In this episode, Jeff Dance is joined by Ursula Saldívar – Director of Innovation & Emerging Technologies at Tecnológico de Monterrey, and Mackenzie Price – Co-Founder of 2hr Learning, to explore the transformative potential of AI in education. Both guests highlight their innovative approaches to personalized learning, underscoring the role of AI as a powerful tool for efficiency and engagement. They discuss how this new paradigm can enhance educational outcomes and nurture essential life skills while also emphasizing the importance of adapting educational institutions to embrace these advancements.

AI in Education – Episode Transcript:

Jeff Dance: In this episode of The Future Of, we’re joined by Ursula Saldívar, Director of Innovation and Emerging Technologies at Tecnológico de Monterrey. I’ll refer to that as el Tec going forward, and Mackenzie Price, co-founder of Two-Hour Learning and Alpha, to talk about the future of AI in education. I’m going to start with a brief intro, but welcome, you two. Grateful to have you.

MacKenzie: Thank you, Jeff, for having me, and I’m so excited to talk to Ursula as well.

Ursula Saldívar: Yes, thank you, Jeff, for having us. Also great to get to know Mackenzie, and I’m sure we’re going to have a great conversation.

Jeff Dance: Thank you. So Mackenzie Price is a pioneer with the Future of Education. She actually has her own podcast on the Future of Education, so we’re really grateful to have her. And specifically, as it relates to AI with their innovative AI-powered school, her Future of Education movement has garnered over 100 million social media views. She’s had appearances on Dr. Phil, The Today Show, has been featured in Forbes, USA Today.

Through her podcast and platform, she’s leading a nationwide conversation about reimagining education for the digital age. She earned a psychology degree from Stanford, again, is the co-founder of Two-Hour Learning and Alpha and serves as a Forbes Technology Council member. So excited to have you, Mackenzie, to get your insights and the fact that you’re so deep in this reimagining topic, specifically with AI.

Ursula, go ahead.

MacKenzie: Well, sorry, I was going to say, I do feel a little bad for making you read that bio, whoever gave that to you because I think the biggest thing it’s missing is that we help our students learn more than twice as fast as kids in a traditional classroom in only two hours a day, and our kids love school, and that’s really what it’s all about. So, blah, blah, all the other stuff. Like, we’re helping kids crush academics and love school, which is exciting.

Jeff Dance: That is exciting. Having four kids myself, I’m like super eager to go deeper. Thank you. Ursula Saldívar is a clinical psychologist. She has a master’s in education. She’s also an art therapist and professor, and she leads Mosla at el Tec, which, if you don’t know el Tec, it was founded in 1943. It’s a private, non-profit educational institution committed to the quality of higher education.

It’s one of the largest institutions in Latin America. It’s in Monterrey, Mexico. And I think of them as the MIT of Mexico, but they actually partner with MIT. How many students are at el Tec, Ursula? She’s a traveler. She likes the intersection of social, technology, work, and art. So I think that soft side of your background and kind of the hard side of technology is really interesting. We’ve actually met in Mexico at Mosla and looked at all the innovative things they’re doing at that institution. Our company actually has a little display with an AI device there in Mosla. But I was really impressed with the organization she’s leading and el Tec in general and how it’s transforming students’ lives. So grateful to have you.

Ursula Saldívar: Thank you, Jeff. Yeah, we’re very happy and we’ve been collaborating with you guys. It’s been a lot of fun.

Jeff Dance: Thank you. Let’s stick with you, Ursula. If you can just tell us a little bit more about your journey. How did you get into education? How did you develop into leading Mosla?

Ursula Saldívar: Sure. Well, from all these presentations, what I think is really interesting is that we are both psychologists in technology. It’s like when I started studying psychology, I never thought I would end up working in the area that I do now. Probably in education, yes, but definitely not in technology. That was not on my bingo card when I was studying. So I actually started working at Tec de Monterrey around 13, 14 years ago, as a teacher, a high school teacher. And I always loved creativity, and we’ve always been big in applying technology to our courses at Tec de Monterrey, trying to be fast forward. So I eventually ended up working at Tec de Monterrey in the digital transformation area for getting to do better environments for our IT crews and our developers, ended up being more into technology. And I was like, we need to do something that has to do with technology working towards people, everything that’s emerging technology. How do we empower all the talent we have at Tec de Monterrey? So I eventually started working with emerging technologies. And then I ended up working with AI as one of them.

Jeff Dance:. Mackenzie, how about you? How did you get involved in education and then start this amazing school?

