at.

Is this something that creates legacy funding? Does this create a legacy business that is sustainable, that creates outcome, and that creates trust in a product? Am I solving a problem? Is this true innovation or is this a flash bang? And I think that. More money invested in sustainable businesses that actually are innovations and less flash bang creates more sustainable economic growth.

And I think that somehow we went away from, I'm building businesses to, I'm building wealth. And I think that when you build a business that is sustainable, you can do well while doing good. That actually turns into longer wealth and greater wealth over time. And so I don't know where we got away from that, but I think we need to, we need to get back to that.

[00:25:23] Alex Sarlin: Well, I think it was borrowed from the consumer tech sector and other, other, you know, other parts of mm-hmm. The investment economy and this idea of. Huge size returns for some part of your portfolio if they break through that, that it didn't originate in the, in the education space that originated in, you know, a, a very different part of the tech world.

And I think we're starting to see some of the cracks show. I mean, this, this has been a really refreshing conversation. I really appreciate Yeah, of course. Your perspective as somebody who those this podcast to know, I am a sucker for the flash shiny.

But I think there's something very powerful about I, I know there's something very powerful about sort of getting to these core tenets of ed tech. You know, solve real problems. Think of educators as your partners, and you know that you're not doing something to them. You're doing something for them and with them.

Yeah, 

[00:26:09] Yesi Sevilla: and look, AI is awesome. I use it all the time. But the number of people that are going to be able to interface with all the cool AI things that we're building is going to diminish over time. If human brains aren't developed in the three to six year range, so who is going to work on these things?

Who is gonna innovate and who is gonna be the future workforce if we have more and more people in the population that are illiterate? According to the World Bank, 70% of the world population at the age of 10 right now, 10 year olds right now are in learning poverty. So who is the workforce that will innovate in the future?

And how much of the world are we willing to subsidize in the future? 

[00:26:53] Alex Sarlin: Yes, and we're at this time of enormous change and everybody feels it now. I think that some of these, I. Fundamental questions about how do we prepare our society to survive and thrive. Exactly. You know, the technology goes in one direction, but how do we maintain and, and improve our core educational systems?

[00:27:11] Yesi Sevilla: I've, I actually did a pitch to some investors where I said, look, I'm gonna be honest with you. I honestly don't care if you care about kids. But I know you care about money at the economy and future workforces. So if you want to continue to invest in innovation, the people who will be in innovating in the future have to come from somewhere.

And the 17 year cycles of new workforce entering into the market begin at the age of three. If you want people that will pitch to you in 17 years. Where are they coming from? What country will they be born in and who will be teaching them? I'd like to know. 

[00:27:51] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, maybe you could do a mapping of your, your nine core skills in your curriculum to how they're gonna support a future worker.

It's, it's a really interesting way to look at it. 

[00:28:00] Yesi Sevilla: And when we did the research that came out of Vanderbilt looked at US Portugal, Sweden, and South Africa. 

[00:28:05] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:28:05] Yesi Sevilla: So we kind of know what countries are doing a lot of these practices. And so if you don't start investing in that human education. Where is your workforce going to come from?

And I think we've already seen workforce deserts popping up all over the world and even in this country. And so it doesn't matter if you love kids, I don't care if you love kids. I mean, you should. But if you don't, 

[00:28:34] Alex Sarlin: but I mean, I, but I think it's a fair, you know, you can, you can come at the problem from different angles.

Exactly. Just, we just covered something this week about how the majority of high schoolers say they don't feel prepared for post-graduation. There's just a report, and not only that, but. More than half of hiring managers are saying that recent graduates are unprepared for their workforce and, and many of them are reluctant to hire from the Gen Z cohort because of excessive phone use and poor this 

[00:29:02] Yesi Sevilla: reation.

[00:29:03] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And the, the sort of first generation of, of social media kids is now hitting the workforce in, in bulk, and we're seeing some really interesting things happen. So I, I think there's a lot, there's a lot of truth to what you're saying. Um, I wish I had more, I wish I had more time. You should come back and talk.

Yeah, we'll, we'll talk more in in our future conversation anytime. It's really interesting. I feel like this is, these are some angles that we don't usually think about in this way on the podcast and I. Thank so much for being here. She's the founder of Coaching and a TED speaker with over 20 years in EdTech, biotech Healthcare Consulting and higher ed.

Thank so being with us. 

[00:29:42] Yesi Sevilla: Thank. 

