Tony Wan, Head of Platform for Reach Capital, discusses the perks and pitfalls of ChatGPT, the expanding role of artificial intelligence (AI) in EdTech, and how the market is shifting in 2023.

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Elana:

Hello, and welcome to All Things Marketing and Education. My name is Elana Leoni, and I've devoted my career to helping education brands build their brand awareness and engagement. Each week I sit down with educators, EdTech entrepreneurs, and experts in educational marketing and community building. All of them will share their successes and failures using social media, inbound marketing or content marketing, and community building. I'm excited to guide you on your journey to transform your marketing efforts into something that provides consistent value and ultimately improves the lives of your audience.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This week I am very excited. I'm sitting down with Tony Wan, the Head of Platform for Reach Capital. If you don't know what that means, he's going to tell you what he does, so don't worry. I'm assuming last time I talked to him, he did a little bit of everything, so I'm excited to dive into what he does for one of the venture capitalists, Reach Capital, that specializes in education and other mission-driven areas. Today, we will be talking about all things EdTech.

All things EdTech, but we're going to also talk a little bit about AI and the infamous ChatGPT that everyone cannot stop talking about and are really curious about exploring in education. Who knows where our conversation is going to go, but I'm just really excited to have his expertise and be able to pick his brain and hang out. This will be really fun. Before we get into these topics, let me give you a brief background about Tony.

Like I said, Tony is the Head of Platform for Reach Capital. He's going to talk a little bit about that. But before Reach, he was a co-founder, reporter, and managing editor at EdSurge. I know you all know that wonderful publication, EdSurge. At my role at Edutopia, I felt like we were in parallel paths a lot. We were both kind of in this media world, and that's where I got to know Tony. I think, Tony, we've been in the same circle for, gosh, almost a decade now.

Tony:

Yeah, we're the OGs.

Elana:

I was looking at our tweets and I'm like, "Oh, this makes us look old." It's like you and me going, "Hey, nice seeing you at this meet-up. That was so fun," and listing a whole bunch of people that don't even have Twitter accounts anymore.

Tony:

Oh, man. I miss meet-ups back when they were a thing.

Elana:

I know, I know. I would say for people that don't know Tony, you love this space, you love this industry. When I come to you, you always have a smile on your face. You're connecting people. You want to learn as much as possible, and I learned so much from you. Those of you that don't follow Tony on Twitter, we'll tell you at the end his handles and how to keep in touch with him, but he also blogs. I've recently learned a lot from you, too. I'm like, no, this is the fact. No. I am just so excited to have you on the show. Welcome, Tony, to All Things Marketing and Education.

Tony:

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Elana. It is a pleasure. It's a pleasure. This is a great way to kick off the day.

Elana:

Yes, and it's an excuse for us just to hang out, too. I'm like, let's get some time. Why don't we tell the audience a little bit more about you? I actually don't know beyond EdSurge. You said a little bit about gaming, but I'd love for you to tell a little bit about your story of how you got into this crazy world of EdTech and what keeps you going and what do you do at Reach Capital?

Tony:

I feel like, for many of us, it's a circuitous route to where we are today. I think nowadays maybe there's more of a planned path you can take to EdTech now. But I think for other folks, the route with circuitous. Mine, it started with Zelda, Zelda the game with Link and Hyrule. This was a math game. We built this math game that was modeled off of Zelda, which began as a side project with friends. One of them was in a graduate program at Stanford, and this was his capstone project, and I volunteered to help him out with it.

Think about a 2D math game ripped off of the Super Nintendo Link to the past Zelda days that we just layered on some arithmetic practice. That was essentially the premise of the game. One of the advisors for this project was John Danner. He was at the time CEO of Rocketship, which is a series of charter schools at the time. He helped us set up a pilot, and they were using this game for a little bit. This game was really kind of our introduction, our foot in the door into the world of EdTech. As part of learning about this industry more, because we were very new to it, we were doing some web research, and that led me to finding out about meet-ups and events where I learned about EdSurge for the first time. It was just a newsletter. I subscribed, and one day there was an opening for a part-time assistant editor position. I applied and got the job as the first hire. That was kind of...

Elana:

Wait, you were the first hire at EdSurge?

Tony:

I was the first hire at EdSurge.

Elana:

That's amazing.

Tony:

Elana:

I know your role has been changing, but what do you do primarily within Reach Capital? Because some of our audience is on the EdTech side and is familiar with Reach Capital. Some of them are just educators and going, "Reach who? What? What do y'all do?"

Tony:

Elana:

That's pretty impressive.

