Keynote: Ctrl+Alt+Streamline
Well, and I'm so excited to be able to build on what doctor Collins Wayla presented. UNESCO was doing some of the best work around AI from a global standpoint and having power plugged in to what is really amazing for the Philippines, They're really shaping the future of guidance for teachers and students across the board. Pretty Pretty amazing. I'm gonna talk a little bit about control alt streamline, right, which is a a fancy way of saying we're gonna talk about operational and effectiveness. If you don't know me, I've actually this is my third time to the Philippines. I love coming down here every year, meeting with schools, meeting with you all.
But I'm part of the academic strategy team here at Instructure, and led by Melissa Lowell, is our chief academic officer. And two years ago, we sat down and and created this team really focused on the future trends of education. And that team now has grown into five of us. They really span the globe. So for instance, Simone Rabioli is based in in Italy, and he's plugged into the World Economic Forum and UNESCO and some of those groups are really setting those trends.
Tracy Weeks, who's joined our team, tracks policy across the country. So the policies that are coming out of the Philippine government, out of the US government, out of the EU. She's really incredible with with documenting that and sharing that with our team, and it shapes our vision of the future. Jodi Zaylor has plugged in the product in incredible ways and really helped shape, you know, the feedback that you give along with, you know, our folks like Farrah King, who you're gonna hear with later today. What does our our future look like from a product standpoint? So an incredible team.
And, honestly, I think I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to I get to visit schools literally on every continent. I think at this point, only Antarctica I have not been to. But but talking about challenges that new face. At bringing back.
And education is truly one of the most collaborative industries in the world. And so being able to collect that information and share it with other institutions is incredibly important. So when we started this team, we we actually sat down and said, how do we not boil the ocean? How do we find those themes that are impacting everyone across the globe that we we share as as educators, you know, wherever you are in the world. We came up with what we call the impactful eight. And these are eight themes that that are interrelated.
You'll actually see streams of what doctor Valenzuela said earlier, what the what Martin Bean will be sharing here later today, woven throughout. So the first one we're gonna talk about is operational efficiency and effectiveness. I'm gonna dive into that quite deeply. But I wanna talk about the other ones that support that as well because I think we saw themes of that just now. So evidence based design.
That's really using the data across your campus to make informed decisions, whether that's on what programs you offer, what institutions you offer, but data is difficult. Data's one of those those areas that prior to COVID, there was a very negative perception of data. And the idea that we would use data in punitive ways or ways that would negatively impact students and teachers. And the reality that we learned during COVID is that that data gives us a more complete picture of students and institutional performance than we could possibly have otherwise. Right? And so now the the focus is really on how we get more data, organized data.
And that has an impact on other things like AI and how effective AI can be. The next one is lifelong learning. You will hear this theme multiple times, and this is an area where I love where the Philippines are currently with their stance on lifelong learning. I think, there's been a major shift over the last five years. AI has accelerated that, but we need to make sure that we are creating lifelong learners, not just, you know, perpetuating the old model that was go to school for twelve, Sixteen, maybe twenty years, and then working a single career for a year.
That's just not not the reality of of Today. The assessment life cycle, again, you saw doctor Bellantua talk about that a little But AI is fundamentally transforming. Forming, how we assess the mastery of skill in ways that that we're still trying to figure out exactly how to Right? Writing a ten page paper, writing a twenty page paper is no longer the best way to to measure the mastery of skill and probably never was, but it was the easiest way to do that. And now we're being forced to be more creative with how we assess That skill. Recognition of learning, That is what you saw in doctor Milton's way of slides as the credential space.
How do we create new currencies to show proof of skills? Not just a a traditional degree, college degree, but those micro credentials, those stackable credentials that students want both for lifelong learning. But for instance, my daughter is a a third year student at the University of Utah, And she wants to get her four year degree in communication, but she also wants to get a certificate in data analytics to show that she has that skill set for potential employers. So traditionally, we thought about credentials as for adult learners or nontraditional students. But more and more students are looking at how do we create stackable skills to to represent ourselves. And so how do we make that seamless and change their internal definitions within our organizations.
Education industry partnerships, doctor Valenzuela spoke to that. And this is really incredible because we've long talked about the skills gap, Whether or not universities are preparing themselves for or preparing students for the jobs that that are available. And as we've seen this fast paced, you know, doctor Bellensweiler mentioned the the World Economic Forum and their tracking of in demand skills, What we're seeing is those skills are evolving faster than ever before. And they're not just the technological the technological skills. They're the human skills.
Now that AI can automate a lot of technical processes, how do we how do we encourage people with problem solving and those tech those human skills, interaction. Right? I was at San Jose State University, and there was a professor who did product design. And he said, we used to spend half of our time in the class designing the product, And then we would, you know, do a final review, do the rest of the course. Now that only takes ten percent of the time with AI. AI can do the design, the dimensions, the packaging much faster.
So now, I actually make my students reach out to industry professionals and present their idea and get feedback. I can tell you right now that my teenager does not answer the phone. If I call her, she will text me back and ask me what I want. Right? So the idea of her calling and reaching out to a stranger to set up a meeting is incredible. And so this leaning into the human skills is truly a new aspect, and it's a return to, I think, the human skills that we saw ten, twenty years ago.
Obviously, generative AI continues to be woven through everything, and we'll talk more about that as well. And then the science of learning. Right? How do we leverage what we've learned about the brain to make sure that we're creating different mindsets around learning creating lifelong learners. That's an incredible incredible idea that that we we don't spend enough time on today. So we're gonna dive a little bit into operational efficiency and effectiveness.
And this is a lot of words, but the the the meat of this is really efficiency is doing things right, and effectiveness is doing the right things. And I think when we actually look at the processes within a lot of organizations, we find that we spend a lot of time maybe doing the efficiency aspect, and we don't necessarily focus on the effectiveness. Are we doing the right things? Are we spending our resources in the right places? And and more now than ever with constrained resources, the speed of change, the need for updates, that's incredibly important. We need to make sure that we're focused in the right areas. Earlier this year, we released we released what we called the the attack top forty.
And we used LearnPath platform, which is a company that Instructure acquired two years ago, to actually use their data and measure how many tools were being used by most educational institutions. These are edtech tools. Right? Softwares. And you can see it's a it's a broad spectrum. What they found is on average, students and teachers were interacting with fifty different learning technologies on a weekly basis.
Pretty incredible. Think about then, what does that look like from a login standpoint? How many passwords is that? How do these tools interact with each other? Do they plug in seamlessly? How do you navigate? From one to another. Right? Pretty quickly, you realize that's a that's a lot of solutions. That's a lot of distraction from the learning that these tools are actually meant to port. So how do we, as educational providers, streamline that experience.
It's incredibly important. The other piece of research that we did earlier this year was the the state of higher education report. And this is a global report, but we focused on a few key markets. ANZ was one of those. The Philippines was another of those.
EU and the US were the others. And so we really dug into insights within the Philippines on those responses. If you haven't read this report, It's it's incredibly impactful. And what we found were the the the key challenges in the Philippines. And most of you have probably recognized these.
