The Educators Down Under: Reaching 1 Million Students in Australia by 2027

Welcome to Educast three thousand. It's the most transformative time in the history of education. So join us as we break down the fourth wall and reflect on what's happening. The good, the bad, and even the chaotic. Here's your hosts, Melissa Lobel and Ryan Lufkin.

Hey there. Welcome to Educast three thousand. I'm your co host, Melissa Lobel.

And I'm your co host, Ryan Lufkin. And on today's podcast, we've got a very special guest, Megan Wuff, CEO of Code for Schools. Code for Schools is an Australian charity committed to fostering a digital first future for every student, especially those from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds. Megan's leading the charge to equip a million students across Australia with essential digital skills by twenty twenty seven.

So no small task there. Megan was actually one of our keynote speakers at our CanvasCon Adelaide earlier this year, and I thought, you know what? We've gotta have her on the show. So, Megan, welcome.

Thank you. Very excited to be here.

So before we jump into the topic, given a little bit of the background, tell us a little bit about your background and your role as CEO at Cove for Schools.

Yeah. Like so many of us, my pathway to the role I have today is a nice big fat squiggly line. I think when we are at school, we all learn that, you know, cool. We're gonna decide what we wanna be when we grow up, and then we go be that. And then you turn into an adult and you realize that's not quite the case. But it's a good squiggly line in that I feel like everything's added up to being able to do the role that I do today to the best of my abilities. So very briefly, studied civil engineering at university.

Absolutely decided that wasn't for me at the time. Really loved the way of thinking. Did it sort of didn't vibe with, I guess, the work experiences that I had at the time. There still there wasn't a lot of women in the space.

I didn't sort of see myself in that space, but really enjoyed the really systematic and mathematical thinking, I guess. From there, went off and did a heap of traveling, which, you know, life experience in the moment is a wonderful thing, but when look when you look back on it, like, how many things you actually learn. Did some yoga teacher training and became a yoga teacher for a few years. One of the biggest things I think I learned from that was how to command a room full of people, which, gosh, how often does that pay off as well?

Because of that, ended up running my own business and loved the business side of things. So went on to build a few different small businesses as I continued to travel around, which was a which was a wonderful thing. And then started hearing these ideas around startups and technology and and, you know, people could build solutions. And up until then, I had no idea that, you know, the the phones we use and the the services that we engage with actually someone builds them.

And it's amazing how much you can interact with something without really ever thinking about how they come to be. Sometimes they're just in front of you. So probably by my mid twenties, I was coming around to the point of, oh, there's there's this thing called technology and it's not just something we use. It's something people build and and work on and and evolve over time.

So kind of bringing my business skills and my growing passion for business and solving problems to the table, I very deeply explored these ideas of startups and technology and how I could kind of upskill and and what's a better way to upskill than learning by doing. So I started a startup, was one of the only females in Australia at the time to raise money from venture capital. Went on to run that startup for about six years. I moved over to San Francisco, kinda lived the founder life.

You were right into the right into the Silicon Valley.

Right into the heart of it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Probably did about fifteen years of learning in those six years.

So I feel like I'm a little bit older than I actually am. Then, like, let's be very honest, like, most startups, like most companies, don't ultimately find that next layer of success. I think especially when you're a startup, there's a little bit of a swing for the absolute moon or nothing. So swung for the moon, didn't quite make it, and ultimately shut the company down.

Kept WIP for myself, so I'm still sitting on that, which is which is nice. I worked very, very **** ** it. And then went on to work on the other side of the table. So one of the massive things that I saw when I was running my company was how few people like me, how few women were in there, how brave I had to be to step into that role, to step into that fundraising, to step into that leadership, to step into building a technology company.

And it's like, how do I how do I bring that immense experience and those lessons I have to the table and help other people like me? So I went to the other side of the funding, company building, and mentoring side of things.

Really loved it. Really spent a lot of time and energy trying to change the dynamics in the system. Who sees themselves as people who could start companies, who could build products, who could identify solutions and go on and act upon those ideas that they have?

Unfortunately, the culture of venture to capital was not for me. I thought I could change it from the inside. I think some things don't wanna be changed, and I thought that my energies could be better spent solving that problem from a different space. So after that, again, huge lessons, some really big wins in that space, but kind of decided to tackle it from a slightly different angle.