MacKenzie: Yeah, well, Ursula and I do have in common that we were both psychology majors, but I will tell you, when I took my final exam at Stanford University, I walked out and I literally patted my head and said, I am done, because I was one of those students that hated school. I hated school from the time I was little, but I was very good at playing the school game. And so I finished school. I thought I would never walk through the doors of a school again, other than if I were picking my kids up, which eventually I sent my two daughters to our traditional public school down the street and very quickly started noticing that there was just a real lack of ability to provide any sort of personalization to my daughter’s experience. Teachers were trying as best as they could, but they were locked into what the curriculum was and this whole world of having 20-plus students that they had to cater to. And about halfway through my daughter’s second-grade year, she said to me one day, ‘I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean? You love school.’ And she said, ‘School is so boring.’ And I had a moment where I just realized, my goodness, this system has taken a kid who is tailor-made to be curious and interested and want to learn and go to school and wiped out that passion. And I saw that she was going to go down the same road I went down. And I looked around and said, ‘There’s got to be something different that we can do here.’ And for me, it wasn’t about going to a private school or staying in a public school, it was really about the model. The teacher in front of the classroom model is inefficient and it’s broken and it was time to change. So 10 years ago, I decided to start my own school. And with that school, we knew that we could allow children to use adaptive apps to provide a more personalized, self-paced learning experience. We also knew that it wouldn’t take all day to sit in class to do academics. And so I had a focus on wanting to make sure we were developing life skills, things like financial literacy and entrepreneurship, public speaking skills, leadership and teamwork, and communication. So fast forward 10 years, we now have about eight different schools across Texas and Florida, and we’re expanding throughout the country. And at our schools, we have our students use an AI tutor that we have developed to do their academics. And in about two hours a day, our kids are able to perform and learn twice as fast as the rest of the country does. Our classes are in the top 2% in the country. I would argue actually there’s no other schools performing at the level that I think we are. They do it in the morning, and then all afternoon, we provide life skills development, and we make school really fun and exciting. I think I ended up falling into education because I saw it was broken and it was time for something new. And I really was one of those kind of just mama bears who wanted something better for my children and for as many kids as possible.

Jeff Dance: Thanks for that background. That’s awesome. It’s really interesting, like you said, both started with a background in psychology, wanting to change things through technology to see how it could better education. I experienced a lot of cool things that Ursula’s team was working on at el Tec. And so here we are, we are coming up on two years of ChatGPT being released, and it was one of the fastest-growing movements in tech in general, and especially in education. I don’t know if people realized how quickly the adoption was in education, both for teachers and for students. So I’m really interested to get your insights as we go deeper, especially with the advancements of generative AI.

Great. Well, let’s dive in here. A year ago, the founder of an online learning company, the Khan Academy, gave a TED Talk titled, How AI Could Actually Save, Not Destroy Education. I think everyone’s been concerned about AI’s effect on education, but haven’t realized some of the benefits. We know technology can be good and bad, and we witnessed that through smartphones. There are great things with smartphones, but there are also a lot of bad things that have happened, right? Technology kind of has a life of its own a little bit, but let’s talk about the good things. Mackenzie, you talked about sort of this model of adaptive personalized learning. Can you tell us more about the role of AI in your K-12 learning program today? How are you guys using AI?

MacKenzie: This is literally the most exciting time to be in education, and the next 10 years, I think, are going to be transformative. Education, the way we educate kids, hasn’t changed in almost 200 years. It’s been that teacher in front of the classroom model, and there wasn’t really a better way to educate people.

For years, learning sciences told us that the best way for a child to learn is to have one-to-one mastery-based learning, but that’s been impossible until recently. Now technology and AI specifically are enabling us to literally provide that one-to-one mastery-based tutor for every single child, no matter where they’re at. If they’re in the 10th percentile academically or the 98th percentile academically, the tutor is able to meet them exactly where they are. And so, as I mentioned, when I started the first school 10 years ago, we were using adaptive apps, but if a kid doesn’t know how to use those apps well, not efficiently, if they’re topic shopping or bouncing around from question to question, or not reading the explanation on a question, that can always be challenging. And that’s part of the reason that apps haven’t been super successful in the classroom environment over the last 15 years.

But what we were able to do is take this extra layer and use an AI tutor to make sure that students are efficiently moving through the material at exactly the level that they need to be and the pace that they need to be. And so we’ve really been able to take that power of technology and use it to make sure kids are learning much more efficiently. Then you add to it the power of AI to take that little boy who hates reading but loves the Avengers movie, is great friends with his soccer team, and loves his grandparents on his dad’s side. And then create a story at the appropriate Lexile level for his reading capability. Suddenly that boy is now the hero of a story about going and saving the world with his soccer teammates and then having milk and cookies with his grandparents afterward.

Suddenly that boy becomes more interested in reading, right? Or using baseball to help teach math statistics. We can really cater interest into a child’s knowledge that we need to help them learn. And that’s one of the things that’s been so exciting. So what we’ve found is through the use of AI, we’re able to deliver rates where kids are, again, on average learning more than twice as fast. We have students who are learning eight, nine, ten times faster than kids in a traditional classroom. And again, the most exciting thing about that is it’s not just for advanced students. We can reach every single student.

Jeff Dance: That’s fascinating. So personalization and kind of self-guided one-to-one and progressing at their pace. Like they could, if they want to go faster, they can go faster, but if they’re slower, you can help them where they are progressing essentially.

