Edtech Insiders

John Gamba is a serial entrepreneur and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, John Gamba, Jr has been dedicated to transforming education for most of his career. In 1999, John co-founded PACE – The Partnership for Academic and Community Excellence. PACE was the first school-to-home communications network, connecting thousands of schools to millions of homes nationally and was eventually sold to Blackboard, an international industry leader in education. 

John currently serves as Entrepreneur in Residence and Director of Innovative Programs at Penn’s Graduate School of Education. In this role, John mentors education entrepreneurs, helps incubate new EdTech ventures and oversees the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition, which has awarded millions of dollars to world-wide education ventures.

Thaddeus Reichley has over twenty years of teaching and leading in public, charter, and independent schools. He has designed curriculum, led faculty through challenging times, done strategic development, and built highly productive teams. Thaddeus is completing an EdD at USC and is in the midst of writing his dissertation about student engagement in online environments.

Recommended Resources

• Alan November, Who Owns the Learning?
• John Doerr, Measure What Matters
• Stanford + Emeritus' Collaboration

Varun Gulati is the CEO and co-founder of Koalluh, a startup which makes reading & writing more engaging by empowering kids to make & share quality, illustrated children's stories using AI.

Varun is a former public school teacher, and a product & engineering leader. He co-founded, scaled, and sold his first company, UClass as CTO & Head of Product. Most recently, Varun led the Product & Growth teams at Mystery Science, the fastest-growing K-12 science supplemental in the U.S.. The products he has built have reached tens of millions of students. Varun is also an ex-Googler and former Teach For America corps member.

Recommended Resources

• Ben's Bytes on Substack on AI
• Education and The Significance of Life by Jiddu Krishnamurthi

John Edelson founded homeschooling platform Time4Learning in 2013 in his living room and remains the president today. Over 360,000 students have now benefited from Time4Learning. He also created Time4Writing, VocabularySpellingCity, and Science4Us. His company was run independently until joining Cambium in 2018. 

He has extensive expertise working with various educational software, diversified entertainment, and technology companies. He was the producer of the Sony PlayStation game, Croc, Legend of the Gobos, which went Platinum. After college, he spent two years in West Africa in the Peace Corps. He is a proud father of three. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard.  

In this special, UNEDITED version of Week in Edtech, Ben, Alex and special guest co-host Matt Tower discuss:

1) The sudden demise and federal takeover of Silicon Valley Bank and what it means for Tech, Banking and Edtech.

News:

• Jenna Smialek and Alan Rappeport of NYT
• Eric Wallerstein et al. of WSJ
• Daniel Taub of Bloomberg

Takes

• Kevin Roose of NYT
• Matt Levine of Bloomberg
• Noah Smith of Noahpinion

2) Discuss the rumors of ChatGPT4 launching next week with AI-created video

• Microsoft will launch ChatGPT 4 with AI videos next week | Digital Trends
• New Study Reveals Only 1 in 10 Global Workers Have In-Demand AI Skills
• Grammarly expands beyond proofreading with AI-powered writing

3) Herald the Launch of Non-Profit ai.edu with 50 partners across tech and ed

• Partners include Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Verizon, Intel, TFA and many more

4) Unveil the (secret) purchase of top Education App Photomath by Google

• Matt reports on this in Edtech Thoughts
• You can also read about it in Croatia Week

5) Discuss the on-the-ground happenings at SxSW EDU

Guest co-host this week: Zaza Kabayadando

Topics This Week Include:

1. New Federal Guidance for Higher Ed Fallout
   • Education Dept. Shocks Ed-Tech Experts and Colleges With Expansion of Oversight
2. AI Continues to Polarize Educators 
   • AI bots can seem sentient. Students need guardrails
   • Is ChatGPT the future of cheating or the future of teaching?
   • Adapt, evolve, elevate: ChatGPT is calling for interdisciplinary action
3. GSV Goes to India
   • GSV + Emeritus India Summit: Women entrepreneurs lead conversations on gender funding gap; call for critical changes to foster women entrepreneurs 
4. Edtech Startup Ecosystem in Africa
   • Co-Creation Hub’s edtech accelerator puts $15M towards African startups | TechCrunch
   • African tech startup funding reaches new record
5. State of Edtech Report
   • Found Here

Department of Ed launches new OPM Restrictions

• Insider Higher Ed on this
• Phil Hill on this (here too)
• U.S. Department of Education Launches Review of Prohibition on Incentive Compensation for College Recruiters

Teen girls in mental health crisis, blowback toward big tech

• NPR: 10 things to know about how social media affects teens' brains
• Nearly 1 in 5 Teen Girls ‘Engulfed’ In Wave of Sexual Violence; Many Suicidal
• Record Levels of Sadness in Teen Girls, CDC Reports - The New York Times

