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Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Inside the First VR Homeschool: Meta-Backed Optima Ed and the Next Era of Learning with Adam Mangana
Adam Mangana is the Co-Founder and CEO of Optima Ed, the first full-time VR homeschool backed by Meta. With over 15 years in edtech leadership, he’s pioneering immersive, AI-driven learning experiences that expand access to quality education and reimagine how, where, and why students learn.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How Optima Ed blends classical education with cutting-edge VR technology.
- Why the future of learning is immersive, individualized, and accessible.
- The role of AI tutors and digital twins in supporting teachers and students.
- How education savings accounts (ESAs) and policy innovation are enabling new school models.
- Why Adam believes the next era of schooling will liberate learning and bring world-class education anywhere.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:02:37] Entering a cell, not just watching one — the power of immersive learning.
[00:07:36] Optima Ed brings top teachers to every home through VR.
[00:11:33] Solving online school loneliness with metaverse classrooms.
[00:16:25] Teachers gain flexibility to teach from anywhere in the world.
[00:20:07] ESAs and spatial computing are transforming school choice.
[00:43:56] AI-powered tutors enable personalized, multilingual learning.
[00:49:20] “Learning liberated” — Optima Ed’s mission for global access.
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[00:00:00] Adam Mangana: Alexander becomes great when Aristotle is ported into his home, right in ancient Greece, and he can take over the world. And so if you could have the very best public school teachers, private school teachers, charter school teachers being able to port into the homes of students for whom there is an education drought in their kind of local proximate environment, you can create a whole bunch of Alexander the greats.
And we have children here in this country who are just naturally brilliant, but for whom the current system, which was designed to kind of democratize immigrants. Is not really relevant for today.
[00:00:41] 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.
Welcome to EdTech Insiders. We have an incredibly interesting guest. I can't wait for this conversation. Because I think this may be a glimpse into the future of education. I know I don't say that actually very often. You might think I would, but I don't. Adam Mangana is the Co-Founder and CEO of Optima Ed, the first full-time VR homeschool backed by meta.
With over 15 years in ed tech leadership, Adam has pioneered immersive learning solutions that improve student outcomes, expand access to quality education, and reimagine the future of K12 schooling. Adam Mangana, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:02:01] Adam Mangana: Alex, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here and excited to dive
[00:02:05] Alex Sarlin: into the conversation.
I'm really excited to hear about what you're doing because I think this is a big and very exciting swing in EdTech that I think everybody in EdTech should be aware of and know about what you're doing. So first off, you have been at the forefront of immersive learning. That's vr, ar, XR for over. 15 years.
Tell us about what you see as the unique power of mixed reality, virtual reality, augmented reality to address education and what you're doing with Optima Ed.
[00:02:37] Adam Mangana: Alex, this is a great question. I think people for a long time have understood the power of concept-based instruction. Augustine said the words printed here are concepts.
You must go through the experiences. So the ability to actually experience things is really powerful. In 2016, about 10 years ago, I was thinking about like, what does life after YouTube look like? Everybody on this podcast, all your listeners, understand that the most used educational app is YouTube. Yep.
So it's, if you wanna learn about a cell, for example, it's pretty cool to be able to watch a video on the cell. It's much cooler, Alex, to be able to enter a cell. And this is what we are watching as families continue to elect for this more immersive concept-based instruction. And when you begin to think about the power of immersive concept-based instruction with the ability to individualize that instruction through the use of ai, that's when the era of spatial computing transforms and revolutionizes.
Access and student outcomes at scale. And so we are now entering a phase where we're kind of leaving the world of, you know, the checkerboard of faces and these glass rectangles that you and I are talking about right now. And we're gonna enter a world that will be projections and holograms and much more immersive, much more individualized.
And I'm excited to be at the forefront of trying to make that possible for all students, not just students that have high incomes. Right? We, we wanna figure out a way, and that's. Optima's unique mission is access. We've done this in partnership with governments so that our students are experiencing this tuition free.
[00:04:08] Alex Sarlin: Right. So let's talk about this particular moment in educational history and why this is an interesting match for what you're doing here. You said tuition free education, where parents can make the choice to choose this immersive style of education. And we are in this really interesting moment where I think there is basically an all time low belief in.
Traditional public schooling, you are seeing a huge rise in educational savings accounts, Theas and micro schools and home schools and pod schooling, and a lot of parents voting with their feet to try a different type of educational approach. And you're there saying, I know what type of educational approach you should try immersive.
Education. Tell us about this moment and why BR AR XR is a really exciting and viable solution for parents right now.
[00:04:57] Adam Mangana: Alex, thank you. I think, you know, people are, you're absolutely right. People are absolutely tired of the public school system, but they're not tired of public school teachers. And this is the distinction, right?
And so Alexander becomes great when Aristotle is ported into his home, right? In ancient Greece, and he can take over the world. And so if you could have the very best public school teachers, private school teachers, charter school teachers. Being able to port into the homes of students for whom there is an education drought in their kind of local proximate environment.