And that angle was when I was in that space, by the time someone got to thinking, could I start a company? Could I work at a tech company? Could I build products? I felt like my experience was so many people had already counted themselves at that place, already decided for one reason or another, this isn't for me or hadn't even considered it in the first place.

And the more I dove into that space so after that, I did just a couple of years of project based work consulting just to really get a good understanding of who's working in this space, what are the solutions, how are we thinking about this kind of at a society level. And it was amazing how much I learned about how early that tends to happen. And when I say early, I mean, especially for girls, we're talking grade two or grade three. We're talking, you know, seven, eight, nine years old.

They've already decided this isn't me. I can't do this, which is was very surprising at the time and very sad as well. Like, imagine being that early and deciding I can't run a company. I can't build products.

I can't solve problems. So that end that drew me into the education space. Before that, my experience in education was I went to school. So I've very much come from a technology perspective into this education space, which I think has brought a lot of value to how we approach this problem now.

One of the companies I ultimately was doing some work for was Kocher Schools. Absolutely love the work they were doing, and I'm sure we'll talk more about this, but really love the work they're doing with how early they were identifying the problem and really giving a trajectory changing experience for an entire generation. So we're talking about every kid at school, not just I mean, for me personally, girls are a massive focus for the company. Lower socio economic disadvantage areas are a massive focus, but truly it's about it.

It can be carried at a trajectory changing moment for a generation. And I think now that I've been here for a few years, in a way, this is only becoming more important. Like, I'm sure we're also gonna talk a lot more about technology. But, yeah, so being here for a few years years now, absolutely love it.

Like, what a what a space to be working in. What a problem to be solving. It's big and messy and, you know, we're halfway through, but we're also kinda just at the start and then all of a sudden AI turns up. So really enjoying really enjoying it being here, but I think I could only do what I do now because of that.

Dave's experience of life and work experience had kinda led up to this point.

Yeah. Melissa and I talk a lot about this is the most transformative time in the history of education. So it's an exciting time to be to be in the thick of it.

Yeah. Absolutely. And speaking of transformation, and you've alluded to this a couple points in your journey, but one of the questions that we always ask our guests is a moment, a learning moment, either a favorite learning moment where you were the learner, where you were the teacher, where you observed learning, could be something in your family. But, like, I'm kind of guessing I can see and hear through all of that. Lots of learning moments over that career. But do you have a favorite one to share with our audience?

Yeah. Absolutely. So I actually have two. I'll keep them brief. One is a personal one and then one is kind of how I've seen learning moments play out through what we do at COVID schools now.

A personal one is I know it's such a learning moment, but learning and putting yourself it requires bravery. Like, requires bravery. And I think bravery looks different for everyone, but especially when you're trying something new, something different, someone no one around you has ever done before, something that, you know, that's saying you can't be what you can't see to be the first person so that other people behind you can see. I think that bravery again, the bravery looks different, but I feel like that's been a very common theme in how I've approached all the new all the new experiences and opportunities I've had that there's been a lot of bravery required.

I think that's a good thing but also not a good thing on a whole. I think, you know, it's exciting that people like me are able to you know, if you're inherently quite brave, you can take those big step forwards. But I don't think that we should require bravery from everyone to be able to go out and explore. I think we should be breaking down those barriers of of getting started.

And I think that what that looks like when the work we do for COPPA schools is a lot of the kind one of the big key levers that we pull is supporting teachers and training teachers. Because teachers, we all know, wonderfully, incredibly, absolutely important and can be the biggest levers for change in how students approach learning, in how students approach a topic or embrace a topic. But so often so one of the things we do is we train do teacher training. One of the versions of that is we bring them out of the class for the day and we give them a full day experience of learning.

We fully surround them with the experience of technology, so we often bring them to a technology company, and then we give them that experience of upskilling in these kind of core technical skills that they're gonna go back and use in the classroom. And almost without a fail, we've done this with hundreds definitely moving towards the thousands of teachers now. And almost without fail, the start of the day, they are nervous. They are fearful.

Someone's often strongly encouraged them to come and participate in, you know, a digital literacy or a coding day. They might not know anything about it. They might think, I'm not technical. This is not for me.

