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Edtech Insiders
Week in EdTech 5/13/26: AI Literacy, Student Data Privacy, AI-Native Schools & Future of Assessment! Feat. Lisa O’Masta of Learning.com, Aaron Feuer of Panorama Education, Larisa Hovannisian of Armenia Education Initiative and Alexandra Walsh of Amplify
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- [00:00]
Ben
This season of EdTech Insiders is brought to you by Cooley LLP. Cooley is the go to law firm for education and ed tech innovators offering industry informed counsel across the pre K to gray spectrum. With a multidisciplinary approach and a powerful edtech ecosystem, Cooley helps shape the future of education. This season of EdTech Insiders is brought to you by Starbridge. Every year, K12 districts and higher ed institutions spend over half a trillion dollars, but most sales teams miss the signals. Starbridge tracks early signs like board minutes, budget drafts and strategic plans and then helps you turn them into personalized outreach fast. Win the deal before it hits the RFP stage. That's how top EdTech teams stay ahead.
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Hello EdTech Insiders listeners. This special series of guest interviews feature conversations with Lisa OMASTA, CEO@Learning.com, aaron Fewer, CEO and Co Founder at Panorama Education Larisa Hovanisian, Founder and CEO at Armenia Education Initiative Alexandra Walsh, Chief Product Officer at Amplify. Please enjoy.
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Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology technology industry. From funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, K12, higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders.
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Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar. And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders plus where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's podcast.
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Foreign.
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Tech Insider listeners I am so honored today to be joined by Lisa Omasta, CEO of Learning.com Learning.com focuses on making every student digitally ready. Previously she was President of Learning A to Z, expanding its reach by 40%, and CEO of illustrative mathematics. She holds a BA from Towson University and an MBA from Johns Hopkins University. Welcome to EdTech Insiders. Lisa Omasta thanks Ben.
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Lisa Omasta
Great to be here.
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Ben
Tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you get into education and ed tech in the first place? And then tell us a little bit about learning.com?
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Lisa Omasta
yeah, no, I'd be happy to. So I've been in the edtech space for, gosh, over 25 years. If I think about my journey here, I started right out of college. I actually started in financial services for like a hot second. And what I realized was that I didn't like making rich people richer. It just didn't feel good. And I was able to have a great opportunity to to land in Education and kind of from that perspective. And I fell in love. It was like the perfect thing that I was able to do and make meaningful impact in something that I care deeply about. And so that kind of followed through working, whether it was from the publishing side to the nonprofit side with a lecture of mathematics. One of the things that was just a constant is what can you do? It's in the best interest of students. And when this opportunity with learning.com came up, it was personal. I'm a parent of four kids. It happened during the COVID time period. I personally had a kid who was impacted in a way circling around this idea of students not necessarily understanding how to use technology and parents not knowing how to support it. And unfortunately, or fortunately, one of my kids, my youngest kid, ended up attempting suicide. And because they got caught up in some really bad stuff, fortunately, fast forward, he's doing great. He's continuing to thrive. But there's so many stories like that and parents should not have to about think about that. Parents should not have to worry what their kids are doing and should have those pieces. And so learning.com became really a personal thing about how do we make sure that students know how to do better and how teachers and how educators and how parents and families can do so much better.
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Ben
Everyone thinks, oh, we've got parenting figured out in the digital age because we work in the space. We're just like everybody else trying to figure out how to support our learners. And they've also faced a digital tsunami that in our childhood we never had to face. So there's so many opportunities but also challenges in this moment. So one of the things that everyone is talking about is social media, AI, cell phone ban, screen time and learning.com is really an empowerment play to help students navigate them. But in the space, there's also a move or a call for banning all technology. What inspired you to explore the impact of cell phone bans alongside digital literacy programs and@learning.com and what trends have you observed in schools implementing those types of ban or not ban policies?
- [05:01]
Lisa Omasta
There's this thinking that bans and digital literacy are opposing strategies and they're not. They're actually extremely complimentary. And bans can help reduce immediate classroom distraction. Taking technology away may change behavior for a period of time, but it doesn't automatically build that self regulation and build that judgment that so important. It's the instruction that's building that judgment. Right? Students need explicit instruction in balance, boundaries, safety, judgment. If you think about the social pressures, the algorithm driven content, the cyber bullying all of that follows students home. And so if we really want students to be successful in life, we really can't just teach them that. The only way to manage that is by having an adult take that away from them.
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Ben
You're really not talking about just like a digital citizenship curriculum. You're talking about something more comprehensive. How do you build developmentally appropriate digital literacy programs that attack or manage things like attention, social pressure differently than some of the other programs that are out there?
- [06:04]
Lisa Omasta
We kind of focus on something I like to think about is stop, think, choose. Digital literacy can teach students what is happening and what to do about it. And we want students to stop, stop before you do something, and then think, is it smart? Is it safe? Is it fair? Is it accurate? And then make a choice. Is this the right thing for the right time? Because if you think about a device by itself, that's not necessarily the distraction. It's everything on them. It's all the things you just talked about, the notifications, the algorithms, all of those pieces, those are the problem. Oftentimes we hear a lot of focus at the high school level. We hear a lot of focus at the college level. And I think those are absolutely important in those higher grades. We need to teach students, and at that point, we're trying to teach them how to interrupt habits that are already taking hold. But the reality is we need to start in those early grades because that's when the habits start to form. What can we do to help them understand what these devices do and how they can pull their attention and make sure that they start to learn what are the ways that they can balance and create safety much earlier in that process.
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Ben
So for like K8, can you give a concrete example of like a before and after?