You can create a whole bunch of Alexander the greats, and we have children here in this country who are just naturally brilliant, but for whom the current system, which was designed to kind of democratize immigrants. Is not really relevant for today. I think most of your listeners would agree as we kind of adopted the Prussian educational model.
Back a hundred years ago in the progressive era, it was all about trying to scale the, you know, democratizing immigrants and pledging allegiance to the flag and all of those things that are, were critically important for that time period. Today we require a much more dynamic, individualized approach to education.
So where we move from a kind of standardization. Us preparing the needs of the kind of factory system a hundred years ago. Today, the problems we're solving are so dynamic and so quick paced that having a much more flexible, individualized model, right, where it can be accessed in a more modular way, where no matter where you are, you can take a world class education with you.
Mm-hmm. Most of these families are now demanding a much more model, which means okay, how do. Financial products slash uh, funding mechanisms to make that happen. And so you've seen an evolution in school choices you've mentioned, which has culminated this year in the current legislation with many schools adopting Universal ESAs educational savings accounts, the ability for the dollars to follow children.
So regardless of your politics, Alex, this is an inevitability. And so with that being. And inevitability for those of us in the education business, it behooves us to make sure that families are empowered. That these systems and, and new models and new funding mechanisms are kind of demystified, and that no matter what zip code you live in, and no matter what your parent does for a living, you can have access to these incredible learning opportunities.
And that's really at the heart of what we're doing with Optima. We happen to be really good at spatial computing as well.
[00:07:36] Alex Sarlin: So when you mentioned sort of getting out of the glass rectangles of a Zoom classroom, you're talking about the ability for students to use virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality, and I know you are backed by meta, so I imagine that may be.
Headsets somewhat like the, you know, the Oculus and the Quest headsets. Um, people can be in a virtual environment and connect with teachers and connect with other students and go into a cell and have all of these different really unique and immersive experiences. Can you walk us through sort of a archetypal day in the life of a, a student in an Optima Ed homeschool environment?
How do they connect with their teachers? How do they connect with each other? How do they do these immersive types of environments?
[00:08:20] Adam Mangana: So first and foremost, I'm eating my own cooking. My two children live on a 29 acre farm in a very rural area, and they go to school in the Metaverse every day. And, uh, a couple of points you made.
We're very proud of our partnership with Meta. We are, as a company, hardware agnostic in that we run on any six degrees of Freedom headset. So we run on, on the Pico products and HCC products, but Meta has launched this year, meta for Education. And in that launching has created a mobile device management system that has really demonstrated their commitment to K12 and the safety, security of student data.
And that for us, because student data and just the security of students in general is our highest priority, has been a really nice fit. So as we've kind of moved forward with meta in terms of the archetypical day, what that looks like, my kiddos are in class by 8:00 AM. And they may start out in class.
The way that we think about the curriculum, you have the planned, the delivered, and the received. So my kids come to class having read something and so we still see reading and books as a technology and they may actually physically read a traditional great book my daughter was reading recently, Machiavelli's the Prince.
And so then they will come into class and then they're gonna have the opportunity to go back into ancient Italy. So teacher turns into magic school bus, and now we can add concept based and context to they reading and idea. The teacher should be, facilitators, should extend thinking through questioning, and that the environment can be this kind of secondary teacher that allows that extension of thinking to become real for students.
Right? And so we have a, a little saying at Optima focuses the new iq. Our kids, while they're here, can't be on their phones, they can't be on TikTok. We have their complete attention and it's kind of ironic that we're using technology to leverage attention. But we really see value in trying to make lessons really efficient.
And so they're in class for about 35 to 40 minutes. The instruction is very efficient. Whatever the objective for that day is very clear. And then students are kind of assessed through an exit ticket, so they may have four classes a day. Each of those classes would've some form of assessment, informal assessment around did they master that particular standard.
Those students who did not master the standard had the opportunity in the afternoon to get intervention. So one of the things I've been most proud of is that as we've looked at our, our student outcomes, we've had the highest growth scores in the state of Florida in both reading and mathematics. We've had a hundred percent of our students pass the civics exam, for example, which is an end of course exam.
12th grade, we're seeing mastery across all of our end of course exams, which is something we're really proud of. So it's not just something to do for fun, but it's an academically serious approach that meets the current learner, the current generation of learner where they are, and engages them and solves for this kind of loneliness problem that has traditionally existed in online school.
[00:11:33] Alex Sarlin: Let's talk about the loneliness problem that's existed in in online school. I think that one of the interesting, you know, ideas of an immersive environment is that it's a pseudo social. I'm not sure I, what I'd even call it, but you're not alone. Your kids on a 29 acre farm or kids in any context, whether they're traveling, whether they're from home, whether they're working in a micro school, whatever context they're logging in from.
Can have a somewhat social experience, I think. I don't know what I'd call it. I'm curious what you'd call it, but that socialization aspect is a big part of what the traditional concerns have been about homeschooling. How do you think about socialization in the context of virtual reality, augmented reality, and what you're doing with optimism?
[00:12:15] Adam Mangana: I think it's really important that students have in-person socialization, but I do think one of the things that I've known to be true, that others may disagree with me about in the education business is that at scale, a lot of what has happened in our schools from a socialization perspective has not been positive Actually.
