Edtech Insiders

In this special episode of Edtech Insiders, Phuong Do interviews eight edtech companies at the Edtech Asia Summit 2023 held earlier last month in Bali, Indonesia.

1. Adriel Yong from Ascend Angels 
2. John Tan from Doyobi
3. Minsam Kim from RiiiD
4. Raphael Nolden from Amy.app
5. Ryan O'Hare from Keypath Education 
6. Ruby Nguyen from Curieous 
7. Sandeep and Gaurav from Kaizenvest 
8. Vu Van from ELSA

Kenzie Butera Davis is the CEO and founder of Maro, a pediatric mental healthcare and education app. She recently won the ASU+GSV Pitch competition.

As a veteran of the startup industry, Kenzie has supported 70+ healthcare, consumer and B2B SaaS startups from launch to growth acceleration to funding. Prior to founding Maro, Kenzie spent 4+ years composing an academic thesis on the implementation of health education in the US while conducting customer discovery. Her current venture, Maro, is one of the leading companies in pediatric healthcare innovation, as awarded by Oracle Cerner and Children's National Hospital.

Recommended Resources:
Rock Health
Digital Health Buzz
Chalkbeat
Edweek Market Brief

Todd Mahler is the Chief Product Officer at Edmentum. For over 25 years Todd has led the development of educational technology products for the nation’s leading publishers and is proud to have impacted the lives of millions of students. As Chief Product Officer for Edmentum, Todd drives product strategy for Edmentum, ensuring their solutions meet the needs of the educators and students they serve. Prior to Edmentum, Todd served as Chief Product Officer for Apex Learning and has held senior leadership positions with McGraw Hill Education, Redbird Advanced Learning, and Six Red Marbles. Todd holds a Master’s degree in Education from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Science in Astronomy & Astrophysics from Villanova University.

Dr. PJ Caposey is a dynamic speaker and a transformational leader and educator. PJ began his career as an award-winning teacher in the inner-city of Chicago and has subsequently led significant change in every administrative post he has held. PJ became a principal at the age of 28 and within three years was able to lead a small-town/rural school historically achieving near the bottom of its county to multiple national recognitions. After four years, PJ moved to his current district, Meridian CUSD 223, as superintendent and has led a similar turnaround leading to multiple national recognitions for multiple different efforts.

PJ is a best-selling author and has written 10 books for various publishers. His work and commentary has been featured on sites such as the Washington Post, NPR, CBS This Morning, ASCD, Edutopia, the Huffington Post, and was featured in a Global Leaders Forum thinkpiece alongside the likes of General Petraeus and General McChrystal. He works in the Education Department of three universities, including within the Ivy League, and in a myriad of capacities with the Illinois Principal's Association including Principal Coach and author of the first complete stack of MicroCredentials offered in Illinois.

Recommended Resources:
Academic I - Ground Rules on AI by Edutopia
Institute for Educational Innovation

Chris Parrish is Co-Founder and President of Partnerships at the leading experiential learning company, Podium Education. At Podium, Chris led the launch of The Global Tech Experience, an industry redefining digital program that enables students to build skills and experience by working on projects directly with organizations like Intel, The Grammy’s and charity:water. Podium currently partners with 55 universities across the world and will support 10,000 students in 2023. His work has been featured in Fortune Magazine, Forbes, InsideHigherEd and TechCrunch. Chris and Podium are based in Austin, TX.

Recommended Resources:
Jeff Selingo
ETCH by Matt Tower
Higher Ed Trades

In this episode of Week in Edtech, Ben and Alex discuss:

1. Big Tech:

• Gemini - Google’s largest and most capable AI model.
• 2U faces upcoming existential changes - Helpful analysis from Phil Hill on the financial challenges 2U is up against as their stock continues to get hammered in the public markets. 

2. Assessment:

• States are radically changing testing requirements in both red and blue states
• All Yale students get As

3. Politics:

• University Presidents royally blow it in Congress
• Oakland Educators Hold Unauthorized Teach-in Supporting Palestinians
• AP African American Studies

4. Legacy of Paul LeBlanc

• Southern New Hampshire University President Paul LeBlanc to Step Down after Transformative 20 Years of Leadership

5. Future of Work

• Nolej raises a $3M Seed
• Carnegie Learning Announces LiveHint AI
• Curriculum Associates Expands Student-Focused AI Capabilities with Purchase of SoapBox Labs

Special Guests:

• Jared Grusd, Co-founder of Ethiqly
• Gavin Cooney, CEO of Learnosity

Märt Lume is the co-founder of Futuclass, a company building curriculum-aligned Virtual Reality games to enrich natural science education for secondary school students.

