Welcome to Season Seven of Edtech Insiders. The show where we cover the education technology industry in depth every week and speak to thought leaders, founders, investors, and operators in the edtech field. I'm Alex Sarlin.
And I'm Ben Kornell. And we're both edtech leaders with experience ranging from startups all the way to big tech. We're passionate about connecting you with what's happening in edtech around the globe.
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Today we're speaking with Yvonne Soh and Jim Wagstaff, the co founders of noodle factory, an AI powered teaching and learning platform based in Singapore. Before co founding Noodle Factory Yvonne spent many years in adult education working closely with different companies to incorporate technology to improve learning outcomes. Previously, Yvonne worked in product product marketing and solution development roles at Dell Technologies and f5 networks. Dr. Jim Wagstaff co
founded Noodle Factory. He is also the co founder of jam factory and a founding board member of up to speed companies that focus on corporate training. Jim began his career at Dell Technologies, brocade, communications and Hewlett Packard Enterprise in various sales, pre sales, sales management, channel management, general management and executive roles. Most recently, Jim was vice president and general manager of Hewlett Packard enterprises data storage
business in the APJ region. Jim earned both his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Liverpool. His ongoing research focuses on how organizations harness the power of digital capabilities to better serve customers, students
and users. Jim has also earned his postdoctoral diploma in academic practice from the University of Liverpool in coordination with the fellowship for higher education in the UK, where his ongoing work includes action research concerning the use of generative AI in teaching and learning. Dr. Jim Wagstaff, Yvonne Soh Welcome to Edtech Insiders,
it is great to be here. Thank you, Alex.
Yeah, we're really happy to be here.
It's great to have you both. Let's start with a little bit of background, give us a little bit of the history of how you got to the idea of noodle factory and a little bit about what it is we'll dive much more into it and future questions.
Well, in short, noodle factories, AI palette teaching assistant platform. And it goes with the concept that teachers can never be replaced, but they need help. And that's where AI can come in how we started, developing noodle factory actually came from a previous company that we still have a training company called gem factory, then let Jim explain the two names later on. But Jeff factory is corporate
adult training company. And we've developed bespoke solutions, training solutions for companies a lot of times incorporating technology. So from there, one of the biggest problems that we wanted to solve was how do we actually scale ourselves as educators, because that's actually the hardest thing to scale to make, the learning more effective is actually that interaction with the teacher. And that's where we started looking at using chat. And at that time, you know, chatbots, were kind of not
really fashionable anymore. They were kind of known as dumb. They were largely used for like customer service, very, you know, structured kind of interactions. But we felt that it was actually something that could really be used because it mimics interaction, a one on one interaction. So we started looking at how AI could actually help to automate the process of the setup of a chatbot for content rich environment. And that's how noodle factory was born.
It's interesting, I think you both came from sort of a business background and what you're doing with noodle factory spans between education space and the business space. It's really interesting. So noodle factory has this AI powered teaching and learning platform that can generate questions, it can work as a chatbot trainers can upload material and it can do all sorts of things with that material to support the teachers and save
them time. Can you tell us a little bit about how your platform leverages generative AI to really change how this kind of education is delivered? Jim, let me start with you.
Yeah. So if you look at the way that we do things, so we are kind of a teacher first platform or an educator first platform. And just to kind of circle back to something that you said, we're using the tech stack across all the different types of education. So in ed tech very broadly, whether it's K through 12, higher education, workplace learning, it's the same tech stack. And the way that we approach this is we don't do content. So We provide the
platform. And that's why we're able to span across all of those different types of edtech, if you will, or approaches to EdTech. It's because our clients, whether it's a school, a university, or a company, they're bringing their content. And this is going back to the origin story of noodle factory. In our own company, we had tons of content that we had created. And so one of the things that we did not want to do is go recreate content, we wanted to repurpose that content, leverage
that content. And in talking to our clients, we know that's something that they want to do, too. They spend a lot of money and time and effort on great content. And so we want to give them a way to extend that extend that experience for the student extend the learning, attack the forgetting curve, you know, whatever the problem is. So back to your question. That's how we're using generative AI is to take that in contextualize that. And that could be something as simple as a PowerPoint
presentation. And the speaker notes, that's a great source of data for us. Documents, obviously, are a great source of data. It could be storage locations, it could be websites, lecture, transcripts, anything that we can turn into text at this point is a great source of data. And effectively, what we're using generative AI to do is then contextualize that we can immediately have a conversation within that curriculum, or to summarize that
and to repurpose that. So to do things like creating question, answer pairs, formative assessments, all sorts of different things that we can do with that. And the whole principle of noodle factory that where the name comes from is two things. Obviously, noodle is slang for brain. Sometimes we have to explain that. And people go, Oh, yeah, that's right. And, you know, I'm sure heard somebody say, let me noodle on that. Or he's got a really good
noodle. So that's something that we're big on is the automation, if you will, or the creation of new knowledge. But the other aspect of noodle factory is it's a design principle that we have. So if you have ever, and if you if you've ever been a student, you probably will identify with
this. If you've ever had cup noodles, or packet noodles, ramen noodles, how long does it take to get those ready, a few minutes, even if you spice it up a little bit and add your own ingredients, you're ready to go in about five minutes, that's always been a design principle of ours is the AI needs to assist to make it quick and easy. So that using your content, you're up and running really fast.