The first was technology and infrastructure. Right? Ninety three percent say infrastructure improvements are critical to lifelong learning, and the funding and resources were an issue. Right? We all know there's need for improvement. There's need for change. I think one of the challenges and this actually came up in some meeting with some of the leaders yesterday in the market, was the idea that during COVID, we implemented a lot of solutions that were implemented very quickly, were not necessarily implemented or adopted very plea.
Then there was also confusion, especially, at the primary school level through the idea that the the mandate for to return to in person courses actually drove a lot of confusion that we don't need to use technology anymore. So instead of of saying, okay. How do we create a hybrid approach? They were saying, well, we don't need to use the technology. We'll we'll just go back to in person. What they're missing there is this idea that that that hybrid approach That that use of technology even in the in person classroom sets up the the safety net for any sort of disruption, whether it's weather disruption, whether it's technology disruption, whether it's a return of a pandemic, things like that.
Not only that, it's how students want to learn. Students, there's I always tell the story of a of a little girl, and they handed her you know, she's a toddler. They hand her a magazine, and she goes to scroll on it. And she can't figure out why it won't do what she wants. She looks at her finger.
She wipes it on her shirt. She does it again. For her, that's just a broken tablet. She's so digitally native. She is used to that responding.
And when it doesn't respond, she thinks she must be doing something wrong. Think about that perception, how different that perception is than you or I who grew up I'm I'm old, to Be fair. I grew up with magazines. Right? But they have a a fundamentally different perception of the world. And so how do we meet that perception? How do we make sure that when they want to access their courses, they can.
When they want to access it on their phone, when they're on the bus, when they're moving to going to class, how do they access that in the ways that they expect to see them. They're used to social media. They understand how it works. They want that approach. And so how do we support that? The second piece is, again, that lifelong learning is a national priority.
Rapid AI adoption, like doctor Valenzuela said, it can can feel very overwhelming. AI is coming at it so quickly. I get about five different newsletters every day and know, they're constantly being trained on, now it's a trillion, now it's Three trillion. They're they're moving quickly. You don't have to know all of that.
You can actually very quickly jump in learn the basics of AI and AI prompt writing and what they're capable of. This is something that that I encourage everyone to do if you're not already playing with AI like Ed said. Use it five times a day. Use it twice a day. Try to use it for simple tasks.
Create images. You know, the the Gemini's new nano banana. It's the newest image creation tool from Google. Has made a great leap forward. Before, you would say, okay.
I'm gonna create an image, and we'd give you that image and then it would if you ask for changes to that image, would completely rewrite the image and you lose the, you know, the maybe the things you liked about that first image as they came up with the next version. Now Banana can now say, okay. I like all of this. Just change the color of her shirt. I don't like red.
I want it to be black. Right? And they can do that without changing the full image, which seems like a simple test, but it's the first time the large engine model has been able to do that. And that came out about three weeks ago. Solve problems that you have, that you can do simply. You don't have to learn all about the most advanced versions of these tools and quantum computing.
Use the ones that solve your problems, but use them. Understand that the the you know, none of us will be replaced in my opinion, except the ones that don't use these tools to make their lives here because that's what that's what they're really good at. Facility and platform readiness, we're gonna talk a little bit more about this, but right now is the time that we need to be looking at our infrastructures or technology infrastructures and making the changes necessary to support future technology. If we don't fix what's broken now, that broken foundation will lead to challenges in the future. And then the the the strategic operational disconnect.
Right? And this is very different by organization. Some institutions that have very advanced academic teams wanna push them but wanna do more. And sometimes there are odds with their technology teams. Right? And we've got to get aligned how those work so that we're supporting the mission of the educators across the board, not getting lost in some of the minutiae of of making. This report, if you haven't seen it already, is great.
Go and dig into it. I think one of the things that's interesting, and talked about this a little bit, but that thirty four percent of educators reported their institutions haven't developed any guidelines around AI. And I was talking to some leaders yesterday about this, and the there is a a spectrum of guidance, and it really depends on your institution. Right? And there's great there's great high level guidance and recommendations coming out of groups like UNESCO and their learning week That help guide requirements for teachers and students, organizations, and you can adopt those very well. But you've got to adapt them to your individual institution and your needs.
And some institutions with more tech advanced educators are saying, look, we're not going to create those guidelines because we don't wanna restrict innovation. We want to foster innovation. MIT, Michigan Institute of Technology is one of those that says, look. We're gonna we're gonna be hands off. There's other institutions that say we're gonna get very specific on how it can be used per course.
The biggest challenge is fostering and supporting what your faculty want to do. If they need the guidelines, if they need to have what good looks like modeled for them, there's ways to do that. If they need to be let let loose to run and and innovate to their will, let them do that. Right? But we've gotta create some sort of framework that fosters that innovation. Again, like I said, I think one of the benefits of the Philippines right now is that from a leadership standpoint, you have leadership that is focused on advancing education, digitizing education, creating non degree programs and non traditional upskilling and reskilling opportunities.
This is incredibly important. I do understand that sometimes great leadership, great headlines don't necessarily come with additional resources or frameworks to guide that approach. And that's where it's kind of incumbent on groups like this to come together and share what you're doing at your institution with other institutions to really build that framework, to build that understanding of what's possible. But at the high level, you've gotten support. I'll tell you right now in the US where it feels like education is very much under attack, we don't have this level of support.
We're not getting this focus. And so it's one of those things that that need to that from a educational standpoint. So as we talk a little bit about the lifelong learning cycle, I love this quote. The illiterate of the twenty first century will not be those that cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. This is incredibly important.
Right? The idea that we would go to school for so many years and then go directly into a job and work that job for the rest of our lives is really coming a thing of the past, for more educated learners. Right? Technology is evolving quickly. Skills are evolving quickly. Those human skills, right, are are important. I'll tell you right now, if you haven't done a certificate on AI basics, whether it's from IBM or ChekGBT or Google, You can simply go out and take a course.
Many of them are free and put that on your LinkedIn that you understand the basics of prompt writing. The basics of how an AI tool works. We should all be doing those. Right? It simply shows that we're we're capable of learning. We're capable of evolving.
We have a desire to keep doing those things. It's incredibly important. And then you build off of that. Right? Maybe your next one is around building a large language model or about the ethics of managing these tools. But there's so many opportunities.
That's that's truly one of things that's the most fascinating about being in education. It feels it feels like a very disruptive time to be in education, very tumultuous time to be in education. But the flip side of that is there's more learning opportunities for us today than there have been at any other point in history, The history of mankind. Whatever you want to learn, however you want to improve yourself, there is is a pathway to do that. Many of them are low cost or free and they're proliferating quickly.
How do we not just clean that ourselves, but then foster students, make sure students understand those opportunities and then leading into them as well. I work with Stanford. You know, Stanford in in many ways is leading a lot of areas. Doctor Valenzuela showed the Stanford AI report. This is actually the Stanford longevity project on lifelong learning.