[00:29:43] Alex Sarlin: For our deep dive this week in week in EdTech, we are here with the co-founders of Scholar Education, which does really awesome AI platform for schools. This is Ed Buckley, PhD and Marley str. They're the co-founders of Scholar. Uh, I'll give a quick bio. So Ed is a serial entrepreneur.

He's co-founded Scholar Education, which support more than five teachers, helping reduce workload and person instruction also, and CE. Which was acquired by Peloton, and he leads AI development at Sword Health, which is using technology for personalized medicine, personalized care. He has a PhD in digital health behavior, and Marley Strong is a co-founder and head of education at Scholar Education where she leads.

Development of AI tools. She's a former teacher and a founding principal nearly two decades in education. She was also named a 2024 Ed Safe AI Alliance woman in AI Fellow, and was one of the AI show at ASU GVS 2025 leading women in ai. I was there for that photo shoot that was totally amazing. Such an amazing group of of leaders there, her TED X talk.

Redefining learning for the next generation explores how AI can empower and not educators. Both of you. Welcome. 

[00:30:55] Ed Buckley: Thank you for having us. 

[00:30:56] Marlee Strawn: Yes, thank you so much. Appreciate it. 

[00:30:58] Alex Sarlin: So first off, let's talk about the dogs. This is sort of one of your, your core, one of the, the sort of touchstone concepts behind, uh, scholar education.

Uh, Marley, lemme start with you about this actually. What is the story? You have two dogs. They're beadles apparently, that sort of represent some of the AI that you do in the classroom. It's Baxter and Professor Bruce. Tell us about the dogs and what, how they work inside scholar education. 

[00:31:24] Marlee Strawn: Yeah, so our entire platform is centered around the two bernadoodle.

So Professor Bruce is the teacher assistant, and Baxter bot is the student tutor. They work together to create personalized learning for students. I'll let Ed tell you a little bit about the origin because they are his dogs, but essentially what they do is they work together to create a really personalized experience First.

Students. So Professor Bruce will help teachers with lesson planning and data analytics where Baxter Bot provides the tailored support based on their academic learning profile. 

[00:31:56] Ed Buckley: Well, it's really a good thing that we decided to end up using both of them, because actually at day one we only had Baxter bot and it was on the student side, and Bruce was getting jealous.

So, you know, luckily he helped our business model out by helping the platform get more valuable. And the thought was always, look, we wanted to have a student and teacher assistant side that pushed the flywheel of success on both, right? The interactions with both populations, using that underlining data to help the other side and AI is scary.

It can be overwhelming, it can just, A lot of people don't know where to start, and we thought, you know what? Everybody, well, almost everybody loves dogs and Beadles are certainly cute and they're very friendly. Bruce and Baxter think every single person they ever meet are their best friends. And the thought was actually twofold, which is, well, let's make them the face from the assistant perspective.

And A, that would give them some personality. So when the students are talking to B. He is like Wolf, Wolf and Paw Princes. And he literally, you know, he acts like a dog and it would help give a consistent assistant across all of our schools, right? So you have a lot of platforms that are like create your own, and there's really no consistency.

There is no comradery or sharing like, oh, there's backer bot, right? Whereas all of our schools see that and they know, and Marley will always tell you these stories, like the kid's, like that's the talking dog, or that's the robot dog. And the other thing was, I knew we would be able to bring the dogs. Into schools, right?

We've always wanted to make sure that we were more than just an AI company or just the tech companies. We wanted to be partners with the schools, with the districts, with the states. And whether it's educating the teachers through new courses, whether it's educating the kids in classrooms with how they can leverage ai, you know, we wanted to just be able to have reasons to get into the classroom.

And so if you follow us on social media, you'll see. The dogs go out to the schools all the time and the kids love them. I, one of the kids was asking if they could take them home the other day, and so it was just cool. It gives us, I think, a different feel, a different perspective and a different energy than everyone else was out there.

And the reason I'll, I'll stop talking after this, is like Baxter being the original one. The reason he's Baxter bought was we were filming an educational video in space and we made Baxter an astronaut and people loved it. So that's why Baxter bought, still is an astronaut to this day. It's a. So throw back to our origins and it's been great and.

[00:34:28] Alex Sarlin: It's a tried and true strategy in ed tech. You know, we have Duo the Owl for Duolingo that BrainPOP has had characters for many years that, that the students get to know and love. And I, I think it's, I think it makes a lot of sense. As you say, it's a great way to have consistency because you have a lot of AI teacher assistants, you have a lot of AI tutoring bots that are out there.