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Lisa Omasta
There's an interesting analogy I like to think about. So many times we think about, like addiction and we think about. You'll oftentimes hear the analogy with cell phone bans. We need to remove it and ban it like we do alcohol. But the reality is, if you think about technology in the classroom and cell phones, like we think about nutrition, the reality is kids are still going to eat, right? We can't just ban our way out of kids eating. And you think of a traditional nutrition. We remove junk food from the vending machines, right? We remove all the sodas and the junk, but we still teach the kids nutrition. There is a lot of research out there that has demonstrated the cell phone bans are helping to remove a lot of those distractions. There's a recent study from the National Bureau of economic research. And they were able to find that it helped reductions in unexcused abse and it helped to improve test scores, which is great, but we really need to talk about it in terms of that being the first step. I was having a conversation with a district here in Arizona. It was a seventh grader, a young woman I was talking to. They'd had cell phone bands in their school. They'd been using our tools and our digital literacy for about four or five years. And I asked the student, and I was like, all right, you know, what did you think? Have you learned anything? And she's like, well, I don't like the cell phone bans. I said, well, has it changed anything that you've done? And so the district has seen that the bands have impacted distraction. And what this student showed me, I guess the biggest thing is now, before I post anything or before I use anything, I think, how would my mom feel if she saw this? That's the stop moment. Right. That is so unbelievably critical. If we can get every student to just stop, think, and then make a choice, it's a game changer.
- [08:39]
Ben
Stop and think and make a choice is great advice for all of us at any age. A lot of what you've talked about has been a growing issue over the last decade. And now AI is coming in. It's becoming an integral part of students online experience. What key skills should they develop to navigate the AI landscape responsibly? And how are you supporting schools and educators and ultimately students themselves to navigate that?
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Lisa Omasta
Yeah, AI is part of that full online environment. It's not just a standalone tool. And so the most important AI skills are not just how do you use it, which is important, but there it's about those judgment skills again. Can I trust this? Should I share this? Is this trying to influence me? Should I go and ask a parent permission, or is this something I need to think about? And so we really want to make sure that schools and students are thinking about what's the privacy? How do we make sure that these students are protected? What should they never enter into AI? And so if we can teach them, don't ever use your personal information on AI. Right. They need to start to understand and be able to recognize what does manipulation look like? What does persuasion look like? Because if you think about the way AI communicates, it comes off with a lot of confidence. Right. You are so smart. Thank you so much for this. Right. And it comes up with that confidence. And we need to teach students what that means. What that looks like and how to interpret that because we're not just preparing students for that one tool. Right? We're really preparing them for where AI is embedded and all the experiences that are around them.
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Ben
We'll be right back. Innovation in pre K to gray learning is powered by exceptional people. For over 15 years, EdTech companies of all sizes and stages have trusted higher education to find the talent that drives impact. When specific skills and experiences are mission critical. Higher education is a partner that delivers offering permanent, fractional and executive recruitment. Higher education knows the go to market talent you need. Learn more@higheredu.com that's H I R E edu.com
- [10:54]
so let's talk a little bit about educators. One of the challenges is that the pace of change is incredible. There's not only what's the latest trends on TikTok or Facebook, but also ways in which AI is integrating into companionship apps and things like this. How do you ensure that digital literacy programs remain relevant and effective as technology and AI continue to evolve rapidly? And how do you support educators in staying ahead of things?
- [11:22]
Lisa Omasta
One of the things I'm happy about, one of the things that make me uncomfortable is with all the noise, good and bad around AI, there's a lot of new resources that are coming out in the market. The bigger concern I have, I mean, we've been doing this for 20 years@elearning.com and so one of the things we think about is this is not a one time thing. This isn't a I took a class check. Let's move on. One of the questions that districts really need to think about is can this content keep up? Is it built in a way? Where does the organization have the background and history to make sure that it's up to date? Is it physically built in a way that they can make sure all the content is updated? I was looking at a very popular AI tool and it had some guidance, free guidance in a tool that was not designed for digital literacy. But it was this free guidance that basically said students should let AI do 80% of the work. It made my heart hurt. Right, because the idea was is that you should put your work in, get AI to help you think of the idea. Good digital literacy is about teaching kids to think first and then kind of use it. So it's actually the exact opposite. So be really cognizant of not only can it be updated, but is it really grounded in. There's so many different benchmarks right now that are defining what good AI literacy looks like. And we need to really make sure that it can be updated. Asking those questions considering whether the product architect is it supporting kind of fast and practical updates and then what's the long term relevance? Right. Requires both strong instructional design and kind of that operational consistency and capacity around that.
- [12:52]
Ben
Yeah. When we implement things, we want to implement it really well one time and then essentially have that scaffolded support for educators, students and parents alike, all dynamically updated so that we're not constantly throwing new curveballs at our staff and students. That's not how for most districts it's playing out. It feels more reactive than proactive. I'm curious, for the schools and districts that have been more on the proactive side, what are the elements of their playbook and what advice would you have for a school district, board or superintendent if they wanted to get on the front foot in this? What are the elements that they need to have as part of their AI resiliency plan for staff and students?
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Lisa Omasta
There's kind of two things we're hearing a lot of right now. The districts that are leaning into AI or just in all of these pieces, the first thing we're hearing is we need teachers first.
- [13:44]
Alexandra Walsh
Right.
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Lisa Omasta
We got to get all of our teachers structured and learning on it. And then we need to get the tools in place to make our teachers more efficient. Not necessarily bad that you want to do both of those things. I think that's fantastic. The challenge is, is there's this whole other piece around the student side. Students aren't waiting for teachers to figure it out. Honestly, by the time teachers do figure it out, it's have changed again. And so the idea that teachers are somehow going to stay up to speed and continue to move this forward and we can just wait and then once they're comfortable, we can get students on board. Unfortunately, that's not a reality that's going to work.
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Ben
Yeah. Recent studies are showing like 80%, 90% penetration of just ChatGPT itself.
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Lisa Omasta
That's right.
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Ben
In student populations, there's issues with cheating. There's issues with relationships with AI companions, There's issues with appropriate access. Many kids don't realize that the data that they send to AI is also being used to train the model. So there's all these potential data privacy violations too.
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Lisa Omasta
That's right. You used the word, Ben. That I keep hearing is schools are so focused on kids cheating. So kids have been cheating for 100 years. Kids are going to cheat for 100 more years. We can make it harder for them for sure. But if cheating is what people are worried about for AI, and that's not why they're going to teach them the digital literacy and the AI literacy, then they're focused on the wrong piece. The scarier things are the chat bots. The scarier things are how students are understanding this materials, the unconscious bias that's built into these AI things that we need to teach kids how to understand that the content is not necessarily right. So teaching kids those pieces. Yes. Learning when to use it and when not to use it and not to use it in cheating circumstances is important. But if I think about what it means to be really safe and healthy and all those things to make sure these kids get what they need, the AI literacy piece. And when you talk about when schools are focusing on teachers first and missing that other piece, which is that digital literacy and AI literacy, they can happen at the same time. One of the things we focus on@learning.com is we've created our digital literacy and our AI literacy where students and teachers learn together because we recognize that it can't just be one, then the other, this single parallel track, that there's actually value when students and teachers learn together. Right. It helps to build that bond in that relationship, but then it also enables students and teachers to learn and not necessarily kind of wait for those pieces and parts.