And globally, they're looking at is we're we're culturally we're living longer. Right? We have better health care. We have better access to health care. We have better environmental for the most part. How does that affect our learning, savings, our career planning? And again, that reskilling, that upskilling, even retiring and coming back and doing an encore career It's become a major topic across the globe.
Right? And Stanford's looking at tracking that and understanding how does that affect us across the board. I will say with the Philippines focus on credentials and not degree programs, They're already leaning into this this piece. Right? So how do we how we leverage the work that is being done by the government to make sure that we're advancing as well? There's the the World Economic Forum has done some amazing work around the skills. And there's some great data points here. The the idea that forty per forty one percent So less than half, about sixty percent of all employees will need rescaling of some kind in the next five years.
Jobs are changing that quickly. Right? I'll tell you right now the skills gap we talked about a little bit earlier where there's this gap between what employers are needing and what students are learning coming out of school with is growing and those technology industry partnerships are a way to solve that. One of the biggest challenges we see right now is that that the goalposts are being moved by AI. The first job that I had out of college was working for an advertising agency, And I worked on the Coca Cola account. And my first job was to write radio bumpers, twenty second radio blurbs for markets across the Western United States.
The challenge there is that can be done by AI in a matter of Today. Customized for the market using the language they use. Heck, they can do it for most of the globe in a matter of seconds. Right? So that entry level job, that job that got my foot in the door at The agency no longer exists. So how do we compare students for the next level job? The next foot in the door job? This is a constantly changing piece.
This is actually only the last probably six months has really become a major concern as employers say, Shoot, how do I onboard my entry level employees in a way that I never done before? And so we don't have an answer for this right now. This is something that is an evolving target. We've got to work between education and the industries to figure out what that looks like. Is that more experiential learning? More internships? More Apprenticeships, right? Making sure that we're preparing those those potential boys for skills that they need. One of the reasons that digital maturity or organizing your digital foundation is so important are these four elements, right? Improving the student journey.
And this I've said for a long time, one of the silver linings of COVID, if there's a silver lining from a global pandemic, I know that that sounds somewhat obtuse, but it really is the idea that for the first time, we sat down and thought about what does the student experience look like? As I navigate those forty to fifty different technologies on a daily basis, what does that look like for me? And for the long time, education really aired on the side of what was easiest for the teacher. What can be adopted through the teacher? And for the first time, we started saying, look, we've gotta create some consistency. We've got to look at the navigation path. We've got to look at how do we help students connect to their outcomes and get their effectiveness, Right? And technology is an increasingly important element of doing that. Right? We've talked about some of the challenges, some of the new regulations from a governmental standpoint In in the Philippines around reporting outcomes, Soon outcomes.
That's almost impossible to do in Excel spreadsheets. It's almost impossible to do manually. So how do we actually make the technology work to help track that and build on that, Right? We've got to understand that student journey is now he and we keep our students from making them effective by streamlining that across the board. Operational efficiency. Right? Reducing the cost, understanding which ones of our systems are being used effectively, which need to be adopted more deeply? Right? We can't do that unless we have the data on how they're being used.
And for too long, we've operated in kind of a black space where we didn't understand the tools were being used. It was all anecdotal. Now we can get data. We need data and we can look at where they're being used and we can drive better usage patterns. We can target educators with messages that help them, with resources that help them adopt better, we can do better.
We have the ability to do that. The third piece is scaling computing power and advanced research, right? Research relies on data, organized data, Efficiency. Right? If we don't have our data in order, if we don't understand where things live on campus, we still have a very siloed campus, We can't access that data. And so that's incredibly powerful. We've got to actually make sure we've got some consistency across an organization about how we organize our information.
And then, maybe education delivery. This continues to be a challenge. How do we make sure that educators that didn't grow up using smartphones necessarily are designing for students who primarily want to use the smartphone to access their education. I've known I've talked to students who were saying, I almost never access my course on a computer. It's always on my smartphone because that's what I have access to.
And the idea for many of us of writing long form papers with our ums sounds crazy, but it's how students want to do it. Right? I look at my my own. I have a I have a fifteen year old son, almost fifteen, fourteen, and eleven months. Who who would rather lean his bed and watch YouTube videos on basketball than watch him on the big screen TV? Right? That's weird to me. I don't understand it.
But that's how he wants to access that information. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of NBA basketball because he does that so much. We don't watch that much basketball. He's he's micro learning in his bedroom on his phone. How do we ensure that we encourage that? We understand that screen time is is not all bad.
Focusing in the right area and screen time mean incredibly beneficial to learning. So this is the other aspect too is is shifting that growth mindset. Right? We need to fundamentally change how learners think about learning. Right? We have to encourage mistakes as part of the process. We have to increase access.
We need to create constant feedback, right? It's one of the biggest pieces of feedback I get from students is, you know, I want I submitted my paper yesterday. I still haven't heard how I did it. Most educators don't have the bandwidth to grade all their assignments within twenty four hours of the meetings submitted. That's that's crazy. Leveraging AI with a first pass grade tool Sensitive.
You can increase that speed of feedback pretty rapidly. And you're gonna hear some of the other later this afternoon or later this morning. You're gonna hear more about some of those features that can save the educators time, but allow that level of feedback that students now expect, Right? We have to actually change the fundamental mindset of learners, and that's the responsibility of everyone in this room to do that. The other aspect is we need to change assessment. Right? We need to build assessment into the process.
I love the idea that assessment is as and for learning. Right? Instead of just, here's the learning, measure your learning. How do you make the assessment aspect part of the learning process? More seamless, more forgiving, more contributing to the outcome, right? And that's something that we're right in the middle of right now. And Doctor. Rollins, we spoke about that a little bit.
There's ways that as we look at competency based education and formative assessment using AI to close and personalize learning experience for students. How's it going be absolutely being teacher and student? There's a lot of opportunity there. We have to understand how it would work. We have to have the foundations so they work properly in order to get there. This is one of those quotes I love because some of the most proven aspects, serves proven approaches we need overlooked.
When we look at the Socratic method, the original Socrates teaching one on one, asking guiding questions to his students. This is one of those areas where this is not scalable for most of education. Yeah. Or at least it hasn't been. Until AF.
Right? It only exists in bastions of learning like Oxford University, right? Where a student writes a paper and then sits down with their professor, And she is asked questions by the professor to really gauge her understanding over the course of an afternoon and they have a conversation that's not scalable, except with AI. And so how do we, as educators, stay pumped? How do I facilitate that? How do I create that level of personalized experience? That level of personalized assessment? It can be done, and we're starting to understand what those tools look like. And I will double down on the fact that AI will never replace educators. We all carry around the world's knowledge in our pockets right now, right? We all have a smartphone. You can look up any facts right now.
You can all find it. Right? But we still need teachers. We still need guides. We still need someone to help us along those learning pathways. Access to information Doesn't change that.