I've never thought to approach this before because I just I don't wouldn't even know where to start. How do I even get started? And then we do a really good job over the first hour or so of breaking down that fear so they can move into a space of embracing learning. And it's amazing, you know, in the first two hours probably of the training, how quickly they can go from we go around the room at the start just to break it down a little bit and ask them what they're thinking and, you know, all those words I just spoke about often come up.

But within a couple of hours, we've broken through that fear. And it's amazing once you've moved past that fear, how capable you are of learning and experiencing new things and and taking on new skills. So I think it's about fear is often something that stops us from or can stop us from learning even though we are fully capable of learning these new skills. And I think we're seeing that a lot with AI.

There's a lot of fear around AI, I think, which stops us getting started and it's kind of beginning that process of learning and up skilling. So that's been a really big thing. How do we move people past that point of the year to just getting started? We don't all need to be experts, but we are all extremely capable and I think we need to keep, you know, believing that we are capable even when it's something new or something slightly scary.

I can relate to that bravery piece. And, you know, I've been through various points of my career. I I was in a small startup as well that didn't end up making it. And and it's not a skill well, we shouldn't even require it.

I one hundred percent agree. We also don't teach it. And so it becomes this barrier that doesn't need to be there. So I'm curious though, before we keep going, share a little bit about code for schools.

Like, who are you? What are you doing? And then I know you have this big goal of one million students with digital skills by twenty twenty seven. Share a little bit about that goal as well.

Yep. Alright. So at Covra Schools, we're Australia's leading digitech charity, which means that we support schools to deliver digitech in the classroom. So we were starting twenty nineteen, so we've been around for a little while now, with the idea that Australia, the world, but we'll start with Australia.

Australia needs more tech workers kind of as a as a baseline. So what that means is the world is becoming increasingly digital and digital skills, you know, whether that's deep coding or technical skills all the way through to to really being really comfortable using technology at work is becoming increasingly important. And if we don't kind of shift how we introduce digital technologies to young people, then it becomes much harder to make sure they're job ready in the future. So it's a very practical approach, but I think over even since we started and especially the last few years with technology, this is about making sure that we are equipping young people that have the with the onboarding experience to digital technology that they need because technology, whether we like it or not, is a hundred percent part of our lives and definitely part of our part of our jobs.

Like, Ryan, I'm not sure if you remember, but in my talk at CanvasCon, like, I was saying, okay. Who can tell me a job that doesn't require any digital skills? Full stop. And I do this in every room that I cross to.

No hands on up. It's very, very, very challenging to think of a career or a job, full stop, that doesn't require some sort of digital literacy. Even think about accessing emails for payroll or for scheduling. Anything from there all the way out to, you know, building AI.

So we're about making sure that every student has access to quality engaging digital technologies. So we do this in three main ways. So curriculum aligned education, so anyone can engage with our materials. It's free.

It's open. It's classroom ready. It's designed to be taught in timetable digital technologies classes. So this isn't a lunchtime club.

This isn't an after school activity. This is making sure you hit every kid in a year level or every kid in a school so that we all have that same starting point. The second thing we do at Chesapeake Out is teacher training because even if we give you all the resources in the world, it can still be very intimidating to get started. So it's about changing that teacher confidence.

And the big thing we see out of that change in teacher confidence is a change in attitude and how a school will approach digital technologies, and that's when we see a really sustainable change within a school. And then the third main thing we do is partner with industry. So everything we do is curriculum aligned, but we make sure that all the examples, the pathways we talk about are directly connected to the skills that are currently relevant in industry and that they see as what's going to be relevant moving forward. So we bring in examples, but we will have a massive wonderful group of volunteers from industry that might be software engineers, that might be product managers, that might be customer success people.

They all work in tech to some degree, and they will mentor teachers. They can come in and talk to students. It's about bringing digital technologies to life because we all work in a tech company. I mean, people might not think of Canvas as a tech company, but it absolutely is.

I mean, most companies are tech companies now and we know how important these roles are. But our understanding is that the school system hasn't yet caught up with the importance of technology in all jobs. So really bringing it to life for the students, for the teacher, and for the school system in general is how we get kind of that ongoing engagement and sustainable change.

Yeah. I love that creating the context so they actually understand how these skills align to what they're gonna be doing for the rest of their lives. And I love the point too that you said about, you know, we use these technology tools all the time without really thinking about who created them or where they came from. Right? We take that a lot for granted. But a lot of your work really focuses on the underrepresented and disadvantaged groups. So what strategies have proven most effective in reaching these students and making sure you've got that equitable access, to digital skills?