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Ben
Yeah. I'm seeing so many occasions where the students are two or three steps ahead that I also think that digital literacy programs where there's peer to peer learning can also be really successful if there's a sense that, well, other kids are using AI to cheat. Should I, shouldn't I? If that's in the shadows, if that conversation is not out in the open, it can feel very zero sum. But when you have teachers who are empowered just to facilitate the conversation, frankly, it's amazing how students actually want to have an ethical playing field and they want to use AI for its positive outcomes, not its negative outcomes. Learning.com, you've been around for a long time, but now the need for content updates is just so month to month. How have you as a CEO thought about the content challenge of staying on top of things, staying relevant, and continuing to push these out in a way that partners can implement it successfully? What's been a change for you in terms of how you run the business?
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Lisa Omasta
We actually don't have content creators in house developing our AI literacy material. For example, we, we actually have a core subject matter expert, a group of eight individuals who are kind of the front lines of a lot of what's going on in the world. And so we're looking at it from all of those lenses and we are working with them very closely all the time. Like what is working, what's not working, what are you hearing, what are you seeing? And then we're closely aligning to the different, whether it's AI Edu or any of the core frameworks that they've been put in place recently, we're working with them. We're obviously working with Innovate. Edu. We're working with a lot of the organizations that are really front and center, along with those thought leaders and subject matter experts that are helping design our materials, review our materials, and then we're putting them in the classroom, beta testing them, making sure they're working, making those changes, and then talking to companies like, what are you looking for in students? Knowing and understanding from an AI literacy perspective. So our goal is to really making sure that we're listening and hearing both what is needed, but also what we know is going to be coming so that we can kind of get in front of it and make sure that we have the information to begin with.
- [18:10]
Ben
If people want to find out more about learning.com, obviously they go to learning.com but what are some resources that you feel like people in the field should be accessing through learning.com on our site
- [18:22]
Lisa Omasta
there's a resource center. We call it our AI Resource Center. On the resource center, there's a couple pieces. We just pushed out the launch of our K8AI literacy foundational resources. It's kind of a starter kit if you just want to get in there. It's freely available. You can get access it on our website that provides lessons for it's breaking down into K2, 3, 5 and 6, 8 resources. Parents can use it with their kids. Teachers can use it with their students. We've also provided a policy tool which really just is a guide to help districts and states really think about their policy. Also on that resource center, you'll see a lot of all the freely available teacher professional learning. We have brought them all together, curated a lot of the free resources that are available from everything from Microsoft and Google and IBM and brought all of those resources together so that districts have all those tools that they can access quickly get their certification for teachers. And those are all available on our website as well.
- [19:18]
Ben
Lisa Omasta, CEO of Learning.com it's been incredible to have you. I'm very optimistic about our future and empowering kids to stop think and then ultimately make a good choice. I'm going to need to take some of that advice myself too. So I appreciate the mission that you're on and thanks so much for being such a great community member in this space.
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Lisa Omasta
Thank you.
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Ben
And we'll be hearing about more of it, hopefully coming soon.
- [19:41]
Lisa Omasta
All right, Ben, thank you so much. I appreciate the conversation.
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Ben
I am so excited to be joined by Aaron, the CEO of Panorama Education, his 14 year old company. But I probably met you, Aaron, right around when Nico was one year old and Panorama was a little more than a glint in your eye, but still forging its way. For those of you who don't know what Panorama does, it helps school improve outcomes for 15 million-plus students using data and technology. It's been a real evolution too for Panorama. Where you started and now the robust services that you offer. You started Panorama in high school driven by a belief that elevating student voice is essential to support every learner's success. Nothing really could be truer today. Thanks so much for joining us, Aaron Fuhrer, CEO of Panorama.
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Aaron Fuhrer
Thank you, Ben. I am thrilled to be here.
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Ben
You've had an incredible journey. Can you just tell our listeners a little bit about how the arc from founding through acquisitions, you've really had a remarkable run. Help us make some meaning of that arc.
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Aaron Fuhrer
You know, as you mentioned, I began working what became Panorama as a high school student in LA Unified, thinking about how do we help schools better understand students? What are their strengths, what's their story? What do they need? And we officially founded Panorama as juniors in college 14 years ago. Again, this simple idea, how do we help understand every student and take action to support students? You know, the beginning of Panorama was we were literally in our dorm rooms helping a couple local districts use data to improve and fast forward. Our vision for Panorama has been to build the end to end system for supporting students and driving learning. You know, the name Panorama is for this like full 360 of a student. And it's been an amazing journey. You know, today we serve about one in four students in the U.S. we've acquired two amazing companies, Mesa supporting workforce readiness, class companions, supporting instruction. For me, what I'm really excited about is I think this opportunity in this moment to help shape what the future of education is.
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Alexandra Walsh
Right?
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Aaron Fuhrer
It's one thing to help power what school is today. A whole different challenge to say, how do we make school better for the next generation of students?
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Ben
The orientation around the 360 view of the student was powerful when you started, but even more powerful now with AI. It's been a really exciting time, but also a scary Time for schools and districts and full disclosure. My school district, when I was on school board, we purchased Panorama. You've talked a lot about how student data privacy has to be the foundation of any AI strategy. What does getting it right actually look like?
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Aaron Fuhrer
There's a proliferation of AI tools that are being used in classrooms across the country. I love the innovation, but it's the wild west out there and I think we need in districts a top down focus on vetting. What are the products? Where is student data going? Who's using it? You know, what are the most popular AI products used in schools? You know, they're using a company based in Singapore to host student data. We can make choices about protecting student data privacy. So for me, level one about getting this right is going from this wild wild west to districts really controlling what tools are we allowed to use and vetting the privacy and security. Especially in this moment where AI makes it so easy to build something. There are a lot of apps that are like quickly coded using AI but don't meet the security standards. We have a good set of standards for what security should look like in schools. We just got to double down and support that. AI is most powerful when you're able to bring in real data that matters. We see teachers pushing the limits of where they're willing to bring data in to support AI. I think the opportunity we have in a school system is to say it's not that we should never use data with regard to AI, so we have to find a way to use data safely. I think a lot of the leading districts are saying, we know we have to use data with AI. Let's do this in a way that's safe, secure and no student data is being used to train a model. And we have our own walled garden where we can use data securely as a district. And I think that lets us both get the benefits and harness the security side.
- [23:36]
Ben
Yeah. And so much of Panorama's value proposition is around trust. Trust with students, trust with parents, and trust with the district. And it feels like trust is in short supply right now. In the education sector, a lot of what you bring to light is not just academic, but social, emotional and state of mind and sentiment. What kind of analysis are schools and districts doing? What are people using AI insights for? With Panorama, the first place where folks
- [24:05]
Aaron Fuhrer
are using AI has been using AI to support the full spectrum of student support for students. So one, identifying who are the students who need more help and might be falling through the cracks and then helping to identify like, what can we do next? To help support these students. Students to save time on tasks that take teachers away from students. So, for example, part of Panorama is we're helping counselors use AI to double check student transcripts. People don't really recognize this, but counselors spend about 20% of their time double checking, are my kids taking the right classes to graduate? And it's a great example. We can use AI to help counselors complete that task, in effect, giving counselors 20% more time with their students. I'm really passionate now about how we can use AI to help educators shift where they spend their time. Can we make schools more human as a result of really effective use of AI?
- [24:58]
Ben
I feel like the data has been living in so many silos, and having been a school board member myself, we're really trying so hard to connect these dots, and then you're missing all of this at home and student context. I'd love to hear about how you connect the dots, specifically with MTSs and other intervention programs, but also more broadly for districts that partner with Panorama.
- [25:23]
Aaron Fuhrer
On the Panorama side, what our focus has been is to say, what is the full picture of a student? What's their story? What are their strengths? What are their needs? And I think it's important to understand that traditionally, all of these things live in different systems. You've got attendance over here, You've got behavior over here. You've got student safety over here, You've got literacy here, you've got math over here, and so forth. And the problem this creates is that it becomes really hard to actually, really understand how a student is doing. And so, you know, an example in Panorama. One part of Panorama is that we're focused on helping understand what a student needs. Next. And an example would be, let's say you see a student who's not reading at grade level. If you're looking in silos, you just think about literacy. But if you're in Panorama, you're asking, is this an attendance issue? Wait. The student actually has missed so much school. And it's not that they're in school learning to read as they weren't in school, or, hey, you know, this student here is a behavior issue. Wait, they don't feel safe at school. They don't find school interesting. And so a lot of what we're trying to encourage is looking at everything about a student together, because you start to realize that most things aren't exactly like what you think they are. And I think we're finding that teachers can make much more gains in supporting students when they understand all of the dots versus just one piece.
- [26:35]
Ben
As we've seen many, many more districts try to experiment with AI and AI tooling, where do you think they get it wrong and where do you think the space is heading long term? What gives you the most hope that it's going to turn out favorable for students and families?
- [26:53]
Aaron Fuhrer
So foundation One is data security and privacy, which we've talked about here, and I want to just anchor that as the foundation. But two is quality. I have this silly thing. My personal errand benchmark is I go to ChatGPT and I say I need to get my car washed. I live 100ft from the car wash. Should I walk or Drive? And ChatGPT says I should walk to the car wash because I'm so close. It underscores that like AI is so smart and also like pretty stupid. And so where I'm seeing districts getting this wrong is not focusing enough on quality. We've been auditing some of those popular tools to help teachers generate IEPs for students. And they're generating IEPs that look good, but they're not compliant and they're not good IEPs. We focus on quality in most things we do right. Curriculum quality, for example. Why don't we do the same with our AI tools? We should audit every AI tool we use. Like, do we like the lesson plans? Do we like the iep like the supports? Another thing I'll say is AI can generate really good outcomes. One of our districts, Mesquite isd, has had a real focus on using AI to support special education and they've been able to get extremely high quality guidance to empower their educators and help write good IEPs. But it took a lot of work, a lot of effort and a lot of guidance to get that quality. A lot of folks thinking these out of the box tools are going to get you there and it's not. It's taking us backwards.
- [28:15]
Ben
What has it been like to evolve the company from a really tiny, scrappy team? How has that evolution been for you personally and professionally? What gives you joy today in this much larger company, even though you've moved far beyond those early startup days?
- [28:33]
Aaron Fuhrer
I love the long term journey. I love the early days when I was like coding the entire product myself. And I'm having so much fun today when I'm running like, you know, a 300 person team. I like the challenge and the learning of every scale of the business. And what I appreciate is that as you scale right, the problems get harder, but also you get better at solving them right. The Scale of problems you're addressing are bigger, but you've grown. You're constantly learning. A new job, a new challenge, new opportunity.
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Ben
Right?
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Aaron Fuhrer
So for example, right now it's how do we model effective, safe, secure AI use internally? Entirely new problem, uncharted territory, you know, really exciting. What I love about Panorama today is that with a larger team and a larger scale.
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Ben
Right.
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Aaron Fuhrer
We have 2,000 districts in 10 states that use Panorama. It enables a level of ambition to think bigger when we hear problems that are coming to us.
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Ben
That's awesome. How have you been reimagining product and product roles with the advent of AI? Where do you see human in the loop or even human dominated skills as required? And where do you see AI accelerating or holding back your work?
- [29:40]
Aaron Fuhrer
I think AI forces some really good questions about what should always remain human. You contact Panorama support. You are getting a Panorama human. You're looking at what is checking our systems to make sure in the background they're all working properly. You're getting AI to help do that. So what I mean by a team is kind of two lenses. One is how do I get everyone superpowers? I see AI as an amplifier to the humans on our team. How does every role at Panorama kind of supercharge what they can achieve through AI? Right. As CEO, I'm now coding again. I'm building my own AI agents for myself. Right? I'm like, how do I become twice the CEO I can be? When you do that, you don't need a smaller team, you actually need a bigger team because your team is accomplishing so much more. It's very easy to feel tempted to just vibe code the heck out of stuff. And I just don't think it's the right answer. Right. I think something we focused on is that we invest so much in trust and security and privacy and quality. That's not something that AI can do out of the box. I see people taking the easy button of AI doing things from a development perspective that isn't yielding good products for kids or good security. How do we use AI to accelerate our work while keeping trust, security and privacy front of mind? With that, I think we're going to see a bifurcation in quality in K12. Right. You're going to see stodgy companies not using AI falling behind. You're going to see companies using too much AI and not creating good things for kids. And the hard part is going to be charting a middle path like we're trying to do where AI helps us move a bunch faster. But you get an even higher level of quality. You're not making those trade offs with AI.
