The Future of Edtech: AI, Interoperability & Trust with Michael Feldstein of 1EdTech

Alex Sarlin (0:00)

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Michael Feldstein (0:24)

Most of the individual humans working in Edtech on all sides of the table want to do the right thing. We have incentive structure problems, and that is particularly true in an industry where sustainability is difficult. That creates tensions that aren't good for good ethical outcomes for the humans. Working under those constraints, I've found to be very good people and I've worked on all sides of that table.

Alex Sarlin (1:01)

Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry. From funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, K-12, higher ed and work, you'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders.

SPEAKER_3 (1:17)

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Hope you enjoy today's pod.

Alex Sarlin (1:41)

We have an incredibly exciting guest today on EdTech Insiders. We are speaking with the great Michael Feldstein, who has been in the EdTech space, observing, being a thought leader, being a product leader, and now as a Chief Strategy Officer at 1EdTech. He's been absolutely central to the education technology conversation for decades, including with his pivotal blog, Eliterate. I'll do his formal bio there, but I just want to start with that incredibly exciting. I'm very excited to speak with him here and we've never had him on the pod before.

As 1EdTech's Chief Strategy Officer, Michael Feldstein helps shape the organization's strategic vision and advances an open, trusted and innovative ecosystem of interoperable products and digital credentials. He collaborates with the 1EdTech community to identify needs and develop solutions that improve learning outcomes. With more than 30 years of experience in educational technology, Michael previously served as CEO of the Empirical Educator Project, co-founder of Argos Education and Chief Accountability Officer at Eliterate. Michael Feldstein, great welcome to EdTech Insiders.

Michael Feldstein (2:53)

Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here, Alex. It's a delight to finally speak together at LITE.

Alex Sarlin (2:58)

Exactly. It really, really is. So we are going to talk about a lot of things today. But before we get into any of them, I'd love to give you just an open forum to talk a little bit about your career, some of the through lines of it, and what you're doing at 1EdTech to really elevate the entire education technology field.

Michael Feldstein (3:16)

Yeah, thanks for that opening. I'm a teacher from a family of teachers. I haven't worked in the classroom for a long time, but that's the through line for me. I got into educational technology in part because it was an opportunity to express teaching practice in a way that could support and amplify good education at scale and allow me to talk to educators in a new way.

Eliterate, the Chief Accountability Officer is a joke. Eliterate was a blog I started over 20 years ago. Now, really well before there was any such term as social influencer, I was entering a conversation and I've been lucky to stay in that conversation. For me, it was always about how do we stay true to that core in this thing that became called Edtech, and became an industry and so on. In some ways, being at 1EdTech is the most illiterate job I've ever had. We bring together a community of policymakers, educators, and providers, and we talk about how these pieces need to work together in order to support teachers and students.

Alex Sarlin (4:34)

It's really been a legendary career, and I feel like you've woven in and out of various institutions in a way that has been really exciting to see because you can maintain that independent strategic voice and really observe the entire EdTech landscape as it evolves, and it's evolved a lot, but also jump in and actually create projects and build really major institutions. 1EdTech is one of the most important interoperability and standard-defining institutions in all of education technology.

Let's think big about some of the big trends in EdTech right now, and I'd love to hear you talk about how you're connected, right? Obviously AI is on everyone's mind, and you've thought a lot about this. We're also hearing a lot about cyber security, and consistently some of the large EdTech companies are under attack, and school districts are under attack by a lot of third-party hackers. And then, of course, interoperability, which is sort of the core DNA of 1EdTech and something we've all been striving for for a long time. So AI, cyber security, and interoperability, all major priorities. They're all sort of orthogonal to one another in a lot of ways. So how do you think these areas are becoming interconnected? And how should we think about them from the EdTech field?