It’s YOUR time to #EdUp
In this episode,
YOUR guest is Steve Daly, CEO, Instructure
YOUR guest co-host is Chike Aguh, Senior Advisor, The Project on Workforce, Harvard University & Former Chief Innovation Officer, U.S. Department of Labor
YOUR host is Dr. Joe Sallustio
YOUR sponsors are Ellucian Live 2024 & InsightsEDU
How can technology make education more equitable & accessible?
Why must credentialing adapt to recognize broader learning?
What does Steve see as the future of Higher Education?
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Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to EdUp on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. I'm standing here in 2024. Can you stand in a year? If you can, I'm doing it. And we have recorded nearly 800 episodes. I think we're coming up on January 25th. So I'm putting time around this episode, which I'm not supposed to do, says my co-founder and partner, Alvin Freitas. He says, don't talk about time, but I am because our four year anniversary is on January 25th. We've interviewed 250 college university presidents, nearly 800 people across in and around higher education to the tune of about 370,000 or so downloads. Thank you. I just want to say thank you to everybody as we approach our four year anniversary for supporting this podcast, for listening, for contributing. And I've said it once and I'm going to say it again. This is your podcast. What does that mean exactly? Well, my guest co-host will tell you when I bring him on.
When you're a guest to this podcast and you have something important to say, you can be a guest. You can come on and be a guest. You can decide that you want to come on and interview other people, which means you could become one of my guest co-hosts that we have that rotate around. You could see somebody that you want to interview and say, you know what? I want to interview them with Joe. And you could even host your own EdUp podcast. Sometimes I look for people when I am sick or I've got my kids at home and it's very hard to record with kids at home. I will tell you that. I need somebody to just take over for me. You could be one of those people. This can be your podcast if you want it to be. And let me bring in my guest co-host, special guest co-host now. He's done a thing or two, just a thing or two in higher education and he'll continue to do that. Ladies and gentlemen, wait, see, I'm not ready. I'm not ready. You guys know how I work with my sound effects. I didn't have my applause up. I had the Price is Right thing where it goes... I don't want to do that to him. Ladies and gentlemen, he's Chike Aguh. He is the senior advisor for project and workforce at Harvard University and the former chief innovation officer at the Department of Labor. Welcome back, my friend.
Chike Aguh: Thank you so much for having me, Joe. And I look forward to the conversation today.
Joe Sallustio: Now, is this your second time back co-hosting?
Chike Aguh: This is my second. I got to co-host with Olli-Pekka Heinonen, who is the head of International Baccalaureate.
Joe Sallustio: That's right. I missed that one. See, I miss them sometimes. You know what, what are you gonna do? Thanks for stepping in and handling that with me. Appreciate it and glad to have you here. What are you doing these days, my friend? Talk about your work a little bit.
Chike Aguh: Sure, probably the two things that are most germane here, I spend the majority of my time with Harvard University at their Project on Workforce, an interdisciplinary research project across the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, focused on everything around how we have the workforce of the future and particularly the role that higher ed plays. And then also germane to this, as of last year, I am the vice chair of the Maryland Higher Education Commission. So we oversee all higher education in the state of Maryland, public and private. So always these conversations are very germane to what I do on a daily basis.
Joe Sallustio: So you left the Department of Labor and thought, I'll just fill my time with all sorts of things. It sounds like you're a busy man.
Chike Aguh: My wife wants me out of the house. And so she said, I have to figure out a way to keep myself busy.
Joe Sallustio: Yes, I understand. I understand exactly how that goes. Happy wife, happy life for anybody that wonders out there how to have a happy marriage. That's how you do it. Ladies and gentlemen, let's get to our guest. I'm going to guess when he tells you what he does and where he's from that you have probably come across a product of his that he's working on before. Just a guess that that's the case. But he's going to tell us like from scratch, like you never heard. Ladies and gentlemen, here he is. He is the one and only Steve Daly. He is the CEO at Instructure. Steve, welcome to an EdUp mic.
Steve Daly: Well, thank you. I'm honored to be on this. This is my first time, unlike Chike. This is my inaugural run, so I'm excited.
