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Based on feedback from events this year, we plan to address two expanded topics

Phil Hill
April 16, 2025

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At ASU+GSV as we have covered, the two overwhelming topics were generative AI and the political environment during the Trump 2.0 administration. Based on feedback I’ve received this year to date, I’d like to give readers a heads up on upcoming coverage on these two topics at On EdTech.

Generative AI and the Big Tech / EdTech Divide

Last fall I attended Google’s Learning in the AI Era summit and summarized some notes in this post. The overall point essentially was that Big Tech (think OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, AWS, but not deficient Siri) is a difference in kind, not degree compared to EdTech.

A commercial would imply that Google is trying to sell something to someone, to convince organizations to choose Google over other options.

Instead, the event was more of an invitation for analysts, university administrators, and partners to see what Google is doing with AI for learning, and maybe to provide feedback, regardless of what happens in EdTech. We’re going this way regardless. There were university partnerships highlighted, such as Study Hall from ASU and Crash Course. What there was not was a group of EdTech executives from LMS, SIS, or CRM vendors whom Google was courting to use Gemini over ChatGPT. And only one slide that was competitive in nature (how LearnLM was better than ChatGPT) in the presentations.

In yesterday’s On EdTech+ premium post, I shared my experience using HeyGen as a video translation tool (matching the speaker’s voice and tone and syncing lip movements to each language). Note - I do not speak French beyond café and vin rouge travel necessities.

Based on that post, I received an email from a reader who asked to remain anonymous.

I wonder how much staying power these businesses have since there is little moat or protective IP – it’s largely just wrappers around the big generative AI models that do this. There’s no way YouTube doesn’t eventually offer this for their creators, or that LMS platforms don’t offer this as a feature/setting in their platforms. AWS will certainly offer this capability soon. And there are solid open source options for all the steps in the pipeline. It reminds me of when there were separate applications for spell checking and thesaurus in the 1990s, before they simply became basic features of Word and other products.

I think this observation is spot on. Nothing against HeyGen (I love the tool so far), but the bigger point is around AI capabilities, and those are provided by Big Tech. We are going to go into more depth on this Big Tech / EdTech divide and what it might mean to education markets.

What to Expect with Trump 2.0

During the Biden Administration, we ventured further into policy circles as there was no good way to understand EdTech without seeing the regulatory environment targeting online learning, OPMs, and the broader EdTech markets. With Trump 2.0, this sentiment has grown - federal policy is driving so much of what to expect in EdTech. But this is broader now, as many colleges and universities are facing existential issues with the aggressive moves by the Trump Administration.

I have provided several presentations at conferences, boards, and executive leadership teams essentially on the topic of how to understand what the Trump Administration is doing and what to expect next (or at least how not to be surprised).

Initially I had planned to keep this analysis to these live meetings due to the politically sensitive nature of the topic and the one-step further away from EdTech coverage. In a live setting I can address questions and observations in a way to defuse emotions and focus on the topic, hopefully with a dispassionate tone.

Discussing ASU+GSV, Morgan noted on our podcast [starting at 8:45] the obvious interest in this topic.

There were two disjunctures for me. One, nobody was talking about the current situation in the US in higher education and how we were going to think about it. There were some sessions where that was discussed. So Phil had a session that was actually like, I swear there were many people outside the door trying to get in as people inside. So, you people were sitting on the floor and hanging by the light fixtures and everything.

That session was sponsored by Noodle, and we are exploring how to duplicate it to a broader audience. But I now think that I should include more of this analysis at On EdTech. It’s a somewhat dangerous topic, but it is becoming clear that there is a hunger to go beyond the headlines and explore what to watch.

As an example of this topic, I have noted that there was an executive order issued in February directing agency heads to review regulations and report back in 60 days. The due date is this coming weekend.

Subsequently, there was an executive order signed April 9th setting up what should happen next.

Following the 60-day review period ordered in Executive Order 14219 to identify unlawful and potentially unlawful regulations, agencies shall immediately take steps to effectuate the repeal of any regulation, or the portion of any regulation, that clearly exceeds the agency’s statutory authority or is otherwise unlawful.

What this means is that next week we should know from the Department of Education’s perspective which regulations they intend to repeal or keep. Think of the open questions behind Financial Value Transparency & Gainful Employment and various online education-related guidance we have covered before. And 90/10, Borrower Default Rates, etc.

While we don’t know which regulations ED plans to repeal, but some of our past assumptions that this process would take years may not apply this time around, according to the NY Times.

Across the more than 400 federal agencies that regulate almost every aspect of American life, from flying in airplanes to processing poultry, Mr. Trump’s appointees are working with the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative headed by Elon Musk and also called DOGE, to launch a sweeping new phase in their quest to dismantle much of the federal government: deregulation on a mass scale.

Usually, the legal process of repealing federal regulations takes years — and rules erased by one administration can be restored by another. But after chafing at that system during his first term and watching President Joseph R. Biden Jr. enact scores of new rules pushed by the left, Mr. Trump has marshaled a strategy for a dramatic do-over designed to kill regulations swiftly and permanently.

At Mr. Trump’s direction, agency officials are compiling the regulations they have tagged for the ash heap, racing to meet a deadline next week after which the White House will build its master list to guide what the president called the “deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.”

The approach, overseen by Russell T. Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, rests on a set of novel legal strategies in which the administration intends to simply repeal or just stop enforcing regulations that have historically taken years to undo, according to people familiar with the plans. The White House theory relies on Supreme Court decisions — some recent and at least one from the 1980s — that they believe give them the basis for sweeping change.

While most headlines are centered on federal funding of Columbia and Harvard, there is about to be a new regulatory cleanup effort that, if the NY Times is correct, will not look like past efforts under the first Trump Administration.

Stay tuned for expanded coverage.

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