In a world increasingly saturated with “hot takes” on AI and education, it can be tempting to tune out the noise. But Andrea Flores brings an unconventional, expansive perspective to the table, drawing from a career spanning 15 years across higher education, public health, and workforce development.
In this episode of The Learning Experience Ops Show, host Jason Gorman sits down with Flores to move beyond surface-level debates and dive into the deep, systemic changes reshaping our field. Currently a Senior Instructional Designer at MIT Sloan, Flores doesn’t just see herself as an educator or a technologist, she is a designer with a deep commitment to improving the quality of life for others.
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From Engineering to the “Fuzzy Front End”
Flores began her journey in engineering, a background that gifted her with a “systems thinking” mindset. This ability to see interdependencies and troubleshoot complex problems became the bedrock of her approach to learning design. However, her true passion for adult education was sparked in an unlikely place: an operations warehouse.
While working there, she found that the small fraction of the job she actually loved was training staff and finding ways to make their work safer and more efficient. This “nugget” of interest led her to teach English overseas, where she learned the ultimate lesson in student-centered design.
“It teaches you to be really creative in how you present information… a very clear sign of learning is if they can actually communicate.”
This experience taught her to be agile in the middle of ambiguity, navigating the “messy front end” of projects with curiosity and humility.
Solving the “Learn-to-Work” Fragmentation
Flores is currently wrestling with a massive question: what would a total redesign of our fragmented “learn-to-work” ecosystem look like?. In the U.S., the pipeline between learners, higher education, and employers is often siloed and slow-moving.
To bridge this gap, Flores advocates for several shifts:
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- Stackable Credentials: Breaking degrees into digestible, skill-based pieces that fit into a working life.
- Digital Infrastructure: Using digital wallets and badges to help learners communicate transferable skills directly to employers.
- Accelerated Expertise: Pushing basic knowledge transfer down to K-12, augmented by AI, so that higher education can become a “problem-solving accelerator”.
She envisions a future where students don’t just sit through lectures but come together to tackle real-world, interdisciplinary problems such as climate change and geopolitical tensions.
AI as an Augmenter, Not a Replacement
While Flores acknowledges the anxiety surrounding AI, questioning if certain fields will “die out”, she remains a firm believer in the power of human vision. She sees AI’s role over the next few years as a way to augment the design process and create “AI-native” learning experiences.
She is already exploring AI agents that pull real-time labor market data to help learners reskill, or tools that identify when a student is facing a high “cognitive load” and intervene with support. However, she draws a hard line at replacing human voices with synthetic personas.
“I don’t want it to replace the voices and the perspective of learners… I don’t know if AI can capture their entire nuance and lived experience in the same way.”
For Flores, the goal isn’t just efficiency or cost-cutting; it’s about using design as a vehicle for good.
The Ultimate Measure of Success
How do we know if these changes are working? Flores suggests we look beyond immediate ROI and graduation rates. To her, the true metrics of a successful education system are societal.
Are we improving economic mobility? Are we reducing the burden of disease? Are we becoming more responsive to the needs of industry and the planet?
Flores reminds us that education is not about reciting facts; it is about supporting a person’s trajectory in life. As technology handles more of the “tasks,” the role of the designer becomes even more critical: to bring a human vision to life and ensure that learning remains inclusive, thoughtful, and impactful.
Listen to the full conversation with Andrea Flores on The LX Ops Show or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Podcast Transcript– Jason Gorman with Andrea Flores
Jason Gorman (00:00)
There’s no shortage of hot takes about AI and education right now. And I don’t know how you feel about this, but for me, it can get kind of exhausting. For a while, I was trying to read everything, keep up with every new idea or debate, but lately I’ve been trying to protect my brain a little bit, be a little bit more selective and intentional about what I read and who I listen to. And I found myself wanting to talk with people who are thoughtful people, who think deeply.
but also in unconventional, expansive ways. And that is exactly why I wanted to bring Andrea Flores onto the show today. Andrea and I have known each other for a while through different jobs, different phases of our careers, and we’ve always clicked. Every conversation with her leaves me thinking differently. My ideas get challenged in the best ways. My perspective always expands. Andrea is a learner and an educator at heart.
She has a deep commitment to improving the quality of life for others through education, technology, and design. She has 15 years of experience in our field, has a diverse work history across higher ed, public health, workforce development, and now AI. She loves to design experiences that are impactful, thoughtful, and innovative. And one thing in her profile, she says when she’s not deep in a process map or tinkering with technology, you’ll find her exploring
the streets of Boston, wandering around in a contemporary art museum, or spending time with family and friends. Welcome to the show.
