Edtech Insiders

Sam Walder is a violinist, computer engineer, and the co-founder and CEO of Trala, which he founded as an undergraduate at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

Trala is a tech-powered online music school. Founded in 2017, their mission is to make world-class music education accessible to every single person on Earth.

With over 600,000 downloads and violin students in 193+ countries, Trala has received support from top musicians and investors at Duolingo and LinkedIn. Trala closed an $8M Series A in March 2023, putting their total funding at $15M.

Recommended Resources:
Edtech Founders

Note: While Trala does have an incredible partnership with Joshua Bell, he's not currently a Trala instructor.

Edtech Winners of the Summer:
- Kahoot! gets $1.72B Buyout
- Duolingo continues to beat the market
- GoStudent raises $95 (some debt) to expand
- Ukraine-based Preply raises $70M (some debt)

Edtech Bummers of the Summer:
- Paper conducts layoffs
- Byju's negative press after board walkouts, despite AI rollout

Edtech Partnerships of the Summer:
- Instructure to distribute Khanmigo through Canvas AI App Marketplace
- Newsela acquires Formative to expand assessment capabilities
- Coursera and UT System launch system wide "Career Academy" microcredentials

+ The biggest story in Higher Ed (the end of affirmative action) and K12 (continued backsliding of outcomes in the face of politicization), the AI beat, funding round-up and more!

Kristina Ishmael is the Deputy Director at the US Office of Educational Technology (which we’ll call the Office of Edtech, or the OET), part of the US DOE. She is an educator, learner, advocate, and agent of change. As the leader of the Office of Ed Tech, she executes the office mission of developing national edtech policy that enables everywhere, all-the-time learning and supports digital equity and opportunity.

Before the OET, Kristina was the Sr. Research Fellow on New America’s Teaching, Learning, & Tech team where she advised on the inclusive technology portfolio and incorporated digital equity and culturally responsive and sustaining education.

Kristina was also the Digital Learning Specialist for the Nebraska Department of Education where she led professional learning and advocated for school librarians. This experience granted her a unique perspective on leveraging educational technology in urban, suburban, and rural school systems. Kristina started as an early childhood and elementary teacher of emerging bilingual students in Omaha, Nebraska.

Recommended Resources:
Office of Edtech (OET) official website
EdTech Evidence Toolkit by OET
AI Report by OET
National Educational Technology Plan by OET

Dr. Martyn Farrows is the CEO of SoapBox Labs, the global leader in voice AI technology for children. Martyn joined SoapBox Labs in 2017 as Chief Operations Officer to lead operations, business development, and strategic partnerships. He was appointed to the CEO role in May 2021. 

Founded in 2013, SoapBox Labs is an equity-centered, privacy-by-design voice AI company that powers accurate and equitable voice experiences for children of every accent, dialect and stage of development.

By the end of June 2023, SoapBox had powered the practice, screening, and assessment tools of over 50 global education companies and delivered more than 80 million learning experiences for young students. SoapBox is the first AI company to be certified for Prioritizing Racial Equity in AI Design by Digital Promise and the Edtech Equity project.

Martyn holds a PhD in European Politics and has more than 25 years experience in edtech and AI for children, with a particular focus on data privacy and ethical approaches to leveraging AI in the classroom.

Recommended Resources:
Soapbox Labs Blog
AI in Education by Getting Smart
Digital Promise

Ben Whately is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Memrise. A psychologist by education, with a Masters in Experimental Psychology from Oxford where he focused on neural networks and computational modeling of human learning, Ben has spent the last 15 years looking at ways to learn and teach languages.

While at Oxford, Ben became fascinated by how we learn languages. In the past, he’d always been able to pass language exams, but would find himself totally unable to actually use the language abroad. While studying psychology, he formed a theory for why this is, and Memrise has been a journey of bringing that theory into reality. He believes that people fundamentally learn languages to connect with other people or because they are enamoured of the culture of that language, and Memrise strives to embody this experience of connection.

Building on his neuroscience and language acquisition background, Ben pioneered the use of LLMs to create the world’s first AI language partner using GPT-3 technology, Membot. Ben is also a prolific angel investor, investing in and advising more than 50 companies in the UK startup ecosystem, with a focus on AI, machine learning and climate tech.

Recommended Resources:
Language Learning on Memrise

Michael Chasen is the co-founder and CEO of Class Technologies Inc., the maker of Class. He is an entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to improving the way people live and learn.

Most notably, Chasen served as co-founder and CEO of Blackboard Inc., a pioneering edtech company with software used by over 20,000 institutions in more than 70 countries by 20 million teachers and learners worldwide.

