Educast 3000

InstructureCast

Ah, education…a world filled with mysterious marvels. From K12 to Higher Ed, educational change and innovation are everywhere. And with that comes a few lessons, too. Each episode, EduCast3000 hosts, Melissa Loble and Ryan Lufkin, will break down the fourth wall and reflect on what’s happening in education – the good, the bad, and, in some cases, the just plain chaotic. This is the most transformative time in the history of education, so if you’re passionate about the educational system and want some timely and honest commentary on what’s happening in the industry, this is your show. Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and join the conversation! If you have a question, comment, or topic to add, drop us a line using your favorite social media platform.

  1. 2 days ago

    Planet of the Apps: Every Technology That Was Going to Replace Teachers, and Why None Did

    The loudest voices on AI in education sit at the edges, and almost nobody who teaches every day lives out there. Matt Miller calls the place they actually live the sensible middle, and this episode makes the case for it. Hosts Ryan Lufkin and guest co-host Jody Sailor talk with the creator of Ditch That Textbook, a high school Spanish teacher of more than twenty years and the author of seven books, about what changed when he stopped assigning workbook pages, why he went back to the classroom after eight years away, and what he thinks has to stay human while the ground shifts. In this episode: Ditching the textbook was never about hating textbooks, and Matt describes replacing the questions at the end of the chapter one at a time until he needed the book so rarely he stopped reaching for it.The promise of AI is easiest to see in a Spanish 1 class of 31 students, where Matt can deliver strong whole-group instruction and still not get meaningful personalized feedback to every kid.Cognitive offloading worries Matt as much as it worries families, and he recounts a district parent survey that came back saying, in a variety of ways, that they're afraid AI will make their kids stupid.Time is the barrier teachers name out loud, though Matt points to comfort as the one nobody mentions.Asking students what they think is the move that requires no permission from anyone, and Matt walks through the four-step conversation from AI Literacy in Any Class that gets honest answers instead of self-preservation.The one-room schoolhouse kept the entire curriculum inside one teacher's head, and Matt traces how every innovation since has pulled learning away from that center, which is why he argues the question worth asking now is what only a human brings. ditchthattextbook.comMatt's free newsletter, Mondays and Thursdays: ditch.link/joinAI Literacy in Any Class by Matt Miller

  2. 11 Aug

    The Neverending (Learning) Story: Skills for a Whole Life

    Learning doesn't end at graduation, and the systems around us shouldn't either. This clips episode takes that idea and follows it across a whole life. Hosts Ryan Lufkin and Melissa Loble revisit five conversations, from a charity teaching school kids to code in Australia to a summer-learning advocate to a university leader rethinking credentials, and line them up as one continuum: the skills that matter at every stage, and the gaps that open when we treat each stage as separate. In this episode: Fear, not ability, is what keeps kids out of digital skills, which is why Megan Woff's Code for Schools starts with curiosity as it works toward reaching a million students by 2027.Summer learning loss hits low-income students hardest, and Christi Kobus Rokicki explains how a gap that opens in childhood compounds every year that learning stops.Durable skills like resilience and leadership can't be studied for a test, since Emily Foote argues they're built by doing real work, which matters more as AI absorbs the entry-level tasks graduates used to cut their teeth on.The critical thinking and communication skills the liberal arts have always taught, Joe Potvin makes the case, outlast any single job or technology.Credentials should recognize the learning people already carry, and Martin Bean lays out how a connected learning system would follow a person across their life instead of ending at a diploma.Guests: Emily Foote, Chief Growth and Strategy Officer, Saxbys Megan Woff, CEO, Code for Schools Christi Kobus Rokicki, Vice President for External Affairs, National Summer Learning AssociationJoe Potvin, History Adjunct Professor, Simmons University, and Senior Portfolio Manager, Cengage Professor Martin BeanKatie Novak, Founder and Chief Education Officer (CEO), Novak Educational Consulting

  3. 28 Jul

    No Country for Fast Answers: Safeguarding Critical Human Logic in a World of Instant AI Responses