I like it is the metaphor is sort of the factory model, you can very quickly put things together in any kind of way that you want. But noodles, and it was jam factory was the other company.
Yeah, we've got kind of got an obsession with food, I think, you know, we're we're Singapore based. And anybody who's ever visited Singapore knows how obsessed people are with food and Singapore, but the jam factory that with that name, there's a meaning behind that, too, we were looking to create sticky solutions. So we've always been really focused on attacking the
forgetting curve. So making sure that knowledge actually is useful beyond just the class that if the class was interesting, and intellectually stimulating, that's not enough, it's got to be useful information. So jam factory was about creating sticky solutions.
And the noodles and noodle factory also are reflected in Walter, your mascot AI who has, I think noodles for hair, I believe, and is sort of the physical representation of some of the AI that you use in noodle factory, which is a lot of fun. So Yvonne, I wanted to ask, both of you have really interesting backgrounds. Jim, you can sort of hear in the way you're talking about it, you have a background in learning, you have PhD and I think learning sciences or education,
my doctoral degree is actually in business with an emphasis on organizational development. But then I've got a postdoctoral diploma and academic practice
exactly is that you know, forgetting curve and, you know, talking about some of the principles there. And then you've on your journey, as you've done product marketing, you've done technology you've worked in, you know, business to business and education. So both of you bring this really interesting combination of backgrounds to this role. And you're based in Singapore, which is, you know, one of the big hubs of edtech, and tech throughout, you know,
all of Asia in the world. But Yvonne, what do you think, from all of the different roles that you've played? How did it come together into your current vision of how AI is really shaping the future of edtech?
At heart, I'm a tech geek. And that's always been my interest in kind of knowing and understanding how technology works, but being able to kind of marry it to the business aspect of things. And this has really helped because as a startup, running a startup, you probably have heard a lot you know that you need to be really be able to do everything now the chief cook and bottle washer at the same
time. So having the mix of experiences helps me to understand the different aspects of the business, day to day between Jim and myself. I focus a lot on the product management product development, I work very closely with the product team. So although I'm not a coder, per se, I do understand how technology works. I mean, I'm very involved in the day to day development, I joined a lot of the stand up meetings. So that
has really helped a lot. But at the same time, I'm also able to switch back because, you know, obviously, we work with a lot of clients on the business side, the education side. So I think having that mix of different experiences has really helped me to be able to relate and kind of much, because it's never just tech, for the sake of tech is always the tech should help something in this case, educators. And I think that has really helped a lot.
That makes sense, it's really unusual to have a background that spans you know, product thinking and technology and education. And as you say, it's bringing those skill sets together allows a lot of different things to happen, which is really interesting, in the case of of noodle factory, you know, Jim, you just mentioned how content can come
from anywhere. And workplaces and higher ed professors and, and K 12 educators all have in common is that they have this sort of long tail of content, they have a lot of things they've built over the years, there are all these books, their research papers that are out there that are relevant readings, PowerPoints, slides, tell us a little bit more about what you actually do with noodle factory, once you ingest this content that is coming from these different, you know,
different areas of education, you turn it into a lot of different things. And you turn it into a chatbot as well. So tell us about sort of how the suite of the different things that noodle factory does and what that unlocks for your educators.
Yes, so one of the things if a teacher or an instructional designer, really anybody who's interested comes on board, effectively, the first thing that they see is what we call the teacher Toolkit, which is something that we offer free forever. So we want teachers to
have this. And it really feeds into one of the metrics that we're most concerned about, which is Teacher productivity, by extension, alleviating teacher burnout, giving teachers time back for teaching and for students, but bringing the content and maybe I can tell you a story give you an example of this, how we worked with a lecturer in a very famous business school that you would know who had exactly that problem years and years of content that had been built up over time, lots of great
content. In fact, this professor has literally written the book on her subject, she is the subject matter expert in her field. So you take her textbook, about 500 pages long, or maybe a little bit more tons of articles, PowerPoint slides, lesson notes, all sorts of things. Plus, during the pandemic, she had recorded hundreds of hours of herself, giving lectures and explaining in great detail these topics, each one of those discreetly, can be ingested and summarized
individually. And we can use that and students can engage with that. Or it can be blended and summarized and really transformed into documents that take and create essentially something new, there's the generative part of the generative AI out of all of that superset of information. And that that in the teacher toolkit the teachers can do and beyond that they can create quiz banks or question banks question answer pairs, guided tutorials
on a particular subject. They can create formative assessments, there's just so many different things that are very, very time consuming, that they can do. And we this particular educator, the testimonial was, look, all those hours and hours of video, she's now ingested those and effectively her students, and she would have, you know, hundreds of students in a class potentially, it's like having office hours with her at anytime, anywhere, any device. And that's the analogy that she
likes to use. And beyond the teacher toolkit, what she's done is what most of the schools we work with, or companies we work with, do, they've opened this up this information that's been created, the knowledge set that's been created, they open that up to the students. And from there, the students can explore through conversation.
