Meet the Patrons interview with Jason Mayland of Merlyn for Education

A native of the US, Jason has an undergraduate degree in history and politics from Franklin and Marshall College, studies which saw him spend a year researching British imperial history at Oxford. He earned a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Pennsylvania where he remained to pursue his doctorate in Higher Education Management. He also served in the US military in both active and reserve duty roles. Indeed, his service took him to Bosnia where he disassembled land mines and prepared international students for the SAT, a standardised test for US college admissions.

After leaving the armed forces, he joined Michigan State University where he ran the Land Policy Institute. He then joined Lansing Community College in Michigan as the head of research and planning, an analytics-based role in which he developed and implemented new reporting and survey systems. Prior to joining Merlyn Mind in November 2020, he served as Vice President of Technology and Innovation at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania.

What are the biggest lessons you learned in your career?

As a younger man, I was very reluctant to take risks. Despite the fact that I disassembled landmines for a period of time, when it came to my pay, I was very risk averse. I remember working at a company where there was a big shake-up with a lot of redundancies and I was concerned that I would fall victim to that. The facilities director looked at me and said, ‘Jason, you really shouldn’t worry about this because you were looking for a job when you found this one’. And that’s a huge lesson I’ve carried with me. It’s an acknowledgement that all things are ultimately temporary and you do have control over your destiny. If you’re willing to take a risk, you can do something extraordinary.

The other thing is that your integrity is more important than a paycheque. In all my professional dealings over the past 25 years, I can’t overstate the number of people I’ve met who have no integrity. Honest and fair dealing is the thing that will keep you going forever. EdTech is a small sector. Everyone knows each other. If any one of us in the industry suddenly started pushing products that didn’t work, we would all lose out. People with integrity may lose in the short term, but always win in the long term. Reputation is everything.

What was the best advice you ever received?

My grandfather had been in the military and when I decided to join, he told me, ‘Go in as an enlisted man because you will probably give orders for the rest of your life and you should know the consequences of bad ones’. I didn’t fully internalise that until I found myself in a leadership position early in my career and it wasn’t working. I had to take stock to understand how that could be when I was, in my mind, the smartest guy in the room. The big turning point for me was when I realised that no-one cares about that. They care about whether what you’re doing makes sense for them. Once I learned that, the results were a lot better.

How would you define your work style and how has this changed over your career?

At the beginning of my career, I was a bit of an autocrat, which could have been a holdover from my military career. I believed that I had a monopoly on truth, which was absolutely wrong. Now I think my management style relies on empathy and flexibility, by which I mean: while I believe you can raise people to a standard, you also have to meet people where they are. People are happiest when they’re doing work that is not only meaningful to them, but is what they want to do.

When I took over Merlyn Mind’s education business, I asked every employee three questions: Without giving me your job description, tell me what do you do, what would you rather be doing, and how can we change for the better? Based on the responses, a couple of people had their jobs tweaked and they’ve done much better and they’re much happier. I’ve done that in organisations of 400 people with similar effects. If you listen to the people you are entrusted with and you give them a voice and purpose, you will get excellent results.

If you hadn’t chosen your current career, what would you love to do instead?

I would teach eighth grade comprehensive. I did teach for one semester after I finished college and didn’t stay on because I had already signed up for graduate school. It was the last job I had that I felt I could do everything and that gave me a sense of agency. I also really enjoyed the interactions with students. Even today, when I visit schools and kids ask me about AI or I go to my son’s school to do a demonstration of Merlyn Origin, I find that often their questions are more insightful than my colleagues because their honesty is unvarnished and that is life affirming. I wouldn’t say I have any regrets about not being a teacher. My mother was a school teacher and she was very insightful. She explained that I would not have done well with the bureaucracy of teaching. And she was absolutely right. Bureaucracies and I have a very fraught relationship.

How has AI impacted your organisation/industry?

You can’t discount the impact of AI but I believe that fear is driving people to confuse and conflate certain things about the technology. Yes, AI has changed things dramatically, but a generative AI query is simply a faster literature review. People fear optimising processes because they don’t know what they’ll do with the extra time. They fear for academic integrity – as if a student never cheated before. There’s a concern about automation, but in my opinion some of these concerns are class protective. The same people railing about AI now didn’t rail when factories were automated with robots but will now that junior attorneys might not have to write briefs or junior accountants might not have to worry about a profit loss sheet.