Tony:

My title is Head of Platform. It's kind of a Swiss Army knife role. I don't know, I tend to gravitate towards Swiss Army knife roles, but a lot of my time is spent on providing support for our portfolio companies with whatever they may need, whether it's helping out with some of their marketing or some of their press outreach, to some thought leadership and community building. I also just continue to write about what we're learning in the course of our work as we look into different spaces. That's what my role is. I mean, funny enough, back when I was working on a math game, we had actually gone and pitched a couple of the Reach Capital partners, who at the time were part of NewSchools Venture Fund. In a way, I've come full circle after a decade.

Elana:

I will say that what you're not saying is in your role at EdSurge, you were a journalist, you were doing all of the things around there, but you were also helping build community. That's why you went to all of those meet-ups, and you were a connector. I still see that at Reach. You're about to go do an AMA and just to try to build community within your portfolio of companies and friends. I love that, and I love community builders.

Why don't we get into what everyone wants to talk about? Let's start about AI and ChatGPT, and then we can get into where EdTech is in this world. But you cannot get off your phone, off your radio, off of anything without anyone talking about ChatGPT. The reactions range from "Oh my God, I'm going to block it" to "Let's really explore it, and let's do all of the things" to "I'm just scared, and I'm just going to act like it doesn't exist." It's everywhere. Can you tell people what it is? I'd love to just talk a little bit broadly about AI in education, too, because this is not a new thing. It's definitely new technology, but AI is not new.

Tony:

Yeah, no, AI is not new. I think ChatGPT is kind of... It's in headlines everywhere. As you said, you can't avoid it. I can't open my Twitter or social feed without seeing a screenshot of somebody doing something with ChatGPT and commenting on it. I mean, I like to just take a step back. As you mentioned, AI in education isn't new. We've had technologies around image recognition or natural language processing or voice recognition that have been used in EdTech tools in the past. At Reach, we have invested in some of these companies that provide things like chatbot for student support or image recognition for grading handwritten assignments. AI in education, it's not necessarily a new thing, but it might have been happening more in the background. You may not have realized it was happening, but it was being used to help make certain processes more efficient, particularly around grading on a mass scale.

But with ChatGPT, I think OpenAI, which is the developer of it, has really brought AI to the front with this chatbot that has output that can rival... I think it can rival human output in terms of creativity, maybe a little bit less so on the accuracy side. I mean, I imagine many of your listeners are familiar in with it enough, what it's capable of. I think what's exciting and different this time is that usually there's a lag period between the emergence of new EdTech and its adoption in classrooms and education. But I think what's remarkable with ChatGPT and GPT-3 is just how quickly you go across the education and technology community have taken up on it. I think, for me, it was students who were leading the charge. I first learned about it from students who were talking on Discord about, "Hey, this new cool tool that I can use to basically do all my homework." I was like, "Ooh, this is kind of spicy."

There's a devious side of me that says if I were a student, I would probably do the same thing as well. I mean, honestly, it feels like schools and districts are responding to this with more urgency than maybe some of the other problems on their plate. I mean, within five weeks of ChatGPT being launched, a lot of districts have moved to ban it. It's like, where else do you see big districts moving this fast on something that's new?

Elana:

A lot of those same districts also banned cell phones. They also banned social media. They also banned a lot of things that they had to unban too, which may not be -- I mean, I'm not a banner for anything. I feel like, embrace it, because the more you ban stuff, the more people are going to do it undercover even more because now it's "bad."

Tony:

That's the quickest way to get eyeballs onto something is to ban something. I think this knee-jerk reaction to ban it, I think it was predictable. It was something that I felt like was not surprising. But now I think, as with the case with Google or YouTube or Wikipedia, I'm hoping that it's going to push us towards new ways of thinking around how we think about assignments or just use technology to incorporate into our pedagogy for our students. I think for all of the concerns around academic integrity and plagiarism, which I believe are very well-founded, I'm also seeing glimmers of a teacher who's trying out ChatGPT for themselves and using it to push their own thinking around assignments and homework and having a discussion with students around what using this technology means in the process of learning.

