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WorkingNation is in San Diego this week for the 12th annual ASU+GSV Summit, the big three-day convening focused on innovations in education and technology, and their impact  on the way we acquire knowledge and skills. My guest on this episode of the Work in Progress podcast is Deborah Quazzo, managing partner of GSV Ventures and the co-founder of ASU+GSV, a collaboration between GSV and Arizona State University (ASU).

The way we prepare for our future—the way we learn—has changed just as much as the way we work and the skills we need for a good job. As we’ve seen over the past 18 months, the adoption of education technology has accelerated as we’ve had to address the impact of the pandemic on our lives.

“We really are here. It is truly the dawn of digital learning,” Quazzo tells me in the podcast. “There has been a transformational change in the acceptance of digital learning and scaling solutions that has the opportunity to really make a difference in the lives of millions of people in ways that just had not happened here before, and the attraction of capital into the space is going to drive more and more innovation.”

The three days of conversation touch on all stages of learning, from “pre-K to gray”, as Quazzo describes it. Given the impact of the pandemic on the workforce, many of those discussions zero in on how this ed-tech innovation can help close the skills gap.

“It’s really about what can this means for the transformation at scale for working adults who desperately need it, who probably even more desperately need it coming out of COVID.

“We can finally really look where the puck is going and chase it. While it’s hard not to talk about what we’ve just been through, we’re trying to keep a focus on staying on the balls of our feet. How do we take advantage of this? How do we transform things? And how do we use the crisis to transform workforce learning, to transform reskilling, upskilling, higher education, and K-12 education. We’re trying to push the conversation that way.

“What we really hope is that people walk away feeling like the world really did change, and that learning has really become a centrally important cultural and economic sector and learning is just a critical economic sector for the world.”

You can listen to this Work in Progress podcast with Deborah Quazzo here, or download it wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode 196: Deborah Quazzo, ASU+GSV Summit co-founder, GSV Ventures Managing Partner
Host and Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, editor-in-chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

Download the transcript for this podcast here.
You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts