Week in Edtech 9/24/25: AI Tutors Under Scrutiny, Gallup Shows K-12 Trust Collapse, CZI Launches Learning Commons, Phone Bans Rise, Higher Ed Struggles, and More! Feat. Jamie Candee of Edmentum & Nick Chen of PlayMath.org

Join hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell as they dive into the latest headlines shaping the future of education technology, from AI tutors and Gallup polls to new VR career pathways and the impact of phone bans in schools. 

✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:38] Mashable compares AI tutors from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic
[00:10:45] Gallup poll shows confidence in K-12 at all-time low
[00:15:48] CZI launches Learning Commons open-source AI infrastructure
[00:20:41] CZI + Anthropic partnership expands AI tools for edtech
[00:23:31] Kahoot unveils new AI-powered study tools
[00:26:26] Phone bans spread in U.S. schools with positive results
[00:29:53] Higher ed faces declining international applications and demographic cliff 

Plus, special guests:
[00:36:24] Nick Chen, Founder of PlayMath.org, on educational gaming and product lessons
[01:00:40] Jamie Candee, CEO of Edmentum, on career pathways, durable skills, and VR workforce prep 

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Chapters

• 4:11 Mashable compares AI tutors from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic
• 11:18 Gallup poll shows confidence in K-12 at all-time low
• 17:03 CZI launches Learning Commons open-source AI infrastructure
• 21:56 CZI + Anthropic partnership expands AI tools for edtech
• 24:46 Kahoot unveils new AI-powered study tools
• 27:41 Phone bans spread in U.S. schools with positive results
• 31:08 Higher ed faces declining international applications and demographic cliff
• 37:39 Nick Chen, Founder of PlayMath.org, on educational gaming and product lessons
• 1:01:55 Jamie Candee, CEO of Edmentum, on career pathways, durable skills, and VR workforce prep

Transcript

[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: Everybody knows that context matters here, right? That, as you say, learning gym versus new concept versus what many students are going to these tools for, which is, I'm in a class and I wanna do well in this class, and I wanna understand the ideas in this class and get good grades in this class. That's a starting point for so many kids, and yet none of the frontier model tools.

I think a lot of the study generation tools, the EdTech tools do treat that as a starting point, but there's just different contexts by which people come in. There's curiosity versus grades versus trying to understand a new concept that's confusing versus trying to teach something that's an even one.

There's a lot of stuff going on here. 

[00:00:36] Ben Kornell: That's something we regularly see my child's teacher or my child's school, but the system is going the wrong way. But I think it's just overall. And what's cool about the Gallup data is they break it across political lines, demographic lines. Basically it's a universal trend.

Trust is eroding in schools. People don't feel like it's going the right way. So when you have these conversations about what works, what doesn't work, we've gotta try some new things it feels like. Or is this really just a misunderstanding of the public of what schools are about?

[00:01:14] 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 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.

[00:01:54] Ben Kornell: Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. It's another weekend. EdTech Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell here with another weekly report of all that's happening in our world, education-wise, AI wise, technology-wise, impact-wise, policy-wise. It could be a really long show, Alex, but we also have two incredible guests. Tell us about the guests first, and then we can go through our headlines as per huge.

[00:02:20] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, we had great guests this week, so we talked to Jamie Candee, the CEO of Edmentum, about all the amazing work that they're doing to do career embedded learning into K 12 schools. They're really trying to sort of make much more of a continuum so that people are learning, they're exploring careers in middle school, they're deep diving into durable skills and careers in high school, and by the time they are ready to graduate high school, they're actually ready to enter either college or the workforce, but with a real skillset and they're bringing VR into it.

It's really interesting. And we also talked to Nick Chen, who is a product manager who's been at ST Math at Kiddo Math, Epic Learning, epic reading, and he is now doing something with math games. That is super interesting. I think super close to your heart, Ben, all about making math really, really fun and engaging and exciting for kids.

Both great interviews. Stick around for both of those. 

[00:03:09] Ben Kornell: Yeah, and you know, in terms of events going on, we've got a bunch of events coming up. October is New York Ed Tech Week, so we'll be there in full force. We also have the Stanford Accelerate Education Innovation Summit. That's the first week of November, and then the second week of November, we'll be reporting to you from Google's AI for Learning Summit.

More to come on that in terms of headlines, man, where do we start, Alex? 

[00:03:38] Alex Sarlin: Where do we start? I mean, I think there was an article that stuck out for me this week that I thought was worth talking about just because it is right at the heart of something we've been talking about a lot recently. It basically is a Mashable article where they went through all of the different learning modes, the AI tutors that open AI, Google and Anthropic each offer, and tried to really dive into it.

They also talked to a McGraw Hill lead and what they're doing, and then sort of put it together with some of the research from a scientist who thinks a lot about AI relationships. It was a really interesting article, and I think overall, uh. The takeaways from it. We'll link to it. I suggest people look at it, 'cause I think it's an interesting way to look at all of these different learning modes.

They basically say, you know, learning is social. There are potentially benefits to these tools. They do all sorts of interesting things in terms of teaching and learning, but at the end of the day, none of them are quite optimized for learning in the way that they say they are. According to this journalist, and particularly it's because basically they make an interesting metaphor about how it's sort of a very modern engine, like a supercharged engine, which is retrofit for a use case, which is actually different than what it's really built for.

It's trying to suddenly not give you answers and lead you down these quizzing paths or Socratic paths, and that the retrofitting makes for a sort of an awkward fit. I thought it was an interesting take. We've talked to Dave Messer from Google who did the guided learning. We've talked to Drew Bent from Anthropic.

We've talked to a lot of the people who are behind these tools. They're working really hard to do interesting things. I thought it was an interesting journalistic take that got decently deep on the pros and cons of each of these different models. What did you make of that one? 

[00:05:09] Ben Kornell: Yeah, at a deeper level, I think you can figure out pros and cons of each one, but ultimately it kind of blended together that there wasn't true differentiation between the products and that ultimately there's a question about the use case.

So often when we're with EdTech, is the technology good enough or is the use case the right use case for that technology? And I think the point of the Mashable article is really that the use case is a tough fit, like you said. Yeah. And what we really need to acknowledge is that good tutoring is a guided practice where someone says, based on your data, based on what I know about you as a learner and your goals, let me scaffold a learning experience to help you accelerate your deep comprehension.

That's just not the starting point of a search bar. That's AI powered. With some prompting layered on top. I think it is telling that for all of the specialized model talk we had a year or two ago, that for many of these folks, the base model is actually just their latest LLM model with some prompting on top.

That makes sure that you don't give away the answer, which goes to show that like maybe what we're doing is we're taking a square peg and trying to put in a round hole. Now that being said, this is an opportunity, this matchable opportunity, yeah, opportunity for ed tech companies. To show why they're different than just your standard study mode on GPT, and you think about quizzes or Quizlet or some of these companies that have embraced AI early on.

Maybe this is their opportunity to say, because we know so much about what you're doing, because we have all this data, we're actually the better spot to support your learning. But I mean. Nothing here was a surprise. Did it surprise you? 

[00:07:05] Alex Sarlin: Nothing surprised me. I think I was intrigued by the negative stance.

You know, we talk a lot about, on this podcast about how amazing, and I think almost miraculous it is that these are the biggest companies in the world. They are literally could do anything. They have almost endless budgets. They get these absolutely massive funding rounds. Nvidia invested a hundred billion dollars in OpenAI this week, right?

These are huge amounts of money. Huge. They, they're global and they are focusing on education as a use case. They're taking it seriously. They're building for it. They're building features. Like it's easy to be skeptical and I think the journalistic stance tends to be a skeptical, let's try to sort of look through the hype stance, and you see that very much at work.

In this article, the journalist tries to pull together what an average student would do by pulling questions from the regents and various exams, and then tries to put it to the test. But at the end of the day, like. I think to your point, there's definitely room to run. It's not that these are solved problems, it's not that philanthropics, you know, the Claude's learning mode is it?

That's it. We solved tutoring with AI. No way is that true. There's a lot around that. There's a lot still missing in the perfect experience, and I agree with you about the search bar is not the natural starting point for tutoring experience. At the same time, I feel like it's very easy to look at all these products that are very new and say, oh, they don't work and I don't think we have any evidence that they don't work.

Or any evidence that chat GT's study mode is actually still giving away the answers the way that Mashables journalists as it does. So I would be cautious. I think that it's very easy. To be skeptical right now because there's so many people hyping some of these tools. But I don't know, I find myself rebelling against this stance that a lot of people take right now as they look at all these AI in schools or in educational environments, and they see it as like impinging or like at least sort of weak sauce.