Think of it like a chat, GPT experience, but within the confines of the curriculum, so you're kind of in a protected zone, if you will, they can take as many formative assessments as they want, because the pursuit here is mastery. And so that's kind of a design principle that we have and a guiding principle that we have for the educators is let's ensure that your students achieve mastery and see how that translates back into the classroom and into the
summative assessments. So we see this a nice symbiotic relationship between what the teachers can do in the toolkit and then what they can present out to the students in many different channels, if you will,
hearing you talk about it. It reminds me of two of you know what I consider the the biggest strengths of technology when it comes to the tech landscape. And, you know, one of them is as you just mentioned above on the idea of being able to scale teacher
time. That's one of the most limited things we have educators that's why higher ed cost so much because, you know, among other reasons, but you know, faculty He doesn't scale, you know, and the idea of being able to take all of somebody's writings and their textbooks and their videos and all their content and generate a, you know, a conversational chatbot, they can have their knowledge.
And if not, you know, their personality, at least everything they know about the field is incredibly valuable for scaling. And then the other thing is that the interactive nature of edtech, right, instead of it being all lecture based, generative AI allows conversational interactives formative assessments, which we know are better for learning than just listening to somebody
talk or than reading. So the idea of transforming content into something that is directive and transforming enough content of a single instructor so that it can actually sort of emulate them is really, really powerful. Yvonne, I'd love to ask you about about that, you know, I mean, this is relevant to all the different sectors that you serve, how do you design noodle factories offerings, so that they really take advantage of these particular aspects of edtech,
I think one of the key things that we always look at is that it needs to be aI assistant, but educate the curator, because it can never replace the human and AI shouldn't replace the human, but it should take over tasks that take a long time for humans to do that are prone to error. And that's how one of the key design principles that we've had. So from the very start, and that comes also from our past experience with jam factory where we worked with a lot of
different corporates. So we've been trained, or kind of like gotten used to working very closely with clients in developing the product, because every corporate has different very unique needs and pain points. So this has been something that we've done with Nadeau factory, even as we were building it from the start. So we started to partner with different educators in testing our initial prototypes, and even
our MVP. So this has really led us also to design the platform in a way that it needs to be flexible, not that it can be customized to the different needs of every single customer. But that it can be used in different ways and use cases to meet different needs. So it needs to be broadly applicable for education.
If I could just jump in there, I think so our MVP or minimum viable product was launched kind of close to the beginning of the pandemic, which was interesting timing, you know, that was a time of great need for educators to have tools like this. And we had a fairly, if you look at what we have today, it was fairly basic, it was pretty straightforward. The core features, capabilities
functionality was there. But I would say, you know, a lot of the things that we do that are, I think, really interesting, like being able to recommend learning outcomes, which is particularly useful for university educators who probably are subject matter experts, but they aren't necessarily steeped in education, giving them just brainstorming ideas on hey, here's some ideas on learning outcomes based on the content,
you've ingested. The lesson planning, right, that comes directly from interaction with our education clients, we do rubric based grading, you know, that was something that we'd worked directly with a client on that. And so all of these great ideas, we'd love the voice of the customer, you know, whoever that customer is, whether it's an education customer, or a corporate customer, and we work on two weeks sprint cycles, now I'm getting into ivanti area of
expertise. But you know, I sit in on those two, and we have these two week sprint cycles. So we can have a conversation with a professor who's got a great idea, we'll vet that and make sure that it makes sense in what we're trying to do both from a product perspective, but also from a teaching and learning perspective, which is where I focus. And chances are, you know, three, four weeks later,
that shows up as a feature. So we're moving really quickly, I think that served as well, because as you mentioned earlier, this space is just changing so rapidly, you have to be in a position to move with it.
100% I love this philosophy, you know that you just mentioned divan of if I'm getting a right, AI assisted, but educator curated, where the educator is still at the center of the experience, but some of the pieces that that are so time consuming and repetitive and, you know, don't always defend the same level of expertise can be off and are mistake prone, you know, can be offloaded onto the AI, I'm sure your professor, your faculty and your corporate trainers, you know, find it incredibly
valuable. And then Jim, as you're mentioning, you get an opportunity to sit inject some of the best practices of instructional design, like defining outcomes in advance, or rubric race grading that's really, you know, tries to be very calibrated and objective into the way you actually teach.