MacKenzie: Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the other benefits of AI is it’s able to really think about it like a CAT scan of a child’s brain. It’s able to understand, does this child need 15 repetitions of a concept before they really understand it, or do they only need five? And when you think about it, in a traditional classroom, the way that we teach is we explain a concept and then we move along. For that kid who already understands the concept, they’re spending most of their time bored, and for the kid who has no idea what’s going on even after the concept has been explained, the train is moving, and that’s kind of the way it is. That’s why we see so much trouble with students, especially as they get older. If you’re not performing well, and you don’t understand your multiplication table really well, it gets hard to do fractions, and then it’s really hard to do algebra.

And what we’re able to see instead is that we cater exactly to the learning that a student needs and make sure that they’re always at the appropriate level of challenge. And that’s what’s so exciting about what AI technology has done. But the other part of this, and I’m sure we’ll get into this in more detail, this isn’t meant to replace the human. What it’s allowing us to do is allow humans in the classroom to do what they do best, which is provide motivational and emotional support to help students kind of find their why. So I think that’s the other beautiful part of AI in the education classroom is we are transforming the role of teachers. Instead of having to grade homework, create lesson plans and lectures…

they can really focus on getting to know each of their students, spending time with them to figure out when they’re challenged, what it is that they tell themselves, and how can we work with them to create a better mindset? What are the things they’re excited and passionate about, and how can they incorporate that into whatever it is they’re learning? And that’s, I think, where we’re seeing so much success is because we’ve allowed the adults in our classrooms to spend that time focusing on the kids and then allow AI to educate the child academically.

Jeff Dance: Thank you. Ursula, what about you? What examples of AI are you seeing in universities? What are some of the things that you guys are working on?

Ursula Saldívar: Yes, well, we are also working alongside what Mackenzie is doing with adaptive learning. We also think it’s crucial for every student to truly personalize their journey and start learning at their own pace. We have a very different setting because we have college students and have a model based on developing competencies for every student. So it brings a challenge for us on how do we do this across all the different schools we have, like engineering, business, humanities, like how do we start adapting our type of courses to this type of new learning? So we’re doing some pilots with adaptive learning that have been successful so far. Also, along with Mackenzie, we found that students not only learn faster, but also they feel more committed or engaged with what they’re learning because it’s not like they feel left behind as their peer. It’s like we learn differently in different time frames, but also in different ways because that’s very important. And AI now lets us do that type of stuff. We are working towards different projects. When you have college students, they tend to be fast with any type of platform or AI that they discover every day. They start using it, they come to class, and tell their teachers. So all of our innovation areas, we are in constant hype and need of evaluating all these types of platforms also. So we’re working with virtual assistants, academic virtual assistants for our students because one of the things that faculty have is that they wish they had more time to actually spend with students and be there. We have office hours, and we have all this stuff that maybe a student is starting at 2 a.m. in the morning and he or she needs something to be assisted with academic. So we’re working towards this tutor that will help them. This is the subjects you have this week, you need to do these activities, you can find the references you’re looking for, the information in the library. Here are the references that you’re looking for. That’s a work-in-progress. We also have a program that we developed in-house called Skill Studio. It’s a project that we have. It’s a platform that allows our teachers to have pre-prompts of activities and they can share these activities. So imagine they do a prompt for a well-structured prompt for developing different activities related to emerging technologies and how to define the learning objectives and the whole activity. So now they can use their time more efficiently. I completely agree with Mackenzie that it is not a replacement for teachers because right now we’re working a lot with faculty and we’re trying to let them know that AI came here to empower your talent. AI is here for you to do all that, well, we also have, now that I’m talking about evaluation and feedback assessment, that’s something that teachers at any level spend a lot of time doing, you know, like evaluating. So now it’s like we tell them AI is here to take out and help you out with these activities that you may think look very repetitive and let you empower this whole talent that you have to motivate your students to be with them, to actually trace how they’re doing. So I think AI in education, that’s the big revolution that it’s going to bring.

Jeff Dance: Thank you. A pattern I’m recognizing between these, and I’m going to relate this to much broader than education, I think the promise of AI is accelerating things, right? Accelerating our learning, augmenting what we do, whether we’re the teacher, whether we’re the student, the personalization aspect of that. And I really like the connection to, like, if we can speed up that aspect, we can spend more time on the human side, the connection side. And I think there is definitely some concern about how that impacts our human side because we’ve seen how mobile apps, how smartphones have changed our human behaviors. There are cons to that. But I think the promise of the good side, right? The promise of technology, and this is fairly universal, is that it actually helps us be more human. And that’s when it becomes more invisible, essentially, more natural.

In my conversation with some of the top roboticists in the country, they believe their best work will help humans be more human. I think that is the promise of technology, that actually aids us, that augments us, accelerates the things that we need to do and makes it easier. Because we don’t really want to do robotic things, essentially. We don’t want to sit in a robotic classroom, where we’re all kind of the same, right? We’re all individuals that have different skills, talents, learning styles, and there’s catering to that through AI. So I love to hear from higher education, also K through 12, that kind of overarching pattern, and I think it relates to the workplace as well, right, to everyday businesses.

MacKenzie: Absolutely. It’s really allowing us to raise human intelligence and what we’re able to do. The other big thing, a lot of people look at our model and they’ll say, ‘My gosh, what about socialization? You have kids that are sitting on computers and they’re learning, don’t they need a teacher?’ And it’s like, well, let’s think about what a traditional classroom is like, right? The kids are sitting there for six hours a day, generally being pretty quiet, right?