Joe Sallustio: Well, we're glad to have you here. Surprise. So you've got a lot to say. We want to get to it and just lay it out. I'm in higher ed. I've come across Instructure for the first time. Tell me like, what's the elevator pitch?
Steve Daly: Yeah, so if you're in about, there's about 50%, almost 50% of all U.S. higher ed students are using one of our products, which is the Canvas Learning Management System. If you've come across us, you've been in that teaching and learning environment. That's what we're best known for, the Canvas Learning Management System. Over the last several years though, really our strategy has been to expand the reach that we have, the things that we can help institutions with, the ways that we can connect teachers and learners.
And so we've actually got a much broader portfolio than just the learning management system. We have technology that will help with student engagement, will help with multimedia and how we deliver, you know, much richer sort of lessons and instruction. You may have run, you know, we're talking about higher ed, but we're also in about a third of all US school districts. And so you may have actually had us through your entire learning journey.
Particularly when you're talking about Canvas. We also just announced an acquisition. It's yet to close of a company called Parchment. Parchment does credentialing, right? They have transcript services, diploma services. They also have some comprehensive learner record technologies. They have badging and credentialing. And so that's part of the bigger strategy to become, again, not only the technology that teachers and learners are using within the classroom to deliver on teaching and learning, but also to be the evidence of that learning throughout a learner's journey, whether it is through that, you know, primary, secondary or post-secondary, or maybe it's vocational and other paths that people may take in their learning journeys.
Joe Sallustio: I'm going to ask one more and then I'll pass to you, Chike. I want to ask about the Parchment, I'm not going to do that right away because that's the easy one. But I do want to ask you first about your customer. When you think about strategy and Instructure, who is it designed for? Who is this strategy for? Is it for the student? Is it for the faculty? Is it for the administrator? Is it for the superintendent who's buying the product? You're working multiple-sided marketplaces. How do you think about that from a strategy perspective?
Steve Daly: Yeah, from a strategy perspective, frankly, you know, Canvas came onto the scene about 10, 11 years ago was when we first launched it, right? And at the time, you know, zero market share at the time. And we've been able to become the number one market share leader. We took share from primarily Blackboard, who was kind of the dominant player in the market at that point. And part of the reason, first of all, we approached it with a cloud-based solution, which at the time, you know, wasn't always fully embraced by institutions. But we did decide that, you know, what we wanted to do was approach our design philosophy from the teaching and learning, right? So from the student and the teacher experience, rather than the administrators, which a lot of LMSs at the time were about how do we simplify the administrator's life? And everything we talk about is how do what we do improve student engagement? How does it make teachers' lives easier? How do we do it in a way that doesn't require you to go watch 47 YouTube videos to figure out how to use the technology? And that's really our design philosophy and approach.
Joe Sallustio: Love that. Chike, over to you.
Chike Aguh: So many places that I could go. So many thoughts and questions. When I think about Instructure, I actually used Canvas when I was a graduate student about in that exact kind of timeframe. It is hard to go from zero to market dominance. So hats off to what you've done. When I think about this business that you all are in, I always talk about, if you're building a business, it's almost great to be in the parts of the business that people can't see. You're in the substrate. You're in the, it's like who makes the screws that keep the beams in your house up? You don't know, but they make a lot of money because those screws are really important. I think you all in some ways serve a similar kind of function. And as we think about most businesses, I don't care what the sector is, healthcare, retail, whatever, the move of digitization and how do we use technology to make them far more efficient, you all gonna fit very much within that stream. Think about the future for me. We've had a debate in higher education about how much this is gonna be digital versus person-driven, so on and so forth. And I think during the pandemic, we saw that we need a wider set of tools to teach and reach students. We need asynchronous, we need online, we need in-person. Talk about how you see Instructure fitting into this multimodal, multi-channel ways that higher education institutions are gonna have to reach students. Let me give you just one institution that I think of. I think of, I'm from Maryland, the University of Maryland Global Campus, which is, you know, a national, international leader in this type of education. You know, they're reaching folks here in Maryland, one through cybersecurity, and they're serving veterans in Singapore.
