Tuesday, March 10, 2026 - For 30 years now, colleges have relied on the Learning Management System, or LMS, as a key portal for professors and students to teach and learn. It's a tool that has helped colleges adapt to online learning and bring digital tools to classroom teaching. But generative AI seems poised to disrupt the LMS. And it’s unclear whether the LMS will evolve—or be replaced altogether. For this episode, Jeff and Michael talk with a pioneer of the technology, Matthew Pittinsky, about the lessons of past moments of tech disruption like the smartphone and cloud computing and about what could be different this time. This episode is made with support from Ascendium Education Group.
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The LMS at 30: From Course Management to Learning Management (At Last), by Matthew Pittinsky in OnTech.
LMS at 30 Part 2: Learning Management in the AI Era, by Matthew Pittinsky in OnTech.
“Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils' Intellectual Development,” by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson
“Two-Sigma Tutoring: Separating Science Fiction from Science Fact,” by Paul T. von Hippel in Education Next.
0:00 - Intro
1:34 - How the LMS Became Key Infrastructure at Colleges
3:04 - What Was the Sales Pitch When the LMS First Emerged?
5:15 - Why Blackboard Bought Up So Many Competitors
7:36 - AI Will Disrupt LMS Even Though Previous Tech Didn’t
10:57 - Could AI Can Bring ‘Hogwarts Magical Study Aids’?
12:22 - Is the LMS Needed In an Age of AI?
14:14 - Should LMS Providers Build Guardrails to Prevent Cheat-Bots?
18:25 - What Lessons From the Past Can Help Respond to AI?
19:52 - A New Leader at Blackboard
21:06 - Sponsor Break
22:00 - How Faculty Are Key to Change
28:03 - Why Change From AI Might Be Discipline-Specific
34:50 - Lightning Round With Matt Pittinsky
Michael Horn
Jeff, together we try to sketch out what the future of higher education, of course, looks like on this podcast. But to do so, we also like to draw from critical lessons.
Jeff Selingo
You know, Michael, what's even better is learning from somebody who was actually there, helping create a big piece of that recent past. And in this case, it's the commercialization of what happened in the 1990s when professors started to put their assignments and grading online. And something in my opinion has a very clunky name that we'll be talking about, the learning management system or LMS. And today, we're gonna be talking about the lessons of that era and what it portends for AI broadly and the future of the LMS in particular. That's ahead on this episode of Future U.
Sponsor
This episode of future you is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission-driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org. Subscribe to Future U. wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.
Michael Horn
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo
And I'm Jeff Selingo.
Michael Horn
Well, you teased it perfectly, Jeff. The learning management system or LMS is a major part of the tech stack at most universities.
It's the part that students, I think, are most familiar with. They interface with it on a regular basis for good or ill, whether they're an online student, whether they're on campus.
And it certainly has helped enable the dramatic growth of online learning. And in terms of what it actually does, you sort of alluded to it. The LMS in my view is certainly misnamed. It's not so much a learning management system as it is a course management system.
Jeff Selingo
And a lot of that is because of its origins, Michael.
But you're right. It's a significant part of how universities have changed over time. And at the heart of that story is a company called Blackboard, which was cofounded by Michael Chasen and Matthew Pittinsky.
You know, after leaving Blackboard, both have continued to play entrepreneurial roles in edtech. Most recently, Matt led Parchment, a service that streamlined and digitized services around transcripts, which he then sold to the disruptor of all things in the LMS space, which was Instructure. And as we'll hear, Matt is now leaving his role with Instructure and returning to Blackboard. And he thinks that AI can really make the LMS finally live up to its name with a focus on learning.
So we're thrilled to have him here to soak up the lessons for how the LMS evolved and where things might be going. Matt, welcome to Future U.
Matt Pittinsky
Thank you for having me.
Jeff Selingo
So, you know, we're talking so much about AI in campuses now and whether they're kind of ready for this new technology.
So I've been really wondering about the lessons that previous tech waves in higher ed could kind of teach us. You know, we, of course, had the introduction of the PC, you know, 40-plus years ago. And then about 30 years ago, we had that thing that got labeled the learning management system or LMS, which became a key piece of infrastructure that really shaped how colleges adapted to the Internet at first and then later to other technologies.
Of course, you were a big player in the LMS.
So let's go back to the beginning of what became, you know, your company, Blackboard. What was the sales pitch before we even had that phrase learning management system?