Learning at the same pace as the rest of the peers in their class, developing, as Ursula mentioned, shame or attitudes about themselves if they’re not as smart or not doing as well or any of those types of things. And what we’re able to do is take this much more concentrated period of time where we’re creating this very engaged learner who is getting so much more connection and impact in terms of how they’re learning and learning the exact material. And then, for us, it’s freeing up the rest of the day. There’s a reason we call this two-hour learning because our kids are just spending the morning part on academics. The rest of the day, they’re getting so much richer of a socialization experience than they would in a traditional classroom. And then that’s not even beginning to think about the ways that we’re then training our children to use AI as a tool, instead of just something that they can use to cheat with, right? Which is what a lot of traditional education is saying, ‘We don’t want ChatGPT to write kids’ essays for them.’ Let’s use it as a tool. One example of that is we do a teamwork leadership workshop, and the test to pass for that workshop is the students get to go into an escape room. Have you ever done an escape room? They’re so much fun.

But what we do is we mic our students up and then we use AI to analyze their intonation and their positivity ranking as they’re communicating. Are they being uplifting to each other? Are they working as a team well together? And that’s one example of the ways we’re using AI to help develop things like teamwork, leadership, socialization skills. There are so many other things that we’re able to leverage AI for that again are raising the quality of human interaction and human potential.

Jeff Dance: I love it. Ursula.

Ursula Saldívar: Also, I think what Mackenzie is doing and what we’re doing at Tec de Monterrey is being part of the narrative and start writing the narratives about AI. Because when you think about kids using AI, it’s now part of their culture. So they’re going to become adults and they’re going to understand what AI does, what AI is capable of and also how they can use it for not only their benefit but for a social benefit, for the benefit of everyone. They’re going to go through that culture and go through school and go to work and go to the world with this new understanding of this world they’re living in. It’s the same for our students. It’s not only the use of AI for the sake of using AI and being on the institutional rankings and being like you’re very innovative. We’re giving them the tools, but we’re also making them understand why it’s important and also the implications and responsibilities that you now have. Because when you’re using AI, you’re also making more of a big deal of our critical thinking as humans, you know, because now you need to assess everything that an LLM gives you or anything that any AI tells you, right? You’re like, is it accurate? Is it not? Should I ask more questions? I used to be a philosophy teacher.

MacKenzie: You know, philosophically, I think that’s such an interesting aspect of what AI has the potential to do. One of the students in our high school created an AI chatbot where a parent can enter in whatever their kid is interested in, like maybe it’s a cartoon or it’s the Gilmore Girls show or it’s a musical artist. Then it would provide the parent with information about the story and, in this case… how to relate that to moral and religious values that your kid is learning. Ursula, you said you have little kids. I’m sure you’re constantly hearing about cartoons or shows that you’re like, wait, what is this? It was empowering parents to be able to say, let me get to know this thing that my kid is into in pop culture. Then let me figure out how I can engage in conversation around values that we want to instill as a family. It’s a perfect marriage of AI to really connect with parents and children…

Let’s talk about our family philosophy. Let’s think about how Taylor Swift views forgiveness and then how the questions that come up from that. It was just one of many examples of where we’re using AI technology to really increase that fabric of connection between people.

Jeff Dance: It seems like the more, thank you, the more we, at least in my understanding, the deeper I go into AI, and we’re pretty deep from a business perspective on multiple aspects, is like the more we understand our own brains. We were talking about philosophy, and I often relate to the LLM to our own brains. I think there’s something big related to this connection and this evolution. As we move forward into the future, like I started this by saying, hey, there could be pros and cons. How do we think that education will be transformed? And I would say that both of you are kind of on the front end. You are trying to implement the future now, in a sense. But as we fast-forward 10 to 20 years, Mackenzie, how do you think AI will have transformed education? Not just the two-hour learning, Alpha being a major national program, but how do you think it will transform education overall?

MacKenzie: I believe in the next five years, every child is going to have access to an iPad that gives them basically everything they need to learn. You know, at their fingertips. One of the big questions that the world is going to have to basically answer is, how are we going to make sure that those students then, with all of that extra time, what do we do with all that time? How are we helping to develop them? That’s one of the places that we, on a small scale and I think much bigger, are going to work on.

What are those life skills that young people need to have in order to be successful? And here’s the good news about that is, a lot of times people don’t always agree on how important it is to be 90th percentile or above in math. You know, it’s like, eh, it’s this, or I’m not a science person or whatever. A lot of people have debates in education about what the academic standard can be. But when you talk about what are the skills that people need to be successful in the world, there’s a surprising amount of commonality.

with regard to that. People do believe that financial literacy is really important, that being able to deal with failure is important, that communication skills are important. So I think the biggest thing that we’re going to see in the next five to 10 years is the ability to have more focus on those skills that make people ready to go out in the world and be successful, because we will get much better at efficiently and successfully educating our children.