Steve Daly: Yeah, great, great leader.
Chike Aguh: So as I think about them as more and more institutions are gonna have to be like them in the future. So I'm curious how you see Instructure and all of its facets kind of fitting in there and helping accelerate that.
Steve Daly: Yeah, I think, I think absolutely, you know, the institutions that we work with, some of them refer to this as an omni-channel education, right? And what the pandemic did to your point, I think, was two things. One is it forced educators to think about what digital looks like, right? Because it was really easy. Let's say you're a K-12 teacher, right? You've got a four-drawer file cabinet in the back of your classroom full of lesson plans and things that as you went through your education.
Chike Aguh: That was me as a teacher almost 20 years ago, absolutely.
Steve Daly: My wife, we still have them sitting in the garage, right? She doesn't teach anymore, but we still have them. And so it really forced those types to say, well, I got to put them online, right? I got to figure out how to do this. What they've recognized is, life is actually pretty good because now I come in in the morning, I don't have to go get that assignment, go make copies, hand it out, collect it, grade it, right? All that stuff can be automated and I can focus on teaching. But even in the higher ed space, which is a little ahead of K-12 from a digital transformation perspective, you still had a lot of faculty that, you know, used it as just basically electronic syllabus, right? And almost like a file share, right? I'm just going to put stuff up there that people can download. And it forced people to think about the pedagogy, think about, you know, the instructional design and that, you know what, there are some things we have to do differently when we're in remote environments. And so it really kind of catalyzed, I think, educators as far as digital transformation goes.
The second thing though, which I think is a more probably enduring impact on this transformation that you were talking about is that the learners recognize that I don't have to follow this path that says I'm gonna graduate from my high school, I'm gonna go to this college, I'm gonna spend four years, get my degree, right? And on campus, whatever. That they recognize that there's flexibility. And so a lot of our institutions are getting told, look, if you can't do this for me in a flexible way, so yeah, freshman year, I want to come. I want to live in the dorms. I want to have that experience. I want to be on campus 100% of the time. But you know what? Life got in the way. I got to work full time this next semester. I'd love to be able to just take one or two classes online asynchronously. Or my daughter's a senior right now up at Utah State University. And she loves the ability. Some of her teachers are like, Fridays, we're going to do this remote. And she can take it from her apartment. And she could get a lot of other things done. It's similar to what we've in the workforce have experienced, too. So I do think you're right. This is a trend that's here to stay, this omni-channel, this multimodal, however you want to call it. So from our perspective, our goal is to be that infrastructure. As you said, infrastructure is awesome because it becomes that core that you need and fundamental to running your business. We're that core infrastructure that allows you to not have to use separate technologies depending on which modality you want to teach in. And so the fact that I can create a class in Canvas for my class that I teach in person as a faculty member, and then tweak it a little bit and make it available online, we have technology that allows institutions to publish those courses online, right? Including things like how do you register somebody that maybe isn't coming, they're not matriculating, right? How do you register them? And so we have the technology on the backend, again, the infrastructure technology that allows that and the credentialing, the badging in case somebody's here just for a certificate or micro-credential. So our strategy has been let us be the fundamental technology that you use, regardless of the modality, regardless of how education is gonna be consumed. So it's been great. You know, it has, I believe there's a disruption coming to the OPM market, right? I think it's starting to deconstruct because institutions are recognizing, you know, they used to be able to outsource reaching us in our homes, but now they're saying, why isn't this part of my core competency? My future depends on being able to reach students that aren't gonna come to have a four-year experience on campus.
Chike Aguh: I agree and see so much of that just in our lives. Again, partially because of some of the institutions we have here in Maryland and locally. Joe, let me throw it back to you. I have tons more questions and I could go for an hour. Here's your show, my friend.
Joe Sallustio: Keep going.