And so, that spark between lead teacher and learner, the magic of education. AI can help facilitate that. AI can deepen that engagement, but does not replace teachers. And that's something that I think we need to repeat over and over and over again. Because the biggest barrier I think right now for teachers adopting AI is the fear of training their replacement or leaning to their replacement.
We've gotta get over that. We have to understand how powerful these tools can be to really enhance that experience. Again, data as an aspect of that, if we can measure it, we can improve it. Right? We've got to pull these datasets together. We've got to understand from a data standpoint how we're doing.
And there's a whole lot of frameworks around that. We're not starting from scratch. Like I said, we're an incredibly collaborative industry. We work together. We understand what other institutions are doing.
We build off of other institutions. We have great leadership organizations like UNESCO, like Educause. Right? We can leverage their tools in a way that's incredibly powerful. Yeah. Speaking, which is Educause's defining digital transformation.
Right? Five steps to transform your institution. All of you can probably look at this and say, we're probably Two? Maybe we're moving into three. Some of you might be like, we're four we're four for sure. But understanding this pathway and understanding how organizations like Educause are measuring this transformation really helps us to find where we are and then map our improvement. This is not something you have to start from scratch to understand.
That's incredibly important. Okay. Thinking about the journey, how do you get from here to there? Once you've figured out where you sit on that spectrum, how do I understand? How do take the next steps? Where what do I need to attack on my organization to improve that? That's incredibly important. One of the aspects here is understanding that failure is not Bad. Ready? We learn from failure.
We learn from mistakes. Gartner predicts that thirty percent of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of this year. And we've already actually seen Some of that first round of AI noise making startups going out of business. Right? They run out of funding. I had one call me and say, hey.
Do you wanna buy our our IP and our URL and our in our customer list. I was like, hope your customers probably know that you're trying to sell me their list. And that's that's pretty alarming. Right? But we have to understand that just because we tried something with AI and it failed, doesn't mean AI is a failure or we won't move forward with AI. Right? We have to build off of those mistakes and reiterate and building in.
That's an incredible mindset. It's part of that growth mindset. Right, that we talked about earlier. We gotta have that growth mindset when it comes to our own projects, not just fostering the states, but building within ourselves. The reason for that is because we are in the middle of an evolution of AI right now.
This is going to be, as Farrah walks you through some of the great AI updates that are in Canvas and coming in Canvas in near future. You have to understand that we're still about that subject matter expert individual task approach. But we're moving very quickly into the AI agent approach. Who's heard of AgenTik AI? Raise hands. AgenTik AI, AI agents, cutting some hands.
What's important is an agent is an AI tool that's capable of more autonomous action. Right? They can take action on your behalf. And this is really where the industry is moving right now. And we'll talk a little bit more. I'm not gonna go into a huge amount of detail.
But you have to understand that the the first AI tools that you're rolling out are just the beginning. They're the trust building tools. They're the tools that help understand what's possible. The agentic tools are the next phase that accomplish tasks across your across your your systems in a way that is more like a human assistant would do. Right? I'm gonna, you know Lane Freeman, is the North Carolina in the United States.
Head of of AI training. I love his approach when he said, treat AI like your lazy graduate assistant. And you'll never be disappointed. Right? That's the level you can expect. The answers are, okay.
Sometimes he gets it right. Sometimes he gets them wrong. Sometimes you get accomplishes with a task, Sometimes it gets part of the way there and Saab's. Right? That's where we are, even with agents. Right? And so there's a lot of there's a lot of over promising or overthinking what these tools are capable of.
We've got to be realistic. They're still prone to hallucinations. They're still prone to confidently incorrect answers. Right? We cannot let these tools run off into the night. We actually have to everything has to be humanly.
We have to review their outcomes. This is incredibly important. So as you move into the agentic phase, that's putting your agent to work. Right? Your your lazy, glad you're the assistant. To try to accomplish tasks, but you still have to review those tasks.
You still need to be the expert to double check that work. Somebody has to be. And that's equally important to understand. And when you understand that they're not As you know, this is not a a all knowing robot that's taking our jobs. When you understand that, they're much more approachable.
And you can actually start figuring out what tasks they're best for. But again, Agenetic AI is goal driven, autonomous, decision making. Right? Again, within reason, with a human oversight, but it is the next phase and it's where we're headed. And it can do a lot of things that the basic tools we have right now can be. And I think Farrah, I wanna talk a little bit about why Canvas is uniquely positioned to support them in the future, but it's important.
So, I've got, like, five minutes left. I'm gonna go through these pretty quick, and we'll make sure you get these slides. And I wanna make sure we continue the conversation here. But the biggest barriers to efficiency, everyone in this room will recognize. Right? Disconnected teams.
Teams that don't talk to each other. Teams that aren't included in the room when good the right decisions are being made. Right? Clunky systems. Systems that you have for a long time because you had them for a long time. Right? They maybe weren't implemented well or they they've been customized over time and they don't work great.
We need to look at those systems and figure out where those can be improved on. Scattered data, right? That is the biggest challenge. If you have organizations in or departments within your organization that are protecting their data or not giving me access. That's a problem. Holistic data, complete data sets are what allow us to make good decisions.
Everything from the student level to the the university level, the organizational level. We've gotta make sure we have complete data to do that. And then change fatigue. Who who wants to learn one more technology today? Right? After COVID, I think we all thought, oh, we're gonna get a break. It'll go back to normal.
Right. And then November thirtieth twenty twenty two came, And AI came out. And suddenly everything changed. Right? We have lots more work to do. Change fatigue is a real thing.
Change fatigue is a real thing. How do we address that? How do we support that? How do we make sure that we're being empathetic to that while ensuring that we have to keep changing. It's just part of the world. So embrace digital transformation. Incredibly important.
Right? We've got to understand that it's a process. We've got to own it. We can't fall back on on the status quo. Centralizing that data, making every resource count. Again, measuring the effectiveness of everything from your CRM to your LMS to your SIS to the plug ins that that you may have.
How effective are they being used? Can you make them more effective? Can you drive better adoption? Or do you seek different tools? That's incredibly important. Tear down those silos. Is something that I can't argue enough. And the way you do that in most cases is by creating cross functional teams where all of the all of the stakeholders are recognized and represented heard. Right? That's generally the biggest challenge to that aspect is that teams don't feel like they were included before.
They feel like they're gonna be on the outside. If you can make them part of the decision, part of the process, it's easier to tear down those walls. And then automate the busy work. This is where AI starts coming in Pretty quickly. We can automate so many of the tasks that take educators so much time.
But we've gotta be able to have the foundation built. We've gotta be able to have the tools and the trust in the tools to move forward there. So that's about all I have for you today. I will say Melissa Lobel and I host a podcast And we actually go out and find the smartest people in education that that we can meet. Martin was one of our early guests and will probably be a guest in the very near future again on that.
But it's one of those things where it's it's these are relatively short podcast. But if you're interested in any of the the impactful eight themes that I talked about, we've got guests from across the globe coming to speak to us about that. I think there's about Thirty or forty episodes out there. If you're interested, it's a great resource to hear more and dig deeper, as well as reach out to me. Reach out to Melissa.