I’m belief that I have is that I believe all kids are limitless. I believe they have the potential to excel in academics in a shorter period of time. When we look at the last 100 years of school, that has not been the case, right? Kids have been very much underrated, and many kids get written off, right? It’s like, hey, this kid’s never going to be more than just an average student, or they’re not going to be great. They’re never going to be on a good track. And what we are seeing is that

You can take any person, right? And as long as you give them the fundamental knowledge they can build from, they can learn things. We always say, we believe every student can be 90th percentile or above in K through 8 common core. Maybe not everyone’s going to go be an astrophysics major at MIT, but they can definitely get science done. And if they’re able to do that, then let’s go figure out how to develop all the rest of the skills. And the other big part of this, and AI is also a great tool for this as well, is let’s use this time in kids, young people’s lives to help them find the intersection of their passions and their talents. What is it that they want to do so that when they’re going through high school, they’re starting to identify like, I’m interested in this, or I’m really good at this, maybe I should go work on these things versus

I think so many of us, myself included, I was a successful student. I graduated from Stanford. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I graduated college. I think that’s a travesty. I never had that kind of mentorship, and I was unable to arrive at it myself to be able to understand like, OK, Mackenzie, this is what you’re great at, and this is what you’re interested in, and let’s go figure out what are the pursuits that you could do that would match those skills with some sort of career. 

That’s what’s really exciting to me. You also mentioned, Jeff, like what are the cons? I will tell you I don’t get tripped up too often in answers, but that one is hard for me to think of. Like, what are the big cons? I think the biggest thing that’s happening right now is that education is still not quite willing to let go of the traditional model. So they’re trying to help teachers use some AI and simplify things. But a lot of times, people are thinking, let’s just cram more into the day. I think the real magic is going to happen on a large scale when we allow AI to create time in a day and unleash kids to be able to do something. That’s why in my model, we are very pure, which is we don’t do hybrid. We don’t say, OK, we’re going to have academic teaching, but we’ll use some AI or adaptive app to support this.

We’re very much for our adults in the classroom, we don’t call them teachers, we call them guides because they are not doing academic teaching. What they are doing is helping kids learn how to become experts, find their own resources, learn to learn, and then all of that social-emotional stuff that’s on the other side. I’d be curious to see what you think, Ursula, about that because you are training teachers, you’re working with teachers on that.

We’re really trying to say we can take teachers and transform their role to become guides. But in my ideal world, it doesn’t include them teaching academics.

Ursula Saldívar: Yeah, what I think that it’s going to look like in the future, I totally and completely agree with Mackenzie that it’s more about the life skills. I think university is going to be more related to being this social, being more social, having more empathy, all these life skills, being more resilient, being more adaptive to change. But what I do think is

In five or ten years, I think this is going to be embedded in the culture. AI is going to be, it’s not going to be the enemy. Because maybe last year or even today, it’s like no AI, like everything. And then everyone gets clickbait on the news and it’s no, you don’t need to use this because it’s the worst thing that has ever happened to us. So what we’re working a lot here at Tec de Monterrey is AI literacy on actually.

Ursula Saldívar: teaching our faculty, teaching our students, you know, this is AI. AI has been here for a long time. It just exploded like two years ago, you know, like you, yes.

MacKenzie: Don’t you love that Ursula? Isn’t it crazy

when people will be like, there’s no way you did this 10 years ago. You know, this was, you know, this has only been around for a year and a half. And it’s like, well, actually no AI has been around since the eighties. It has come into the normal public sphere in the last year and a half with ChatGPT. But there has been some inklings of things that have been part of this, right, for a while. And now it is really fun though to see that the common person can literally use AI in their daily life to help them.

Ursula Saldívar: Yeah.

MacKenzie: no matter what their job is, no matter what it is they’re doing. It can help them with thinking what to make for dinner, know, with show me what’s in my refrigerator and let’s make a dinner out of it, right? It’s exciting.

Ursula Saldívar: Exactly. And I think that people don’t realize it’s been part of their lives for a while because I’m like, I mean, you have talked to Alexa or you have talked to Siri and guess what? They’re a form of AI, you know? They’ve been in your life. So working towards that AI literacy of understanding what AI is, what it can do and where the limits are of what you can do with them and how they can aid your life. We’re very big here at Tec de Monterrey also on

making our faculty do understand a little bit of the security risks with data, for example. I’m pretty sure maybe when you talk about little kids, I’m pretty sure that takes another challenge completely. Because even when we have college students, like, they write everything. And I’m like, no, no. You don’t need to give all your information. This is how it works with the AI. You need to be mindful of what you

put into the AI, but also mindful of what you want to get out of the AI. Understand how they’re trained. Not on the technical side, but understand basically how it works. I wish in 10 years we were, I remember when I was a little kid and I watched the Jetsons and you know how you and the Jetson had this little assistant that, like a virtual assistant, and it was a diary and everything. So I was thinking about that the other day and I’m like, well, we don’t have this little Marsha that goes around with you.

but we do have a lot of virtual assistants that enable us to do all this stuff that we once just dream of and we just saw in cartoons and this type of foresight. I do believe that AI also is going to assist us not only on the academic stuff, in truly personalizing pathways for our students, but we’re also going to find a way to be more inclusive because we can think about

mental challenges to include our students, maybe students that have in any way an autism spectrum, for example, that they are there, that they can help them with their social skills. Once this little threat, AI threat goes away and people understand, I think they’re going to clear our minds to be like, there’s so many outcomes that we can have when we see AI as an ally rather than an enemy.