With a 15-year journey across Vancouver, Denver, Lviv, Berlin, and Tallinn, Märt has designed gaming, enterprise, and educational software. Notably, in Vancouver he was the first employee of Glitch game, which eventually became known as Slack.

A pivotal moment in 2017 introduced him to VR, sparking the realization that immersive technologies, coupled with learning via layered game mechanics, hold the key to transformative human learning experiences. This revelation fueled the inception of Futuclass, which now elevates chemistry and physics classes in over 10% of Estonian schools, earning praise from students and educators alike.

Drawing wisdom from years of close collaboration with schools, Futuclass has expanded its offerings into the comprehensive Futuclass School Kit. This turnkey solution equips schools with hardware, software, teacher onboarding, mentoring, and best practices, igniting students with excitement for learning through VR. Futuclass School Kit is also launching partner apps, seamlessly integrating VR lessons into subjects like art, design, social studies, music, and physical education.

Märt's recognition includes the "Friend of Education 2022" title at Estonia's esteemed Teacher's Gala, acknowledging his contributions to numerous EdTech startups and initiatives. He is also an advisor and angel investor to 20+ companies at the moment, with a focus on EdTech and XR.

Recommended Resources:
The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball
“We Met in Virtual Reality” documentary
Edtech Estonia
VR Chat

Nikil Ragav is the CEO and founder of inventXYZ.

Nikil studied Electrical Engineering & Business at Penn/Wharton and interned at Intel, Google, Microsoft before starting inventXYZ. In college, he ran inventathons for middle and high school students to learn to build and code real products. He worked with schools in rural PA then remotely across the US to teach CS and electronics.

For his work, Nikil was awarded Penn’s President’s Innovation Prize to start inventXYZ. NFL player Travis Kelce tweeted he was sponsoring a STEM lab for underserved kids in Kansas City. Nikil tweeted at him, and eventually inventXYZ moved to KC to help design and run the STEM lab.

Now, inventXYZ makes it painless for middle and high schools across the country to teach 100% of their students Computer Science and AI even if they don’t have a dedicated teacher.

Nikil has published a paper on teaching AI in K12 w/ Johns Hopkins researchers: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/nai/ti/pre-prints/content-22.4nw

Recommended Resources:
inventXYZ: Preparing Students for the Future of Work
inventxyz.com
Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in
Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies by US DOE
Bite-sized Way to Understand Learning Science

In this episode of Week in Edtech, Ben and Alex discuss:

1. Big Tech:

• Meta launches “Seamless” LLM for speech-to-speech translation.  Multi-modal innovation
• Meta’s Instagram also made news in all the wrong ways

2. Higher Ed:

• StraighterLine Partners with Acadeum to Offer College Course Sharing

3. In Other News...

• U.S. Department of Education Holds Off On New Rules for Third-Party Servicers… For Now
• Curriculum Associates Acquires SoapBox Labs
• ParentSquare Acquires Remind
• 2U finances unveiled by Phil Hill, doesn't look good
• Portland Teachers Strike Ends after a month and nobody is happy
• Congress (Tom Cotton) pushing a ban on cell phones in school

Special Guests:

• Sara Mauskopf from Winnie discuss Early Childhood Education
• Candice Faktor from Disco discuss Community Powered Learning

Maria Barrera, is a Stanford-educated engineer and founder & CEO of Clayful. She is committed to addressing the youth mental health crisis. Born in Colombia and understanding the pressures of adversity, she leverages her experience from her pioneering role on Nearpod's founding team to create impactful solutions in education.

Through her tireless research and collaboration with a diverse team of experts, Maria developed Clayful, offering accessible, preventative mental health resources to families of all socio-economic statuses. Her dedication to training a diverse mental health workforce and establishing partnerships with schools has already impacted thousands of students across the country.

Recommended Resource:
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Dan and Chip Heath

Per Borgen is the CEO and co-founder of Scrimba (YC S20), an interactive code-learning platform with over a million users worldwide. He’s also a web developer and coding instructor. Per's passion is to help people change their careers and lives through learning how to build software, just as he did at age 29.

These days, he leads Scrimba's AI Engineering initiative. The company has partnered up with Hugging Face and LangChain to create tutorials and courses that help web developers learn how to build AI-powered apps. Through these partnerships, Per get a front-row seat at how these AI infrastructure companies lay the groundwork that the rest of the industry builds on top of.

Recommended Resource:
Latent Space: Rise of the AI Engineer