Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top edtech companies. Welcome to This Week in ed tech the week of February 24 2023. We're so happy to have you with us today where we're going to talk about all the headlines, all the amazing things that are happening in the ad tech world. We have an incredible guest host today. Zaza Kavya Dondo, who's a researcher, a strategy consultant, and an ed tech veteran has been at a lot of incredibly interesting ad tech companies and has all sorts of opinions about exactly what is going on in this crazy world Zaza Welcome to the pod.
Oh my gosh, thank you for having me. It's so exciting to be back. This is actually not my first time here in tech insiders. So happy to be here going through the news this week with you.
It's really a pleasure to have you here as well. So on the podcast this week, we have some really cool stuff. We just talked to Andrew Schubert of the Chinese edtech company ello seven really interesting inside look at the Chinese ed tech world. Next week, we're talking to the head of social impact that study.com that does a wide variety of different partnerships. And then we've talked to four of the seven South by Southwest edu launch competition finalists, that competition is coming in just a couple of weeks at South by Southwest edu. But let's jump in to the headlines. So first headline we got to jump into today is the federal guidance for higher ed, that dear colleague letter that has come out about at Tech vendors basically is really starting to sink into the ed tech world to everybody who works in higher ed both on the administration side, the actual school side, and the vendors. We talked about this in detail last week. But basically, this potentially puts a crush on all foreign vendors not headquartered in the US, because third party services cannot be headquartered outside of the US. It also potentially applies to not only OPM this but also you know, financial aid support and attendance support and tutoring companies and LMS. It's very unclear what type of vendors fall under this. So Chronicle of Higher Ed had a really good in depth article today about how shocked everybody is and how they're just trying to figure out what this really means for the EdTech world. Zaza. What is your read on the impact the potential impact of this guidance?
So some of the things I'm hearing are, you know, the dear colleagues letter, as soon as it came out, like discussions about contracts about operations stalled. And my first reaction is to calm down everybody effective May 1 is still a bit of time to figure out what the implications are, I think people are taking, maybe are more scared about this. Because you know, the format in which it came out as a letter doesn't really have the same sort of explanation and long due process and sort of long announcement to kind of help people figure out how to get their ducks in a row before it's effective. So I think that's where a lot of the panic is coming from. But if I'm honest, I do think that some oversight is needed, right, a significant amount of federal funding that goes to tuition ends up in the hands of these third party partners. And so the you know, I think the government should kind of have a say, or at least an understanding of where the funding ends up, right. In some cases, the revenue share agreements between an institution and their ad tech partners might be as high as 60%. Right? So this ends up being like a six $7 billion industry that there's no audit, there's no oversight, I think, a little bit as do it's just a matter of how to do
it. No, it makes a lot of sense that I agree with that. Basically, there's been this loophole that a lot, you know, tech companies have been exploiting, they don't call it a loophole, they don't think of it really as a loophole, but they're basically like, these nonprofit institutions get huge amounts of you know, federal and some state money. And we can provide all these services for them. And you know, sometimes even essential services, there is a little bit of a gap there between you know, the money going in and people understanding where it really goes. That said, like, like you mentioned, there's a little bit of panic setting and people don't know if their contracts should go forward. They are the article in chronicle specifically said that there's some that just got immediately put on pause. And administrators just don't don't even know what to do. And then the format like you mentioned, I think it scares people more than anything because it seemed to come out of nowhere. Yeah, I mean, our friend of the pod Matt tower, really agreed with what you are saying about the format as well his big take on on this Letter is basically that it was the dear colleague nature of the letter rather than it being a sort of long process with discussions and, you know, this clear pathway to what the actual legislation and regulation will be, that really just took the whole ad tech community and the law community by surprise, because it's it's a sort of written in a relatively casual way, but it has potentially huge implications.
It kind of feels like a natural thing that happens, you know, the first few years of a market, it's a free for all wild, wild west, like lots of opportunity. And I think that's what's been really exciting about watching the big players, I'll be Oh, PMS. And then, you know, people start to point out like, can you Okay, at this point, we have over 500 colleges that are, you know, in contracts with OEMs, and a lot of questions about ethics, marketing tactics of targeting minorities and underrepresented groups, and just a need for a bit more regulation. So I think it's a natural, unnatural stage of the process, maybe we shouldn't be seeing this as an indicator of how the market is maturing. And for some, you know, that's scary, it means it might slow down, or it requires a change in strategy. But I'm excited to see how it kind of pushes people to to innovate and think about this in a different way. Think about partnerships, especially.