Yeah. Really good question. I also realized I didn't answer the one million questions, so we can come back to that. But in terms of equitable skills yeah.

So in terms of equitable access, so this is multilayered. Like everything, it's wonderfully complex, always changing. So at a base level, everything is always free and open. No no payment ever required from schools for the most part as far as we can possibly make it.

No logins ever required. No software downloads. Everything's free and open on browsers. So it's kind of stage one.

If you wanna use it, can you just use it? And that's I think that's really important. And there's there's different ways that we approach that, but I think that is foundational level of importance. The next one is we localize.

So that might be in our courses in general, we make sure you use local Australian examples. But whenever we go specifically out to say regional areas and we do say teacher training or an activity for the students, we always work with local industry. So it's not about, hey. You're out in a regional area.

You know, if you come to the city, you might talk about technology. No. Here's an example of a local business that you might drive past every day or everyone knows about, and here's how they're using technology in their company, either as a direct pathway to employment or just understanding the localized technology. The localized technology context for their community.

It's about technology is in every community, and here's what it looks like for your community. So it's about strengthening that community conversation around technology as well. So that's another really big a really big piece we're doing kind of a broadest broadening from that. It's about meeting the school system whether are they ready for this?

You know, if a school you have to be ready to engage and ready to learn and there might be some kind of pre steps we need to do to help a school to get there. But, you know, do they have the technology? Do they have the connectivity? Like understanding that every school is different.

And while, you know, eighty percent of what we do is probably common across all schools, recognising the importance of understanding what a local school community needs and meeting them where they're at and respecting that, I think, is a really, really big piece of what we do as well where we do find so much success.

So knowing that you're focused on underrepresented or disadvantaged youth, but even just more in general, talk a little bit about the one million students initiative that you have by twenty twenty seven. And then how do you measure the impact of that? How do you know you're actually reaching those students and making the difference that you're hoping to?

Yeah. Absolutely. So in terms of the one million and the impact, so we're growing quite rapidly every year. This year has been a massive year of growth for us.

Think there's a we are I mean, digital technologies has always been important, we believe, but I think there's a shift, a general shift in the in the narrative of recognising that this is a very important thing to start actively engaging with at at a school level. So we've seen a lot of growth this year, and we're expecting a lot more growth over the next three years. We've got a reasonably ambitious goal of a million kids across Australia. So in Australia, they have roughly four million kids in the or students in the school system, p to twelve.

So it's a quarter of them.

It's a few quarter of all students.

That's a pretty big goal. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So there's a couple of reasons for this. I think digital technologies and within that we include AI.

So we have a new AI program, which I'm sure I'll talk about, AI literacy, which is kind of foundational digital literacy. I think AI one hundred AI sits within digital, but it's foundational for everyone now. So the idea is that the biggest push for this number is that it can't really wait. We don't think we could wait until two thousand thirty to say, hey, maybe we should start work and make sure all kids get access to this.

This is about right now is a very particular moment in to step up and say, how do we make sure with this rapid changing in the world around us that education that the young people are getting are able to keep up? And that's incredibly challenging. I think the technology is so drastically outpacing the education system as it stands with kind of its normal rhythms of change and that we saw a potential role. We saw our role as saying, how do we connect industry with school systems, so, you know, departments of education, Canvas as well, and make sure those students all get the access they need.

Because in three years' time, like, we'll use AI every day. Who knows where it could be? If we don't start now, we're we're quite aggressive, for a lack of a better term, in making sure that we do very proactively try and reach all students, but mostly the underrepresented ones. I think what we're seeing this anecdotally and through some of our data is that the digital divide at a time when it should absolutely be closing is actually getting even wider.

So this is about us saying, this is a moment in time that we need to take very seriously. How do we pull all our resources and influence and support structures together to say this is a moment in time to make sure as much as possible all kids have a strong foundational piece. This isn't about full fluency from p to twelve with, you know, AI and digital technologies. We believe if we give every school system and every student a foundational learning that they can what they do with that, what the school does with that, what a teacher does with that, that's on the power of the teacher in the school system, but without that foundational piece, it's incredibly challenging.

And that includes teachers as well. Like, when we go if we go back to what we're talking about with fear that I've been speaking to a lot of teachers recently and it's amazing. I mean, humans, you could talk to a lot of humans about AI at the moment and the kind of between That's true. Terrified.