And at the same time, I'm like, no, the fact that these enormous, really thoughtful tech companies are putting serious, serious juice into education use cases, like I think we should be excited about that and thinking about it as a starting point rather than, oh, they're pretending they solved this because they aren't.

[00:09:12] Ben Kornell: Yeah, and I see both sides of it, and what I would say is maybe tutoring as a framework is not the right frame. Yes. Maybe we need new learning modes or models that leverage AI. I like the idea of. You go to the learning gym and you have to do practice, and there's some parts of training where it's just doing a bunch of problems.

AI is super great at that. When it's a novel concept, teaching a brand new schematic or way of thinking, or mode of thought or conceptual understanding, AI is not very good at that. Not yet at least. And so where's the leverage point with the AI is the question I have not, is it all good or bad? But maybe we're just losing the nuance.

Across all spheres of conversation here. Yeah. If you talk to like Drew at Anthropic, they're not claiming s stake the ground. We've solved it. 

[00:10:03] Alex Sarlin: Not even close. They're clearer than anybody that they're in the like the very, very beginning of even thinking about this stuff and everybody knows that context matters here, right?

That, as you say, learning gym versus new concept versus what many students are going to these tools for, which is, I'm in a class and I wanna do well in this class and I wanna understand the ideas in this class and get good grades in this class. Totally. That's a starting point for so many kids, and yet none of the frontier model tools.

I think a lot of the study generation tools, the EdTech tools do treat that as a starting point, but there's just different contexts by which people come in. There's curiosity versus grades versus trying to understand a new concept that's confusing versus trying to teach something that's a even one.

There's a lot of stuff going on here, 

[00:10:45] Ben Kornell: a short plug for our EdTech insiders map where we start with the use cases and then go to the AI tools. I mean, definitely on that point I also wonder what do we have to lose K 12 schools? If you look at the NATE scores, we are at all time lows. And actually can we segue to our K 12 segment?

Okay, go for it. So the headline that caught my eye was a Gallup poll that showed that US public confidence in K 12 has reached an all time low. 35% of Americans, just 35% say they're satisfied with quality of K 12 education, and only 26% believe K 12 schools are heading in the right direction on preparing students for work.

Just 2% said that their schools were excellent and only 19% said good. And similar scores to preparing kids for college, career, life, and so on. So 74%, they are completely or somewhat satisfied with their actual child's education, which that's something we regularly see my child's teacher or my child's school.

But the system is going the wrong way. But I think it's just overall. And what's cool about the Gallup data is they break it across political lines. Demographic lines, basically it's a universal trend. Trust is eroding in schools. People don't feel like it's going the right way. So when you have these conversations about what works, what doesn't work, we've gotta try some new things it feels like.

Or is this really just a misunderstanding of the public, of what schools are about? I don't know. What's your beat on? 

[00:12:27] Alex Sarlin: I mean, it is worth pointing out, and I think you did call it out there, that often in these polls, people have much more negative views of K 12 schooling in general than they do of their actual schools or their actual experiences.

And I think that is an important thing to call out because it implies to me that it's not necessarily that, you know, as soon as you get specific, is it, you know, your teacher, your school, your kids', teachers, they're not like, oh, they're horrible. They don't know what they're doing. And that matters. You are seeing ESAs, you are seeing people opt out of public schooling, so they are voting with their feet in some cases, but I think they're more likely to say school in general is not meeting the bar than my school is not meeting the bar.

And what that implies to me is that it is now school as an institution has really lost its luster. I just think that, and we've talked about this for, I think for a few weeks now, but I think it's, these Gallup results really put a fine point on it, especially the 2%, right? I mean these preparing for the workforce piece that it is so low.

I feel like that is a strong signal because I think what that's saying is people are realizing that we're in a time of great social change. There's a lot of uncertainty for the future, and they just literally do not trust schools to be on top of that change. They don't feel like they can lay back and say, the education system's got it.

It will evolve. It'll make sense of this for me by the time my kid graduates from. Elementary school or high school, they'll be fine and they'll be ready. They're saying, no, I see the writing on the wall. Things are changing quickly and something's wrong with the education system. They're very comfortable saying that even if they're not saying that about their particular schools.

That's how I read it. So I feel like it's almost a zeitgeist thing about school as an institution not meeting the needs that people are expecting it to, such as preparing for college, preparing for workforce, giving kids the skills they need to succeed. So that's important and I do think that's a huge opportunity for EdTech and I think it's a huge opportunity for all of us to think about.

Okay, what would it take to get those numbers back up? Even for the general schooling itself, not my school. 

[00:14:29] Ben Kornell: Yeah. I mean, per our previous conversation, it is not gonna be some sort of magic wand waved by tech companies where all of a sudden their AI tutor's gonna solve all of our problems. A related headline actually, which I think you know something about is Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is actually launching new tooling, basically infrastructure tools that allow AI to be used by all of these companies to create more dynamic, dare I say, personalized learning for kids in, I think it's mainly focused on math, but the idea is a knowledge graph that allows ed tech companies to plug into AI tooling that helps 'em serve up differential problems, content learning experiences that allow kids to accelerate their learning.

And so when you're talking about these big crisis of confidence issues. You could talk about what's going on in the classroom, but there's this infrastructure that we need to rebuild, and it seems really exciting to me. Full disclosure, I know the team at CZI Well, and we've often done collaboration with them, and I know you've done some advising and partnering with them on this specific project, but tell us a little bit about how this could be a game changer.

[00:15:48] Alex Sarlin: Yes, and that disclaimer is in place. I have done some consulting and advising with CZI. So this is coming from a place of a little bit of knowing the project from the inside, what they're doing. They just launched what they're calling Learning Commons, and it has a couple of different elements. And what's interesting for our audience here is that what they're doing is actually for EdTech companies as a core stakeholder, and they're basically trying to create shared infrastructure so that every EdTech company has tools that they can use to accelerate their own development of content, to accelerate their own standards alignment.

They're taking some of the information and the underlying structure. That you would need to be able to create a really successful AI based ed tech company, and they're basically creating an open source version of it. So there's two elements of it. There's the knowledge graph, which is basically a giant data set, which has all of the coming core standards.

It will have all those 50 state standards. It has a lot of them now. It has all of these interesting coherence maps from Achievement Network and student Achievement partners. It has all of this data all in one place, as well as the illustrative math curriculum. That's why when you say it started with math, that's the key math element there.

The entire Illustrative math, which is basically the top open source curriculum in the us. It has all of that information in there. It's all accessible. Through actually a clawed front end through the model context protocol, and you can go into Claude and start pulling some of this incredibly important information from a core database and using it to align your content or tail or your content in different ways, or go crosswalk to state standards, or to look at what illustrative content might be a good match for whatever you're doing.

It's a really, really interesting project, and this is the very beginning of it. So they just launched the first tools. Publicly this week they've been doing a lot of beta testing and they're also working on these evaluators. The second part of the project, which is basically evaluating the output of AI tooling against a number of different pedagogical frameworks, such as text complexity or appropriateness, or whether it contains mindset, language.

So really, really interesting work. I really highly recommend people look into it. It's a little bit complicated to explain. You could hear me sort of stumbling over it as I explain it, but there is a lot of upside there for EdTech companies, frankly, especially EdTech companies that are really pulling together their strategy right now.

It's good for both incumbent companies and newbies, you know, people entering the space, but I would say people entering the space, it's a huge accelerator where you can get all the state standards crosswalked by these underlying learning components to the illustrative math curriculum. A lot of powerful stuff in there.

[00:18:28] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, for me the, we talk a lot about like the business side of EdTech. The ability to build on top of this will fuel micro companies in a way that if they had to build all of this themselves, it's an impossible task. Right? So I love it from, it's like a barbell for the early, early stage or startups, what an accelerator.

And then for the big incumbent dinosaurs who, because of their scale, have to have a technical foundation that's really, really rock solid. I think this could be a great accelerator. What surprised me most was the partnership with enro. Like this is the first time we're seeing people on the philanthropic side in education crossing over and working with the latest AI.

And I'm not sure how much you can, you know, share on that front, but like to do it with anthropic, given that there's like a meta affiliation also just goes to show like. They're doing something where they want it to be available everywhere for everyone, full stop. I think that that's a big, bold move.

Whereas in the past we had all these like closed source, you know, you've gotta be part of this product ecosystem or that product ecosystem. There's no interoperability. The idea of, you know, this infrastructure layer for AI insights being open source, I think it's a game changer now. How much will this get adopted That remains to be seen and you know, ultimately I think it's gonna get baked into the cake, where at the end user, they may never realize that this was part of it.