This is a pretty a rich space, but they often sort of recreate themselves over and over with every conversation or with every new school. So having consistent characters, I. Is is a smart branding idea. So let's talk about what, what scholar actually does. Mar, lemme go back to you on this. You are the education.

You've been in education for a long time. Let's talk about the teacher side first. So scholar isn't just about saving teachers time, although I'm sure it does that, that takes administrative load off of them, but it's really designed around insights and data. Tell us about what. And I guess it's, or Bruce, that side of the house, the teacher side of the tool, how it uses data to sort of help teachers differentiate how to help them understand their classroom, help them be more effective teachers.

[00:35:28] Marlee Strawn: Yeah, so I think going back to when I first started using generative AI and really helps give detail on the decision here, which I was a principal at the high school that I founded, and I started using chat GPT mostly because my teachers started freaking out because they were, some of their students were cheating using it.

So I'm like, what is this new tool? And we're December, 2020, so.

That there's, there's definitely gonna be a time saving element here because of the fact that it generate text so easily. So therefore you can anything. But I really started to think about the most challenging tasks. That always to me goes back to data and whether it's paperwork, whether it's analyzing data to support your students.

So from day one, it was really important for us at Scholar to not just go from an efficiency standpoint because I think that that. Is a general use case for AI in general, for every industry, regardless. So AI saving teachers time, obviously that's how you kind of get into the door and sell the teachers on how AI can impact them.

But really, I, I think the true use case for, for AI and education and how to make it really meaningful is leveraging data to provide insights to the teacher on how to support each student. And that's really where we go back to like that personalization aspect and focusing on some of the things like there's no lack of data.

I think we can agree with that. There's been, there's tons of data available, but teachers either don't have the time, or let's be honest, they're not data scientists, so they don't know what to do with the data. So my goal from day one education. We're leveraging data analytics and insights. So not just where do they struggle and what the outcome of the assessment or the conversations with Baxter bot, but what can we do?

So actionable steps. So that's really what we do, is we'll provide things like what were the most commonly asked questions today. Here's a summary of each student's conversation with Baxter and how perform on every formative assessment, and here's what to do next. 

[00:37:45] Ed Buckley: I was just gonna say, Marley, are you saying the hard problems are not using AI to make you and your dogs Jedi Knights?

I mean that's, I, that's what I thought the use of AI is for. 

[00:37:58] Marlee Strawn: That's a fun use case, for sure. 

[00:38:00] Alex Sarlin: Well, ed, I wanted to bring you in and you've done your, your work with personalized medicine. You've, you work in personalized health, I think you think a lot in about using data to create. Individualized care. How do you think about the role of data?

I like how Marley is saying, you know, teachers aren't data scientists, but they have this huge suite of EdTech tools. It's even bigger now that AI is around and they have to make sense of all of this data that's coming in, you know, this flood of data that comes in around their students. Where do you see the value in turning that flood of data into meaningful insights and actions for teachers?

[00:38:37] Ed Buckley: I think whoever gets that right or the groups that get that right kind of win the AI and education war as it were happening right now. Because every new tool is creating an exponential proliferation of data, which is only going to make it even harder than it has been over the last several years for teachers.

And so the tool that can ingest data and give the best, most valuable. Actionable steps for teachers, administrators, states, and students and parents will win. Right? And the original problem as we were looking at the landscape was, gosh, it's just a flood of point solutions. There's a point solution for teacher to parent updates.

There's a point solution to do this. And I was like, you're signing in to like six different things or managing seven different tabs. And as an outsider to education, I was like, oh my gosh. And so we knew there would be an opportunity to consolidate. If you could build lots of point solution things into one area.

And then there were these gaps between the natural point solutions where data would fall off and not get used. 'cause they were separate companies. Right. But by building it into one platform, we realized we could not only. Keep that data on the journey, but actually start to use it, right, and have kind of more of a synergistic effect.

So that's how we see the particular problem we're solving here, which is trying to do as many actions that were normally done by multiple point solutions in one place. Because then you don't have that data loophole where they just fall into like, you know, never, never land. And so we're always looking to how to solve that problem.

And one thing that. Always enjoyed me and Marley's conversations on this topic, which is when you hear personalized learning, Marley rolls her eyes a little bit because how overused it's been by groups who don't actually do it. And when you are someone who's like really gotten your hands into how you can unleash AI to be like an amazing assistant for you, right?

Gather information, digest information, give you a handful of things, and have you be the decision maker. You start to realize like there's some amazing things that we can do for our teachers and students, and so that's what we want to be. We want to be someone who's. Actually able to use the word personalized learning, not someone who uses it as a tagline.