Andrea Flores (01:37)
Jason, thank you so much for inviting me. I think it’s just such a great idea. And I thank you for the compliment on being an unconventional thinker. Yeah.
Jason Gorman (01:47)
My pleasure. It’s true. So,
well, I guess first question before we get into the questions, which art museum?
Andrea Flores (01:57)
⁓ Well, I love the ICA because I love any kind of art that you can interact with. So it doesn’t actually even have to be designed as an interactive art experience, but you know, I can take photos or I can, you know, yeah, I don’t know, sometimes paintings on a wall don’t really engage me as much as if you can interact.
Jason Gorman (02:16)
Well, I have to
say you just proved the point about being an unconventional thinker. The ICA is the choice in Boston for unconventional thinkers. So it’s perfect. All right, well, we like to start with a lightning round. What do you think? You ready to go?
Andrea Flores (02:23)
Yes!
Okay, let’s go for lightning.
Jason Gorman (02:33)
Alright, let’s do it. Alright, so first…
What do you care most about in your work?
Andrea Flores (02:39)
⁓ you know, I think what I really care most about when I think about my work is how can I improve? you mentioned this in the intro, right? How can I improve the quality of life for people? And I have a special soft spot in my heart for immigrant learners and non-native speakers. My mom was a non-native speaker. She’s also an immigrant and she was one, she was a person who really shaped.
my view on education and how important it is to have an education. She’s always prioritized that for us. ⁓ And so I didn’t realize how much it had influenced my choices in life. But when I look back, I can see that through line definitely. ⁓ And then the other thing is really using design as that vehicle, right? Because as a designer, it’s very powerful role, right? Because
It’s something that people don’t necessarily pay attention to, but it can have the ability to shape behaviors and change things without people even realizing it. So ⁓ that’s kind of an interesting role. And in some ways, you want to use that power for good, right? So to try to design something that’s high quality, that’s thoughtful, that’s going to be inclusive of all learners. ⁓ And then hopefully helping people.
Jason Gorman (03:47)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (03:58)
⁓ not just in the learning, but to do something in their lives to make a difference, to make a change for them, to support them on their trajectory of wherever they’re going in their life.
Jason Gorman (04:09)
That’s good, and I think that might feed in nicely to the next lightning round question, which is when you are totally dialed in at work, what are you most likely to be doing?
Andrea Flores (04:20)
So I did my undergraduate in engineering. So I think I am actually, there’s a little bit of that nerdy engineer in me. So ⁓ I actually have two sides. So when I’m dialed in, I am like really trying to solve a problem. So somebody has given me something and my brain will just start to kind of ruminate on it, break it apart. How can I do this? How can I think about it?
Now with AI, it’s even better because I can go back and forth with the AI. So I’m like strategizing or I’m thinking about how to build something or I’m thinking about how to create and bring something to life. ⁓ You know, and then the other part of me is like a like the artsy part. And so I love visual design. So I find doing slide decks very meditative or any kind of like, you know.
Jason Gorman (05:09)
Excellent.
Andrea Flores (05:11)
creating some type of visual asset, I find it very relaxing ⁓ and just very enjoyable.
Jason Gorman (05:18)
These are lining up really nicely. There’s the train again. These are lining up really nicely because the next lightning round question kind of drafts off the last one that you just said. You talked about being an engineering undergrad and now what you’re doing is not engineering. So I’m kidding. This next lightning round could be more perfect. We did not do this ahead of time, folks. Here’s a question. What event or moment inspired you to do what you do now?
Andrea Flores (05:46)
You know, that’s a tricky one because it’s not one event really. It was maybe more like a series of moments or events that happened throughout my career. ⁓ So obviously engineering was kind of like the starting point in that I think it introduced me to the design process and certain ways of thinking, particularly about systems. ⁓
But really, I got into kind of ⁓ training and development because I was working as an operations supervisor for ⁓ kind of like the Amazon, but back in the day for an industrial supply company. And, you know, I actually hated that job. But, you know, I hated about 90 percent of it. But the 10 percent that I actually loved was working with the staff to figure out ways that we could make the job better for them, whether it was safer for them.
faster for them, more efficient, know, whatever it was, or just even like training them. I found that I really enjoyed that. And so that was like the little nugget. And so in addition to engineering, I had also done ⁓ Spanish. And so I thought, okay, I’m going to go teach English overseas because I really want to focus on my Spanish and I don’t want to work in operations anymore. ⁓ And that’s actually how I got into adult education and really thinking about
⁓ designing something that is truly student centered. Because I think the interesting thing about teaching English is that you can’t actually teach using English because your students often can’t understand what you’re saying, right? So it teaches you to be really creative in how you present information, how you deliver it, and also how you get students to practice it. Because that’s a very clear sign of learning is if they can actually communicate.
