← ASU+GSV Summit Sessions
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- [00:03]
A
This session was recorded live at the
- [00:05]
B
2026 ASU GSV summit in San Diego. I want to start off on what is a technology topic? To talk about something that has nothing to do with technology. And I want you to remember, God bless you, your first field trip and where you were, where you went. And the reason that I use that is everybody remembers that. So while you think about yours, I'm going to share mine because this was in fifth grade, we were on the east coast, we went to the Plymouth Rock, we got into a bus that was incredibly hot and those damn windows that go down just about an inch to make sure that you're hot the entire time. And we go down to Plymouth Rock and people are dressed up like pilgrims. And they start telling us the story of this rock that's much smaller than I imagined, that's got 1620 stamped on it. And they tell us the first thing, we didn't actually land here, we landed in Provincetown. And they talk about the journey over the Atlantic and say 60, 70 days and how many people died. Those type of experiences really stick with you so much that I could sit in front of you today and remember something that was 50 years ago for me and I remember it like yesterday. That's probably all I remember from my elementary school experience. So Alina, I'd love for you to help us understand what. Why is it I remember that and my wife as well because I can remember this, but I cannot remember how to do Amazon Returns to save my life. So help us understand what is it that makes this stick with us.
- [02:00]
C
Yeah, I think it's all about immersion really. That's the topic of this panel. And in my view, immersion comes in two forms. You have a spatial immersion where you are immersed in the environment and experiencing it. And then we have psychological immersion which is all about the story becoming the person who has agency in the experience. And my background is largely in games. I think it's extremely powerful combining the spatial immersion with something that is story based or in my books, even better if there is a game like element to it. So we have a lot of theory in games especially. Why are games engaging? There is a guy called Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. I heard a story that he changed his name to make it impossible for anybody to write it in research papers. Must have been a funny guy. This was 1974. Has anybody heard of the flow theory? So this is what those young people nowadays when they say like, hey, let her cook, she's locked in. This is that state where you really lose the sense of time and space because you have a challenge level that is just right to your skill level. And you're also getting continuous feedback for your experience. And that is the beauty of games. You have agency and also in a lot of spatial experiences, if you think of of VR learning experience where you're completely immersed in the environment, you become the scientist, you become the door and that's really, really powerful. I work at an Arizona State University in a new lab called Endless Games and Learning Lab. And we are very focused on game based learning. But as many of you probably know, we have the wonderful Dreamscape Learn Technology and curriculum at asu. And one example of these numbers and studies that show that this actually works is our Action Lab has recently released a study there. The students were compared in normal or traditional learning programs learning biology and there was a quarter of a point grade increase when they were learning it in VR. And actually being the scientist and then going back to the lab and being able to kind of tying it to the story where you have the agency and you are doing things. And that's extremely powerful and memorable as well.
- [04:48]
B
Excellent. Thank you. Nikki. When we think about real evidence about xr cause Meta has invested a heck of a lot of money in this. Is there evidence you can point to and can you share that with us?
- [05:00]
D
Absolutely. I think I'm gonna just go back to Alina's point really quick. There is a cognitive researcher named Jeremy Bruner and he actually identified that you are 22% more likely to remember something when it is wrapped in a narrative, when you are actually immersed in that thing. Which is why you remember that field trip so clearly. I remember mine and even some science experiments that we did, I hands on got to do it. And so we really point to that at Meta that there is a reason when you are in immersion that that is so memorable. I really think about EV based in three different categories. There is independent research that's been done in the space, actually some stories that we are hearing directly from universities and school systems that have integrated it as well as controlled studies. On the research side, we have learned a forester research was done last year that showed that 66% of the higher ed educators that were surveyed reported that they have seen increased outcomes, not engagement, actual outcomes coming out of students that actually participated in immersive technology, which is so powerful to think about. Those same researchers that were or same educators that were surveyed, 78% of them expected increased outcomes if they were integrating VR, which is really exciting. So we are seeing actual outcomes. And we are anticipating additional level of support on the outcomes. When we think about stories that we're hearing coming out of institutions. Morehouse University here, many may have heard Dr. Messina Morris, who's here talking about the incredible work that she's doing with her program. Morehouse University was the very first metaversity. And so they're further along in understanding the impact that this has had. They've reported an increase of about 12% in student outcomes for students who have been able to integrate with this VR in the classroom, and excitingly, actually a 10% increase in student engagement and attendance to those classes. So they've seen a very big uptake in students feeling really excited about it. And then the last thing I'll point to is controlled studies. There is a language learning app that we've worked closely with, Immerse, and this is just one example. They wanted to really understand the power of retention in immersive learning. And so they did a controlled study to say, we have this experience in VR, but you can also do this experience on the desktop. And what's the difference? Is there going to be a difference? And what they found in that controlled study is that actually 92% of students retained the information better, compared to 76% of the students who retained it on desktop. And the reasons why that were hypothesized is that you are very locked in when you are in an immersive environment. You can't get distracted by the kid next to you trying to talk to or pass notes. You are really in the experience and locked in. And so to see that incredible increase in retention rates, I think is a really powerful sign.