    Dale Leszczynski leads RMIT University's Generative AI Lab for Education (GAILE), where he's spent the past year building a skills continuum (instead of a single checklist) for roughly 5,000 educators , on the theory that nobody stays an expert in this field for long. Hosts Ryan Lufkin and Melissa Loble talk with Dale about what happened when other Australian university leaders mapped their own institutions against that continuum, and about the debate RMIT staged at its first education conference: are AI tools morally neutral, or does responsibility for them rest entirely on the people using them? And now that AI can do almost anything, what should humans still do themselves? In this episode: RMIT's AI Skills Continuum treats AI skill-building as a moving target, not a fixed benchmark, since what counts as expert practice keeps changing faster than anyone can master it.When Victorian university leaders mapped their own institutions against that continuum, most landed at the earliest stage, a sign of a confidence gap more than a competence gap.Efficiency is the wrong goal for AI in education, since it's made his own work more expansive, not faster, which means the work itself has to change instead of just speeding up.Students at RMIT's new AI advisory board raised concerns about their own learning unprompted, and the thing they asked for most, across every discipline, was consistency, not more rules.For further reading:rmit.edu.au/gailehttps://aiskillscontinuum.com/https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

  4. 14 Jul

    I, Agent: What Happens to Edtech When the User Isn't Human

    Ryan Lufkin and Melissa Loble step back this episode and hand the conversation to two technologists who interview each other. Mike Mast, Principal Group Program Manager for Microsoft Education and a 1EdTech board member, and Zach Pendleton, Chief Architect at Instructure, trade questions about what interoperability means once AI agents start acting inside the tools educators and students already use. The starting point: when the client is an agent rather than a person, agents can learn new vocabularies and reason over different systems on their own, so the hard part shifts from rigid data schemas to giving agents a real semantic understanding of a course. Mast points to Canvas by Instructure and its Smart Search beta as one of the few early examples of that idea in practice. Pendleton makes the case that none of this replaces the open standards ed tech already runs on. He frames MCP, LTI, OneRoster, and Caliper as an "and," not an "or."From there the two get into the part that keeps Pendleton up at night: as actions move further from the human who set the goal, how do we keep people in authority? They cover delegated authorization and consent, audit trails, the gap between what AI can do and what we want it to do, and who carries the cost when an automated tool gets it wrong.  In this episode:  Agentic AI changes what interoperability optimizes for, moving the priority toward semantic understanding of course content rather than identical schemas across systems.New protocols build on existing standards instead of replacing them, so prior investments in open APIs and LTI still matter.Keeping a human in control sometimes costs a little speed, and both guests argue that maximum speed should not be the goal of an educational AI system.Transparency is non-negotiable: if AI touches a grade, students should know, and they should be able to question the result.

  5. 30 Jun

    Good Will Tutoring: Why the Best AI Behaves Like a Great Human Tutor

    James Genone has spent his career at the meeting point of two fields most people keep apart: philosophy and cognitive science on one side, education technology on the other. In this episode, Northeastern University's Senior Vice Chancellor for Learning Strategy joins Ryan Lufkin and Melissa Loble to argue that the design behind a tool decides whether AI deepens learning or just does the thinking for students. His test is simple: does the AI behave the way a good human tutor would? Drawing on his founding work at Minerva University, his product role at Atypical AI, and his current advising with the Digital Education Council, Collage AI, and SkillBench, James lays out what learning science actually asks of these tools and where institutions keep going wrong. In this episode: The tutor test James applies to any AI assistant: a good tutor never writes the student's essay, and the AI shouldn't eitherWhy engagement is the real engine of learning, and how connecting a subject to what a student cares about drives the attention that learning depends onHis case against grades, built on an investor analogy: you can't tell two companies apart if all you see is a letter grade, and a transcript does the same thing to studentsThe two ways institutions keep getting AI adoption wrong, either leaving faculty to fend for themselves or handing down blanket mandates, and the scaffolded, faculty-led approach he'd put in their place