- [31:17]
Ben
I'm curious, for entrepreneurs who are starting out their journey, what advice would you give them if they're building AI natively? You built data privacy from day zero, you built quality control from day zero. And it's alluring to have the AI capacity to generate through generative AI. What advice would you have for founders that are starting their journey today in education, especially in K12?
- [31:43]
Aaron Fuhrer
So I think it's important to understand that AI isn't the easy button. AI enables you to get something really great in front of customers quicker than you could before. And that's what I love about it, right? You can be more innovative, you can move faster. That's amazing. The caveat is you have to understand the double edged sword that creates and I see too many entrepreneurs falling in love with the optimistic glossy side and not understanding the double edged sword. And the double edged sword is that it can be a shortcut and AI1 is not going to get you quality out of the box and two, AI is unlikely to set up the right security and privacy infrastructure out of the box for you. And it's hard because when you use your product and you test it right, you use AI and you're like, oh, this works great, it looks great and so forth, you don't test on the back end to actually make sure that it has all the right protections. And we're starting to see companies with security vulnerabilities that happen because they use AI in the wrong way. So then the challenge for entrepreneurs is what should AI do and what should AI not do? And how do you build a security and privacy foundation that you can stand behind and trust? You can't delegate that to AI while also using AI to help yourself build faster. The generation before me instilled in me that we have a responsibility in terms of quality and data protection of the students we serve. And I want to make sure this next generation harnesses all of the power of AI, but also takes so seriously kind of our responsibility as guardians for the students we serve.
- [33:13]
Ben
Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. I learned so much Every time I talk to you, it's always such a pleasure. If people want to find out more about Panorama, either for their school district, if they're thinking about a job, or they're thinking about learning from the amazing products you have, where can they find you?
- [33:29]
Aaron Fuhrer
Please check us out@panoramaed.com I will give a plug. We are hiring across the company and looking for folks who want to join us on this journey and of course doing a tremendous amount. We are adding new school districts are joining Panorama every day. So please check us out@panoramaed.com wonderful.
- [33:46]
Ben
Well Aaron, thanks so much for joining EdTech Insiders today, listeners. Please check it out. It's happening in EdTech. You're going to hear about it here on EdTech Insiders. I am so excited to have Larissa Hovanisian, the founder and CEO of Armenia Education Initiative. This is a national education ecosystem that she built from the ground up, starting with a flagship fellowship in partnership with Teach for All and has evolved into a movement for systemic change. A diaspora Armenian who moved to Yerevan at 23, she is now launching Armenia's first AI native public school. I am so excited to learn more. Welcome to the podcast, Larissa.
- [34:25]
Larissa Hovanisian
Thanks Ben. I'm so happy to be here.
- [34:27]
Ben
So let's dive in. You've described Armenia as a leapfrog nation for education innovation. What do you mean by that? And what allows countries with deeply entrenched systems to rethink schooling in this AI moment?
- [34:39]
Larissa Hovanisian
I think countries like Armenia don't really have the luxury of doing things in increments, and I think a country like Armenia has a pretty underdeveloped system. Ultimately, when you don't have a hundred year old institution to defend, I think you can really just ask the real question, what are we supposed to be designing for? Given everything that we know about the world? I think Armenia has the motivation, the talent and also the political will to ask that question very seriously. And to me, that's what leapfrogging really means. It means that you don't just upgrade an old system, you really build and repurpose the new one.
- [35:17]
Ben
With that work, you're basically able to start with the foundational principles. Instead of doing this from outside the country, you move back to the capital city in Armenia to work on this transformation. How did that experience shape your perspective on what real systemic change in education requires and why was it so important for you to be based in Armenia?
- [35:37]
Larissa Hovanisian
My move here taught me that you sort of have to be unreasonable to do something like this. You have to be obsessed with your idea and you have to be super stubborn because ultimately you're going to have to survive a lot of no's, much more than the yeses that'll come your way.
- [35:52]
Ben
I've often said that being a founder is one of life's most irrational acts, and yet it's this incredible power if you can do it.
- [36:01]
Larissa Hovanisian
I was young when I made that decision, so had I Done this again. Knowing what I know now, I don't know, but I'm so glad that I did it when I did at a young age because I think it just gave me possibly the courage, but also the naivete, I think as something crazy like this takes. And so, yeah, we started, as you said, with a teacher recruitment program that's part of the Teach for All global network. And that really grew into a huge movement of people who are working now across the system to ensure that our kids have access to a great education. I think what I learned is that the plan that you have obviously matters, but the belief behind what you're doing, that energy, I guess, is even more important.
- [36:43]
Ben
So now you're launching the country's first AI Native public school. What does AI Native actually mean in practice when it comes to curriculum, the role of teachers, and the day to day learning experience for students?
- [36:56]
Larissa Hovanisian
When I say AI Native, I think people immediately think that our kids are just going to be in their screens all day long. I actually think it's the opposite. I think through AI we can really enable personalized mastery based learning. We can probably shorten the day in a lot of ways. A lot more project based learning can be woven into what they do. When I think back even to the roots of the word teacher, right, it ultimately meant someone who was in constant dialogue with a student, was debating with the student, was problem solving with the student. And so I think through AI our teachers will finally be able to come back to the actual purpose of teaching. AI can't replace the human connection that I think we desperately need. We envision a school that leverages AI to design a lot of things and to deliver, yes, a lot of things. But to do that in a way that humans take and use to have a more human experience in their school,
- [37:54]
Ben
you're building this from the ground up, intentionally challenging some of the existing assumptions. Can you tell me about some of the things that are dramatically different from regular school? I think this idea of focus on human connection is something that today's schools would like to emphasize but often aren't able to.
