Edtech Insiders

Kian Katanforoosh is the CEO and cofounder of Workera.ai, the skills intelligence platform redefining how enterprises understand, develop, and mobilize talent. Workera empowers organizations to stay ahead by unlocking the skills data needed to drive innovation. Enterprises get an objective pulse of their innovation skills through a configurable skills ontology, using AI-powered measurement of data, AI, software, cloud, and cyber skills at an atomic-level.

Kian is also a lecturer at Stanford University, where he teaches Deep Learning in the Computer Science department with Prof. Andrew Ng. Kian has been acknowledged for his teaching excellence by Stanford with the Walter J. Gores Award, Stanford’s highest teaching award, and the Centennial Award for Excellence in teaching.

Additionally, Kian is a founding member of deeplearning.ai and he co-created the Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera with Andrew Ng. From 2014 to 2016, Kian co-founded and co-led Daskit, a French start-up developing in-classroom ed-tech solutions for universities.

Kian's Recommended Resources

To learn more about cutting edge AI, try:

• Learning through Tiktoks
• Follow AI company CEOs, founders and researchers on Linkedin and Twitter, and see who they follow. People like:
  • Andrew Ng
  • Andrej Karpathy
  • Demis Hassabis
  • Yann LeCun
  • Jeremy Howard
  • Ian Goodfellow
  • Ruslan Salakhutdinov
  • Whole slew of companies and CEOs here
• AI Reddit goes deeper on research
  • r/ArtificialInteligence/ (yes, with 1 "l")
  • r/MachineLearning/
  • r/ChatGPT
  • r/OpenAI/

For more Technical training, go on AI conference websites to look at award-winning papers. This includes conferences like:

• ICLR
• ICML 
• NeurIPS

On this super-sized episode of "This Week in Edtech":

• We talk to Guests Audrey Witters of Stanford GSB and Mike Malefakis of Emeritus about the Emeritus/Stanford collaboration to bring localized executive education from Stanford to the world
• And hear from Amy Jenkins, COO of Meadow, about their plans to improve tuition transparency and streamline payments.

Ben and Alex also dig into:

• ChatGPT and Edtech coming together
  • PhotoStudy announces ChatGPT-like Chatbot for Math Textbooks and their Publishers
  • Who Owns the Generative AI Platform? | Andreessen Horowitz
• DARPA for Education
  • Is a ‘DARPA for education’ finally happening?
• Culture Wars Continue in US Schools
  • The College Board Strips Down Its A.P. Curriculum for African American Studies - The New York Times
  • BBC: Revised AP African American Studies class drops controversial topics after criticism
  • AP African-American studies: Syllabus changed after Florida 'woke' claims - BBC News
• Teacher/Mental Health Professional Shortages as the ESSER Cliff nears
  • 63% of educators consider leaving profession | K-12 Dive
  • The funding cliff for student mental health 
• Phoenix moving to Arkansas?
  • University Of Arkansas May Acquire For-Profit University Of Phoenix - Which Is Good News

Funding:

• Corporate Training platform Gemba raises $18M in Series A
• Math VR company PrismsVR Raises $12.5M from Andreesen Horowitz
• Swiss curriculum delivery platform Evulpo raises $8.3M
• Indian LMS Provider Saarthi Pedagogy raises $3.7M Pre-series A
• Healthcare training platform Re:Course AI raises £3.4m in seed funding

Siya Raj Purohit is the Global Edtech & Workforce Development Lead at Amazon's AWS Marketplace and a General Partner at Pathway Ventures. She’s an operator-investor in the Edtech and Future of Work sectors who helps grow & invest in companies that drive economic mobility through innovative models of earning, learning, and community building.

Siya is an edtech veteran and a true insider, as an early employee at Udacity & Springboard, a graduate of Harvard GSE’s TIE program, and an author; she published her first book: “Engineering America” while she was an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin.

Resource Recommendations from Siya

• Matt Tower's Ed Tech Thoughts newsletter
• The work of business professor and author Adam Grant

In this special episode, we speak to Beth Havinga, Managing Director of the European Edtech Alliance, and Rhys Spence, Head of Research at Brighteye Ventures, about the state of European Edtech. 

Both organizations have recently released fascinating reports about the state of Edtech:

• European Edtech Funding Report 2023 (Brighteye Ventures)
• European Edtech Map: Insights Report (European Edtech Alliance) 
• European Edtech Map (European Edtech Alliance) 

Beth Havinga is the Managing Director of the European EdTech Alliance and the EdSAFE AI Alliance. Beth represents the EEA both in the EdTech Roundtable of the European Commission and UNESCO’s Broadband Commission. Beth has considerable experience developing interoperability standards frameworks, and represents Germany as head delegate to the European Committee for Standardization of Interoperability for Learning Technologies and EdTech. In addition to creating her own consulting firm, Beth has taught in schools, managed education software and publishing houses, founded two startups, and worked in over 45 countries to develop digital structures and strategies.

— Rhys Spence is Head of research at Brighteye Ventures. He researches geographic and product market trends, as well as supports the portfolio with business-related themes, including international expansion, marketing, HR, ESG and impact. Before Brighteye, he worked in UK education policy research, specialising in the early years and latterly edtech.

In this week's Week in Edtech, Ben and special guest co-host Hailey Carter:

1) Talk to Salwa Muhammad of Fourthbrain.ai about the upcoming 3-day workshop with Andrew Ng and other AI Education leaders

2) Discuss "Study Hall", new Youtube/ASU/Crash Course Collaboration (Youtube Blog)

3) Take note of a recent survey that expresses doubt about Edtech leaders (Edweek)

4) Compare Recent Reports on the State of Edtech Funding
- Reach Capital (US)
- Brighteye Ventures (Europe)
- Inc42 (India)

5) Explore the Push for the $60K Minimum Teacher Salary in the US (Edweek)

6) Look at the Race to Adapt to a ChatGPT World (Forbes, NYTimes) and Quill and CommonLit's Free Tool to Detect Cheating 

Laurel Taylor is the founder, CEO, and driving force behind Candidly (previously known as FutureFuel.io). 