We're here because we want to understand your challenges and we want to get your feedback. That's all I have. Thank you again so much for letting me join you. This is like I said the third year I've been back to the Philippines. I love speaking with your community. I think you are always such an amazing involved group and I appreciate your time today. Thank you.
But I'm part of the academic strategy team here at Instructure, and led by Melissa Lowell, is our chief academic officer. And two years ago, we sat down and and created this team really focused on the future trends of education. And that team now has grown into five of us. They really span the globe. So for instance, Simone Rabioli is based in in Italy, and he's plugged into the World Economic Forum and UNESCO and some of those groups are really setting those trends.
Tracy Weeks, who's joined our team, tracks policy across the country. So the policies that are coming out of the Philippine government, out of the US government, out of the EU. She's really incredible with with documenting that and sharing that with our team, and it shapes our vision of the future. Jodi Zaylor has plugged in the product in incredible ways and really helped shape, you know, the feedback that you give along with, you know, our folks like Farrah King, who you're gonna hear with later today. What does our our future look like from a product standpoint? So an incredible team.
And, honestly, I think I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to I get to visit schools literally on every continent. I think at this point, only Antarctica I have not been to. But but talking about challenges that new face. At bringing back.
And education is truly one of the most collaborative industries in the world. And so being able to collect that information and share it with other institutions is incredibly important. So when we started this team, we we actually sat down and said, how do we not boil the ocean? How do we find those themes that are impacting everyone across the globe that we we share as as educators, you know, wherever you are in the world. We came up with what we call the impactful eight. And these are eight themes that that are interrelated.
You'll actually see streams of what doctor Valenzuela said earlier, what the what Martin Bean will be sharing here later today, woven throughout. So the first one we're gonna talk about is operational efficiency and effectiveness. I'm gonna dive into that quite deeply. But I wanna talk about the other ones that support that as well because I think we saw themes of that just now. So evidence based design.
That's really using the data across your campus to make informed decisions, whether that's on what programs you offer, what institutions you offer, but data is difficult. Data's one of those those areas that prior to COVID, there was a very negative perception of data. And the idea that we would use data in punitive ways or ways that would negatively impact students and teachers. And the reality that we learned during COVID is that that data gives us a more complete picture of students and institutional performance than we could possibly have otherwise. Right? And so now the the focus is really on how we get more data, organized data.
And that has an impact on other things like AI and how effective AI can be. The next one is lifelong learning. You will hear this theme multiple times, and this is an area where I love where the Philippines are currently with their stance on lifelong learning. I think, there's been a major shift over the last five years. AI has accelerated that, but we need to make sure that we are creating lifelong learners, not just, you know, perpetuating the old model that was go to school for twelve, Sixteen, maybe twenty years, and then working a single career for a year.
That's just not not the reality of of Today. The assessment life cycle, again, you saw doctor Bellantua talk about that a little But AI is fundamentally transforming. Forming, how we assess the mastery of skill in ways that that we're still trying to figure out exactly how to Right? Writing a ten page paper, writing a twenty page paper is no longer the best way to to measure the mastery of skill and probably never was, but it was the easiest way to do that. And now we're being forced to be more creative with how we assess That skill. Recognition of learning, That is what you saw in doctor Milton's way of slides as the credential space.
How do we create new currencies to show proof of skills? Not just a a traditional degree, college degree, but those micro credentials, those stackable credentials that students want both for lifelong learning. But for instance, my daughter is a a third year student at the University of Utah, And she wants to get her four year degree in communication, but she also wants to get a certificate in data analytics to show that she has that skill set for potential employers. So traditionally, we thought about credentials as for adult learners or nontraditional students. But more and more students are looking at how do we create stackable skills to to represent ourselves. And so how do we make that seamless and change their internal definitions within our organizations.
Education industry partnerships, doctor Valenzuela spoke to that. And this is really incredible because we've long talked about the skills gap, Whether or not universities are preparing themselves for or preparing students for the jobs that that are available. And as we've seen this fast paced, you know, doctor Bellensweiler mentioned the the World Economic Forum and their tracking of in demand skills, What we're seeing is those skills are evolving faster than ever before. And they're not just the technological the technological skills. They're the human skills.
Now that AI can automate a lot of technical processes, how do we how do we encourage people with problem solving and those tech those human skills, interaction. Right? I was at San Jose State University, and there was a professor who did product design. And he said, we used to spend half of our time in the class designing the product, And then we would, you know, do a final review, do the rest of the course. Now that only takes ten percent of the time with AI. AI can do the design, the dimensions, the packaging much faster.
So now, I actually make my students reach out to industry professionals and present their idea and get feedback. I can tell you right now that my teenager does not answer the phone. If I call her, she will text me back and ask me what I want. Right? So the idea of her calling and reaching out to a stranger to set up a meeting is incredible. And so this leaning into the human skills is truly a new aspect, and it's a return to, I think, the human skills that we saw ten, twenty years ago.
Obviously, generative AI continues to be woven through everything, and we'll talk more about that as well. And then the science of learning. Right? How do we leverage what we've learned about the brain to make sure that we're creating different mindsets around learning creating lifelong learners. That's an incredible incredible idea that that we we don't spend enough time on today. So we're gonna dive a little bit into operational efficiency and effectiveness.
And this is a lot of words, but the the the meat of this is really efficiency is doing things right, and effectiveness is doing the right things. And I think when we actually look at the processes within a lot of organizations, we find that we spend a lot of time maybe doing the efficiency aspect, and we don't necessarily focus on the effectiveness. Are we doing the right things? Are we spending our resources in the right places? And and more now than ever with constrained resources, the speed of change, the need for updates, that's incredibly important. We need to make sure that we're focused in the right areas. Earlier this year, we released we released what we called the the attack top forty.
And we used LearnPath platform, which is a company that Instructure acquired two years ago, to actually use their data and measure how many tools were being used by most educational institutions. These are edtech tools. Right? Softwares. And you can see it's a it's a broad spectrum. What they found is on average, students and teachers were interacting with fifty different learning technologies on a weekly basis.
Pretty incredible. Think about then, what does that look like from a login standpoint? How many passwords is that? How do these tools interact with each other? Do they plug in seamlessly? How do you navigate? From one to another. Right? Pretty quickly, you realize that's a that's a lot of solutions. That's a lot of distraction from the learning that these tools are actually meant to port. So how do we, as educational providers, streamline that experience.
It's incredibly important. The other piece of research that we did earlier this year was the the state of higher education report. And this is a global report, but we focused on a few key markets. ANZ was one of those. The Philippines was another of those.
EU and the US were the others. And so we really dug into insights within the Philippines on those responses. If you haven't read this report, It's it's incredibly impactful. And what we found were the the the key challenges in the Philippines. And most of you have probably recognized these.
The first was technology and infrastructure. Right? Ninety three percent say infrastructure improvements are critical to lifelong learning, and the funding and resources were an issue. Right? We all know there's need for improvement. There's need for change. I think one of the challenges and this actually came up in some meeting with some of the leaders yesterday in the market, was the idea that during COVID, we implemented a lot of solutions that were implemented very quickly, were not necessarily implemented or adopted very plea.