Matt Pittinsky
I think it was a very simple idea, which is the university was investing millions of dollars to wire up the campus. This is before wireless. So the motto was ‘two ports per pillow,’ or I guess ‘a port per pillow,’ two ports per dorm room. And students were playing video games. Again, this will date me, but like Doom and Duke Nukem. And it just seemed obvious that for all of the investment in administrative software, the student information system, the back office, there was going to be a teaching and learning side to the enterprise software market of higher education, that there was going to be a platform that took that network and made it useful for teaching and learning.
And it turned out the key to that was the instructor, was the faculty member, and how do you make it incredibly easy for that professor to be able to create a course website. And as every professor did that, you would end up with what we now think of as the learning management system, a common platform for the support of campus-based courses or fully online courses.
It's changed. We now call it a learning management system. I think that's a misnomer. I think the category is still very much course management, not learning management.
I also think AI is gonna change that.
Michael Horn
So I wanna get to that in a moment, but let's stay with sort of a little bit more past because you co-founded Blackboard. You played key roles, you know, in the company over the years.
And as you know, the company earned a bit of a reputation for being a little ruthless in buying up competitors, shutting them down perhaps to be the biggest player in town. And in a recent article, you reflected on the motivation for this.
What was the strategy, and, you know, were there unintended consequences as a result of that?
Matt Pittinsky
Yes. So we always thought of the learning management system, and I think this is still true today, as a platform.
So it is an application in the sense that you use it to create a quiz, or you use it to, you know, manage a discussion board, post content, and so on. But it's also a platform. And by that, I mean, it's the system through which course materials from the commercial education market, you know, digital courseware, third-party learning applications, that there was going to be an ecosystem of all these pedagogically specific and discipline specific tools and content that would run through the LMS.
For that vision to be true, the LMS would likely end up being a system where most institutions used a common platform, as well as through open standards, as opposed to higher education fragmenting across, you know, 10 or 15 or or 20. It's much harder for the course materials market, the developer market to support all of the long tail of what high-quality education requires if they're writing against, you know, 10 or 15 different LMSs.
There once was a time when the publishers all had their own LMSs wrapping, you know, their content, and institutions were building their own.
And so, you know, the article speaks to the mistakes that I think were made along the way, and how that misdirected R&D towards consolidation as opposed to innovation, which gets back to the idea of the LMS, you know, this hasn't really changed.
But I think the underlying logic is still true today. There's still, you know, most institutions use one, two, three LMSes, and I think it's because of that platform dimension of the LMS.
Jeff Selingo
So, of course, now though, Matt, as you kind of indicated earlier, all the talk is about AI.
And I'm kind of curious because the LMS kind of survived the first big technology that followed it, which was the smartphone, right, which students then started carrying around, and it kind of adapted to that. Then, of course, there, you know, you talked about the move from wired to wireless. Then there was the move from every campus having its own data systems to store all this to then move to the cloud. So it survived those two things, the move to the smartphone and then the move to the cloud.
But it sounds like you think that AI is gonna be different. So why is that, and what do you think is going to change about the LMS when it comes to AI?
Matt Pittinsky
Well, it's interesting you used the word survive. For me, those platform shifts should have been major catalysts for innovation. That if you looked at the LMS today, and compared it to the LMS in 1999, it should look, feel, and taste different. Because we've had the shift of cloud. We've had the shift of mobile. And it doesn't.
So, for example, the LMS in a cloud era should be supporting multi-institutional learning models. Dual enrollment and course sharing, the way systems approach the delivery of education, the kinds of collaborations that can span institutions, a cloud native LMS should have been much less of an institution-centric kinda institutional domain environment, and should have been much more conducive to cross-institutional learning.
But instead what happened is we took the same on-premise mindset, and we just moved it to the cloud.
Similarly, with mobile, you know, my student is at a high school that uses one of the major LMSs. I'm not gonna cast shade. And I cannot tell you what he has due tomorrow. I can't tell you what he has due next week. If a teacher puts the syllabus in a Google Doc and doesn't use the native tools, right, I can't tell you that the syllabus says that with this missing assignment, you know, you could still get 50% recovery. And by the way, here's what your grade distribution looks like in terms of the probability of, you know, given the number of assessments that are left, where you're gonna end up.
