EdTech: Trends, Perspective And The Future

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending EdTech Week in New York City as a member of the host committee. While this was my first time attending, the event has been an important industry staple for about ten years. The organization behind the conference, StartEd, was founded with a bold mission: to attract and develop an army of innovators, solve problems at every stage of the journey, and to ensure equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. However, as every ed tech start-up founder knows, you cannot do this in a vacuum; rather, you must tap into an ecosystem of stakeholders to address the industry’s most pressing challenges. It was this notion that catalyzed EdTech Week — a convening of an impressive network of founders, investors, educators, policymakers, researchers, and industry practitioners to shape the future of learning and the global workforce.

This year’s event attracted nearly 2,000 participants from all parts of the ecosystem to engage in a dialogue with over 300 speakers on how to solve critical problems. Among the many insights gleaned over the course of the week, here are my top three key takeaways:

AI Problem Solving

1. With AI, it’s not the size of your model, but how you use it. Discussion on AI has run the gamut lately, from critics saying it's “all hype-cycle” to advocates claiming it will be “the biggest disruptor since electricity.” However, after spending two days at Google’s offices in NYC, my key take-away is that AI can be the great disruptor, but only for those who align it with their business strategy. There is a tendency, especially among start-up founders, to start with AI as a solution, before proper problem identification, or as one founder said to me, “AI is the answer, what’s the problem?” But this thinking is critically flawed. Those who will create the most value by leveraging AI will be those who start with the problem to be solved, explore a variety of solutions, and only then come to a conclusion that may or may not involve AI. Just because you can use AI, should you? If yes, how?

As a few leading experts at Google shared, it may strategically benefit some organizations to leverage “smaller” models and customize them with proprietary data to solve specific problems. Within the higher ed space, one institution is highlighting this approach: the University of Michigan, which recently announced the launch of a new platform that customizes artificial intelligence services to its entire community. One such resource on the platform is U-M Maizey, which allows students, faculty and staff to use UM’s hosted language models to query and question their own datasets - this includes the ability for faculty to create their own AI Tutor. This is notable for a few reasons (1) it begins with the problem to be solved - how might we free up faculty and staff time by creating an asset that still provides a leading student experience? (2) it leverages existing models and customizes them with proprietary data. Through both thinking strategically and customizing with proprietary data, UM is already beginning to see a value enhancement to all stakeholders in its community.

Workforce Learning Modalities

2. It will take a diverse coalition of partners across the learn-work ecosystem to solve the problems of today and tomorrow. My background is in both post-secondary education and workforce learning. That means I spend a lot of time thinking about the intersections between higher education and corporate learning and development. Part of my involvement as a member of the host committee for EdTech Week was to bring together a panel of leaders from both sectors for an open and thought-provoking dialogue. The key points raised included (1) curating content for each “learner persona,” which means types of learners at different stages of their career, seeking to reach different goals. This requires taking into consideration leadership level, functional area, needs of the firm and personal aspirations; (2) mapping the “right” learning modality for each of these personas; (3) fostering a culture of work-based learning/ and (4) examining how post-learning expectations affect desired ROI for educational experiences.

There are already some notable examples of these ideas being put into practice. For example, when I was at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth we partnered with the LIXIL corporation, a multinational organization headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, to design a strategy program. LIXIL needed to create a shared approach for strategy creation and execution, even though its workforce didn’t even speak the same language. Through partnering with Tuck to create a program that met the different employees where they were - different languages, learning styles, and leadership levels - the entire company was able to create a culture of strategic innovation, and ultimately positive business outcomes. This result was only achieved through bringing together different functional and product groups within LIXIL and also constituents outside of the company, including other higher ed and governmental partners.

The Future of Learning Is Global

3. The future is global and belongs to those who approach education on a multinational scale. This takeaway was catalyzed by several notable conversations during the week. One key moment came during a panel discussion amongst venture capitalists called “Where is the next EdTech hot spot?” A VC shared her observation that US-based founders think US-first and then see the rest of the world is an afterthought. By contrast non-US based founders have a global-first mindset, which greatly increases their market potential. It is well known among US higher education leaders that by 2025 the number of high-school graduates will be at its highest level, creating an “enrollment cliff” until well into the 2030s. However, taking a global mindset, this enrollment decline could be offset by international students from China and India, who are on track to overtake the US in the percentage of working-age adults with postsecondary education in the next 10 years. How could a global strategy match the supply of postsecondary education in the US with this international demand? Kaplan has long taken this global perspective through the operation of its pathways programs, supporting international students in their aspirations to attend university abroad. This includes partnering with a number of US and UK universities to help them think about how they can attract international students; most recently, adding the University of Victoria as its first Canadian university partner.

It may seem at times that the rate of change is faster than ever before, especially in the education sector – and this is both daunting and exciting. It’s heartening to know that there are individuals and organizations working to solve today’s critical challenges and innovate solutions for tomorrow’s work-learn ecosystem. I believe the next few years in this area may surprise us with some historic changes and course corrections.