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.
Thanks for listening. And if you'd like the podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review.
For our newsletter events and resources go to edtechinsiders.org. Here's the show.
Shiren Vijiasingam is the Chief Product Officer at Instructure, the leading learning platform and maker of Canvas. Shiren has built global software products for millions of users for over two decades, with more than half of his time in education. He previously served as Chief Product Officer both at Newsela, a K-12, content platform, and before that at General Assembly, the pioneer of career
transformation education. He has a master's degree in interactive media from Quinnipiac University and a bachelor's in communications from St. Cloud State University. Shiren Vijiasingam Welcome to Edtech Insiders.
Excellent. Alex. Thank you. Happy to be here.
I'm so excited to talk to you today. You have a really storied career in edtech. You've been at General Assembly, you've been at Newsela. And you're doing huge things at Instructure. Give us a little bit of your background and edtech and what brought you to the field in the first place.
Yeah, thanks for asking. I have always been passionate about education. It's been something that I've benefited from, I think it's this big unlocker of upward
social mobility. And so the back half of my career being able to steer, steer my journey, it was important for me to focus on doing something with a positive mission meaning and so I've enjoyed the privilege of working with a number of incredible organizations in my past and in structure, I think of this really sort of the epicenter of where a lot of the educational journeys begin and are enabled,
right. So it was a no brainer for me to join an organization thinking about lifelong learning in such a productive, positive way.
And so you said the back half of your career, what led helps you transition? What were you doing before at Tech and what brought you into edtech? In the first place?
Yeah, I've had a I have a range of experiences in a number of different verticals, really, I think being able to steer is the biggest driver in the backhand, right? You sort of go from opportunistic career seeking to really intentional seeking. And I grew up in a household my mother is an educator, I've got
family who are educators. And so focusing on taking the skills that I've learned and building software for humans into a space that was near and dear to my heart was perfect combination, right of the kinds of things that I thought would be valuable and the skills that I could bring into education, I kind of found it happenstance. And once I got in, I just couldn't leave.
It's awesome. I am a tech lifer. And I know a lot of our listeners have some are at Tech lifers, others have transitioned, but everybody feels that sort of glow of doing something that you know is trying to be as good as possible for the world seriously have impact and your story about having an educator in your family. We've heard that many times on the podcast because that is a big one. My mother was a kindergarten teacher and a
researcher at education. So Instructure has an enormous ecosystem around your partner program, the EdTech collective now has over 850 partners, that is a massive group of companies and supporters and partners in all kinds of ways. How has this partner network really worked to make Instructure a vast ecosystem? What does it do for the customers? And what benefits does it bring to your educators and your end learners?
Yeah, it's a great ecosystem of education solution, both software technology solution as well as content solutions, right, that make up our partners and from the very origins of Canvas, it's always been built on an open ethos, right? So open API's built to enable and empower everyone to extend Canvas to be better learning product. And that certainly is true today, right with the Instructure learning platform is building an
ecosystem of learning. And the reason the origins and the reason we continue to do that is because we believe firmly that the best learning is the learning that benefits a student that benefits a learner and helps educators do what they do best. And we really believe firmly in the spirit of community innovation. It's innovation built certainly within our walls. But innovation built with our partners, our
institutions. And so by creating this open ecosystem, we think that rising tide is gonna rise all boats. And so we've continued to work on that. And that's the reason why, you know, you mentioned over 850 were four times larger than any other LMS in terms of our partner ecosystem. And that's because we have supported our partners in building their solutions and building their businesses around helping every educator. And so it's exciting to be part of an ecosystem that helps make all of
this better. And we benefit, our educators benefit from having a range of tools, our learners benefit from having tailor made solutions, right to meet the individual needs. And so we truly believe in being able to enable this, this idea of a individualized variable learning to suit every learner in our ecosystem of partners has really made this possible.
edtech can sometimes be such a fragmented field, there's lots of silos, there's lots of people doing sort of the same thing in different places. And it's really encouraging to have an ecosystem this large. And of course, Canvas is so widespread in higher ed in K 12. It has a lot of enterprise customers. So it's a great way for partners to reach audiences, I'm sure they couldn't reach otherwise. And it's a great way for campus to have added functionality and to leverage innovation that's
happening everywhere. One of the things you've been focusing on recently, some of the recent enhancements to the learning platform are centered around core teaching and learning analytics, which is huge for so many partners, integrations, and lifelong learning, which is growing at a fast pace. And all of these are infused with artificial intelligence and AI, we are in the age of AI. Tell us a little bit about what you've
been doing. Tell us about these innovations and and what they've been doing in the landscape.