So, you know, what I'd love to ask about when it comes to these things is tell us about some of your success stories and like moments where you have explicitly seen the learners who are being affected by this platform who are actually you know, using noodle factory, improve their learning outcomes or upskill and workplaces. How are you measuring Success.
So we focus a lot on learning success. So we actually have a learning success team, who works very closely with the different faculty to kind of optimize their setup, but also to kind of measure a few success metrics, and a few key success metrics that we measure terms of educator productivity. So time savings, and also the student engagement, also still use the product for a longer period of time, that is also student
performance. But apart from that, I think, a story that actually happened very early on, and in fact, the client was using our MVP is a particular educator, who we started working with and the educator was overwhelmed came to us because I needed to find a way to be able to automate some of the marking process like the grading process and giving feedback to the students. So started to test the platform and use the platform. And on a Friday night, I got a
text message from her. And she said that, hey, guess what, I'm at the movies. And this is something I haven't done in a long time, because I'm normally grading papers. So thanks to doodle factory. And that, to me is really something that is I think, is immeasurable, you know, but it's something that actually meant a lot more to us than all the numbers. And also for that same educator, the school, in particular school caters to a wide array of students with different
capabilities and needs. And one of the things that she fed back to us was that, you know, some of the students, they have different learning needs and challenges. So in class, they tend to not want to speak up, they don't want to keep asking what may seem like a stupid question. But the platform has enabled the student to kind of practice the same thing over and over again, to ask questions without judgment, because there's no one to listen to them
except the AI tutor. But that has something that the student found very valuable.
I think you're highlighting another real strength of education technology, which is that it is not human, it doesn't judge.
Students can feel much more exposed or comfortable and make themselves more vulnerable, at times, at least it often when they're asking an individual conversational bot that instead of asking a question in front of a whole class, we talked to Michael Chaisson from class technologies a few months ago, and they have an AI bot that's inside their live classes when they're doing online synchronous
classes. So students can actually, if they don't understand something in real time, you ask the Chatbot on the side and say, Wait, I didn't understand that, or what was that? I totally missed that. And it can it can bring it back up.
And I think, you know, that is such a strength of the entire AI system is that it allows students to, like you say, scale office hours to how you know, instead of that one hour a week, that you had to actually ask the instructor in a one on one setting, you got it 24/7 It's really interesting. It's also true for tutoring. Jim, speaking of these really important, you know, going into the movies, the time saving for instructors, student engagement. And then you know, as you know more about the
student performance. One of the things that you do that I think is very interesting is you actually run these webinars teaching instructors and corporations how to use generative AI to reach these kinds of outcomes and basically, save themselves time and make courses that really work. And
then engaged learners. Tell us a little bit about what those courses are light and what you're teaching them and how they work to sort of connect you with your possible customers and others who are designing in the space.
Yeah, I mean, we're really excited about this, because I think this is something we sort of stumbled into, we have a couple of anchor clients, mainly universities, where we have a good working relationship with the faculty. And this sort of emerged out of conversations with them. And we actually have two types of workshops. Sometimes we do them separately, sometimes together.
The very first type of workshop that we launched, was, essentially we call it instructional design for chat based learning, which is kind of descriptive, and it is a thing in the literature. So chat based learning is a thing going all the way back to the very first chatbots in the 1960s. Clearly, we're well beyond that. But we call it that because as an educator, you can kind of wrap your mind around what we're
trying to do. And we just go in with a very simple set of principles and a playbook, you know, essentially a design guide that says, if you're going to repurpose your content, and that's typically what we encourage, here are a couple of things to consider. You know, we show them, here's a path that you can take. And whenever we do the workshop, I always ask the question, I say, How many of you have too much content to cover in a term in a semester? And everybody says, Yep, I've got
way too much content. There's a great use case for this type of AI. So give students the opportunity to explore all of that other great information content, the knowledge building that can take place, but do it on their own terms. So a very constructivist attitude. Let's let the students decide. Let them explore on the other hand, and I asked the same question as
a part of the workshop. How many of you have students who made knee Need a little extra time and focus on the curriculum, as Yvonne was saying, maybe there's some particular need there. In fact, we encourage our clients to do action research on this. And we've seen research where, you know, students who might be presenting on the autism spectrum as an example, they may need to approach the curriculum on their own terms, and at their own pace, great opportunity for them to just extend the
classroom experience. And we showed the teachers how to do that, how to design for that, in a way it's not, you know, it's not really anything new. It's just we're reimagining or contextualizing the way to use this type of AI generative AI and AR platform to create different learning opportunities, and different student experiences that will lead to better learning outcomes. So that's one aspect of what we're doing. The second type of workshop, I think, is
really exciting. This is something that we do with a lot of different types of organizations. And it's really about how to harness the power of specifically the generative AI aspect of not only what we're doing, but what's happening very broadly in learning. And so we approach this very, not with a noodle factory spin, we're not trying to pitch noodle factory, this is really us trying to demystify, unpack and make very accessible generative AI to as