And so the shift to mobile should have driven the creation of entire new application surface for the learner, where instead of the learner only existing in the context of specific courses and specific institutions, going back to the cloud comment, the learner would have their own persistent surface that would stay with them and would be super course and would provide a lot of the executive functioning type capabilities that we know are critical.
So the reason why I think AI is different is just because it is so compelling. It is absolutely so compelling in its ability to personalize learning. And the marketplace, similar to, you know, the early days of the LMS where, you know, there was so much pressure from the outside of the institution to consumer use of the Internet, consumer use of AI is putting so much pressure on institutions. People know that they can expect a level of personalization.
That gap is gonna have to close as more and more people experience AI in the consumer market.
Michael Horn
Why do you think this moment will be ... So there's that consumer pressure. Institutions are pretty sturdy in the way that they've done things, the courses, their boundaries, and so forth. Are there other things happening in the market, Matt, along with AI that you feel like this truly will be different from, say, the smartphone or the cloud transitions that reified that struct LMS structure rather than changed it?
Matt Pittinsky
It's just so compelling. I mean, institutions want to provide a study companion to every student. They want their students to have an executive functioning. You know, I think of it as the combination of, like, a smart proactive academic planner, Hogwarts book of magical study aids, where you're walking to class and it's reading the lecture notes for you, so you're prepared, or it's giving you visual mnemonic flashcards, or it's, you know, assessing your mastery before you kind of progress to the next level. It's your best friend, who also happens to be the TA in every course, and knows the deep domain of every single one of the courses that you're in. Something you can't get on the general Internet, that's one of the moats that I think institutions have, is the content course repository.
So I just think it's so compelling to a natural desire for what institutions want to support in their learning, but have been unable to do so because of the economics of it.
Michael Horn
So what I'm curious about then is, could these things that you're describing, I mean, those sound pretty neat. Right? They sound like great learning innovations and so forth. Could they happen without the LMS? Or maybe some new kind of platform that is natively built, right, with AI in mind. Right? Or or are you worried, in other words, that with AI, it might actually kill the LMS or a company like Blackboard's opportunity to pioneer this new platform?
Matt Pittinsky
I think, you know, it's and this is a world you know better than me, so I need to choose my words smartly.
Michael Horn
Go for it.
Matt Pittinsky
But I think it's classic, you know, innovator's dilemma, where a natural tendency of LMS providers, encouraged, I think, by institutional procurement practices, is to focus on the surface area of the LMS today and ask the question, ‘How can AI make that a 100 times better?’
So instead of having to go in and create a quiz and then change the schedule for each of the courses that I teach and then give certain students with 504 extra time, and I can just write that in and it'll go in and magically update all of the different pages.
That's neat, but that's not fundamentally changing the value proposition of the LMS. And if that's where vendors focus, I think they're going to find themselves replaced by a much more valuable kind of personalized learning system view that replaces first, it complements, but then ultimately replaces.
If they recognize that there are entire application surfaces that don't yet get supported by the LMS, like when you're walking to class with your phone, you know, then I think there's an opportunity for the LMS to evolve, to support, to truly be a learning management system instead of just a course container.
Michael Horn
So I wanna think about the other side of it as well, because part of this Hogwarts vision you just described is what else students could be doing with these new tools. Right?
And we're seeing, obviously, headlines all the time right now about these new agentic AI tools that students can log in to the LMS pretending to be them, and the bot can essentially complete all of the assignments and quizzes without the students even being involved at all. It's the sort of ultimate cognitive offloading, if you will.
And it has some professors, as you know, calling on LMS providers to build guardrails, in essence, to stop this from happening. And I'd love your take. Should LMS companies be putting these kinds of safeguards in? Is that their responsibility, or does this fall back on the faculty members?
Matt Pittinsky
So about a month ago, I was pitched by an AI gradebook company whose argument was basically AI is undermining academic integrity in the digital learning environment. Institutions need to shift to blue books and oral exams. They don't have the labor to be able to scale that up. So the answer is AI-based assessments in grade books of the blue books and the orals. So that's kind of a, I think, a non virtuous I don't know what you call that in the business I was a sociology major. But a non virtuous cycle?
Michael Horn
Vicious.
Matt Pittinsky
Yeah. Vicious cycle. You know, we have already been seeing a hollowing out of learning, driven by a sense of empty credentialism, where it's not about learning, it's about the grade. And we see that in grade inflation. We see that in a lot of dynamics.