Yeah, so we'll certainly chat in more depth about AI and how we're thinking about it. But I think at the highest level, right, the instructional learning platform is built to support all of the learning needs across the entire learning journey, right from from K 12, through higher ed, and onward into career and continuing. And so if you think about the innovations that we've been announcing, they sort of map themselves really nicely to
that lifecycle, right. It's things that help in the core teaching and learning process. It's helping our students, it's helping our learners, our educators, it's helping the administrative staff that surround them, whether it's curricular staff, design staff, or technology, administrative staff, it's helping with this core teaching and learning. But part of that teaching and learning and it's teaching and learning that's enabled by our platform and our ecosystem of partners. Part of it is that
feedback loop, right? It's understanding how this teaching and learning is working. And so analytics is the obvious next place to go right. It's how is this learning driving effectiveness in the core instructional learning platform? With our recent acquisition of learn platform, right? It's extending that even further to
our partner ecosystem? How can we see how partner tools are working to provide feedback to partners in ways to make their product better, and to provide feedback to educators to help that learner? So all of those pieces, you bring them to life with the data, right, that helps you make good decisions about the learning. And if you start to think about this ecosystem, you know, we really want to think about how all of the pieces can work together in
tandem. Right? So how does a learner who needs a little bit more support in a particular area, get their need identified? How do we then provide from our ecosystem of partners have a solution that's purpose built for that learners need? How do we surface that in our platform, so that an educator knows Hey, this is a highly effective solution that's going to help my
learner. So the platform integration just kind of brings together all of the pieces of the instructor learning platform from the Canvas LMS, right, which everybody knows and loves to all of our surrounding products in mastery, and tools to help drive usage and adoption of products. And tying that all together with the data to make decisions, that data to make the next decision, right in all in service of helping our educators be more efficient with their time to save time and help
learners do all of that. Well. And if you think about something that does all of those three things, now, you're set up well to do this journey, and this journey can be a continuous non ending journey, right? It's I think we're seeing certainly some shifts in learning that were accelerated by the few years of the pandemic, right? But those are persistent, right? We have learners looking for
greater flexibility. We have learners looking for increased choice and, and we've got employers saying, hey, we need folks with skill development, upskilling and rescaling. And so all of those things fit really naturally we think about all of the places, right, we have distribution in K 12, and higher ed bringing all of that together really helps enable this lifelong learning journey that that will continue with the learner.
I'm glad to hear you say that even at these different ages with different types of learners with different environments. There's this sort of core loop of learning. That is true for everybody. I have felt that way myself in my career. I've worked with lots of
different ages. And that idea of you mentioned sort of theory of predictive analytics seeing where where students are going what they need help on recommendations, personalization, helping educators identify through data where they might intervene. These things are true no matter who the learner is, no matter who the educator is.
That's exactly right. Yeah, it's, it's built on existing sound learning theory and learning research, right. But the science is there. And so we're really just bringing the science to life, this pedagogy in this instructional learning platform. And again, providing these targeted interventions just in time, right, that really helped me sort of identify the need and provide the supports.
So speaking of just in time, men, and this idea of the supports you need, one of the things we've been covering pretty extensively in our weekend ed tech, current events, podcast and newsletter is this really fascinating partnership between Instructure and Khan Academy as well as some other really cool AI tools, but Khan Academy's student tutoring tool conmigo, which is very widespread, and they had early access to all the tools to make it is now partnering and can be
accessed in the Canvas learning environment through your sort of AI app store, I think you have a different, slightly different name from it. But tell us about how this partnership came about that is really exciting. We'll talk about the platform, by the way, as well. But this partnership with Khan Academy, how does it align with instructors mission? How do you sort of see it connecting and helping educators and learners to personalize the learning experience and enhance teaching and learning?
Yeah, it's a phenomenal question. I think to answer it, do it justice, maybe start with our philosophy around AI, right, which might help sort of tell us why we've embarked on what we think is a great partnership. So we started the journey of AI like any emerging tech, right, we start first and foremost with listening, listening to our teachers, listening to educators, listening to our institutions, to hear what it was that was
most important to them. We've done some research, we'll be publishing it soon around the things that are most important. And a few things sort of surfaced right consistently. And there are different perspectives on what to make of this emerging trend of generative AI. And no matter where folks sat on the spectrum, the one thing that was consistent is that everyone was focused on making sure we were being intentional with how we approached it to put the educator at the center. Right.
That's that's a theme that surfaced a lot. Another theme that we heard a lot of is this idea of safety and privacy. Privacy is good and data, intellectual property of an institution, right? How do we how do we ensure safety and a time of generative AI? And the third, and probably most important to me was this idea of being equitable, right? So making sure that the use of generative AI and all of the parts around it didn't further the equity divide, but actually helped kind of close that gap.