I hope so. And I mean, some of the buzz is like Will this slow down innovation because it'll make people so frightened of the of the current and future regulation. And I think others who say, hey, this has been wild west, how can we make this sort of make more make more sense? You know, what I always think back to is, you know, the amazing book, you know, lower ed by trustee, McMillan cottom about the for profit University industry and how it really was, you know, it sort of fell into these very predatory tactics, not on purpose. It didn't start out trying to do that, but then fell into that. And I think when you look at at some of the OEMs, because they're trying to keep momentum and sell degrees and expand degrees, you know, and you have these huge sales teams, sometimes some of those a little bit of that same DNA falls into that. And I think that the government, especially some of the Democratic senators, who have been thinking about this for a while, sort of see a little bit of shadow of the for profit in what the opions are doing, and they really want to get ahead of it. That's my read. I don't know if they would say it clearly, or you know, that bluntly, but that's sort of my feeling. Do you think there's any, any relationship between the sort of for profits, which have been regulated heavily? And OPM?
I'm glad you brought that up? I think you're right. I think your instinct is right, that it kind of feels like backlash against, you know, things that have happened before. What came to mind for me when I saw this was the lawsuit, wasn't it USC that was sued by I think it was social work program, where it kind of seems like this is the reaction to that right? That was wishing is so high that students are saddled with debt, that doesn't actually it's disproportionate to how much they could actually earn in the career for the degree that they're pursuing. And so it seems predatory. That USC
article really shook people. And I think that idea of a college and a vendor for profit vendor coming together to get saddled students with that really freaked people out.
Yeah. And it's all about the story that you can tell about what's happening. There's something that comes up in my work all the time, right? Like how are we going to frame this for a public audience and thinking about, you know, a brand and and I think most people are worried about this space, because it feels like the university is not taking a big enough role in creating the offerings, that is just the brand used to attract students. And so it feels like a bait and switch, if the the, you know, third party servicer is doing all the design of the curriculum and sort of delivery of the course with very little involvement for the universities, I can see how in the beginning, it was important to have these partnerships because it meant that universities which maybe don't have a lot of, they don't necessarily have the resources in place to be fast to market, right. So takes a bit of time working with OPM, these kinds of partnerships were a good way of getting people online, getting these institutions online quickly. But now it's time to, you know, like, take ownership. And I think what I would like to see is more differentiation in the market, more targeting of sort of, you know, different tiers of customer differently, you know, thinking about our segmentation, like all these sort of traditional ways that you can innovate as an industry matures. I think that's going to be exciting changes ahead for us that this is the theme for today, isn't it?
The theme is things that seem scary, but actually could be really exciting and very good for innovation. That's how I see all these things because I mean, I would be shaking a little in my boots if I were you know, a to you are an academic partnerships are wildly right now because they're coming after, you know, at least that public perception and you know, I mean, I've been on the inside of this because I was at trilogy education services when it was acquired by to you. I mean, not to be awful. But there is some truth to that. I mean, some of these third party vendors really do sort of run the show and a lot of the things that are delivered in terms of curriculum design and creating content, certainly the marketing, certainly the branding, certainly the the outreach, and the admissions, like a lot of the pieces of these programs can be outsourced to, oh, PMS. And you know, and as you say, exactly when this started, this was a way for universities to get online in a way that, you know, made perfect sense. They wanted to expand access, it felt very noble. But over time, it starts to feel like wait, why are these federal dollars going? for profit companies, it's going to be interesting, and I hope that it does spur innovation, I hope that it doesn't just sort of like put a chill on the industry, I can imagine that it might. But one really interesting take that I think we have to mention before moving to the next headline is, Phil Hill, who's like an amazing observer of Ed Tech and education for many years, had a really interesting take on this. His take was part of why this is so surprising is that it bundles two pretty different things together. One is this sort of quashing of the OPM, specifically, you know, people who are taking tuition, and it's specifically about that section. And then there's this sort of much broader idea of third party services, which could apply to almost anybody. And his take is that it might be a sort of political move by the Department of Ed, to put these things together so that if either one of them gets sort of knocked down through any combination of factors, they can use the other one and still say, Okay, we made some meaningful regulation to help the help the higher end industry and it's an interesting take, I don't know if it's that savvy on the the Department of Ed side or if it is that savvy, but I think his idea of the conflation of these two things being part of what is confusing people is very right on, it's hard to read this stuff and not see, oh, it's about foreign vendors. It's about you know, but it's not about tutoring, but it is about this and it is about CMS is an LMS is it's just it's a wacky set of things to try to combine into one, you know, one guidance. So speaking of scary things that may turn out to be very innovative in the long term. Ai continues to polarize educators, all throughout the education, world, Zaza. What have you seen this week about the chat? GBT AI you know, Zeitgeist happening everywhere right now,