- [38:13]
Larissa Hovanisian
The way traditional schooling works now is that age sort of determines everything about the child and the journey that they're supposed to be on. We usually group kids by birth year and call that a grade level. And that almost always has nothing to do with what the child is actually supposed to be doing, learning, and how that whole thing actually works for every child. So content delivery obviously is now probably the least scarce thing in the world. The scarce thing is wisdom in My view, it's relationships. It's the ability to help young people figure out who they truly are as a person, not what they will do. Because I think AI is also challenging that. You know, I think we associate ourselves with what we do in our lives. But potentially, by the time my kid, who's 6 years old, graduates school, what you do might not be the whole purpose of your life's existence.
- [39:02]
Lisa Omasta
Right.
- [39:02]
Larissa Hovanisian
And so a lot of what we will challenge is grade levels, whether kids can use personalized learning through AI to learn at the pace that feels comfortable to them, potentially move a lot faster. Right. In their learning journey. We're totally going to rethink how much time is spent on academics versus other things. The role of teachers, therefore, is going to change a lot. Really excited to see what that is. Of course, because we're a public school and we're operating in Armenia, we have to follow national curriculum here. And that is what it is. You know, it very much has not changed in a long time. So we kind of have to meet the moment where, yes, we still have this national curriculum that we need to follow. It's a fine curriculum, but it's definitely designed for the old world. Really, for us, this school is a space through which we constantly design, redesign, and iterate on our own theories. The most important thing we want to do now is to create that space, to bring a great group of thinkers together and to learn alongside our children, because kids also know intuitively how they need to be learning.
- [40:09]
Ben
I'm very excited. When does the school launch?
- [40:11]
Larissa Hovanisian
Well, if everything goes well, September of this year. In terms of the program, the content, the teachers, we have it all figured out. I mean, one of our greatest resources is the people that have been through our programs at the Armenia Education Initiative. And we have a fantastic group of people who know what we're supposed to be doing, but also aren't scared to say that there's a lot of stuff we don't know and we need to be learning along the journey, hopefully in the next month. Ben, I'll send you a note and I'll let you know that we're actually launching this in September and then eventually partner up. I mean, we're partnered with the government now, but really partner with the government to scale the model to other public schools and potentially build a network of schools ourselves.
- [40:52]
Ben
As an entrepreneur and starting a new school, how much of your time are you spending on logistical and organizational challenges versus the actual teaching and learning design? And how do you balance the that
- [41:04]
Larissa Hovanisian
our organization has multiple initiatives right now and some of them are very mature initiatives. And so I'm not in the day to day at all. I have a really strong team that oversees all of that. But this school Launches is a startup and so it's exciting for me because I'm like a serial entrepreneur and I sort of get to go back to the foundations of everything and roll my sleeves up and work with architects to figure out what the design needs to be of the school so that it actually supports the the learning process that we want to set up there. Working with funders, talking to the Minister of Education and crunching numbers on Excel. Now, thanks to Claude, much easier to do that nowadays. It's something new. It's a school. We have never run a school before. So even with our experience, it's still a steep learning curve. I know we'll look back and we'll say that this was the right thing to do and we're so glad that we decided to open this now as opposed to a year later, two years later, because no one knows what the world will look like by then.
- [42:02]
Ben
Right. And for those learners that you're able to impact now, a year is a big developmental difference. Glad there's irrational actors like you out there. Serial irrational actors.
- [42:13]
Larissa Hovanisian
I like that.
- [42:15]
Ben
If people want to find out more about the school or about the Armenian Education Initiative, what's the best way for people to find out? And if people want to support it, what are the best ways for them to support your work?
- [42:26]
Larissa Hovanisian
So we're actually redesigning our websites, but we have information on AEI.org and AEI Armenia education initiative.org so people can look us up there. We're very active. I mean, we also have Teach for Armenia as a organization and website. It's an initiative within our ecosystem. At aei, we're also very active on social media. I'm personally pretty active on LinkedIn where I talk a lot about what we're thinking about what we're planning to do with our school. And really we want this to be a co creative process. We're about to launch an advisory council which we're looking for people from different walks of life and backgrounds who are asking these questions and want to learn together. What's most important to me is that the kids who come to our school are happy to be there. We made a bet six years ago that you can have improved academic outcomes through a focus on social emotional learning and that those two things don't need to be separate. And I'm just so happy to say through the data that we're seeing in our work that that's true. And so we're building this AI native school with a strong focus on social emotional learning. And especially for kids in Armenia that have been through a really tough last five years, we had multiple wars here, of course, with the rest of the world. We also went through a pandemic. And then as Armenians in general, we have a pretty challenging history of genocide and of spreading across the world. And living as a diaspora. Trauma is just a generational sort of issue. And a lot of times nations like ours don't take time to process those things. Our school will very much focus on that. We think that those two things, academics, social emotional learning, are inseparable and they have to be done together. And very happy to say that. Now international data is also showing that that's the right way to go.
- [44:17]
Ben
This idea that the size of the problem or the size of the challenge in a country like Armenia, you can get your arms around, okay, what would it take over a 3 to 5 year or 10 year period to transform schools?
- [44:32]
Larissa Hovanisian
Exactly.
- [44:33]
Ben
The numbers are not so overwhelming and as you said, the systemic entrenchment is just of a different level. So we're going to be cheering for you and excited to hear how it's going. So EdTech listeners, please stay tuned and we'll bring you more when the school opens in September. Send us some pictures. Thank you so much again for joining us. Larissa, love the work you're doing overall with the Armenian Education Initiative, but specifically with this school.
- [45:00]
Larissa Hovanisian
Thank you, Ben.
- [45:01]
Ben
Talk to you soon. Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. Today we have a special guest, Alexandra Walsh, chief product officer of Amplify. She leads Amplify's product strategy, Driving coherence and platform excellence across math, literacy and science. She previously led the ELA business and curriculum development and earlier she advised social sector leaders at bridgeband and began her career teaching high school biology with Teach for America. Yay. Fellow TFA alumnus. Welcome, Alexandra, to EdTech Insiders.
- [45:34]
Alexandra Walsh
Thanks so much for having me.
- [45:36]
Ben
You were a high school biology teacher. How did that classroom experience shape the way you think about building products for educators today?
