Can AI Make Students Better Thinkers? Inside CAiSEY's Voice-First Learning Revolution with Dan Wang & Johanna Chouraqui

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What are these learning goals and learning objectives that we want our students to accomplish. And you can use this thought and this research to really plan out assignments that are creating for really meaningful discussion. As it relates to what we're seeing in the classroom, this is really one of my favorite questions to answer because it's not me making the claim, but our instructors, we love when they come to us saying, our students were going at it in class. And really arguing, you know, pushing back, engaged in a way that I think is really one of the hardest things to move in a classroom.

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Welcome to EdTech Insiders. We have a really interesting pair of guests today doing an incredibly cool AI native company out of Columbia University. We are speaking with Dan Wong and Joanna Chiraki. They are working on CASEY, that's C-A-I-E. SEY, which supports voice discussion in all sorts of interesting ways. And I met Dan recently in an episode what we did about EdTech Showcase at Columbia. And the work they're doing is so interesting, we wanted to come back and do a full episode. So let's start with their biographies. Dan Wong is the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School. He's the co-founder of Casey, which is a voice-first AI discussion partner that deepens student learning. He's received multiple awards for teaching classes on technology and strategy. His research studies how migration, activism and entrepreneurship shape human progress. and he earned his PhD from Stanford and his BA from Columbia. Joanna Chiraki leads instructor onboarding, user research, and operations at Casey, bridging the gap between user needs and product decisions. She brings nearly a decade of experience in New York City public schools, an adjunct teaching background at Teachers College, Alma Mater, Columbia University, and a foundation in speech-language pathology that grounds her approach to how people learn. and communicate. Dan Wong and Joanna Chiraki, welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks so much for having us, Alex. It's great to be here.

Excited to be here. Thank you.

I'm really excited to have you both on. So Dan, let's start with you. What was the original insight that brought you to Casey? You are a business school professor, but