Elana:

I was thinking about, because we are in conference season now and we had FETC, that's the Florida big EdTech conference, and TCEA, so the other bigger conference in Texas in EdTech. Both of those had standing room only about a session around ChatGPT. I believe it was Matt and Holly that were running it, and maybe somebody else, but was I just saw pictures of educators, their faces were lighting up and they were curious. Those are the things that excite me about education. Educators are such lifelong learners and collaborators and I saw that. ChatGPT is so new and curious. If you all are listening to this and saying, "I still don't know what the heck it does," we'll put some stuff in the Show Notes for you. I'm going to put some resources. I'm going to put some really great sketch notes of 50 different ways you can use ChatGPT, but just think about your own reaction when it comes to technology. Sometimes I go, "Oh gosh, that's a little scary." That's my initial reaction, but just think about it and try to explore. Because more often than not, your students are going to be exploring it. From an EdTech perspective, it's here. Tony was saying it's been here for a really long time. It's just been in the background. It's good for you to understand it, because it's coming and may integrate/affect your product roadmap in the future.

Tony:

I mean, I think a lot of companies are definitely finding ways to leverage it to make some of their processes a little bit more efficient in the background. We're also seeing a new crop of startups trying to fine-tune a version of ChatGPT that's a little bit more appropriate and useful for the classroom as well. I think there's a lot of attention on AI writing and cheating, but there is also a lot of potential, too, for it to assist teachers with some of the things that they do, particularly around, like, lesson planning or creating assignments and prompts. I think that I would encourage folks to try it out and ask your prompts in ways that can help support your work and what do you do. Maybe some of the stuff that you find a little bit tedious or if you're hitting a writer's block, I think ChatGPT can be a good way to -- I mean, you may be surprised at some of the ideas that it can spur and stimulate. Caveat being that it's not always accurate and appropriate, and you do need a baseline understanding of what's right or what's wrong, or what's appropriate or what's not, to watch for these things. But I think overall, I mean, I think ChatGPT is really fun. I don't know, I use it in really fun ways.

Elana:

I've seen some fun ways on Facebook and LinkedIn and stuff. It's like mix synopsis of this novel with a theme of Baywatch or something, and it does it fairly well.

Tony:

I mean, when I first saw that kids were using it to just do their essays, I was very curious about it from the perspective of writing. I like to say writing is something that's near and dear to me. I like to say it's my only marketable skill, perhaps. I initially approached it with some concern. Can ChatGPT just write like me and just take my job as a writer kind of thing? I did this little test where I took all of my EdSurge articles that I wrote from my last job, around 700 of them. I fed it into the GPT backend to fine-tune it. I wanted to see if it could create articles that sounded like me. Can GPT write EdSurge articles in my style and my voice? I was pleasantly surprised in terms of the tone and the voice that it could. It could mimic my certain styles or my patterns, the things that you think are really unique to your style, but which machine could just learn instantly. That was pretty cool. In a way, it's kind of eerie, but also it makes you reflect on your style, your voice as a writer as well.

I've been intrigued by that as something that made me reflect on my writing and my style. I like to think that this writing feedback or reflection at least can be used in useful ways, as a useful instructional tool as we think about what the future of writing looks like. The caveat of me creating this little bot is that all the facts are inaccurate. I essentially created a fake bot news, a bot that spits out fake news in my voice. That's the downside of my experiment.

Elana:

We've gravitated towards ChatGPT as it relates to writing because that's its most direct impact. I think right now a lot of English teachers are not freaking out, but they're concerned because it can sound like the kids and whatnot. I think this is an opportunity for a lot of the education organizations around writing to embrace this and really quickly step up and try to find ways to empower the educators. But do you find if there's any resources to help the struggling educators and go, "Oh, great, just survived a pandemic, now I got ChatGPT." How would you recommend they try to navigate this challenge?

Tony:

What I've heard people do is any assignment or any prompts that you would assign to your students, feed them into ChatGPT first and see what it comes out with. And if the result are things that what you think your students might be able to write, you might want to just think back and just think a little bit about what it is about your assignment that AI can't necessarily replicate or maybe think differently around what you want your students to convey or to communicate, or how you want them to develop their style.

Just for me personally, a lot of my issues with writing or how I learned writing back in my school days, it felt a little bit very straight-tracked into the five-paragraph essay or the 12-page research paper. I understand that there was use for these formats as a starting point for organizing your ideas and your thoughts. But I think that with ChatGPT, I hope that it opens up possibilities for you to write and explore new ways of writing, new styles, different kinds of formats beyond the standard formats of essays that we typically rely on in schools.

Elana:

What I'm hearing from you is some of the hintings I've seen resonate is, one, is reflection, like "Gosh, do I really talk that way? Do I overuse these words, or is that cadence always that way?" But can it break down some barriers that we have unnecessarily put on ourselves at times, right?