AI is a that-much-more frictionless way to achieve that outcome.
The solution to it, though, is not AI. The solution to it is how we design courses. It's the movement towards mastery. It's the movement towards more authentic assessments.
And this is not unlike, you know, the early days of the Internet, where there were also arguments that, you know, online was going to hollow out the ability to assess learning, because on the Internet, you know, anyone can be a dog or whatever the famous New Yorker cartoon was.
And there's two ways to think about that. One is that they were right. Right? We have seen that, and you have, you know, SafeAssign and anti-plagiarism tools. But in another sense, it wasn't really about the technology. It was about the way we design courses and the way we assess learning.
Jeff Selingo
So it's interesting, Matt, you talked earlier about kind of the lack of innovation in the sector for so long after the LMS kinda grew up. And so as you look now ahead, so we've gone through the last 30 years of the LMS.
Like, as you think about the next 30 years, what are some other lessons, or really, what is the biggest lesson that you've learned that can help shape that next next chapter? What is it that you think, we really learned that now, and now we're gonna be different in these next 30 years?
Matt Pittinsky
Before I answer that, one other thought though, from Michael, your question.
There is a temptation, I think, among LMS vendors to use that fear of agentic replication or replacement of students to lock their systems down. And I just think institutions have to be careful, because there's also a commercial self-interest in locking the systems down, and creating a monopoly position for the LMS provider at your school to be the one that's giving you those agentic experiences. So we have to figure out, and that was you know, the learning management system began as a university initiative.
What we call 1EdTech used to be the Instructional Management Systems project, and it was because visionaries like Carol Twigg and Bill Graves and others realized that we want open systems that can support, you know, the full breadth of teaching and learning.
And I think we have to take a playbook, and whether it's Educause or 1EdTech, we have to figure out how to create the right kinda balance of equities between protecting the learning environment and not giving license to LMS providers to shut down innovation.
But Jeff, to your question, it's the faculty member. I mean, the reason why Blackboard grew organically, put aside M&A, the reason why Blackboard grew organically to be the most-widely-adopted LMS is because we focused on making it the easiest system for individual faculty to use. And we started where the faculty was. We didn't say you have to reimagine your course. We started with, here are the problems that this new technology, and in this case, this new medium, kinda helps solve. And oftentimes, we wouldn't win a sale because we didn't have all the features in the checklist. But if 10 faculty tried it, it just made sense to them.
And I think we have to take the same approach with AI, which is to really understand the ergonomics of an instructor's day, and look for those opportunities. Even as I'm also making the point that if we kind of work from within the paradigm, we risk missing the bigger value impact, which is this new learner-centric surface. And that's where the institution, I think, needs to be a champion, is to recognize that we now can give every student a study companion that's deeply embedded in the course context, which is directed by the instructor, not a generic sense of education in society, but professor Patinsky's education in society. And that's a great opportunity.
Michael Horn
So, Matt, we understand we started with the history, you with Blackboard. We understand, as this episode's coming out, you're stepping into a new, perhaps old role in some ways that'll put you in a key seat, for this next stage of the, perhaps finally living up to its name as the LMS.
Can you share a little bit about that?
Matt Pittinsky
Yeah. So Phil Hill put this out in his newsletter. I think, you know, by the time this comes out, likely it will have already been announced. But I will be returning to Blackboard as CEO, and I'm excited. I feel very lucky to be old enough to have been part of the Internet's impact on education, and young enough now to be part of AI's impact on education. And so I'm not starting right away. I have some commitments to, you know, to where I last worked in terms of a cooling-off period. But once that cooling-off period is up, I'm excited to join Blackboard again.
Michael Horn
Well, it's a reunion that'll be really exciting for all of us to watch. Matt, thank you for the vision you've been sketching out about what the LMS can be, and the power of AI to accomplish it, and we'll look forward to watching. Thanks for joining us in Future U.
Matt Pittinsky
Thanks for having me.
[Sponsor]
This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission-driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds. Ascendium envisions a world where low-income learners succeed in postsecondary education and workforce training as paths to upward mobility. Ascendium's grantees are removing systemic barriers and helping to build evidence about what works so learners can achieve their career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.
Michael Horn
Welcome back to Future U.
I always love talking to Matt. It makes me feel smarter at the end of it, maybe dumber at the beginning of it. But either way, I learned a ton.