- [08:17]
B
Love that. Thank you.
- [08:18]
C
And if I can add to that, that's very much aligned with our studies as well, with the increased retention and also enjoyment of the experience. So students like it, which is really important.
- [08:32]
B
Exactly. So, Kayleigh, from the publisher's perspective, so Pearson's got to have more learning data than anybody on the planet. Right. So how do you deal and converge with this opportunity of you've got all this data, you've got real demonstrable results as the two just shared. Where are you at with all of this?
- [08:50]
A
Yeah, so I work within Pearson Labs, so we're doing sort of the R and D experimentation and some of those studies alongside some of our efficacy folks. A couple of them are in the room actually with us. We're really focused on trying to figure out how we move this industry forward. Forward, because we have all of these studies that say that it is great for learning, it's great for efficacy, but it's a little bit of the wild west at the moment of there are so many apps out there, we don't know what is quality learning experiences and what's just gamified learning that doesn't actually result in outcomes. So we're actually doing a lot of research into a quality mark framework is what we're calling it. And if you all want to do a one on one session with our efficacy folks, we have a couple of slots left this afternoon to talk more about what that looks like. But really how, you know, how much cognitive stimulus can you put into an experience that's meaningful? Right. What does that mean for a teacher who's looking for their experience? Like where do you find these quality learning outcomes and how do you source those experiences? And we did a study with some teachers and we found that 60% of them, or 62% I think it was, have trouble finding the right content for their courses. And so that's one of the big problems that we're trying to resolve. The other big problem is around teacher professional development. And so even if a teacher can get this technology, they don't know how necessarily to use it. How do you implement it in a curriculum in a meaningful way? So it's another problem that we're actually solving with the help of Meta. We're partnered with Meta to deliver some PD courses and credentials to help teachers become these immersive educators.
- [10:30]
B
I love that the convergence of everyone on this stage will actually get this to the tipping point, which I think is outstanding. Alina, back to you. So when does immersive not work? When does it go sideways?
- [10:45]
C
I've learned a new term here at the conference. So AI native versus AI bolted. I think it's a little bit similar sort of thing here when you have an experience that's not really natively designed for immersive, let it be spatial experiences or games, especially in games. How many of you have heard a term called gamification? So few hands. And that was a very trendy thing to do maybe 10 years ago. And that's a good example where people who don't necessarily get games add sort of like sticker kind of features in products that are not really games. There is not necessarily the engagement and, and the storytelling and becoming the person who is actively doing things. But instead you see things like progress bars or let's give you a badge or now you level up or things that are sort of gamey, but they are not really, they are not true games that Somebody would consider as you might have heard of chocolate on broccoli comparison as well. So you try to make like, hey, this is a game. We have a quiz in the end or something like that, but it's not really truly a game. And I think when I started working on games, this was almost 25 years ago, serious games was the silver bullet that was going to solve all the problems in learning and education. And I think we got in games side, we got a lot of bad rap because of that sort of solutions that they're saying like, hey, this is your new educational game. But the kids don't like it. They smell from miles away that like, hey, this is not it. And don't get me wrong, there are some great educational games for sure out there, but I would argue that's really the minority.