this is my favorite topic of the month, maybe of the year. So a really interesting article on Inside Higher Ed came out about how students actually need guardrails because they make assumptions that AI is AI bots are sentient. And I think this is really a really interesting nuance. I for one, you know, before I get started on this, I know that I thought Chad GPT could search and it was like, I do not search, I just summarize things. So I think there's a lot of things that are lost in translation as far as like the the user interface and what exactly, you know, the language processing is doing. Anyway. So in this article, it talks a lot about how policies might go beyond academic honesty and creative classroom uses. According to many academics who are consulted in the story, the bots that are underlying the technology, these sort of large language models that they use, they are intended to mimic human behavior. And though the machines are not sentient, humans often respond to them with emotion. And as big tech accelerates its use of the public as a testing ground for these maybe suspiciously human sounding chatbots students may be prepared to manage their emotional responses, they may not be prepared enough. So in the sense AI chatbot policies that address literacy may help protect students mental health. Yeah,
that's a quote from this story. And it's actually a through line have a few different articles that came out this week, this idea that, you know, that this AI, not only the first reaction was, oh, this is going to be really problematic for for student integrity. That was this first sort of wave of concern, oh, people are going to cheat. They're going to just put their questions, their homework questions and quiz questions into chat up and get the answers. And they certainly are, and they already are. But now it's going to this other level. And they're saying, we're already in a student mental health crisis. What will happen if these students start getting, you know, emotionally involved, or feel influenced by what's happening in the AI and wired has this amazing, you know, predictions of the world and 2023 that came out a couple of weeks ago, and one of the predictions pretty intense from head of an AI company is basically that this year, we'll see the first suicide caused by AI, and it'll create a serious Whoa, moment. This is from Gary Marcus is that the executive chairman of robust.ai, he's like people who are going to get attached to these things. They're going to listen to them and the AI can't fully be trusted, and somebody's going to push to do something really You know, intense like suicide from AI. And we're already facing student mental health crises, including cite suicidal ideations, especially among teen girls. So that's a really scary thing. What do you think is as that
seems like a really high stakes design issue. So So you know, in my background, I do a lot of human centered design. And I was on at Tech insiders, with Michael Preston. And we talked a lot about work that we had done with kids and a research lab at the University of Washington. And so the professor there, his name is Jason Yep, he does a lot of studies with kids and their perceptions of AI, and just how they think about the interaction and the interface and what it means to design something specifically for them as vulnerable users as opposed to adults. But I think the lessons that they're learning for kids might actually apply to users of all ages. So this idea that like, when you ask kids, what kind of tone Do you want the bot to have? Do you want it to be your friend? And they're like, No, I don't want to blur the lines between mom, dad, friends, siblings, and but I want the bot not to talk like a friend not to talk like a human because I don't trust it. And I don't want to be lured into that. And I think there's something there that, you know, usually the design for kids is an afterthought. But this is one of those instances where it would be useful to kind of bring in those perspectives early on. So I hope that as there's a lot of excitement around chatbots, chat TPT in particular, and sort of extensions and applications, often that we're thinking about design from from all of these perspectives.
I think that's an amazing point. And I really, really prescient point about, you know, as this AI becomes part of our lives, and I think it's sort of becoming hard to imagine that it won't at this point, there's probably a good temptation to make it act like a friend, there has been research about, you know, virtual agents that can support students or, you know, virtual tutors. And sometimes building a relationship is sort of seen as a good thing. And you're saying that at rightfully, I think that for students, they don't want another friend. They don't want this to feel like they're, you know, the Jiminy Cricket on their shoulder who's their pal? They want to feel like it's a robot because they the lines are already blurry, and can be very confusing in this tech enabled world. And yeah, I think that's a really important lesson for any of us, for the whole world that sort of thinking about what to do with this AI.
