Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
From Writable to HMH Labs: Andrew Goldman's Journey in EdTech Innovation
Andrew Goldman joined HMH in 2024 when HMH acquired Writable, where he, as Co-Founder and CEO, oversaw business and product strategy. Andrew joined HMH as the EVP of HMH Labs, a newly formed division that pursues innovative product development through a highly cross-functional team structure. Previously, he was the Founder and CEO of Subtext, Inc., a collaborative learning company that was acquired by Renaissance Learning. Before entering the EdTech industry, Andrew was the CEO and Co-Founder of Pandemic Studios, a leading game development studio that was ultimately acquired by Electronic Arts. Andrew received his BA in Political Science from Brown and earned his Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction from NYU. Andrew was a member of the U.S. Olympic sailing team in 1988.
Recommended Resources:
📚 Edtech: The AI Educator by Dan Fitzpatrick, Ethan Mollick
🎧 Podcast: Founders
🚀 Venture: 20VC
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for Education Entrepreneurs. Founded by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work just as hard as you do.
Andrew Goldman joined Houghton Mufflin Harcourt HMH in 2024 when HMH acquired Writable, where he, as the co founder and CEO of writable, oversaw business and product strategy. Andrew also joined HMH as the executive vice president of HMH labs, a newly formed division that pursues innovative product development through a highly cross functional team structure. Previously, Andrew was the founder and CEO of subtext, incorporated a collaborative learning company that was acquired by Renaissance Learning before entering the ed tech industry. Andrew was the CEO and co founder of Pandemic Studios, a leading game development studio that was ultimately acquired by Electronic Arts. Andrew received his BA in Political Science from Brown and earned his master's in human computer interaction from NYU, and he was also a member of the US Olympic sailing team in 1988 Andrew Goldman, welcome to Edtech Insiders. Alex, it's
Andrew Goldman:great to be here. I'm really excited for our conversation today.
Alexander Sarlin:I am as well. This is one of the interviews that I have been really looking forward to. I specifically have wanted to talk to you for a while, because I think you have a very interesting journey in ed tech. Let's start by talking a little bit about your background. Tell us your journey into ed tech. You did games in the past, and how you came to writable and about writables acquisition. Give us just the story.
Andrew Goldman:All right, so I go way back to my high school experience. I thought that I would be a writer or a going to film or something like that. And have always been interested in creative pursuits. And in fact, in high school, I had the good fortune of having a wonderful teacher who tolerated me doing an independent project, writing a novel. So this poor guy had to read hundreds of pages of my work. But as I got into college and took some engineering courses, and had always been playing video games. I was intrigued by the opportunity in games to create something that was wholly new, and I had this feeling that whatever I did as a writer or in film, it would be derivative of other people's work. And in video games, there was an opportunity to create something that was entirely new. And I had the good fortune out of college of meeting Bobby kodick, the person who refounded Activision, and I joined Activision at a very early time. There were about 20 people at the company, and it had just been reformed, coming down from the Bay Area to the LA area, and I picked up, moved out, and began this journey of trying to create a truly novel entertainment experience. I did that for about worked in the video game business for a long time. After five years at Activision, I moved on to form an independent developer, and that grew up to be a very successful studio. I don't know how old you are here, but you may have played some of our games. Star Wars, Battlefront was probably one of the most popular, yeah. And eventually we sold the development studio and it became part of Electronic Arts. And at that point, my mom said to me, okay, you've had your fun. You're gonna. Do something that is going to make an impact. And in a lot of ways, Ed Tech had been adjacent to video games. There were companies like broader bond that were doing both entertainment and education. So I had been paying attention to it, and I was really drawn to this opportunity of being able to create something that was wholly new in education and would have a meaningful impact on our world. And that led me deep into exploring what was going on. And at the time, digital reading was emerging, and I sat down by myself for about six months or whatever, and built a prototype of a digital reading app that would bring students into the pages of any text together, bring classrooms in together, and the idea was that you could have an interactive layer that sat on top of what students were reading, and that we could make it much more engaging by doing that. So we built that company. It was eventually acquired by Renaissance Learning, and in that process, I learned a lot about building an ed tech company and how hard it is to go to market. We began as a freemium app, but found that it was very hard to take it to market. And while we got a lot of teachers and students in it, making it into a business that was sustainable, was challenging, and when we joined Renaissance, we were able to take this great app that teachers loved, that we had built, and connect it to their sales force, and in one quarter, we transformed The business, and it was such an eye opening experience of how the whole go to market works in ed tech. So that was formative in understanding the business that we would build with writable The other was that while building this reading app, which was called subtext. We worked directly with teachers in the classroom, and almost