And I think that's kind of the point. It's, I mean, to, I think the kind of. This caution around this is not gonna be a revolution overnight. This is gonna take time. Like that all seems right because it will take time for teams to build on top of it. But it does seem very similar to when we called for, you know, all the AI companies to vote 1% of their compute to impact.

This is actually a step up from that. 

[00:20:41] Alex Sarlin: No, I agree. And I, I think we always talk about sort of the human in the loop within an AI systems, and I think what's interesting about this strategy here is it's really like ed tech companies in the loop. That's like really core part of it is that you're in many ways what these knowledge graph and what these evaluators do or or teachers in the loop as well.

It provides all of this really UpToDate really valuable information from all of these different sources, from nonprofits, from standards bodies, from research, from curriculum builders. It provides all of it. It interconnects it with these learning components underneath. So you can say, Hey, I want this Alaska State standard, and underneath that Alaska State standard, it's actually asking you about, you know, knowing the greater than or less than singles in, in an equation.

Okay, great. Then I can align that to my content as an EdTech provider. I can align it to the illustrative content and see what they have for it. I can use say, what about if I went to Nebraska? What are they doing? Well, the Nebraska standard that aligns to that same underlying learning components is this one.

It provides a crosswalking and a sort of way to connect all of this information, but, and this is the in the loop. Metaphor, but the ed tech company or a teacher is always very core in the loop here. No end user is using the learning commons material directly. It's all being used to facilitate and support, really engaging and pedagogically sound education experiences with an education builder, whether that's an individual educator or more likely an EdTech company at the helm.

So that's really core here, and yet it's to be determined what the uptake is. They're doing all sorts of really interesting beta testing and there's a lot to offer there, but I think it's still early innings. But I do recommend that people who are listening to this check it out and see if it would be really valuable to your own development process or to your own evaluation of your outputs or anything like that.

'cause there is a lot there. One other K 12 headline that stuck to me, and I know there's one you wanted to cover too, is Kahoot is launching a whole bunch of new study tools that are AI powered for back to school. You know, Kahoot's been actually a little quiet. It's a huge EdTech company. And it's been a little quiet in the AI space.

They've had sort of an AI quiz generator for a while, but they just launched a whole suite of different tools, including a test mode, a quiz starter product, a AI generator that offers students a personalized learning experience. They that you can see that they've been busy behind the scenes and they are now coming out with their whole suite of AI enhanced features for the new school year.

And of course Kahoot is in both K 12 and in higher ed. That's interesting to me just because it's a, another example of a big ed tech company that has sort of been heads down. You could tell there's been whole product teams thinking about how do we use AI to make the Kahoot experience really, you know, through the roof and they're now going public with some of what they're doing.

So that always sticks out to me. Ben, the other thing that happened this week is phone bans are happening all over the country, and I know this is something that's close to your heart. What do you make of that? 

[00:23:31] Ben Kornell: I mean, the banning of AI and the banning of cell phones have been both incredible stories. One, the banning of AI has really retracted and evolved.

The banning of phones has accelerated, and now we're actually seeing real implementation of phone bans. Now, why phone bans? I think there's a lot of psychology around phones and screen addiction and so on. And I think that that has created a case for less screen time. But what really was the kind of pain that schools were finding is that kids were being distracted, disrupted, and you know, there was a bunch of negative social activity happening on phones that were just making school days hard to manage everyday Stuff that, you know, kids having drama spill over to social media and then coming back into the school.

And so what we're seeing with the phone ban is actually a lot of positive response. Kids are responding positively. There's a New York Times article about the unexpected upside of phone bans in schools. Only districts that have done, you know, high school bans have really been studied well. I, I think the jury's still out on middle school and elementary just because, um, in high school it is much more prevalent, whereas in middle school it's been much more used as a phone device.

The business side of this story though is fascinating. There's three different models that have emerged now. There's the like put your phone in a phone pouch. That's one model. The other is using technology to suppress the ability of phones, to reach out things. That's either where people are installing things on their phone that basically during the school day blocks access to apps or even some technologies that basically broadcast this suppression at the school site.

I mean, it's fascinating technology and it's a quasi dystopian, and at the same time it's been really effective. And the third is just abstinence. Don't bring your phone to school. If we see it, we're going to snatch it. What I have, and you know this comes from my common sense colleagues, what I'm hearing about is kids are actually loving it.

Kids are loving the freedom from phones. And I was thinking this story was about the adults and the administrators and the logistics. But kids are saying, gosh, it's so freeing to not have to be on social media during the hours of school. This is great. And to me that is exactly the opposite of how everything played out with the AI band.

So I think it's the tale of two stories. When you ban the cell phones, kids are actually loving it. When you ban the AI, kids are like, come on. Like we can be responsible. What's your take on this? I, it seems like a story that's getting underplayed. 

[00:26:26] Alex Sarlin: I agree. People aren't talking about it nearly as much. I think dozens of states now, I don't know, have the exact number in front of me, but a huge number of states have instituted phone bans in a lot of districts too.

I am not super surprised at that reaction. I mean, people have listened to this podcast for a while, may know that like I've wrestled with this question, you know, as an ed tech person. Just the idea of blanket ban on a technology and saying that this is like overall, you know, not worth it, not good for you can't work.

Especially because it takes a lot of tools out of your hands, right? There are a lot of EdTech tools accessible on phones that could be used in a school day. That said, I have come around a lot on this and I think I am coming closer in line to the take that that EdTech and technology can be used in all sorts of positive ways.

But the phone packages, all of this technology and the thing that is primarily being used on phones are social media and, and to a lesser extent, games and video. That's really what kids use their phone for. And so if you put together social media games and video and say, you know, should kids have access all day long to social media games and video, I can see why schools and districts are saying no.

And of course, combine that with all the research that we've found about mental health declines and depression and isolation. This is probably the first time I've sort of officially said it, but I can get behind the phone bans and I can understand why they probably are beneficial to a lot of people.

That said, I'm not sure I'm totally. Feel like it's the same split as with the AI because you are still seeing lots of adults, lots of teachers and professors who are saying, I personally still do ban AI even if my district doesn't ban it, even if my university doesn't ban it, I ban it. And I remember seeing something recently from the University of Sydney, Australian University that basically came out and said that they were banning AI bans.

They were basically, their official stance was no individual professor could ban AI for use in classes for learning purposes. Not for cheating, but for learning. The reason why a university has to do that is that there's still a lot of drama and a lot of complexity between individuals in any given school about whether AI makes sense or not.

So I don't think it's exactly a closed book. This idea of is AI gonna survive in schools? And, you know, phones might be banned, but AI is, is in. I don't think that's what you're really saying anyway, but I, I think that that metaphor is a little loose here that said. Maybe removing the phones and removing the distractions from phones actually could make more energy and time for the entire school environment to embrace even ed tech, the ed tech that would obviously not be phone-based.

So, long story short, I can get behind the phone bands and I can actually see why students would be comfortable not having access to their social media and or two games or video during the, the hours of the school day. And I can, I can, you know, maybe it's a, a turning of a page through the social media era.

[00:29:14] Ben Kornell: You know, the last thing I would say is we thought maybe ed tech tools would be accessible through kids phones. They're accessing it through Chromebooks. Yeah, but this is not a ban ed tech. No. This is banned phones. It's about social media distraction, et cetera, not about learning tools. Yeah. So I also think that we're in a very different place than maybe where we were four or five.

Six years ago, pre COVID when one-to-one devices were still, you know, climbing. Before we go, we should talk a little bit about higher ed. What's capturing your attention in higher ed? I'm concerned about the business model. I'd be curious what you're thinking. 

[00:29:53] Alex Sarlin: I am disappointed in the higher ed sector.

More often than not, I feel like there is some innovations. We see some interesting things happening. We saw Syracuse University this week join into Anthropics, Claude for Education Suite. We've seen a lot of universities sort of jump in in different ways to various types of technology initiatives, and I think that's great.

One thing that jumped out to me this week was a new poll that basically said that about a third of college students use AI daily, which actually feels almost even low to me, but we've talked about how. AI among students and even instructors is going to become sort of near ubiquitous. And I think this is a survey from Copy Leaks, which is an ed tech and plagiarism detection platform.

And they basically saying that 24% of students are reporting using AI several times a week. 73% are saying they use AI more this year than last year. And 90% were reported having used AI for academic purposes at least once. So all, you know, 90% of college students, so. I think this is, you know, another check in the box that we have been predicting for a while, which is that AI is so powerful, it can do so many things, that it's just going to become woven into the fabric of higher education, especially in higher ed, where they can't ban phones or ban computers or ban usage.