And this is something that's lost, right? Because for me, I think I was really surprised Chad GPT kind of caught me off guard, because you know, we were coming out of the holidays, I was super busy. And then all of a sudden, I'm on LinkedIn, seeing all these articles, like what's going on? I've been on it. And yeah, definitely, at some point, I'm like, Oh, thanks for doing all my work for me. I'm so grateful. Can I buy you a coffee? And it's very quick to say, you know, I'm a machine. And to say, you know, I'm giving you these answers, but make sure you check with the lawyer, which I think is great. But what I wanted to say is, maybe my reaction to all the news this week is, are we overreacting a little bit, it felt as though we were very quick to say, oh, my gosh, what does this mean for assessment and cheating? And does this mean that students are going to be copy pasting essays based on prompts that they give to a chatbot? And then, you know, you had the first, you know, like the first wave of educators, teachers who are actually in the classroom, especially with college, kids in high school, high school students saying, you know, actually, we're using it in the classroom as a way of, you know, we'll feed the bot a prompt, and then it gives us a response. And then we talk about that. And it becomes a really useful tool about digging deeper into the craft of writing, or the craft of constructing an argument. And I think that is a more promising conversation than, you know, just Oh, my gosh, we have to sort of, you know, make sure we need more supervision and more surveillance because we can't trust our kids. So as I've been kind of going through the articles coming out this week, one quote really stood out to me because I think it's I was in my heart, it's from the Times Higher Education and it's an article about adaptive all the Elevate is Chad GPT. They're saying that it is calling for more interdisciplinary action. And I agree with that. So you know, in this quote, I'm just gonna read like, one part of it is should we be assessing university and college students on work so trivial that a beta version, a large language model, can readily earn a high degree? No. And that is, I think, the essence of all of this, we shouldn't lose sight of this being an opportunity to elevate the type of work that we're doing right? We can't be doing rote answers and memorization and multiple choice. I think it's going to push us to incorporate more kind of design driven and sophisticated learning experiences that are actually the type of learning that students enjoy and that do prepare them for work in conjunction with artificial intelligence, right. So I like to push the conversation away from it's out As against them, this thing is taking away my job and more towards how does it enhance your job and free you up to do more things. So what I'm hoping to see in the future is like more use cases where maybe you know, the Chatbot is acting as a research assistant, that you can kind of feed it your own training data. Maybe it's like 1000 science articles on this topic. And then it can help you kind of dig deeper and help you you know, conduct a literature, literature review things that have been traditionally, you know, barriers to conducting research or doing research driven work open up when you have this assistant that can do that. I was at the Tech Stars demo day last week, and there was this really cool startup virtual HR, that is using a chatbot to help HR specialists. So they can, it has, you know, it's trained on specialized content, around compliance and just sort of an HR rep can kind of go in there really quickly and compare and contrast how two states might, you know, have different protocols or compliance requirements, and then be able to kind of come up with, you know, this is the hybrid approach we need to take because we have remote workers who are living in a different state, right. So I think, situations like that this is like an excellent application. And I hope we shift the conversation away from assessment, to things like this, like things that enable us.