I'm pretending it's not happening. And I use this all day every day, and it right now runs my life. I mean, everyone sits on that spectrum somewhere. So that's kind of the imperative behind it.

In terms of impact and how do we know we're doing good work, I mean, you work with schools as well. That's an incredibly challenging piece. So we do have some very strong impact numbers in the short term, and then let me talk about long term as well. But in the short term, on our platform, everything is free and open, but we can see usage.

So on average, any student who's doing one of our courses so at the moment, our courses are lessons that might be done over eight weeks or however a school wants to do it. It's completely up to them. But over that eight week or over that eight lesson course, any student doing one of our courses is engaging with each of those lessons, actively coding or actively working on digital technologies activities for at least forty eight minutes. So we're talking forty eight minutes average.

So that's the keenest kid in the class, and that's the least keen kid in the class. So on average so this year, we're on track. We'll reach about a hundred thousand students this year with an average of forty eight minutes engagement time, which is massive. And that's extended over those eight weeks and that's really active engagement.

So that might be a direct result of a teacher we upskilled or just a school that's picked up our resources and used them. So we can see the direct direct impact of classroom learning, which is really strong. A few anecdotal pieces for the longer term is a lot of schools so one, once a school starts working with us, they tend to stick around. We have an incredibly high retention rate.

And building on that retention rate, we've got a lot of schools that work with us. So year seven and eight is generally where the school will start because it's kind of brought us across the curriculum there. But a lot of schools that work with us, once they teach that first cohort, they'll start having a year nine technologies elective for the first time because we sparked interest in those kids, and all of a sudden, there are enough kids interested to warrant that. They'll start having year ten, eleven, twelve.

Every state's different, but, you know, electives or or subjects that kids opt into. We've had schools that have gone from within a couple of years, zero students engaging with technologies in year nineteen, eleven, twelve to two or three full classes, and we're talking fifty or sixty kids. Like, that's a strong spark of interest and a strong change. So we have I mean, been around for while, but it's only been twenty nineteen.

Twenty nineteen, we only worked with eight schools. So, I mean, if you're in year seven in twenty nineteen, you only just finished school. Like, so in terms of how many of these kids have gone on to, you know, start companies or become software developers or work in technology, that's gonna take a lot longer. As you know, you work in education, these things take these things take time, but we do have really strong relationships with schools that we can understand kind of how they're how they're dynamic around how the school approaches digital technologies is really changing.

And we hope to take a lot of those learnings into this kind of AI literacy piece as well because what we're doing with the AI literacy is we're moving from working with Digitech teachers and Digitech subjects to all teachers across all subjects. So it's how do we take all our learnings and make sure a school wide approach to technology evolves as as required.

Well and and that's the thing. AI literacy, we've had some guests on talking about AI literacy and the societal benefits of just raising that AI literacy across the board. But what are some of those other skills, those other digital skills that are and by the way, I love the creating context for local employers and, like, making sure they understand like, a student can understand how they can apply that even where they live. What are some of those other skills that are in demand with employers now?

Yeah. Good question. I think one of the biggest things is and it's fortunately not a digital skill, but it's curiosity. It's it's that willingness.

It's almost that other side to bravery. It's that willingness to say, this is a new thing. I'm going to continue to learn and upskill. So it's kind of that curiosity, that lifelong learning, the adaptability, and so much of that comes from when you work with and play with technology.

The more you play with it, the more you understand that it's not a big scary thing to who's telling you what to do. You you have control. You have influence you can build. You can you can manipulate it.

So because, you know, workforces are changing so rapidly, it's it's being comfortable with technology is a big piece. So that means, you know, if you get a job, there's no way your job doesn't involve you likely sitting in front of a computer or engaging with technology as we've said before. But beyond those kind of, I guess, general expectation of comfort to be productive with technology, it's then how can you use and manipulate technology? So I think the really interesting thing for us is, you know, we've we've seen technology change from it's in a certain part of the business to the whole business, which is I think what we're seeing with AI.

It's digital technology is no longer a certain part of the school system. It's the whole school system. So in workforces, we need people who can go in whether they're software engineer, whether they're a product manager, whether they're a team lead, whether they work in retail, whether they work whatever it might be, understanding the power of technology, understanding the context of your job, and how you can produce your outcomes or be more efficient. So it's interesting because we do you know, we talk about this a lot with schools, but there's no hard and fast rules at the moment.