And so we see some of the ways in which this current generation socializes, if we have ever been to a 12-year-old birthday party, they come in person. They then get on Fortnite together in the same room, and they socialize at the metaverse while they're physically together. And so if you understand this to be true, you know that this generation is already socializing in these kind of metaverse context, whether it be roadblocks, whether it be Fortnite, and.
I think it's important that the adults in the room meet them in the rooms that they're in. Hmm. That's a really important piece. What has happened is that we've asked students to come meet us in our rooms, and what we found is that in an era where modularity, flexibility, the ability to take our school with us, more choices available.
We're just watching students not show up. They're voting with their feet. Families are voting with their feet. So if you want to be part of the conversation with the current generation of learners, every school, even brick and mortar schools need to have a metaverse strategy because that's where their learners' attention currently is.
That's really specific to this generation of learner. Even the kids in college today really were not significant metaverse users in the same way. And I think that's the other thing that has been kind of misaligned. We've imagined that this was something that even millennials would be part of. And millennials are just really too old for this media.
And so it's, it's really the gen alpha crowd that is gonna be, you know, fully participating in the space, leading the way. And we need to shape. How we're creating digital citizens for this? You said the word future. I would say the word present. Hmm. Every one of your listeners who has elementary and middle school aged kids knows how their kids are currently socializing.
And if we just, you know, just mapped it out, we would find that they're creating real and meaningful relationships online. That doesn't mean we shouldn't. Be in person. I think it's really powerful, but my vision is that we can model how to behave as a citizen in these spaces and then create opportunities for healthy socialization in person where it really counts.
I
[00:14:50] Alex Sarlin: think that's a very powerful point that young people are spending a lot of time in virtual environments, whether or not they're immersive in a sort of VR headset, or whether they're inside a game world, or whether they're inside a YouTube or on their phone or on a social media app. Young people have sort of been retreating into a variety of different virtual worlds, many of which do not have any adults in them.
I think that's, that's a point I've never quite, I've never thought about it quite in that way.
[00:15:16] Adam Mangana: I think we have to understand that. Technologies by themselves are not good or bad. Right? Socrates was skeptical of books. He thought men would lose their memories. Right? They'd no longer be great orators. Right?
And the Gutenberg Bible releases at scale and it transforms the world. And he's absolutely right. We certainly relied on the written word. For years and years and years as an empathy machine, some of the greatest books are portals into the minds of the greatest thinkers that have ever lived. We're now at another inflection point with the intersection of immersive computing, as you've described, an ai.
Mm-hmm. Where we can literally walk a mile in someone else's avatar and so. If the point of socialization is to drive home skills like character, citizenship, empathy, we really have a tremendous medium by which to achieve this if the adults will come back in the room and take the responsibility for teaching.
[00:16:10] Alex Sarlin: What have you seen in terms of the teachers' interest or will or, or ability to teach in this virtual environment? I'm curious what that looks like in terms of professional development or recruiting. I'm just curious how that even works.
[00:16:25] Adam Mangana: So we're in our fourth year of operation. In year one, we were at 150 students.
Year two, we doubled Year three, we doubled again to 600. This year we have over 1200 students that are attending full-time. We also serve another 2,700 or so folks who are just kind of purchasing our field trips and kind of a not full coursework. We're scaling fairly quickly. This is also the first year that we had.
Fewer teacher applications than student applications. Our first three years we had so many teachers applying for the opportunity because much like 60% of the workforce teachers, contrary to popular belief, also want to have more flexibility. And so what we were finding, and this is the the point that we kind of opened with, people are frustrated with the school system, but they're not frustrated with their favorite teachers.
Right. And so if you can create a way in which teaching can be sustainable, you really can collect the very best teachers, which we've been fortunate to do. The fact that folks can have more flexibility. And to be able to work from where they wanna work from. We have a teacher working from Mexico City and is, is, has an arbitrage in terms of the rent that they're paying.
We have teachers who have been able to be teaching a lesson on Rome from Rome, you know, and so even though they may be Florida residents, they can take their classes with them as they explore the world. So those have been really compelling ways to get really, really, really, um, compelling teachers.
[00:17:58] Alex Sarlin: This combination of, I think, three different factors that, that we're talking about here, that all are coming together in this moment, just gets me very excited.
I'm not purely excited. There's a little bit of a trepidation here, and I'd love to address this with you, that I'm a huge optimist in terms of VE tech and innovation. Anybody who listens to this podcast knows I embrace new models all the time, and I, I embrace this. I really like what you're thinking about the combination of fit essays and school choice, this movement.
And more public funding, which you've talked about to be able to use for different types of school models. Huge, huge movement right now. The launch of virtual reality and technology that can be fully immersive, where you can step inside a cell, step inside ancient Italy, go to space, go to do the type of field trips you've been talking about, but also be in a virtual classroom of any kind and have the walls fall away and suddenly you're in the Amazon basin.