So we built around these three pillars, right, of intentionality, of safety and of equitability, and around these principles became clear some opportunities, right. So you mentioned our marketplace, our emerging AI marketplace, we've said, partners who want to work with us, we want you to adopt the same pillars of intention of intentionality of safety, and
equitability. And so it became a very easy conversation when you've got, you know, two of these great leaders in education, talking about how the conmigo tutor provided a really effective way to drive equitability, right, because if you think about it, it's a way to level a playing field, particularly for folks who don't have English as a first language, particularly for folks who are neurodivergent learners,
right? It's creating this, this tool that helps everyone, right, more effectively, right, help create content. And so we were excited to start the conversation, we've been excited to integrate into our products, and really excited to see the impact it's going to have on again, making learning more equitable. And so if you think about our core mission, it's really about elevating the success of every learner. And we
hold that true, right. And so this, we think, is going to be a powerful way to enable every learner to achieve their full potential, and to be something that with our distribution with the instructor learning platform make us accessible to as many people as we possibly could.
It is really powerful. And you know, Khan Academy, obviously, as a nonprofit, as a global company, has been, you know, focused on equity and translations and language and ease of access for its whole entire lifecycle at least lifetime. And I know that Instructure because it's so widespread, also has to really, really think about many, many different types of learners. And it just feels like a really powerful match. There are some other things in your app marketplace that I find really
interesting. And well, we just talked to one of the cofounders of knowledge AI, fascinating company, amazing what they're doing. And that I think will be a very useful tool for educators. I know they're in your in your marketplace. We're talking to noodle factory out of Singapore soon. There's just you have a small marketplace so far after in compared to the 850 partners, but I have a feeling each company is being very carefully vetted and talked to through these lenses.
Yeah, and making sure that every one of these partners we talked to abides by our principles right our pillars of intentionality of Safety and equitability has been critical for us, and really thinking about the most effective ways to use the new technology. And it's a technology like any other right. And I think it's really important to think about it as an enabler. But the thing it is actually enabling is core
teaching and learning. And so making sure that we put that in the center, I think it's served us well, so far in in how we've been approaching the technology and how it's used to drive teaching and learning.
Absolutely. Let's talk briefly about learning platform. I wasn't actually planning to talk about it, even though it's an another incredibly exciting partnership at Instructure acquired learning platform, I believe, the beginning of this year was it.
And Karl Rove tennis is another friend of the pod, another fascinating guy who has been thinking about evidence as a service and how to truly, truly find evidence for what is working and not working in edtech, as well, as you know, what the field looks like, how many tools are teachers using? How many tools are districts using? How does it all come together to make a great learning experience? How's it
been going? So far? I'm so curious about the connection about how learn platform, what role they're playing inside the Instructure? Universe?
Yeah, if you say if you think about this unstructured learning platform we've been talking about, it's it's built with things that we've created. And it's also built with this ecosystem of creators around us, right, this ad tech collective. And so if you think about it, the things that learn platform does really, really well, is understanding what those universe of tools are understanding the impact of
those tools. And so you can see how it's this this perfectly fit purpose for our mission, right? It's helping all of our ecosystem of edtech solutions, be particularly effective, give them a feedback loop to see what's working, give districts and institutions, right, where we hope to extend it into higher ed as well get higher ed institutions, the tools that they need, it's an extension of what I described as analytics, right? It's just It's yet
another feedback loop. And what's working particularly effectively at an institutional level at a tool level and down to a learner level, right? So some set of tools may be particularly better equipped to meet the needs of one set of learners, and another set of tools for another set of learners. And I think that's the magic of the instructor learning platform, right? It's this perfectly working seamless universe of all these learning solutions purposely built to meet the needs of every learner
and of every educator. And there's, there's something for everyone and and focusing on what's important, right is focusing on outcomes is how is this helping everyone move to that next outcome, whatever that outcome is a learning outcome and earning outcome is what we talk about, right? How do we get everyone through that progression on this lifelong
journey? So it's been great to have them as part of the family and I think it's, you know, it's really helped extend our partner ecosystem even more, right with the idea of being able to tell their story through evidence and through outcomes.
It makes a lot of sense, it's been so exciting to see that sort of outcomes. I mean, seem silly to say this, but there's sort of like focus on outcomes in edtech. Over the last few years, especially post pandemic, we have this learning loss throughout the system. And I think people are care maybe more than ever before about their edtech tools actually delivering outcomes, learning and earning. I think that's a
wonderful thing for the field. I think it's something that hasn't, unfortunately, always been focused, sometimes it's about coverage. Sometimes it's about ease of use, you know, there's lots of different things going on in the world. But this focus on does it work? Does it actually get students where they need to go is obviously the core of any educational experience?