It's that adaptability piece is so important.

Adaptability. Mindset that Melissa is such a a keen supporter of. We've talked about that a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. You need to so baseline comfort with technology and then what can you do with it? How can you whatever your role is, that kind of ownership of do I make the technology work for me and my job and my company? That's a really, a really big piece.

I remember being a kid and the first time I took apart a radio and realized that there were parts inside that contributed to the functionality of this thing, and I could actually take them apart and modify that. And when you realize, you know, you teach a student that they can actually open the source code of a website and look at the parts inside of it, there's something really empowering about that. Right? And I think that just creating that curiosity and showing them what's possible, I think, is fascinating. I love that answer because I think, yeah, that growth mindset, that curiosity is such a powerful tool.

Yeah. Which is very different to, you know, saying we all need to be really good at calculus or we all need to be really like, it's a complete change, I think, in the the skills that we're are gonna be required. Like, if I talked about the top ten skills I needed in my job right now, they're not, you know, necessarily specific skills I learned in school. It's the growth mindset. It's the adaptability. It's yeah.

Well, and five years ago, we were talking about writing SQL code. Now we're saying, well, you can have AI write the SQL code. What do want it to build?

And so it's more about that creative, yeah, aspect of it as opposed to actually writing the code.

It is the creative aspect, but I think where digital technology is why it's such a fundamental piece now is if you don't understand how it works, I mean, you don't need to go build it, but if you don't understand that that how it works, you're only ever gonna be a user. And, like, moving forward, only being a user of technology is only going to narrow your opportunities and possibilities. We can't be stuck in consumer mindset because, you know, if like, to have a pretty rudimentary example, like, if AI can teach you everything, what can you bring to the table? Like, you need to be that one step ahead. You need to go that one step deeper. So it's about understanding kind of how things work. And and I think digital technologies in terms of opportunity creation and kind of future possibilities is just as fundamental as kind of literacy and university now.

I think knowing that you us being able to manipulate technology is an incredibly important piece, and that's where that foundational digital literacy and AI literacy comes in, I Love that.

Yep. I wanna build on this foundational piece, but shift the audience a bit to teachers. And so one of the biggest challenges, and you you talked about this already in the beginning, is helping teachers feel comfortable. And I think many of our listeners might either be teachers themselves or they might be supporting or or enabling or inspiring teachers around them.

How do you all work with them to get them to feel more comfortable and to feel that same growth mindset. Like, I can do this and I can learn more. How do you approach that? And do you have any advice for others trying to get teachers to feel more comfortable, more brave, more curious?

Yeah. It's a big question, isn't it? So I think so there's to us, there's kind of two layers. One, it's the foundational layer.

Is everything easy to access? Do you feel confident that you've landed in the right place? This is for you. Like, when we teach teachers, when we develop courses, they're developed by teachers so they understand the classroom context.

It's not someone who really knows digital technologies but has no clue about the realities of classroom or or a teacher. So it's kind of developed by teachers for teachers for classroom context. So I think that's a really big piece because that can that can get you seventy or eighty percent of the way there. Like, this is this this content, this resource, understand my context, so it gives me a lot of confidence in using it.

So I think that's a really big piece. And then the rest of it is we use a lot of examples. So here's how other teachers do it. When we have videos, we we might use teachers in our videos.

We might use students in our videos. We might use industry engaging with the classroom. It's around sort of showing that other people have taken that journey and found success. And, yes, they might have found it hard or scary or didn't think it was for them, but here's how they were able to start getting comfortable with their own skill set and building on that skill set.

So, I mean, it's hard. We definitely haven't sold it. I definitely don't have all the answers. But in terms of just how we it always comes back to who are you as people, your your teachers?

What is the reality of your day to day, And how do we come as close to meeting you where you're at as possible and moving forward with you rather than saying, hey. Here's the ideal state over here. If you could just meet us over here, that would be wonderful. Like, teachers don't have time for that.

Like, we need to make teachers exactly where they're at and say, here's a solid path forward that other teachers have walked and found success beforehand. And with every teacher, we will learn and we will adapt and we will evolve. I mean, you know, we're approaching this. How do we teach teachers about AI?