many people as we can. So for example, a very seasoned group of university faculty just a couple of weeks ago, we had a session with them. And the workshop was focused on a few key things. Number one, what is generative AI? Because that's, I'm surprised. I think because we live this, I'm surprised sometimes how little has broken through with academics. So let's unpack that. What is it? Let's take the fear out of it. Let's just talk through some of the issues you might feel around
generative AI. Okay, now that we've worked through that now, how can you harness it? What are the specific things that you as an educator can automate? Going back to the time savings, here are the things that you can do that are going to make your life easier, you're going to enjoy teaching more, you're going to be able to focus on maybe it's research, or it's your students, or a combination of the two things? Here's how you can do that today. Let's get hands on
and practice that. The second thing is really how do you now incorporate that into your teaching and learning? So what are some very simple practical things? We're not trying to boil the ocean, but things that you can do today like answering FAQs, giving students the opportunity to explore the curriculum, just by ingesting the materials don't even have to do any more design beyond that
just ingest the materials? And then thirdly, and this is more for universities, but how do you use generative AI as a research assistant? So that literature review that you've been putting
off? kickstart it right, use generative and kickstart that if you're looking for gaps in the literature, I mean, we show them we take a journal article and say, Okay, show me based on this journal article, what are some ideas that are gaps in the literature or gaps in this particular research that I might want to go and fill, you know, just simple things like that. And I had a professor, I'm gonna paraphrase, but the after that session, they said, this is like
magic, it feels like magic. And that, to me is such a great description of what's going on. And I forget who said it, it might have been Steve Jobs, but great technological advances are like that they feel like magic. And so that's the sort of feedback that we get out of these workshops. And it's really energizing to see the response. And once the fear is taken away as to, you know, the downside of generative AI, and there aren't, you know, their ethical challenges that we've got to
work through. But the upside in teaching and learning if we can harness it properly, it's great to see professors, teachers, corporate trainers, embrace that.
I think we've been seeing this sort of wave over the last year of early adopters. And now I think we're getting into sort of the bigger middle where people you can't escape hearing about this stuff, actually engage with it and see what it can do and actually have somebody you know, explain it to you and actually make sense of it. There's this light bulb that goes on that goes, Wow, I can go
to the movies. Again. I can spend more time on research, I can use these research tools, I can teach better, I can make chatbots that can talk about my content, offer these extension activities. There's so many different use cases, and we're just scratching the surface. We're still in, you know, the first year of this technology. It's kind of amazing to think about, and already, it feels like magic. I think that quote was from Arthur C. Clarke, unless I'm mistaken, I think
that was a wish. Doesn't one. Yeah, the Space Odyssey author about you know, advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But yeah, that's, that's really, ya know, you really, really feel it with this particular technology. You mentioned sort of the creation of FAQs, as one of the you know, very simple but important use cases. And the FAQ is on the noodle factory site are so interesting. You know, we have a lot of listeners who are in tech entrepreneurs themselves or
investors. And when I read through your FAQs, I was like these are very obviously coming from your customers. Just you know, this is like you're addressing the things that they're concerned about, and reassuring them and explaining how things work. But, Yvonne, can we just do a little like lightning round? Can I throw you some of the FAQs that are on the site that you've already written and answered? And explain, you know, why your customers are
worried about this? And how you have to, you know, talk to them about it? That sounds good. Okay. It's been a while, but no, no, you know, it's really the core idea. So one is, do I need to spend a lot of time to set up, Walter set up the AI?
No, you don't. And literally, it is just drag and drop. And then you're good to go? And why do customers ask that? Because I think with a lot of educators they've done, you know, they've worked with so many edtech tools, sometimes it actually takes longer to set it up. And then after that becomes outdated, the content needs to be updated. And then, you know, educators are sometimes very wary of more attack tools. And that's the main thing, it needs
to be easy to use. A lot of educators also are not really tech savvy sometimes. So they may not like technology. So it takes a lot for them to kind of want to use the tool. So we need to assure them that is easy to use.
Yeah, I mean, if they're doing this to save time, asking them to put a lot of time in upfront can feel counterproductive. And speaking of the tech savvy, the next question is do I need to know programming to use the AI powered learning platform is such an interesting FAQ.
Not at all. I think this comes from the fact that a lot of times when people first heard about chatbots, you know, they were used to having to program it kind of set up all the different pathways to intense very technical terms. So what we essentially allow or enable educators to do is to build no code, AI tutors in minutes.
Yeah, and that's, I think, a big part of why this does feel so magical is that it does such advanced things without you needing to know how to speak and you know, computer language, like basically, you know, coding language, you can talk to it in regular English, you could talk to her, you know, whatever language you speak, and it will respond and be really, really responsive to what your needs are. The next question is super interesting. Who owns the content I put on? Walter,
you own the content. So we don't provide content, we only provide the AI tools, the capability to use the AI tools. So you own the content, whatever you put belongs to you. And it's not seen by anyone that you don't want to see the content? Yeah.