Tony:

Yeah. Look, I mean, there will still be a need for teachers and students to communicate the fundamentals of writing like grammar, punctuation, sentence structures, and things like that. I mean, after those foundations are set, and I don't know if ChatGPT can help you set those foundations, I think it becomes really interesting, because ChatGPT, its output, if you want to use it to assist your writing, you're really becoming more of an editor than a writer at some point. I think that you still need to have some fundamental understanding of writing. You need to know what good writing looks like in order to be a good editor, I think.

I think as the world maybe shifts to more AI-assisted writing in the working world where you may be more of an editor, I think still having that baseline fundamentals of what good writing looks like, it can really just turbocharge or improve the quality of the AI assisted output. I don't know. There's a lot. I think everything I'm seeing are things that I'm hoping. It comes from optimism around how this can really shape not just the quality of writing, but how people enjoy writing. I think a lot of people, from my experience, also don't like writing for a myriad of reasons. I'm hoping that there may be opportunities for this to bring out more of the joy of writing, too, by allowing people to explore different styles and different ways to convey the written word.

Elana:

I love that. I love that. I mean, we started this conversation on AI in general. It's not something brand new, but perhaps we weren't banging on the door saying, "Hey, this is AI." Reach Capital has invested in some companies that have AI in them, and you also cover a lot of EdTech when you're looking at it and getting to invest in companies. You talked about grading in AI. If you want to just talk a little bit about AI's role you've seen in other places, too, and maybe its effect that people don't understand. I think there's a huge opportunity for ChatGPT, but there's a huge opportunity for AI in general in education.

Tony:

Beyond just grading, we had a company called Gradescope that did image recognition for grading. It was acquired by Turnitin, but we have a few others as well. There's one called Mathpix, which is image recognition for handwriting in math and science. When you do a word problem or more complicated math or science problems that require students to show to work through writing, that's another tool in the grading world. One that's really interesting is using audio recognition for analyzing classroom conversations and dialogues. We have a company called TeachFX that uses AI to capture and also analyze the discourse that's happening in the classroom. It measures things like, how much are teachers talking? How much are students talking? What kinds of questions is the teacher asking? Is the teacher talking 80% of the time and the students are not getting a chance to participate?

These are, I think, insights that really tie back to a lot of the pedagogical practices that I think teachers learn in school in terms of how you engage with different students. I think it gives really powerful insights to see how you are leading discussions or how you're encouraging students to participate. It's all based around the premise that when students talk, they can learn more by talking and sharing their ideas in a classroom. I think that's another really interesting use case of AI in the realm of classroom conversations.

Elana:

As you were talking, I was thinking, "Gosh, it also just like ChatGPT allows for reflection."

Tony:

It's a really powerful reflection tool as well.

Elana:

Regardless of what it's doing and it allows you potentially, if you're doing it right, with grading, maybe you have more free time to reflect and do more critical thinking, the strategy of changing up things. When people are afraid of AI taking over jobs, I remember the same thing happened when we introduced robotics and things. It's like, no, it's not taking over jobs. It's potentially taking over the menial tasks so you can be better at your job and do the things that give you joy, right?

Tony:

Yes.

Elana:

Well, okay, I think we can talk about AI and ChatGPT forever and ever. Tony, if you have some great resources, send them to us. We'll put them in the Show Notes. Everyone listening, we'll be throwing up the Show Notes link at the end of the episode, but know we'd like to give you as much resources as possible, especially as you're trying to navigate this new and emerging world.

Tony:

Elana:

You mentioned it's down investment, but I think what helped me reframe it a little bit is that it's up comparatively prior to pre-pandemic in terms of funding. Just because funding is down, because of all of the stuff going on in the economy and the China stuff, doesn't necessarily mean lack of innovation or availability of EdTech and things like that. I'm wondering for the EdTech folks listening, what's their takeaways? What should they be concerned about, if any, about this year that might affect them?

Tony:

I think part of my concern, and maybe going back to the ChatGPT AI thing, is that one of my concerns would be similar to what we saw with some of the adaptive learning craze over the last decade, that there will be a temptation to think that these AI tools will be tools that are these magical apps where you just plop a kid or a learner in front of them, and it will be a very individualized, self-driving learning experience. We've seen that's not the case. The best tech, the best AI, whatever, the best innovations in education generally help to improve human connections or enrich human connections or enable human connections. I think that's a very important part of the learning experience, the teaching experience that I'm skeptical, though, that AI or any technology will ever fully replicate. No, it doesn't have to be an in-human or in-person experience, but I think thinking about the interactions and the role of the teacher, the role of a facilitator, the role of a guide, I think those elements, that human component, the human in the loop, if you will, that's a very AI term, still has to be there.