I totally agree. And it was really encouraging this week that, you know, I think the first first first immediate reaction was, oh, my gosh, it's all about integrity and cheating, then there's been this sort of reaction of Oh, my God, it might even go deeper and might be about mental health. But at the same time, there's this growing chorus of, hey, let's think about pedagogical uses of Chatty beauty. Let's use it to improve our teaching, let's use it to improve our pedagogy. You know, you saw one or two people saying that in the first couple of weeks now there's, you know, Hechinger Report this week says, we can add Jack GTP to the latest list of concerns about cheating, but let's go deeper. Or you have, you know, education times in India saying Chad GBD presents challenges, but could be used as a pedagogical tool, you're just seeing the the set of people saying let's take this as a teaching moment for educators, and actually step up to the challenge rather than Oh, God, panic, you know, how do we keep kids from using this? It feels like it's getting momentum. And I'm really happy to see that. And I'm also happy to see the mental health conversation happening, you know, so early, so that we don't get caught by surprise by a suicide and then go oh, my gosh, we should have seen this coming. You know, the next headline is about India. So GSV global Silicon Valley, we know is that one of the big ad tech venture capital firms. They held a summit this week with emeritus in India, basically sort of really, really focusing in on the Indian ad tech ecosystem and the big, you know, head honchos at GSP. That's Deborah Collazo and Miko Mo, have become more and more vocal about India being the sort of focus of their investment philosophy, they're thinking, look, India is a place where they care enormous ly about education, there's a lot of momentum, there's a lot of, you know, amazing entrepreneurs, it's a humongous market, soon to be the biggest market in the world. It's surpassing China, I think it either already has or it's about to, and they're getting very, very, very bullish on India, we also saw them put their money where their mouth is, you know, this week and give a $6 million round to an admission services platform in India called N midcard. So, you know, I think it's worth stopping briefly on this topic, even though it's, you know, coming from one specific VC firm, because I think it's the first VC firm coming out of this ad tech, winter, quote, unquote, with a very clear philosophy about what's next they're saying, Look, India is where it's at. That's where we're going to spend, you know, a lot of our money and attention. And that's where the sort of heating backup of the funding around the world is going to start happening. And I think in future weeks, we'll probably see some of the other ad tech VC firms have either similar or opposing philosophies, but start to you know, be clear about their intentions about where to spend that. That powder, Zaza. What do you think Indian Tech has been in the news a lot, but like, do you think it's having a moment? Do you think it's building momentum?
Absolutely. I think it's been there and been really strong for a long time. And we're just paying more attention to it now, because the gaze of funding has turned there. The VCs are kind of following something that has been on the rise for quite a while. So I think you're totally right. When you say or imply that, you know, India was always going to be the next frontier, as the US especially gets saturated. One cautionary thing that I hope we pay attention to is not repeating sort of funding patterns that we've seen in the US especially, but just around, especially women in this case, right? So so one of the articles that we were reading is around kind of the reporting of the India Summit, and I'm thinking specifically off the women entrepreneurs who were leading discussions around funding gaps based on gender and the statistics as to That was only 6% of the co founders are female. And yeah, it makes me mad and speechless all at the same time. So that's do better. This is an opportunity to do it fresh, right? Maybe that's optimistic of me to say, but I'm hoping to see some changes there.
I totally agree. And, you know, we talked to Beth venga from the European tech Alliance, who said something very similar about Europe, that it's just not enough female, certainly solo female entrepreneurs, and even not enough, you know, teams, including a female CEO or a co founder. And it's just worldwide at this point. And that's not where we want to be. I always look at there's an ed tech female founders fellowship in Europe, that is just a really cool program that brings together at tech founders from different countries with different, you know, focuses about their companies. But it's really focused on empowering female founders and giving them the support that they deserve to really, you know, break through that silly sort of glass ceiling that we still have in edtech. And I'm hoping that you see, you know, versions of that pop up all around the world, especially in India, where there's been a long history of women not being as involved in business as they could be at the same time, you see some enormous celebrity, female, Indian, you know, business people. So there's a tension there. And I think it's a really important for them to take. I'm glad they're having conversations about it. Let's put it that way. So speaking of global ed tech, another interesting headline this week was from the ed tech startup ecosystem in Africa, Zaza take us to the co creation hub.