How do we start integrating AI into schools? And it's huge. No one no one has the answer yet. And it's continuously meeting teachers where they're understanding their context and saying, here's our based on all our experience and expertise, here's where we think the next step is and here's where we think the next step is.

Give us feedback. So we're very feedback driven. We're very open, like, continuously learning and evolving, but I think it's recognizing where people's starting point is and starting with them at that point.

Yeah. With a goal like reaching a quarter of all students in Australia, partnerships are probably critical to scaling something like that really, you know, across the country. Talk a little bit about the the role of government and industry and community partners. How do you bring all of those different, like, stakeholders together to make something like this happen?

Yeah. Big question. It's a big job.

Not a small one at all. Yeah.

Not a small one at all. It's finding, again, those common points of alignment. You need to start similar goals, I think. You can't convince someone who's got a wildly different job.

Like an industry I mean, not at all unfortunately, not all industries care about, you know, making sure the next generation is is ready to go with the skills they need to be productive members of the workforce. But a lot of them do. Like, a surprising number of them do. So it's first of all saying, who's as as close to alignment with this as possible, and what can you bring to the table?

Is it resources? Is it volunteers? Is it expertise? Like, what are your goals? Again, same with the teachers.

What are these company goals? A big part of what we do is we're a bit of a buffer layer between industry and education. Because if you plugged industry directly into education, I don't think it would land as well as what we're able to land it because it's that recontextualizing for the education system. So it's finding people who have very similar goals.

And then from an industry point of view, to be honest, it's showing our rock solid track record of, like, if you had these goals but you reporting on impact numbers is important or you being able to leverage a certain amount of your workforce as volunteers is important, it's understanding their goals and making sure it fits in directly. Again, it comes to us as a filter of how is this directly relevant to the education system and plugging that in. So, I mean, I made that kind of easy, but it's quite challenging. We're constantly getting better at it.

From a education and kind of government and and department's point of view, it's a very similar thing. What are their goals? What are they internally capable of, and what are their expertise and capabilities, and where does our expertise and capabilities really complement that. So anyone like, departments, full respect to them.

They fully understand how important digital technology is. They fully understand that AI is gonna be to be a huge piece moving forward. They're still really trying to figure it out like so many of us are. But as I said before, like, the pace of the education system wasn't built in a time of such rapid change in technology.

So in terms of they're probably looking for different ways to engage with or support, and it's like, who's got proven results in the education system? Who does the education system already trust? Who do they work with? So it's about that alignment piece again, which is far more challenging than the word alignment makes it sound, but it's you know, you need some proven results no matter what you do, which is hard because you before you have proven results, where do you start?

Fortunately, we have some results that we can very much lean on. And then then we've I think we've got two other categories. So we've got community. Again, it's I think community is a huge piece of respect.

Are you respecting who we are as a community and what we wanna achieve and what outcomes? So, again, it's outcome alignment, and we do a lot of filtering of outcomes to make sure that we can pull together these resources and expertise and say, how do we how do we make that genuinely useful for the school system to to kind of move forward and reach all these goals? And then there's partnerships with people like Canvas as well that you have deeply established roots in the education system and how do we how do we use those channels to directly meet teachers where they're at? Because I think one of the really interesting things one of the really exciting things about working with Canvas at the moment is, I mean, if you're a teacher and you say, buy me a course on AI, you ask to find your course on AI, you're gonna get hundreds.

You are gonna get so many options. And I think trust is such a huge thing right now. Who can I go to that I know this is trusted, endorsed, worthwhile, relevant? Like, that trust piece is a huge piece.

So we're developing this with Canvas and how we're going to be able to roll this out to schools is it'll be supported and endorsed by industry, by government, and then delivered to schools through a trusted format. So if you're a teacher, like, if you're a school with no like, if just putting ourselves in the position of a teacher, you've been either at a school level or as a teacher level. Like, your kids are now using AI. Gosh.

I gotta keep up. Where do I even start? Is this being course being built for teachers by teachers? Is it safe for the school system?

Is it for my local context? Does it know where I've started? Does it know my, like, my level of digital literacy? Is it gonna be able to answer all the questions I have?

Like, no wonder so many teachers don't know where to start because where did you start? Like, if if I didn't live and breathe this stuff every day, I wouldn't know where to start. It's it can be very intimidating. And at SAIs, there's a lot out there.