- [12:46]
D
Yeah, if I could just jump in really quickly on that as well. I think another reason that we've heard from educators is that. And we do not support tech for tech's sake. Right? Like don't include immersive just to do immersive. If you are gonna do an experiment in the classroom, if you can do that, experiment safely in the classroom, you should do that and have the students be hands on. But there is a great example. The University of Glasgow we were working with, they asked their teachers, if you could do anything in immersive, what would you do? It wasn't the beaker and doing that, because they can do that, you know, very easily in the classroom. The physics teacher was like, I want to turn off gravity. Can we do that in VR? We can do that. And so we can see what gravity, how that impacts the drop of a ball and measure the outcome of that. Let's turn up friction. Let's do that in the classroom, because we can't do that. You know, let's take our whole classroom and go on a field trip to Anne Frank's house. Because we're learning about the story of Anne Frank. And that is very unrealistic for I would say 99% of classrooms. And so to be able to do things, there's a model that a scientist and a VR proponent at Stanford University put into place, the DICE model, which maybe people here are familiar with. Is it dangerous to do in real life? And you can do this in VR safely, Is it impossible taking your class to the moon?
- [14:16]
C
Right.
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D
You can do that in VR and you can't do that. Obviously, as an educator, is it counterproductive? A lot of times the cadavers actually sometimes, you know, it's difficult to procure those, you can do, you know, those dissections in VR very safely or cutting down a redwood tree to count the number of rings. And then lastly, is it expensive? So that example of taking your class to Anne Frank. So I think making sure that you're integrating technology when there is a purpose for it.
- [14:45]
B
No, I love that. It was a school I visited in Massachusetts that's training for offshore windmill repair. And the windmills that we can see from on the ground, much smaller than the ones that are out in the ocean, if you've ever seen them. And they fly them in on a helicopter in pairs of two. And the virtual simulation is very important before you go and try that for the first time. But great example. So sticking with you, Nikki, for a second, because teachers have said this, that we, they jump in, they buy this, they believe us collectively, they go out, they make the investment, they bring it in the classroom, and then it falls down. And when it falls down, it's about the training and how do you get them over past the purchase. So you've made the purchase. Now what happens next? Can you talk about that?
- [15:32]
D
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm actually going to lean on Kayleigh as well in a moment because I think that there is a lot in the industry that we have to do in order to support and scaffold those experiences. I think one of the things that we've seen and the trend on the content developer side is actually doing a better job of scaffolding that learning. So right now there is a very big burden on educators to identify what experiences to bring into the classroom, how to do it, when to incorporate it, and get the students to understand what they're trying to do. And that is, it's very difficult. And from an infrastructure standpoint, I think we need to look at a more holistic experience of the system and how the process can scale, which is what this panel is all about. And then PD is so important. How do teachers understand that? So I think as we start to see the trend of right now, a lot of thought leaders and XR experts are the ones really driving the innovation in the classroom. And now we're starting to see it kind of trickle down into more people that are a bit more nascent to the technology and learning what that looks like. And that there is a big burden. The content developers have a big opportunity, an example, really quickly, to share. I was in a classroom, they were learning about Renaissance art. And this developer created an experience where there was an art gallery scattered across a couple of different rooms in this virtual building, all the students from the class at the same time were in this experience. It was a co located experience together. They had to go through, find the painting and match the artist to that painting. If they did that correctly, they got a letter and there was actually a worksheet that they had to do outside of VR to put that letter under each numbered painting. And when they were completed, if they did it correctly, they got a statement. I think it was like, renaissance is fun or something. Very, very simple. But they know that they actually matched all those artists and paintings together. So because that developer incorporated this learning piece and it was scaffolded, it was very easy for the teacher to know exactly how and when. And so we'll see trends, I think, like that, where that learning is more scaffolded. I'm going to punt it to Kayleigh to talk a bit about professional development because we've been working closely in understanding how we need to do that together.