MacKenzie: We had a student who joined our school last year as a fifth grader and absolutely so shy and scared to death of any sort of public speaking. One of the things that, you know, that’s a very important skill that we really promoted at our school. What we started the student out was one, you know, let’s think of things that you love to talk about. Like, what do you like? What are you interested in? He came up with a topic that he loves talking about. Then we use an AI tool

so that he could practice his public speaking with just the AI tool. Nobody in the room, just the AI tool. Then this AI was giving him great feedback and here are things you can do and whatever. Pretty soon he started expanding. Then he worked with a classmate and then a few. Anyways, six weeks into the school year, we did one of our big test to pass nights and he spoke in front of the entire school. His parents came up to us afterward with tears in their eyes, like I would never in a million years

have guessed that this student could become that confident as a public speaker in such a short amount of time. When we asked that student, one of the things that he said is he built so much confidence knowing that what he was saying and his intonation and his projection were good from the AI tool that then it wasn’t so scary when he started opening up to a human audience. It’s just one example of where AI can give kids superpowers.

Jeff Dance: Just to riff a little bit on what you guys have been sharing and I’m learning, so thank you. One of the things I think in our education, I love this theme of life skills, like we’re going to have more time for life skills and I think it’s very common, I think our education often fails us with just basic life skills. It’s like, we’re going to do all the thinking stuff and spend all the time there, but then the communication skills, the creative skills, the social skills, the leadership skills, the…

maybe parenting skills, you know, like all these life skills that somehow are just supposed to be given by osmosis or learning. Supposedly you might have had good parents, right? But the reality is not every kid has that experience, but we’re only testing for certain things, right? We’re testing if they’re test smart in a sense. So I love this focus on like, can AI help us develop, have more time for those life skills and have…

a guided discovery where you discover what you’re good at earlier on because you have pathways to learn and explore your talents. I think that’s that pattern of not knowing what you’re going to be when you come out of school because you get locked into a path or you make a decision early on on something, but not having as many pathways. I love the notion that maybe we can help kids discover what they’re good at faster and then nurture that. You continue to nurture that. I

I also agree that AI is going to be ubiquitous whether we like it or not. You know, probably like what if half the world is using a derivative of chat GPT right now, then they’re already using it for their education or for their support. I want to help my daughter, but she uses like an AI tutor to show her the math problem and talk her through the math. So I’m not needed to guide her through that anymore. I’m surprised.

It seems like whether educational institutions have a plan or not, this is moving, right? It’s moving. So how do we get ahead of it and power it and make it its best form in education? These are some of my thoughts, but my wife and daughter, oldest daughter went to Zambia this last year and I was looking at the expression of these nursing students who were given laptops and they were just so delighted and like, well, you can touch the screen and like.

And I’m just thinking also about how if AI has the power to personalize education, accelerate education. Mackenzie, imagine if someone had your two-hour learning school and they’ve never had a computer before. They’ve never experienced AI, and they never had internet access. But now we’re on the verge of internet access being ubiquitous no matter where you are through things like the satellite internet.

MacKenzie: Starlink, yeah.

Jeff Dance: Then you could drop in, there seems to be a huge leapfrog opportunity for the world’s kids that aren’t getting a quality education.

MacKenzie: You know, we did that with Ukrainian refugee students who had literally been out of school because of COVID and then the war started. So two summers ago, we sent our first group of students, high school students, over to Ukraine. We’ve now onboarded over a thousand Ukrainian refugee students who are using our two-hour learning program to get an education. By amazing about that is that

Those students were learning at a rate of almost 3x faster. The way I measure that is I use NWEA MAP testing. I’m a big fan of standardized assessments when you can take the results of the assessment and do something different for that child. Standardized tests are a brutal situation to deal with in a traditional environment where nothing changes about that kid’s education. But we’re able to use these assessments to go and feed information to these students.

We had students that were literally not in school and didn’t have a place to go to school for some amount of time who were learning at a rate of almost 3X via their computer. Now, the motivation model we used on that, because as lovely as it would be if every kid wwas self-driven learn and improve their math and English, not always the case, we paid those students and they were able to earn $5 a day to do this and…

That was kind of the thing, but I totally agree with you, Jeff. I think education is going to become so much more accessible for all. And one of the things I believe is that AI tut doesn’t care if a student is white, black, or brown, doesn’t care if they’re rich or poor, doesn’t care if they’re in the 15th percentile or the 85th percentile. It’s infinitely patient. And that’s the beauty of AI. I truly believe it is going to be the common denominator that allows us to raise the floor…

and blow the ceiling off what is possible when it comes to educating people.

Jeff Dance: Thank you. Ursula, I’ve seen a lot of your team’s advanced work. I love this focus on principles as well. How do we do this right, given that there’s so much potential? We’ve been talking about potential, but there are also risks. There are biases. Tell me more about how you guys are thinking and trying to build principles to help guide the future of one of the most successful higher educational institutions in Mexico.