I mean. This is a technology has been improving for years and years and years. It's now pretty seamless, photorealistic, really quite immersive. And then this concept of the school system itself being. Open to change, I think in a way that we've never seen. We've talked a lot on this podcast just about how there's a lot less reverence for the, the traditional public education system.
This is both K 12 and higher ed. The sort of Prussian style model that a lot of us in EdTech have been, have been railing against in various ways for many years. But I think now. It's become almost common beliefs that traditional school is not quite gonna cut it. And these three things combined are really, really interesting.
I'd still like to hear you make the case a little bit more just because when I hear, lemme back up. I don't wanna say this in like a condemnatory way 'cause I don't feel this way. I'd love to hear you make the case of in this moment with these three factors in play. How do they come together to create the perfect breeding ground for a immersive style of education?
This metaverse style education. People have been claiming that for a while, and it never quite comes to fruition. It feels like this might be the moment, and I know you're right there. Make the case for us and for our listeners.
[00:20:07] Adam Mangana: Thank opportunity. I think we should set the table with not just the three factors that you mentioned, but also ask the question, what's the difference between teaching for excellence and teaching for genius?
Hmm. And the reason I say this is because if the role of public education is solely to maximize utility. China, India, the countries with six day a week school days and billions of people are going to eat our lunch. Right? And so if you wanna get surgeons and you want the variance of that surgical training to be very tight, right?
The excellence model is a very solid model, which means that we have a educational system that does work for about 20% of the population, right? You're trying to teach for genius, right? If you're trying to create a tribe of jazz musicians where the variance is gonna be all over the place, right? That needs to be highly individualized and that child needs to be known.
And one of the things that has been the superpower of this country has been to be a place where we can harness. Incentives. We can harness the creativity of capitalism. We can create new models and not just copy other people's models. I think that's something that we have a birthright and a legacy around, and we should fully embrace this at this time, which is what I see as people are beginning to think about life after YouTube.
And so I set the stage for this to say. Why are we at life after YouTube? Well, we have this innovation and policy that you have described, which allows funding to move in a different way. We had a very centralized model of funding up until this point where you kind of ran everything through a centralized government, and now that is gonna be decentralized, pushed to the states and then in the hands of parents, right?
And so as we're moving from centralization to decentralization, that's gonna create a lot of velocity that's gonna incentivize entrepreneurs to solve problems for the folks who have the dollars. So you say, why is this now the time? Well, first of all, the innovation around policy that creates a new funding mechanism is gonna create huge incentives.
Yes. At the same time that this is happening, we're now entering a new era of computing. So you have an innovation in policy and now you have an innovation in technology. Where, to your point, you know, in 1968 when we had the mother of all demos and we demoed the desktop for the first time, right? We also a week later demoed the Sword of Damocles, which was the first VR headset, but we didn't have the compute power really to recreate our reality immersively in 1968.
So two dimensions. One, over the last 50 years, 60 years, right? We're now in a place where we wanna more reflect the human experience online. It has been very cold, it has been dominated by efficiency, and as I mentioned, utility. And what the next era of computing will be. It will be dominated much more by trying to solve real human problems because people are gonna get tired of the AI slop.
They're gonna be very skeptical. You're gonna start seeing, I think, nutrition facts related around ai. And so anytime you can create a real human connection, that's gonna be really valuable. And so. The hallmark of great educational models, no matter what their philosophy underpinning philosophy is, is relationship.
I mentioned before the relationship between Alexander the Great and Aristotle. So whatever your model might be, if it's traditional, if it's progressive, if it is able to, uh. Incentivize and sustain real human relationship, it has a much better chance of being successful than if you're gonna just create, you know, a correspondence course or a check the box, or a maximization of utility kind of model.
So I'm excited about these innovations in both policy. And in technology, and I think you're so astute to mention that the wind seem to be blowing at the same time. Right. To force this innovation, I will say that the smartest folks in this business are also thinking about what we should preserve. So they share your skepticism and they say, okay.
What about the old system Should we preserve? And there is 5,000 years of very content rich content, right? I would love to preserve the lessons of the stoics, right, the in of Epictetus. I want to see the time tested approach to education that has been really helpful that we know. Leads, you know, students wrestling with really some of the greatest thinkers that have ever lived.
I wanna see that preserved in the A computing. So the only thing that I really see as the variable is the delivery mechanism, but there's so much. Content that I think should be actually preserved. That's part of what we're doing at Optum. We we're almost a contrarian approach because we have a very classical, kind of traditional content source with a very innovative and non-traditional delivery mechanism.
[00:25:23] Alex Sarlin: Right, so you could have the Socrates Academy and just hang out in the the Greek town square and talk with other. We
[00:25:29] Adam Mangana: actually have the Academy of Athens location. We take you to it anytime.
[00:25:33] Alex Sarlin: There you go. So that makes a lot of sense to me. That's really interesting. I like the way you're phrasing it a lot.
This policy innovation. This whole wave of policy innovations that are partially in response to, to public sentiment about education, and then you have this technological wave of innovations and they're coming together. I think that's a really, really thoughtful way to look at what's happening right now.