It is. And it's a very sprawling ecosystem, right, we publish to the Ed Tech top 40. And the data is startling. It's over 2500 tools in use in the average district a
year. And so it's really difficult if you're an administrator of a district, to be able to make sense of the 2500 to understand which set of solutions is serving which set of students best and understanding that and so the ecosystem, that learn platform helps us extend as part of the instructor learning platform really is part of making yet another suite of tools are available to make the best decisions, right, ultimately, in service of helping educators helping learners
and the suite of tools. The idea that tools interact, they can be accessed through each other, they talk to each other they send data to each other is a very important part of the process. Because of those 2500 tools that districts use. Not that many work that well with each other, they're often totally different companies, totally different types of systems. Getting them all to integrate is really exciting. So let's talk a little bit about some of the AI
features. You know, one of the things that has been really exciting to see in AI, and generative area over this year is tools designed for educators and specifically to save educators time, keep them from burning out make their lives better, but also enhance engagement and outcomes. So you give teachers time back, but keep the quality of the courses as high as possible. So tell us a little bit more about your AI assisted course. templating it feels like that is very much in that vein.
Yeah. So if you go back to those pillars I mentioned right, it's important for us to start first and foremost with putting the educator in the center and saying what is it that has benefited them. So there's an analogy I've been using, right, you can tell me if it resonates or not. But there's plenty of people who love to cook, right? There's lots of folks who really enjoy the craft of the joy of cooking. And there's not a single person I've met who says, I really enjoyed doing the
dishes, right. And so if you think about an emerging technology like generative AI, we're taking advantage of what the technology offers the dishwasher to help you with the not fun parts of the journey, because that's going to give you even more time to do the joyful parts of the journey, which is
the cooking. And so if you think about that analogy, in the context of teaching and learning, there's so much that educators are so good at and there's so much that we want them to be spending their time with the class and, and spending time creating course content. And having to futz with a tool to get there is not the highest
values of their time. And so why not take advantage of the capabilities of generative AI in this emerging tech to help educators create courses, but to do so as simply as possibly as conversationally as possible, so that they can do things like take back their Saturday nights, right and spend it doing the kinds of things they want to be
doing. And so, so we're really excited about taking advantage, again, of the emerging tech to enable the things that educators want them to, to be enabled right to help them with the things that aren't high value, because then that just creates more time and space for them to spend time on things that are high value in the course of learning.
Yes, it makes a ton of sense. And I think we're seeing some exciting numbers about the percentage of educators who are actually trying some of these AI tools, it's being adopted pretty quickly given that we're only a
year in. And I think a lot of the tools that educators are most excited about are those that save them enormous amounts of time to do this sort of lack of a better word, the grunt work, the busy work, they the stuff that you have to do to put all the pieces together, but they're not really about the core teaching or connecting with students.
That's exactly right. And that's the approach in our template design tools have taken a lot of the tools that we've built it save educators time, is really about understanding, right, and this is where we started with listening, understanding what it was educators found not particularly valuable uses of their time, and what they found high value and making sure that we pointed our use of the technology to help them with the things that they don't really need to be spending their time
doing so that they have more time to do the things they absolutely shouldn't want and love to do. Right. I think that is that is the best of both worlds coming together.
Absolutely. I love your cooking metaphor. Another metaphor that comes to mind, as I hear you talk about this many years ago, I I was wanting to go into editing, sort of book editing. And I talked to a number of editors when I was
very young. And they all said, you'd be surprised how much of our time is spent, you know, writing contracts, negotiating contracts, doing all this paperwork, making sure we have the rights to things, they're like, you think it's gonna be all reading amazing books, because that's what it looks like on the outside. But we have all of this other work to do. And it feels very similar to this. They all got into it because they love reading and
writing. But they spend all this time doing other things, teachers have the exact same situation.
Yeah, and imagine right what a world looks like when we can empower them by taking away all of those tasks that they don't need to do. And all of the time they get to spend on the things that they do best. And really helping learners. That's, that's a great end state, I'd love for us all to get to
100%, especially in this time of teacher shortages and teacher burnout. You've mentioned a couple of times keeping the teacher at the center. And I think that's absolutely core principle. And we're seeing that as a principal for a number of companies who are getting into AI. One area that it gets kind of interesting, where you have to really sort of put the pieces together when it comes to that is grading. So conmigo does offer a feedback on written
assignments. It offers sort of grading support, but obviously you wouldn't want to outsource grading and feedback to an AI when you have very highly trained educators. How do you see these pieces going together? How can a AI powered feedback and grading system actually empower educators to provide support rather than sort of competing with them?