Chike Aguh: So let me fast forward a little bit, and this probably does touch a bit on the Parchment kind of conversation. So I was the chief innovation officer at the Department of Labor. I came in on day one of the Biden administration, left at the end of this past April. And this question of basically how do we get people the skills to do the jobs that America needs done and also to start them on the careers that are hopefully going to put them on a different economic trajectory. That's, you know, that was an obsession for my bosses, Marty Walsh and Julie Su, as well as for the president himself. And so, easier said than done. As you have seen in your business, whether it's from higher ed, whether it's from industry, lots of types of credentials, they don't talk to each other. They're not the same taxonomy. There are a million credentials. Over a million credentials. I call it the, I've talked about this with Scott Cheney from Credential Engine. It's a tower of Babel, to use a metaphor. And what's happened as there are more and more credentials, the theory was more and more credentials, the better it's going to be. One of the challenges is they don't talk to each other. And from the industry, and I hear this again and again, they say, we don't know what these mean. And so what industry does is they create their own credentials. I've seen it in cloud and cybersecurity and so on and so forth. I know what my credential means, but it almost feeds that problem. So I would love to hear how you all think about yourself in the credential space, which by the way is the fastest growing part of a lot of higher ed institutions, particularly the community college. And then secondly, wax a little poetic on how do we make this a more integrated experience, more just understandable experience for whether it be a student or an employer who's trying to figure out what credential should I do, what credential should I take? It's fuzzy math.
Steve Daly: Yeah, it's a huge challenge, right? And to your point, companies are creating their own credentials, but I just recently read an article, so Google has these credentials that you can take. But when you look at the job description, it requires a bachelor's degree. So even though you have that credential, it's not carrying the weight of what it needs. So let's still be clear that the number one credential that carries weight today is your diploma. And so I think institutions that have brand name, that's going to be the thing that carries the day for a long time. But to your point, the fastest growing part of this is these micro credentials and these other sort of credentials. So our belief is ultimately, and the reason we're in the process of acquiring Parchment is because we have to make those credentials, and even if it's a transcript, they have to be much richer in the data that they provide.
And so part of this is how do you demonstrate that when I took Computer Science 101 and I got an A, right? How do I demonstrate what I actually learned in that? And we believe that the way forward here is going to be let's create a portfolio for a learner, right? That again, a lot of that information is gonna be in the learning management system, right? This was my project that I worked on and here's, you know, here was the rubric and this is how I did against that. We get a much richer sort of information associated with those transcripts. And that works when you're kind of tying those skills to a transcript in a higher ed institution, which is why I think ultimately, I ultimately believe our higher ed system is gonna win in capturing the non-traditional student.
We've got others that are trying to compete for that, right? MOOCs and those types of things. I think ultimately the higher ed system wins in this case.
Chike Aguh: Tell them like it is.
Steve Daly: Yeah. The question is, how do we get that taxonomy, normalize that taxonomy, right? And here's my belief. So we're working with governments. So Canadian government, the Australian government, and they have these concerted efforts to really try to match a taxonomy that everybody's gonna agree that when you say, I can program in Java, this is what it means, right? For instance, or I can weld with a MIG welder, this is what it means. And so I think it's gonna be a little bit challenging for us in the US to do that. And it's gonna be a very long process, even in these other countries where they're going down this path, right? It's gonna take years for that to become really recognized and understood and believed.
What I'm seeing in the US is individual states are trying to tackle this themselves. And so we recently announced a deal that we did with the Alabama Community College System. And I think they are really advanced in their thinking and their implementation of how do we match workforce development with education and educational institutions? And so they've funded an Innovation Center. They've decided that part of this is going to be, we've got to give students a unified experience, whether they're in Mobile Community College when they're at home or they're at University of Alabama during the winter. What does that experience look like? And so ultimately, I think the governor's really pushing for this kind of unified experience and the chancellor at ACCS as well. And so I do think they're doing a tremendous job of working. They have a task force in the Innovation Center that's working with the employers in Alabama to help define what that taxonomy looks like. And again, for them, there's a lot of auto industry there, right? What they care about is gonna be different than what the employers here in Utah care about.