Then there was also confusion, especially, at the primary school level through the idea that the the mandate for to return to in person courses actually drove a lot of confusion that we don't need to use technology anymore. So instead of of saying, okay. How do we create a hybrid approach? They were saying, well, we don't need to use the technology. We'll we'll just go back to in person. What they're missing there is this idea that that that hybrid approach That that use of technology even in the in person classroom sets up the the safety net for any sort of disruption, whether it's weather disruption, whether it's technology disruption, whether it's a return of a pandemic, things like that.
Not only that, it's how students want to learn. Students, there's I always tell the story of a of a little girl, and they handed her you know, she's a toddler. They hand her a magazine, and she goes to scroll on it. And she can't figure out why it won't do what she wants. She looks at her finger.
She wipes it on her shirt. She does it again. For her, that's just a broken tablet. She's so digitally native. She is used to that responding.
And when it doesn't respond, she thinks she must be doing something wrong. Think about that perception, how different that perception is than you or I who grew up I'm I'm old, to Be fair. I grew up with magazines. Right? But they have a a fundamentally different perception of the world. And so how do we meet that perception? How do we make sure that when they want to access their courses, they can.
When they want to access it on their phone, when they're on the bus, when they're moving to going to class, how do they access that in the ways that they expect to see them. They're used to social media. They understand how it works. They want that approach. And so how do we support that? The second piece is, again, that lifelong learning is a national priority.
Rapid AI adoption, like doctor Valenzuela said, it can can feel very overwhelming. AI is coming at it so quickly. I get about five different newsletters every day and know, they're constantly being trained on, now it's a trillion, now it's Three trillion. They're they're moving quickly. You don't have to know all of that.
You can actually very quickly jump in learn the basics of AI and AI prompt writing and what they're capable of. This is something that that I encourage everyone to do if you're not already playing with AI like Ed said. Use it five times a day. Use it twice a day. Try to use it for simple tasks.
Create images. You know, the the Gemini's new nano banana. It's the newest image creation tool from Google. Has made a great leap forward. Before, you would say, okay.
I'm gonna create an image, and we'd give you that image and then it would if you ask for changes to that image, would completely rewrite the image and you lose the, you know, the maybe the things you liked about that first image as they came up with the next version. Now Banana can now say, okay. I like all of this. Just change the color of her shirt. I don't like red.
I want it to be black. Right? And they can do that without changing the full image, which seems like a simple test, but it's the first time the large engine model has been able to do that. And that came out about three weeks ago. Solve problems that you have, that you can do simply. You don't have to learn all about the most advanced versions of these tools and quantum computing.
Use the ones that solve your problems, but use them. Understand that the the you know, none of us will be replaced in my opinion, except the ones that don't use these tools to make their lives here because that's what that's what they're really good at. Facility and platform readiness, we're gonna talk a little bit more about this, but right now is the time that we need to be looking at our infrastructures or technology infrastructures and making the changes necessary to support future technology. If we don't fix what's broken now, that broken foundation will lead to challenges in the future. And then the the the strategic operational disconnect.
Right? And this is very different by organization. Some institutions that have very advanced academic teams wanna push them but wanna do more. And sometimes there are odds with their technology teams. Right? And we've got to get aligned how those work so that we're supporting the mission of the educators across the board, not getting lost in some of the minutiae of of making. This report, if you haven't seen it already, is great.
Go and dig into it. I think one of the things that's interesting, and talked about this a little bit, but that thirty four percent of educators reported their institutions haven't developed any guidelines around AI. And I was talking to some leaders yesterday about this, and the there is a a spectrum of guidance, and it really depends on your institution. Right? And there's great there's great high level guidance and recommendations coming out of groups like UNESCO and their learning week That help guide requirements for teachers and students, organizations, and you can adopt those very well. But you've got to adapt them to your individual institution and your needs.
And some institutions with more tech advanced educators are saying, look, we're not going to create those guidelines because we don't wanna restrict innovation. We want to foster innovation. MIT, Michigan Institute of Technology is one of those that says, look. We're gonna we're gonna be hands off. There's other institutions that say we're gonna get very specific on how it can be used per course.
The biggest challenge is fostering and supporting what your faculty want to do. If they need the guidelines, if they need to have what good looks like modeled for them, there's ways to do that. If they need to be let let loose to run and and innovate to their will, let them do that. Right? But we've gotta create some sort of framework that fosters that innovation. Again, like I said, I think one of the benefits of the Philippines right now is that from a leadership standpoint, you have leadership that is focused on advancing education, digitizing education, creating non degree programs and non traditional upskilling and reskilling opportunities.
This is incredibly important. I do understand that sometimes great leadership, great headlines don't necessarily come with additional resources or frameworks to guide that approach. And that's where it's kind of incumbent on groups like this to come together and share what you're doing at your institution with other institutions to really build that framework, to build that understanding of what's possible. But at the high level, you've gotten support. I'll tell you right now in the US where it feels like education is very much under attack, we don't have this level of support.
We're not getting this focus. And so it's one of those things that that need to that from a educational standpoint. So as we talk a little bit about the lifelong learning cycle, I love this quote. The illiterate of the twenty first century will not be those that cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. This is incredibly important.
Right? The idea that we would go to school for so many years and then go directly into a job and work that job for the rest of our lives is really coming a thing of the past, for more educated learners. Right? Technology is evolving quickly. Skills are evolving quickly. Those human skills, right, are are important. I'll tell you right now, if you haven't done a certificate on AI basics, whether it's from IBM or ChekGBT or Google, You can simply go out and take a course.
Many of them are free and put that on your LinkedIn that you understand the basics of prompt writing. The basics of how an AI tool works. We should all be doing those. Right? It simply shows that we're we're capable of learning. We're capable of evolving.
We have a desire to keep doing those things. It's incredibly important. And then you build off of that. Right? Maybe your next one is around building a large language model or about the ethics of managing these tools. But there's so many opportunities.
That's that's truly one of things that's the most fascinating about being in education. It feels it feels like a very disruptive time to be in education, very tumultuous time to be in education. But the flip side of that is there's more learning opportunities for us today than there have been at any other point in history, The history of mankind. Whatever you want to learn, however you want to improve yourself, there is is a pathway to do that. Many of them are low cost or free and they're proliferating quickly.
How do we not just clean that ourselves, but then foster students, make sure students understand those opportunities and then leading into them as well. I work with Stanford. You know, Stanford in in many ways is leading a lot of areas. Doctor Valenzuela showed the Stanford AI report. This is actually the Stanford longevity project on lifelong learning.
And globally, they're looking at is we're we're culturally we're living longer. Right? We have better health care. We have better access to health care. We have better environmental for the most part. How does that affect our learning, savings, our career planning? And again, that reskilling, that upskilling, even retiring and coming back and doing an encore career It's become a major topic across the globe.