It's going to be, I think we just are in a new world. We're in a world where AI is just part of the toolkit for students, and we're gonna have to figure out how to get used to it. So that stood out to me. What stood out to you, Ben, when you say you're worried about university's business model, what does that mean?

[00:31:23] Ben Kornell: Yeah. One of our articles, we can link it here, is really about the application to colleges in the US are declining from international students, and the applications from US students to institutions abroad are increasing. So you have a real threat to the business model coming from two angles. One is you've got international students, which disproportionately represent the revenue of most us right?

Institutions. You're able to charge full freight. For more affluent international students coming in, and it allows you to provide the scholarships and discounting for US-based students. So many schools, and we've talked to a few, like some even have as many as 20% of their students account for a hundred percent of their revenue, and of that 20% a significant chunk of our international students.

Yeah. Meanwhile, you can imagine the demographic of students that are applying to go abroad. These are full pay US students that are now looking at going abroad. It is going to be a four or five year struggle to try to win back foreign students into the us. But if we lose our US students, our top US students going abroad, this is the sign of the brain drain.

This is like, wait a second. Our import export is flipping, and now we are exporting our talent, not importing. And that is, it's foundational to the university business model. It's really foundational to American hegemony. This is one of those like canary in the coal mine stories where you're like, wait, our own best students don't want to go to university here, uhoh, we are losing the threat.

[00:33:07] Alex Sarlin: Big time. And you know, just the idea that the flip side of the universities charging full freight for international students, which they've been doing for a long time, is that the freshmen discount, the discount rate, sorry, not freshmen, the discount rate for incoming students has actually gone up a lot.

Schools are actually starting to, you know, quote unquote cut tuition in terms of giving more of a discount rate off their sticker price for us students. And even with those cuts, people are still choosing to go abroad or they're choosing to for go college altogether, or you know, we're seeing enrollment declines.

You know, there was a terrific article by Jeff Lingo, who's a long time higher education journalist this week in New York Magazine. I think it was, uh w we'll link to it basically about how the demographic Cliff is finally here. They've been anticipating it for a long time and now universities are truly about to see lower numbers of a potential freshman and be much more competitive for them.

And it's going to be a really tough time for a higher ed and this international student. Trend is a big part of it. And even if it's temporary because of the political environment, there's still gonna be huge headwinds for universities. And he anticipates a lot of mergers, a lot of closing, hopefully a lot of innovation as schools try to stay afloat and try to make sense of this really different economic environment.

So it's a wacky time for higher ed, but man, I just wish there were more higher education leaders that you could point to and say, but they're doing this really brilliant thing, this really interesting take. They're changing the three year degree, or they're offering a degree in collaboration with a tech company, or they're offering a degree that is designed for this particular career trajectory.

Like it. You do see headlines like that, but way too infrequently given the crisis that they're facing. I think higher education leaders are such. They copy each other. They're very status quo oriented. They're very constrained by bureaucracies within their universities and they just don't innovate as much as they should for a, a sector that is like truly in trouble.

They are in trouble as a sector and I don't think they're acting like it. 

[00:35:05] Ben Kornell: Yep, yep. This is a collective action challenge and you know, I think this is, the erosion is happening so rapidly because of policy dynamics, because of economic dynamics that I'm not sure colleges and universities will have the time to change and adapt building from that down note to an up note.

I am really excited for us to share two great guests here, so we'll transition now. Thank you so much, our listeners and our community for listening to EdTech Insiders. You find out more on our substack or check out EdTech insiders.ai with our AI map, and thank you so much for listening. If it happens in EdTech, you'll hear about it here on EdTech Insiders.

[00:35:52] Alex Sarlin: For our deep dive this week on the week in EdTech, we are here with Nick Chen. He's an EdTech product veteran with a passion for educational gaming. After spending six years at St Math, he's led product teams at numerous EdTech companies, including Imagine Learning, Kiddom and Epic Reading. He recently partnered with Corina Initiatives to build a new venture PlayMath.org, a play-based learning math platform focused on high quality math games for schools.

Nick Chen, welcome to EdTech Insiders. 

[00:36:24] Nick Chen: Hey Alex. Thanks for having me. It feels like long time coming then. You know, I've been a long time listener and operator in the space, so now that I finally have my own thing, thanks for giving me a little space. 

[00:36:34] Alex Sarlin: You are an amazing product manager and you've been doing so many interesting things for so long.

I am so excited to talk to you about what you're doing with play math, but also about your EdTech journey. We just mentioned a whole bunch of really interesting companies you've worked on everything from ST Math, where you move penguins around in a gaming environment to epic reading at one of the biggest and most stir undr, complicated EdTech stories around, but an incredible product.

What do you think separates a truly great educational game from one that's just gamified learning chocolate covered broccoli? 

[00:37:09] Nick Chen: Yeah, thanks. I mean, I. I do love this question. I probably talked about it way too many times at Happy Hours and other seminars. I try to put my spin on it. I think one of the most important questions is what is the core activity that the kids are doing?

And I think, you know, if we kind of define terms a little bit here, gamification being more on the, what a lot of teachers would call like the bells and whistles in terms of leaderboards and points and game-like elements around like a digital worksheet type activity. And those, I think there's some.

Power in that I think of it as like, how can I growth hack kids' behavior to do more boring stuff? And that's well and good, but the most important thing is how do I actually make that broccoli taste good? How do I make kids like broccoli and appreciate what it is? And so I think when there's a really strong connection between what the core gameplay is.

The content that they're supposed to be learning. Like that's that magic sweet spot. I'll throw out a couple other pieces, which is, this is one of the biggest things that ST Math is concept of informative feedback. So one of the things that technology can do is it can give kids immediate feedback, which is very powerful.

Versus like getting your test back on Tuesday that you took last week, and you're like, oh, I got this wrong. I don't even know what that means, you know? So you wanna give 'em that feedback right in the moment, but you also wanna tell them, why did you get this wrong? And on so many products, you just get the red X, or it just says, oh, it wasn't A, it was B, and you just move on.

But I think that's actually the biggest opportunity for learning right there is when they get it wrong. And so this concept of informative feedback, so you can kind of like, oh, well I did X and Y happened, but I wanted Z to happen, so how can I change my X kind of a thing. Like that's really the magic of the learning.

Yeah. And then the last thing I'll touch on there is I think the biggest power of game-based learning is you can take. A concept like system of equations or something that's like pretty chunky and difficult and you can create a game around it that makes it accessible to much younger grades. And I think that is just absolutely a wonderful thing.

And I'd say that there's the flip side too, where you can take a more. Elementary concept and you can make a cool game out of it, and it's actually more appealing to the older kids too, and so taking these concepts and putting it into practice and some application and kids are actually playing with it, it extends the range too.

[00:39:28] Alex Sarlin: I love that. So you make a core game loop that actually appeals to kids rather than gamifying the outside of a boring work, even though there is value in both. I definitely agree with that. Then the ability to shift ages to sort of shift the focus and the theme of a game so that kids of different ages can approach something that would be outside of their purview.

That's really powerful as well. You know, when you talk about the core game loop, I think of things like Tetris or Angry Birds or things that have very, very specific repeated actions that are actually really fun that you really want to do and that you want to build on and keep going with when you're doing play math.

How do you think about these core game loops and sort of identifying what the baseline action of the game would be? That would be actually something kids would really want to do, rather than just feel like, well, I guess I could do this, and it's better than having to do a worksheet. 

[00:40:16] Nick Chen: I'd say we have our MVP up right now that did perform well, but I'm kind of in this double triple down mode right now.

And so I think our very specific content guidelines, like we're still maturing that. I think play math is a little bit different than like an IXL or even an ST math because we're not just thinking about like, oh, how do we just teach all of the standards? And you know, we wanna be much more in that kids identifying in the recreational space.

So there's a lot more of these, what you would consider like kind of a typical puzzley, casually type game. Mathy, thinky, puzzley games is kind of my tagline. And so I think there's a range, right? Like kids, for example, we had a very heated discussion around whether we're gonna allow runner games like the kind of subway surfer, like run type games.

And I think for now we're siding on, look, we don't want kids to be. Penalized if they're not great on a track pad, on a Chromebook and these dexterity games. You know, the line I have right now is we train minds, not fingers. That being said, some of those interactions, they're fun for the kids, and so we're trying to find kind of a balance of, hey, maybe we can have it so that there's like a non-time mode of these games or something like that.

But I think the most important thing is trying to reach kids. In a lot of the gameplay type experiences that they're used to. And if there are interesting ways to make it more mathy or make the numeracy component more deliberate and clear, then we'll try to wrap that up. 

[00:41:45] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's a great point. And we train minds, not fingers.

