ASU+GSV = The Best Education Conference

I’ve attended many education conferences but ASU+GSV is the best. When I say “the best” I mean connections, thought leadership, and overall value. To put it another way, I spent 54 hours traveling roundtrip (the airlines being what they are today) for 15 hours of conference time. Still worth it. Why?

First, one of the major themes of the conference—and I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t—was the education field’s response to AI. The panel that I attended was “K-12 Strategies for Excellence” which included, most notably, current client Imagine Learning as well as GoGuardian. They spoke about the potential for AI to deliver truly personalized student experiences, understand the baseline for a kid, and deliver differentiated instruction. Although the “jury is not out on how to educate kids effectively,” that’s about to change as the largest digital curriculum provider in the U.S. is developing initial experiments to drive AI use cases.

The panel topics were wide-ranging, making the strategic point that “excellence” is a highly complex puzzle. What did ChatGPT make of it all? I typed:

“Write a blog post on K-12 strategies to address the following topics: educators need to change, learning loss, infrastructure, school closings and implications, what teachers need, personalize student experience, differentiated instruction, tutoring, student safety, assessments, ability to drive outcomes, keep students engaged, formative assessment, parent involvement, political challenge with districts afraid to spend Federal money, metrics, focus on skills, update workflows, products that assist teacher learning, instructional services business, large language models, and use cases for AI.”

What I got back was a whole lot of education blah-blah. Until next time, ChatGPT. We still need people, partners, and processes for an effective strategy.

Westchester Education Services offers a complete solution for product development, but our approach goes well beyond a wide range of services. We strive to meet our client’s needs by asking the best questions to produce the best results. When you put that statement into ChatGPT, it provides some tips: ask open-ended questions, focus on the client’s goals, ask for specifics, understand the timeline, and follow-up with clarifying questions. Yes, that, and so much more.