Is AI the future of teaching? Or is it the replacement for teachers? Technology has become necessary for learning, especially during the New Normal, where the face-to-face setting is at home. In this episode of In the Back Room, our guest Gus Schmedlen talks with us about the future of learning. He serves as President & Chief Revenue Officer at Merlyn Mind. He formerly served as Vice President and Head of Worldwide Education at HP, where he oversaw a period of rapid expansion, leading to creating a multi-billion-dollar global education technology business. During his tenure at HP, Gus also led international efforts to improve access to quality education for students in marginalized contexts, contributing innovation, support, and scale. Earlier in his career, Gus led education and public sector industry solutions units for IBM and Lenovo.

Who’s someone that has had a tremendous impact on you as a leader?

[4:06]

The people who impacted Gus the most comes from two walks of life: The Business side and the Nonprofit side. One of the standouts from the business side is the former president of Lenovo, Rory Read. During his time as the company’s president, education was a strategic thing. Rory taught Gus that he still carries today, which is “Own your objectives. Own your business. Manage your dependencies. And don’t make excuses.” Rory was one of the nicest people in tech, but he’s also the most demanding in execution, which is why he is an effective leader.

[5:10]

One of the most intelligent people that Gus has worked with is Alex Cho, who is the current president and of personal systems at HP. He is the exemplar of modeling the behavior he wants to see, which he believes is good leadership. Alex is completely tireless and dives deeply into issues, and he knows absolutely everything about his business.

[5:43]

Gus managed to work with Thomas Looney, who was the head of North America for Lenovo. Gus became formative when he worked with Looney. He learned to set the bar for accountability, creativity, and building trusted relationships for the organization.

[7:47]

Todd Gustafson of HP focuses more on facts than tact. From his perspective, he asked many questions. Gus thought that his methods were very effective at running meetings.

Advice for someone that’s going first into a leadership role

[9:30]

You want to define leadership for yourself. Figure out what leadership means to you. For Gus, leadership is the discipline of inspiring others to succeed, both for themselves and the organization. He says that a leader’s main role is to create the conditions for both the team members and the overall team success to deliver on the objectives to ensure that the employees are personally successful.

[10:04]

Remember that a personally successful and engaged team member directly translates into results. Try not to be the boss and be paternalistic. You hire people for a reason. And that reason isn’t for you to tell them directly what to do and to micromanage them.

[10:38]

If you don’t create the space for feedback, you can miss a lot. And what you miss can be deadly to the business. If you support your people, give them the space and the resources they need to succeed, the business will benefit.

Is being Surveilled necessary?

[12:32]

If you look at all the disciplines within a company, the most surveilled is sales. That’s where the leading indicators are essential for planning supply. And it’s where the company will get purchase orders and accept dollars coming into the system. But once you go to non-sales roles, things get a little more challenging to manage.

[13:08]

One way to make someone disengaged is to feel surveilled constantly. They’re not going to go beyond if they’re being surveilled. Evaluation is fair, but constant observation or surveillance is not appropriate. It’s counterproductive.

Automating Teaching

[18:21]

Specific jobs are far less likely to be automated or replaced than others. When the OECD went and looked into professions, the least likely to be automated is teaching because it’s a complex profession. And it became dramatically more complicated because of all the technology that seeped into the classroom.

[18:55]

A company from North Carolina did a study and found that an average school district uses 1,400 different apps per month. This indicates that we live in this era of the forced digitalization of education. And unfortunately, the people that are bear the brunt of all this complexity to help teachers are taking their instructional time away. So instead of looking to replace the unreplaceable teaching job, the company got together to build a digital assistant that is contextual to teachers. They created an AI that uses the language of teachers and does what teachers do in the classroom. They made an AI that unlocks utilities across the spectrum of student information systems and, naturally, learning management systems.

[20:43]

The whole idea of human-machine symbiosis is to create a complimentary digital assistant that acts as the digital instructional coach for every teacher, regardless of the teacher’s experience. It is trying to create a series of micro automation where the teacher can just express a natural movement, and it just works.

Supporting Teachers

[25:37]

A professor at Bowdoin College called Doris Santoro wrote a book called Demoralized. The book is about how teachers are becoming demoralized. It’s not just because they’re overworked or burnt out, but because they’re making fewer decisions about what they teach and how they teach it.

[26:13]

Before COVID-19 struck, 34% of surveyed teachers said they wanted to leave teaching or were considering leaving education. After COVID, it was 54%. So there needs to be support for one of society’s most important roles, which are teachers. The way to do it isn’t to replace them with AI, give them more work, or throw more frustration at them, but to give their time back. They can use their cognitive load on teaching, not about figuring out technology. And so they have all the time back to personalize instruction and do what they do best.

How Teaching is Valued Around the World

[28:32]

Teaching has become politicized for a variety of reasons, and it needs to be depoliticized. This is imperative for our society to make sure that teachers feel supported. Off-cited countries that take care of teachers were the best, and brightest become teachers, and the teachers are pretty compensated are Finland and Singapore.

[29:14]

The best about Singapore is its commitment to quality and its rigorous study of what works. One of the things about Singapore is the assessment and evaluation that works with the Ministry of Education.

[34:43]

What Queen Rania and her office have done for education is nothing short of spectacular. She’s one of the top political leaders focused on education. It is just amazing to see someone devote so much time to an issue, which she probably doesn’t have to. That’s why she is very respectable.

Future Plans of Merlyn Mind

[36:47]

Merlyn Mind is in their early access phase, where they work with different classrooms, gathering additional information and improving their product. They are seeking to find other micro automation, which makes the lives of teachers a lot easier. They will have general availability in the December-January timeframe.

[38:43]

Merlyn Mind’s teams made deliberate decisions to create an edge compute appliance so that the load balancing with computing with bandwidth, etc., happens in the classroom. So, when their automation is processed, it’s processed at the school. It does not put a massive burden on the school network or the teachers.

Learn more about Gus Schmedlen on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schmedlen/

Website: https://www.merlyn.org/

Learn more about HP in Education: https://www.hp.com/us-en/solutions/education/overview.html

Learn more about Lenovo in Education: https://techtoday.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/education

Learn more about Connection Public Sector Solutions in Education: https://www.govconnection.com/public-sector/k-12-education?cm_sp=MegaMenu-_-Industries-_-K12Ed