And why do people ask that it feels like this is such a growing concern. And just big question mark about this whole AI space is the idea of ownership. And you know, where the data lives and who has it? And what do people ask you, especially from a university setting about this?
I think right now, there's a lot of debate about that about copyright issues. So whether it is the lectures content, or even if it's, let's say publish your content, so that has become a concern, because who owns the content? A lot of times for publishers, it falls within a fair use agreement. So it's no different essentially, for me taking a textbook and writing a set of notes of that.
Yeah, it's fair use if it's used in an educational setting. Yeah. And then a lecturer has content they have spent years on but they want it to be used, but they don't want it to be sort of taken wholesale. It's really, really interesting. And then so the next one is related, you know, how secure is Walter?
Well, that's very secure. In fact, we've taken great pains to ensure that every customer, when you use the platform, your data is encrypted, is secure within your own container, and no other organization has access to it. We don't use your data, to retrain the algorithm, unless it is for your own organization. So it gets better the longer you use it, but only for yourself. And also, we just got ISO certified as well. So we've been continually working to make sure that the platform continuously
is secure. We've done a lot of penetration tests. So definitely, that's top of our list.
We just saw, you know, just this last week that open AI created an enterprise version of GPT. And the main thing that they focus on is exactly this, the encryption, security data privacy that trying to address people's you know, questions about are you using my questions and everything I upload to you as training data? Can somebody else find it? And obviously, this is such a high? You know, it's so important for so many
people, especially in K 12. But I think throughout, what kind of questions do you get about security, like when companies or universities come to noodle factory? What is their sort of initial impression of the security story? Do they know a lot about it? Are they very concerned Do they not think about it until it comes up?
I think that's a big concern because it especially now with generative AI so they're very worried that any data that they put in is being used As to retrain the model. So it goes into the large language models. But the other thing as well, that clients are that universities and schools are very concerned with is the privacy data of their students.
So that's very important. And we make sure that, you know, we actually capture very minimal information about the student apart from having to log in and what class or cost the student belongs to. There's hardly anything else that's captured that can tie the information back to the student.
I mean, I can imagine like for the use case, you said, Jim, about neurodiverse learners, you know, if a student asked a chatbot said, oh, you know, I'm on the autism spectrum. So can you explain it to me this way, suddenly, that student is revealing medical information. So you have to be very thoughtful about that. And it sounds like you've thought a lot about it. I'll give you a break. Because there's two more, and I think this one be really
interest. I want to hear your take on this, Jim, as well. Yvonne, you've already talked about a little The next one is, will your AI tutor replace the role of teachers?
Yeah, the short answer, there is no. And we have never envisioned that for our platform. Certainly, we are a teaching assistant. And when we introduced this, because we have onboarding sessions with new faculty and even new corporate trainers, because you could say the same thing about corporate trainers, will this replace corporate trainers? But the short answer is no, I do a little thought experiment with people we onboard. And for most people, they may not have a
teaching assistant. I mean, teaching assistants are kind of hard to come by unless you've got a graduate student. And certainly, if you're in the corporate world, you probably don't have any sort of learning assistant that you work with. And I said, you know, imagine that you have a, you know, really smart graduate student, but they need to be told what to
do. That's what this is. So you've got somebody that you can go set off and do certain things, you need to be a little more explicit, maybe in your prompts in the way that you work with them, until they begin to learn the way you like to do things. So there's an interesting analogy there. But eventually, what you've got is an assistant that will allow you to save literally, you know, two, three, in some cases, five,
six hours a week. And we have seen this and the action research that we've done, as long as you are using it to go after this, what we think is low hanging fruit. So short answer is no. But what I do think we will see is more proliferation of these assistant type approaches where you're essentially giving teachers that I mean, it's an overused phrase, but kind of a new superpower, because they've got access to these capabilities that are more
accurate. Don't get tired, don't drift, that they can focus on these mundane tasks that are super important, but don't necessarily need to be done by the teacher.
Yes, it's so funny that you say it's becoming an overused phrase. I have heard that a lot recently. But I agree with you that it is it is what it feels like just the same way that chatty beauty feels like magic, and you sort of can't get
away from that feeling. This feels like it's turbocharging, you know, superpower, educators to be able to do so many things that couldn't do including, as you mentioned, a lot of them literature review, writing assessments, writing summaries, combining sources into one thing, answering student questions. All of these things are exactly the type of things that teaching assistants have done traditionally, one of
the really interesting things we have really talked about it that you just reminded me, the feedback that we've gotten from a lot of educators is that the fact that our platform, essentially can operate, even though a curriculum is in one language. So let's say English, because most of our clients use English to teach and English materials primarily. Even though the content is in English, the student can choose to use upwards of about 110 languages.