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think first and foremost, the way we've implemented, the kami good tutor tool inside of Canvas is giving the educator the choice, what things they want to turn on, whether it's the feedback tool, whether it's the drafting tool, whether it's a tool to help understand the prompts, right, so there's different components to it that we've separated out. And its most simplistic level, understanding what the prompt is, is something that is purely
about equitability. If I don't recognize and understand the language, how do I get help with meaning right? At the point of implementation, where you've got this idea of feedback, right? It's akin to a peer feedback model, right? So draft an essay exchange papers in the time where we're using paper with the person sitting next to you and provide feedback. It's that first level feedback that actually helps with the learning process because it's increasing the level of psychological
safety. This is a low stakes way to get a first round of feedback. And so thinking about a tool like this, that allows you to make the mistakes that you're bound to make when you're writing for the first time and to get some of those pointers before it goes into a graded Hi stakes perceived version of it is exactly the kind of thing that educators love. Because it says, hey, get them that first level of support, and then we
can coach them, right. And it actually creates even more leverage for an educator to say, that's why they do peer reviews is so powerful because they're, it's pure feedback. And it's
creating this first round. And so the ability to employ a tool like that, instead of conmigo tutor is, is a boon to any educator who chooses to turn that that functionality on, and it allows them to spend the time that they might need to with an educator or with a learner who needs a little bit more support, right, it allows them to target and say, Hey, this is someone who might need a little bit more support, I agree to go spend some time workshopping with
them. And I think it creates the capability for that to be possible. That's a pretty exciting state and the educators we've talked to about it, there's a lot of agency that they retain and turning things on and choosing how to deploy a tool. It's a tool, right, like any other tool that an educator has at their disposal, and they are in control of how to employ the tool to best meet the needs of their classroom.
It makes sense. I like that distinction between different types of feedback. And it's so important, especially in the service of equity, we talk a lot about formative feedback. And the value of it as well as the issue of students don't do well in math, because they can't read the prompts. And they because of their language issues. And it's there are these very strange issues that sort of everybody knows about if they work in schools and classrooms, but they don't have any really good way
to scale the answer. So I'm very bullish on this idea of AI being able to provide, as you say, low stakes fast cycle, rapid feedback proven to be very valuable in a formative setting. So that teachers can really actually and educators can really think about the higher order things. You know, we all remember getting those papers back in high school where it's like, every spelling error is crossed out every paragraph, every missed space is crossed
out. And by the time you get to the real feedback at the end with like about the actual content of your paper, you're sort of already burned out, you're like, you've already told me everything I did wrong. None of that should be happening. It should be all higher order feedback when you're talking about a real instructor.
Yeah, and it's fascinating. I've spent time in education, right. And so that means spending a lot of time in classrooms and especially when you've got classrooms with a wide range of variation in the students that ability to be able to ask, what is in air quotes here? Right? Uh, not so savory not so right. Not so smart seeming question is an incredible part of the learning process, right? It's pushing them outside of their zones of proximal development.
And so I think anything that helps a learner feel comfortable asking a question that helps them learn is a positive for that learner. And, and I think this is where we see tools like this is really driving up the equitability of learning by making sure that everyone can get the same support levels that they need and feel comfortable asking for, so that they can achieve their full potential.
Yeah, it's an exciting vision. And I, the goal is that for both educators and students, that everybody can operate at a higher level, it's not about you know, you can get beyond the the small things, that fear of questions, the small errors, the confusion about what the prompt even means, and actually be talking about the true meaning of the learning and the higher level outcomes. It's exciting. I'm very excited about seeing that future. So Instructure, you've mentioned, it's really about
integration. It's putting all these pieces together, making them as seamless as possible. One interesting integration is between Canvas and Mastery Connect, which is an assessment management system, very popular one, one of the systems that's in there is this idea of a panda bot, and AI powered chatbot
called panda bot. And I'm curious to hear your take about how a chatbot like that contributes to creating a cohesive platform and how you can sort of use that kind of help to make multiple tools work seamlessly together and to navigate them.
Yeah, so the Chatbot tool certainly enables moving seamlessly and asking questions seamlessly through a conversational interface across our range of products, right. So it's just one dimension, of really making the Instructure learning platform truly come to life. It's all of the pieces not in their independent value. But it's all the connection between those pieces that really makes it powerful. And that connection takes the form of the data that moves seamlessly right across
our products. It takes the form of the seamless navigation. And it takes the form of the questions about how to do things and questions from the standpoint of an educator, or an administrator as well as questions from the standpoint of a learner who may say, how do we do this? And so it's again, thinking about how when we look at the instructor learning platform, it's not individual
items, right. So the LMS helps enable empower the planning and learning and delivery Mastery Connect, which you mentioned are AMS enables the formative delivery of assessment and in some cases to some of the delivery of assessment, but how do we put that together with the analytics tools I mentioned? Elevate suite of offerings with the impact access tool which allows you to send a targeted message to say, let's start a discussion. Let's talk about this. How do all these pieces
fit together? All of them in concert, right, make that learning experience seamless. And anyone who spent any time in education knows this, right? But the amount of time you spent moving from tool to tool as if you can trim time out of that, that really makes it powerful.