every teacher asked us for more writing integration with the reading that we were doing, and we built this wonderful system of adding in writing that sat on top of the pages of the book, and it worked beautifully in getting students to write a ton. We looked at the analytics of this, and we're like, this is great. We've got these students writing so much. And we'd go back and visit teachers in the classroom, and we'd find this frazzled teacher that was overwhelmed by this fire hose of writing content that they were solely responsible for providing feedback on, and the solution for generating writing fell over based on its own success in generating writing. So it was good that we were getting students to write, but we were overwhelming teachers, and that was the creative genesis of writable, the idea that we could create a product that would help teachers with this very important skill that is critical in students' lives. It's the gateway to so much of what comes in life, from writing a college application to thinking through ideas. If you're at Amazon, they're going to ask you to write a six page piece on what your idea is, and you're going to be responsible for effectively communicating what you want to do. You probably maybe wrote some love letters or texts or whatever. In every aspect of life, writing is much more prominent than people may think, and it gets a short shift in K 12 because it's so hard for teachers. So we felt that there was this opportunity to really meaningfully make a difference in the ability of a teacher to teach writing. And from the very beginning, eight years ago, we had this idea that we would approach this as a three legged stool for feedback. So the teacher would be one aspect of the feedback, and we would set up a very efficient workflow for them to be able to manage feedback. Peer review would be a second and AI would be the third, and. At the time, we had to plan for AI being not so smart, right? And that's how the product was built.
Alexander Sarlin:So AI has gotten a lot smarter since then. Can you tell us about some of the evolutions of writable through the sort of generative AI era?
Andrew Goldman:Yeah. So we've always had an AI component in writable, and about three years ago, we started to look what was going on in Gen AI. And it wasn't quite there, but we were watching it emerge, and then the time is all a blur, but the first step that we took in experimenting with Gen AI was in content generation. So could we help teachers with creating assignments? And we created what we called the promptificator, and that was our first step where a teacher could enter in a topic, and they would get a prompt back, and that was wildly novel at the time. And then we started to experiment with the idea of being able to provide reviews and feedback. And reviewing and feedback is incredibly important in writing, and we always have this challenge where only about 20% of student writing would get feedback or get reviewed. Typical teacher in our classrooms has 150 students. One minute per student would be two and a half hours. So solving for that feedback problem was really meaningful, and we for last school year, really focused on leveraging Gen AI to be able to both score according to a rubric, but more importantly, provide feedback for students, and we saw amazing results. And when you compare it to what students were getting before, the level of support that they were getting in the classroom with Gen AI was a huge, huge step forward. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:and it shortens that feedback loop so much, rather than handing something in waiting, you know, a week for a teacher to be able to give you feedback, and by that time, your mind is in a very different place. You can sort of go back and forth with a generative AI in real time while you're sort of in the zone. Such an interesting story. It brings up a lot of thoughts for me, just really, I don't know if people have read the Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow book, but that is about game designers who are trying to do things that are totally original. It reminds me a lot of what you're saying in that world. I think that world is fascinating. And obviously working with Activision and EA, some of the very, very biggest game publishers in the world gave you a lot of insight into engagement, into how to get people to care about products and spend a lot of time really enjoying working with them. I think the games to education transition makes a lot of sense, especially to Ed Tech. But the thing I want to focus on here you mentioned right in the middle, and I bet a lot of our listeners ears perked up when you talked about how in the ed tech industry, it is very hard to break into schools. You people try that freemium model that sort of bottoms up, top down, crocodile pincher, where they get teachers to love the product and use it for free, and then go to the districts and or the school level and say, all your teachers are using this we should sign a contract, and then they go through procurement and all this stuff. And, you know, you mentioned that, with subtext being acquired by Renaissance, it totally changed how the business worked. And I'm sure that there's something similar happening with writable, by getting the might of Houghton rifflin Harcourt, you know, huge reach into schools and districts and sales. This, I think is a model that is very, very interesting to me, and I think to a lot of our listeners, can you talk about that sort of combination of the agility of smaller companies that are especially trying to use AI, and the distribution, you know, power of big, established publishers like HMH, and how they complement one another. Absolutely,