- [45:44]
Alexandra Walsh
It really shaped me as a person. It was just a really invaluable and lovely experience. Most importantly, maybe I would say I made all of my own curriculum and at the time I didn't totally know what curriculum was or enough about curricular design, certainly. But I would take things from the textbook that my district had purchased. I'd collaborate with other teachers. I'd look online for things like the New York Regents exam and what standards kids were held to in New York and other places with really high academic outcomes and make a lot of my own stuff and in fact ended up taking all of those materials. And my school sort of paid me over the summer to organize it in a way that I could, like leave it behind. So I did not know at the time that I was essentially building curricula, but that is really front of mind for me as I lead our teams to really try to think through that teacher, experience the unique needs of different classrooms, how do we build things that really get used by teachers and not shelved in favor of making their own stuff, and how we can be better as a company for them.
- [46:53]
Ben
You took an unconventional path, going to Bridgeband and then leading curricular groups within Amplify. How is that shaped? Rather than coming up from the technical side, where you often see a chief product officer or chief technology officer really focusing on technical skills or delivery, how did that all play out in how you've kind of come up on the product side from the curricular side of the house?
- [47:18]
Alexandra Walsh
Yeah, it's a great question. I totally see how my path is somewhat non traditional, though along the way has really made sense at each stage. But, you know, I think Amplify tries to be really rooted in the classroom across every aspect of our programs and products. And so it really makes sense that our leaders, including actually my partner, our cto, is also a former teacher, a former science teacher as well. So, you know, I think we really try to prioritize that classroom experience across varying leaders at Amplify. And so here it doesn't feel that non traditional. And I think it allows us to really live into our mission of helping teachers and keeping classrooms front and center as we build. I've learned so much at Amplify and really on the ground from our customers and what they need from industry leaders in terms of whether it's market best practices and standards for technical integrations or really big partners in the industry, whether it's clever or Google or others. So on the job, I've had the opportunity to learn a lot from both districts and other companies about how to make Amplify the best place not just for content, but also for product and technology.
- [48:33]
Ben
I think it's so telling that Amplify has so many leaders across the board who have deep pedagogical teaching, instructional experience, and this learning and adaptive element that's embedded in your curriculum, you apply that with your staff. You know, I've been watching Amplify really since Wireless Generation but the ability for people to grow their careers and develop new skill sets. They've modeled what a learning organization looks like as well. Now you've got this unique challenge of each discipline has its own unique pedagogical moves and needs and curricular requirements and so on. And yet at the same time, you want to create coherence across across the Amplify platform. How do you think about that? How do you juggle the different needs with also this sense of commonality, common threads, or common mission?
- [49:23]
Alexandra Walsh
I similarly realized quite quickly when I started here and somebody demoed Amplify Science how woefully inadequate my science curriculum making was. So I'm also a fan of the product and wish that it had existed when I was teaching. That is, I would say, probably problem number one, two, three and four every day that we're grappling with. I don't even just mean this for end users, but I mean in managing my own teams, they each care really passionately about their specific users. And sometimes I'm the one who has to say, I know you really want to do that, but that person also uses ELA and this is how they do it there. And so even if that would be marginally better for the only math user, our Hope, particularly for K5 teachers, is that they're using all of our Amplify products at some point. And so we need to try to really balance coherence with specificity of the discipline. So that is an active discussion on nearly a daily basis here. We have prioritized seamless login, seamless navigation, reporting that's shared across all of our products. Then I would add that we've been really pleasantly surprised by the ways in which the former Desmos platform that is now the core of the Amplify classroom platform, which was, you know, built as a math first tool, has extended quite beautifully to science, but honestly even to English language arts. The way that we can have annotation, then feel more social and collaborative, that same type of dashboard experience that people know and love from desmos can really power discussions and great moments in ELA classrooms has been great to see. So I believe that as much as there is a lot within each discipline that is unique and that we need to prioritize from a content delivery standpoint, there's so much more that is shared about the type of classroom we want an Amplify classroom to be. That even though those debates can be hard, I think we have a North Star that people are able to really rally around.
- [51:29]
Ben
There's a through line which is really around interactive content and making things very personalized, learner centered, deeper thinking. And that's where the science curriculum stands out too. So one of the things that leads to is you have to think about ease of use for the user and for especially teachers who have tons on their plate. In elementary, you're often switching between subjects multiple times a day and so really making that seamless. I want to talk a little bit about the pedagogical moves. Some of the work that Amplify encourages is more advanced pedagogy. And like any Teach for America teacher, I think if you're still in education, you've done a lot of reflective analysis of man, I could have been so much better here or there and I wish I'd had these tools. How do you think about meeting the teachers where they are and pushing the pedagogy? You've got this challenge of you want to satisfy and make it easy to use, but you also know what good pedagogy looks like. How do you find that balance?
- [52:28]
Alexandra Walsh
I do think this is an area where my teaching experience is useful because I have been a first year teacher and I can feel sort of in my body the fear that comes from the day that you do like the coolest thing. And it's this awesome hands on. And I remember designing this complicated hands on around osmosis that was so cool and the kids actually got that. But the transfer of knowledge to the same kinds of questions, the same conceptual question in the state test format or something, it just was like fell so flat. And the panic that you have of like I haven't done my job is so real. And that's often what we're asking teachers to do. Both trust us, but also take a bit of a leap of faith that if they put more on their students and elevate that student thinking, that in the end the knowledge that students do attain will be more durable. It also just requires a tremendous amount of commitment from the district. So where we see it go well is in districts where from the superintendent kind of down, they have said that this, whatever the pedagogical shift, whether it's a shift to the science of reading, a shift to a more problem based approach in math, a shift to the NGSS and science, that that is a priority for the district and that the professional development support, the coaching, the infrastructure is there to help help those teachers.
- [53:54]
Ben
Just like you need to be in the zone of proximal development for students, you have to be in the zone of proximal development for teachers. I Remember, your osmosis project was my ancient Egypt project where we mummified chickens. And there were moments where you're doing all the extra prep work and you're sweating and just fearing this could go so horribly wrong. And then it goes well and kids learn it, but you're exhausted and then the next day you've got to keep the trains going. And so one thing that I always appreciated about some of the packages that exist in the math and science curriculum, I'm a little bit less familiar with the ELA is a lot of the thinking and preparation and materials are ready made. You can do stuff to make it your own. But it's not that Sunday night panic when you're like, oh God, I gotta get to Kinko's and do these things. We would use salts, we'd learn all the religious figures and hieroglyphics, and then we would bury it in a field and then excavate it six months later.