I think the. Question I have for you in terms of the experiential education is I don't think of myself as somebody trying to conserve particular aspects of, of the educational system, but I do have a sort of gut reaction in it, and there's conserving parts of the content, as you say, the idea of the academy or the idea of being able to solve a problem together.
I can imagine a field trip from which. A bunch of students are trying to go solve a climate change based problem and they have to figure it out and do the research. Immersive, I mean, such an exciting idea to take a classical approach of collaboration, move it to modern times. I mean, it's really exciting, but what about the experiences of in-person schooling that are worth preserving?
Not that there are necessarily a ton, but I think there are some. I think, you know, even people who really, the biggest critics of school don't necessarily say, but people shouldn't. Connect in person. They shouldn't be going to school dances. They shouldn't be sharing friendship bracelets, whatever kids do these days in person.
I'd love to hear you talk about that. Not that this is a huge hangup for me personally, but I feel like it's a very easy concern that people have when they think about this future of VR based homeschooling is what about will the kids even look like themselves inside the virtual world? And if not, are you gonna school with people you literally have never wouldn't recognize them in the street.
It's an interesting kind of sci-fi concept and I'd love to hear you talk about it.
[00:27:17] Adam Mangana: Yeah, that's probably its own podcast. We do require students to look like themselves. We have required them to be in uniform in the metaverse as well, so we've taken a fairly traditional that's approach there. Very interesting.
Partly, yeah, partly because. Again, we want to demonstrate an academic seriousness. This isn't Fortnite, this isn't, so we do that. I think your bigger question though is really important. You know, we have not really audited the school day, right? We've not really thought about the value proposition of why one should be together, and I would suggest that ultimately what we are doing is we are selling time.
We're giving people time back, and if you do believe that parents know their children and if you provide them with opportunities to parent that they'll make the right choices for their children. Giving parents more time to plug into the kind of social opportunities that they want is really valuable.
What I have looked at is, okay, how is the current school day usually modeled? And so I take, maybe this is probably my most radical position, but I believe it, like I know my name. We have convinced ourselves that we should out from.
For most of the hours of the day outside of the presence of the parents. I actually disagree with that. I actually think that I want as much time. And this is as a CEO of a company, you know, giving 14 hour days to Optima, right? I want as much time to shape the relationship that I value with my two children as possible.
And so being able to give me that time back allows me to engineer where we put the emphasis on socialization for our family, church and athletics has been a real exciting space to have socialization occur. Now there will be some folks who, to your point, and we live in a rural area. That high school football, Friday night light experience is just something that they did, the granddaddy did, the great granddaddy did, and they don't wanna see that disrupted.
And for that person, you know, I totally respect that and don't wanna see it disrupted either. But there are so many people, if you were to give them the opportunity to be present in the lives of their children, and they could do it in a way that they could afford to do it. Hmm. That would be a game changer for the family dynamics forever.
Hmm. And so I look at those trade offs and I say, Hmm, should we maintain this kind of idea that. Outsource the raising of our children. Now, when we were in 1916 and we had a whole bunch of folks coming from another European country and we needed to make sure they understood English and they needed to pledge allegiance to the flag and they to fight in world wars and they needed to work in factories.
I'm gonna take your child for. Eight to, I'm gonna, so that child for the good, the country today, I don't believe that same demand. We should certainly teach, but we don't need them for eight to put them in. Boxes and have them delivered a standardized model in order for us to be successful as a society.
So, mm-hmm. If you agree with that premise that we're kind of from first principles reorganizing and rethinking the best ways to educate and socialize, then the family unit becomes even more important than the school. I think it was our friend, was it Mark Twain that said, I never let school get in, in the way of a good education.
Yeah. You know, the verb to school someone is a very different verb than to educate someone. Right? And so I just hope that we can reimagine time, that we can reimagine the value proposition for the folks who are kind of skeptical of all of this choice. Where I agree with them is that what we are doing.
Collectively should be a public good. We should be finding ways to keep our democracy intact. We should be finding ways to make sure that regardless of income, you can have access to world class education. That we have an educated electorate that can make really important decisions for the future of this country.
So I think that there has to be some. Government oversight as it relates to the ESA platforms themselves and who gets allowed to participate there. But we cannot be so focused on the regulation that we do not allow for this moment in innovation to fully optimize. And I think that Alex is where you and I are screaming from the rooftops, like we need more innovation, not less innovation particularly at this time.
And so the organizations that are on the front lines at the Vanguard, we should be trying to encourage them to be successful and creating incentives for them to be sustainable.
[00:32:30] Alex Sarlin: Sacred cows are almost just the, the common wisdom about how education has been delivered over the last a hundred years in the United States are really being shaken, including just the idea that you have to go to a school building to be educated. The idea that education should not involve a parent, that's obviously something that's.
Intrinsic to the homeschooling movement, right? Is that, is the idea of parents being involved in the education, but the idea that socialization must happen in person. These are things that are, are really intriguing and I think. We take a lot of them for granted, and as we think about the different education systems, I think one thing that we're sort of swimming around here, or at least I I'm trying to swim around here, is saying, I love the way you put it.