And you mentioned this earlier, this idea that we can take this ecosystem of tools that are out there, the ones we build, certainly, but the ones that are built by our partners, and make them all seamless, fluid and easy to access in the classroom.
We think just again, is about trimming away time that's not spent on the high value learning and focusing it on that and so yeah, so it's it's really about how do we bring all of these pieces together and use whatever the emerging technology is of the moment, right today, it's generative AI and you know, a set which technology changes, right, tomorrow, it might be
something new. But how do we think about that technology, enabling what we believe is the core teaching and learning experiences, and making sure that we're continuing to support that, and we think that'll that'll be a good focus for us as we think about helping to elevate education?
Yeah, it's been really exciting to see the pace at which new technologies get adopted in the education sphere there, there was a time when, you know, I remember when the iPad first came out it which is a long time ago now. But it was one of the first technologies that people pretty immediately saw a use case in the classroom. And they thought it could be really useful that it could contain all these educational apps, all these things. But even with all the demand, it became hard to
actually make it work. I remember, the cameras had to be turned off, and they they had to make sure the internet was accessible. In only these ways, there was this huge disaster at LAUSD when they tried to give everybody an iPad. And you know, I think people have been burned by this before. But now we're getting to a point where the new technologies, such as generative AI, can really make their way into students and teachers lives within just a few months of
existing in the first place. I'm really excited about that world. And I'm curious, you know, as a show somebody who does product for this vast, vast ecosystem of different types of institutions, how do you evaluate what how far you can go with it with a system like general AI without ruffling feathers, you have to have so many different constituents with different needs and use cases, I'm curious how you how you balance that.
I think it all begins when you start with the problem, right, and you spend time with your end users truly understanding what the needs are. Because when you do that, you're solving a need that they have, and you spend as much time in whatever is required, whether it's the latest emerging technology, or maybe it's technology that has always existed, right to solve those needs. That's how we build our
products. That instructor is focusing on spending time with the an educator spending time with the student, with the learner in K 12 institutions, in schools, in college campuses in non traditional forms of learning, because that's when we truly understand what those needs are. And those those needs are going to vary. And as we put all of these needs together, consistent themes emerge, right.
And then taking advantage of, again, technology, and tools that we build to help solve these needs, sets us up to build a instructor learning platform that we think solves for all these needs in ways that are compelling to an educator than ways that are compelling to a
learner. And it's something that we like I said, I used to go out into classrooms, and one of the things I do is my favorite thing to do is to spend time with a stopwatch, right, just timing how long it took to move tool, the tool or how long it might take students to get up and go get a device, in some cases when they were in AV closets, and
that sort of thing. And so I think spending time really immersed in understanding those problems has helped us build and will help us continue to build products that meet the needs of our educators that meet the needs of our learners, and meet the needs of our administrators, our institutions, while making sure that we're taking advantage of the best of what is available
to offer. And so as I said, today, the emerging tech is generative ai 1012 years ago, the emergent technology was cloud and Canvas was build cloud native and 10 years into the future, right, we'll be thinking about whatever the emergent tech is, but against solving first and foremost core teaching and learning needs, that keeps us grounded. And that keeps us making sure that we're we're building the things that we
need. And we're validating them, we test them on their users, we, we build in beta we get our customers to help us make our products better. And this spirit of community innovation, they build on top of our API's. And so we've always centered ourselves on solving educational needs, and focusing on our mission, right, making sure that we can elevate the success of every learner and inspire everyone to learn to go.
I love that the sort of focusing on the user centered design are however you want to call it staying in touch with the core needs of all of these different types of educational institutions of
educators of students. And as we mentioned, you know, they may not be as different as they sound even if you're For a career seeking lifelong learner doing continuing ed or fourth grade or learning about the pyramids, there's still some core needs, you need things to work well and work quickly and be integrated with each other and to know how well you're
doing. And some of these things, they're just they're there in learning, they're part of what learning is, if you focus there, to make sense that you can get there. And I also really like to focus on you know, needs rather than solutions. This is something that can be tough if you have a product background. And sometimes when something is flashy and exciting as generative AI comes along, you're just like, we need to use it. Where should we use it? Instead of wow, this is amazing.
What do people need that we can actually finally address with this amazing new technology?
That's right. That's right, starting with the problem, right? And then solving for it. First and foremost, yeah.