Right? And Stanford's looking at tracking that and understanding how does that affect us across the board. I will say with the Philippines focus on credentials and not degree programs, They're already leaning into this this piece. Right? So how do we how we leverage the work that is being done by the government to make sure that we're advancing as well? There's the the World Economic Forum has done some amazing work around the skills. And there's some great data points here. The the idea that forty per forty one percent So less than half, about sixty percent of all employees will need rescaling of some kind in the next five years.
Jobs are changing that quickly. Right? I'll tell you right now the skills gap we talked about a little bit earlier where there's this gap between what employers are needing and what students are learning coming out of school with is growing and those technology industry partnerships are a way to solve that. One of the biggest challenges we see right now is that that the goalposts are being moved by AI. The first job that I had out of college was working for an advertising agency, And I worked on the Coca Cola account. And my first job was to write radio bumpers, twenty second radio blurbs for markets across the Western United States.
The challenge there is that can be done by AI in a matter of Today. Customized for the market using the language they use. Heck, they can do it for most of the globe in a matter of seconds. Right? So that entry level job, that job that got my foot in the door at The agency no longer exists. So how do we compare students for the next level job? The next foot in the door job? This is a constantly changing piece.
This is actually only the last probably six months has really become a major concern as employers say, Shoot, how do I onboard my entry level employees in a way that I never done before? And so we don't have an answer for this right now. This is something that is an evolving target. We've got to work between education and the industries to figure out what that looks like. Is that more experiential learning? More internships? More Apprenticeships, right? Making sure that we're preparing those those potential boys for skills that they need. One of the reasons that digital maturity or organizing your digital foundation is so important are these four elements, right? Improving the student journey.
And this I've said for a long time, one of the silver linings of COVID, if there's a silver lining from a global pandemic, I know that that sounds somewhat obtuse, but it really is the idea that for the first time, we sat down and thought about what does the student experience look like? As I navigate those forty to fifty different technologies on a daily basis, what does that look like for me? And for the long time, education really aired on the side of what was easiest for the teacher. What can be adopted through the teacher? And for the first time, we started saying, look, we've gotta create some consistency. We've got to look at the navigation path. We've got to look at how do we help students connect to their outcomes and get their effectiveness, Right? And technology is an increasingly important element of doing that. Right? We've talked about some of the challenges, some of the new regulations from a governmental standpoint In in the Philippines around reporting outcomes, Soon outcomes.
That's almost impossible to do in Excel spreadsheets. It's almost impossible to do manually. So how do we actually make the technology work to help track that and build on that, Right? We've got to understand that student journey is now he and we keep our students from making them effective by streamlining that across the board. Operational efficiency. Right? Reducing the cost, understanding which ones of our systems are being used effectively, which need to be adopted more deeply? Right? We can't do that unless we have the data on how they're being used.
And for too long, we've operated in kind of a black space where we didn't understand the tools were being used. It was all anecdotal. Now we can get data. We need data and we can look at where they're being used and we can drive better usage patterns. We can target educators with messages that help them, with resources that help them adopt better, we can do better.
We have the ability to do that. The third piece is scaling computing power and advanced research, right? Research relies on data, organized data, Efficiency. Right? If we don't have our data in order, if we don't understand where things live on campus, we still have a very siloed campus, We can't access that data. And so that's incredibly powerful. We've got to actually make sure we've got some consistency across an organization about how we organize our information.
And then, maybe education delivery. This continues to be a challenge. How do we make sure that educators that didn't grow up using smartphones necessarily are designing for students who primarily want to use the smartphone to access their education. I've known I've talked to students who were saying, I almost never access my course on a computer. It's always on my smartphone because that's what I have access to.
And the idea for many of us of writing long form papers with our ums sounds crazy, but it's how students want to do it. Right? I look at my my own. I have a I have a fifteen year old son, almost fifteen, fourteen, and eleven months. Who who would rather lean his bed and watch YouTube videos on basketball than watch him on the big screen TV? Right? That's weird to me. I don't understand it.
But that's how he wants to access that information. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of NBA basketball because he does that so much. We don't watch that much basketball. He's he's micro learning in his bedroom on his phone. How do we ensure that we encourage that? We understand that screen time is is not all bad.
Focusing in the right area and screen time mean incredibly beneficial to learning. So this is the other aspect too is is shifting that growth mindset. Right? We need to fundamentally change how learners think about learning. Right? We have to encourage mistakes as part of the process. We have to increase access.
We need to create constant feedback, right? It's one of the biggest pieces of feedback I get from students is, you know, I want I submitted my paper yesterday. I still haven't heard how I did it. Most educators don't have the bandwidth to grade all their assignments within twenty four hours of the meetings submitted. That's that's crazy. Leveraging AI with a first pass grade tool Sensitive.
You can increase that speed of feedback pretty rapidly. And you're gonna hear some of the other later this afternoon or later this morning. You're gonna hear more about some of those features that can save the educators time, but allow that level of feedback that students now expect, Right? We have to actually change the fundamental mindset of learners, and that's the responsibility of everyone in this room to do that. The other aspect is we need to change assessment. Right? We need to build assessment into the process.
I love the idea that assessment is as and for learning. Right? Instead of just, here's the learning, measure your learning. How do you make the assessment aspect part of the learning process? More seamless, more forgiving, more contributing to the outcome, right? And that's something that we're right in the middle of right now. And Doctor. Rollins, we spoke about that a little bit.
There's ways that as we look at competency based education and formative assessment using AI to close and personalize learning experience for students. How's it going be absolutely being teacher and student? There's a lot of opportunity there. We have to understand how it would work. We have to have the foundations so they work properly in order to get there. This is one of those quotes I love because some of the most proven aspects, serves proven approaches we need overlooked.
When we look at the Socratic method, the original Socrates teaching one on one, asking guiding questions to his students. This is one of those areas where this is not scalable for most of education. Yeah. Or at least it hasn't been. Until AF.
Right? It only exists in bastions of learning like Oxford University, right? Where a student writes a paper and then sits down with their professor, And she is asked questions by the professor to really gauge her understanding over the course of an afternoon and they have a conversation that's not scalable, except with AI. And so how do we, as educators, stay pumped? How do I facilitate that? How do I create that level of personalized experience? That level of personalized assessment? It can be done, and we're starting to understand what those tools look like. And I will double down on the fact that AI will never replace educators. We all carry around the world's knowledge in our pockets right now, right? We all have a smartphone. You can look up any facts right now.
You can all find it. Right? But we still need teachers. We still need guides. We still need someone to help us along those learning pathways. Access to information Doesn't change that.
And so, that spark between lead teacher and learner, the magic of education. AI can help facilitate that. AI can deepen that engagement, but does not replace teachers. And that's something that I think we need to repeat over and over and over again. Because the biggest barrier I think right now for teachers adopting AI is the fear of training their replacement or leaning to their replacement.
We've gotta get over that. We have to understand how powerful these tools can be to really enhance that experience. Again, data as an aspect of that, if we can measure it, we can improve it. Right? We've got to pull these datasets together. We've got to understand from a data standpoint how we're doing.