And it's just like, oh, hand wavy ai. You know that. So even us, we're not there yet. We're gonna get there. And I hope that when we get there, it's the most single valuable thing that schools, teachers, parents, and, you know, everyone in that ecosystem is, is proud to use. 

[00:41:13] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that you're preaching to the choir here.

I have been complaining about personalized. I, I, you know, I use it myself sometimes, but really I have been leading a sort of charge on this podcast to move from this concept of personalized, which is extremely overloaded. It doesn't necessarily have a lot of meaning. It can mean something incredible. But frankly, anytime you ask an LLM anything, it's gonna give you a personalized answer because that's just how it works.

It's silly. Yeah. 

[00:41:37] Ed Buckley: If I could real quick on that, one of our approaches, and not to give like the secret sauce away, but in some of my previous businesses, we got to work with the partner, which was usually health insurance company, to know as much about the member as possible. So from the first time we actually met the member and they would say, hi, I'm Marley.

We'd be like, we know because we've got all this information on you. You're just confirming who you are. But we already know a bunch of stuff. Right. So that was something that Marley's been really adamant about and I've seen previously work really well, is when the student comes to us and says, Hey, I'm Alex.

That's more of a, yeah, we're just confirming who you are because we know about you from other data that we're pulling. So that day one, when you show up, Alex, we already have a personalized approach for you, and that's really the way that we've been trying to approach this problem. 

[00:42:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I just think the terminology could be more sophisticated.

I've been making a pitch for precision learning. That is my personal what I think precision learning is a better way to frame it than personalized. Partially just 'cause it doesn't have the baggage of personalized. But for people outside of the space, personalized is wonderful. It's interesting. So Mar Marlee, I wanna ask you, you, you did this Ted talk about how educators should talk about how AI can empower and not replace educators.

And we've already talked about how integrity concerns that, you know, for a lot of educators in the classroom and even students, the sort of number one thing they think of when they think of AI is. Integrity, cheating, plagiarism, and I feel like hopefully, certainly within the ed tech field, we have a lot of other thoughts about what AI can do than that, but I think for the two of you spending a lot of time in classrooms, a lot of time with your 5,000 students, right?

You have over 5,000 students and teachers all, all over using the platform. I'm curious. How you help them sort of move their mind past these sort of negative headlines to the real power that is there. You have this AI Champion course as part of your training where teachers can learn to sort of champion AI and tell their story to others.

Tell us about how you, how you sort of pass over some of those. Concerns that people have about ai, which it's not that they're not real, but they're such a tiny part of the story and start to see the power of data, the power of differentiation, the power of administrative workload, the power of all the things that could happen.

[00:43:55] Marlee Strawn: Yeah, so you know, as a principal, obviously I sat on the other side of the table of ed tech companies purchasing them, deciding which ones to use, going through the implementation process. And I have to be honest that one of my biggest takeaways from implementing Scholar in schools for the first time is that.

We are not only just teaching them how to use a new tech tool, but we're actually teaching them how to use AI in general. Right? A lot of them have zero context and therefore, so we have to really go into this with a partnership with all of our schools and we have to educate them on how the technology works, not just how our platform works, because I feel like if you know what a large language model is and engineering is.

You'll get a lot more out of our tool, but any tool as you are working with them. So we spend a lot of time, uh, partnering with our schools, which means that we spend time at the beginning of onboarding, teaching them just about generative AI and the evolution of AI in general and kind of taking the fear out.

I'm sure you've heard many example of how AI has been used in the classroom. I could name a list of tools that we've been using to give students assessments and then make recommendations on next steps and things like that. In fact, most teachers are using their cell phone every day that has AI built into it.

So we do a lot of demystifying at the beginning, but it's really honestly about educating when you kind of unveil what generative AI is, how. My favorite thing to do is just to show them at the very beginning how quickly they can do some of their most tedious tasks. They get bought in and then, then I can evolve to, okay, well let's talk about scholar education.

But I, I really focus on building a partnership. That's why we built the AI Champion course. We actually have a AI champion course for students.

Putting AI in the hands of students, they didn't even know how the technology works. So we actually, I would say we were one of the first to unveil an AI literacy course because we did that for all of our students and our pilot, and then we made it free on our website. And essentially what we do is we're providing ongoing training and support for the, for the schools that we're partnered with because know that part of our relationship with them is not just.

Using our tool, but how to leverage AI in general. 