Covid Relief fund cliff is coming

• Time Is Running Out for Colleges to Spend COVID-19 Relief Funds

ChatGPT- Things are moving faster than we can anticipate

• Most sites claiming to catch AI-written text fail spectacularly | TechCrunch

1. ChatGPT, Pt. 1: APIs

• OpenAI launches an API for ChatGPT, plus dedicated capacity for enterprise customers | TechCrunch
• Introducing Q-Chat, the world’s first AI tutor built with OpenAI’s ChatGPT | Quizlet

ChatGT, Pt 2: Ramifications of ChatGPT

• The evolution of ChatGPT will fuel the future of higher education, says Udacity's Sebastian Thrun
• Will ChatGPT Make Students Turn Away From Homework-Help Services? | EdSurge News

2. Federal Guidelines on TPS Delayed

• Department of Education Delays Guidance on TPS Expansion

3. Interesting Acquisitions

• IXL Learning Acquires Teachers Pay Teachers, the World's Largest Platform for Educator-Created Content
• Paper™ acquires MajorClarity to Create a Comprehensive Career & College Readiness Platform
• Education services company Perdoceo acquires coding bootcamp school Coding Dojo for $52.8M

4. TikTok Launches New Edtech Platform GeniusJoy for Math

• TikTok's parent ByteDance is building a new 'AI-based' edtech platform called GeniusJoy and is hiring in Los Angeles and Singapore
• From TikTok to Trigonometry: Could ByteDance Corner the Market on Edtech?

Funding Rounds

• New Markets Venture Partners Raises Over $160 Million 
• Chinese platform Nowcoder raises $50m
• StudentFinance secures $41m for ISAs in Europe 
• Moroccan KOOLSKOOLS raises $960,000 

In this special episode, we speak to four of the seven finalists for the SxSW EDU Launch competition:

- Sari of Kide Science
- Nick Suwyn of Promineo Tech
- Varun Gulati and Christie Chu of Koalluh
- Kavindya Thenakoon of Tilli

Dana Bryson leads the Study.com's social impact and double bottom-line strategy, working to build new mission-aligned partnerships, and manages the company's policy and strategic positioning. Dana has spent the last 25 years creating breakthrough results through her vision, innovation, and dynamic leadership in service of non-profits, local governments, and businesses. She is an entrepreneur, nonprofit advocate, activist, founder, funder, board member, chair, and advisor. Dana has served as Chief of Staff to Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, Chief of Staff for City Operations for DC Mayor Anthony Williams, and as a senior appointee for Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. She represented the ownership group of Major League Soccer team DC United as she led the negotiations with the D.C. government to build a new stadium, which was completed in 2018. Most recently, Dana designed and implemented a national leadership program for a 45,000-member organization committed to equity in education. Her program supported over 260 former teachers who were newly elected to public office, in over 230 communities nationwide, representing over 26 million children.

Dana Bryson holds a master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a bachelor's degree in both Foreign Affairs and French Literature from the University of Virginia.

Fun Fact: Her parents had the first legal, interracial marriage in Virginia after the Loving vs. Virginia case. As a child, she once found a needle in a haystack.

Recommended Resources:
Pod Save the People by DeRay Mckesson, Kaya Henderson, De’Ara Balenger, and Myles Johnson
Teacher Diversity and Student Success: Why Racial Representation Matters in the Classroom by  Seth Gershenson, Michael Hansen, Constance A. Lindsay

Andrew Shewbart is an edtech executive and board member who spent more than two decades working in the digital and offline education management and training industry throughout Asia.

As EVP and Board Member of ALO7, China’s largest digital publisher and B2B content solutions provider, Andrew oversaw digital curriculum development and provided English Language Learning (ELL) guidance for the entire company and the 10,000 schools that utilized ALO7 products. 

ALO7 revolutionized the way children, parents, and teachers participate in the ELL process by providing a communicative and task-based learning platform and content. 

ALO7 and its curriculum were designed to increase confidence and stimulate children’s interest in learning English through the use of engaging materials and content in class, at home, or on the road. ALO7’s Genius English series was a CODiE award finalist for Best ESL, ELL or World Language Acquisition Solution.

Andrew is the lead consultant for CCTV’s educational English programming, and an internationally renowned expert on children’s ELL production, teaching theory, practical teaching, and using technology to empower teachers, children, and parents in the digital age.

Andrew's Recommended Resources:

 - "I feel in the edtech space, books become outdated as soon as they are published, so I prefer blogs or news aggregators. GSV N2K EDU is a great source of up to date news on edtech"