- [17:57]
A
Yeah. So I can talk a little bit about how we've set up this course in the first instance, we're going to be piloting it over the summer, so it may change. We're all about innovation and going back and fixing things that don't work. But how we have it set up right now is kind of three modules. And the most important part to us is the first is really about I know what immersive is and I know why it matters, essentially. So, like getting that buy in from stakeholders, right, from your decision makers. How do I convince decision makers that this is worth investing in? And then the second is that educators need to know how to do it for themselves. They need to actually be putting on a headset and going through and using the controllers and figuring out what that movement is, looking at different experiences, like having that knowledge base so that then they can get to the third step, which is I can do this for others, so I can implement this in my school. And that's the biggest module, obviously, because you have all the logistics, you have all of the things about cyber sickness potential and all of that kind of stuff, but even beyond that. So within Pearson, we define immersive as broader than just virtual, augmented and mixed reality, because you can achieve the same kind of immersion through virtual worlds, for example, which I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so helping educators understand that there's not one way to implement this technology. There is a variety, variety of technologies that you can use to access these experiences and to help your students access the same kind of feeling.
- [19:22]
B
No, I love that. I think in the early days of Dreamscape Learn. So, full disclosure, I was on the board of Dreamscape Learn in the beginning, and one of the things that was probably most misunderstood was the time in glass. Right. So the time that you actually had the headsets on. And so I think there was this gross misunderstanding that was like, so the students will come in the classroom and they'll put these headsets on and they'll stay there for six hours and be like, oh my God, no, that's not what happened. This is like a lab. You go to the lab in the headset for a fixed amount of time that is studied and understood before you. Before you really dig into any particular topic. And then like the one for biology, again, speaking of Dreamscape, is that you leave the experience and then you go back to that traditional scientific method that all of us used as well, which is like, I went into the experience, we found birds that were dying. Why did the birds die? I develop a hypothesis, I come out of the virtual experience, I do my scientific method, I go back in to test my hypothesis. Right. So it's this idea. This is not a gaming environment where you're plugging this on and you're on the sofa for six hours. As you do this. It's a very different experience.
- [20:35]
C
Yeah. And it's powered by story. Now you have a reason to do that test and you understand why you're doing it instead of you just being thrown into a lab. I'd actually like to add super quick sort of developer point of view here. I can put many hats on because I've worked in the games industry. I actually joined an XR startup right before the Metaverse hype curve. When everybody started to talk about Metaverse and we had a product that we. How many of you guys know Unity or Unreal? This Game Engines. I see some nodes. So familiar platforms and 80% of the world's games today are built on these platforms. Well, we had a XR environment that was accessible through the Oculus classes and it was accessible through mobile. It was even accessible to AR glasses, which were much more shabby back then. Like, was it. The Unreal was, I think, the leading platform at the time and those things would heat up. But the cool thing was that our dev team got that cross platform functionality for free. So because game engines support this, the biggest problem actually was, and I was a chief experience officer for that company and largely in charge of user experience, including the UI design. So now if you have an AR experience and you can see the room through your glasses, the ui, the user interface might need to be quite different. Whereas we found that VR and mobile actually translated really nice, we didn't need to do much changes. So that's actually a real opportunity there. If you have kind of like schools with access to higher tier equipment versus then schools who might have something like Android based devices, you can build the same thing for different platforms and then your audience accesses the experience through the platform that's accessible for them.
- [22:50]
B
I think that's probably one of the best kept secrets specifically around the work that was done at ASU is it wasn't just all the things that we were talking about is that when you actually look at the gaming science and the computer science is that all of the people that are behind the scenes to actually make it work are students. So there's a whole nother gaming, computer science part of this that is helping to deliver the experience for biology, chemistry, et cetera. So you're really doing two things at once, which I think is really interesting to explore. So Kailey, over to you. Because content has been one of the things that's really lagged in this industry, right. The technology's been way out in front and now with our friend AI, generating content is a whole lot easier, a whole lot faster. Is this rapid development content help or a threat or a disruption? Tell me your perspective from the Pearson lens.
