Week in EdTech 10/15/25: AI Adoption in Classroom Now Hits 85%, India’s EdTech Rebounds, Campus Acquires Sizzle AI, Learning Avatars, and More! Feat. Joy Chen of HeyGen & Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist Artwork

Edtech Insiders

At Edtech Insiders, we interview founders, investors, operators, educators, and thought leaders about the future of education technology. You’ll hear from leaders across the education technology industry and learn about all of the important edtech trends happening globally.

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Edtech Insiders

Week in EdTech 10/15/25: AI Adoption in Classroom Now Hits 85%, India’s EdTech Rebounds, Campus Acquires Sizzle AI, Learning Avatars, and More! Feat. Joy Chen of HeyGen & Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist

October 24, 2025 • Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell • Season 10

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Join hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell as they explore the latest developments in education technology leading into NY EDTECH WEEK, from AI adoption in classrooms to major acquisitions and emerging trends across global EdTech.

✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:39] 85% of teachers and 86% of students used AI this year, sparking concerns about disconnection.
[00:05:21] Google’s Notebook LM and OpenAI apps mark the next phase of AI-driven learning.
[00:10:56] Campus acquires Sizzle AI to accelerate AI-powered associate degrees.
[00:17:46] “Combine or Die”: AI startups merge with delivery platforms to stay competitive.
[00:20:38] India’s EdTech resurgence with new investment from Google, Anthropic, and SpeakX AI.
[00:22:16] One in five teens report AI relationships, redefining digital social life.
[00:23:40] Computer science shifts from major to essential literacy for all students.
[00:28:15] AI’s rise mirrors the early internet era as it becomes part of everyday life.

Plus, special guests:
[00:33:56] Joy Chen, Enterprise Account Manager at HeyGen on how AI avatars are reshaping instructional design and interactive learning.
[00:59:55] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist, on creativity, mentorship, and the role of technology in artistic education

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[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: They worked for the university to do a study for early literacy, and they basically said, which of these three avatars are young kids gonna feel most compelled to learn from? Here's the choices. I'm curious what you're gonna guess. A cartoon animal, a ultra realistic teacher that looks like a real teacher of young people, or a customized version of themselves.

[00:00:19] Ben Kornell: Thinking about the test maker side of this thing, you probably want me to answer the cartoon animal, and so I'm gonna X that one out because that would be the obvious answer, and then I would probably go with. Uh, avatar of themselves.

[00:00:32] Alex Sarlin: That's exactly right. Well done. Yeah. The engagement scores were much higher for customized versions of themselves.

Kids wanted to actually talk to versions of themself as a avatar.

[00:00:41] Ben Kornell: Metacognition, there you go. And also, these are the kinds of experiments we should be doing. Exactly. This is why the ai, not AI is no longer an effective frame.

[00:00:56] 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.

[00:01:36] Ben Kornell: Hello, EdTech insider listeners, it's another weekend. EdTech. I'm Ben Kornell alongside Alex Sarlin. Bringing you everything that's going on from the last week in Ed Tech, Alex, there's been so much happening as we lead up into New York Ed Tech Week, what's going on with the pod?

[00:01:55] Alex Sarlin: So this episode will probably come out right smack in the middle of New York Ed Tech Week.

We're recording a few days before it starts. The going on in the pod. In this episode, we talked to HeyGen, uh, enterprise account manager at HeyGen, talking about instructional design and AI avatars. We also talked to Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, who is the author of Lin-Manuel Miranda, education of an artist, all about his work, about Lin's education, how education technology came into it.

And a spoiler alert, I am an old childhood friend of Lynn's, so we got into some stories there too. Next week we're talking to Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson, who wrote that amazing book about team disengagement as well as Justin Reich, MIT professor and head of Teaching Systems Lab. And then of course on the pod overall we're talking to Mireia Torello from AIKreate, has put it together, a really amazing AI literacy curriculum and a set of GES of GESA.

They call it the GESA Awards finalists, and the organizer of the GESA Awards, which is an international ed tech prize, all sorts of amazing things. We're also talking to, and in case that wasn't enough to Erin Mote. And Michelle Culver from The Rithm Project, who, when I put out my editorial about AI Companions, they said, I think you're missing part of this story.

Let's talk a little more about AI Companions and education and some of the, some of the risk factors there. So we're gonna be talking to them in just a couple of weeks as well. So many amazing conversations just coming up nonstop on EdTech Insiders.

[00:03:17] Ben Kornell: Yeah, it's been an exciting time in the space. I feel like AI has taken a lot of the headline news, but there's also a lot going on in the m and a front in EdTech.

I've been talking with Matt Johnson, our friend from Oppenheimer, and I think there's a bunch of. Deals that are about to pop. Let's start with ai. What's the headline that's top of your inbox?

[00:03:39] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so I mean there was a new report. We see this sort of drip drop of really interesting reports about AI and education, but there was a new report this week that really caught my eye.

It's from the Center for Democracy and Technology and some of the numbers in there are really, they're pretty eye popping in terms of just the ubiquity of AI in the classroom, which is something we obviously talk about a lot on the pod. The numbers they show are 85% of teachers and 86% of students have used AI in the 2024 to 2025 school year.

That's the last year. That is incredible. You know, we talked about how there was gonna be sort of ubiquity. 85% usage is extremely high, and they also break it down into what they're using it for. So teachers are using it for curriculum and content development. That's almost 70% using it to engage students.

They're using it for pd, which is really great. They're using it for grading. And then students are using it for tutoring, for college advice, for relationship advice, for mental health support. Some of these use cases that were, that, you know, getting people a little nervous, but a little more on the sort of personal meets education front.

I thought that was a really interesting use case. They also called out that some people are, um, that students are worried that AI is actually creating distance between them and their teachers. They said that half of the students agreed that using AI in class makes them feel less connected to their teachers.

And, and I think over 70% of teachers were worried about that sort of cognitive offloading, cognitive outsourcing students sort of skipping steps and not doing the thinking themselves. So this one of these reports where it's like it's everywhere. People are using it for many different things and yet.

Some major concerns remain. None of that is exactly news, but it's really interesting to see the numbers on it and just to see the continued integration of AI into the baseline classroom experience.

[00:05:21] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, when we met with Steven Johnson, I think both of us were excited about Notebook as a surface area as a user experience, and I think that one thing that we're seeing now is that the chat experience of a single bar of text as your one's injury point really isn't the optimal form factor for learning and learning experiences.

At the same time, the technology around audio visual ai has accelerated so much. The kind of hook feature of notebook, remember was these podcasts you could create with AI voices. Based on source documents and materials. I have a eighth grader, so I'm hearing a lot about AI right now. And one thing that I'm noticing is that AI as a cheating tool seems to be have run its course and fading because most of the teachers in middle school and high school are changing their assignments to have much more in-person tests.

And so let's say you skip all the learning steps and then you show up for the exam, which is free of technology, or maybe it's on a Chromebook that's locked down. The short-term benefits of the AI are creating like long-term negatives. For the assessment. So, you know, when I'm looking at notebook lm, I actually feel more optimistic about this is a creative multimedia space, and you've also seen OpenAI make these moves to embed other applications within their ecosystem.

We thought like a year ago or two years ago, we would see more like AI app marketplaces, and we thought we'd see these more differentiated learning surfaces. It may be that just some of that technology is catching up with the use cases we saw at that time.

[00:07:12] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so I mean, on the OpenAI front, OpenAI, you know, announced just recently their sort of revamped app strategy and they had Coursera as a launch app and they also have Khan Academy listed as sort of the next generation of apps.

So, and one, one level. They are trying to take all of these educational experiences and sort of tuck them within the text-based interface that is chat BT that is sort of the monolithic, dominant interface of AI right now. On the other hand, you have things like, you know, Google, uh, notebook, LM this week.

You know, you just mentioned some of the, the podcasts. They've expanded into videos, and this week they put out something that I thought was really interesting. They now have six different styles of video that you can turn any knowledge base into. That could be your class notes. That could be a reading, that could be a book, it could be anything that you already have a transcripts.

And one of the styles that jumped out to me just 'cause it's such a popular one, is anime. You can basically now turn your notes into anime videos. They also have paper cuts, they have watercolors, they have these sort of retro ones. They have some really interesting ones. But the idea of being able to turn anything you're learning into an anime video, and they have have two lengths too.

They have short, short form and they call it a brief video. Like you get a brief or you can get an explainer. The idea of being able to take anything you're learning and turning it into, into anime, one of the most popular media formats around right now, I feel like it's directionally something that is, is where, where things are really gonna head.

So like, like you're saying, you know, the chat based interface, you just, you ask and it responds is sort of. AI 1.0. I feel like we're getting much more into the contained knowledge base, contextual ai, maybe agents in certain capacities, and then where the output is actually tailored or customized to something you actually wanna consume.