It's a great line and I think it's really, really interesting way to look at it. 'cause it's true. Sometimes there are dexterity. Sometimes that core loop is about how fast you can move, which is interesting and can be fun, but is not always directly tied to outcomes. And it also maybe doesn't work for that type of informative feedback you're talking about because if you're moving as fast as you can, you're not gonna take time to make sense of meaningful feedback as well.

It's an interesting balance to strike. You know, we haven't even gotten into this. Tell us a little bit about what play math.org actually does. It's a set of all these thinky mathy games. What types of games are there and how are you hoping to move the needle on education with this really interesting product?

[00:42:23] Nick Chen: So I think without calling out any competitors directly, I'd say that first of all there's so much junk mathy content that's out there. Like if you look up math games, you know, and most of it is this lightly gamified digital worksheet experience. There's also a huge focus on fact fluency, which is just memorizing your multiplication table or your math facts, which a lot of people do think of math like that, which is unfortunate 'cause there's much more deeper mathematical thinking than I think is much more critical for today's kids.

So, you know, I'm so grateful to have found Corina initiatives and they're really all about this kind of math portfolio. Art of problem solving is one of their big companies. And I know you know, Ben is there now. So I think what we are really trying to do is. Have a great free product for schools that's focused on Chromebooks for now, because that's the kind of main entry point to have it be ad free.

To have them be what I'd say actually cool. And like actually math games. And that Venn diagram of that sweet spot in the middle is really tricky to do. Right? To have it so that you want the teachers to both be, you know, we've been playing with some taglines, but like kid tested or kid love, teacher approved, right?

Like you need the teacher sign off. And their buy-in, that it's a quality educational experience and you also need the kids in class begging to play it again every week. And so we're really trying to nail that sweet spot in the middle, which is a tricky thing to do. But I think with my background, just between Epic and St.

Math in a lot of ways, this is like the epic of math play. That's right. Right. We're not building all of the content ourselves. There is good content that people have made that's out there that they didn't hit the kind of distribution scale or brand or anything. And so we're gonna try to focus on that.

We do have some homegrown games. We have some AAA partnerships, like the Monopoly Clue stuff with, with Hasbro, and then we have a bunch of indie developers, and then we have a bunch of in-house stuff. So it's kind of this smorgasborg of what we consider like actually fun, actually math games. And there's definitely, I'm still trying to define exactly the kind of thinking, and I have a, an essay I'm writing about like what is mathematical thinking?

Yeah, I think just trying to basically get more kids engaged in playful mathematical thinking to change their relationship with math, to build their confidence. And we can get into this side of things too, but I think there's, frankly, you know, I have a four and a 6-year-old. I know you got kids. The one are the, 

[00:44:55] Alex Sarlin: I have two.

Two, but there are three and under one. 

[00:44:57] Nick Chen: Three and under one. Yeah. And I just think about the future, even the present that they're coming into with the tiktoks and the chat TBTs. And it's just like, what skills are they going to need? And this felt existential 10 years ago, and I think now it's just even 10 times more.

And so I think this is the kind of product that's going to get the kids to engage in that focused. Cognitively challenging, fun, juicy experience and hopefully that can be an anchor for them for how they approach learning in their lives. 

[00:45:29] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. You mentioned Chromebooks as sort of a core entry point for schools, which is seems dead on.

And also this idea of TikTok as a good example of the kind of thing that is drawing attention, that is sort of becoming a go-to place as well as many other social media or gaming sites or video sites where kids are sort of drawn to. So. You're talking about this complex attentional environment that kids are in right now.

They have social media tools that are drawing their attention. They have AI tools that are drawing their attention, but most of those tools don't have much of an educational bend. And what strikes me is really interesting about what you're doing with play math is it's a combination. It's something that has some of the shine and appeal of a commercial tool, but the educational underpinnings of an education tool.

So tell us about how you're trying to split that difference and make something that's really appealing to kids and yet also appealing to educators. 

[00:46:23] Nick Chen: Yeah. I think there's two sides to it. There's a very aspirational side that's, Hey, I want deep mathematical thinking to be as fun and enjoyable as eating candy, or whatever the equivalent is.

And that's something that I think we strive for, right. At the same time, there's a little bit of an acknowledgement that like. Does broccoli ever beat chocolate? Like I'm not sure, like what's the real comparison here? Right. So when I think about, and again, I don't wanna call it any product specifically, but when I think about like a lot of the more traditional math digital curriculums that do feel much more like digital worksheets and that kind of a thing, I think play math versus that is a no-brainer.

We already know, and we did some pilots and some research and stuff, and so we know that play math is very engaging compared to those kind of products. When I think about both from a product vision perspective, but also from a go-to market and just like business viability perspective, you know, at the end of the day it's again similar to Epic in that we're competing for educational dollars and recreational dollars, right?

And so are we gonna get that kid who's gonna say, Hey mom, I don't want. I guess tiktoks not really a paid product, but like, Hey mommy, I don't want my TikTok time today. Can I do play math? Like that's certainly something I strive for, but I think that's a very difficult thing. You know, the way that I talk about this is like with my kids, it is billions, maybe trillions of dollars worth of design that have gone in to these kinds of algorithms to hack our kids' brains for this short form content and just get them to stay on and like that's a Goliath type situation, right?

But at the same time, I do think that you can, with the right kind of games that you know whether, you know, there's a lot of words that we use, like make them juicy, make them fun, make them appealing, make them sticky, all of that. There is a world where kids get sucked into that. They kind of build that capacity because it is harder.

It is much harder to play a play math game, you know, where you actually have to use your brain than to just sit there and kind of. Look at your phone passively, right? And so it's always gonna be this battle. In some ways it feels like a losing battle, but in other ways I think that even as a parent, like I'm addicted to Reddit and some of these other, you know, social media apps, and I have some self-awareness of that, and I will like try to manage it and do this stuff.

You know, I don't know that kids do that as much, but I think there is a little bit of an understanding even with kids that like there's a value that they're getting out of something like play math that they don't get. 

[00:49:00] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, 

[00:49:01] Nick Chen: like I said, it's kind of aspirational. I have to be in an aspirational mode and I have to be kind of realistic about it.

But I know that we have that kid love where like we, you know, we visited a classroom and the kids are like, oh, are you guys the play math guys? And like get that kind of reception. So I know that they like it, but I'm still trying to figure out like, how can I compete with Minecraft? How can I compete with Roblox?

How can I compete with. The kids' time, let alone the, the business side of thing. 

[00:49:28] Alex Sarlin: I think you're putting your finger on something that's always been one of the central complex tensions of educational gaming, right? Is are you comparing yourself to purely commercial games who have huge budgets and the only thing they want to do is keep.

Attention and keep kids clicking and keep kids logging in and they have no constraints, right? They don't need to do informational feedback. They don't need to design games with any kind of curriculum or, or even, you know, edifying theme in mind at all. The Minecrafts and Roblox, even though those companies do have educational components sometimes, but you know, the pure Roblox or are comparing yourself to digital curricula or even.

Regular old math class or regular math worksheets or things like that for which you are the absolute pinnacle. One thing that strikes me as so interesting, and I know this is on your mind too, is when I've gone to classrooms in the last few years and kids have this moment to, they finish their work and they have a few minutes where they wanna be able to do something, the games that they beg to play are extremely old fashioned, which is actually a little bit of a surprise to me.

'cause they know better than to ask for Roblox or Fortnite, you know, in, in school. So the things that are allowed, it's a relatively small group and they look for things that are very old school. And I feel like part of what you're doing with play math is updating in a really important and major way that sort of ask of kids are saying, oh, can we play play math?

That's very different than, it's much more modern and much more thoughtfully designed than what they're asking for now. Uh, is that something you've experienced? Yeah, 

[00:50:55] Nick Chen: I mean, it's interesting what options the kids have. You know, I, I kind of alluded to some of the, the competitors that are out there, and I think a lot of the sites that teachers use, because they're looking for stuff that's, that's free, that's easy to use in a lot of cases, like account list.

So they can just say, Hey, go to the website and you guys can play it's Friday, you know, good job or whatever. 

[00:51:15] Alex Sarlin: And safe. 

[00:51:15] Nick Chen: Yeah. But a lot of those sites. Have a lot of junk content on them. Like there'll be some math stuff and then there's just like throw knives at the wall or whatever it is. Exactly. You can see like what the top 10 games are and they generally are those kinds of games.

We actually experimented even with a, it was a game called Sticky Numbers and it was like, it definitely looked like math, but really if you play it you realize you're just kind of like moving your mouse around or whatever. And it was one of our top performing games and we actually pulled it because we realized that like, okay, you know, and it was a little bit of a scary move for me to like, oh, I'm gonna take away, first of all, you never take away things from schools, let alone kids, but to like take away one of our top performing games.