Jeff, you were, making a lot of notes in the background as we interviewed him as you often do. And you wrote a note that I wanna start with, which was you said, quote, so little innovation. And I assume that you meant that while we certainly saw disruptive innovation the element of LMS space from the server-based Blackboard in essence to the cloud based Instructure with its LMS Canvas, the basic architecture I'm assuming you were talking about at the LMS, it just hasn't changed all that much. Is that what you were alluding to?
And say a little bit more, maybe, about what you were thinking when you wrote that.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. And, of course, Michael, we went to the cloud. We went to mobile. You know, I don't see that. I see that as tech innovations overall, not innovations within the LMS.
And I think there's two reasons why we probably saw so little innovation in this space. One is it really is confined to the classroom. Right? And the classroom is largely managed by faculty. It's really hard to scale, I think, technology innovation when it's individual faculty members who largely because of academic freedom are responsible for, you know, teaching their course, designing their course, delivering their course.
You know, so many times over the last 10 years, you know, companies and startups have approached me really trying to figure out how to scale up from what they were successful at, which was getting individual faculty members to adopt their technology in their classroom. But that is not exactly a scaling operation for edtech companies. Right? They don't want hundreds or thousands of customers, individual faculty customers. They want hundreds or thousands of institutional customers at the enterprise level.
And what they came to me with was this challenge of, like, we have Michael Horn in the Ed School who's using our solution. How do we get the Ed School to use it? And ultimately, how do we get the entire university? And it's really hard to reach deans and presidents about this.
And I think that's largely because so many of the innovations in the teaching model, and this is where I was really kind of interested in what Matt was talking about with the future, things like flipped classrooms, personalized instruction, interactive textbooks. Think about all the innovations that have been in the classroom since Blackboard was introduced in the 1990s. They all have been outside of the LMS. Right? The LMS has really been the container.
And in fact, you know, in preparation for us talking about this episode, I went to all of these different learning technology companies. And I noticed on so many of their marketing materials or their materials in general, they kept talking about, ‘we integrate with your LMS.’ Right?
So it's like the LMS was that container. Everyone else was developing other entities. You know, as Matt said, early on, they bought some of those entities, but I think they were buying them largely because they didn't want them to compete with the LMS, not because they thought those entities were kind of smart about learning and learning management in general.
Michael Horn
Yeah. It's interesting, Jeff.
And part of I think the reason we were asking the question then is, do you really think Blackboard can make this jump to what's actually truly a learning management system thanks to AI?
I think part of the question is, ‘Will you actually need an LMS to be that platform for all these technologies to integrate into in the future?’
You know, we're hearing a lot about a softwareless world, the end of SaaS, you know, businesses as we've known them, software as a service. And I think that's largely because people view that there's gonna be agents, AI agents, right, that are doing all this work in the background.
And frankly, AI-powered agents could spin up content and curriculum and learning experiences within clear rules, learning design rules, much quicker than the container, right, of an LMS that's much more static based and so forth.
And so do you really need the LMS at all? And if you don't, then is Blackboard the likely entity or Instructure the likely entity to create that future? Probably not.
It's probably gonna be an AI-native approach to it that'll be disruptive. Right? For the same reasons, you know, from a business perspective, it was hard to jump from a server-based to a cloud-based sort of delivery of the LMS. Right, Jeff?
And so I think that is an interesting undercurrent of all this.
What I think I hear from you, and you can push back, but what I think I hear from you is maybe that's all true. But actually, as long as it's still faculty-led to some degree in the traditional institutions, there is a capture. And if I'm a faculty member, you know, flipping the classroom, I'm not sure how widespread it actually was, but to some degree, that's easy. It's still my book. It's still, you know, my reading materials. Right? Like, I'm not ask like, I don't care if the AI can spin up novel content or ways of presenting my book. Like, I actually want students to read my book and then have a conversation about it.
I think the bigger opportunity, frankly, or the bigger disruption for these things that maybe transcend the LMS will be these AI-native universities that built with built with very different assumptions or, frankly, some of these, you know, some of the existing online institutions that have centrally-designed learning experiences that may fall back far more on AI agents to design and deliver and integrate and work with students on these various experiences.
That I could imagine going around the LMS completely, but I think it's two different markets in some sense. Right? And so maybe the LMS still has capture because of sort of that faculty-driven process you just described in the existing set of universities.
