Week in Edtech 8/5/26: Higher Ed Leadership Turnover Accelerates, OpenAI Expands Its Education Push, AI “Slop” Floods Teachers Pay Teachers, Students Propose AI Rules, and More! Feat. Janice Jackson of Aspen Institute

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What's challenging then is you have all these ed tech players, like a Quizlet let's take for example, who built an entire business off of creating flashcards, who are now really getting competed against from an OpenAI who has unlimited resources and doesn't need to make money off of this to have it be a successful product. And so I think what we in the ed tech space are experiencing is a little bit of what we experienced when Google launched Google Classroom, which is just like distorting the market field a little bit because big tech coming in.

They also announced, just to put a fine point on it, access to 100,000 academic researchers this week. They're giving free advanced models, free GPT, I don't know what model, the Sol Pro, the 5.6 Sol Pro, to 100,000 academic researchers. So you can see this sort of multi-tiered approach. They're sort of coming at universities from all sides saying, "Look, this is the future of how thinking is gonna get done. In our opinion, you really need to get on board and put it together, and have this be accessible to your researchers, to your students, to your faculty," and you can see how it would go from there. It's an interesting strategy, and they're hitting it on lots of fronts, which means it's obviously some kind of a priority internally. [upbeat music]

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Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. It's another week in ed tech. Ben and Alex coming to you, first week of August, back to school's in the air. We're also back to school here at EdTech Insiders. Alex, what's the latest on the pod and newsletter, et cetera?

We have all sorts of interesting things coming out. We're near the end of our really amazing series about the SCALE Initiative and some of the AI research that's been coming out over the last couple of years. We've been writing it up in all sorts of ways. There's one coming out this week all about teachers, especially K-12 teachers, but to some extent college professors as well, and how their attitudes towards AI have changed, and how they're actually evaluating AI tools, as well as what support they're getting or not getting from their institutions. That was really, really interesting. In terms of the