In terms of learning, I see the potential in microcredentials, personalised learning, and tutoring. There are so many things we can do with this technology that are fundamentally transformative. Obviously, it’s appropriate to think about risk. I would put AI in the same category as nuclear science. A lot of great things can be done with it. Likewise a lot of very scary things. One of the things humans can do that algorithms cannot is discern what’s good and harmful. I would like policymakers and academics to think more about how they can apply that discernment. AI is not a universal solution, but what it can be is a very powerful tool to improve human productivity and democratise education.

Progress always wins. You can try to slow it down, distract from it, but whether it’s the Luddites and the mills, or the emergence of the computer, or the printing press, technology wins. We need to spend some time as a society figuring out the best, most ethical, most humane ways to apply that technology.

Why is R&D important in your industry?

Our parent company, Merlyn Mind grew out of IBM research, so everything we do is about research, development and innovation. Without that, you die on the vine, so we are constantly iterating and improving technology for the benefit of our customers. Merlyn for Education does not do basic science, but there are always people working on different projects that may not have a direct application to the product today, but will spur development, innovation and thought for new features and functions in the future.

Our customers envision use cases we can’t imagine. They have real-world situations that we didn’t contemplate and we’re constantly in a feedback loop with them to really understand how we can improve our products, services, and solutions to solve their problems. That’s really critical. The goal of research is to make things simpler and more relevant. If I can simplify my products, if I can make them more relevant. If I could solve stickier problems, I could do more good for people. That’s the goal.

From your experience, what are the current trends in learning?

Learning is going to be increasingly about personalisation, nano-credentials and flexibility. There is a scenario where traditional university training and traditional training in general for the vast majority of people is superseded by much more flexible micro and nano credentials. We’ve already seen this with coding boot camps in which a history student will go on an intensive six-week coding course and become a backend developer. There are going to be lots more pathways for people to adapt with small specialised training courses that are self-paced, in large part because today’s economic realities are so different. In the future, you might not just work for seven or eight employers, but in seven or eight different industries.

I don’t think we’re giving enough discussion to agentic AI, and I don’t think we’re also giving enough discussion to voice enablement. So while we all use voice to set a timer in the kitchen, or pick out a favourite song, or maybe open our garage door, we’re not really using voice to truly simplify our lives.

We can also make learning more accessible. Take this interview. Following the conclusion of this interview, the text will be edited into a reasonable narrative that might be a bit too long for people to read. Those people can now upload the interview to Notebook LM and listen to it as a podcast. Imagine what that would do for a student with dyslexia, or someone with ADHD. There are all sorts of great technologies and tools that can improve dimensions of human learning, and we’re still thinking about human learning in a way that’s not much different than Socrates under the tree. That’s both remarkable and scary because every other aspect of our life has evolved dramatically, and teaching and learning really hasn’t.

What are the biggest skills challenges to your business or sector?

The greatest challenge my company faces now is de-risking artificial intelligence. There are a lot of people who, for what may be legitimate reasons, are not just sceptical of AI, but fearful. In response, I might ask the question, ‘Did you use Google Maps today?’ Yeah? Well, you’ve already used AI. So, what are you really scared about? For some people, the risk is: if this does this, what do I do? A lot of professions are inherently human. For all the technology in medicine, when you go to a hospital for a procedure, you’ll meet 30 people because it’s a human-intensive thing. The same is true of education. No matter the technology I give you, there will be a teacher for a group of students. People need to be allowed to understand that technology is not going to replace them. It’s going to empower them to make better decisions and use their time better. The machine is not the problem, it’s part of the solution.

What book would you recommend on learning, technology, business or understanding people?

I think Virgil was right: ‘Beware the man of one book.’ But if I had to recommend one, I would say The Art of Explanation by Ross Atkins. I had seen Ross Atkins on the BBC for years. I didn’t realise that he had created a process for clear, concise, direct, useful communication. That is the thing that will distinguish people in a world in which facts are universally accessible but clarity isn’t a given. The ability to effectively communicate is one of the uniquely human traits that will continue beyond all the hype around AI. That means crafting a message in a way that people can receive and understand. That’s a really powerful thing. There’s no algorithm that’s going to do that for you.

Why is membership of Learnovate important to your company?

Learnovate does a lot of things well. It brings together a very diverse expert group of people in the learning space and provides an amazing network opportunity. It is a great vehicle for advocacy. Learnovate has been personally helpful to my firm with things ranging from introductions to publicity to resources to research. I wish there were more groups like Learnovate in other parts of the world.