Her mission is to address the unmet — and urgent — market need for smart solutions that support individuals and families through every step of the planning, borrowing, and repayment experience. Candidly works towards this goal by creating trusted, intelligent and comprehensive solutions that enable Americans to reap the rewards of that investment so they can build financial wellness and wealth.

About Candidly:

Candidly exists to crush student debt for America's 44M borrowers. On average, Candidly shave $15k and half of a decade off of a user's student loans, through a personalized Student Debt FinHealth platform that optimizes repayment plans, automates the management of unruly student loans, and gamifies rewards points and spare change across the household.

Resources:

- Get Candidly Blog on the Secure 2.0 Act (which Laurel calls "the most important workplace innovation since the 401(k)"

On this Week in Edtech:

• We speak to Mateo Elvira of Elvira Media about Edtech content marketing, and how to utilize storytelling to stand out from the crowd, as well as...
• ChatGPT: 
  • We discuss both the prediction that ChatGPT will create a new Edtech boom...
  • ...and the backlash to tech, including mass bans of both ChatGPT at large school districts and Tiktok at universities
• Big Tech: 
  • We discuss the controversial layoffs at Google and Microsoft and whether it might breed new entrepreneurs in edtech ...
  • ...and Reed Hasting's one-two punch of donating to Minerva University and then stepping down as Netflix CEO
• XR/VR/AR
  • Prisms VR launches in the Meta Store
  • ASU-incubated Dreamscape Learn gets $20M in funding
• 2023 Predictions from our friends at Transcend
  • The 2023 predictions from Transcend founders Alberto Arenaza and Michael Narea
• Funding Rounds
  • Hack The Box raises $55M
  • Sana raises $34M
  • Dreamscape Learn raises $20m
  • WorkIndia raises $12M
  • Supermom raises $6M
  • Equalture raises $2.7M
• Mergers and Acquisitions
  • Noodle acquires Hubble Studios
  • 7 Mindsets acquires BASE Education

Vadim Polikov is the CEO of Legends of Learning, online educational games for teachers and students with 2,000 fun, curriculum-aligned, math and science games created to engage students and assist teachers using hybrid learning, blended learning & distance learning models.

Vadim loves to learn and build. Bold new ideas excite him and he wants to put them into practice. He sees his career as a series of ideas built to fruition and scale. He wants to make an impact and believes creating self-sustaining for-profit businesses is the best way to make an ongoing impact. He believes entrepreneurship is an incredible process that creates value, ideas, jobs, and products. It is a big reason why he thinks the US is such an amazing country.

He has built three successively larger businesses and is now focused on building the next one, a really exciting Ed Tech startup that uses games to help teachers teach in the classroom. He also acts as an angel investor on the side.

He is incredibly thankful for Duke University, which provided his undergraduate and graduate education, and for the Baltimore community, which provided a fantastic childhood. He hopes to be able to give back to both communities.

Recommended Resources:
MatthewBall.vc
The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

Welcome back to our Weekly Round-up of Edtech news across the industry!

Guest: Natalia Kucirkova of Wikit, AS

Our top stories this week:

1) Companies Becoming Platforms through Consolidation
- HMH acquires school testing non-profit NWEA
- Instructure (maker of the Canvas LMS) acquires evidence platform Learnplatform
- Zoom launches 'Essential Apps' including Kahoot! and Prezi
- Jack McDermott of Chegg on consolidation in Edtech 

2) Edtech Winter creating CEO turnover
- Upgrad CEO Arjun Mohan resigns
- Newsela CEO Matthew Gross leaves, Pep Carrera from Nearpod takes helm
- Udemy CEO and Board Chair retires, is replaced by Head of Udemy Business
- Inspera changes CEO

3) Seattle schools suing big tech
- Seattle schools are suing TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube for causing mental health crises

4) Student Financial Aid Startup Frank Being Sued by J.P. Morgan Chase
- JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon and co are now suing the company, alleging that Frank invented 4+ million fake users to close the sale.
 -  Ben: "the FTX of Edtech."

5) Edtech Conference Season is Underway
- GSV announces its "GSV 150" and the "Elite 200"
- SxSWEdu announces its launch contest participants

Funding Rounds

• LEAD School becomes Unicorn, acquires Pearson's K-12 Business in India
• Toddle raises $17 million
• Eduvanz raises $12.6M
• Schola raises $10M
• Howdy extends series A

Dr. Deepak Sekar is an inventor and entrepreneur. Over the last decade, he has been granted 192 patents, making him one of the more prolific inventors in the world today.
 
You may know him from his role as Founder and CEO of Chowbotics, which built the world's first fresh food-making robot named “Sally.” Sally now operates in over 250 locations worldwide. Under Sekar’s leadership, Chowbotics was named among the food trends of 2019 by The New York Times and listed as one of the world’s most innovative companies by Fast Company. Chowbotics was acquired by DoorDash in 2020. 

Around that time, Sekar watched his daughters grapple with pandemic-induced online classes and felt something should be done about it. So, he co-founded Prof Jim to help transform e-learning. 

When he’s not in Silicon Valley coercing his family to test his latest brainchild, he’s most likely climbing some distant mountain in a quest to push his limits (or at least, get out of the house!). He holds a B. Tech. from IIT Madras, and a M. S. and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering.