Education Futures

Svenia Busson & Laurent Jolie
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Education

A podcast about the future of education in the age of AI. We bring together interdisciplinary voices to explore how we can shape more desirable futures for learning.

  1. 12h ago

    Can AI build human connection instead of replacing it?

    Julia Freeland Fisher is Director of Education Research at the Clayton Christensen Institute, the nonpartisan think tank built on Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation, where she has spent 13 years making the case that who students know matters as much as what they know. She holds a BA from Princeton and a JD from Yale Law School — a credential she cheerfully calls "a very expensive detour," having decided along the way that she did not want to be a lawyer. She began her career in 2007 at NewSchools Venture Fund, at the height of the No Child Left Behind era, when American education reform was measured almost entirely in test scores and graduation rates. Looking at the world of work, she noticed that networks quietly determined who got jobs, internships and promotions — and that this was completely absent from the reform conversation. She joined the Christensen Institute in 2013 to incubate the idea nobody was funding: social capital as a measurable, buildable education outcome. She is the author of Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students' Networks (Wiley), co-written with her husband Daniel Fisher, with a foreword by Clayton Christensen. Today her work sits at the intersection of social capital and AI. She writes Connection Error on Substack, on how AI is changing our relationships and how our relationships are changing AI. Her latest report, Prosocial Possibilities: Building Tech That Builds Students' Connections (with Anna Arsenault, published August 2026), documents a project with 10 ed tech platforms testing prosocial features and functionalities in the college and career guidance space. She is also running an early-stage Jobs to Be Done study with Bob Moesta on what actually drives demand for AI companionship among 18–24 year olds. In this episode, Julia talks with Svenia Busson about: Why relationships are the thing everyone in education agrees about and no one is accountable for — no budget line, no outcome metric, nobody's jobAI companions as a textbook case of disruptive innovation — the risk comes less from the technology than from how flagrantly we've neglected human connectionWhat prosocial AI looks like in practice — Protopia, Road Trip Nation, Climb Together and Uprooted AcademyThe four "jobs to be done" behind AI companionship in her study with Bob Moesta — and why not one young person used the word "loneliness"Fear of burdening others as the most potent force pushing teens toward chatbots, both pushing and pullingWhy measurement alone won't save human connection — "what gets valued gets measured gets done" — and where the Search Institute's Developmental Relationships Framework and Harvard's relationship mapping fit inThe 75+ US state bills regulating AI companionship, warning labels that miss the point, and federal cuts to outdoor education as two sides of the same coinHelp-seeking and networking as the most neglected "skill of the future" — the Connected Scholars curriculum tripled graduation rates, and no employer ever asks for it The AI conversation education is missing: relationships are the real disruption. Links mentioned in this episodeJulia Freeland Fisher at the Clayton Christensen Institute: https://www.christenseninstitute.org/people/julia-freeland-fisher/Prosocial Possibilities (Julia Freeland Fisher & Anna Arsenault, Aug 2026): https://www.christenseninstitute.org/publication/prosocial-possibilities/Connection Error, Julia's Substack: https://juliafreelandfisher.substack.com/Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students' Networks: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37862640Navigation & Guidance in the Age of AI: 5 Trends to Watch: https://www.christenseninstitute.org/publication/navigation-guidance-ai/NewSchools Venture Fund: https://www.newschools.org/Protopia: https://protopia.co/Road Trip Nation: https://roadtripnation.com/Climb Together: https://www.climbtogether.org/Uprooted Academy: https://www.uprootedacademy.org/Search Institute — Developmental Relationships Framework: https://searchinstitute.org/resources-hub/developmental-relationships-frameworkMaking Caring Common (Harvard GSE) — Relationship Mapping Strategy: https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/resources-for-educators/relationship-mapping-strategyConnected Scholars (Jean Rhodes, UMass Boston): https://mentoringcentral.net/mentoring-training/connectedscholars/The Rithm Project — Youth, AI, and the Relationships That Shape Them: https://www.therithmproject.org/Common Sense Media research on teens and AI: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/researchFoundation for Social Connection (Julianne Holt-Lunstad): https://www.social-connection.org/Jobs to Be Done theory (Bob Moesta's framework): https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/jobs-to-be-done/

    Can AI build human connection instead of replacing it?