  6. 16 Jun

    Lost in Translation: Getting Employers and Educators to Speak the Same Language

    What makes a skill count, and how does it travel from a classroom or a kitchen table into a job? Ryan Lufkin puts that question to Glenda Quintini, who runs the OECD's Skills and Future Readiness Division in Paris, with Simone Ravaioli sitting in for Melissa. Glenda's answer starts with a confession: a few months ago she couldn't tell critical minerals from rare earths, taught herself by reading and talking to people, and never enrolled in anything. That's how most adults actually learn, and almost none of it shows up on a resume. The conversation works through what it takes to fix that. Degrees aren't dead, Glenda argues, they're bundles of skills nobody has unpacked. The harder problem is language: employers and educators describe the same skills in completely different words, a gap she says blocks worker mobility as much as visa rules do. From there the three of them get into micro-credentials, individual learning accounts, the data behind dropped degree requirements, and why governments have to move faster than a two-year accreditation cycle. In this episode: Why eliminating degree requirements barely moves non-degree hiring on its own The difference between regulating credentials like New Zealand and letting the market sort it outWhy the next 15 years will be about lifelong recognition, not just lifelong learningFor further reading:  A Skills-First Labour Market

  7. 2 Jun

    Catch Me If You Can: Why This Biology Professor's AI Tutors Lie on Purpose

    "Hallucinations are not a bug in my classroom. They are the assignment." That's Giorgio Lagna's framing for one of the 13 AI tutors he's built into his biology course at Santa Clara University. In this episode of Educast 3000, the UCSF research scientist and college lecturer joins Ryan Lufkin and Zach Pendleton to walk through what happens when you design AI not to answer questions but to refuse them, not to be right but to argue back. The conversation covers his "Crucible" course design, the DISCO framework research he published this year showing measurable equity outcomes, and why he believes higher ed is making a strategic mistake by treating AI as an integrity problem instead of an assessment problem. In this episode: Toll booth gems, boss battle gems, and certification gems explainedWhy deliberate AI errors teach better AI literacy than warnings about hallucinationsThe cost math on AI-powered oral exams (NYU's run came to 42 cents per student)How community college students are now running CRISPR research with AI co-investigatorsWhat Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical said about AI and education the day before this recording Pedagogy Under the Microscope: https://substack.com/@glagnaStructured AI Integration for Equitable STEM Writing: A Pilot Study of the DISCO Framework: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0047231X.2026.2625111UCSF profile: https://profiles.ucsf.edu/giorgio.lagnaFurther readingPope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html

  8. 19 May

    Everything Everywhere All at Once: Making Sense of Data Overload in Education

    What does it actually mean to be "evidence-based"? Melissa Loble and Ryan Lufkin sit down with Mary Styers, Director of Evidence and Learning Strategy at Instructure, to find out. With 20 years in program evaluation, Mary breaks down why education's relationship with data is broken and what it takes to fix it. The conversation covers why rigorous research means nothing if teachers aren't on board, how compliance-driven data cultures stifle real learning, and why a study with only positive results should raise red flags, not applause.Mary also tackles the paradox of data overload: institutions have more data than ever and still can't act on it. Her answer? Start with one question. Work backward. Build psychological safety. And treat evidence as a journey, not a finish line. Key topics: Why teacher buy-in matters as much as research rigorThe difference between a compliance culture and a true culture of evidenceEvidence literacy — what it is and why we're failing to build itHow rapid cycle evaluation helps institutions iterate fast and learn fasterPractical first steps for leaders who want to make evidence-driven decisions

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About

Ah, education…a world filled with mysterious marvels. From K12 to Higher Ed, educational change and innovation are everywhere. And with that comes a few lessons, too. Each episode, EduCast3000 hosts, Melissa Loble and Ryan Lufkin, will break down the fourth wall and reflect on what’s happening in education – the good, the bad, and, in some cases, the just plain chaotic. This is the most transformative time in the history of education, so if you’re passionate about the educational system and want some timely and honest commentary on what’s happening in the industry, this is your show. Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and join the conversation! If you have a question, comment, or topic to add, drop us a line using your favorite social media platform.

Information

  • Creator
    InstructureCast
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    53
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2008-2024 Instructure, Inc.
  • Show Website
    Educast 3000