In the second episode of our miniseries on AI-powered tools in education on Class Disrupted, Andrea Passinetti, the co-founder and CEO of Kira Learning, joined me and Diane Tavenner to discuss the impact of AI on education with a focus on Kira Learning’s new 2.0 platform.
Andrea shared the challenges of personalizing learning at scale and how Kira is leveraging AI to consolidate the massive number of edtech tools that districts use, enable real-time curriculum adaptation, and facilitate personalized paths for students. Our conversation explored how Kira’s AI operating system seeks to replace static textbooks with dynamic, deeply tagged curricula to empower teachers and students to achieve mastery through ongoing assessment and individualized interventions.
Diane Tavenner
Hey, Michael.
Michael Horn
Hey, Diane. Good to see you. And continue these conversations we’re having this season.
Diane Tavenner
Yeah, what a season it is. We are hearing from so many people that they really appreciate the conversation we’re having about AI and education because it’s really grounded in what’s actually happening right now. And, and today’s gonna be no exception to that. But before we jump to our guest, who I’m very excited to speak with, we have an ask of our listeners.
Michael Horn
We do. And it’s a little bit out of, I think, our natural character, if you will. Diane but it’s also kind of crazy that we’ve never made the ask before. So, you know, here we are seven seasons in and we are hoping that you will all take a quick minute to rate, review Class Disrupted wherever you listen or watch. And of course please subscribe on whatever platform you are, help others and as most of you know, Class Disrupted has largely been a labor of love for both me and Diane. I say largely because they’re moments where we’re like, is it love or not? But it’s certainly never been about the likes and ratings, but it turns out that they do matter. So we would certainly appreciate it.
Diane Tavenner
We definitely would. And that please don’t stop with the most valuable thing to us, which is all of the notes and emails and conversations we have with folks about what you like and what you’re interested in, what you want more of, who you want us to talk with. Those pieces of feedback are invaluable. And it just turns out that people are confused that none of that shows up in the public space. So we’d be grateful if you would just say it publicly, what you tell us privately.
Michael Horn
It’s perfect. Diane all right, let’s transition to our guest that we are both excited to learn from today. Diane.
Andrea’s journey to Kira Learning
Diane Tavenner
Yes. So I’m excited to welcome Andrea Passanetti. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Kira Learning which is a venture backed educational technology company that develops AI based tools for curriculum design, automated grading and teacher support. And I think we’re going to learn a whole bunch of interesting things about all those pieces today. Notably, one of his co-founders is Andrew Ng. Prior to Kira Learning, Andrea founded Teach for China in 2008 and served as the CEO of that organization for over a decade. He oversaw the placement of teaching fellows in under-resourced schools across rural China and his work with the organization led to him being selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and his inclusion in Forbes 30 under 30. Under his leadership, Kira Learning has established partnerships with organizations such as Anthropic and various state departments of education to implement AI integrated computer science and STEM curricula. And just recently, Kira has announced, I think, what you’re calling 2.0, which is what I think we’re really going to get into today.
So welcome, Andrea.
Andrea Passinetti
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Michael Horn
Yeah, we’re excited to learn from you. And so, Andrea, let’s maybe back up before we get into the what and mechanics of Kira Learning, tell us the origin story for it. I’m guessing your experience in founding and leading Teach for China probably played some sort of role in all this, but walk us through the motivation and inspiration behind the current work.
Andrea Passinetti
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. My work at Teach for China, the name sort of has implications that belie what actually happened there. So the Teach for China program certainly had a big component which was placing fellows in existing classrooms in rural communities. I can talk a little bit about how I embarked on that journey in the first place, which was a great source of inspiration for me, but also very much happenstance. But what’s interesting about that experience is that we also started a chain of charter schools. So these were the first charter schools in China. In fact, I think to date, probably the only charter schools in China. And by that I mean public schools that were being run by a private organization, in our case a foundation.