Whether it's a podcast or a video that feels like it's becoming 1.5 or AI 2.0. And then combine that with your assessment story that you just said of people starting to catch on to the, the traditional assignment. I think we're starting to see the next generation of AI emerge.

[00:09:13] Ben Kornell: So combining those two, if we're seeing ubiquitous use, we're also seeing some of the downsides of disconnect and so on.

I think we have to be realistic that talking about AI as a uniform thing is no longer effective. And you know, it's like when I was in college, we'd call these companies, internet companies, oh, look at all these internet companies. Now they're just companies, right? And there's a million subsets. I feel like you just super clearly articulated 1.0, 2.0 or maybe 1.0 to 1.1, 1.3, and now we're on 2.4.

But really, I feel like the headline of this being everywhere actually helps us understand that now it's really about, okay. How is this, what is the user interface? And I think that's probably what gives me the most hope. That this evolution that, you know, in that interview with Steven, you were already predicting some of this stuff to happen.

So here we are.

[00:10:18] Alex Sarlin: It's happening. It's happening and it's really exciting. And you know, I mean, talking to the HeyGen folks, which is at the end of this episode, you also see how video platforms are starting to think about outputs in these different ways, right? I mean, interactive video avatar based, like they did a study.

I, Ben, I don't think you've heard this part. It's so interesting. They worked with the university to do a study for early literacy and they basically said, which of these three avatars are young kids gonna feel most compelled to learn from? Here's the choices. I'm curious what you're gonna guess. A cartoon animal, a ultra realistic teacher that looks like a real teacher of young people, or a customized version of themselves.

[00:10:56] Ben Kornell: Oh man, that's a tough one. Well, I think that, you know, um, thinking about the test maker side of this thing, you probably want me to answer the cartoon animal. And so I'm gonna x that one out because that would be the obvious answer. And then I would probably go with, uh, avatar of themselves.

[00:11:12] Alex Sarlin: That's exactly right.

Well done. Yeah. The engagement scores were much higher for not cartoon, for customized versions of themselves. Kids wanted to actually talk to versions of themself as a avatar.

[00:11:24] Ben Kornell: Metacognition. Metacognition. I mean, this is my, my point. So, uh, that's, that's great to hear. Interesting. Right. And also, these aren't the kinds of experiments we should be doing exactly right now.

This is why the ai, not AI is no longer an effective. Frank, I agree. It is all about use case and how speaking of use cases and how campus, which is one of the leading ed tech companies in the two year degree space. So really thinking about college career and how might we break that down to really accelerate students forward.

They've made a big acquisition with Sizzle ai. Jerome was actually on our podcast, and Sizzle was a hot AI startup for learning, in part because Jerome and his team come with incredible credentials from Meta and some of the other kind of leading organizations in AI as well as experts from MIT and Harvard.

With this acquisition campus still can be debt free and they still have these two year career programs, but the idea is that this accelerates their roadmap by two to three years by embedding student facing learning tools with AI as well as leveraging AI for them to build their product roadmap. What's your read on on this?

Is this a business story? Is this a higher ed and reshaping higher ed story? What's your take on this?

[00:12:48] Alex Sarlin: That's a great question. Yeah. So here's my take on it. I'd see if this, this resonates with you. Ben, I'm curious. So campus is an EdTech app that really focuses on delivery. It has, it's, it's basically, you know, you get associates degrees, they have some very high demand fields.

They also have degrees in cosmetology and, and other fields that are commonly done for two year degrees. They're accredited as a university and they're really trying to sort of disrupt and make more flexible the community college experience, or community college and associates degree experience. So that is already sort of inside the credential ecosystem of education Sizzle.

And was trying to do things that they actually made learning itself more accessible. They were about customizing, learning objects, using ai, trying to make learning more personal, trying to make learning more efficient. And I think the combination here, my guess it's just a guess, is that Sizzle doing that kind of work.

Outside of any context may or may not have been finding true product market fit, because just learning itself isn't a value proposition for that many people, right? It's learning in a context of credentialing, learning in a context of work, learning in a context of graduation, learning in a context of trying to improve your, your, your life outcome in some way, no matter what age you, you're maybe learning to read.

Read. So I think what's interesting about this collaboration is it's a very technical forward thinking and very slick AI company, but that was focusing on something that wasn't actually contextualized in the education system that we have, meeting a successful company that is very much contextualized in the education system.

It's literally about, you know, making two year degrees, which is a, can be a real game changer for people's careers and skill sets. Combining these two is a really natural fit. My guess is that there were maybe some investors pulling some strings behind the scenes. There may have been, I'm not sure. And you know, campus has these superstar investors.

It has Sam Altman as an investor, it has Shaq as an investor. They're a sort of star ed tech company. Sizzle also had some star investors. So my guess is that it's a sort of a slightly, I wouldn't say forced, but a slightly encouraged marriage behind the scenes. But one that's actually very logical, because campus is all about delivery and outcomes and sizzle is all about learning efficiency and effectiveness.

And they could really use each other. And you know, and Jerome pti, who is a former VP of AI at Meta, is now becoming the CTO. He is already on their site, the CTO of campus. So they get to accelerate the roadmap, get really great technology, get learning efficacy, but get it in the context of helping people get their degrees.

And because we're talking about associate's degrees. May be first generation students or people who may not have a huge amount of, of learning infrastructure around them. So I think it's a great idea and I think it's an interesting combination when we may see replicated in the future. This idea of the delivery model meets the sort of hardcore AI learning system.

[00:15:38] Ben Kornell: Yeah. We've seen this combination happen in other spaces where a highly technical company and a highly contextual company, like you said, join forces. One of my takeaways from this is that it's really hard to be a technical expertise or infrastructure company and serve multiple players who have channels.

So there's a bunch of people trying to run the gambit of, I will be your AI tool provider providing X, Y, Z service. I work with you and I work with three of your competitors. You should all sign contracts with me. And from a revenue standpoint, the dream is you become vital infrastructure. Kind of everybody embeds with, it's like the Intel chip or the A MD chip.

Nobody else is creating the chips and they're all embedding one of those two chips. And finally Apple created their own chip because they just got frustrated with that dependency. But it becomes so ubiquitous with ai, it's just hard to have the defensibility to be the sole layer that everybody plugs into.

And so once you get that one reference customer, or once you get that one partner, all the other people, they wanna partner with you less because then they are like, wait a second, if I partner with you, the things you developed for me might benefit my competitor. And so I don't know what really was going, you know, these are stories where we don't have all the facts and all the background information, but m and a makes a lot of sense when you've got these like two puzzle pieces fit together.

It makes more sense than these syndicating commercial deals across a competitor set. And so I think there's a fair number of ai, well-funded AI companies that kind of came up over the last two years where they may have to make a choice around just instead of having multiple customers, we really only have one customer.

Let's get acquired by them and work from the inside. And I, I think that that, whether that exact thing happened here or not, I think that's a trend in the space that connects with this.

[00:17:46] Alex Sarlin: I think that's so well put and, and we've seen it both in the AI space at large, right? With companies like Scale. AI was trying to do that with all of the companies and then got acquired by Meta and sort of pulled out of play, or even inflection AI got acquired by Microsoft and Mustafa Sullivan got pulled in there that they were trying to be a little bit of that.

And then we've seen it in the EdTech space. We saw it with Soapbox Labs. That's like when we talk about a lot, right? It was trying to be shared infrastructure for automated speech recognition for children. And then Curriculum associates came in and said, we want that and we want nobody else to have that because it's a huge, huge differential advantage.

And they bought it out and caused a little bit of chaos in space. So I agree with you. I think it's a really smart pattern recognition, that idea of, you know, some of these technical plays that are trying to be infrastructure across the board. Create a sort of a lopsided dynamic where people become dependent on them.

This is also true in this chip space, but that's a whole other world, right? But it's like people, like you said, with Intel or Nvidia md, people can become dependent on the middleware, but the middleware is benefiting everybody. It also, in EdTech, it works across different ages. So like, you know, sizzle ai, I'm sure that they had clients in higher ed, they had clients in workforce, maybe they had some K 12 clients.

Now within campus, it's like, well, we know our customer. We need to optimize this for community college, for associate's degree, for this is our customer now. That is very clarifying, and it allows them to accelerate their own development map with a specific use case in mind. Just as you probably saw that with soapbox when it became in Curriculum Associates.

It's like, well, now we know exactly what we're building for. Rather than trying to build an infrastructure layer for, for multiple use cases, we may see th similar things in the mental health space. I mean, there's some really interesting opportunities here, but I like that. Reid, my hunch is that there was a little bit of pushing together, like.