I remember my chem honors teacher used to say like, you know, students are like. Molecules or electro, he was trying to make a comparison about like they're trying to stay in their lowest energy form or like use the least amount work rate. And so, you know, we pulled that game and like they just find other games.

Yep. You know, and so I think we, we have our pretty high floor high bar I guess for what we consider, you know, like an educational game. 

[00:52:22] Alex Sarlin: Which I think is a big improvement on some of these open gaming sites that are out there, that are sort of the go-tos for teachers. I think it's a major improvement and those are very popular.

That's the other thing that is maybe not clear, it's, it's a sort of a funny corner of the ed tech world, but some of these, you know, quote unquote educational gaming sites that are sort of out there and open no accounts. They have huge amounts of traffic because every classroom on Friday is going to them and giving kids some free time to wander around in these game portals and it, it's an interesting space.

One aspect of your history that I'd love to dive into a little bit is your time at Epic Reading. You've mentioned it a couple times as an inspiration. You are at Epic during its acquisition by Biju. Every listener to this podcast sort of knows about that entire story. I'm curious what lessons you took away from your time at Epic.

It's an incredible product just now resold that you are now applying at play math. 

[00:53:13] Nick Chen: Yeah, it's funny, it's almost such a surreal experience to have you ask me that question on this, in this environment. You know, I have obviously lots of thoughts and feelings about everything that happened with Buy Juices and Epic.

You know, I'm not gonna get into all of it here. I'd say like the highest level thing that I took away from that, I mean Epic like category leading product. Amazing team. Yes. Buy GS was the biggest ed tech company in the world at the time, and you know, kind of the king. And you know, in two years they went from 22 billion to bank, essentially bankruptcy.

Epic was acquired recently by T, which is a Chinese company. And I'm, yeah, cautiously optimistic about the future of Epic. I think the biggest takeaway, to be honest, was I thought that was a very safe job when I took it and. I think I've come to realize that like even at the top levels of this, like there's a lot of incompetency, there's fraudulent behavior in some cases, and kind of I walked away with this feeling of like.

Well see. I guess nobody really knows what they're doing, so I might as well go try my own thing. You know, I've been an operator for like 20 years. I never really wanted to be a founder, but I think that really gave me the push to be like, okay, well you might as well try to do your own thing at this point.

And then there's some very specific things. You know, there's a feature that we built at Epic, you know, it kind of relates to what we were talking about with the attention span. So one of the main goals for, for the product team at Epic is to get kids to read more books and whether that's like, get to the right books faster, read more books, spend more time overall, you know, similar engagement type KPIs.

And so one of the cool things that we were able to sneak in during that very turbulent time was a feature that we called cards. It's actually, it's still available on iPad only. And essentially what it is, is instead of just browsing like books, like the Netflix experience, it gave you, dare I say, like a TikTok style kind of card.

It was like a cool picture from the book or like a fun fact from the book. And you could just kind of flip through these and once one of them caught your attention, then you click it and it like unfolds into the book. Hmm. And so something like that, even just with our initial kind of MVP AB test, you know, we saw that like half of the kids were reading an extra book as a result of that.

So that's something that very specifically design wise and you know, one of my full-time employees at play Math was one of my senior product designers at Epic who worked on this feature. So we've been really talking about like what does that look like in play math and how do you kind of innovate on the browse experience, which I know some people would consider like a kind of a solved problem.

But I do think, especially for kids. They get a lot of choice paralysis and they spend, you know, I, I definitely end up on Netflix and I'll poke around for 30 minutes and then I'm like, yeah, I'm good. I didn't actually watch anything, you know, so, yeah. Yeah. That's my, my kind of very specific like design principle that we've taken.

[00:56:12] Alex Sarlin: I don't think it's a solved problem. It's still lots of innovation to go and browse, especially for kids and especially for that type of reading experience. So I think that's really interesting. Obviously there's a lot to dive into with the Epic by Jews tall education story, but I think that was a very fair-minded overview of it from the inside.

I think what you're doing with play math is really interesting in a lot of different ways. I wanna ask you just one more question about it, which is that you mentioned that it's a combination of, you know, licensed games, of indie game designers and then you build some of your own games. And I know that you had been working before, play math on some really interesting ways to build.

Games, especially using AI. I'm curious about the building experience when you decide to build your own math games inside play math, how do you think about that and are you using interesting technologies or techniques to build games that sort of rise right to the top of uh, something that kids would really enjoy and learn from?

[00:57:03] Nick Chen: Yeah, I think in general our part of the strategy of play math is to buy over build, right? Like I said, it's very expensive and time consuming to really sit down, ideate, what is an amazing game, you know, math, educational, math game. How do we make it fun? How do we make it educational and build all of it?

And so we've been trying to, you know, buy and license as much as we can. We do a lot of stuff where like, we'll buy like Unity projects and then we'll kind of enhance them. And so, so I'd say the vast majority is not built from scratch. But I will say with the rise and continued maturing of AI power development, you know, I actually didn't find out about Rosebud.

Until I did that panel with you guys and I was like, oh, this product's cool. And then I made a bunch of games on it. And I think certainly for like play testing a concept. Mm-hmm. Right? Like you could just whip together something like, Hey, I want Minecraft, but instead of building everything by block, by block, I want an X times Y times Z interface.

And then I can even more quickly build the right shapes. Like you can build that stuff so quickly now and just play with it and get it in front of my 6-year-old and see how he interacts with it. So I think the prototyping thing is like easy, like definitely there's so much that you can do there. And then as far as like building production ready games, I think we're getting there.

We're one of these micro companies. You know, we have some part-time, you know, senior engineers that kind of look over our shoulders, but it's really me and one other product design engineer that are kind of hacking this stuff together. I have my kind of attacks on AI. I have my, like my love for AI and I think there's so much we can do on the product development side that it's powering that makes it more affordable and accessible for us to build this kind of content.

But that's kind of where I'm at, is like definitely like the proofing and the prototyping. All those tools are amazing for, and then you kind of gotta. Do that extra 50% or whatever that, that proportion of work is to kind of get it production ready. But that is definitely a core part of our homegrown strategy.

[00:59:06] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, well, I think it's an exciting moment for even just that prototyping use case that you're talking about. The idea of having an idea for a game and being able to create a playable experience that you can put in front of kids, or try yourself very quickly before you, you know, spend a lot of time building.

That's already a powerful technique and I think, you know, it's only gonna get better. You've thought a lot about this and you're playing it down here, but I think you've thought a lot about this. It's very interesting what you're doing. Nick Chen is an EdTech product veteran with a passion for educational gaming, any lot of experience in it.

He's been, he did six years at ST Math building math games. He's worked at Imagine Learning Kiddom and Epic Reading. And his new venture is PlayMath.org, a play-based math platform focused on high quality math games for schools. Nick, thanks for being here with us on EdTech Inside. Thanks so 

[00:59:53] Nick Chen: much, Alex. See you around 

[00:59:54] Alex Sarlin: man.

We have a very special guest this week for the deep dive on this week in EdTech. We are here with Jamie Candee President, CEO, and board director at Edmentum, where she leads strategic vision and long-term growth. She's a former educator with 16 years of leading at Edmentum, and she's put educators and unique student needs at the forefront of Ed Men's Comprehensive.

K 12 Digital Solutions, which leverage adaptive technologies to accelerate learning, improve student achievement, and enable pathways to careers. Under her leadership, Edmentum has grown significantly and now serves over 6 million students in all 50 US states and over a hundred countries worldwide. Jamie Candee, welcome to EdTech Inside.

[01:00:40] Jamie Candee: Hi, Alex. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Oh, 

[01:00:42] Alex Sarlin: thank you for being on 50 states, a hundred countries. It's really quite amazing and you've just continued to innovate and do new things at Edmentum. So let's start by talking about the revamp. You are doing a full revamp of your career Pathways offering this year.

Yes. What are you doing there? What changes, what new features? How do you see this changing students' success post-secondary and beyond? 

[01:01:06] Jamie Candee: Yeah, so I love talking about this topic. I think it's near and dear to many of our hearts right now as we navigate to some of the challenges and opportunities in K 12 education.

We have always served students, a large percentage of the students that we serve at Edmentum, and just for a reminder for everybody we are. Inception dates back to 1960. We were actually the oldest ed tech company in the country. We started as the Plato Learning Project, which went on to become Plato Learning and was rebranded to Mentum in 2010.

And why that's relevant is because the very first research project that the University of Illinois took on through a research grant from the National Science Foundation. Was around upskilling, computer assisted instruction for adults. So that is actually how we got our start. So as I look at what's happening around our country right now, and there's a number of factors that are contributing to why we must invest in career connected learning for students as early as late elementary, early middle school is number one.