Elana:

I love that, because sometimes when we think about tech, we think about not enriching connections. You said we have to really look at it, and there's so many great examples in EdTech about tech really enabling deeper human connections as well, and potentially with AI getting rid of the stuff, the menial tasks, so you have more time to do that. I love that perspective. I've seen it in action, but I haven't seen people talk about it as a theme. That's awesome.

Tony:

I think all of this is to say is just to be really mindful of where does your proposed offering sit within a toolbox that a lot of schools have that frankly are very full right now? Is this another thing that you're putting on their plate, versus are you actually helping to take something off their plate? I think having a really good idea of where it sits and being mindful of the user experience from both the student, teacher, and also the admin side who is responsible for connecting all these dots. That's something that I would urge, because tech fatigue is something that's real and frankly can also be very, very discouraging.

Elana:

Tony:

I think there's also more of a spotlight on efficacy and usage as well. I think how easy or how well it integrates with the other tools is just like a big -- It would be a growing property, I think, for a lot of the vendors selling into schools. A lot of attention. I think we're seeing a swing towards a focus on usage now. Is your tool actually being used? And how does that shape how much we're paying for it, the ROI, from the school administrative side. I mean, very often as with some of the hardware stuff, we're finding that a lot of software that schools may have purchased were not being used.

Elana:

Great. Well, Tony, I know we could talk forever about EdTech and all of the new things like AI and ChatGPT, but I'd like to close down our podcast with one of the questions we ask all of our guests, and it's about inspiration. It's about how do you personally refuel, because all industries are tough, but educators, everyone in education that I've met, personally, I put my heart and soul. I get so inspired by education, but my heart gets broken sometimes, too, and I just feel drained. I'm wondering, what do you do to refuel when you have those challenging times? Is it a physical? Is it intellectual? Is it emotional? What are the activities or things you do to help refuel on those challenging times?

Tony:

I've been trying to get back into running as a way to clear my mind. Running is also a time-intensive activity, and with an 18-month-old, it's sometimes hard to find hours of a day to get out there. But that's something I like to do just to clear my mind and get out, fresh air a little bit. I don't know if you can see this, I brought my drum set up, electric drum set up from my high school days. Trying to get back into music and drumming, some of my childhood hobbies. I've been told I'm a pretty even-keeled kind of person, but sometimes I just need to...

Elana:

Bang it out.

Tony:

Bang it out. I don't know. I've just been trying to find ways to get back or tap back into the arts a little bit, the artistic side. I just watched a documentary about Robin Williams. I find comedy very inspiring. To me, I mean, I don't know if philosophers really exist anymore, but I think comedians to me are the closest things into a philosopher in my book. There's just this magic that happens at the intersection of smart, stupid, and funny that I find really joyful.

Elana:

Yeah, well said. Well, thank you, Tony, so much for your time. For people that will want to follow along and learn alongside you, how best can they do that?

Tony:

You can follow me on Twitter. It's just my name, Tony Wan. I think you drop that in the Show Notes. Sometimes I don't tweet about EdTech, so I don't know, it's your warning. There's a website. Our website, Reach Capital, that's where you can find the things that we publish, insights into this industry, or learn more about how we're looking at different areas as investment opportunities in the EdTech space. I'll also be at some events. Maybe I'll see you at one of these, Elana. For me, coming up, there's South by Southwest EDU in Austin in March and also ASU+GSV in San Diego in April.

Elana:

Yeah, sure.

Tony:

I'll be at those two places.

Elana:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, again, Tony. For everyone saying, "Gosh, they keep mentioning these Show Notes. Where's the URL?" You can access them at leoniconsultinggroup.com. That's two Gs, consultinggroup.com/44, so /44. We'll be putting in all of the AI, ChatGPT resources, links to where you can contact Tony, and anything relevant that we think might help you along this journey and just understanding where EdTech is, but also what are the new things, and maybe how can I approach things with a state of curiosity and wonder versus that just, okay, I'm not sure, this is scary type of reaction. Like with all of these podcasts, I hope you make a challenge to yourself to look at one thing and say, "Wow, Tony really changed my perspective on where EdTech is or how I can use ChatGPT in my classroom." Think about that, reflect, rewind. We also have the transcript attached to the Show Notes as well. Thank you all for joining. We will see you all next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.

Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode. If you liked what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can visit leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast for all Show Notes, links, and freebies mentioned in each episode. We always love friends. Please connect with us on Twitter @LeoniGroup. If you enjoyed today's show, go ahead and click the subscribe button to be the first one notified when our next episode is released. We'll see you next week on All Things Marketing and Education.