I may be wrong, but just because these are both, these are two companies with a lot of press, with a lot of, with got, got a lot of attention and with very sort of high cloud investors. But my guess just between you and me, Ben, you know, and and our listeners is that, my guess is that Sizzle got a lot of attention when it first came out, partially for its technical prowess, but you haven't heard a huge amount since then about it sort of blowing up the space.

I feel like it probably hadn't totally hit product market fit on its own. So combining it with this type of delivery mechanism that is doing well, I mean campuses, I think over 3000 active students, it's like, which is for, for colleges is pretty good and they're growing and they've gotten a lot of tension.

Like I, I can see how putting it together and giving them a focus is gonna be beneficial to both sides.

[00:20:12] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I feel like this is the time where Combine or die is also an element and the investors behind these things may have seen the exact puzzle pieces you saw, which is one has this great contextual impact and this other has this compelling technical advantage.

I'm curious, just as you're looking across AI and ed tech, are there any other stories that came to the top of the list for you?

[00:20:38] Alex Sarlin: The other one that, that I thought was worth talking about today is, we've reported here about how the first quarter of this year was a huge bounce back for Indian ed tech. And I think we're seeing, we're starting to see a real resurgence of, uh, Indian tech and Indian ed tech, and I think India is very hot again right now.

And this week we saw, you know, Google announcing their building a $15 billion AI data hub in India, all about digital transformation and infrastructure. We saw Anthropic make, you know, after, after Daria Amide met with the Indian Prime Minister, they have announced a big Indian strategy and they're starting to really go there.

It's their second biggest market that's following on. We saw open AI hire an uh, India lead. We also saw. Speak X ai raise a good chunk of money this week, which is an Indian ed tech raised $16 million, which is an English language learning ed tech out of India. I'm just trying to put the signals together and it just feels like we're officially post post by Jews.

We may even start to be post some of the other big Indian ed techs that we always talk about the physics wall, and it just feels like we're, we're entering a new phase of Indian tech and Indian ed tech where India is going to be like a very serious part of the conversation again, and, and the Anthropic India office is focused on social sectors, including education and healthcare, which are incredibly important.

So I just have my eyes on India. You know, we've talked about that a few times. We obviously know that GSV, one of the major ed tech VCs has focused on India for a long time. There's been a lot of movement in India for a long time, but it just feels like there's a new, a new page turning for India that is worth everybody in the ed tech space really paying attention to.

[00:22:16] Ben Kornell: Yeah. And the Paul of the overhang in that space with basically the kind of full wind down of Biju, I think has also kind of freeing things up. Yeah. You know, the other two stories that caught my eye was one in five students have had a relationship, high school students have had a relationship, romantic relationship with an AI bot.

I think that is something just for parents to be aware of that this is coming and kids use technology for all of their needs and interests. So what will that look like for the future? That's something for folks to be aware of. And then the second is like following up on our series that we did about joblessness for computer science majors.

There was a podcast from the New York Times about, you know, kind of sold a story, part two, which was sold a story that computer science is the path to the good paying jobs and now kids are under paid or underemployed. It is making me feel more, the theme that I've been picking up on is computer science is no longer a major, it should be a minor, it should be something that everybody takes a few foundational computer science courses.

But just like we were saying, every company is an AI company now. Like basically every graduate should have some sort of CS basics, almost like you need literacy because even if you're not writing code, your ability to review code and use AI to make stuff is important. And it's, that's elevating the importance of having passion about the subject area you're going into.

And, you know, we were talking a little bit with your friend about actually the more technology advances. The more, the differentiation is actually around people's deep passion and and knowledge. And in some ways it's like this great advice you can give to a high school or college student is find what you're passionate about.

You'll probably have 12 or 13 different jobs and roles you'll have to evolve and play. But if you can really find what lights your fire, whether that's a subject area, a functional area, a group that you're serving, whatever it is, that North Star can help you evolve and weather the technological disruption that now just feels like an in inevitable every couple of years.

So that's kind of, I'm sitting with that story and just kind of the numbers don't lie.

[00:24:47] Alex Sarlin: I love all of that. I got just a couple of quick thoughts that I think put some of these stuff together and we, we also saw OpenAI put out a teacher led collection this week, which is worth looking at of classroom uses of chat, GBT.

That's just neither here nor there. But I thought it was worth mentioning in terms of your, the romantic AI relationships or the idea of following your passion. I, I can never escape. I, I feel like a broken record here. I've said this probably 10 weeks in a row, but there's so much, I think we can learn from the, the rise of the, the first internet boom with this rise of AI in that when something appears on the scene that is technological, that changes behavior, that just, it makes everything accessible first.

It feels like, like you said, internet companies, oh, all these internet companies are coming up. It's, it's, it's the new internet company and then suddenly you start to realize, wait, the internet is just a normal piece of life now for, for individuals, for companies. Yet everybody has a website. Everybody's gonna have an email.

And I feel like what's happening with some of these stories with ai a really mirror that, right? I mean. The one in five high schoolers has had a romantic AI relationship or knows someone who has Right. That NPR story you're mentioning, I mean, that was what chat rooms, that was what was happening at the first minute of, of a OL.

And you know, the early days of the internet people were getting on and saying, what is this? There seemed to be other people here in AI's case they're not real people. But what do I do? Do I flirt? Do I try to find them? Do I, you know, cyber chat with them? What is this new way of communicating? And you just see high schoolers playing with this idea that report about, oh, well, they're asking about college advice and career advice and mental health and relationship advice.

They're just talking to it and figuring out what it knows, what it might help with. It's a very experimental period, and I don't, people are very afraid of this. I'm not that afraid of this. And what we'll talk to Aaron Mode and Michelle Culver next week. They'll probably scare the bejesus out of, out of me and, and all of us with some of their statistics.

But like this is new and everybody's playing with it and figuring out what it can do. And then I think it's relevant to your point about passion as well, because just the way that the internet became normalized, you couldn't just be an internet person anymore. Right. If you wanted to start an internet company, you needed to care about something.

Right. You know? eBay was started by people who were doing collecting. They were PEs dispenser collectors, and they wanted a big flea market, and they created eBay. Amazon was started by, you know, a classic story about the guy who wanted to remove all the barriers to buying things like, like create a, the everything store.

But like, if you track back any internet company, at some point there's some level of of interest and passion in there that is not internet. They're not passionate about the internet, the way you'd be passionate about ai. They're passionate about something. They wanted to make something happen. So they made a site about it.

They made a store about it. They made an online community about it, and I feel like it's the same thing now. It's not that different, right? I mean, AI is just gonna become part of our lives. You need to care about something other than AI and use AI to do something new, to actually make something happen.

And I don't know. I'm very excited about it. It also maybe implies that there is an AI bubble. It's something we did not talk about. It's been in the news a lot recently. There was certainly an internet bubble in the early, the late 1990s or to 2000. There may be an AI bubble for all the same reasons. But I don't know.

I find that framing incredibly useful for trying to make sense of what's happening right now with ai because it's a fundamental change to society. And last point on this, I think what's gonna be coming is social uses, right? Remember Web 2.0 where it went from receiving to communicating through the web user generated content.

We have not seen that at all with AI yet.

[00:28:15] Ben Kornell: The only thing I would say is we're seeing a lot of slop and just flooded channels. So that's the fear of the U GC plus AI moment too.

[00:28:25] Alex Sarlin: That's the moment we're in. But you saw a lot of slop on the first year of YouTube too, right? I mean, and then they started to figure out how to get people the stuff they actually wanted to see.

[00:28:34] Ben Kornell: Curation is like a real benefit in that environment for sure.

[00:28:38] Alex Sarlin: Huge. It's more important than ever when anybody can create music. Anybody can create video, anybody can create images.

[00:28:45] Ben Kornell: I just listened to Rage Against the Machine, a like soul band version of Bulls on Parade generated by ai. It's awesome. It's like super high quality.

You know, I think in the education context, there is this question of, yes, maybe that is what's happening and where we're heading and we're on this really fast disruption curve with some bubbles, with some ups and downs, and I think people are really trying to navigate what can they trust, what feels appropriate.

I saw in our EdTech Insiders Chat that Alpha Schools submitted applications for charter school petitions. In something like seven states where it was rejected because it felt too experimental. And even though state regulators created charter laws to do innovation, it felt beyond the pale of what they could uh, prove.

And then similarly, we have more traditional ed tech providers like Stride in New Mexico having huge lawsuits where this kind of sense of prioritizing profits over prioritizing the benefits to teachers and kids come into conflict. So there is this like trust issue where EdTech promised a lot during COVID times.

Now we've got AI with a bunch of promises. And you know, of course, like you just said, students are using it one way or the other. What is a school to do when you really are trusted with safeguarding your kids and providing high quality valuable supports? So I feel like this is a theme. We're gonna be, you know, we've talked a lot about themes since the early days of the podcast, like disruption of higher ed and how this is going to get stackable, fractional, and and so on.