I think that's how it's going to evolve and it's going to take some great leadership within the states to kind of drive that in the near term. Ultimately, do we get to kind of a national wallet as Australia refers to it or something like that? Maybe, but that's a hard thing to drive from a federal level. It'll take time.
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That's super helpful. And you've heard about the wallet. I've always thought about it. The analogy that I've always used is, if you remember 15 years ago around health care data, there was this idea of the blue button, which is that everyone owns their data. You can pick it up, move it around. Lots of interesting companies came up with ways to do that. And one can imagine an equivalent of that in the workforce for the skill set and that you have a, you carry your portfolio around, you share it with who you want to, you know, so you can avoid what happens to me when I go to the doctor's office, I tell the same things to four different people and they're like, wait, don't you talk to each other? And the answer is they don't. And to be honest, in the workforce space, it's kind of very similar. Let me ask a question, and this is a question that I probably shouldn't have the answer to. Do you all serve any folks in the corporate space? So obviously, if you think about what corporations are doing, they are doing tons of training, credentialing all the time within their companies. When I was with General McChrystal, we worked with CHROs all the time doing this. I'm curious if Instructure plays in that space.
Steve Daly: And we, you know, frankly, we did for a while and we got out of it. So we said, look, we're going to focus on education, educators. And there are, so one of our biggest customers is Amazon Web Services, but we work with them on their academy, which is training engineers how to use AWS stuff, right? It's not an internal training. We don't sell to HR, right? They look a lot more like an educational institution. And so, yeah, from our perspective, we wanna stay kind of true to that educator focus rather than going after the HR functions and things like that. We're always getting pulled there because they all want something like this, right? But pedagogically, it's different, right? And you do have a different, there are different requirements, there's different things you care about. And so we don't wanna dilute that focus on educators and how they do their job.
Chike Aguh: Let's go back to the Parchment thing a little bit, because this is such a significant acquisition, right, for your organization. And in higher ed, it's funny because we've seen so many school closures, we've seen mergers, acquisitions. And so we see it rarely. We see big ones sometimes, like when Arizona went and got Ashford or Purdue Global Kaplan. But they're not, they're higher ed acquisitions, which are different than a business acquisition in a lot of ways, right? Monetarily and structurally, taxes, all that. Why was this so important to Instructure to go after Parchment? Because I know 50% use Instructure, maybe 90% use Parchment of institutions out there. But what was the tipping point to say this is really in line with our future? You know, what tipped you guys forward to go after Parchment?
Steve Daly: Yeah, you know, when we were looking at Parchment, part of the motivation was on the Canvas side, we're in a unique position in the LMS market. We not only do we have number one market share in higher ed, but we're also the market share leader in K-12. And so for a lot of students, we're there in the classroom from when they start their primary education all the way through post-secondary. And so we've been working with systems like California. We just did a deal with Montana, which is trying to figure out how do we ease those transitions, right, for students? Because they lose a lot of students in that transition from high school to college. And so we've been working about how do we make that classroom experience seamless? And then the question that always comes up is, well, how do we also kind of evidence it, right? What is, you know how do we, instead of having to go to four different places to get your transcripts, if you, you know you did some of your educational journey at a UC school or a California community college school or in your high school and all that kind of stuff. How do we make this journey much simpler? And so it was just kind of a natural progression of here's what's happening in the classroom. Now, how do we evidence it? I think the other thing that was pretty exciting about doing this is also what we talked about earlier is let's make that record much richer. Right. And so let's bring those things together in a way that makes it much, you know, much more valuable when I'm trying to connect my education to an outcome.
Chike Aguh: I like your style, dude. Let me ask you a question, Steve. This is literally just came to my mind as we were talking about Parchment. I began my postgraduate school career at a, at that time it was called the Advisory Board Company on the higher education side. It was what became EAB, which you're probably very, very familiar with. We were very acquisitive. We purchased a lot of companies. And I think one thing that the company learned overall is acquisitions can be done poorly and they can be done well. So you can have an acquisition that makes a lot of sense on the football chart, the cap table. But then obviously when you get the people, the leadership, it just doesn't quite work. And we've all seen this. Stay with me for a second as I ask this question. You're seeing higher ed go through this. I'm a senior fellow at Northeastern University. Northeastern University bought Mills College, New College in London. I forget the school they bought in Virginia, one in Maine, and they're in this process of bringing these things together still very early days, although I think they're doing a decent job of it. Give some advice to higher ed leaders who are thinking about acquiring. Yeah. What are some lessons from what you've done that you would say, here's how you do it and do it well? And again, it doesn't totally translate, obviously, business to higher ed, but I think honestly, there are some lessons that, there probably aren't zero lessons. So I'd love that, as you think about, as you're talking to some presidents who are thinking about this, what are some advice that you would think about as you try to acquire potentially another institution?
Steve Daly: Yeah, you know, and I've done a lot of these technology acquisitions and I've messed them up horribly, which has been great lessons learned. Where I do think it's very similar is, when it comes to buying a software company, you're not really buying the software, right? Because software is, the value is the creative process that invented it, but then somebody sees that, they can recreate it really quickly, right? And so it really does come down to the people that are involved in the process and that you're trying to bring together. And I think for us, we spend a lot of time in the due diligence process, really understanding what is that culture, where are they focused? For us, we have almost half of our employees are former educators. So we have a bent to want to, I mean, we are educators, right? So we really look for that kind of DNA when we're trying to do an acquisition. And then we really spend a lot of time trying to think about not cookie cutter everything, right? Not say, hey, we got a recipe here on how we bring these in together, but recognize that each one's gonna be a little bit different.
So in the case of Parchment, for instance, first of all, the cultural fit was awesome. The CEO and one of the founders of Parchment actually was one of the founders of Blackboard. And so we have this kind of understanding of the industry, right? And when we first started talking, he's like, this is where I thought Blackboard ought to go the whole time. That's why I wanted to do Parchment. And so we just felt this kind of natural, cultural affinity. But even then with that great cultural affinity, we're gonna run them separately for the first year and recognizing that we're still people, right? And we're all gonna work a little bit differently. We gotta take the time to understand that. So over that course of the year, try to figure out, where are the right integration points? So for us, it really is, it comes back to those people and those relationships.
The other thing we did look at was also, and I don't know how pertinent this is, but the Parchment people are selling to different people than we sell to in universities. They're spending a lot of time with registrars, admissions, those offices. And so part of our calculus was, okay, we don't have those relationships anyway, so let's keep these separate, let them teach us about that. But that was also one of the advantages for us because what we started to recognize is as institutions go more and more after these non-traditional learners, it was getting more and more important for us to have a relationship with the registrar, right? Because there's so many things that are, you know, when this student comes on through our portal, not through the normal admissions office, right? How do you bring them in, right? And do they get access to all of the library services, you know, and do we have to pay a license for that, right? There's all these things that you didn't think about. And so having those relationships became really important to us as well. So it was kind of a multifaceted way we look at it. And we found that that is the one common denominator across all of those integrations is where's that cultural fit? And then what are the connection points within the people we're trying to reach as our customers, right?
Joe Sallustio: Steve, I gotta stop you just really quickly because you know, full transparency here, I asked you this question earlier and you recorded your answer and I want to play back your recorded answer. It wasn't as long. I like your plan, except it sucks. So let me do the plan and that way it might be really good. That was your true answer. No, you didn't really say that. It is a complicated thing. Mergers and acquisitions, right? Culture, culture eats strategy for breakfast. That's where you hear it. That's where it comes from. You have a vision, you have a strategy, and then you get the people and the emotions in the mix, and it makes it really hard. I do want to just ask one follow-up, because you talked about it. We've been talking about omnichannel learning. Canvas is used by institutions that run standard term, non-standard term, non-credit programs, for-credit credentials, competency-based education, the three-year degrees come in, what's next on top of CBE. How does the technology do all of the things that you need it to do? It's not like one, you open up the box and it just does everything perfectly. You have to move it and configure it. And a lot of institutions are doing different things. How do the teams work? Your internal teams are, you know, are they working back end? Are they looking to the future? Like what's coming? How do we get ahead of it? Design AI, right? I know we're going to talk about that, but yeah, it's coming, right.