  2. 2d ago

    Teens, AI, and the conversations we are not having

    Laura Zimmermann, Ph.D., is the Director of Youth AI Research at Common Sense Media, where she leads research within the newly launched Youth AI Safety Institute — the first independent safety lab dedicated to testing how AI products affect children. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology at Georgetown University with a concentration in Human Development and Public Policy, and was an Institute of Education Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Education. For over a decade, Laura has studied how children learn from screens — starting in infancy and early childhood and working her way up to tweens and teens. Her graduate research at Georgetown, in collaboration with Binghamton University, tested whether the well-documented "transfer deficit" (young children learn less from a 2D screen than from a live person) also applied to the then-brand-new iPad. It did. Her landmark paper, The Ghost in the Touchscreen: Social Scaffolds Promote Learning by Toddlers (Child Development, 2017), showed what closes that gap: a responsive human sitting next to the child. She is also a co-author of Developer Meets Developmentalist: Improving Industry–Research Partnerships in Children's Technology (Journal of Children and Media, 2018). Across her career she has led research for PBS KIDS, Sesame Workshop, New America, the Aspen Institute, the Bay Area Discovery Museum, Google, and MIND Education. She credits two mentors in particular: Lisa Guernsey at New America, and Donna Mitroff — the educational consultant behind Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. At Common Sense Media she is a lead author of Teens in the AI Era: Schoolwork and Skills That Matter, a nationally representative survey of over 1,000 US teens aged 13–17, fielded with NORC at the University of Chicago. In this episode, Laura talks with Svenia Busson about: The transfer deficit — why toddlers learn less from a touchscreen than from a person, and the one thing that closes the gapWhy 70% of teens now use AI for schoolwork, but only a minority have ever discussed with a teacher what AI actually isThe 63% who get answers from AI — and the 77% of that same group using it for brainstorming, feedback and checking work insteadThe nearly 90% of US teachers who have received no AI professional development, and what that vacuum producesWhy 44% of teens have had an AI tool blocked at school — and 59% of them simply switched to a personal deviceThe 38% who say AI makes them generate fewer of their own ideas, and keep using it anyway — grind culture as a hypothesisAI companions: 72% of teens have used one, and why Common Sense Media's position is that under-18s shouldn't use them at allThe sycophancy problem — why "practising" social skills with a character that always agrees with you isn't practiceThe equity question nobody has data on yet: does AI narrow or widen the gap between well-resourced and under-resourced studentsThe developer/developmentalist gap — what it would take for child development evidence to shape a product before launch rather than after the scandal The most powerful intervention isn't a policy or a filter — it's a conversation without judgment. Resources mentioned in this episode: Teens in the AI Era: Schoolwork and Skills That Matter — Common Sense MediaTalk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions — Common Sense MediaYouth AI Safety Institute and its free AI Risk Assessments of tools kids actually useDigital Literacy & Well-Being Curriculum, Grades 9–12 — free AI literacy lessons for teachersThe Ghost in the Touchscreen: Social Scaffolds Promote Learning by Toddlers — Child Development, 2017Laura Zimmermann's researchThe Disengaged Teen — Jenny Anderson's episode, referenced on teen shame around AI use Mentioned in this episode: For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

    Teens, AI, and the conversations we are not having

  3. Sep 3

    Inside England's digitized curriculum, built for AI

    John Roberts is the Chief Executive of Oak National Academy, an NGO publicly funded by England's Department for Education to build a free, fully digitised national curriculum for England's schools. A former secondary school teacher and senior leader in the North West of England, he built his first reputation outside the classroom by founding Edapt in 2011, an independent edu-legal support service for teachers and school staff, where he remains chair. In April 2020, as COVID closed schools overnight, Roberts helped launch Oak as an emergency remote-learning platform — going from a WhatsApp conversation to a live site in 12 days, delivering over 130 million lessons between April 2020 and July 2021. He joined initially as Director of Product and Engineering before becoming CEO. Under his leadership, Oak evolved into what he calls the world's first fully digitised, machine-readable national curriculum: 13,000 lessons and roughly 100,000 resources across all 17 National Curriculum subjects, now used by one in three teachers in England. In September 2024, Oak launched Aila, England's first publicly available generative AI tool, now used by more than 60,000 teachers to plan lessons grounded in Oak's own openly licensed curriculum data. In this episode, John talks with Svenia Busson about: Why Oak scaled from a pandemic emergency platform into England's official digitised curriculumThe case for openly licensing school content under the UNESCO 2019 Recommendation on OERBuilding Aila — and the safety and quality failures (Americanisms, guessable multiple-choice distractors, chatbot risk around sensitive texts like Romeo and Juliet) that shaped its designWhy grounding AI in a rich curriculum corpus, including full lesson transcripts, beats one-shot lesson generationCognitive outsourcing vs. cognitive offloading — keeping teachers in the loop on lesson planningWhat Oak's open misconception datasets and curriculum knowledge graph (published on GitHub) enable for other builders, and how they compare to efforts like Eedi's misconceptions research with Google DeepMindWhy public digital infrastructure, not just AI models, is the missing layer in ed-tech — from the US's philanthropically funded Learning Commons to Anthropic's MCP standardOpen questions ahead: faster evaluation methods, the pending NFER/EEF evaluation of Aila, and England's 2028 curriculum change Find out more about knowledge graphs: https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/why-ai-gets-lesson-planning-wrong-and-how-fix-it Mentioned in this episode: Education Futures Fellowship A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

    Inside England's digitized curriculum, built for AI

  4. Aug 31

    What the AI debate misses about the Global South

    Dr. Maria Mercedes "Didith" T. Rodrigo is a Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, where she directs the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences (ALLS) and co-heads the Ateneo Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Laboratory. For over two decades she has studied what students actually do and feel while learning with technology — detecting boredom, confusion, frustration and engaged concentration from interaction data inside intelligent tutoring systems, educational games and programming environments. She is a former President of the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE) and a recipient of its Distinguished Researcher Award, and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society. Her opinion piece "Is the AIED Conundrum a First-World Problem?" (International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education) argued that the classrooms most likely to benefit from AI are the ones structurally least able to deploy it. In July 2025 she delivered the keynote "The Technopolitics of AIED: A Developing Country's Perspective" at the AIED conference in Palermo, and later that year argued for culturally-responsive AI at the K-EDU EXPO in Korea. In this episode, Didith talks with Svenia Busson about: Why AI in education is built on Western psychological constructs — and whether boredom in Manila is the same as boredom in MichiganThe Scooter experiment: US students deliberately provoking a scolding animated dog, Filipino students insisting "Scooter cares about me""Gaming the system" — why students in the Philippines pretend to work rather than walk out, and what generative AI does to that instinctFindings from WHIMC, the University of Illinois Minecraft science environment, where lower-performing Filipino students made almost no observations — the cost of saving faceTesting LLM grading bias on Filipino English, after earlier work showing essays written in African American English scored lowerAI Ed Unplugged — Seiji Isotani and Ig Ibert Bittencourt's Brazilian movement to design AI for classrooms with one device, one connection, and paper examsWhy she'd give the scarce resources to the teacher first — including the maths teacher assigned to teach relaxation massageEpistemic vigilance as the successor to critical thinking, and why friction, confusion and struggle have to be designed back inThe trade-offs a Global South education minister actually faces — including feeding programmes, because hungry children cannot learn Mentioned in this episode: For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

    What the AI debate misses about the Global South

  5. Aug 27

    Building schools where 25 Million have none

    Zia Akhter Abbas is President & CEO of The Citizens Foundation (TCF), one of the world's largest privately-run networks of formal schools for low-income children and the largest private employer of women in Pakistan. He came to education sideways: an IB diploma at Lester B. Pearson United World College in Canada, an MBA from LUMS, then seventeen years in senior business and risk roles at Citi and Standard Chartered, plus a board seat at 1Link, Pakistan's leading payments switch. He left banking for TCF in 2014. For a decade he led TCF's global resource mobilisation, working with a volunteer movement across 14 countries, building the organisation's global governance framework, stewarding its Government Partnership Schools network (400+ public schools now run by TCF), and driving TCF's Strategy 2030. He became President & CEO in June 2025. The organisation he now runs began in 1995 with six friends in Karachi who met every Wednesday, decided education was the closest thing to a root cause, and built five schools with their own money. Today TCF operates 2,261 school units across 60+ districts, educates roughly 300,000 students, employs ~24,000 people including 15,000+ female faculty, runs its own construction company that completes two to three schools a week, and moves teachers 75,000 kilometres a day in a fleet of nearly 1,000 vans. Its results: 55% of TCF students complete intermediate (vs 27% nationally) and 26% enter university (vs 12% nationally). Zia is a Schwab Foundation / World Economic Forum social entrepreneur and a board member of the Global Schools Forum. In this episode, Zia talks with Svenia Busson about: Leaving banking for education after seventeen years — and why the nonprofit job turned out to be harderHow TCF scaled from five schools to 2,261 units using the "unit concept," a cookie-cutter template for an entire school system — and what a sacred template costs youPakistan's 25 million out-of-school children — a population the size of Australia — and why the state stopped building schools decades agoFunding 300,000 students with no government money: $60M+ last year from diaspora volunteers, chapters in 14 countries, institutional funders, and zakat acting as a global community endowmentThe all-female faculty decision, made intuitively rather than from research — and the finding that girls' enrolment drops 15% for every 500 metres of walking distanceWhat broke when EdTech built for paying markets met dust, theft-prone tablet racks and 24-hour power cuts — and why TCF may have to build its own toolsThe Khan Academy Pakistan / Khanmigo pilot for Grades 6–8 maths and science, why it went teacher-facing rather than student-facing, and what principals said when asked if they'd ever use AIWhy AI literacy training was rolled out before any AI tools — and why you educate 24,000 people rather than police themThe Global South inversion: why the biggest unlock may be language, not tutoring, in a country where everything meaningful requires EnglishWhy the acute Western harms — mental health, isolation — look different when eight people share a room and the phone belongs to your father Mentioned in this episode: For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