'cause it just makes sense. I also think this evolution towards use cases and multi-directional learning cases is a theme that whether it happens tomorrow or whether it's more like a four year thing, probably has more to do with social circumstances than it does with the actual capabilities of the tech itself.

Totally. But I think that's something we're gonna see as a big trend.

[00:30:55] Alex Sarlin: It took us a while to figure out how to use the internet inside school environments. Right. It wasn't an obvious answer. It, we took blacklists and white lists and, and firewalls and lots of thinking and policies and state policies and district policies, but internet is now in classroom now, right.

People do, people can use it for a lot of different things. We're going through the same process right now. It's, it is not a natural fit. Automatically that chat, BT or especially Anthropic, you're not even allowed to use Anthropic if you're under 18. Right. It's 18 and over. It's, it's mutually exclusive with high schools.

Right. Almost entirely. So what do you do? Well, maybe Atropic fuels a magic school. Magic school creates a environment and a set of tools that work for teachers. Then they think about what's safe for students and create structures there. Like this is exactly our role as the ed tech ecosystem, is to take this incredibly powerful technology that's sort of wild west and figure out how to use it for learning, how to use it for social engagement, how to use it to engage students, how to use it to make teachers' lives better.

How to use it for, you know, for all the, to health graduation rates and outcomes. Like this is our job. And I, I think it's really exciting because there's lots of scared gotcha kind of worries about ai, but this is the work and we've seen it work before.

[00:32:06] Ben Kornell: Well, with that in mind, we're excited to have our guests come on on the podcast, but thank you for those of you who are tuning in.

If this is your first time to weekend EdTech, if it happens in EdTech, you'll hear about it here on weekend. EdTech. Please follow us online. Please like the pod and your platform of choice. And feel free to reach out to me or Alex if you've got more ideas for what we should be covering on the pod. And

[00:32:28] Alex Sarlin: Ben, this is coming up right in EdTech week.

Tell us about your EdTech Week panel.

[00:32:31] Ben Kornell: Oh, my EdTech week panel is really about the great disintermediation caused by ai and we're gonna be talking about some of the shared tooling and platforms that are hopefully creating, I think, a new batch of micro school cap or MicroComp capabilities. And this idea that behemoth corporate curriculum companies.

May finally be a dinosaur of the past. The other thing that we're talking about is the role of the learner, the role of the teacher, and the role of the parent changing pretty fundamentally over the last several years and how AI is accelerating that. So should be a great panel. And also some differing opinions and provocative views on that.

You have Stephen Jewel and Ahmed Patel, right? That's right. And we also have Kristen from formerly

[00:33:19] Alex Sarlin: Chan Zuckerberg

[00:33:20] Ben Kornell: Initiative.

[00:33:21] Alex Sarlin: Oh, amazing. Yes, and I'm talking to Potluck Mattel from, who's the head of AI at campus. So we'll get to talk specifically about this acquisition. Be interesting as well as Bru GTI from Lit Lab, Monique, Malcolm Hay from, uh, rethink and Steve Fer from Reach Capital.

We have a really interesting panel about the speed of change that AI is, is reaping for all of us. It obviously relates to everything we talk to on the podcast. Really excited about EdTech Week, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in person, Ben. We don't. We don't,

[00:33:49] Ben Kornell: yeah, we don't see each

[00:33:50] Alex Sarlin: other enough.

[00:33:50] Ben Kornell: Well, hopefully we'll see you all there. Thank you everyone for listening. And now on the interviews.

[00:33:56] Alex Sarlin: For this week in EdTech Deep Dive, we are talking to Joy Chen. She's an enterprise account manager at HeyGen, one of the fastest growing AI video companies. Joy holds a master's degree in education, technology, and instructional design from teachers College Columbia University, and over the past three years at HeyGen, she's worked closely with learning and development leaders across K 12 schools, universities, and corporate training organizations.

She brings a unique perspective combining her expertise in education and technology to help customers adopt AI video solutions effectively. Joy Chen, welcome to EdTech Insiders.

[00:34:34] Joy Chen: Hi Alex. Thanks for having me. And I'm very glad to have this opportunity to join like EdTech Insider community to share my learning and observations in the past three years.

[00:34:45] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I we're really curious about those. So, you know, we've talked about HeyGen on the podcast. It is a very interesting company, does hyper-realistic, interactive avatars that can look and sound like, like historical figures, but it also look and sound like anybody, and it's very, they're very easy to train.

Tell us a little bit about your experience with HeyGen. You came to HeyGen from an educational perspective, and where do you see AI video, especially the type of video HeyGen does, making the biggest difference in enhancing instructional design?

[00:35:15] Joy Chen: Yeah. I joined HeyGen three years ago. I start my internship with HeyGen when I still in teacher's college.

So my major is instructional design. I think digital media. So in my program actually, we have a lot of alumni, once they graduate, they become a instructional designer in large corporate. So when I first joined HeyGen, we really want to find early product market fit. Because we're a early startup, we really want to find out how like the instruction designer can using HeyGen, this kind of AI video generation platform into their day-to-day workflow.

So my first project for HeyGen is we done a lot of interviews with instructional designers and also some TC professors try to understand what is their pinpoint to create content for the corporate. I think how we think about this kind of AI platform generative AI can help for instructional designer is we do can provide instructional designer this kind of platform.

Previously, we know when we design a very high quality studio level, quality courses is really need an instructional design team. So it'll be include instructional designer, video audio producer, motion graphic designer, and also if you want to translate accountant, localize it into different languages.

You also need the localization team to help you to localize accountant. But now with generative ai, we do want to provide a all in one tool for the instructional designer. Actually, once they have an idea, they can use AI to generate and polish their script and use an avatar. We call it AI avatars like your digital twin, and you do not need to go into a video studio.

You can directly use Avatar to generate that training content. And if you want to translate that, you can also use AI to translate it into different languages. So we do want AI provide this kind of all in one solution for instructional designer team and then like they just, uh, much easier and smooth workflow for their day-to-day content creation.

[00:37:29] Alex Sarlin: What I'm hearing you say, and it's a really interesting take on it, is that usually you need a whole team to do a high quality, you know, video based course. You need many roles sort of working together, of which the instructional design is only one input, but when you have an AI avatar that can play the role of the host, and that could be from a, you have an enormous library at HeyGen of preexisting avatars, or as you say, a digital twin, and that can be localized and translated, and it can be done in much lower cost, almost realtime generation in a lot of ways.

It actually puts more of. The power of the sort of reins into the instructional designer themself, rather than it having to be this whole team project. It can be a smaller team, more efficient, easier to update, but the instructional designer gets this toolkit to create AI avatars and create a course very high quality studio level course without needing to be quite as collaborative.

They can inject the instructional design closer to the core of the product.

[00:38:27] Joy Chen: That's right. I do think we provide this kind of toolkit and instructional design actually can be more independent and once they have an idea, they can actually just start to create and generate.

[00:38:40] Alex Sarlin: And do the graphics and the multimedia and sock footage, all these different pieces that can sort of go into it.

One other aspect of the HeyGen avatar suite that I find just incredibly exciting is the interactivity. And you know, one of the things that that video, educational video has always been, you know, considered really powerful but also somewhat passive. And we know that learning is not really passive. People should be actually engaging.

So sitting and watching a video, you know, you can definitely learn a lot from it, but it's a little bit of a passive experience. Can you talk about the interactivity and how HeyGen's interactive AI avatars work and what you think the potential there is for instructional design?

[00:39:17] Joy Chen: Yeah, I think you mentioned that feature, which I'm also very personal, excited, is Interactive Avatar.

We now also call it Live Avatar. So I think firstly we mentioned like, Hey, you have a capacity, like you can use your avatar to generate video content. We know like video as you mentioned, is one way deliverable, so it's a little bit passive for the learners to learn the content, but interactive avatar and live after avatar actually, like you can imagine, like the avatar can join a live conversation and chat with that learners, the users, and you can set up the knowledge base to create the knowledge base.

And HeyGen will be like the visual layer, the avatar, visual layer to talk with the end user so you can set up the knowledge base is, you can imagine you, you can just. Create your own large language model, or you can also use, for example, Gemini or chat GPT to do your customized GPT. And it's just like the brain of that avatar and HeyGen's avatar is like the visual layer and can have the lip sync and directly talk with learners.

And now we want to also make it much customizable. So you can create your own customer interactive avatar. You can also try to use some animated character because when we think about schools, think about keys, we probably want to make that learning experience more gamification and more engaging. So we can also create some animated character to capture their attention.