And in a university setting where you have a diversity of languages that might be natively spoken at home. What an amazing opportunity. And the feedback that we're getting is that let's say I've got a student from a country that's coming to a country that's predominantly English speaking, and we're teaching is done in English in
the university. The fact that they can use other languages to explore to gain confidence to develop mastery in a subject, and bring that into the classroom is visibly being noticed. So it's showing up statistically, in the formative assessment results, which are showing up into the gradebook, but it's showing up in greater student engagement in the classroom. And just something as
simple as that. I mean, it's not really simple, but it's straightforward is that the ability to be comfortable with a subject in your language and then take that into English in the classroom. What a game changer. I mean, it's just generative AI is allowing us to do this.
I'm so glad you're bringing this up, because this is a subject that I feel like has not gotten as much attention is sort of ink as it should. Because I mean, we both mentioned earlier this sort of idea that students sometimes don't want to ask questions in class because they don't want to, you know, ask quote unquote, stupid questions or slow down the class to make sure something's happening. And that is extremely exacerbated for students for whom, you know, the teaching language is not their
first language. There'll be lots of research about this, you know, people are uncomfortable speaking out, they don't want to seem like they don't know what's going on. So the idea of empowering students of all backgrounds, including linguistic diversity, to be able to engage with the content in an interactive way, is so powerful, it's powerful at all levels of education. I, I feel like as you say, it is straightforward. So it doesn't feel as sort of sophisticated a thought as some
of the other ones. But at the same time, it may be one of the biggest effects, I think that this moment has on education is sort of like the Babel fish, you know,
I'll tell you a really quick story. And this may or may not be relevant, so you decide. But we were in a conference last week in Indonesia. And many of the presenters up on stage were speaking English. They come from an English discipline, background, PowerPoint slides in English. And I was in the back of the conference facility, and I was looking at, I just noticed that things weren't landing, they weren't resonating. And I decided I was going to do
something different. I was like this, we've got to do something different. We need to make sure that the generative AI message lands with this audience in Indonesia. So I went to the organizer, and I said, Hey, I'm going to use my own laptop. Is that okay? And they said, Okay. And what I did was, I turned on just a simple feature in PowerPoint, which is real time Translation and Subtitling, and, you know, got up there, turned it on. And I'm on the title
slide of my presentation. And I said, we're going to talk about generative AI, and how it can impact teaching and learning. But I'm going to show you a simple example of generative AI, I'm going to show you how my speaking, I'm speaking in an American accent, I'm speaking English, we're going to transform that into Bahasa Indonesia. Turn that on. And it was like, the energy level went way, way up. And people their heads were up cameras coming out
there taking videos. And afterwards, there were people coming up and saying, How did you do that? What did you do that and I turned my laptop. I said, it's in PowerPoint, you can do it too. It's generative AI, start using it today.
It feels like magic, right? Again, it's like something that you just didn't think was possible real time translation suddenly is the touch of a button. It's really quite amazing. It's a great story. And I think that our listeners are starting to say, oh, yeah, right. This is really powerful. I mean, our listeners know a lot about jet AI. We've been talking about it for a long time. But this translation aspect, I think, really has a
lot to it. I think there's a real wow factor there when it comes to student engagement and sort of linguistic diversity. So we're at a point where noodle factory has obviously already been pioneering teaching people you know about generative AI and how to use it and best practices, and then providing tools to be able to use it in all sorts of ways. Where do you see it going next to Yvonne, you're the product person? I'm sure you know, the product roadmap, you don't have to give
away any secrets. But I'm curious about like, where do you think this is all going? And what is it little factories next big steps?
Well, going back to the beginning, so why we started noodle factory was so that, you know, Jim and I could find a way to kind of almost replicate ourselves. So I think that's something that has always been our dream to make it so easy for anyone to create. Not so much a clone, but like a virtual educated version of themselves.
You know, for example, I think there was a time when blogs were very popular, everyone had a blog, because everyone had something to say, I think every one of us has something to teach others. So imagine being able to just create a virtual educator of yourself and really being able to share that information. I think that's something that we're working towards.
That is extremely cool. And I'm excited about that a little bit in the context of tutoring where you have tutors who are with students for an hour a week. But if you had a again, I don't know if we have a word for it, but a an emulation, you know, as something what we're doing is sort of a simulator. I don't know what you'd call it, but of the tutor that is available all the time. It's not a replacement for the tutor. It's an enhancement of the tutor and it can reach so many students all
the time. It's really exciting. So we are getting to the end of our time. I want to ask both of you the questions we always end the podcast with Jim, let's start with you. What is the most exciting trend that you see in the Ed Tech landscape right now and you can't say AI because the way we've talked about it the whole time that you think our listeners should keep an eye on?