- [23:38]
A
Yeah, so it's both, it's always both. It's great because it does allow for that rapid creation of content that was super expensive before. Right. And if you want to come to Pearson Place, I'll put in another plug. I've got my colleagues Chris, Ethan and Anton here who are doing demos of an app that we're developing where we're trying to help solve that problem of a lot of times educators will get the investment for the headsets and they don't really think about how to purchase experiences. And then you purchase an experience and it's good for one time use and then you're done. So how do you create some kind of app that you can use over and over and over again, but kind of on the flip side of that, and you can use AI by the way, we are kind of exploring what that looks like of helping to generate 3D models using something like Meshi to be able to add into your lessons? So that's kind of the good side of it is it increases our ability to help educators for cheaper in better ways. But on the flip side of that, AI is also creating this little bit of a hype cycle around again. It goes back to quality. AI does not necessarily always produce the most quality 3D models.
- [24:46]
D
Right.
- [24:47]
A
And it can't replace the things that I think are being promised that it can replace. And so there's a lot of red herrings that are kind of coming out around like, oh, well, we can AI do this and you don't even have to touch it. Like, well, no, you still need to know what. Like a little bit of 3D development skills that you can adjust a model that comes out of AI. You can't just like plug and play that. But a lot of. I think a lot of teachers are getting a little bit duped by that idea of AI can do this. For me, it really can't. You do need to have that quality check and the human in the loop for that. And so. Yeah, so both to your.
- [25:22]
B
No, it's great. Because I do think that many of the people here, I think, would worry about the pedagogical approach was kind of go out the window with some of these technologies. And I think where we've seen the most demonstration for success is when the pedagogical approach is actually dialed into how these technologies work. And I think that's an important component of it. Nikki, when you think about AI inside of xr, where is that? How does that working for you folks so far?
- [25:47]
D
Yeah, I think we have a long way to go and I think that there is still a big growth opportunity for more personalized adaptive learning where we have started to see AI integrated in those experiences. We are seeing huge advances for students. One example that I'll give there is an app called Body Swaps that you may be familiar with. This is an app to train on your soft skills. So having conversations, interview training, crucial conversations, patient bedside manner, all of those, they've been doing incredibly well in nursing to help nurses understand how to have patient conversations. They recently integrated AI so that you can now have realistic conversations back and forth and then get a very detailed report after of how you did, how was your vocabulary, how was even your perceived eye contact that you were kind of sitting up straight, you weren't looking down, which you can tell in the device. And so there are huge advances. I think that we can still go a very far way. But in the apps where those are being integrated, we're seeing really positive sentiment. I think that there is a lot to think about as we kind of go down that road and the best ways in order to just again, really hone in on student experience. I think that's going to be the key, is that Is this beneficial for the student? What is going to be the big driver there? And ensuring that what is built is not tech for tech's sake again, but that is actually really beneficial for the end user.
- [27:30]
B
Excellent. So Alina, when AI and game based learning tell us about what you folks are doing, I can imagine it's pretty deep. And share that with us.
- [27:39]
C
Well, we've been building some quite interesting technology for play based learning. So our lab has three pillars. One is play to learn, which is all about what can students learn when they are playing games. But then we also have make to learn which is student. What can you learn when you are creating a game? We get a lot of students at asu who are those students who I want to work in the games industry, but a lot of these students will never work in the games industry. However, like one of our friends likes to say, who is here right now in the room as well, that games is this beautiful, beautiful Trojan horse for students that makes building and learning and doing and creating projects much more exciting. So we use games for that as well. And then the last bit, how do we connect these two carriers? And I like your Dreamscape example with the student workers. We have students working in our lab as well and building these experiences in the play to learn side where we are talking about. We are not building educational games in the lab. What we are doing is there are a lot of great games out there. Think of a game like Assassin's Creed, somebody might have played it. You can learn a lot about history. Think about game like World of Warcraft. You're managing your guild, you're managing the members. You can learn about project management, community building, things like that. But in education, those benefits and those learning outcomes are not really surfaced. It's difficult to argue to a teacher like hey, you should have kids play this game because it teaches you something. So what we have built is basically an AI overlay that observes the student playing or the learner playing the game and then builds a knowledge graph based on it. We call this technology Miranda. It's still in quite early stages, but we are moving to the place where we are going to be doing efficacy studies and having a lot of students playing different kind of games and finding out surfacing those learning outcomes comes from the gameplay and that's very scalable. We are all about scale and being able to bring these technologies. Our concept of learner in the lab, yes, we teach ASU students, but we really want to have global reach, especially reach underserved communities. I'm here without my Immediate team supporting me today because they just left to Africa. And I heard from them, they go into Nigeria and I heard from them that one of our team members got his visa just when he was at the airport. So talk about living in the edge. But yeah, it's global reach scale that is super important and AI is really helping us to make that happen.