But this is based on. Live chat. So we do see some early adoption for our customer, like using it in a real world use case for training, especially for this kind of conversational based training, for sales enablement, for this kind of upskilling coaching, this is more conversational style, role play training.

[00:41:18] Alex Sarlin: It really starts to get close to this incredibly exciting sort, almost like science fiction inspired idea of being able to pull up a tutor or a character. As you say, it could be an animated character. It could be somebody who, it could be an avatar that looks and sounds exactly like your teacher or your trainer.

It could be a historical figure, you know, if Sky is the limit and actually converse back and forth with that person, and as you say, their brain. I like that metaphor, right? It's like you give that avatar a brain, a knowledge base, data to work with, and then some variant of a large language model and some behavior, and suddenly it can act in certain ways, know certain things and give you the feedback you need.

It could be trained on the corporate policies of a company or the curriculum of a K12 school, right?

[00:42:01] Joy Chen: Yeah, that's right. You can just customize that. As we mentioned, like for example for the corporate, if you want to create a compliance training avatar, you can just customize that knowledge base or just a new hire onboarding field just to upload that onboarding knowledge base.

And also like for K 12, you probably just can, based on the your learning goals or your textbooks to customize that brain. And Alex, I also feel another exciting thing about interactivity is we try to also enhance the video videos interactivity, because we talk about live avatar is like interactive avatar.

But for the video we also try to develop some features. We call it branching and interactive quiz. Because we know when we design a learning experience, really we use our learning management system to design that branching and also interactive quiz feature. Now we also want to directly build it into HeyGen and instructional designers learning experience.

Designers can directly use this to design that and export at score and upload to their learning management system. So this is another interactivity feature we are building now.

[00:43:28] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And, and people who have been in the, in the l and d field for a while or have known about this video technology, that type of branching, scenario-based training has been something that we've aspired to and sort of has been built in various ways over the last decade or so.

But I feel like what's happening with, with LLMs and AI and with what you're doing at HeyGen is you take that branching type of work, which which has been very manual to build, right? You have to build every single branch of the trade. You know, do you ask the user if they wanna do X or Y and they pick y and then from Y they, they make three choices, and each one has a different video output.

It's powerful and it's interactive, but it's very time consuming to make. And I feel like what's so exciting about LLMs is you can have virtually infinite branches based on much more intelligent understanding under the hood about what's being discussed in a particular knowledge base or a particular learning goal.

One of the things that's so interesting about what you're doing, because you're coming from teachers college because you're bringing all this instructional design experience, you've been doing some mapping between some of the most common and and most well used instructional design techniques and what's possible with HeyGen avatars, and I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about some of the instructional design and teaching theories that can be brought to bear in the context of an avatar based learning experience.

[00:44:47] Joy Chen: For HeyGen, we do think we provide a multimedia learning solution for the users because actually they can use AI avatar to be the narrator, the presenter of their video content. And also you can create some templates. When we think about templates, I think if we use, uh, instructional design concept to perspective, to think about, it's really like a score forwarding of your content.

You can set up the, the goals, learning objectives, and design that chapters video chapters to match, to well design your content. And also, like what I'm thinking about is also we do want to think about like personalized learning theory. When you have more, when AI help you to reduce production cost, you actually can create.

Much like personalized content to approach the audience and also for the live avatar. If we think about, we build up a live avatar, but we have 100 different students to get approach to the avatar. Actually, the avatar can be a personalized coach and personalized tutoring, so they receive much more personalized.

Education. So I think it's very exciting.

[00:46:08] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. The scaffolding, the personalization, the idea of the, the AI avatar being able to be, to act like a tutor and act like an effective tutor, ideally in the diff exact context in which somebody's trying to learn whether they're a, a. Corporate employee, whether they're a lifelong learner, whether they're a higher education student.

These sort of are putting together the front layer, the delivery layer, the underlying knowledge base and instructions, and then the behavior, which is a particularly, you know, I think really exciting part of this. So there's been some interesting studies I, I know that, that HeyGen has been starting to really look into in terms of that, what does the behavior look like, you know, because this avatar, it looks totally realistic, it speaks in any language, it can speak in different voices.

You know, there's this sort of delivery piece, but what's happening in the brain, as you say, can be really trained to be more pedagogically valid than an off the shelf LLM. And I think you've been thinking about both different types of avatars and how people experience them and different types of teaching methods under the hood and how people experience them.

Tell us a little bit about where you think this is all going. You know, do you feel like there will be a tutoring. Brain that may be created by a frontier model. It may be created by a platform like yours, but a type of behavior that tries to imitate what a really effective tutor does, and then combined with an incredibly smooth, multilingual front end.

Is that where you think we're gonna get, where everybody will have a personalized tutor, has a knowledge base, has the behavior built in? How do you think these pieces are gonna come together?

[00:47:39] Joy Chen: I think this is our interesting topic. We have collaborate with some universities, especially this technology is really new, so we, we really want to find out how it can better support education for, to build this kind of more effective learning experience.

So we work with universities. I think a very interesting use case, use scenario is for the kids early, early literacy education. So we actually try to create some custom avatar, some animal avatar and also, uh, teacher avatar try to compile different result, like how the student interact with that specific avatar and to see, to combine the result.

And it's also very interesting, the result for the customer avatar is actually have a higher. Outcome, like the student have a high engagement rate when they use their own avatar, but also have a little bit customization compared with some teacher's avatar and animal avatar. So this is a early finding we we had.

And another interesting thing is. We also partner with some other customers, like they are trying to build us some role play product role play training, like conversational based training platform. And they also try to think about what's the different avatar in motion will affect the learning and training result.

So because now we provide this kind of very formalized avatar, like looks very professional and friendly, but the customer also requests if the avatar can have some sadness, face or crying and have this kind of different emotions and how it will be effect the conversation and learning experience. So it's very interesting.

[00:49:39] Alex Sarlin: It's so interesting, and I just wanna to to read back some of what I'm hearing you say, because I think you're touching on things that are so important and so relevant to this field right now, and we're only beginning to understand them. So when you talked about the custom avatars, you're saying in an early childhood, a study that HeyGen did in early childhood literacy use case, children were asked to engage with a couple of D.

There were different options. There's one that looked like a teacher, realistic teacher, one that looked like a sort of animated animal, right? More like a character, and then one that was actually themself, but like a customized version of themself, like talking to themself in a costumer themself with some kind of customization.

And the third one, the customized version of themselves. So a kid talking to their own self as a digital twin avatar was the most engaging. Did I have that right?

[00:50:27] Joy Chen: Yeah, that's right.

[00:50:28] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's really interesting. And something that I think is, there's a lot to chew on there. And then this emotional idea, it's uh, you know, because another thing we are, we've sort of take for granted perhaps is when we think of an AI tutor or an AI character that might work with a student, we tend to think of it as acting like a teacher, acting like a tutor, sort of being authoritative explaining, but suddenly we're not limited to that paradigm anymore.

If you had an avatar who was very sad and you wanna help them and teach them something to make them feel better, I could imagine that being very engaging and motivating to a student. Or maybe even in a corporate training, it could be an angry customer, right? You're you doing a role play with somebody who's really angry at you because something's going on and you get to actually work with them and settle them down.

You know, the emotional side of this is also I think an open, an open question about what kind of. Avatar emotion would work with? What kind of learning experience is that? I mean, those are just two of, I feel like many different open questions about what it means to learn from an avatar.

[00:51:28] Joy Chen: Yeah. I just feel like Avatar can provide more flexibility to mimic that scenario and previously you very hard to find a lot of teachers, actors to help you to build up that, that learning experience.

But now you can set up that avatar and to match your like training goal. So I think it's just to provide more, um, flexibility and also scalability.

[00:51:55] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely, and I mean, it feels like it becomes this new world. As you mentioned, instructional designers don't always have the most resources. Sometimes they're working with, with a big team, with lots of inputs.

There's a lot of constraints. But the idea of suddenly, you know, I like to think of AI giving everybody enormous power, basically to do new things, capabilities, affordances we've never had before. Well, for an instructional designer who's trying to do a course or a corporate training course or a higher education distance course, suddenly they have this whole new toolkit of avatar technologies to try out, to play with, to use with their pedagogical knowledge.

It's really an exciting moment, I think, for instruction. I'm, I, I'm a trained instructional designer too. I went to the same program that you did in, in Teachers' College, and I'm trying to imagine what it would feel like graduating from that program with this type of tool at your disposal versus the much more out of the box old school branching scenario At best, but often it's just passive video or lots of text.

Suddenly you have interactivity, you have avatars that can look like anything you'd like. They can be pop up and push or pull. What do you think the future of an instructional design will look like in this world?

[00:53:05] Joy Chen: This is a really nice question. I think so firstly, I feel the same. I feel very excited every day when I talk with.