Our students want a different kind of engagement when they go to school. Number two, they want more. We all know that it's very important. Literacy is critically important to success in life, mathematics, the other content areas. But one of the things that we've struggled to do within our K 12 systems is help kids see a pathway to employment.

So what we talk about at in Inventium is exploration to employment. And why that's so important is number one, the labor dynamics, the economy is changing. What we need in terms of our future generations in terms of skills is evolving and changing very quickly. Always has continues to do so. What our school systems and policy makers are recognizing is that we actually have an opportunity in K 12, number one, to better engage our students early on.

Number two, to help them dream about their future. What do I love? What am I good at? How can I turn those passions into jobs? And then as I get into high school, how do I start to experience what those jobs might be like from the pathways that I follow in terms of courses I take to better learn those types of careers, to how I build a portfolio, capstone, experiential learning.

And when I then graduate, because I've been more motivated now to stay in middle school, high school, my absenteeism rates go down, my engagement levels go up. And now as I graduate, I'm looking at, maybe I go into higher ed, but maybe I go work for a few years so that I can afford higher ed. And so what we see happening right now in this country, and there's a lot of dynamics driving this.

It is a unique opportunity for Edmentum to really reimagine and restore the roots of the company, which is we started in 1960, very much focusing on how do we prepare learners to be workforce ready. And we see that coming full circle and we're super excited about it and we've put a ton of investment in, and it's a part of the organization that's growing very quickly right now.

[01:03:52] Alex Sarlin: It's amazing. And you mentioned this exploration to employment idea and exploration is this breath, right? Yes. Trying on all different identities, different careers, different industries, and then going deep enough and rigorous enough within one or a couple so that you come out of school with some meaningful skills.

I'm curious how you balance that breadth and that depth in Edmonton's programs. 

[01:04:13] Jamie Candee: So the way that the learning model works right now, or the instructional model is what we're advising our districts private schools and charter school and state partners, quite frankly, 'cause we're doing a lot of this work at the state level is between the years of fifth and seventh grade, you wanna start with exploration.

And that breath is really important because it's the time that kids are really figuring out what their passions are. So if you think about when you and I were in middle school, you start to think about, oh, I'm good at these sports, or I'm really artistic, or you know, you've gone through your younger years trying a lot of things and then you start to think about, well, maybe I wanna do more of this thing that I'm really good at, whether it's sports, whether it's art, whether it's performance, arts, whatever it might be.

And so we've advised our partners that when you bring middle school exploration into your instructional program, what it allows kids to do is start to really formalize the way in which they explore that breadth of all of the things. If you think about like. Anything you can do in the world and how many of those careers and professions you knew about as a child, the chances are, at least for me, I grew up in the seventies and eighties.

I understand it. A very limited amount of what was possible in the world. Right? And so we're trying to change that. That's the breadth part. Yeah. And then as kids get really interested in a particular area, that's where the depth comes in. And we call that the pathways. And so what is a pathway? A pathway is.

A series of courses organized around a cluster, and so right now in the country, allied Health is a really popular career cluster, and there's a lot of different jobs you can do in healthcare. What we allow you to do through our Allied Health Pathways is maybe you have a dream to really help people when you become an adult, you're not sure if that means being a doctor.

You're not sure if that means being a therapist. You're not sure if that means being a nurse. We allow you to do in these pathways is go deeper into learning more about those particular fields and potentially going deeper in a couple of those areas so you can practice the skills. And so the depth that we actually go through is both the technical skills and the way that those jobs actually operate when you're out in the real world.

And something that we think is really important with depth is how do we actually help you then build your durable skills? So what are durable skills? We used to call 'em soft skills. I think a lot of people are talking about durable skills. Now what we've done is we've actually embedded durable skills into our middle school and high school courses so that when we think about how do you practice and learn metacognition, inhibitory control, communication skills, how do I demonstrate leadership critical thinking?

We think it's really important to be developing those skills along with the technical skills because that's what our employers are asking us for. So the depth is. How do we align to state and national standards? How do we give you a fulsome experience of what it would be like to be a CNA, A certified nursing assistant that could lead to a registered nurse?

How do we make sure that we're building some of those critical, durable skills that are important to how you would become a nurse or a doctor, like communication, which is critically important. And when we define a pathway, that is how we're defining the fulsome breadth of the experience for our students.

[01:07:05] Alex Sarlin: It's a powerful vision and it's happening against a backdrop in which parents and students are having record low levels of faith in traditional educational institutions, especially higher ed, to really get them where they need to go career wise. So I think there's a real gap here to be filled. You mentioned the technical skills and some of the technical trades.

You recently announced a partnership with a VR company to bring immersive training in skilled trades into K 12 districts. That's a really exciting idea. What drove that decision? Tell us about what that product looks like and how you see that sort of hands-on, immersive VR type experience, transforming hands-on learning for the trades.

[01:07:41] Jamie Candee: Yes, so we had a chance to meet Doug and the team over at Interplay a few years ago, and what really struck us was the team had figured out how to take somebody who was already out of, whether it was higher ed or K 12, and somebody who had, let's take plumbing for an example. Huge demand for plumbers across this country.

Many, many different small businesses are being sold right now from the baby boomers into the millennial Gen Y generations and individuals are looking for. I am pretty good at kind of basic plumbing skills, but how do I become trained in plumbing? And so what interplay figured out is how to make that process of learning upskilling and workforce readiness more, uh, approachable and accessible to individuals and small businesses, mid-size businesses.

And so when we saw the model that they had taken to those small and middle market businesses, what struck us is it's the same kind of model that you can take to K 12. And the reason for that is one of the biggest challenges that we have in really scaling these programs in K 12, whether public or private, is access, right?

So the mobility issues of kids in high school. How do we find the opportunities to go do apprenticeships? How do you get them to these different locations? Is there enough locations for them to even train in their local communities, especially if they're rural? And so what interplay allows you to do, and it's both ar, vr, is bring the experiential learning into your home, the classroom, the lab, wherever that student might be learning.

And so. When you take our courses that take you on a pathway, the next part of that, before you go sit for a certification if it's required, is to get that apprenticeship, that internship, or that experiential learning to actually work with your hands, specifically in the trade prep areas. And so interplay actually brings that to a more accessible approach, which we think is critically important in our K12 environment.

So we're excited about the partnership. We've got dozens of pilots running right now across the country. They're running really, really well. And we think that this is something that is gonna be in high, high demand as we move forward in k12. 

[01:09:35] Alex Sarlin: One thing I'm hearing across the board and how you're talking about education, it's really, really intriguing is this idea of instead of seeing this early education and post-secondary and secondary, all as these sort of distinct phases, seeing it much more as a continuous spectrum, sort of working backwards from a fulfilling life with a career.

And I'm curious how you think about, you've mentioned embedding workforce readiness and skills and durable skills into education at a much younger age. How young does that go? Do you think about younger learners or elementary school learners? Do you feel like there's a role for workforce readiness or this type of thinking about your entire life ahead of you, even younger than middle school?

[01:10:12] Jamie Candee: We do, and it takes a different shape for younger learners. So what we're not advocating for is tracking. So we know that we have some countries where you try to figure out what a child is good at, and then you track them to a specific job. I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is what we know about kids right now is that they're inspired and engaged in different ways.

We live in a world that is filled with technology, with artificial intelligence, with social media, and all of these things are part now of our children's lives. So we can fight that. We won't win that fight. Or we can figure out how does education have to evolve to support the way in which kids want to and will continue to learn.

And part of that is kids are looking for, when we talk about, again, going back to that exploration, to employability, in those younger years when you're 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, what it's about is getting you excited about learning. Mm-hmm. And part about getting a child excited about learning is helping reinforce what they're good at.

Right? So kids respond to things they feel competent in. And so as you help them dream about all the different things, they love, things they like to do, I like to color, I like to draw, I like to sing, I like to dance, I like to play soccer. If you can really take that and harness. How do you then build upon that?

That's really what we're talking about, right? So everything I just named there can turn into a job. If you like kicking a soccer ball, you can go be a professional soccer player. You could also be a coach. You could also be an agent for soccer players. Like think of the endless possibilities. It's the same with dance.

It's the same with performance arts. It's the same with anything. And so if you actually harness the things that inspire kids and engage them, and you start to build your educational ecosystem around that, guess what ends up happening? Absenteeism goes down. Literacy and numeracy rates go up. Kids feel confident and good about being in school.