Ursula Saldívar: Yes, Jeff. Well, for us, that was one of the main objectives to guide our teachers and students towards what’s most useful for them. It hasn’t been easy because everyone sometimes they’re like, why are you not allowing me to use certain platforms or certain stuff? And not only on…

banning stuff, let’s say, or saying no to stuff, but also on how to use platforms properly. Teachers, for example, were telling us, I’m going to do an example of, well now if I ask them to write a poem they’re going to do it on ChatGPT and I was like well yeah maybe they can do a poem on ChatGPT but guess what ChatGPT can make 40 poems in an hour you know so what if you ask them to

make a poem of a different style, you know, like a haiku and a rousin style poem, and they do 40 different ones. Now they need to ask different and then you can have a conversation with them about which poem they like the most and the poem is going to be about roses, all 40 of them, you know. Our guidelines are going towards protecting data and security…

which we work with our IT and transformational digital teams. We’ll work very close to our faculty departments on telling them, like, do we train our teachers? How do we make them not only understand AI, but also use AI in their classes? We work very closely with our deans and executive leaders to

make a good strategy on where we want to be and how fast we can be there. We actually have a department just for artificial intelligence that is just being on frameworks and guidelines and how we need to work with it. Also, we have an AI committee. Every month, this AI committee that is built within our executive leaders, our deans, people from every school, our IT department, and selected teachers, and sometimes students.

And they meet monthly and discuss these topics, do we want to work towards this? Do we pass this project? What do we think? We work every single area from ethics and also from finance stuff and strategy stuff. I always.

I think that when an emerging technology arises, everyone says it’s the year of AI, it’s the year of the metaverse, it’s the year of anything related. Everyone starts doing stuff because they feel the imperative of putting themselves into action. Like, you need to do something. I’m like, no one thinks about the strategy. No one thinks, why are you doing this? Like, are you doing it for the sake of saying you use an AI tutor?

Or is there something behind that you’re doing it for? It goes for any technology, but with AI, I think everyone’s like, we need to do something. It doesn’t matter. My teachers are using this, ChatGPT for making blah, blah, blah, blah. You’re like, but have you taught them how, is this going to be scalable? How does this benefit their students and also benefit them?.

So we’re working towards that strategy, and I think it’s very important to have everyone included in that strategy. The teachers did, because if you don’t have everyone on board, it’s not going to work. It’s challenging, especially in larger institutions. If you move this to companies, it’s the same thing. You need to have everyone on board. Just last week, we were at EDUCOS, which is a very important ed-tech conference. We saw a lot of universities, and we saw Arizona State University, and we saw the University of Florida, and we saw Penn State, and we saw a lot of universities working with AI. But when I left the event, I was very happy to see that everyone had this in mind at the end. It’s like, who are we doing AI for? I love that everyone had the same question to be like, OK, let’s do AI, but let’s not forget that the person has to be at the center of it all. The person being the teacher, the person being the student, and why are you doing it? I love that. I love seeing that higher ed.

It’s going towards that same thinking. No matter where you are, no matter if you’re in the US, no matter if you’re in Latam, no matter if you’re in Europe, we all have that at the center. It’s the person. I love that.

Jeff Dance: Thank you. Great. I loved your focus on the thinking side, the why, the benefits, the risks, the audience, you know, and how we think about this. I think what I loved about that original pattern you guys mentioned of like, hey, we’re going to have time for more life skills. I don’t know if everyone has that in mind, like that principle. As we think about how we design with intent.

I think, Mackenzie, clearly your program is designed with intent. It’s like we shortened it, we accelerated education so we could then go do this. But what other educational institutions really have that figured out? They might not be thinking through the risks at the same time, where the education isn’t accelerating, it’s just we’re copying something from an AI source.

MacKenzie: Well, I do think the biggest challenge that we’re going to have to get widespread adoption is people do need to be willing to sort of blow up the way they have normally done the day. And I’ll give you an example of that. I spoke to the Secretary of Education of a large country who said, we love this idea of two-hour learning. We want to bring it to our students and we’re going to do it in an after-school program.

You know, how can we do this? I said, that sounds great. We’ll do it just like we did with Ukrainian refugee students. We’ll use a motivation model, we’ll pay the students. He said, no, no, no, no, no, that would never work in our country. We would be very against the idea of paying students. That is wrong. And I said, OK, well, what would you want to do? He said, well, it’s just going to be an after-school program. You know, the students will come and they will do the two-hour learning. 

I said… What kid wants to do more school after school, right? No, that’s not going to work. He was like, what do you mean? It’ll work. I said, no, and I’m not going to allow you to do this program because, again, the magic isn’t just in the software or the AI tutor, it’s in providing this environment that enables kids to become motivated to learn. So we’re not going to do this. He called me back about a week later and said, OK, I’ve got an idea. We are going to put it in the school day.

I said, OK, great. What are you going to do during the school day? He said, well, we’re going to shorten lunch and we’ll just take 10 minutes off of each class and we’ll put it in there. And then I said, again, you’re just trying to cram more school into the school day. And if you’re not willing to fundamentally change the schedule of your day, that’s not going to work. Anyways, he ended up sending a team to Texas and toured one of our schools. And afterwards they called and said, OK, now we understand.