Yeah, absolutely. So news came out this week, you can read about it on TechCrunch that the co creation hub is launching a $15 million accelerator program that has been dubbed the Ed Tech fellowship program. And the goal is to support 72 startups across Nigeria, and Kenya over the next three years. This is exciting news. I love the idea of you know, pouring more money in as we know, Africa is the youngest continent. It also has a growing population, it has lots of issues in infrastructure that make it a market that's ripe for innovation, of all stripes and sizes. And a lot of things that are done, you know, here, for example, could be replicated or adopted in new and exciting ways in the market. So I think it's really exciting to see funding go there. I hope that we continue to, you know, really invest in African founders and not just you know, American transplants and expats that are creating companies in Africa, although I do think that that exchange of ideas and that partnership is important. That's kind of my first pass at that. A few weeks ago, I made a connection with a former she so she's the co founder of a startup called and Aiza, which is a tutoring via text startup. And we had a really wonderful chat about just sort of, you know, her experience building the company, she was an American expat who had spent a lot of time in Kenya before deciding that she wanted to launch the startup in that market. And now they've grown to be I think they, they serve millions of students, and they're in multiple countries, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, but also Cote d'Ivoire, and Sierra Leone. And one of the interesting things about their model is that they partner with Safari comm one of the bigger telecommunications companies, in order to offer a subscription model. So for 10 shillings, you get access to unlimited texts, and they bill on a weekly, but also daily basis. And there's sort of that subscription fee is deducted from your airtime the money that you put in order to make a call or receive messages or data. And so I think it's like really interesting when you do have these collaborations between, let's say, an American and an African because it kind of brings up new ways of thinking about, you know, what does Software as a Service look like on this continent, it needs to be tech space, we need to think about subscription, not on a monthly basis, but maybe on a daily because that's how people are topping up their phones, right, they don't have a bill at the end of the month. So I kind of love how these collaborations kind of bring all these new ways of of applying a technology that might not be new, but that ends up with, you know, very new use cases. So I hope that as investors go international, that they're not over indexing on patterns that they've seen before. We know that that's traditionally been the source of a lot of inequity, and then just sort of lack of diversity in terms of who they identify with as founders, but also in the types of metrics or KPIs that they want to see to feel happy about an investment. I hope that you know, this sort of new strategy and fresh eyes as they go into the space. So it's really exciting to see the funding coming in at the level of an accelerator because I think that that means they can sort of grow together. Yeah.
Fantastic takes on all of that. I think two things strike me about what you're saying, as well as some of the news out of Africa. It sounds like you know, tech investment in Africa generally has been rising. And it just past $3 billion 43% of it is in FinTech. But it includes energy transport, you know, health ed tech. So there's a lot of funding going in, but a lot of it is in what they call the Big Four markets, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. And, you know, I look at like the whole on IQ reporting, and they talk about rest of world, because the amount of investment in all of Latin America and all of Africa has been so small, they just lump it all together. So it even shows up on the map. And I hope, and I think we're starting to see some more understanding of how these markets are specific, they're different, they have a lot of potential, especially because they're so young, Middle East is also incredibly young. And it's really an exciting time. The other thing that strikes me when you talk about the sort of telecom providers and how they can work and texting and how that can sort of the infrastructure is there, the African ecosystem reminds me a little of the European ecosystem, it's, you know, you have a lot of countries that in and of themselves may not be big enough markets, except for places like Nigeria, which are enormous, but they go multinational pretty quickly. And they work in many countries. And then they build a big enough market it there's also language barriers between countries that can be overcome with various smart ways of doing things. And there are multinational telecom providers, which is a big, you know, Europe has a ton of these very big telecom providers that really run the show played things like orange and England. And I think, you know, seeing some of those parallels between Africa and Europe and between Africa and India, because you have also the sort of lack of infrastructure in certain ways, or we need to sort of build up from technology that everybody has, could allow African edtech to really leapfrog to really accelerate and use AI and use texting and use all the amazing stuff that is coming out around the world, to move faster to you know, improve faster than many other markets. It's really exciting to see I'm really happy to see this news coming out. And I'd love to find more African and tech entrepreneurs to interview on the podcast because I think getting some on the ground understanding of that ecosystem would be amazing. So if you are one of those founders, or if you run an accelerator in Africa, reach out and we'll definitely be coming to you to find out more about what's going on there. Our last story we're coming on time here though, our last story is the state of the ad tech report. 2023 To 2024 came out this week from Ed Tech digest. And we were so happy to see that a number of our past guests were on the top 100 influencer list, including Sunil Pandaria, Kavita guy, and Natalia because they're Cova Philip Kotler from paper, and of course, super honored that I was also named as one of the top 100 influencers in edtech. Because of this podcast, and all of you amazing listeners, they covered a lot of other things as well. And we'll definitely link to that report. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, but wanted to give a shout out. And thanks to Victor Rivero and Ed Tech digest, it sounds like anything in that report jumped out to you.
