We noticed that Instructure talks with incredible leaders every day, but had never given them a place to talk honestly and share with an audience about how hard it actually is to lead in education. And so, the Learning while Leading podcast was born. With our first episode of Learning while Leading (recorded live at InstructureCon 2026 in Louisville, in front of a live audience), I wanted to share some thoughts on how it went and why I think it’s important that leaders share their stories with other leaders.
My co-host Justin Stone and I only had one name on the list for our first guest: Dr. Marina Aminy, executive director of the California Virtual Campus (CVC), who works at the system level of the California Community Colleges.
Marina's been a customer of ours for years, and getting to know her as a leader over that time is a big part of why I wanted her first. For context on what she's actually running: 116 colleges, roughly 2.3 million students a year, all with real independence from each other. If I were going to test a new show on someone, I would want a guest who has spent a career getting a large, decentralized system to move together. Marina was it.
The icebreaker gave her away
We ask every guest the same question to open the show: what's your dream class, who's teaching it, and who's sitting next to you? Marina didn't hesitate. Muhammad Ali. She has a black belt in taekwondo, her father boxed for the Afghan national team and taught school in Kabul, and she wanted pointers on form as much as she wanted to hear Ali talk about growing into who he was in public. Her answer told me a lot about how she leads: fighter and teacher, at the same time, by inheritance.That instinct showed up for the rest of our conversation.
A system built so no one has to ask permission twice
The story Marina told about course sharing is the kind of thing that sounds simple until you learn how long it actually takes to pull off. A student at a remote college, one that doesn't offer the single class they need to transfer, used to be stuck. No seat, no workaround. So the CVC built a way for students anywhere in the 116-college system to take a course from another campus without a new application, a new email, or a new ID.
It took seven or eight years to get the technology right. It now runs on an Instructure platform, and last year, about 60,000 students used it, enrolling in a couple of minutes instead of waiting in a queue.
Marina used real examples and cases to help sell through her vision. For instance, she highlighted Lake Tahoe Community College, small and remote, picked up thousands of enrollments it never would have reached on its own. "It's not a zero-sum game," she told us. Colleges bracing to lose students to the shared platform found the opposite happening.
Steering 116 colleges
Marina’s role is more of influence than mandate. She can't tell any of those 116 college presidents what to do, so I asked how she gets anything done at all. Her answer, paraphrased only slightly: stop micromanaging, trust your team and your partners, and let the work speak for itself.
She'd also rather put faculty, researchers, and students in front of the people who need convincing than herself. And it works to her advantage. In fact, some of her loudest advocates showed up on their own, with no campaign behind them: students posting TikToks about how easy CVC made enrollment. Her own son found the program before she'd mentioned it at home, which made me laugh, because my daughter Sophie does the exact same thing to me with Canvas.
But persuasion has limits, and Marina knows when to stop being diplomatic. One college shortened its drop-for-nonpayment window from 14 days to three, giving students almost no time to scrape together tuition before losing their seats. She got in a room with that college's leadership and made it personal to their own values: you've built equity into your strategic plan, and this policy contradicts it. Not a lecture. A mirror.
What it actually costs her
I asked what keeps her going when the win takes years, and the road is full of colleges telling her no. Her answer, without missing a beat: "a lot of chocolate." Then, more seriously, honest conversations with peers when something falls apart, and a habit of picking apart her own missteps afterward instead of just moving on.
That part of the conversation got personal for me, too. I've found that the higher I've risen in my own career, the lonelier it's gotten, and it was a relief to hear Marina name that out loud instead of pretending leadership always looks put-together. She talked about how mentorship gets harder to find the further you rise, and how it looks different at every stage of a career. As a woman, an immigrant, and a Muslim over 50, she's had to keep finding new mentors as her old ones stopped being the right fit.
Her advice to women coming up in education leadership: find other women, ask for help before you think you need it, and bring an ally into the room before a high-stakes meeting, not during it. Her advice to the men in the room: give credit out loud, and repeat a woman's point back with her name on it when you notice it got skipped over the first time.
She uses AI like a colleague she doesn't fully trust yet
Marina's view on AI in her role is mostly used to save time, and she holds it at arm's length everywhere else. The clearest example: students using course sharing sometimes need a prerequisite manually verified before they can enroll, and that human review is slow enough that her colleges dropped between 3,000 and 5,000 students last year who simply ran out of time waiting on it. That's the kind of bottleneck she wants AI to help close.
Where she won't use it: her own writing. "I read it and I'm like, this just doesn't sound like me at all," she told me, and she'd rather sound like herself than sound polished. She's also wary of letting AI run analysis on research data, after a colleague pointed out that bias baked into one AI-assisted analysis can quietly spread into everything that cites it afterward.
On policy, she wants guardrails, not a script: guidance on security, privacy, accessibility, and FERPA, and then room to actually do her job without someone unfamiliar with the daily work telling her how.
Sharing the voice of leadership
I encourage you all to listen to Marina’s story, as I believe many of the challenges she faces resonate across the desks of so many leaders in education. She was a terrific first guest and an even more inspiring person. Thank you, Marina.
This is exactly why we felt it was important to create this podcast: leaders running the business side of learning need an outlet to voice their challenges, their solutions, and even just ask for help.
Learning while Leading is a monthly podcast. Please listen, follow, and give feedback on what you’d like us to discuss! And if you have an idea for a great guest to be featured on the program, please share it at LearningWhileLeading@instructure.com.
Listen to the full conversation: Episode 1: Making it work: The business of leading