To customer because most of my customer, they also from like training use case or this kind of instructional design background, what I'm thinking about the next step for how instructional designer can use this kind of AI video platform is probably related to uh, AI agent, because recently HeyGen also released a new feature we call the video agent is actually prompt video.

You can type a video idea, prompt your video ideas, and you can generate short form content. It's good for the marketing use case or if you want to create short clips, but what I'm thinking about probably in the next six months or 12 months is if I am a instructional designer, I already have a very comprehensive learning goals, learning the tax based content, I can just use AI to generate that end-to-end course.

I can generate a 40 minutes course or one hour course is really just an entire course, and I can use AI avatar visa, a row, visa narrator to teach the course. And also we have the B roll generation. You can generate that visual representation to support the A narration so everything can be generated and also very engaging because myself is a visual learner, so I really like watch video.

I think it's just a, let me. Really easy to understand the things and also help me to imagine things. So I think AI now just, um, reduce the cost. Like we can generate a lot of things to visualize a lot of things. So I, I do think once I have a learning. It's kind of text-based idea. I can directly use this kind of AI technology to generate that end-to-end course.

And also I can add interactivity to check the learning outcome. This is what I'm really hope like the the product AI can help.

[00:55:21] Alex Sarlin: It is really exciting and I think one of the, the most powerful affordances of ai, generative AI is to be able to translate content from one medium to another. And I think increasingly the translation we've been seeing more and more is, as you say, from text to video.

We obviously just saw Sora two came out just a couple weeks ago and has become one of the most fastest growing, you know, AI applications of all time. We've seen Google's video, we've seen all sorts of real midjourney runway, you know, cling. It feels like text to video is becoming absolutely core use case.

And what you're saying about instructional design, about being able to take your, you know, your five page curriculum of all the things somebody has to learn as a new hire or they have to learn for a certain type of compliance training or, or they have to learn for a curriculum of any kind. And being able to translate the whole thing into an interactive.

Video course at the touch of a button. It's a pretty thrilling and pretty massive change in, in how it's worked in the past. I remember in my Coursera days it would be, you know, they'd have to plan every shot, every video so far in advance because it, they had to get the professors into the studio and record them and edit them and do graphics on top of them and do any kind of, you know, translation if they were gonna do that.

And everything was sort of very, waterfall had to be planned way in advance. And if you wanted to update a video, it would take forever. It's just a totally different world now. It's really exciting. One thing I should mention though, you know, I am a huge fan of HeyGen's Live avatar stuff and one of the things that the interactive avatars, one of the things that I do very consistently when I'm talking to people and I just wanna show them like, this is what I think the future looks like for teaching and learning, I will pull up the HeyGen interactive avatars and just say, look, you can ask it any question.

It's trained on a knowledge base. It's hyper realistic, but it can look like anyone you know, and it's safe and it's multilingual. I'm like, there's no reason this won't be everywhere. And it feels like it's increasingly becoming everywhere. I know we're almost at time, so lemme just give you one more very high level question, but I think we're gonna have to be pretty quick with it, which is, you said HeyGen's been around for three years.

That's right. From the beginning of the sort of Gen High revolution, three years from now at the pace that we're changing, what do you think will be the most exciting thing we'll be able to do with AI avatars?

[00:57:33] Joy Chen: I still think most exciting things for me is live avatar because now we just see the early adopters using it in learning.

But what I thinking about is if we think about like each universities K to 12 schools, actually they can try to integrate this kind of live avatar AI learning companion to their classroom is, will be a really huge improvement. But I think between that, it's still need, I think from our side we are like building, provide the technology, but I do think it's need the instructional designers, this kind of learning expert to think about the gap between the real learning using scenario and the product and to just fill that gap and bring this technology to.

Classroom. I think it still takes time, but it's just needs a collaboration between like both side and I think that this is also, I feel very excited about that. Yeah,

[00:58:42] Alex Sarlin: me too. Joy Chen is an enterprise account manager at HeyGen, one of the fastest growing AI video companies. It's really quite incredible if you are listening to this and you haven't yet gotten onto HeyGen and tried out their avatar creators, their short form content, they're interactive.

It is really worth looking at. It is amazing technology and we are working on a HeyGen avatar here at AI Insider at Ed Tech Insiders as well. Thank you so much for being here with us on Weekend EdTech and EdTech insiders, Joy Chen from Hey Gen. We have a very special guest with us for this week in EdTech, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner has written about theater and contemporary culture for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times, born and raised in Oregon. He teaches theater history at Portland State University and is the scholar in residence at the Portland Shakespeare Project. He lives in Portland with his wife, whom he met in a fifth grade production of a Midsummer Night's Dream and their two children.

He is also the author of Lin-Manuel Miranda, education of an Artist, all about the educational journey of one of the most renowned playwrights and performers of the 20th century and 21st century. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, welcome to the podcast.

[00:59:55] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Alex. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

[00:59:58] Alex Sarlin: It's so nice to see you again.

You know, we talked a while ago in the context of this book, but give us a little bit of an overview of the book. You have written this amazing book about Lin-Manuel Miranda's entire history of starting from his birth, from his early childhood of everything he was learning, his teachers all the way through all the different phases of his career and through in the Heights and Hamilton, and all of these amazing projects that have changed Broadway history.

Tell us all about it.

[01:00:24] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Well, this is not a traditional womb to tomb biography 'cause our subject fortunately is, is our age. But, uh, it's our age. But, uh, I thought of it as womb, tick, tick, boom. And as a teacher myself, Alex, I love the way that Lin Manuel has approached his whole career as trying to figure out what he could learn from everybody around him.

And your listeners may already know that one of the first people that he. Wanted to learn from when he was a student at Hunter College. High School in New York City was one, Alex Salin, who was the music polymath of the school. You knew all the chords. You knew how to play all the instruments. Lynn Manuel wanted to make art, but he wasn't certainly the best musician or the best writer, the best com composer in his class.

And so the story of the book is the story of him kind of apprenticing himself to a series of mentors and collaborators, sponging up everything he can from them, and then finding the people who could help him execute his dreams of being able to make art that reflected all the facets of his self.

[01:01:23] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. Yes. And I'm sure our listeners do not know, but I, I am an old friend of Lin-Manuel Miranda from elementary school. And yes, we did many projects together. I have videos of US pillow fighting, throwing things at, at rubber wrestlers and, and also every kind of production we ever do. And, and as you say, Lynn's superpower, as it were, was having these amazing ideas and direction and then working with all kinds of different people from the likes of me in, in elementary school to some of the best arrangers, composers, performers, directors in the world, you know, now to just continue to make really amazing art.

But yes. It was pretty amazing to see him on his great rise. And one of the things that we, that, that we talked about in our, in our interviews was this idea of the taste gap, right? This is an I hourglass concept that people who wanna make great art often realize how terrible what they're doing is when they're starting out.

They're like, I want great art, but everything I'm doing sure doesn't feel like great art yet. And I think Lynn is somebody who really, I think, navigated that taste gap better than I think anybody I've ever met. Tell us a little bit about what that looks like in the book, in various parts of Lynn's career.

[01:02:29] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Well, I was so glad that you had articulated that concept for me, Alex, when we spoke and I asked Lynn about it and I said, you know, why weren't you stymied or inhibited as a number of your peers were by the fact that what you were making wasn't as good as the art that you admired? And he told me, he said, this is a matter of choosing your heroes, that when he was in high school, it was the nineties sort of indie boom in filmmaking.

His heroes were Quent Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. And Robert Rodriguez, uh, the filmmaker wrote a memoir called Rebel Without a Crew, in which he said, you go to a screenwriting school, they're gonna tell you write three screenplays and throw 'em out 'cause they're no good. And then maybe your fourth will be good.

And Robert Rodriguez said, no. Make your first three screenplays into cheap movies using a video camera and your friends sell your plasma at the blood bank if you have to, to finance it, and you'll learn by doing it. And Lin Manuel took that lesson to heart and he said he knew that. His first movie was not gonna be Citizen Kane, you know, go from Zero to Oscar instantaneously.

But he knew that he would learn through the process of making, and he just loved creating things, whether or not they turned out to be masterpieces. And so he spent so much of elementary school making home movies with his friend James Green Armitage, a show that they called Linen James's Show, spectacular, that had music video parodies, and it had commercial parodies.

And it had a Dr. Doolittle parody called Dr. Do Nothing. And it had some original compositions and fight choreography. And so by the time he was in high school, he was ready to make a feature length movie and then a second feature length movie, which I know you featured. Alex. If anybody can track down a, uh, VHS copy of Naughty Bird Curtsy, I would love to see the full version.

And at each stage, I don't think. Lynn would say that any of these were great works of art, but he would see them as foundational stages in learning how to be an artist. So that years later when Imagine Entertainment would call him up and say, do you wanna make a movie about Jonathan Larson? He would say, I've been training to do this my whole life.