This partnership with Khan Academy and you're in emerging app marketplace are really exciting. And it feels like Instructure is really putting down its chip saying I'm we care about this future. We care about using these tools, and distributing these tools in ways that can really make a difference for our end users. Where do you see generative AI going over the
next few years? This is something I've asked a number of different people over the last eight, nine months, but everybody has a totally different answer, because it's so early. I'm curious how you see it, and what Instructure is doing to remain at the forefront of this technology?
Yeah, that's a great question. And I bet if you if you had a penny for every opinion, you got right. And I think it's changing so rapidly that from from the start of our conversation to the end of our conversation, things may have changed already, really. And so I think we certainly have been paying attention to some of the different evolution of the models, right. I think the democratization I think is probably the first order of evolution I see happening,
right, you already see it. And for a while, right, the dominant conversation was around the open AI set of models rather than the flavors of the models. But you've seen since the democratization of Google's borrowed models, and the cloud wanting to models and the open source models that llama has enabled. And so I think this this expansion, this democratization of the various models, is probably going to drive a couple of things in the form of specialization, right?
So I could see specialization happening in folks that narrow in on a particular niche, and education would be an interesting one to stick close to, and certainly even help drive some of that evolution in our efforts. I certainly see a an expansion of the capability and reduction of the cost of entry right to some of these is already a fairly low cost to entry. But how do you make it
just a default? I think one thing that we've spent an a higher number, a number of our calories thinking about is what is most important to educators, right? Because that at the end of the day is what's going to drive any evolution and generative AI is going to be the current thing, but there's going
to be emerging tech. And so one of the things that's true, that we've heard, you know, in this research that we've been doing with educators is more than half of the global educators that were surveyed, believe that generative AI and tools like it are going to change education for the better, right, I think it creates an opportunity for new, more authentic forms of assessment, it creates an opportunity for the ability to create engaging learning to convert something from one media
form to another media form, it creates lots of opportunity to be creative. It's also certainly something that we've seen more than two thirds of the educators say, it's a set of skills that's here to stay. And so it's going to expand the kinds of skills that are needed, right, you know, prompt writing I see as a skill that emerges. And so I think it's gonna evolve what's
required of learning. One of the conversations we had with our educators, I heard this profound quote right now, I'll try to do it justice. But the quote was this, today's teachers are teaching with the best technology they've ever had. And today's student learns with the worst technology they'll ever use. And I thought that was like a mind blowing thing, because that's exactly right. It's, it's going to just continue to
evolve. And I think the agility to evolve the agility of platform ecosystem players, right things like the instructor learning platform to adapt and evolve. The technology is what makes it powerful. It helps educators use the latest and greatest, and it helps learners get the skills that they need to be successful in a learning or earning outcome. And so it's an exciting future I'll be I'll be honest, as a product person you can imagine, right? We can nerd
out on this stuff for hours. But I'm excited about what education is going to be I think about my own education and the evolution since with my kids, and you just think about what that future might look like. It's exciting to be part of an organization like Instructure that is helping create helping shape right through our partnerships and through the work we do to influence industry, and helping at the core right educators and learners find their fullest
potential. It's an exciting future for sure.
It really is. It's a fascinating and very, very thorough analysis of some of the things that might come and I'm excited about that as well. This idea of purpose driven niche models or LMS is really exciting. And I think something this all came into our lives, as you said, it's Chachi, BT and Bard and it was like, Oh, it's a thing that knows everything you ask it absolutely anything, and it'll give you a really good answer. But MLMs can
actually be hyper specific. And it's really, really interesting. I think we will see over time, some combination of these sort of general purpose MLMs, and some extra safe, general purpose MLMs. Like what's happening ICANN, and what you're doing in infrastructure, and some super specific MLMs that do nothing but one thing incredibly well. But anytime you asked about what that one thing, that model is going to be going to be tapped on the shoulder, there's so much to learn. I love that quote, as
well. That's I've never heard that before. And I feel like that should be a catchphrase for all event tech, right? We help educators use the most modern technology they'll ever use. But for students, it's only going up from here. And I think gender of AI is a tech that we really all recognize is going to be here for the rest of our lifetimes.
And that, as you've said, it's an equity issue, you know, not exposing students now to this type of technology is only going to leave them behind when they become when they enter the workforce. And everybody else is using it.
Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's exciting. It's an exciting future. And we feel privileged to be able to be part of helping shape it in some small way. Terrific. So
from your perspective as the CEO of Instructure, seeing a wide variety of different types of learners and educators, what is the most exciting trend that you see in the EdTech? Landscape right now that sort of emerging trend that you think our listeners should keep an eye on?