Andrew Goldman:I feel so fortunate to have had the path that we had in working with HMH, even when you go back to the video game business quickly as a reference point, because it was an important reference point. Almost every interesting intellectual property in the video game business was created by a developer and taken to market in conjunction with a publisher. There is something about a pure focus on the creative endeavor that allows for producing spectacular. Results, and I've always believed in that as a developer, our singular focus on creating game content made us a more creative company in ed tech. It really is the same thing we had the opportunity with writable to create a pure play ed tech tool developer or product developer, and that allows us as a company to build everything around that teacher experience with our product, and we don't have to spend a huge amount of time with thinking about sales channels and managing sales teams and marketing and all that. That's all part of our process, but we're not really working at how do we scale that? And that is a wildly hard problem to support millions of students and teachers. So in founding writable, we saw the power of partnering with a ed tech publisher in our experience with Renaissance, and we wanted to see if we could do it in a way that we were an independent company still, and we were looking for an ed tech publisher that had a great ability to take products to Market, where we were building something that was immediately adjacent to something that was important to them. So it's really important that in our partnership with HMH, they build some of the best ELA curriculum, and we're trying to build the best writing support for ELA curriculum. So selling those two together is really, really important, and that creates a symbiosis between us and our publishing partner that is really important, and being able to establish that relationship where they were getting the benefit of our ability to quickly iterate and be purely focused on this teacher, student experience, and they were able to really focus on effectively taking that to market. Created a wonderful collaboration, and it allowed us to pursue a model where we remained a small team focused on having a rock star at every position, and didn't have to deal with all of the big scale challenges. And it also allowed us to be extremely capital efficient, and in this market that is, in my view, very, very important. And so we were able to profitably build the business all along. And that allows us to just continually iterate and refine and focus on the customer experience and the outcome, I hope
Alexander Sarlin:that that model you just named of the sort of developer and publisher focusing on their relative strengths, as we've all seen in the game industry, an example that comes to mind there a legendary example is Tetris. Tetris created by like a single developer behind the Iron Curtain at the time in the 80s, and then distributed through Nintendo's Game Boy. Came with the Game Boy and became the most popular game in the world. And it was like, you know, that Russian developer was not going to try to get it into the hands of, you know, suburban kids in Illinois, but that combination allowed him to go deep, create a really incredible game that meant a lot to people, and then the publishers might came to play there. So I think that model really can translate to Ed Tech, and it is so interesting. Can you tell us a little bit more? You know? I think it's worth drilling down into when you say the symbiosis between what writable was doing and what HMH has traditionally done, you know, HMH has done tons of curriculum, tons of content, textbooks and Ed Tech, of course, for a long time when you were developing writable How did you keep in mind the idea that it could be complementary to the existing products of larger players? And is that something you would recommend that other small edtech companies think about
Andrew Goldman:so at the time that we began our partnership with HMH. So this is eight years ago, they were pre pandemic, pre really being able to count on every student in the classroom having computers. They were beginning their. Transformation to digital, and they're in a totally different place now, and partnerships would look a little bit different, but what we knew was that reading and writing go together, and writing is always going to be digital. So we believed that even though we weren't at the point where everything had gone digital in classrooms, we believed that writing was still going to be very digital. So that put us in a position where we could partner with HMH effectively at the time, and when we were looking at this, nobody thought that writing was really a category. There is no successful writing curriculum out there, and people just weren't building a lot of writing focused product, but it's such a hard challenge for teachers, both in the time it takes them to grade and provide feedback, but also writing is not necessarily their comfort zone, and there is no curriculum to support them. So we just saw it as an opportunity, and we're really grateful that HMH got on board with us and gave us the opportunity to create complimentary writing programs that would go along with their ELA curriculum.
Alexander Sarlin:It's such a powerful model, because it is so difficult to get into, especially K 12 schools in the US. And you know, as somebody who's worked in the field for a while, and who advises many companies who are looking to make that go to market motion and that, you know, how do you get in front of superintendents? You know, how do you develop with teachers in a way that they want to be ambassadors and champions of your product? It is so hard. It takes so much work and energy. And I think this model of combining the sort of relative strengths is so powerful. And, you know, one of the things that also really fascinated me about, you know, this writable acquisition of HMH and the sort of combination of factors is that you are now the head of HMH Labs, the executive vice president, right? EVP, of HMH Labs, which is basically, you know, the labs in HMH that is going to, I imagine you should tell us, but I imagine it's about its labs. So it's going to be about the future and sort of developing new products. But you tell us what is HMH Labs, and how does that fit into the story?