[00:46:32] Alex Sarlin: I totally agree, and I feel like that's a, a really important realization that, uh, the entire ed tech world is sort of having, is that people in it. And when you use AI every day, or you're building with AI and building an AI first company, you start to think, well, you know how powerful this is, how much, how fast it can create content, as you mentioned, how good it's at synthesizing data.

But inside the classroom, some educators and some students have. Gone all the way in and embraced it. I use it all the time. The vast majority are still making sense of it. And I think to try to say, you could do all these things with AI when they don't even know what AI is and they might only know what it's from, from often negative headlines, it can be an uphill battle.

So I think you're doing a really good job of, of bringing that AI literacy and that sort of concept of understanding, deeper understanding before you use it in your. One thing that's interesting, ed, I wanted to ask you about this because both the teacher space, the teacher efficiency, the teacher data, synthesizing the sort of tool suite for teachers and the student tutoring space in AI are starting to, they're starting to be a lot of companies in them, and I think it's a challenge for any one individual startup to stand out and to be able to tell a story that doesn't sound like.

Other stories that people are hearing, and to have a strategy, basically to have a go-to-market strategy that allows you to really, to really break through. And I, I think one thing that you have brought, I think partially because you're coming from outside the education space is a new lens into, you know, what does it take to be noticed?

What does it take to get the right kind of business relationships in this really complex education space? If you're comfortable, I'd love to hear you talk about some of the things you've been doing with Scholar to help really drive growth. 

[00:48:09] Ed Buckley: Yeah, step one, two really cute dogs. Uh, so, you know, I've been fortunate that I've had some great mentors and had some great experiences.

Gotten a lot of things wrong on the growth and distribution side, and nearly all of my companies have had government contracts sold through the government or health insurance companies, which are kind of like one degree of separation from, you know, the government. And we've always tried to, how do you be as leveraged as possible?

So that you can be effective, get wide distribution quickly and directly. Now, there is a con to that strategy. It requires great expertise from day one, so you can't really be a startup and have entry-level people Look at Marley like she's the top of her game. She's amazing. If we didn't have someone as talented as, as Marley, we as a company would not be where we are.

So we wanted to approach this map by saying, how do you get to the top as quickly as possible? And then when you think about how do you surround that with a great brand awareness, communication strategy, they have to go hand in hand. And so I say this tongue in cheek, but it's so true. Like Reason Baxter on TV more than I am.

And those guys are raking up the miles of TV interviews and school visits and you know, I'm, they're probably gonna get the key to the city here in Tampa by the end of all of this. So they're doing a great job and. I'm not sure I've, I've answered completely, but that, that's really what, what we've always tried to do, which is really unique partnerships.

We didn't want to go school to school to school. We didn't find that an effective strategy. We didn't want to go district to district. We didn't find that effective strategy. We wanted to go to the government at the highest level, so. Once again, I've talked about social, you follow me in social. You will see me in Washington, DC often at events.

Uh, you will see me at state capitals at events because ultimately that's where decisions are made. And maybe if this was an ordinary time, you could not have to deal with them. But everyone of the legislative bodies in this country are concerned and interested with what AI can do for classrooms. And if you're not in the fight helping shape the policy, you'll get dragged to the future.

And so I'd rather be the one running and sprinting and holding the hand of the legislature, show them where the future can be and do it in a safe, effective way rather than not. And sitting out and hoping that it lands in a place that's advantageous for us. So I. Good, bad or ugly. We are very outspoken on, you know, the way that we think responsible AI should be used, good, bad, or ugly.

We are very vocal on why and how schools, teachers, parents, and students should be using this. And sometimes I get in LinkedIn fights with people who disagree with me over it, you know, that's fine. 

[00:50:59] Alex Sarlin: Part of the game in some, in, in a lot of ways. I, no, I think that's very insightful and you know, we talk a lot in EdTech about top down versus bottom up.

And what I'm hearing you say, which I think is really wise, is not only is top down, sensible in a lot of ways, but at a time of great technological change where. Everybody, the top can go up and up and up. It could be entire states or you know, it, it can, it can be government in a large way. They're all trying to figure out what to do with AI TOP could even be a higher top than you might expect for a relatively new company.

It doesn't mean that, you know, it's not necessarily a district. It could even be a whole state that's trying to figure out what is our AI strategy and they're looking for help and they're looking to have, have their hands helped as, to use your metaphor. I think that's a really, really powerful, I'm sure that's a lot of, uh, people are listening and going, Ooh, interesting, interesting idea.