- [30:36]
A
Well, and it pulls on something that we're really passionate about at Pearson, which is authentic assessment, assessment in the flow of work, assessment in the flow of learning. So instead of having to pull students out of their regular class time to assess them. Can you use something like a game to do that kind of assessment? And a lot of especially K12 schools are really interested in the transferable skills, you can call them soft skills, transferable skills, whatever it is. And I think that immersive technology can give you ways to assess that that we've never really had before. Like, how do you sit a student down and say, like, all right, answer this multiple choice question about what it means to be a good communicator.
- [31:11]
B
Right, Exactly. And I think it's. Oh, and it's really important in the time of AI because I think we can simulate better about what, what we predict around the future of work and what these folks and students will be experiencing. I want to shift gears for a bit because I do think there's a commercial question that comes to mind about this business. So, Nikki, with you, what's the business model question? Is this a lease? Is this a. Like, how do you, how does one sell this and how does the business model work? So that way the people are buying it, understand it.
- [31:45]
D
Yeah, I think from a meta perspective, I mean, we sell the hardware, right. So we are selling Quest into schools. Actually earlier this year we announced that we are getting out of the enterprise business. So we developed, our team actually developed Meta Quest for Education. It was a big announcement at the beginning of the year that we actually were not going to be moving forward with Quest for Education or any of our enterprise products. And actually the reason is because it's better if we get out of the way. And so from a business perspective, Meta still is selling the hardware and that's kind of the area that we are selling into. There's third party management that you can still layer on top of that. That doesn't go through Meta, that's ArborXR, ManageXR, any of these other third party management systems that schools are already used to using for Chromebooks and iPads and things like that. So it really becomes more of just the Technology and then it is going to be on the content developers and selling their sol into the platform and into the schools to sell their licenses. But we've taken a step out to say, you know, we felt like we were complicating things and adding a bit of friction into the market where if we get out of the way, I think that those issues can resolve themselves.
- [33:03]
B
Yeah, no, I agree. So, Kaylee, I could see you going for the mic. I'd love to get your. Because I know that for my nearly decade at cengage, we really struggled with this as well, which is getting both conceptual buy in insight about content and then what do you do and how involved does the book publishers getting this? I'd love to hear your perspective.
- [33:22]
A
Yeah, so I think that that's been one of the tough things about immersive education is that there's not a traditional ROI metric that you can use. Right. It's not like, oh, because we implemented this, we now have a 30% increase in revenue. Right. Like you would in a normal business case, these are more qualitative metrics that are more difficult to measure. So, like, if you put students through these mixed or augmented reality experiences, virtual reality experiences, these virtual worlds, does that mean that it opens up a new career path for them that they've never really thought of? Like, that is a very strong metric, but very difficult to measure. Like, do students have that increased engagement? You can measure that in some ways, but then how does that result in something monetary for your business to like continue investing in? Right. So I think it's about putting together a more holistic picture than just the traditional ROI metrics. And I think in education too, in general, it hasn't really changed the way we measure students. What we measure students on hasn't concretely changed since we were creating factory workers. So if you were here in the last session, they were talking about that creativity. And that's not what the education system is currently set up to measure. And so using very old school ways of measuring, with new technologies and new ways of learning, that gap is becoming wider and wider. And so it's all about using that holistic, the whole student. What is this doing for our students and for their future potential and for their creativity and things like that? Again, that we don't measure. So I think that the system is ripe for change. I know everybody talks about that, but once we kind of can get over that hurdle and start really looking at a more qualitative ROI rather than quantitative.
- [35:03]
B
Yeah, no, I like that. I'm going to Go to you.
- [35:05]
C
Anyway, just a quick comment that's really interesting because those are exactly the sort of skills that we keep hearing in this conference that are going to be the important skills that are going to keep us humans still relevant, at least for a while.