Recommended Resources:
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell Podcast
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Freakonomics Podcast

Charles Abelmann is the director and producer of the short documentary English Hustle. He is an educator with a background in research, policy and practice. Earlier in his career, he worked at the World Bank managing education projects in a wide number of countries including China and Mongolia. He has also led public and private schools including being the Director at the Laboratory Schools at the University of Chicago while also having an appointment at the university as a lecturer. He currently is a filmmaker and an executive coach certified by the International Coaching Federation and holds an M.A and Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Recommended Resources:
English Hustle on englishhustle.org
English Hustle on newday.com
English Hustle on Vimeo

Ellie Bertani is the President and CEO of the GitLab Foundation, with the mission of improving lifetime earnings and economic mobility of workers worldwide. With a background in the nonprofit, public, and private sectors, she brings a shared value, cross-sectoral approach to drive sustainable impact.

Prior to joining the GitLab Foundation, Ellie spent ten years in the private sector, with roles at Wells Fargo and Walmart. Much of her work focused on frontline worker economic stability and mobility, and included work on instant access to earned pay, scheduling predictability, removing hiring barriers, and developing internal learning and career pathing programs. In 2020 Ellie was awarded Walmart’s highest recognition, the Sam Walton Entrepreneurship Award, for the development of LiveBetterU, the largest free educational benefits program in the US, and Walmart’s most successful diversity & inclusion program. 

Earlier in her career, Ellie spent nearly ten years in the nonprofit and public sector, including positions with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. State Department, Third Sector Capital Partners, and Rotary International. She received her Master of Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and her MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Recommended Resources:
A Time to Build by Yuval Levine

Sacha Litman is a core member of the Public Sector practice at Boston Consulting Group and the global lead for analytics in education, employment, and welfare (EEW) for that practice. Sacha is an expert in talent gaps, higher education turnarounds, pricing, and student financing.

Sacha advises higher education, employer, and state leaders on building education/employer partnerships that close talent supply/demand gaps in order to improve students' employment outcomes; employer talent acquisition costs and retention; higher education enrollment, brand perception; financial sustainability; and states' ability to attract and retain talent and employers. He has extensive experience in pricing and analytics, and designs models such as outcomes-aligned student financing, financial aid optimization, HR/workforce analytics, and schedule optimization.

Sacha is a former edtech founder and CEO, with the entrepreneurial skills to build pioneering new approaches. Before joining BCG, he was the leader of Public Sector Advanced Analytics for McKinsey & Company, and CEO of the education analytics firm Measuring Success.

Recommended Resources:
A Turnaround for Higher Ed in the US by Sacha Litman, Tyce Henry, J. Puckett, and Lina Bankert
Why Student Financing Must Align with Outcomes by Sacha Litman, Claudia Newman-Martin, Matt Beckett, and John Pineda
How Higher Ed and Employers Can Partner to Power Talent Pipelines by Sacha Litman, Lane McBride, Tejus Kothari, Claudia Newman-Martin, Ruth Ebeling, and Frank Breitling

For over two decades, Chicago Scholars, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit leadership development organization, has empowered nearly 6,000 high-performing, under-resourced students to overcome systemic barriers to success in college. Chicago Scholars is the largest education nonprofit in Chicago, a city of over 2.5 million. In addition to its wraparound support for Chicago-based students, Chicago Scholars has created REACH Pathways, a first-of-its-kind app designed to connect top talent with professional opportunities in ways that feel less like homework and more like a video game. 

Jeffery Beckham, Jr. is the Chief Executive Officer at Chicago Scholars and co-CEO of Reach Pathways. Jeffery is a community leader, artist and tech-entrepreneur known for advancing the fight for equity for youth and marginalized communities throughout the United States. Jeffery lives by the quote: “To whom much is given, much is required.” He strives to support traditionally underserved youth, working as a mentor with the 100 Black Men of Chicago, Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity INC. and other Chicago programs. Jeffery is also a self-taught painter and uses his art to advocate for social and economic justice.  His work has been on display around the world.

Brooke McKean, the President at Chicago Scholars and co-CEO of Reach Pathways, has over a decade of executive-level experience in fast-paced and start-up environments, in addition to experience managing teams in 12+ countries. Brooke is an expert in change management and has developed dozens of systems, policies, and infrastructure across all areas of operations, including IT, HR, finance, data systems, and beyond. Brooke believes in service-oriented and values-based leadership to ensure that Chicago Scholars embodies the values that define its programs to “be the change.”

Recommended Resources:
TED-Ed
Twitter spaces
Youtube
Storybird
Finding Nonprofit Sustainability by Brooke Mckean
Dr. Raj Chetty's Research