Andrew Goldman:Alex, can I go back one second, add one more thing that I think may be interesting on the previous topic, and then I'll come to HMH Labs, of course. Okay, yep, so one of the other pieces that ed tech entrepreneur should really think about, there's the go to market piece of this, but there's also real challenge in how you effectively fit into the school day. And one of the challenges with writing is You can't introduce new readings that are going to take up a week of time in the class and then have the writing be about those readings. When we partnered with HMH and integrated writing more effectively into the curriculum. We were able to draft off of the reading that's already happening. We're saving a massive amount of class time and then attaching the writing to the curriculum work that they're already doing, and it creates a much more efficient school day that is very, very meaningful to educators. So as people think about, you know, their go to market, they also need to think about how they fit into this school day, and that was important to us switching over to HMH Labs. That
Alexander Sarlin:was a great comment, by the way. I totally agree, and it's something people wrestle with a lot. You know, you can't change the teacher's existing curriculum to suit your needs. Anyway. Please keep going, and
Andrew Goldman:you can't manufacture time in the day the schedule is there. So HMH Labs grew out of a lunch I had with Jack Lynch, and we were talking about what was important to us as writable what we wanted to do in the future. And it was just a great conversation where we recognize where the passions are and where the expertise is. And this was before we started talking about joining HMH, but Writable as a company was at this point where we were seeing what was going on in AI, we had this front row seat, and we had introduced AI feedback, and we now. Now had all of this data that where before, we were getting data on 20% of students. Now we're getting data on 100% of the students. And then we saw this generative AI that was able to generate comments, and it was able to generate assignments, and what we saw coming next was the ability for us to really help teachers with that challenge of being less comfortable with writing instruction. I know my subject area. I was taught in my teacher training how to teach reading, but I was never taught about teaching writing, and our teachers want support with that. And what we were seeing was the ability for us to transform the textbook and really go to the next step where we could take this data. Okay, your students wrote this assignment, and the AI has provided feedback on it, and the number one thing the research says we want you to do is to write a revision. Well, that singular act that we're trying to get to happen takes time in the classroom. It takes expertise in the teacher, and it really takes a whole bunch of professional development that is difficult to scale. What we were seeing was the opportunity to take the giant textbooks and the curriculum that sits on the shelf and use Gen AI and the data that we've got to really give the teacher very specific coaching on how they could do a mini lesson to help their students with key skills that they need To revise their writing and take it into a revision cycle that would really help their students grow this ambition to kind of get that level of instruction into the product made us feel like we needed to get more access to the intellectual property that are in the curriculums. And we didn't believe that just going to the LLM and say, generate this lesson, would create a coherent set of instruction that would flow through the year every time it would be different. And we saw this opportunity to really bring much closer together the curriculum materials and the data and the assignment that students are working in and they're inside of there, there is magic and really great support that we can deliver to teachers, and that's what we're going to be going back to school with this year, the deal that the going to that next level was really we were at a point where we were working with intellectual property, and this stuff is so important to Ed Tech going forward that it made a lot of sense to Combine the companies now. Why why did that lead to HMH Labs? Well, as it said, the magic of the developer in games, the magic of the independent ed tech developer, is that it's singularly focused, that we don't really focus on all of the scale issues. We count on our partner to manage those scale issues, and we focus on the teacher and the administrator and what's going on in the school, in the classroom, and we have a small team of customer support and success people that are built into our team, if they hear or see something in the classroom that morning, then that afternoon in our team, stand up, the engineers and the product managers, and everybody will be hearing about it. Everybody on this team is living that teacher experience. And if the teacher is having an unhappy day because of us, everybody on the team is feeling it. And I said to Jack, that's the magic of what we're doing. This small, integrated team connects us so deeply to the end user experience, and it accelerates iteration in a way that it leads to magical results. And that's what Labs is about. It's still it's an interdisciplinary group that sits inside. Of HMH, it works on the whole customer experience, and the idea is to make sure that the development team is connected to the administrator and the teacher experience, and then we still really work closely with the broader HMH team to make sure that we're delivering that great experience at scale. So it's a wonderful partnership where we get to retain what the essence of what our company is. We still tap the scale expertise and just the broader experience that HMH has, we get access to the curriculum and all the intellectual property, and I believe it positions us to really go forward into this next generation of Ed Tech, which in my opinion, will be the golden age of Ed Tech. And it's super exciting to me.