And we started these charter schools with a view towards personalized learning. In fact, we learned a tremendous amount from Summit at the beginning of that journey. The way we structure these are mostly rural schools in fairly remote locations, and we had a lot of capital to deploy to make these great environments for learning and growth for students. They were extremely expensive. We were able to hire amazing teachers, many recent college graduates in China, but many more experienced as well. And we had essentially full reign in terms of how the day was structured, how time was allocated, how curriculum was composed, and how sort of knowledge was conveyed in the classroom. They were also mostly boarding schools. So in addition to the 8 or 9am to 3pm school day, we also had a lot of time after the school day to continue supporting students and to make sure that they were on the right path more generally.
And those ended up being extremely successful. The graduation rates, students’ subsequent continued growth, and the number of students who went to college, who were maybe the first students in their villages or their communities who did pursue tertiary education, was pretty unprecedented. And the idea for Kira really stemmed from that experience. I had known Andrew for some time and what I realized as we were building these charter schools was that it wasn’t really a replicable model like the reality was it was a great experience for everyone who’s involved, parents, students, teachers, administrators, et cetera. But it was too expensive to replicate beyond the scope of the schools that we’d started. And I started investigating AI as a potential solution.
I worked on a white paper with McKinsey about this particular question, which was actually what brought me to Summit to learn a little bit about the approach there, as well as a number of other schools that were at the early stages of experimenting with AI as a tool for facilitating personalized learning and making it possible at scale. So that’s how I embarked on this path, how I started thinking about what AI could do. This was all pre LLM. So this was more leveraging machine learning techniques, NLP, and figuring out what the right entry points for AI in personalized learning were. The reality is, as most, I think, discovered at the time, that the versatility of AI was probably still insufficient to support the kinds of results at scale and that personalized learning was trying to achieve. But obviously the advent of LLMs, so ChatGPT, like interfaces that were more discursive, more powerful, and then eventually trained on larger troves of data, has changed that discourse entirely and changed the frontier of what’s possible.
Michael Horn
So Andrea, maybe quickly there, just give us a sense of the time frame, like so. Right, because you’re setting up these personalized learning charters in rural China. Fast forward you and Andrew collaborate and start Kira thinking that there must be a technology layer to make personalized learning more scalable, more doable, more repeatable. What year is that? And then just so we ground ourselves.
Andrea Passinetti
Yeah, so we started with the charter schools around 2015 and I started working on Kira. So I went back to Stanford and was doing a master’s degree in computer science focused on artificial intelligence, very much with a view towards starting Kira, obviously wasn’t called Kira at the time, but the intention was that intention. Andrew and I started working on this in 2021, I believe. So it was more of a summer project at the time and kind of an exploration. And the wedge we saw then was AI as a tool for supporting non technical instructors of technical subjects. So computer science is an example. But artificial intelligence as sort of a specialization in computer science was where we were most interested back then.
We saw a lot of districts and states in the U.S. passing legislation making computer science a requirement for graduation. We were thinking about job readiness and we saw that most computer science instruction was web development focused and algorithm focused and kind of missed the importance of AI. So supporting more teachers, more schools in being able to teach AI to students by providing an AI tool, an AI teaching assistant for folks who didn’t have the subject matter expertise. And that’s what we started building in 2021, ChatGPT as an API. So commercial availability of LLMs, the ability to leverage LLM engines from an application layer happened shortly thereafter. And so a lot of the work that we’d been doing with NLP and machine learning was very quickly substituted. So we just realized it was possible to do a lot more, a lot faster and to build in a way that was slightly ahead of the frontier.
So in a way that allowed the product experience to improve as LLMs became more powerful. And that’s how Kira ultimately went down this path.
Michael Horn
Well, so say one more word about that, because it sounds like it started in one place to really, as you said, make the teaching of these technical subjects far better for teachers who probably hadn’t had the training or expertise in these areas. You have this kernel of personalization as well with what maybe the AI can support. And there’s some limits there, as you noted, at least initially in terms of the machine learning approach. So now fast forward, you’ve launched, I guess, what is called Kira Learning 2.0. Talk us through. Like, how do you describe what Kira is today? When someone says what do you do? You know, what is this platform? How do you describe it?