What's your take on that?
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. I just think Michael, you know, we've been in and around this space for so long. I'm just skeptical about the ability to really try to change how the classroom is managed, particularly around the governance structure. Right?
So could you imagine the CIO of a major university coming in and saying, 'Ok, we're not gonna we're not gonna use the LMS anymore. We're gonna have these agents and you're gonna kind of design your own.' And, you know, I just don't …
First of all, there's a lack of knowledge, I think, at many colleges, universities about AI, about the ability of AI, and what it could do in the classroom.
Second, I think there is a gap in in training. So some professors are really good at experimenting right now, others aren't, and so they kind of fall back on the LMS. You know, in some ways having the LMS be this container since the 1990s has been great for professors because it's something that they know. There's new features obviously in new releases, but it's something that they know all this time.
I wonder, I think I agree with you AI-native universities, I think online universities. I'm also wondering if this might be more discipline-specific across universities. So instead of seeing it scale up within universities, I might imagine could it scale across, you know, business schools or engineering schools?
And I say that, Michael, because I did this piece a couple of weeks ago around AI in college, you know, kind of the future of college and the era of AI for New York magazine. And as part of that, I spent some time with the provost at Ohio State University.
And as you know, Ohio State went on this big announcement last summer talking about how, you know, everybody at the university is gonna be AI literate by the class of of 2029, the graduating class of 2029.
And then, you know, as I poked at that a little bit with the provost as he said, you know, a lot of this is going to be up to the disciplines, very discipline-specific.
And, you know, when talking to professors at Ohio State, there's a very you know, we've talked about this before on the show. There's an unevenness between the disciplines. Right? The humanities are a little bit different than business, different than preprofessional and health care, and engineering, and health, all the other colleges and schools at a place like Ohio State.
So I wonder if there's going to be more horizontal integration almost across disciplines rather than, more of a vertical integration within a college or university.
Michael Horn
Yeah. It's super interesting. It makes sense.
Right? I mean, I'm just thinking about my own experience at the Ed School. If a company pitches me, I'm a little bit gonna actually kick it back upstairs and say, I don't know. Can I what is this okay? Can it integrate with my LMS? What would this actually look like? Right? And be somewhat hesitant.
And the container in which I teach, right, is also part of this of a clear defined semester and so forth.
Which I think goes to the other piece that I would say is I think you're right. In traditional universities, it's maybe more department or domain or discipline or school specific.
I think my rationale for why we're unlikely to maybe then see though this bigger leap Matt is hoping for to a truly learning management system is that you're ultimately selling within the existing value network of existing schools with their existing business models that are not fundamentally focused on optimizing learning, and you're selling through the faculty.
I just don't think we're gonna see that huge revolution that I think that folks might expect.
Now I think Blackboard could be in a very good position to continue to capture that. Right? Because as you said, the other thing you wrote down that was follow the faculty very smart. So I might say that's, like, not the change strategy that's gonna dramatically revolutionize things, but it's probably a strategy that keeps you front and center in the existing institutions.
I think you should be much more worried about that strategy if we think there's gonna be fundamentally, like, huge market disruption, right, with with transformed institutions that are not beholden to the legacy or not beholden to faculty making these individual learning design choices, Jeff.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. And if you know anything about Matt Pittinsky, he really comes from more of kind of an academic background compared to basically any other edtech leader. And I'm sure I'll hear from some edtech leader who pushes back on that, right?
Michael Horn
That's why every conversation with him, feel like I was dumber going. Like at the end of it, I'm like, wow, I'm not that smart and I learned a lot. Right?
Matt Pittinsky
Right. Because he really does approach this from kind of a more of a faculty-centric point of view. He approaches it more from an academic point of view. He is a fan of, you know, something he's talked about over time, kind of radical incrementalism when it comes to innovation. Right? He is not for, you know, full-scale change overnight within colleges and universities. He's a he's a student of Art Levine when Art was at Teachers College and now at Brandeis. So he thinks about the history of higher ed in a very different way than I think most edtech leaders who come into this business usually from another business, do something for a couple of years, sell off their business, shut it down, and move on to sometimes outside of the sector because they're so frustrated by how long it takes to change and sell into the sector.
I mean, that's the other thing I will give Matt and Michael Chasen for that matter credit for is they've been in it for the long haul. I mean, they've seen it all. And so that's why I was really excited to have him on the show, but more than that, really interested to see what happens from here.