Alexander Sarlin:I agree. I think we're heading into incredibly amazing, accelerative time for education technology. And the model you're laying out is just, it's so interesting, because it really does, I think fix, or at least address, many of the things that keep the ed tech industry from really working as smoothly as it should, which is, you know, the ability to have that deep empathy, to be very close to the end user experience, and those end users are both students and teachers, In many cases, sometimes administrators too, and the big publishers are amazing. I know lots of people at HMH because one of my jobs in ed tech was at Scholastic and the Scholastic ed tech is now part of HMH. So HMH is a really interesting publisher. It's been very innovative over the years, but in general, it's been hard for larger, more established incumbent companies to stay innovative. I mean, this is the disruption paradigm, right? The Innovators Dilemma. And people have tried, in all sorts of different ways to sort of incubate innovation, but you haven't seen that much of it in ed tech, and it feels like this idea of creating HMH Labs inside HMH with that ethos that you just outlined in mind, and then use all of the marketing, sales, distribution power of HMH around, you know, products that are being developed in this very hands on, close to the end user way. It just feels like a paradigm that we've seen happen in other industries, but we really haven't seen it in ed tech. So I think this is a really new idea. So can you tell us a little bit about some of the you know, I imagine part of HMH Labs is also sort of thinking about new ways to use generative AI or potentially even other ideas, whether they're internal to HMH or being happening at other small companies that might be complementary to the HMH offerings. Can you tell us a little bit about that, like, how do you think about the sort of innovation and next steps aspect of what HMH Labs does. I
Andrew Goldman:think it's easy to characterize big companies as slow and, you know, struggling to innovate being on the inside of HMH, I don't really agree with that. There is a tremendous amount of innovation going on inside of HMH every day. The difference is that when they build something, they really have to be prepared to take it to millions and millions of teachers and students in day one, and that creates a lot of scale challenges that are hard for every business. And it's those are challenges that we add in HMH Labs have to address as well, but we are able to start in smaller experiments and then build out from there, which is just a little bit different. Now, HMH will have a new product coming to market this school year called Class craft, which is really going to transform the class hour and bring superpowers for teachers into the while they're going through their live instruction. And one of the Gen AI features in there is with turn and talks. So an activity, the teacher will say, here's a topic, I want you to turn to your partner, talk about it, write down your answer and submit it. And they are using Gen AI to summarize all of the student responses in real time, and then to help the teacher direct their. Instruction out of there. So again, it's the same ideas that we were talking about, of seeing the opportunity to help teachers with writing instruction they are in real time, helping the teacher take in the feedback from the students and advance through the curriculum in the best kind of research backed pathways that type of interaction around Gen AI is part of what we're trying to support throughout the HMH portfolio. So HMH Labs has writable still as its mandate, but that's also a test bed for building out new AI capabilities that other products like class craft can leverage. Now, the class craft project was going before we were here, so that innovation was happening inside HMH, but we are able to collaborate and kind of show some ideas of what might be able to come next. And do that in our little writable laboratory, HMH laboratory, and then bring it out to the full scale of something like class craft. Yeah. It's
Alexander Sarlin:so interesting to hear you talk about it. And I'm not trying to over characterize large companies as slow, but this is just the classic sort of innovators dilemma paradigm of, you know, like you said, when you have a lot of customers, it becomes hard to just try wacky things, because, you know, everything that you do goes out to a lot of people. It's very visible and it affects a lot of people. So it's sometimes harder to take chances. That we talked to Sean Young of class craft on this podcast a couple of years ago, before it was acquired by HMH and became this, you know, the set of features that you're mentioning here, which are really interesting, and it strikes me as the way you're talking about AI, I think, is really prescient, which is that, you know, just as in the early days of the Internet, there was this concept of, you know, how do we digitize what's the digital transformation, and when is it going to happen? It'll happen over time. And how does it fit into each of our, you know, products, or each of our services for a company? The same thing I think, is happening now with AI, this concept of, oh, how does AI affect, you know, professional development. You've mentioned, how does AI affect writing instruction. One thing you mentioned that I think is was worth double clicking on, is that idea that, you know, AI is great at synthesizing data, and often we think of that as students data or student feedback. But curriculum is data. Standards are data too. A company like HMH, which has decades and decades and decades of amazing content, all of that can be used, not only as a training set for AI, but it can be used as the corpus on which an AI can actually pull materials. And I think that is a concept that maybe some folks aren't always thinking about, when they think about AI integrating with existing products, is that content of almost any kind becomes super powered, and it's silo. This is also true in higher education. You have, you have libraries that have, you know, hundreds of 1000s of books in colleges that are read by a few students a year, any one book, and suddenly they're all accessible to an AI. There's some things in academic journals are suddenly accessible by AI. I think this is part of the AI revolution that I think will feed into the vision of the golden age of ed tech you mentioned. I'd love to hear you talk more about it.