We haven't audited the school day. We haven't really said, well, what aspects of the existing education system of a fully virtual or technological education delivery model of a model that involves families at the core of it, at the model that involves barely terrific teachers. At the core of it, if we had our.
Ability to remix and sort of create an assemblage of different. Aspects of education that tries to optimize. And we were able to choose those Friday night football games because that's a highlight of the week. And we say, well, that is an important part of education, so we're gonna make sure that that happens.
All our kids are gonna have a high school football team and they're gonna be able to go to the bleachers and hang out with each other. That's gonna happen no matter what. Also, we want to be able to have an Athens style Academy where students can discuss philosophy that is not a traditional part, but I think can include virtual travel back in time and see and work with people who may not be.
And we wanna have the families involved and we want the parent to be able to check in at least three times a day with their student. And they can do that because they can connect in a virtual reality environment, or they can do that by the student working from home. The potential, the set of different combinatorics there, right?
Become really exciting because if you say, this is what I want education to look like, this is what I wanted to focus on, and I can use technology and policy. Put together the highlights of different models. I think that becomes really intriguing. I'm curious how you react to that. And you are obviously making choices for your own family.
You're living on a 29 acre farm, but your students are doing education in uniform, in a virtual reality for part of the time. They're reading physical books, they're connecting with others in various particular in person.
Specific set of choices and how as an ed tech ecosystem can we sort of enable those choices without it feeling like it starts to get outta control.
[00:35:14] Adam Mangana: We do have to decouple. Custodial care and great instruction. Those are the two key components for world class education. You need both of those things, but they don't need to be delivered at the same time in the same physical location.
And I think that's where the courage is required to reimagine what that looks like, because. Again, I believe that the gift we can give this generational parent is that if you choose to provide the custodial care, we have a method by which we can do that. You don't have to be the teacher of record. You can get the academic press, you can get the content, you can get the pedagogy, you can get the things that you may not be trained to offer, but we know that you're sending your very best child and you love your child.
We know all parents love their children, and so the reality is that. The experience prior to COVID was an experience where parents were working, they were dropping their children off early. Seven o'clock, six o'clock. They were picking their children up seven o'clock, six o'clock, and doing that for years and years and years and years and years.
And so we were in this kind of rat race, hamster race, so to speak, that was lacking the common courtesy of connection. So to be able to give parents the common courtesy of connection with their child is incredibly empowering, Alex. And so there will be some parents that will still need to outsource custodial care, but they should be able to do it on their terms and to be very clear about what they are getting for their dollars.
If they're gonna be spending money on custodial care, they also need to be able to have access to world class. Instruc and they should be able to do that on their own terms. And they have that delivered in a modular and compelling way. And so that's the world that I think both you and I agree on, and we both agree that there's gonna take different type of entrepreneurs, different types of systems, different types of structures to solve for both custodial care and to solve for academic press of.
The reality is that the current system, because it had so much on it, it had to be a COVID nurse. It had to be an active shooter drill trainer. It had to be custodial care, it had to be a bus driver, it had to be cafeteria, Mr. Jaime Escalante and Joe Clark from Lean On Me. And it just was being asked to play every movie that you've ever seen.
That's right. And it was a really out of touch expectation of schools. And so once you can decouple those expectations and optimize for them. Who are gonna be the best COVID nurses in the world are gonna be the ones COVID. You know, those who are gonna be the best teachers in the world are gonna be the ones delivering instruction.
Those who know their children best, hopefully can be much more present in shaping the way that their children are both socialized and educated and we believe parents. Are the experts in their children. They may not be experts in algebra one, but we can handle algebra one for them. Right?
[00:38:08] Alex Sarlin: Right. We sometimes use for that is unbundling, right?
It's unbundling the education experience into different aspects rather than a school being expected to deliver all of these services plus. Plus feeding them, plus teaching them, plus monitoring them for illness, plus, you know, social work,
[00:38:26] Adam Mangana: we haven't even fed them, right? Look at the current state of the union with GLP ones and generations of folks needing to manage their blood sugar levels and things of that nature.
So there's just a lot of opportunity for us to make improvements, and I'm excited about folks like yourself who are thinking about this critically and creating platforms to be able to win over those who may be skeptical.
[00:38:47] Alex Sarlin: And I'm excited about people like yourself who are creating models that have a very particular point of view about what aspects of education need to be innovated on and which need to be conserved, and what needs to be put together.
And I, you know, I'd love to ask you, you're mentioning how your Optima Ed has been growing, the, the student applications have been growing, the teacher applications are already high and still been growing. I'd love to hear a little bit about the feedback you're getting from the parents in these programs, because I imagine that.
As we say, many parents have been voted with their feet. They've been looking for alternative approaches to education that may incorporate more parental involvement. They more may incorporate a higher standard of learning, or more immersive, or more engaging, or more flexible, or fill in the blank. But they don't always know how to get that.
They don't know how to put the pieces together. And you're offering something very specific, right? Kids are getting into school uniforms in a virtual environment. They're reading real books. There's this sort of classical approach meets this incredibly innovative technological approach with, with virtual reality.