Unfortunately, they just don’t think they’re going to be able to culturally sell this and move things along. I think that was an example. They just said, hey, as a country, this is not going to be something we can sell. I think Ursula probably finds this. Individual people, when they see all of the great benefits that AI learning can enable, they’re excited, but it’s getting the system to change.

Ursula Saldívar: Yeah, I agree with Mackenzie. We’ll we call them like pioneer teachers here, which are the teachers that start and they’re like OK, give me whatever you have like I’m going to be in on Twitter.

You have this set of people that will always tell you yes, but it’s going on a scale that it’s the big challenge and the cultural change. I think one of the risks of AI to me, it’s not losing that being scared of what’s going to happen and all of these sci-fi things that we’ve seen all over cinema and movies and whatever.

Books. I think that’s one of the big challenges. And the other one, it’s for me that it’s also cultural. This is not my thing. It’s for example, kids, Gen Z, all find AI for them. AI is for everyone. You need to understand what AI is there. You need to.

Understand their limits and you need to, and this is going to seem so basic, but you need to understand AI. It’s not a real person. AI has its limits. Exactly. It’s still artificial, and it does, AI tells you what you have trained them to do, where to look for. They can be generative, and they can create some stuff, but their basic stuff is where they go to create that, and that creation is human-given.

Ursula Saldívar: You need to be part of this process. What changes is the way you go along in this process. Now you’re not going to be like A, B, and you know, the traditional one. You’re going to be like, hey, let’s go outside and let’s see what this enables you to do, what’s different. I think that shift in cultural change is maybe what’s going to take us a little more time.

MacKenzie: You

Jeff Dance: Thank you both for being pioneers in the space.

Thank you. Any final thoughts on the future and things you’re most excited about as we look forward? Mackenzie?

MacKenzie: The future is bright. Like I said, I think this is the most exciting time to be in education. I think this is finally a time where families are starting to realize they have more choices. They don’t just have to put their kids on the school bus that drives past their house and takes them to the nearest school. There are so many different types of models of education that are coming out. I know for me, what I wake up every day doing is figuring out how to expand access.

Both in types of schools as well as the cost of schools. I’d love to break into the public world so that we can provide tuition-free schools. We’ve got some exciting things that we’re going to be doing just on a homeschooling perspective, as well as things that people can download. I’m doing everything in my power to make that vision that I explained of every kid being able to learn all of their academic needs with the power of a phone or an iPad.

And so it’s exciting. I love what I get to do every day. As I mentioned at the beginning, for being someone who hated school growing up, I love school now. It’s really fun.

Jeff Dance: That’s great. Ursula, what about you? Any other thoughts on how we can design the future with intent or anything else that you’re excited about as we think about the future of education?

Ursula Saldívar: About the future of education, I think I’m excited about being part of this time period, which is like, if life is uncertain, right now it’s like 100 % more uncertain everything that is happening. And…

For me, I love that. I love that every day I’m going to find something new. It’s going to be a new platform. It’s going to be a new challenge. We never have a boring day here. Everything is something new happens that we need to see why we’re going to tackle this new AI stuff. But I think the most exciting stuff is

being part of defining what it’s going to be the new roles of universities. Like, what is it going to be our role right now? Because we’ve always thought about universities as this, know, traditional temple where you go to obtain wisdom and you see it and you get wisdom from the teacher that it’s there and they’re never wrong. And now the AI comes and completely changes this. It’s like.

What is it going to be university? I would love to think that university is going to be a huge playground. It’s going to be somewhere where you go and have a conversation and negotiate ideas and talk and be creative. But this new role of the university is something that it’s…

starting to shape and we as a whole, all the universities need to think, like, what is it going to be the crucial role that now we’re going to have and not only the new crucial role but understand that we’re not going to be nowadays omnipotent, omnipresent type of know setting. We need to change and we need to adapt and how are you going to be able to still

guide this new type of learning and also adapt to learn the life skills that you need to do. I think that’s going to be a great challenge and a great time to be alive.

Jeff Dance: Thank you. Thanks. Thank you both for being here. Just all these themes of life skills, personalization, acceleration, teachers as guides, how we can have more of a playground like we’re seeing McKinsey in the two-hour learning program and have that at the university, how that accelerates innovation. I’m just really excited to watch what you both continue to do and to be part of the conversation. Thank you again for your insights, your passion, your leadership, and for being here on the show.

MacKenzie: Thank you for having us, Jeff. It’s so much fun to get to meet people like Ursula who are doing big things. So I love it. Between you and me, we’re going to crush K through graduate education, right? We got a lot to do. Let’s go for it.

Ursula Saldívar: Yeah,

it is. Yeah, thanks, Jeff. It was a pleasure meeting Mackenzie and seeing how it all starts since their kids, know, everything and just seeing fearful people being like, you know, let’s get this thing going. That’s great. And for having these conversations are like they just spark more ideas and collaborations.

Jeff Dance: Thanks again.