Mental health improves. So we see this, what we talk about when we say exploration to employability is also part of addressing some of the really big issues that we have for youth right now in this country. Because if they feel confident, loved, and secured, they're gonna feel more engaged. Getting to school, going to school, staying in school, and going on and being productive.

So we see this as all a continuous cycle as part of our kind of core, the core offering and the way that we think about education. 

[01:12:26] Alex Sarlin: We just spoke to Stephen Levitt, who's a podcaster. Yeah. The Freakonomics and he Yeah. Mentioned how Arne Duncan, when he was in Chicago, started these career academies. Yes.

And the result the career academies had not only, you know, higher skills outcomes, but higher test score outcomes, higher attendance outcomes, all of these interesting unexpected outcomes when you started injecting career and that type of thinking into education at a younger age. It dovetails exactly with what you're, you're saying there, there's, there's an inspiration there.

Yes. 

[01:12:52] Jamie Candee: It's funny you bring that up just really quickly because Arne is on my board of directors and we've been. Really excited and grateful to have Arnie advising us, one of the advisors, through how we do this work really well. And so very much what you're talking about in terms of how Chicago public schools really brought this to life, we're actually trying to take those models and bring them more broadly, scaling these types of models.

We're in the early years of doing this, but we think there's tremendous possibility. 

[01:13:17] Alex Sarlin: That's fantastic. I'm glad that they are officially connected and not just in my mind. I'm glad you mentioned the tracking 'cause I think this is a very common and very famous pushback against anything resembling vocational training or you know, this idea of kids not being tracked into careers at a very young age.

But I think one thing that, that we've never really grappled with as a country is that, you know, take tracking aside, let's not do tracking at all, but not even introducing kids to the world of work until they're in college or later, which is really how the system tends to work now. Feels like a true disservice.

And I just feel like there's something very. As you mentioned, you know, if somebody likes doing something, helping them understand what the world of work could look like, explore that world of work based on their strengths. It seems very obvious when you say it yet. It's been something that we have truly very rarely done in the US education system.

We see school and work as very different spheres. Yes. And I'm curious, I'd love to hear you talk about why you think historically that was and why we're coming back from that now. 

[01:14:14] Jamie Candee: I think as a country, the way that we built our education system, we were very focused on what happens in these ages and let's segment it, right?

If you even look at the agencies, right, the Department of Education versus the Department of Labor, we've had different structures over time, and some people may not think that matters. It actually does, right? So the way that federal policy is set, that then flows to how the states think about where they're gonna put their funding and how they're gonna write their policies.

And effectively what happens in education is an element of two things. It's an outcome of two things. Policy and funding, and especially in K 12 education. So the policies that are set, how they roll to the states and how the funding flows, that is literally gonna dictate how, you know, strategically the evolution of education happens in this country.

And I think there's, you know, politics are always gonna play a role in this, and I'm not interested in getting into politics today. I think there's some really interesting things that are happening right now in the ways that we think about, like the fungibility or the potential fungibility of, of funding and, and over the decades how funding has flowed because it is the upstart to get these things going and to bring things together.

So you're either gonna see things very separate or you're gonna see things come together based on the policy and funding decisions that we make. I can just give you a really personal story just to reiterate, and another reason why I'm so passionate about this work. You know, I grew up, I had some really significant learning challenges.

I also grew up very lower middle class. I had wonderful parents. My dad was a boiler operator in hospitals and my mom was a cosmetologist. She actually turned her cosmetology certification, never went to higher ed, went to a trade school, got a cosmetology certification, and went on to be a very successful small business entrepreneur.

As I was growing up, and this was, you know, this is in the eighties into the early nineties is when we really started to see the bifurcation of like, college is the dream. Everything that we're doing is getting kids to college, and now K 12, based on its funding and policies are gonna focus on making sure all the baseline things academically are established so that I may go on to be successful in college.

But as I was growing up, watching my mom and what she was doing, trying to understand how she did that and why she was successful and as a child being told I was too bossy, that I wasn't smart enough. All of these things that were challenging, it turns out I had very specific executive functioning skills.

I had some learning differences that made me a lot more grittier and and persistent and a hard worker. And all of that was sort of shaping me into what I eventually found in my life, which was to go from early years of teaching to becoming an entrepreneur, to now running ed tech companies. And I think when we think about that example and why I share it is.

I shouldn't, and no child should have had to suffer the way that I did in my childhood, trying to figure out who I was and why everybody was telling me I was bad at all these things because I actually wasn't. I was really engaged and passionate about things that just didn't make sense in the traditional construct of what it meant to be good in school.

So I challenge us all as education leaders to think about, and there's many education leaders out there that were like, or similar to me, that's why we chose this profession. But this is our moment and our opportunity to really start to bring these things together. And what's most important is what we do for the kids, right?

Because the kids, if they can feel loved and supported, all the things we're worried about with our NAP scores, declining enrollment. Declining enrollment is a little bit about birth rates, but declining enrollment in public schools is not only about birth rates, it's also about more choices for how our kids go to school.

And so, as we think about how we grapple with these problems. Bringing workforce readiness and career readiness into these younger learners and helping them dream and be engaged is going to help us with the outcomes across the board, our core academic outcomes and everything else that goes beyond that.

So I think it's important for us to just keep reflecting on that. 

[01:17:48] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's a powerful story, a personal story, and I feel like it, it really illustrates how you came to your opinions about this stuff. But also I think a microcosm of what we've seen across the board in education, this college for all movement.

And then people saying, wait a second, I think this is actually hurting some of the exact kids we, we were trying to help. Yeah. And I think there's been a lot of retrenchment coming back from that, and we're figuring out what's next. So you are right at the forefront of what's next. And I'm curious, you know, as you look at the political changes, as you look at the workforce readiness world, as you look at people being more comfortable with career pathways, as you look at VR and AR and AI, you know, when you look at all of these trends combined, how do you see things evolving in the education system over the next say five years?

[01:18:30] Jamie Candee: I think we're gonna continue to see quite a bit of volatility. And that can feel scary and we also can feel disenfranchised because a lot of the data that we're looking at tells us that kids aren't improving in pockets. It's not widespread, but there's some significant challenges in a lot of areas. And we have the political volatility right now in terms of what happens to education from the Department of Ed level through the states.

And then we have the rise of the parent and the student voice, which I find really interesting in terms of all of us as parents now believing that we have a perspective on what schools like and what we like and don't like about it. All that inertia and all those factors are contributing to what I call like very significant market volatility.

But what we know about market volatility, if you study any industry over time, we know that this kind of volatility and innovation typically leads to new ways of doing things. And I see that happening right now, and I think we're gonna experiment and there's gonna be many things that we try over the next five years that are gonna be very, very good for kids.

I do think career connected learning is one of them, and I think there's gonna be things we try that we kind of step back and say, you know what? It's probably not the best idea to have. Uh, I'll use an example. We're big proponents of AI. We are using it across our products and internally right now, but what I don't believe is that a young child should ever be taught by AI or a chatbot.

The human element of what our educators do cannot be replaced by technology and never should be. And so that's an example where I know there's some schools popping up right now where kids are entirely being taught and supported by AI. That could work for a subset of kids. I do not believe that that's something we should all embrace and say is the future of, of human engagement and learning.

But I think there's a lot happening right now. And I think what's important for those of us that have been running education companies, organizations, nonprofits, and systems for a very long time, is that we continue to look for the data that supports the things that are working. We continue to look for the partnerships with people and organizations that have been added in this work and care deeply about kids.

And we double down on the things, even if it feels scary, we double down on those things where A, we can see the outcomes and the data are working. B, we have trust and belief that the people we're working with have the best intentions for kids, and we really try to accelerate. Those types of initiatives, programs, re-envisioning high school transformation, middle school transformation, flexibility around how kids go to school.

I'm really, really excited about those components and I strongly recommend that all of us align on that, on those areas because like I said, with volatility and innovation comes opportunity, and I think we're in the messy middle of all that right now. In five years from now, we're gonna start to see some new themes that will start to stick in terms of our concept of like, what does it mean to go to school in k12?

How do we matriculate from K12 into whatever comes next? And then how do you kind of bring those partnerships and those synergies across these segments in ways that we haven't seen in decades? So I'm pretty excited about it. 

[01:21:28] Alex Sarlin: Amazing. Yes, it is a messy middle, but there are so much opportunity. Yes. I love your point about the student and parent voice rising in importance and career connected learning Absolutely is going to be a huge part of that story as is durable skills.

This has been a fascinating conversation. Jamie Candee leads Edmentum's Strategic Vision and Long-term Growth as President CEO and Board director. Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders, 

[01:21:52] Jamie Candee: Alex, thanks for having me. We'll talk again soon. Thanks all. 

[01:21:55] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders.

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