[00:51:44] Ed Buckley: Yeah. And you know, I'll also say this like Marley and I teach each other a lot of, she has great expertise on one side and I have it on the other. And I remember going to my first few education technology conferences, and I come from spaces that are very crowded that lots of capital flows into. And by direct comparison, EdTech does not have the same amount of capital that digital health that had the last 10 years.

Right. And so I'm used to. 10 times the amount of competition and capital that you're up against and that, you know, that was one thing that I told Marley early on as I was like, look at all of these companies that are out there and they were tiny point solutions, right? And it's like, Hey, I'm a teacher and I created this, or I'm just a engineer and I know nothing about education.

I said, I don't see a lot of things that I view as legitimate competition. Whereas they are educational experts and they're distribution experts, and they know how to get capital quickly so that they can grow, right? I raised more than a hundred million dollars in the last few years at my varying companies.

Like we know how to get capital when we need it. We know how to be efficient, we know how to scale, and Marley brings the expertise of going and listening and let the teachers and students help us perfect the product, right? So that's not my lane. I'm not gonna get involved in that and get in Marley's way, but that's why the product has become.

So valuable is because while we take that off of Marley's plate, she's able to spend all of her time teacher, students, administrators, what do you love? What can we deploy in our next cycle, two weeks from now? And we're just constantly deploying new features and testing them out. Like, what do you love?

What do you hate? What do you want more of? 

[00:53:24] Marlee Strawn: I was gonna add to that too. Um, what this strategy has allowed us to do is be really methodical and really work, collaborate with the schools like Ed said, like everything that we've designed has been with the teacher input or the student input, or something we physically have seen in the classroom as a challenge that we're trying to combat.

So I would say that. I can't deny the fact that I get buried and perhaps comparing our strategy with others because I embedded in space what's allowed us methodical. It's allowed us.

[00:54:00] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Um, fortunately we are out of time. I wanted to give you a last word, Marley, because there's one thing I just wanted to hear you, you know, I just mentioned, and, uh, you just mentioned that you're spending time really in the classroom, you're co-designing. You wanna make sure that what you're building really makes sense for teachers.

I'm curious if you have a story about a teacher using Scholar in the classroom, or a classroom that's using Scholar in a way that just really stands out to you that I think you could use to, to help people who are jumping into this space really sort of get their head around it and also just.

Appreciate what you all mean. When you, you're co-designing and constantly shipping, what do you see when you're on the ground in the classroom? Can you think of a single teacher or a, uh, an anecdote of one that Absolutely, 

[00:54:40] Marlee Strawn: yes. I'll share my favorite story. Recently, so January we onboarded a, a lot new.

Teachers who had not been using it semester one and started using scholar education semester two. What that allowed us to do is to kind of get an idea of what their life was before and after implementing in the same school year, which I think is a unique experience. So the story that stands out to me is that what 50% of our students in our pilot this last year were special education students.

And that's because we do a lot of, you know, personalized support with their 5 0 4 and IEP accommodations. So this particular classroom was an eighth grade social studies class, and the teacher taught both traditional students and what is called access students, which means that they don't take traditional testing.

They, they actually are learning different standards tied to special education needs. There was a student in her class who was nonverbal autistic, and the student had never asked a question before. Now, once she implemented scholar education and the student had access to Baxter Bot, who was this one-on-one support system for him.

She was now getting the student to ask questions on a daily basis. So now for the very first time back to that data focus that I mentioned, she was getting insights about his learning process that she never would've gotten without having access to Baxter Bott for her and hearing it gives me goosebumps when I think about it and.

When we saw it in action. For her, this was a really life-changing experience, but not only for her, think about the student now, he was feeling comfortable asking questions in a classroom and getting support on the spot rather than just feeling like, what? What do I do? Right? So that's the story that stands out to me the most.

And we have a lot of those stories because you know, 50% of our students were special education this last year. 

[00:56:32] Alex Sarlin: That's amazing. Yeah, that's really powerful. So thanks so much. This has been really interesting. So Marley STR and Ed Buckley are co-founders of Scholar Education. You could look for Baxter Bot and Professor Bruce, which are are Ed's dogs, Baxter, ed Bruce, and apparently Marley has also joined the Beedle.

Uh. Club has some bird digital puppies as well. It's so nice to talk to both of you and we'll, we'll talk to you soon again on EdTech Insiders. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you. 

[00:56:59] Marlee Strawn: Thanks for having us. 

[00:57:00] Alex Sarlin: 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.

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