How are parents reacting to it? What is the reaction you get when people hear about you and whatcha the reaction that you get when people engage and their students are in this type of school environment? What do they say?
[00:39:58] Adam Mangana: Yeah, your listeners don't have to take my word for it. They can go look at our Google reviews.
I mean, all of this is publicly documented. It's been a blessing for so many families. I say that with a lot of humility. There have been families looking for school at home, not homeschool. They don't wanna deliver the instruction. They want their time back. They wanna be present. They wanna make sure that they can screen what their children are getting access to because they love their children deeply.
And they've had some skepticism around the current content that's taking place in our public school system. So many of them have been refreshed to come to a school environment where they, you are pretty aligned with the content. They see real value in it, but more important than that, they see their children learning every day.
It's funny, blocking and tackling you. You just go back to the fundamentals. If Alex, your children come home and they're asking you about something in history, or they're telling you about an interview that they had with an AI powered Neil Armstrong as he was landing on the moon, or you know, an interview with an AI powered Rosa Parks as she was advocating for herself on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
These are transformational experiences that kids are having, learning experiences that kids are having at any school that does that. Whether they be a metaverse school or a brick and mortar school, or another type of online school or a micro school, if your engineering experiences that matter in the lives of parents learners, they're gonna be very supportive of you.
And so I think the thing that, that I have found that parents can speak to is that they have been surprised that the academic seriousness, they've been surprised at the learning outcomes. They've been really, really. Pleased at those elements they were hoping to find their motivation for coming was about student engagement.
Yeah. Their child was not engaged and they were expecting that we would solve student engagement. What they find is what happens when you solve student engagement is that children all of a sudden start learning at a much more efficient, right and faster clip. Right. If I can get their attention, focus is the new iq.
If I can get their focus, all of a sudden the learning becomes much easier.
[00:42:06] Alex Sarlin: That's really interesting and it makes a lot of sense. It's not what I expected you to say, and I think that's a, it's a surprising and really insightful comment that if the learning is visible, if you're actually having, creating learning experiences that students wanna engage in, wanna talk about, wanna bring home, want to sort of expand on and, and lights their curiosity that.
Reminds parents of the value of school, and that is something that doesn't happen as much as I think most parents would like in many traditional environments. So you mentioned AI in passing here, and we haven't talked about the role of AI in this, but it's yet another element when you mention, because just looking back through this conversation, there's the idea of teachers, you mentioned great public school, charter school, private school teachers being able to work in more flexible environments and teach in.
Virtual reality or in the metaverse, teachers want that because it's flexible for them and for other reasons as well. And students get the experience of having adults inside their virtual environments. We talk about, and you just mentioned ai, non-player characters or AI simulations of historical figures, right, so that you can talk to a new Armstrong or Rosa Parks.
We've also talked, students can work together and collaborate and see each other and they look like themselves and they're in these, uh, virtual school uniforms. It's really interesting. And you mentioned field trips or going inside a cell, going into environments you've never been able to see. It creates such an interesting sort of a toolkit.
Of different pieces that could contribute to an educational environment. And of course I say those things and I'm giving these quick examples, but for any one of those, there's thousands of things that can be done with a virtual teacher. There's thousands things that can be done with collaboration.
There's thousands of things that can be done with ai. But let's talk about the AI piece 'cause it's, it's new to this conversation or to this part of the conversation. What role do you envision AI playing in a metaverse education?
[00:43:56] Adam Mangana: I'm really excited about. What it means for accessibility. Mm-hmm. I don't have a lot of time to watch television, but I happened to be home this weekend before traveling to London, and I noticed that one of the top rated shows on Netflix was a show called Billionaire Bunker.
And I just was curious about it. You know, I live on a farm, so I'm a little, you know, I got, I'm not a doomsday prepper, but it's, it got a little bit on me. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm living on a farm, have my own water source, you know, so the Billionaire Bunker was a fascinating show for me to watch. Well, this is a Spanish show, right?
It is using. Create real time kind of dub voiceovers mm-hmm. That allow for English speakers to access the show in ways that the old school dub overs wouldn't. Right. And so this is just this weekend's use case. But when you think about that in the application of learner, right. Anything that is produced by Optima Ed can immediately be in 10 different languages.
Yep. It can immediately. Solve for a state like Florida that has so many backgrounds represented, right? And so this idea of Pluribus Unum right out of many one AI allows for us to create a bridge for folks who. Access material who haven't been able to access it before. So I get excited about that use case.
I really get excited about the neurodivergent use cases for AI as well. We could do a whole podcast on the impact of concept based instruction and AI on neurodivergence, but you know, the idea that. Not just a historical figure, but that we could create a digital twin of the most effective teacher that your child has ever had and that then be that child's tutor that they can put in the palm of their hand and take them with to them with every metaverse class.
Right. That's just a really wild concept. But we're doing this right now where we shrink down the avatars with power them by language models and you know, it's like. You have your very favorite teacher in your pocket as you're trying to solve this crazy new problem that the next grade has asked of you.