Andrew Goldman:Absolutely, this is so exciting to us, and we would think that this is the step that comes beyond the teachers working directly with the chat gpts out there, or products that are thin layers on top of chat GPT a product like writable and everything that HMH does with NWA and with Ed and all of the curriculum, it is deeply, deeply integrated. And the opportunity that we have through these integrations is to leverage the data to reformat or remix the curriculum in a way that is giving the teacher exactly what they need. So where the curriculum used to sit in a giant set of books on the shelf in the classroom, and the teacher had to go through all the friction of getting to the book, going and finding the material that they need. We now have the capability to take the data and provide them with the specifics of what they need, and I'm not sure. Sure that people fully realize the opportunity to really maintain the power and the continuity of the curriculum. You know, curriculum is, we go back to the it's post Civil War. It's state, you know, it's goes through state review, district review, it's got a set of principles and standards that it is working towards, and it's thoughtfully developed and meticulously crafted to have continuity through that we need to apply the data and the generative technology in a way that we still maintain what the purpose of curriculum is, and the continuity across class periods for the teacher, and the continuity across classrooms in a school and across schools In a district and districts in the state, and a generally trained LLM is not likely to be able to do that, and that's the great position that I feel HMH is in, and a lot of what HMH Labs is focused on.
Alexander Sarlin:You used a phrase in there that really resonates with me, a few but this idea of reformatting and remixing curriculum in any way and in a just in time way, I mean, the when you mentioned earlier about teachers are maybe responding to a piece of student writing and generative AI can create a mini lesson that combines potentially professional development material with curriculum material. And says, Hey, this you're writing a dystopian story. Let's bring in some of the things from our 1984 dystopia unit, which you may not have time to look up as a teacher, but hey, it's right there. Ai knows about it. It can bring it in. It can reformat it, it can remix it, and it can provide, really, basically, just in time professional development, which is incredible,
Andrew Goldman:yeah, and it's amazing. I can give you an example of when we first got an inclination of what could happen here and the way that we could support teachers in the classroom we were working with. I think it was a fourth or fifth grade class that was writing narrative stories, and it happened to be October, and every story, while it was open ended, write a story that is interesting, you. They all had Halloween themes to them, and the AI reviewed it according to the rubric, and one of the rubric items was about developing the setting, and the students needed support in making their bringing out sensory details in their setting. So we knew that that's what they needed focus on. Then we went to the curriculum and took the sections that were relevant around narrative writing and said, Okay, let's recast a mini lesson for the teacher to talk about setting. And so we took the data that said they need help with setting. We took the student samples that were about Halloween stories and the AI wrote this lesson where the examples were, okay, Alex, Imagine you're walking into your playground. This wing is squeaking, and what is happening when your foot presses down on the muddy ground, what do you hear? What do you smell? But it all it wrote all of those sensory lessons in the context of student work. And we were like, Whoa, okay, this is a big deal. We're bringing the great curriculum and the continuity of that to the student work and remixing it in a way where every student in the classroom can react to it. Then we went the next step and said, Okay, we want your students to revise for setting. Now take the lesson that you wrote there every student's piece of work and write them a personal piece of feedback that takes into account the lesson, the terms we used in the lesson, and applies it to their writing and challenges them to go off and write an effective revision. And we're doing this in real time. It's just, it's enabling something that is it was previously just impossible, no,
Alexander Sarlin:yeah, and there's so many elements in that example, right? I mean, there's student interests, right? They all decided to write about Halloween because it was on their minds. They. That gets incorporated. There's personalization. Each student gets a very specific feedback on their particular sample. There's fast feedback that leads to the revision, which we know from the data. Is how writing gets taught. Like it can pull together so many different aspects of education at the point of need. That's what gets me thrilled about generative AI, and it can even do language translation. I mean, if some of the students in that classroom are are speaking Spanish or Mandarin or Ukrainian, no issue at all. It can deal with it exactly the same way. It's a big moment. So this is incredibly inspiring and exciting conversation. I wish we could do a lot more of it. Maybe we can find some time to dive deep in a future session. But we're coming on the end of our time, and I'm going to get to our final questions. I'd really love to hear your answers. One is, what is the most exciting trend we've talked about a lot in this conversation that you see in the Ed Tech landscape right now, that you think our listeners should keep an eye on something that's coming, but they might not be, obviously coming to something that you can see, particularly from your HMH Labs vantage point. I'll