Yeah, it's a great question. So if you suspend AI, right, because that is a that is it's certainly a nascent trend, I think about durable trends. It's something I've been seeing a slow evolution to Word. And it certainly seems to be accelerating a little bit more in the last little bit is this idea of demonstration of skill, this idea of being able to aggregate skills from a range of different academic and non academic journeys, and combining them in ways that help tell the
story of the whole learner. And so you see this happening increasingly in higher ed, as learners are seeking to demonstrate the skill that they can show in the form of badges or verifiable credentials, you see it in the form of employers looking for ways to understand what skill learner may have by being able to verify that credential independently. And it's starting to work its way increasingly back into the K 12.
Space, particularly think about college readiness and career readiness, even for career and technical education opportunities, is this idea of demonstrating the skills one acquired, right and whatever form and, and again, their academic skill, as well as extracurricular non academic
skills. And so I think the path that we're we're paying attention to and you know, our product support this idea of being able to collect and stack verifiable credentials, right, the stackable badging, being able to create journeys and
pathways, right. So as you think about the portrait of a graduate type of journey pathways, and particularly non traditional learning pathways for someone who may have taken time off for a family friend, who may have taken time off to serve in the military, how do we create all of these pathways? How do we create pathways to come back to the learning if you started out in an earth sciences trajectory? And you said, hey, I want to go back and do some more calculus?
Because that's, that's the journey I'm excited about, right? How do we create these pathways through learning? How do we demonstrate proficiency along the way, right? There are something like 40 million learners with some college no credential. And so what do we do about those population of learners? How do we help them tell the story of the skill they've already gotten through
the badging. And so as I think about that trend, we are certainly spending a lot of time thinking about how to embrace it, we have what we call the learning passport, essentially, it's a combination of the portfolios of work, you can demonstrate, you've got the badging and capability around badging for verification, and issuing. And then you've got a learner record, right, the record transcripts, and you put all these three pieces together. And we we call that the learning
password. I'm calling it the learning passport, because it's a password that enables you to access opportunity. And that's more learning opportunity. That's career opportunity. That's an enduring trend I've seen certainly seen it in the last decade, but really sort of driving forward. And, and I think it supports a need, that learners have for flexibility for choice for flexible for the kinds of things that might fit their life needs. And so it's a trend, but it's a durable trend.
I see it's something that is going to stick around and I'm excited for a future that enables learners to take all of these alternative non traditional pathways through the learning and still achieve the same kinds of outcomes and successes, right? Yeah,
I love that. And, you know, it feels like there's been this sort of deconstruction of some of these proxies that we views for generations for learning, you know, the idea that if you have a degree, you're ready for the workforce. If you don't, you're not period. That's never made any sense. It's never worked.
But we've persisted in believing it, or the test scores that people have used as proxies to get into colleges, you know, places are becoming more and more test optional at I think this is a real maturing of the space that we're actually starting to break things down into their composite parts and do the hard work of actually trying to understand that it's not just an on and off, it's not just a yes or no, everybody's different. Everybody has their own personal path. And the
signals are hugely important. So I'm 100% on board with that stackability skills breakdowns? And what is a resource? Our last question here? What is a resource that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed today? Whether they be AI or LMSs? Or ecosystems? Yeah, certainly,
I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about some of the resources that we've made available for educators and the world at large around AI at our, it's simple to remember instructure.com/ai, right number of resources around the things we talked about. But we've been talking so much about the excitement of the future, and the potential it holds and, and there's value of the bottles that exist, right and the credentialing of today. And there's ways to make it even more accessible and even more
equitable. And so we had this presenter at our recent event called Instructure. Con, and it was, you know, sitting back and I had the privilege of introducing him and sitting back and listening to his story. It was a really profound story about how he has really thought about bringing innovation into the work that he was doing. He was talking about innovation in the context of education. And so his name is Dr. Jordan when his website is Dr. Dr. Jordan and GU
y en.com. And it's just fascinating stories he's got to share is really remarkable and down to earth individual. But it's a place that I encourage people to go think about innovation in all the ways possible. And he's really done some meaningful initial focus things in his world. And so exciting stuff to get yourself inspired for the kinds of things we all then bring to our day jobs. Right. So really, really powerful stuff.
Terrific. So that was Dr. Jordan lens website. We will put the link to that. And instructure.com/ai all things AI from instructors perspective as an industry leader, we will put links to those resources in the show notes. As always, thank you so much for being here with me. This has been a really informative conversation about the future of AI and the future of learning from such a real pioneer in the field. So, Shirin Bucha syndrome. Thanks so much for being here with us at Tech insiders.
Likewise, a pleasure, Alex. Thanks for
Thanks for listening to this episode of having me. Edtech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the edtech community. For those who want even more Edtech Insider subscribe to the free edtech insiders newsletter on substack.