And so, you know, this idea that you can bring a tutor with you and that that tutor has anthropomorphic qualities, and it's not just a chat bot, but that you, you feel a responsibility to it in the same way that Alexander felt a responsibility to Aristotle, as we've mentioned, that can be a, a huge motivator.
And then you can feed those models, right? Whatever state testing you want. Guess what? Teachers always complain about teaching to the test. AI doesn't complain about teaching to the test, and so we want teachers to teach to the student. We'd like AI to teach to the test. These are the ways in which we are like unapologetic about student outcomes, right?
We don't need a teacher to limit their creativity, but we're happy for the AI to limit its creativity. And so these are the ways that I see these use cases becoming inevitable. It will not be that AI replaces teachers, but teachers using and leveraging AI to engineer experiences that transform learning, that individualized learning, that make learning accessible.
This is what's already happening at Optima and will happen at scale over the next five years.
[00:47:11] Alex Sarlin: Very inspiring. I can hear the scribbles of all of the people listening to this writing down, let AI teach to the test. The teachers can teach to the student. I think that is a very powerful motto for the AI era, and one that I think speaks exactly to the value of ai, right?
You, you want, as you say, you want to limit its creativity. It is something that can serve your purposes in an educational environment and free up the human creativity. To do really exciting things, including relationship building, which is probably the core exciting thing. That is a really exciting vision.
And, and yes, I love that idea of having a human teacher inside a metaverse education when they're there. And then when they're not there, the student has a digital twin version of them, a sort of Jiminy cricket in their pocket that they can ask Mr. Smith if they get stuck on something while they're in their virtual field trip to a solar plant and an Antarctica, whatever.
It's, I mean. We started this conversation saying, this is, I think, a glimpse, I, I think, a very, very good glimpse into what the future of education could look like. I truly believe that, and I think one of the things that I admire so much about your vision here is that you're questioning a lot of the common assumptions and bringing some of the most exciting ideas from all of these different areas of education and saying, we should embrace them.
Let's run with them, and parents want this. Have been polls coming out about, people are getting nervous about ai. They're starting to read all these negative articles and wonder what it's gonna be about. But I think when you start thinking about, you know, what does it look like and you start putting your kids into the Athens Academy on a daily basis, it looks very different.
I really appreciate you doing that. So we, I know we're almost at the top of our time here, but I wanna give you the final word. You know, when you look at, you've been growing opted, you've been partner, you're in London, you're partnering with Meta. Meta is obviously a huge international tech company that has a lot of device management, as you mentioned, that can really help accelerate the ability for both parents and schools to use virtual reality.
In Metaverse context, what do you see as the next three years of Optima education's trajectory? Obviously, it'll continue to grow. What are you most excited about in terms of helping the world at large sort of start to recognize the potential of this type of education?
[00:49:20] Adam Mangana: The truth and the honest answer, Alex, is I see a vision of learning liberated.
I think that. We've had gatekeepers for world class education. I was really fortunate to attend an Ivy League school. I was super fortunate to have the opportunity to be educated after that at Vanderbilt, which had at the time the number one education school in the United States and maybe in the world.
I have personally benefited from world class education, but it wasn't permissionless. It required me. Checking to have access to be invited to the party. I had to be six three, run a four seven, had the opportunity to play college football, right? And who knows if I would've had access to Brown otherwise, these kinds of things, right?
What if, right? We have a model where learning can truly be liberated and that no matter where you are in this country. You can have access to a world class education. What if that happens over the next three years? And that's what we work tirelessly to achieve at Optima, and we're super grateful for the partners that are making that happen.
I'm keenly focused next year in Texas, so Texas just allocated $1 billion in the ESAs and I'm gonna be focused in rural Texas. Keenly focused in Mississippi, these places where historically we've not had access to a world class education. We started in Florida and we're kind of targeting SEC country because these are the geographies that in the United States have been traditionally underserved.
Yes, once we nail it, we will scale it, but we are really wanting to nail it in the places where there is the most disparage, Jackson, Mississippi, for example, where we wanna go. By the fall of 2027 is the murder capital of the United States. And we think education is the key in mitigating all of these type of statistics that continue to be dominating headlines, right?
And so we're gonna continue to focus there and I'm excited to be part of that and, and to find partners like you that are helping to spread the word on what we're doing.
[00:51:28] Alex Sarlin: Oh, well of course it's fascinating work. So yeah, Jackson, Mississippi meets Athens, the Platos Socrates Southern
[00:51:36] Adam Mangana: hospitality meets virtual reality.
[00:51:37] Alex Sarlin: There you go. Very, very well done. Adam Mangana is the Co-Founder and CEO of Optima Ed, the first full-time VR homeschool, and it's backed by Meta. He over 15 years of leadership. In EdTech. This has been a fascinating conversation. I knew it would be and it has been. I got gears turning. Thank you so much for being with us here on EdTech Insiders, and yes, let's talk again.
I'd love to see how it continues to to evolve. This is gonna be a really exciting time period for education.
[00:52:05] Adam Mangana: Alex,
[00:52:06] Alex Sarlin: thank you so much for having me. 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.
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