    Building schools where 25 Million have none

  6. Aug 24

    Africa's learning crisis and the AI agency divide

    Dr. Obiageli "Oby" Ezekwesili is Founder and President of Human Capital Africa, an accountability and advocacy organization devoted to Africa's foundational learning crisis — getting every child reading, writing and counting by age 10. An economic policy expert and chartered accountant by training, she was a co-founder of Transparency International and later served in the Nigerian government as Minister of Solid Minerals and then as Federal Minister of Education. She led the public procurement reform agenda that earned her the nickname "Madam Due Process." She went on to serve as Vice President for the Africa Region at the World Bank, overseeing operations across 48 sub-Saharan countries. She co-founded the #BringBackOurGirls movement, ran for President of Nigeria in the 2019 elections, and founded the School of Politics, Policy and Governance (SPPG), an unconventional school now operating in Nigeria, Senegal and Kenya, with Ghana opening this year, whose graduates are already running for and winning public office. She also advises Club de Madrid, the forum of former democratic heads of state and government democracies and economic development including on AI regulation and governance. In this episode, Oby talks with Svenia Busson about: Human dignity as the through-line of a career spanning Transparency International, two ministries and the World Bank — and why she now calls education "a living thing"Africa's demographic pivot — average age 18.9 years, and 85% of global workforce growth by 2050 — and why it leads to either a dividend or a disasterWhy she stopped "wasting her voice on incorrigible leaders" and built a school to manufacture better ones instead, refusing national accreditation to escape captured systemsThe foundational learning crisis as a matter of life and death — nine in ten children in sub-Saharan Africa unable to read a simple sentence by age 10, and why she refuses to call a spade an agricultural implementWhat actually causes it: no early-childhood preparation, teaching in languages children don't speak, curricular overload, untrained and uncoached teachers, and ministries with no learning dataWhat works and has been proven at scale — structured pedagogy, teaching at the right level, teacher coaching, and the question she puts to presidents: "Mr President, what did our children learn today?"Sobral in Brazil and India's NIPUN Bharat — a 20% improvement in learning outcomes in four to five years — as evidence that political will, not technical solutions, is the binding constraintWhy the mobile telephony leapfrog (Nigeria: 500,000 landlines in 50 years, 200 million mobile lines after liberalisation) is the right mental model for AI in AfricaThe agency divide, not the digital divide — a child can have the most advanced AI system and still lack the knowledge and capability to use it purposefully and criticallyData sovereignty, AI sweatshops on the continent, and why AI must free teachers for individualised attention and values — never replace them Her three game changers for Africa: young people, African women, and technology as their enabler. Mentioned in this episode: For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