- [35:20]
B
No going to that. Alina, when you think about the systemic adoption of this, ASU is again identified as one of the most innovative schools on the planet. And so how do you get this to the not most innovative schools on the planet? How do you get this to other places?
- [35:38]
C
Yeah, I've been working with one of the largest school districts in the US recently and there are a lot of hurdles when you try to get technology into classrooms, like the approved vendor processes and all that, and just limitations that these schools have. Like we have a huge stack of laptops in our labor because quite often it is in schoolrooms, the technology is the Chromebooks. And if you want to run an experience that involves building games, making games, or playing a little bit more advanced video games, you need the equipment. So that really is a hurdle. And then when you are actually experiencing right now a little bit of a double whammy in the sense that that we need to go through the school's approved vendor process, but we as the lab are not actually the bill maker of the product that is not approved in the school district. So we need to work on both sides to make sure that we get the vendor engaged and then we get the school district engaged. And there is a lot of human sort of things as well that can work against you if you don't work well with people or can work for you. For instance, in this process, I get a little note from somebody from inside the school district who is like, oh, let me know when you submit that application. I can nudge it a little bit. So we are still humans here trying to make things work together. That's an important aspect as well. So there is a lot of hurdles for sure, but persistence and working those human skills.
- [37:23]
B
So Nikki, when you think about 2028, we're sitting up here, what did we have to do right, to make this mainstream? So three years, couple years from now, what do we have to get right for this to work?
- [37:38]
D
It's an important question. I come back to scaffolded experiences that are clear and giving teachers the right tools to implement the right experiences in the classroom. Again, not technology for technology's sake, but technology is really advancing student outcomes. And I think that AI and adaptive learning can really play a big part in that.
- [38:02]
B
No, I like that. And same question Kayleigh, to you, because I think that what's clear from the conversation is that you two need to travel together. This is not going to work with just one of you, not the other. And so I think that's very apparent. So what's your perspective? We're sitting up here 2028. What did we have to get right for this to be used by everybody in the audience?
- [38:21]
A
Yeah. So I think that again, it kind of goes back to expanding our view of what immersive technology is. I think in a lot of ways it is more mainstream than people realize because you have like the Fortnites, the Minecraft educations, the Roblox educations.
- [38:33]
D
Right.
- [38:33]
A
That are still kind of in that immersive technology lens. But I think that as new technologies come out, like the AI wearables. Right, like the meta Ray Bans, that those are also immersive technologies and not being afraid to look into them and see what they can do and see how they can be implemented to really increase student outcomes. Again, like Nikki said, it's all about the quality and the quality mark framework that we've been working on and making sure that that is a very clear cut thing, that we have a road for people to follow and that we can create that funnel into adoption.
- [39:08]
D
And I just want to plus one, what you said, Jim, about industry working together, I think none of us on this stage can do this alone. And I think that that continued partnership and willingness to kind of understand each other's strengths and be able to support the ecosystem as a whole is so important.
- [39:26]
B
I completely agree. So, last question, lightning round, one bet each. Alina, we'll start with you. So what's your big bet and what needs to happen for this to be mainstream?
- [39:40]
C
Can we start from that direction? So I get a little bit of. There are so many things going on in my mind, so if somebody else wants to take it first.
- [39:48]
D
It's a big question for a lightning round. But I will actually say, I think something that Kaylee and Pearson and I have been thinking a lot about is adaptive or, excuse me, the future of assessment. And I think this idea of adaptive learning and personalization is going to be really, really key.
- [40:06]
A
Yeah, I was going to say something similar. It was like these AI wearables that I just talked about. Right. Is how do you use those to assess in the flow of work and do that kind of stealth assessment type stuff.
- [40:15]
C
Yeah. And thank you for the ideas, ladies. I think really being able to surface those learning outcomes and build trust. Like, hey, look, this really works. And efficacy studies. I know those are expensive, but those are needed to show that, like, hey, this is not just hype. We have real results, real students going through these experiences, and we can see an increase in the outcomes.
- [40:41]
D
Plus one on trust. I think that's a really important concept.
- [40:45]
B
Excellent, ladies. Thank you very much. Outstanding panel.
- [40:49]
C
Thank you.
- [40:49]
D
Jim.
- [40:49]
C
Thank you so much.