Andrew Goldman:answer this with what we our ambition, and we would say one of the things that we would love to do is kill the multiple choice question. The multiple choice question, it just it doesn't do great things. It's given in a way that sets up students cramming for a test, and it's not necessarily focused on the thinking and communicating skills that we think are going to be so meaningful for students going forward. So the trend that we believe will happen is that there's a change in the way that assessment can happen in classrooms, and historically, the multiple choice question serves an important role in helping teachers to scale to the numbers of students in their classroom. Well, if generative AI is going to allow for more qualitative assessments, then we could see a really radical transformation in education that I think would be wonderful, and it could change the classroom dynamic on a daily basis where students are if we can get to a model, and there's a lot of human issues that we need to work through, so This is going to take time, but if we can get to a model where in real time, we're assessing how students are engaging in the classroom, if that's what assessment becomes about, Am I doing my best job every single day, every single minute in the classroom. Well, I think we're going to come out with a much more joyful learning experience and something that's much more satisfying to teachers and a classroom that is just wildly engagement. So the thing that I would say I'm interested in is how assessment could be changed by introducing new qualitative measures, fantastic
Alexander Sarlin:prediction. And I would even say that summative assessment itself was designed just as a scaling mechanism, right? The idea that you have to stop the whole class and take a test for a week so that you can evaluate the you know, the students or the classroom. It's all about limitations. It's a way to overcome constraints that we may not have anymore. So I love that really, really interesting.
Andrew Goldman:I just want to say we've got to be careful as we step into this, because you don't know what's going to happen. You know what the effect would be on students with this, but I do think that the the effect of multiple choice questions and summative assessments is not perfect. Okay, so we should be exploring opportunities that allow us to innovate beyond that, leveraging these new technologies, but we've got to do it carefully and responsibly. I almost
Alexander Sarlin:picture, you know, the bubble sheets, the classic, you know, sat bubble sheet, or whatever. You know, the bubble sheets you do on standardized tests. And like, it used to be that a machine could read a bubble sheet, and that was the efficiency, right? If you did an A or B or E or D, it could tell. Now the machine can do this unbelievable amount of thinking around any kind of input, but I hear you, yes. I mean, change in education is never easy. It's never that quick. It always takes, you know, a lot of people's effort and thought and time and has to integrate with existing systems. So point very well taken, and especially in. Somebody in your role who's straddling the innovation and the scale. What is one resource that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed today?
Andrew Goldman:So in ed tech, I would say that the AI educators of Dan Fitzpatricks, he does really accessible, easy lists, a lot of different things that he's seeing. Ethan Molik on AI is super interesting. And then, just outside of Ed Tech, going to podcasts, one that I've become increasingly fascinated with is founders, and what seemed to me initially as a review of biographies of successful business people, turns out to be way more Because the way that there's synthesis done across the biographies is a huge value add in that. And it's just, it's inspirational when you're thinking about innovation, that's just a great reference point. And then for venture folks, I actually really like 20 BC as another podcast. They cover a lot of the issues that startups face, but do it from very much the business, and gets amazing guests in there and it's a wonderful interviewer, so little bit of wide range of stuff there.
Alexander Sarlin:we actually had on the podcast just a couple of weeks ago, the founders podcast and the 20 VC podcast for venture capital. Really good suggestions. Thank you so much for being here with us. Andrew Goldman is the Executive Vice President of HMH labs. He was the co founder and CEO of Writable, which was acquired by HMH and has a long history in ed tech and gaming, is being brought to bear to generate a new golden age of edtech. I love that phrase. Thank you so much. Andrew Goldman for being here with us on Edtech Insiders.
Andrew Goldman:Thank you. That was wonderful, and it's great talking with you. Thanks
Alexander Sarlin:for listening to this episode of Edtech Insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more Edtech Insider, subscribe to the free Edtech Insiders newsletter on substack you.