Yeah, first off, congratulations, Alex, on being named one of the top influences. I think you've played such an incredible role in bringing people together. And I am especially grateful to you for all the wonderful conversations and opportunities that have come my way from from knowing you and listening to the podcast. So I'm excited to see you celebrated some of the things in the report that I thought were really, really interesting takeaways. 87% of educators have said that their tech skills improved during the pandemic, the source for this is EdWeek, I think that's Wow, just blows my mind. Because we've always been talking about, you know, teachers not having enough on one hand, pedagogical content knowledge, but on the other technological pedagogy. So this is like a thing in my field where we talk a lot about, it's not just knowing how to teach mathematics, but knowing how to use the right technology in order to do so. And it's nice to see, you know, we're on the other side of the pandemic, to kind of see how it had this forcing function that, you know, on the other side, now, now we have all these technological capabilities that hopefully will apply in many new ways. Another thing that stood out is that 76% of employees say that they're more likely to remain with the employers who are offering upskilling options. I myself have been looking at that really closely to how, especially with a great resignation, a lot of people were just looking for ways to transition into something new ways to learn ways to kind of reinvent themselves. And then, you know, looking at the longer time horizon like what is my career in 10 years and the fact that you can go on that journey of discovery with your employer as opposed to you know, being forced to make a decision of do I stay or do I quit and be somebody new? I think that's an incredible leap that we've made and thinking about what the future of work in the future of learning AR, when I'm doing consulting work, we often talk a lot about the future of education needs to be permeable and punctuated and lifelong. This idea that, you know, if you're going to be working for 70 years, we're not just going to think the first half of your career is getting the skills you need, you're going to constantly have to come back to whatever learning environment or school in order to upgrade or update your skills to upskill. And the fact that you can, you know, jump in and out or stop and work and come back and needs to be a factor in the future of education. So it's really great to see that, you know, here's a statistic, one metric that I hope that a lot of employers are thinking about, you know, as far as thinking about their futures, talent strategy, so that stood out to me anything for you, that was particularly interesting or worth reiterating here. Yeah, I agree
with that. That statistic about upskilling was really interesting. And I love how they connected specifically to retention, it's like, employees are likely to stay with their employers, if they know they're getting taken care of in a upskilling. fashion, that is really exciting to see. One thing that jumped out to me, you know, they called out a few different sort of stories of the year. One was about St. And SCD merging, which is really is a big story in the net PD world in the educator world for technology, learning loss, they cite a really interesting Google report on the future of education. And then, of course, something we've talked about for many weeks in a row, but they have this idea of the entity of the year, quote entity of the year. And that only makes sense when you learn what it is. It is Chad GPT they really feel, as do so many people in education that Chad GPT just came like a media right at the end of the year. And it's just, you know, it's catching everybody's attention. But it also, you know, next year's State of ed tech report, it would be pretty surprising if there isn't, you know, a rundown of all the new companies, all the new techniques, all the new pedagogical ideas that have come about because of AI sort of entering the classroom. So, so rapidly, Zaza. You've been an amazing co host. I've never had somebody be able to drop, you know, technological pedagogical content that isn't breaking his sweat that is makes me so happy. You know, you always bring so much insight to everything we talked about. Thanks so much for being here. We'll jump into funding next.
Thanks for having me. It's been such a pleasure. And I'm so excited for your again for your acknowledgement as a top influencer. I hope this means that the podcast is getting into the pockets of more and more people. And we continue to bring, you know to build community around ad tech and work the
absolutely community as the key word. We're all in this together. Thanks. In funding news this week we saw in tech startup next wave that's next wave with Noah II, an Indian startup that does certification upskilling and CCVP. certification programs software professional development, raised $33 million in fresh funding. We saw ignite reading which is SF based virtual tutoring company for first to eighth graders raise $10 million. We saw the midcard as we mentioned in our India segment raise $6 million, just about $6 million. Led by GSV ventures. We saw a company called House of math I love that name out of Oslo, Norway raised four and a half million dollars. That's all about grade appropriate math and physical exercise activities, which is pretty interesting combined math and movement. And then lastly, we said the Moldovan edtech company balloon coding get a 1 million euro funding push to expand their coding within virtual reality in the Central European region. interesting set of funding rounds this week for sure. That'll do it for us this week in ed tech week of February 24. We want to thank Zaza kabhi Dondo, who is a fantastic guest co host, Ben Cornell as always who's off with his family taking some much deserved rest. We also wanted to remind everybody that we have a ed tech insiders event coming up in Austin during South by Southwest edu. Please keep a lookout for that and we look forward to seeing you there. Remember if it happens in ed tech, you'll hear about it here on week in Ed Tech. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider subscribe to the free ad tech insiders newsletter on substack