    Africa's learning crisis and the AI agency divide

  7. Aug 20

    Africa's 800+ languages and the AI data gap

    Dr. John Mugo is the Chief Executive Officer of Mizizi Elimu Afrika, the African-led education organization based in Nairobi, Kenya, formerly known as Zizi Afrique Foundation. He holds a Doctorate and a Master's degree in Special Needs Education from the University of Hanover, Germany, and a Bachelor of Education (Music) from Kenyatta University, where he went on to chair the Department of Special Needs Education. Before founding the organization in 2018, he headed Uwezo, one of East Africa's largest citizen-led learning assessment initiatives, measuring what children actually know rather than what systems claim to teach. He leads ALiVE (Action for Life Skills and Values in East Africa), a regional framework and assessment system that has now assessed life skills and values in over 45,000 adolescents across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and works directly with the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development on values-based education and teacher training reform. In March 2026, Zizi Afrique rebranded as Mizizi Elimu Afrika — "mizizi" is Kiswahili for "many roots" — and launched Vision 2040: Strong Foundations for Lasting Change, a 15-year strategy to reach more than 10 million children across 10+ African countries with stronger foundational learning. His organization currently works across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and Cameroon, and is piloting AI-supported teaching with Fab AI and Gemini in 15 Kenyan schools. In this episode, John talks with Svenia Busson about: Why fewer than 20% of children in much of Sub-Saharan Africa are learning at grade level — and why he calls that an "80 to 90% leakage" no amount of university investment can fixVision 2040 and the two-lever theory behind it: strengthening government systems instead of building parallel NGO programmes, and forcing a competitive civil society sector to collaborateWhy Africa's real AI problem isn't models but data — 800+ languages, oral cultures, and knowledge trapped in unpublished grey literatureThe case for voice data and mother-tongue AI as the fastest route to reading — drawn from his own experience learning to read in Kikuyu, not EnglishWhat the Fab AI and Gemini pilot in 15 schools is showing about real-time assessment — and the widening gap between connected private schools and public schools without electricityThe whole-school approach to values built with Kenya's curriculum institute and piloted in 79 schools — because responsibility and integrity can't be taught in a lesson slotWhy place value in Grade 1 explains Kenya's KCSE maths results, and the 10-year roadmap to move Grade 3 numeracy proficiency from 30% to 75%His blunt advice to ministries drafting AI policy: stop banning it, start investing in your own data, and put young people in the driver's seatWhy Africa's median age of 19 is an asset rather than a fiscal crisis — and what has to be true for that to hold Links: Mizizi Elimu Afrika · ALiVE · Uwezo · Fab AI · AI for Education · KICD · John Mugo on LinkedIn Mentioned in this episode: For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

    Africa's 800+ languages and the AI data gap

  8. Aug 17

    Redesigning school for the AI age

    Dan Effland is the Chief of Staff & Strategy at Summit Public Schools, where he leads the continued evolution of Summit's school model. He holds a Master's in Special Education from Dominican University and a Master's in Public School Building Administration from Columbia University's Teachers College. Before entering education, Effland spent over a decade as a professional musician in Chicago. He changed careers in his mid-thirties, teaching guitar to middle schoolers before joining Teach For America — where his cohort, mostly in their twenties, nicknamed him "Stepdad." He became a special education teacher in Chicago and then Seattle, joined Summit Public Schools in 2017, and went on to serve as Dean of Culture & Instruction at Summit Sierra and Executive Director of Summit Atlas High School in West Seattle. He now leads Summit's innovation work: designing "Summit 3.0", an evolved school model that builds on what Summit has promised families for over two decades and responds to the demands of the AI powered era. Summit operates seven charter schools across California and Washington serving roughly 3,000 students, following its earlier "Summit 2.0" personalization model, which scaled the Summit Learning Platform to nearly 400 schools and 100,000 students nationwide. He also sits on the board of the Washington State Charter Schools Association. In this episode, Dan talks with Svenia Busson about: Stripping school down to three elements — kids, outcomes, and resources — to redesign without inherited assumptionsWhy AI doesn't replace a school model, it reveals whether you actually have oneRebuilding Summit's model for the third time: from "college for all" to personalized learning to an AI-native designTreating AI as infrastructure — a data layer and knowledge graph — to dynamically match resources to students, not just as a set of toolsWhy "beliefs come first, model comes next, tools come last," and Summit's push to "create the market" for AI-native school infrastructureRethinking "cheating": protecting the learning while empowering the learner in an AI-saturated classroomRedesigning Expeditions — two-week, ungraded, off-campus career immersions — and why "learning without walls" might be where school is headedWhich durable skills matter more, not less, when a chatbot can write a competent essay in seconds A former teacher now redesigning what school itself should be in the age of AI. Mentioned in this episode: Summit Public Schools · Marshall Street Initiatives · Robin Lake / Center on Reinventing Public Education, who recommended Dan as a guest · Futre, Diane Tavenner's career-exploration platform, used by Summit juniors and seniors · Justin Reich's MIT Teaching Systems Lab, referenced from an earlier Education Futures episode Mentioned in this episode: Education Futures Fellowship A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

    Redesigning school for the AI age
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About

A podcast about the future of education in the age of AI. We bring together interdisciplinary voices to explore how we can shape more desirable futures for learning.

Information

  • Creator
    Svenia Busson & Laurent Jolie
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    78
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Svenia Busson & Laurent Jolie
  • Show Website
    Education Futures

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