I think from my perspective, this is an AI I related trend. So you have to forgive me for that. But I think for non programmers, you know, for people who are not necessarily technical, I think the notion that advanced prompt engineering and when I say advanced, it's a little more complex, a little more complete, a little more focused on interesting outcomes, advanced prompt engineering, as a skill set for everyone, including professors, teachers, trainers
that we work with. And you know, the people that make decisions about how that training or the how that education occurs, understanding that enacting that really getting conversant with advanced prompt engineering, I think, is a really interesting
trend and exciting trend. Is it a long term trend, you know, maybe there's some sort of AI that's going to replace that and automate that part of prompt engineering, the thinking and the creativity that we have to have around it, but certainly, for the short term know, anybody who can really grasp that and get very, very good at practical, advanced prompt engineering, I think, is doing themselves a huge favor, and they're doing a service to their students and their learners.
Yvonne, what about you? What is there an exciting trend that you see in the tech landscape that you think our listeners should keep an eye on?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's a new trend. But personalization, I mean, it's been around and you know, at times, it's been overused, like everyone has personalized learning. But to be honest, personalization has always been a very tough nut to crack. However, I think it's very important, obviously, because everyone learns differently, has different needs and interests and times that they need to learn different things, different modes of learning as
well. But I think with the way that technology has evolved, so it's a combination of AI, immersive environments, for example, that is true personalization is going to be more and more of a reality.
It really does feel like personalization is a word that has been used for many years. But it now is actually possible. And it just, it blows
my mind. And I think, you know, there's a way to sort of weave both of your trends together in that educators who understand their students on an individual level, they and they know each student quite well, they can use advanced prompt engineering to generate material or chatbots, even that are sort of tailored to the strengths and interests and, and needs of each learner, obviously, you know, the chat bot itself can learn about the
learner over time. But the teacher often knows a lot about their learners and their children for that matter. So the idea of being able to say, you know, this student really prefers to learn through this medium, and they struggle with this type of concept. And they have this type of learning difference. And you know, if you can explain that really well, to Gen AI interface, it can make a personalized tool for that students pretty amazing.
I can't believe this. We didn't bring this up earlier. But we I mean, we have a really central vision for what we're trying to do the impact that we're trying to have as a company, and it goes beyond just growth. Yes, we want that goes beyond being in a lot of schools with a lot of teachers and students and so forth. It has to do with something I know that you've probably talked about a lot. And that is solving for the two sigma problem blooms, very famous two sigma
problem. And we are seeing in the research that we're doing with our clients, we are actually on the cusp of being able to provide that high quality one to one tutoring that bloom envisioned and that he showed, yeah, students who get that are going to learn better, but logistically, and economically, it's never been possible. Our vision is really to try to change the unit economics of education. And to make that high quality one to one tutoring accessible to as
many students as possible. And yes, we have to address the digital divide, and connectivity divide. But a student who has a device, you know, we our long term vision is, you know, let's give high quality one to one tutoring to every student who needs it, who wants it, who can benefit from it, and solve that two sigma problem once and for all. Yeah,
it's an incredibly exciting vision, you know, it feels more possible with technology than it ever has in the past. And I feel that very, very strongly. And just to finish up, what is a resource that you would recommend? We've talked about all sorts of interesting things today? What is a resource that you would recommend for our listeners who want to dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed? Yvonne? Let's start with you.
I use TechCrunch a lot, because I think this is a very rapidly evolving field with both like big tech companies and startups. So that really provides very quick insights of what's happening day to day, what different companies are doing and I think that that really helps.
Yeah, that makes sense. look for where the energy is where the sort of tech momentum is, because that's where you know, AI is going next. And Jim, how about you?
I think kind of in line with what I said earlier, there's a website that I would highly recommend. It's called Learn prompting.org. So go out there, it's a great place to start if you're wanting to get a bit more advanced and prompt engineering, just fantastic resources and go out and check that out. I've benefited from a greatly
Great suggestion, we will as always put links to those resources in the show notes for this episode. Speaking of learning, prompting, just one final thought it's so funny to me as as both talk about it, the idea that we turned this thing that's basically having a conversation. Like it's conversational. It used to be called to prompt engineering. I feel like it's such a gatekeeping term, right? It's like, oh, this is a type of
engineering. And by the way, it's like, no, it's not it's being clear communicator.
We need another term, don't we? Yeah.
It's conversational. It's how to ask for what you need. That's literally what it is.
You know, it's true that be clear in your instruction. There's a mantra there that probably works in life and in generative AI.
And it's something that educators are incredibly good at kindergarten teachers are the best people and instructions in the world. They know exactly how to ask for things. So it's just funny that we sort of are branding it with engineering. Anyway, forgive my rant there. This has been such a fun and fascinating conversation. Thank you for that little FAQ lightning round. I think that was very informative.
Yvonne Soh, Dr. Jim Wagstaff, the cofounders of Noodle Factory changing the AI landscape for educators in business and in education. Thanks for being here with us.
Thank you for having us. Thank you.
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