[01:04:34] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely yes. He then made two feature-length movies and held premieres for them and in high school and using his friends, using all of us as just the actors people he was, he knew in the school and using the school as the backdrop using various things in New York as the fodder for it and. I agree. I don't think he would call them great art, but at the same time, he took them quite seriously and he finished them.

I, that was a huge part of it. I think that Robert Rodriguez's, uh, that quote is really key there. You mentioned the video camera, and I think one thing, you know, we have an education technology audience here. One thing that I've always found really interesting about Lynn's approach, you know, he would work with synthesizers and keyboards.

He'd make mix tapes with his, with his boombox. He would be using video cameras. He was always using the technology at his disposal to try to further his, you know, his artistic vision. It wasn't often super sophisticated technology, but it was enough for him to get over the hump. Having that video camera was obviously key to his, his idea of becoming a filmmaker.

And I'd love to hear you talk about the role that you feel technology played in Lynn's storied career. 'cause it's just, it's, it's interesting. It sort of comes in and out. It's very much the backdrop. It's never really at the forefront, I believe, but it's there the whole time.

[01:05:44] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Had I known that someday I'd been invited on an educational technology podcast, Alex, I would've absolutely put it in the foreground, but it You're absolutely right.

I had thought about calling this book The Synthesizer, in fact,

[01:05:56] Alex Sarlin: interesting.

[01:05:57] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Both because one of Lin Manuel's great insights is that you can synthesize all of your influences, and he did it while toting around it, keyboard for. Much of a young life, and you can kind of trace, you know, the development particularly of music recording technologies from the vinyl albums that his parents would play of cast recordings and Puerto Rican protest music to the cassette tapes on which he started to string together his favorite pop music across different genres to impress his friends and Woo, his girlfriends.

And I loved Alex when you would send me the track list of mix tape cassettes that Lin Manuel had made for you, and we would try to piece together, oh my God, there's The Beatles and Les Miserable and the Far Side all on the same album. And you could sort of see where the Hamilton Mix tape is gonna come from to the iPod that makes Shuffle play possible to the iPhone on which you can record the voice memos for the first version of Aaron Burr's song to the streaming world and TikTok, which is sort of what enabled a song like We don't Talk about Bruno to become the most popular Disney song ever from Encanto.

There's a kind of zelig, like present at each stage mode, but there's also ways that these technologies really allowed somebody who was trying to expand his toolkit to make his artistic vision, I think, palpable to the world. So Lin Manuel would be the first to say that his piano chops were not on the level of an Alex Salin or, or, uh, you know, an Arthur Lewis or a Yeah.

Mark, uh, Roan, uh, others of your classmates, let alone Alex Lamore later on.

[01:07:24] Alex Sarlin: Right, exactly.

[01:07:25] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: And it actually became a challenge for him because initially he would record his songs just playing his synthesizer. With his buddy Adam Rauscher filming him on a camcorder, and then they'd record into a cassette tape and send it to their classmates who were gonna sing a song for his musicals.

But he didn't actually, his like his fingers couldn't translate the sounds he heard in his head into the world. And it got to the point with his first musical in the Heights in development, where his producers asked if perhaps he needed another composer to come on and help him out because the, it was a lot to try to get those ideas out of his head.

And initially he found a collaborator, the great music arranger and orchestrator, Alex Lamore, who could hear what Lin Manuel was describing and produce it in his own fingers. And then Alex Lamore told me the key development for Lin Manuel was when he got garage band software on his MacBook. There

[01:08:17] Alex Sarlin: you go.

[01:08:17] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: And all of a sudden he didn't have to play his ideas live. He could record them. Then with the Logic Pro Software, I think that came on a later version. He was able to get for later version of the Mac, he could just slow down the tempo enough that he could play in the ideas he was hearing at the speed at which his fingers could execute them.

And then he could layer in the drum tracks and the baseline and the, uh, harmonic lines too, so that people who wanted to perform his work or produce his work could actually hear the sounds that he was hearing as well. And so, so I love the way that music technology wasn't just a reflection of his work, but was actually a kind of, I don't know if prosthetic is the right word, but a sort of supplement to what the body can do on its own in translating what we have in our heads into what could come out into the world.

[01:09:04] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's so well put. And yes, GarageBand and TikTok and Logic Pro all, all play a, a real, a real role in Lynn's ability to take ideas out of his head and put them out into the world where then they get synthesized by all sorts of different people. I think that's where he synthesizes ideas in with other people in, in tow.

I think that's really key. I, I know one thing this reminds me of when I was taking my piano lessons back in, in elementary school, my piano teacher would often mention Irving Berlin and how Irving Berlin could only play in the key of sea, literally. And he had installed into his piano a lever like super, I mean, I can't even imagine how this worked, but a lever that would sort of shift everything when he needed to play in other keys, because he was self-taught and he did not know music in this sort of formal way.

And I, I always thought that Lynn has that similar, that same kind of thinking of being able to have the ideas, not necessarily have the training or really interest in the training, frankly, to go that deep into the music theory, but be able to still make songs that have changed the world literally just like Berlin.

So my question for you now. Given that suite of tools, you're talking about Garage band, we're talking about Casio synthesizers a kid right now, the age that Lin was when he was making those movies, maybe you know, 14, 15, seventh, eighth grade, that that kind of time 13 suddenly has access to tools that are just on a completely other level.

I mean, you can take Suno right now and sing a melody into it and it will do a totally professional sounding in any style song. It'll do it as a wrap. It'll do it as a poka, it'll do it as an opera. We are in a totally new world for creative tooling, and I'm curious what you think that's gonna mean for the future, for the next generation, if there you know of, of Lin-Manuel Mirandas and other aspiring creative forces and artists.

[01:10:47] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Oh my God, I love it. I mean, I love the way that basically you can have a recording studio in your bedroom if you want. So my daughter is 13. I don't know that she wants to become a songwriter, but she plays in a band with her friends and she will come home and show me this track that, just like she laid down a demo version through Garage Band and it's got this great bass line, it's, and she's like, tell me, okay, and then we're gonna drop out the drums here, and then we're gonna layer the tracks back in and here's how the vocals gonna work.

And like it took Lin Manuel. 25 years to get to that point in his career. And I think of also the like physically cumbersome nature of so much of his early creation was trying to figure out to get the cables to put two VCRs together and hook them up to a television so that they exactly edit. And if you screwed one thing up on the VHS tape, you had to start all the way back over from the beginning.

'cause it was all analog. And now my son who likes to make videos, right, can do this with one finger on iMovie or whatever like that. So I hope that it just makes the barrier to entry so much lower so that it's less of either an economic or a technological obstacle for folks who wanna create this work and they can just start making things and be able to share it with their friends so much more easily than they Manuel could early on.

[01:12:02] Alex Sarlin: You mentioned some of the eclectic influences that Lin has throughout the book. Right. He's a big fan of Far Side, the rap group and, and Big Pun. But he also loved all things musical theaters from a very, very young age. He also loved Latin music from a young age, inspired by his family and other influences.

He was always bringing together all of these different types of influences. I'm curious how you see that aspect in the new generation, because I feel like he was actually pretty unique at the time, or unusual at the time in listening to wildly different, you know, listening to Les Miz and Sweeney Todd, and then going right into Morrissey and then going right into Britpop and then going right into rap.

But right now with Spotify, with TikTok, you know, kids are exposed to more different types of, of influences than ever before. Do you think that this is gonna have an influence on people's ability to mix and match and, and synthesize different influences?

[01:12:53] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Right. Well, I'm trying to think what the counterarguments to this would be, but I feel like when Lynn and when you and I were growing up, music genres were really separated out by space you like you wanted to listen to, you know, Broadway.

Like that's something that happens in one part of New York City listening to hip hop happens in a different part of New York City. Listening to Latin music happens like different physical geography of course, you know, part of demographics. Economics and, uh, migration as well. And physically. You wanna switch from listening to the Man of Lamancha Cast album to listening to Bizarre Ride, to the far Side, to listening to Mark Antony's latest.

Like you are, you are taking a physical object off of your record player or a cassette tape out your, of your stereo or your boombox and putting something else in. And often you're having to switch your friend group if you want to. Make that kind of genre shit. That's right. Lin Manuel said, you know, one of his heroes early on was weird Al Yakovich because he loved, he loved funny songs and he said, weird.

Al taught him that genre was just the set of clothes that you put on that day that you could play across genres. And you, you describe the mix tapes wonderfully as ways to bring those different genres together. But now I think of like the playlist, the algorithmic DJ or whatever. There are certainly ways that you can get stuck in a rut, but there's such a wider range of music that you can listen to or video streams that you can follow without having to physically remove one genre from your mode playing or physically leave the environment that you've been in or, or ditch your social group.