Steve Daly: No, it's a great question. And you're right. There are different nuances, right? I mean, fortunately for us, a lot of the, I'd say 80% overlaps, right? From what the technology needs to accomplish. But to your point, there are different start dates on courses, right? Finish dates. Clock hours, credit hours, all that. Yeah. There's build on last attempt, right? Is a big thing within kind of vocational, right? I missed the question, give me another shot at it. You don't get that when you're taking a test or a quiz in a traditional setting. So we follow a process of, first of all, we have a massive community. So we have over 2 million people that are active in our community. They give us a ton of feedback, right? They're telling us all the time, this doesn't work.
One of the simple ones, for instance, was a bunch of K-12 teachers were like, your default says that this assignment's due at 11:59. That doesn't work for us, right? None of our students are gonna be finishing these in sixth grade at 11:59. We want it done by five or whatever. It's those simple things. And so we spend a lot of time, we have a process that allows them to kind of thumbs up or thumbs down and grade, and then it really is about the product managers that are then kind of bouncing that off. And that's where I think us employing a lot of educators in the company has really helped us because we get it and it does require a judgment call. And so, yeah, it is an ongoing process. In some cases, so for instance, build on last attempt, the majority of our customers don't care about that, right? And so it's really easy to just put it at the bottom of the list, because Harvard or California Community College is like, don't, I need this other thing to put on top of it. So it is a constant struggle for us. And it's kind of a leadership thing to really be able to make sure we're not just prioritizing the things that matter for the majority. Where's the business going?
Chike Aguh: We've talked a little bit about AI and AI is everywhere. And I will say, I'm just parenthetically, I think, you know, I'm old enough to remember like before the internet or before social media. And I kind of wish we had this level of conversation around those technologies before they rolled out. Then we're having around AI now, even though it's still clunky and messy and so on and so forth. In AI, higher education has always been this, whether it was the MOOCs or AI now that, the professors are going to be gone. The AI is going to teach everything so on and so forth. I think the future is going to be much more complicated than that. And so I'd love to get your thoughts on what do you think are your top, call it three opportunities in higher education where the application of AI can make higher ed better. Like today. And then we'd love to get a sense of 10 years down the line longer. What do you think some big kind of horizon opportunities are for the application of AI? What's the future look like Steve?
Steve Daly: So immediately there's, I mean, there's some really low hanging fruit that I think, and I think, frankly, we're gonna see so much innovation in ed tech over the next five years because of this technology. We sometimes get asked, well, what are you doing in AI? And it's like, well, you know what? Just think of that as like foundational technology that's enabling all these outcomes that we're trying to build to. It's not something separate from what we do. How much are you spending on AI? Investors ask me that, for instance. And it really becomes part of the fabric of innovation.
And so the areas where I think we're working on and the things that are in beta right now, and I want to caveat it because we've taken a pretty deliberate approach to this because there are so many ethical questions, privacy questions, security questions, right, bias questions that I think if we rush into this with some of these solutions, we're potentially damaging people and the process and ultimately maybe limiting the adoption because of bad experiences. So we've tried to, you know, the first thing we did was create a council with a bunch of our customers to talk about, you know, how are we gonna address this? How are we gonna talk about privacy, for instance, and how do we keep the data, right? So there's a lot going on just infrastructure wise.
But just, you know, more directly to your question. So I believe this is gonna make teachers' lives much better. So the things that we've got either going that are in either the lab or they're in beta even right now is how do we help teachers just in their ability to create content? And so if let's say they wanna add current events into this semester's syllabus, how do you use AI to do that? How do we help them create more engaging experiences, more interactive experiences? Even to, we've got technology now not released yet, but in beta that helps them create quiz questions based on important content. You know, give me the multiple choice, you know, answer on the Magna Carta, you know, with three distractor questions, you know, answers in that.