And there's a whole lot of frameworks around that. We're not starting from scratch. Like I said, we're an incredibly collaborative industry. We work together. We understand what other institutions are doing.
We build off of other institutions. We have great leadership organizations like UNESCO, like Educause. Right? We can leverage their tools in a way that's incredibly powerful. Yeah. Speaking, which is Educause's defining digital transformation.
Right? Five steps to transform your institution. All of you can probably look at this and say, we're probably Two? Maybe we're moving into three. Some of you might be like, we're four we're four for sure. But understanding this pathway and understanding how organizations like Educause are measuring this transformation really helps us to find where we are and then map our improvement. This is not something you have to start from scratch to understand.
That's incredibly important. Okay. Thinking about the journey, how do you get from here to there? Once you've figured out where you sit on that spectrum, how do I understand? How do take the next steps? Where what do I need to attack on my organization to improve that? That's incredibly important. One of the aspects here is understanding that failure is not Bad. Ready? We learn from failure.
We learn from mistakes. Gartner predicts that thirty percent of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of this year. And we've already actually seen Some of that first round of AI noise making startups going out of business. Right? They run out of funding. I had one call me and say, hey.
Do you wanna buy our our IP and our URL and our in our customer list. I was like, hope your customers probably know that you're trying to sell me their list. And that's that's pretty alarming. Right? But we have to understand that just because we tried something with AI and it failed, doesn't mean AI is a failure or we won't move forward with AI. Right? We have to build off of those mistakes and reiterate and building in.
That's an incredible mindset. It's part of that growth mindset. Right, that we talked about earlier. We gotta have that growth mindset when it comes to our own projects, not just fostering the states, but building within ourselves. The reason for that is because we are in the middle of an evolution of AI right now.
This is going to be, as Farrah walks you through some of the great AI updates that are in Canvas and coming in Canvas in near future. You have to understand that we're still about that subject matter expert individual task approach. But we're moving very quickly into the AI agent approach. Who's heard of AgenTik AI? Raise hands. AgenTik AI, AI agents, cutting some hands.
What's important is an agent is an AI tool that's capable of more autonomous action. Right? They can take action on your behalf. And this is really where the industry is moving right now. And we'll talk a little bit more. I'm not gonna go into a huge amount of detail.
But you have to understand that the the first AI tools that you're rolling out are just the beginning. They're the trust building tools. They're the tools that help understand what's possible. The agentic tools are the next phase that accomplish tasks across your across your your systems in a way that is more like a human assistant would do. Right? I'm gonna, you know Lane Freeman, is the North Carolina in the United States.
Head of of AI training. I love his approach when he said, treat AI like your lazy graduate assistant. And you'll never be disappointed. Right? That's the level you can expect. The answers are, okay.
Sometimes he gets it right. Sometimes he gets them wrong. Sometimes you get accomplishes with a task, Sometimes it gets part of the way there and Saab's. Right? That's where we are, even with agents. Right? And so there's a lot of there's a lot of over promising or overthinking what these tools are capable of.
We've got to be realistic. They're still prone to hallucinations. They're still prone to confidently incorrect answers. Right? We cannot let these tools run off into the night. We actually have to everything has to be humanly.
We have to review their outcomes. This is incredibly important. So as you move into the agentic phase, that's putting your agent to work. Right? Your your lazy, glad you're the assistant. To try to accomplish tasks, but you still have to review those tasks.
You still need to be the expert to double check that work. Somebody has to be. And that's equally important to understand. And when you understand that they're not As you know, this is not a a all knowing robot that's taking our jobs. When you understand that, they're much more approachable.
And you can actually start figuring out what tasks they're best for. But again, Agenetic AI is goal driven, autonomous, decision making. Right? Again, within reason, with a human oversight, but it is the next phase and it's where we're headed. And it can do a lot of things that the basic tools we have right now can be. And I think Farrah, I wanna talk a little bit about why Canvas is uniquely positioned to support them in the future, but it's important.
So, I've got, like, five minutes left. I'm gonna go through these pretty quick, and we'll make sure you get these slides. And I wanna make sure we continue the conversation here. But the biggest barriers to efficiency, everyone in this room will recognize. Right? Disconnected teams.
Teams that don't talk to each other. Teams that aren't included in the room when good the right decisions are being made. Right? Clunky systems. Systems that you have for a long time because you had them for a long time. Right? They maybe weren't implemented well or they they've been customized over time and they don't work great.
We need to look at those systems and figure out where those can be improved on. Scattered data, right? That is the biggest challenge. If you have organizations in or departments within your organization that are protecting their data or not giving me access. That's a problem. Holistic data, complete data sets are what allow us to make good decisions.
Everything from the student level to the the university level, the organizational level. We've gotta make sure we have complete data to do that. And then change fatigue. Who who wants to learn one more technology today? Right? After COVID, I think we all thought, oh, we're gonna get a break. It'll go back to normal.
Right. And then November thirtieth twenty twenty two came, And AI came out. And suddenly everything changed. Right? We have lots more work to do. Change fatigue is a real thing.
Change fatigue is a real thing. How do we address that? How do we support that? How do we make sure that we're being empathetic to that while ensuring that we have to keep changing. It's just part of the world. So embrace digital transformation. Incredibly important.
Right? We've got to understand that it's a process. We've got to own it. We can't fall back on on the status quo. Centralizing that data, making every resource count. Again, measuring the effectiveness of everything from your CRM to your LMS to your SIS to the plug ins that that you may have.
How effective are they being used? Can you make them more effective? Can you drive better adoption? Or do you seek different tools? That's incredibly important. Tear down those silos. Is something that I can't argue enough. And the way you do that in most cases is by creating cross functional teams where all of the all of the stakeholders are recognized and represented heard. Right? That's generally the biggest challenge to that aspect is that teams don't feel like they were included before.
They feel like they're gonna be on the outside. If you can make them part of the decision, part of the process, it's easier to tear down those walls. And then automate the busy work. This is where AI starts coming in Pretty quickly. We can automate so many of the tasks that take educators so much time.
But we've gotta be able to have the foundation built. We've gotta be able to have the tools and the trust in the tools to move forward there. So that's about all I have for you today. I will say Melissa Lobel and I host a podcast And we actually go out and find the smartest people in education that that we can meet. Martin was one of our early guests and will probably be a guest in the very near future again on that.
But it's one of those things where it's it's these are relatively short podcast. But if you're interested in any of the the impactful eight themes that I talked about, we've got guests from across the globe coming to speak to us about that. I think there's about Thirty or forty episodes out there. If you're interested, it's a great resource to hear more and dig deeper, as well as reach out to me. Reach out to Melissa.
We're here because we want to understand your challenges and we want to get your feedback. That's all I have. Thank you again so much for letting me join you. This is like I said the third year I've been back to the Philippines. I love speaking with your community. I think you are always such an amazing involved group and I appreciate your time today. Thank you.