They look shiny. They sound good. Do you have time to invest ten hours in this course versus this course? How's this course?

And so I think so many things of what teachers are doing right now, which is what they always do, ask other teachers. But I think so that trusted piece is going to be huge part of how we reach and find success, like genuine long term. Because it's one thing to develop world class content. We're very good at that, and I've got full confidence that any content we produce is world class.

But we all know that's, what, twenty percent of the job done? You have to do that, but it's about delivery and long term impact in a school. And that's what is incredibly challenging. What almost I don't think I think very, very few are good at that.

And the ones who both have world class content and delivering impact, they're the ones who are gonna win. And I think that's that's what we're trying to bring to the table here.

There's so many nuggets in this conversation that I think are so valuable for educators to be thinking about. The broader vision and how you're focusing as a company and then even just smaller pieces. Right? Your comment there about content is only, what, twenty, twenty five percent of it.

I think in education, like, people have been counting on content to be the solution, and it isn't in and of itself. So I just so many amazing things. For our very last question for you, though, as you look past twenty twenty seven, so you've hit your quarter of the students in Australia because I had full confidence that you are gonna do that. So you've got your million students.

Twenty twenty seven's here and has gone. What's next for you all? Where do you wanna see going next, or where do you feel like education should be thinking? Because that's the other problem with education.

You mentioned this. We all move slow. We tend to do what's right in front of us and the most immediate problem without future proofing ourself for, like, where should we be thinking next? So what's next for you all once you hit that million and, you know, you've really secured good learning and impact in over a quarter of students in the country?

I think a couple of things. One, we'll probably take school holiday off. Let's be honest. Everyone needs to love it.

Two, I think, you know, you've got three three quarters of the students left to go. But I think sort of looking beyond those practicals, I mean, give AI another couple of years. We it's very hard to predict the future at the moment. But I think one thing that we are seeing more and more of that, I don't know exactly what this will look like, is this directly connecting real time industry knowledge and experience into the classroom.

Because industry is moving so fast

That if we don't directly connect that into classroom, students and schools could go off in this direction and industry is actually going off in this direction or they're going in this direction. So I've learned some pretty alarming stats in my time here around the reskilling required of young people once they go into the workforce because they kinda did go off in this direction. So I think it's that deeper coupling of industry education. Having said that, I think someone like us is incredibly important as a buffer between those two. If you directly plug industry into education, you're gonna end up with you know, there could be worlds where Google sponsors this school and AWS sponsors this school.

Yeah. We see those one to one connections.

It's not really that scalable connection for us.

It needs to be agnostic, I think. It needs to be what are the broad strokes? What are their skills? What are the experiences?

How are we evolving? How are we working? Because working is going to evolve in tech companies quickest in the rest of the companies recent you know, different companies at different paces. But how do we make sure we are taking the realities of the workforce and plugging those realities in context with the buffer, like, kind of company agnostic, all of those good things to make sure that as young people, we are giving our young people the best possible opportunity to to develop the skills that they require to be productive, employable members of society as they grow up.

So I feel like that's going to be a big trend and something that we've worked a lot more on recently and are seeing a much bigger pull towards as well. That's a huge problem in and of itself. Like, how do you translate? How do you keep at pace?

But, you know, if we reach a million kids in the next few years, I think we're gonna get pretty good at that as well. And it will be, yeah, that direct buffered translation of industry into the into the classroom to make sure that, you know, as we were talking about before, what are the top skills? That that is kind of as much as possible real time, as much as is possible and relevant and realistic within a school system that it's real time.

Megan, this has been amazing. I'm so glad I approached you after your presentation and said you have to be on the podcast. For our listeners, we'll drop a link to CS in Schools in our show notes, and any of the relevant materials that you wanna share, we'll drop them in there because I think there's there's so much to learn from this initiative and what you're doing in Australia and and figure out how to, like, you know, extend that globally, really. This is not just an Australian challenge. This is a global challenge.

So Oh, absolutely.

So much for your time. Amazing.

Thank you. This has been amazing.

No worries. Thank you for having me. Was wonderful to chat.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Educast three thousand. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and drop us a review on your favorite podcast players so you don't miss an episode. If you have a topic you'd like us to explore more, please email us at InstructureCast at Instructure dot com, or you can drop us a line on any of the socials. You can find more contact info in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Educast three thousand.