And so, I believe this is gonna make it much simpler for a teacher in the creation process. The other thing that's really time consuming for teachers is then providing the feedback, right? And so homework assignment comes in and they've already kind of lectured on it, right? They've already created a quiz question, for instance, about the content. And now they've got to grade it and then provide feedback again on that content. It's three times doing the exact same thing. And so some of the technology we have running right now will give them feedback to answers, both correct and incorrect answers, and allow the teacher to use it or not. I think for the foreseeable future, there's going to be a human intervention piece to this until we get comfortable with the technology. It'll really simplify those types of processes.
So I am 100% believer that this is not replacing teachers, but it becomes an aid to teachers and helps them focus on what they do best, right? Which is they're in there, they're inspiring, they're mentoring, right? Those types of things that teachers love to do. I think on the other piece then, so that those two things I think are the near-term opportunities in teacher assistance. The other side is on the student side. So, we announced a partnership with Khan Academy. They have that Khanmigo technology, but there's a lot of technology out there around what we call virtual tutoring. But what it really is is the technology can actually help in the creation process with the student.
So if a student says, I need to write an essay on George Washington, right? It can ask them the question, well, what are the key points you want to make? Do you have, do you need some, what's your source material? Go find this. And then give them advice, right? That's a little bit passive in your voice. Maybe you should try saying it this way. So everything that a tutor would do, I think the technology can take a lot of that burden off. And then I ultimately believe that that frankly creates a much more equitable access to that kind of experience, right? Because, you know, my daughter struggled with math and we went to Sylvan Learning Centers, right? And we had to pay a bunch of money to go help her get tutored. But if the technology can do that, right? Then those that didn't have the means like I did to be able to help my daughter that way, they still get you know, that access to learning.
And so I believe this is going to be a huge boon for not only for us as innovation perspective, but I think it's going to be a boon for the ability to amplify the power of teaching as well as to elevate students and their outcomes going forward.
Joe Sallustio: That's a fact. I'll tell you what, this has been an amazing conversation, Steve. I know we just cracked the surface on all the things that we want to know from you. But as we wrap up here, I want to give you the mic. No question. Talk about Instructure. Anything else you want to say about your work, your acquisition, anything going on, anything that you just want to say about your team. I'm giving you ideas, but you can say whatever the heck you want about Instructure and what you're doing.
Steve Daly: Yeah, you know, we're actually, we had our sales teams all in. We had a kickoff this week. And one of the things I shared with them was my why. And you know, working at Instructure is such an amazing opportunity to be able to have an impact on education, which ultimately is going to, I talked about my children and creating a world for them, right? That they're gonna have the same opportunities that I have. Instructure, we've got a lot of really passionate mission-driven people that are really invested in education. And we ultimately believe that we will play a huge role in helping democratize education and ensure that with all the changes that are happening and all the needs of learners and that the education system can meet those demands going forward. So it's a really exciting time and the team is really engaged in it. I'm really bullish on the education system and the future and the impact it's gonna have on society.
Joe Sallustio: Bullseye. Chike, what did you think of this conversation here?
Chike Aguh: I'm privileged to be here. Honestly, Steve, thank you for your time. And Joe, honestly, thank you so much for the invitation.
Joe Sallustio: Of course. Ladies and gentlemen, he is a man, a myth, and he's becoming a legend. He is the one and only guest co-host for today. He's Chike Aguh. He is the senior advisor for project and workforce at Harvard University, former chief innovation officer in the US Department of Labor. And he's the VP over at the Maryland Higher Education Commission, right? I can't get all the titles in there. I probably got something wrong, but he'll correct me. And of course, ladies and gentlemen, our amazing guest today, if you don't know what's going on with Instructure, you're not paying attention. They're making moves, and they've got an incredible product, let's just be honest. Here he is. He's Steve Daly. He is the CEO at Instructure. Steve, we hope you had a good time today. A little technical difficulties on both sides, but we did get through it.
Steve Daly: That was awesome. Thank you, Joe. And thank you, Chike. It's awesome. Great conversation.
Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you've just EdUpped.