The Future of Education Podcast (private feed for michael.b.horn@gmail.com)

Two of my former students and now entrepreneurs Abdi Guleed and Kedaar Sridhar of M7E AI joined me to explore how they’re using AI to make math curricula more accessible for all students, especially those facing linguistic barriers. Abdi and Kedaar shared their personal stories and the research that inspired them to create M7E AI, a tool that works with curriculum providers to streamline and clarify math content before it reaches classrooms. Our conversation highlighted challenges districts face when evaluating curriculum, the platform’s innovative seven-factor framework for language accessibility, and the ways AI can help districts, publishers, and educators create more equitable learning experiences. Michael Horn Hey, Michael, here. What you’re about to hear is a webinar that I hosted for a company, M7E, that full disclosure, I’m an advisor to. It’s two of my former students that founded it. And it’s a very cool AI tool that does something different from a lot of the tools out there on the market. It’s not student facing, it’s not teacher facing. What it does is it works with curriculum providers to take their math content specifically and use the AI with a set of clear rules to reduce the language complexity so that the curriculum is actually teaching and assessing on the math skills rather than some of the language things that might run interference for multilingual learners in particular, I hope you enjoy the webinar that we recorded, find it interesting, informative, and that it sparked some questions for you about how else might we use AI that sort of steps out of the typical notion of just, hey, it’s a chatbot, and where are the applications that might take off that could make an impact in education. Let me introduce the two folks first who have been digging into this problem from both the research and product perspective. First of all, we have Abdi, I’m looking for you on my screen. There you are, Abdi Guleed. He’s a Harvard Education Entrepreneurship fellow and the co-founder of M7E AI. And we also have Kedaar Sridhar, also a Harvard Education Entrepreneurship fellow and also the co-founder of M7E AI both, as I said, former students in my class. And together they’ve built this company and product that really evaluates these existing math problems and tasks for linguistic clarity and accessibility. They flag hidden barriers that can trip up students and then they suggest, I think, importantly, revisions to keep the mathematical rigor intact, but while making the language and design more equitable. So I’m excited to bring them in. And Abdi, Kedaar, welcome. I want to get into it. The way we’ll do this is I have a couple questions for you guys up front and then I’m going to sort of give you the stage, if you will, to maybe show what you guys have developed and how you’ve been using it with some curriculum companies. But I think your own personal stories to this, I got to watch it a little bit up close. But for those that don’t know, you tell us your own personal stories about how you came to build this tool. Why did you see it as a big problem worth solving? Because I know a lot of folks don’t even tend to think about these challenges a lot of times. So Kedaar, Abdi, whoever of you wants to take it first. AI Tool Enhancing Math Curriculum Abdi Guleed Thank you so much, Michael. And thank you everyone for joining us today. My name is Abdi. I grew up in Norway and like Michael said earlier as well. But I remember very clearly how math content was created and how that shaped my experience as a learner. And a lot of that stuck with me as I was growing up. And then I came to the US as a student athlete in track and field and built a career always around the core theme of using technology to make learning and organizational process more effective. I spent years working with data and AI, especially my master’s program with Kedaar, where most of our work was focused on how AI can streamline complex manual processes. So M7 education is a natural extension of that work and curriculum creation is one of the most complex and time consuming processes in education. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. And we think AI can dramatically improve both the speed and the quality. And because I personally know the impact of curriculum design, this mission is really, really important to me as well as is to Kedaar. So over to you, Kedaar. Kedaar Sridhar Awesome. Thanks for that Abdi. And thank you Michael. And thank you everyone for being here today. We’re excited to chat about what we’ve been working on. So I’m Kedaar Sridhar, also an international student who grew up in Oman in the Middle East. And I sucked at math like it was. I just wasn’t, I just wasn’t doing well. And turns out a lot of the things and the questions didn’t make sense from a lot of these big publishers, questions about lacrosse which I had never known or played, questions about skiing and I live in, you know, in a very hot country. And like all of these different contextual clues and things that were actually distracting me as well from what I was actually trying to do. Fast forward to, you know, I ended up coming to the US and doing my undergrad at UCLA in computer science. And I ended up in the STEM field. And I think a big focus for me is how can I improve access to that field and to those oriented careers. My career is in product and tech, but specifically I worked as well at an undergrad admissions for UCLA focused on improving access to higher education and then ended up at a nonprofit focused on STEM literacy, digital literacy, AI literacy, helping people bring into more technical careers as well. And, and so this passion, this through line for both of us has been how do we now provide a way for students, for people to access content when the thing that is being tested for is the wrong thing being sort of expressed and shown, you know, people spend more time decoding language instead of actually testing their own math ability in this specific case. And so with Abdi, you know, our master’s was in learning, design, innovation, and technology here at the School of Education, and we worked across the board, you know, across Harvard, across MIT and rest of the Cambridge schools as well, to continue diving into the space, doing research, and figuring out how do we best tackle this problem, that was very close to both of us. Michael Horn So I think it’s perfect, lLifts off, and I love that, well, you probably didn’t enjoy it Kedaar, that personal story of a kid struggling with math. But when I think a lot of people think about AI in education right now, I think a lot of people, like, the thing that comes to mind is chatbot, right. And I think a lot of people are fearful of, like, the student facing chat bot in particular. What I think is so interesting is that you all have built a tool, actually, that is like a couple layers before the student, right. To make sure that the curriculum getting to them. What I think is so interesting, though, right, is before we get to the solution and what. How AI, you’ve been able to use it to help districts and so forth, let’s focus on the problem first. And where do you see districts, schools struggling most in their current evaluation processes, especially when they’re comparing multiple math publishers or frankly, like the homegrown materials that we see or materials that teachers are taking from other teachers in all of this. Kedaar, why don’t you start off on this one? Kedaar Sridhar What we’ve heard and what we’ve also sort of experienced while, you know, speaking to district leaders and just speaking to all the, you know, all the people in the system, right. Whether you’re a teacher, district leader, or part of assessment teams, researchers, editorial teams, or, you know, publishers themselves. There is the core problem of I am a district leader or I’m an instructional specialist or a curriculum manager, and my district has its own needs, right? In my district, I have a specific type of students. Maybe there’s more bilingual students here, or maybe there’s more students that, you know, with a lower average literacy rate or a lot of these other things, but every district has such a different profile, and yet content is sort of dispersed equally to everyone. And so for something that we’ve been trying to tackle as we’ve gotten into more of these conversations, is how can we help district leaders specifically and districts themselves have visibility into all the publishers that come to them, be able to see which story aligns with their populations, which publisher and material best speaks to. And best shares that voice with the students themselves and the educators themselves. And in general. And Abdi will expand on this as well. There is just right now a very manual process and there’s limited bandwidth in general when looking at how this is best aligned not only with my district and our goals, but also coverage in terms of the broader, you know, the broader ecosystem as well. Aligning Curriculum with Diverse Needs Abdi Guleed What we’ve seen, just to add to that is we’ve been talking a lot with district leaders, a lot with Kirkham developers and editorial teams, with teachers, with principals across the board. And there’s the idea when it comes to district leaders and schools mainly is there’s a heavy reliance on that idea that these curriculum developers know, kind of best. But then there’s this almost sort of like a little bit disconnect when it comes to the diversity of students in the classrooms that is changing dramatically. And we’ve been looking at it from multiple aspects of how can we help build something that could help the district leaders and others to evaluate the content, to evaluate the curriculum and be part of the design process before it reaches their specific district. And again, there are 50 mil