Michael Horn
Yeah. I think that's right.
And I guess I would say if you really wanna blow this out of the water and it might not be a software-led solution, but really focus on the learning, I would focus on those disruptors that are optimizing learning. I'm not sure that market is gonna grow fast enough for investors to want you to invest there.
Blackboard also just got some new investment. I'm not sure it's gonna make sense for them to go chase that market based on probably the expectations around return.
I suppose the other variable on this depends on accreditation and whether there are new accreditors that are actually actively bringing on new schools, right, into the higher ed ecosystem. I suspect that's a piece of it as well.
I will say at the end of the day, I do think the technology will be subservient to the business model and value network in which it's deployed. And we should be wary of thinking that the tech by itself will just simply transform the practices of faculty and their priorities, Jeff.
Maybe a good place to wrap it up. But before we do, let's bring Matt back because he was generous to play with our fun little segment here at the end where we have him answer a few rapid-fire questions.
Matt, welcome back. We know you're a listener to the podcast, so you knew this was coming from past episodes, but we've got three lightning round fun questions for you.
And the first one is this. What was the worst grade that you got in college? And tell us a little bit about the class you got it in.
Matt Pittinsky
Well, if I can cheat, I'll answer for high school. So I was a terrible student. I failed multiple classes in high school. One year, the New York State Science Regents, biology regents exam was canceled because the test scores had gotten out, and was posted on the front page of The Daily News. And I was the only student in New York who was counting on that exam in order to help me avoid summer school. So I was a terrible student. And I do think many people interested in education had, you know, experiences that put them a little bit on the outside of the system, and I was certainly that way. In college, I generally took courses I was interested in, and so I didn't really have a bad college course. So high school was more my...
[Michael Horn] (00:00:09,600 - 00:36:06,245)
More was my more intrinsic motivation, if you will.
[Matt Pittinsky] (00:00:09,600 - 00:36:06,663)
Exactly.
[Michael Horn] (00:00:09,600 - 00:36:19,380)
Alright. Let's move to the second you've noted a lot of the phases and buzzwords and things of that nature that have come and gone, in higher ed since you've been around it. What's one higher ed buzzword or phrase that you never wanna hear again?
[Matt Pittinsky] (00:00:09,600 - 00:37:20,130)
Well, I certainly don't like the way we take, you know, the notion of like, we devalue things as sort of like 'content.' You know, courses are not just content, that type of thing. But what I think about the most is Bloom's 'two sigma problem.' Because it's just so overused now when talking about tutoring. And in my dissertation, you know, it related to teacher effectiveness, and 'Pygmalion in the Classroom' is one of those studies that's not actually what people think it is. And Bloom's 'two sigma' is also, like, it wasn't original research. He was just speculating on his doctoral students' work. It was actually more about mastery learning than it was about tutoring. It hasn't really been replicated. All of which is to say, there's still a big, probably one sigma effect of tutoring. I don't mean to but Yeah. No. You know, I'd like us to stop referencing studies that people have may not have actually read.
[Michael Horn] (00:00:09,600 - 00:37:32,335)
Love that one. There's a great takedown of it in Education Next as well that I'd recommend to folks. Alright. Last question. What's the biggest difference between students now and when you were in college?
[Matt Pittinsky] (00:00:09,600 - 00:38:12,960)
I mean, I may be a cliche in saying this, and I haven't been teaching for a while, but I do feel like that executive functioning. I do feel like that ability to sort of map out, organize your day, understand what's due, kind of think ahead. There's just a basic level of self-efficacy, self-advocacy, kind of grit, which is a study I have not read, so I gotta be careful. I'm using lowercase grit. That, you know, it feels different, but that might just make me a curmudgeon. I don't know.
[Jeff Selingo] (00:00:09,600 - 00:38:14,880)
We're all curmudgeons.
[Michael Horn] (00:00:09,600 - 00:38:39,370)
No. Don't worry. Welcome to the show that's part of it. So Well, huge thanks, Matt. As as Jeff and I both said, we always feel smarter after you leave, and hopefully, our audience feels the same. And to our audience, remember to subscribe, rate us wherever you are watching. Subscribe on YouTube as well. You can watch us even if you don't want to watch me and Jeff. You can subscribe to our newsletter at futureupodcast.com, and we'll see you next time.
