Week in Edtech 8/26/26: Federal EdTech Evidence Guidance, AI Backlash in Schools, OpenAI’s 55 District Deals, Harvard AI Faculty Avatars, MIT Rethinks Learning, and More! Feat. Carl Madi of Stepful & Manny Smith of EdVisorly

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Harvard is selling a $699 course taught by AI clones of its faculty. That's not actually the full truth there. The truth is that these are online entrepreneurship courses where the faculty who are also there, the faculty are still involved in the course, have created avatars of themselves with HeyGen to give students the ability to practice pitching and get personalized feedback. They can do it as many times as they want. So they are clones. There are AI clones of Harvard faculty, but it's not that they offloaded the entire course onto the clones of the faculty. That said, I mean, yes, the ability to take expertise of, they talk about Jeffrey Busgang, sort of legendary VC, like taking Jeffrey Busgang and being able to package his expertise so that he can actually respond to every slide in your deck is, I think, a really positive aspect of AI. I think the sort of blaring headline that makes this feel controversial is the idea that faculty are replacing themselves with AI. And I don't actually think that's happening yet. Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry. From funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, K-12, higher ed, and work, you'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders.

Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar. And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod. Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. It's another week in EdTech. We're wrapping up August, headed right into September. And the last of you who've been holding off on school, you know, East Coasters, you've been waiting until Labor Day weekend. It's finally coming. First day of school, you'll be liberated at home. And at school, it's time to go, baby. And here we are. It's go time always here at EdTech Insiders. Alex, so great to see you. Tell us what's going on in the pod.

Yeah, we have amazing people coming up in the pod. As always, we're talking with Carl Motti from Stepful, Manny Smith from Advisorly. They just raised a really interesting round for sort of community college support. You just got off a call with Bellwether, the Bellwether folks who are fascinating. Bellwether is an incredible consultancy in the education space. I talked to Sabine Wallace from NWEA, from HMH, the sort of landmark organization. assessment, you know, the map assessment, as well as others in that space. And we have coming up, you know, Anish Sahony from Teach for America, and our higher ed series, which is starting just this week, we I think you talked to