- [54:55]
Alexandra Walsh
Like a real chicken.
- [54:56]
Ben
Yeah, real chickens. Oh my gosh. But I do think this idea, we have a vision of what? Experiential, rigorous, project based learning that meets the needs of English language learners, that meets the needs of your lower performing and higher performing students and all of that. And to pull it off is such a herculean task, even if it goes well, you've got like zero in the gas tank for the next day.
- [55:22]
Alexandra Walsh
I think sometimes what gets missed, even from our teams who have a ton of former teachers and who are just themselves working late nights and long weekends to try to get these programs across the finish line, it can feel too distant from that incredibly visceral, emotional feeling that you're describing. And so a priority for us is to try and connect as much with our teachers as possible possible to make sure that those feelings are really present across our teams and product development, whether that's user research, interviews, classroom visits, reading the Facebook posts, even if they can be sometimes bruising for the ego, making sure that we're really staying in touch with those users. Because all the things you were just describing are the lived reality of people every day. And we want to be a part of helping teachers have more great moments in their classroom. And we really never want to be part of detracting from their goals. And we know we miss that bar sometimes, but that is really what we're trying to aim for.
- [56:27]
Ben
So all of that is normal standard hard mode. Now we've got impossible mode. With AI constantly changing the world, the world outside of education is changing so fast. Much of the curriculum is really Built around competencies that will prepare kids for the future. How are you navigating it within amplify? And then how are you helping educators and schools navigate it to make sure that their kids are prepared and understanding how to move forward in this really dynamic environment?
- [57:00]
Alexandra Walsh
Being a teacher has always been hard and I think that the one, two punch of COVID plus AI in the past five years, I really honestly cannot imagine what it is like at this point. It's easy from where I sit in an office to kind of think about this stuff and work on it. But I know that the whiplash of send every kid home with the device and remote learning and every kid on device back to no devices. And also AI is everywhere and so don't have any devices but prepare your kids for this world. I think teachers feel really overwhelmed and exhausted right now. We always try to move thoughtfully and I'm proud that we've done that on AI too. Like many places have just done the press releases or rebranded stuff they've been doing forever as kind of AI powered. We have been doing a lot of R and D and there are some things that we're releasing at this Back to School that I'm really excited about that I think speak to the way that we hope AI can change classrooms and it's really around helping teachers. So one of the features we're releasing at Back to School helps process student work in real time, knowing that they couldn't read the 30 responses that their students were doing on any given math problem and then have a discussion and do all that cognitive work in the matter of a minute. But AI can do that. So we've had humans author the discussion, we call them discussion moments that will really help draw out student thinking and really help in this transition to problem based pedagogy. But also pick student responses that will facilitate a really great discussion, which is a hard thing for teachers to do even if they're outside of class and a nearly impossible task if you're live in class.
- [58:47]
Ben
If you had a crystal ball and were to look five years in the future, what do you think really stays the same in education and with amplify? And what areas do you think there will be the most change or opportunity for change?
- [59:01]
Alexandra Walsh
I think humans will still really want the social context of school with the guidance and mentorship and leadership that teachers and schools provide. So schools is kind of the heart of communities will definitely stay the same in that time horizon. And then I think there are a bunch of questions around. We are in the content business and Obviously content is easier to make now than it ever has been. How exactly that all looks in five years. I think we're we alongside maybe everyone else working in education is trying to think about what that means, how we can make it better, how we can make it work better for more context. So I imagine that that will look different. I think schools and kids together with smart, caring adults as teachers will really remain the same.
- [59:52]
Ben
I'm also hoping that assessment can really change a lot of what is in the Amplify platform. In terms of assessment is much more show do tell rather than regurgitating. You talked about your osmosis example not translating to a multiple choice state test. I really wish that there was a way for some of the assessments that are embedded in your lessons to have the test makers essentially parallel those types of questions and that type of more rigorous thinking too.
- [60:24]
Alexandra Walsh
Yeah, I hope that everyone's initial reaction has been to do kind of AI checkers or check for cheating and all that. And instead I hope that what you're saying, which is much more whether it's verbal tests where kids have to prove their thinking.
- [60:39]
Ben
Yeah. Or more diagnostic formative assessment for learning, maybe less high stakes. Take it in. May get the results in October. That just feels like very 1987 even now.
- [60:51]
Alexandra Walsh
Our assessments though, I think are much stronger in terms of not having the same kind of narrow, more punitive approach. They still are reliant on kids taking it on a machine to score or teachers having to do some sort of complicated scoring and entering. I think that should also go away. Like we've already made a lot of R and D advances on just scoring handwritten student work. I think there's a lot of promise around multimodal student work in general, whether it's audio or even hands on manipulatives. That's probably a little further off. But yeah, I think just an opportunity to have kids, to not have this sort of kids get to do things over here and then we test them over here. That's sort of always been challenging.
- [61:33]
Ben
Or if you do a cool hands on project, then you're stuck with 200 kids turned in their science labs and it takes you three weeks to get it back to them too. Well, this has been an awesome conversation. Alexandra Walsh, chief Product Officer of Amplify, thanks so much for sharing everything about the strategy, where you've been, where you're headed. If people want to learn more about Amplify, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [61:56]
Alexandra Walsh
They can check out our website@amplify.com we also always share free resources, so there's a lot of free content that you can get on Amplify Classroom. So please go to classroom.alertify.com and you can actually try our lessons for free across multiple subjects in your own classroom. So check it out.
- [62:16]
Ben
Thanks so much for joining us today.
- [62:18]
Thanks thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others
- [62:26]
in the EdTech community.
- [62:28]
For those who want even more EdTech Insider, subscribe to the free EdTech Insiders newsletter on substack. Tuck Advisors was founded by entrepreneurs who built and sold their own companies. Frustrated by other M and A firms, they created the one they wished they could have hired but couldn't. Find one who understands what matters to founders and whose North Star KPI is the percentage of deals closed. If you're thinking of selling your edtech company or buying one, contact Tuck Advisors now.