Which is not to say there aren't still, you know, stigmas or preferences around. This form of music or that form of music, but it seems like it's so much more fluid now. And so my kids don't groan necessarily if the, uh, you know, what we're listening to on the drive to school suddenly switches from country to hip hop to, uh, show tunes or something like that.

It's just, uh, sort of all in the mix potentially. Now, of course we, there's a lot of gatekeeping in different industries. It's often correlated with race and gender and, and geography. But it seems like the potential is there. You don't have to worry about scratching your parents' record player with a needle if you wanna, um, if you wanna move around.

[01:15:02] Alex Sarlin: Exactly, it's like the eighties and nineties or the era of the mixtape, and now we're sort of in the era of the playlist. And the question is, does a playlist continue to have that kind of multifaceted influences where you can go from thing to thing? Or does it become an echo chamber where, you know, you listen to one thing and then it's gonna keep recommending the same style over and over?

I think we're, we're still wrestling with it, but having those different types of influences is, is hugely powerful. And it was hugely powerful for Lynn. I mean, notorious BIG, you know, obviously within Hamilton you have so many different styles of music, you know, and so many different references to musical history.

One thing that I think is really key to your book and key to, to Lynn's career is the notion of, of collaboration. You know, you mentioned the synthesizer. I think of Lynn as sort of the ultimate collaborator he know, has always known that no matter how much work he's gonna put into something, he, it needs a team, a group, a cast, all sorts of people to make anything come alive.

And I think this is one of his sort of great superpowers. Maybe you could talk a little bit about Lynn's approach to collaboration, but I'd love to talk about it in the context, if possible, of modern life. I think kids these days are a little more isolated, right? There's a lot of complaining among parents and children and teachers that kids aren't collaborating as much.

It's not as much part of life. You know, in Hunter College High School, we had all these musical theater shows that Lynn was always part of and then eventually, you know, led all of them. But there was so much social, collaborative, creative work. I'm curious how you see that in his career and what, how you think education should maintain that kind of environment of collaborative creative learning.

[01:16:31] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Yes, you're absolutely right, Alex. Even before we're getting to Broadway and the, you know, the amazing collaboration of director, choreographer, designer, producer, actors, musicians, that leads to a show back in his freshman sophomore year in high school in Manuel, was recruiting all his, you know, his, a set of his buddies to come over to his house way up in Northern Manhattan and Inwood to make his first feature film Clayton's friends.

And that was, it was sleepover culture. It was go over to Lynn's on Friday, Saturday morning, Isabella. We'll make egg sandwiches and we'll exactly work on this script and try to work in some Simpsons references and a, you know, west side story song and an homage to Reservoir Dogs and Notorious BIG, exactly that moment.

[01:17:15] Alex Sarlin: Exactly. Exactly.

[01:17:17] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: And something I I was tickled to find in the book was that Lin Manuel really had to learn how to be a, a great collaborator. He, he went through a phase of what he called being angry at his friends. 'cause they didn't wanna spend as much time making art as he did. So one of his buddies eventually got tired of spending every weekend at Lin's house working on the movie and went to summer camp instead and got an angry letter from Lynn saying, how dare you forsake our project together to go off and, I don't know, make lanyards by a lake.

And, but then got another letter a week later from Lin Manuel apologizing for the first letter and saying, Hey, our friendship is, is what's most important to me. We'll finish the movie when you get back. So you could see when sort of in real time, learning how to temper his own expectations for his friends with what was reasonable to ask of people who had their own lives.

And you shared some wonderful stories about that process with me too. But I think you're right to see, like the trade off of being able to have a whole band on your iPad or a whole movie making suite in your pocket is that you can stick in your pocket or in your room on your iPad. And so can I propose?

Is this, is this, uh, I don't know, delian to suggest theater as the real time in-person antidote to digital isolation, which is when you're making a, a work of theater for the most part, unless it's COVID, you are making something where people are coming together. In the same room at the same time to produce this and to experience it.

And there is a live charge and a messiness and a glory that can only happen when everybody's doing that together. And so I think Hadley Manuel been a, a poet or a painter. He might have a different relationship to collaboration, but theater, unless you're doing a one person show on a unicycle, is something that can only happen when you bring other people together.

And he really learned from his maybe most important artistic mentor in high school with was his girlfriend, Meredith Summerville, who was a year older than he. And he used to get frustrated if kids wouldn't show up on time for rehearsal or weren't learning their parts well enough. But he saw that Meredith, who was a little, you know, a little more mature, would just sit down with the kid and say, Hey, what do you need in order to be a part of this group?

And how can I lead with rigor, but also with enthusiasm? And, and Manuel, he just adopted that like he was gonna make collaborating with him be the most fun thing that anybody could have an opportunity to do. So if they were learning. West Side story choreography for the dance of the gym. He called it National Mambo Week and brought in mambo themed snacks and physical games and warmup activities so everybody would want to do this project with them.

And I thought that's something that we could all take away is like, how do you be the light in the room? How do you be the person who's giving other people the vim to proceed as opposed to this sort of energy vampire mode that I know I'm prone to lapse into? And it seems like theater or choral singing anything that you, that you have to get in a room with other people to do is a beautiful way of, of building that skill that then when Manuel's collaborators in Disney and movie making and Broadway see as a signature characteristic of his heart.

[01:20:12] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. I, I think they call that like positive codependency or something. So some great term in education where people are dependent on each other to put a project together. And I think theater is like, is the archetypal version of that. Nobody can put on a musical by themselves. They all have to rely on each other and practice together and rehearse and, and maybe even write the whole thing.

Lin was writing his own musicals in high school and had to recruit all of these people. He created a coup in a senior year by creating a musical that was cast only by seventh graders. So he literally shot everyone. He, he got a whole new generation involved. I mean, we, you'd all this better than anybody but it, it's really interesting that idea of being a sort of creative leader and it requiring other people is intention, as you say, with the idea of being able to have these incredible.

AI based superpowers and make it sound like you had a hundred people at an orchestra performing your work, but was really just you on your phone. In some ways, it's, you want that codependency, you want that collaboration. I, I think we're all gonna have to navigate this really strange world as, as we go, but it's really exciting.

I, I, last story, another one I know you know really well, but. When he was doing the Bruno song for Encanto, I remember reading something about how he was talking to them about the name of the character, and it was like, oh, the music had to fit with the story, but they were all adjusting it in in real time.

And the idea of being like Bruno was the perfect name because then it could be no, you could echo the no, no, no. And he was like, oh, that's perfect. And there's just this negotiation that happens when you're working with a lot of people, even if you're the one with sort of the most excitement and enthusiasm that needs to happen to create really amazing artistic work.

I'm hoping that we as an education, technology and education community, don't let that go. And to Delvy, I don't think it's old fashioned at all to say theater is the antidote to that. The question just, how do we keep theater in the schools?

[01:21:56] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Well for sure, and I hope it, you know, it has ramifications even beyond the arts classes.

If you visit the gallery of Lin-Manuel Miranda in Be Alta Puerto Rico, you will see the only trophy that Lin Manuel ever earned in a math class, which came in trigonometry with Misos. Uh, teachers seemed to really encourage students creativity, in which, for the math project, she let Lin Manuel rewrite Billy Joels for the longest time as for the Law of signs, and then recruit a quartet of guys from the jazz chorus to come in and perform Billy Joels if you take the length of angle, be something like that, and that made him feel like he could have a sense of accomplishment in a subject that otherwise caused him stomach aches and headaches for most of his life.

[01:22:41] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. That's an amazing, amazing anecdote in the book. I, I went to a show of Maurice Sinek work recently, and there was work that he had done in high school with a teacher who had allowed him to do his, I think it was Hamlet or Macbeth, a Shakespeare essay, all in illustration. And it was these beautiful illustrations done by a, you know, probably 16-year-old of Hamlet.

And I was like, I recognize that it's exactly the same kind of thinking. The ability to, this is a, a concept in education, universal design for learning, right? Multiple modes of expression that you can use different, especially ones you care about, different ways to express meaningful concepts. And for Lynn doing the law of signs, having this sort of barbershop quartet explaining trigonometry was such a perfect way to meld his love of.

The curriculum. This has been so much fun. I wish we had more time. Maybe we could do some more another time. But Daniel Pollack-Pelzner has written about theater and contemporary culture for The New Yorker, for the Atlantic and the New York Times. And his new book, Lin-Manuel Miranda, education of an Artist is Out Now all about the educational journey of one of the 20th.

[01:23:42] Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: My pleasure, Alex, and thanks for contributing your wonderful quotes to the narrative of the book.

[01:23:47] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free Tech Insiders Newsletter on Substack.

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