And so the evaluation, if you want to think about it, is very immediate. ⁓ And so that’s how I got really interested in thinking about thoughtful learning, thoughtful design, student-centered design. And then I got into educational technology, because during that time, that was when the first MOOCs came out. And so then I did the MOOC from Stanford. I think it was on human-computer interaction. ⁓
Jason Gorman (07:55)
Mm.
Andrea Flores (08:01)
And then it led me to my master’s. And then what got me into instructional design was Kristin Sullivan at the Ed school was looking for her first, her first intern for that department. And that’s also how I met Bill because I was Bill’s first intern. And so that kind of put me on the trajectory for learning design and that space. And it was perfect for me because I knew I wanted to work with adults and I wanted to stay in higher education.
Jason Gorman (08:09)
Kristen.
Andrea Flores (08:30)
Yeah, so that’s how I got into the field. But when I look back on all of the pieces, they all kind of come together very nicely. You’ve got that systems thinking, that technology, that creative piece that I really love, ⁓ all kind of coming together in this one field, and the language pieces also.
Jason Gorman (08:50)
You know, so I didn’t know this about you, but I actually was also, I was a language teacher as well. That’s also how I got into this field or it’s contributing factor. So that’s interesting. The other thing is ⁓ I just, yeah, let’s, can we just shout out Kristin Sullivan? I just, she’s one of my favorite people that I’ve ever worked with. ⁓ She was my boss when I worked at the Harvard Ed School.
And I’m so glad you said her name out loud. You also said Bill Wesser. So he is the current director of, what is it?
Andrea Flores (09:22)
Executive Director
at the Teaching and Learning Lab. Yeah, great. think when I remember Kristen telling me about the internship, I actually got chills. And so I thought, that’s a good sign that I should do this.
Jason Gorman (09:26)
Yeah, Bill Whistler.
Yeah
Man, yeah, she’s great. And obviously it went well, because here we are. All right, all right, ⁓ next question. This week, this could be its own hour, but ⁓ we’ll try to do the kind of thing you feel most deeply. What are you most anxious about for the future?
Andrea Flores (09:43)
Thank
I don’t want to get too much into politics, but I will say that I am worried about the kind of world that is being created right now for the kids today. I have a little niece and nephew and I really worry about the division that’s happening, about our withdrawal from the international sphere, a lot of the changes that are happening in the schools, as well as AI and how it’s going to change.
schooling, how it’s going to change work. I mean, you could look at it positively or negatively for them, ⁓ but at least what’s coming out in the news feels quite pessimistic. So I think I really worry about that. And then I guess even for myself, because I’ll also be affected by a lot of these changes, something I worry about is like, how can I stay relevant? ⁓
Jason Gorman (10:38)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Andrea Flores (10:53)
Am I in a field that’s gonna die out? ⁓ I’m not sure. And then ⁓ will it be too late for me to re-skill or up-skill? Am I gonna age out, as I was told once by a friend? So I think those are all kind of very real concerns. Yeah, and since it’s just me on my own, that kind of adds another layer. I don’t have like a partner or somebody that I could fall back on if.
if things go wrong. And so that is kind of always there at the back of my mind.
Jason Gorman (11:25)
I’m glad you said that out loud about worrying about your career and the re-skilling. I think this is something that lots of people who might listen to this are thinking about, maybe not every day, but often, hopefully not every day, I think it’s important for people to talk about it out loud because… ⁓
The reality is none of us are going through this stuff by ourselves. None of us are doing it. It’s not just happening to one person, right? And there’s a big community of us who are having similar questions about our future. So I’m glad you raised that. ⁓ Just on the theme of AI, got two more lightning round questions. One is, the first question is, what is something in your process that you have done early in your career?
that you’re probably going have to change because of AI, but don’t want to.
Andrea Flores (12:25)
Ooh, that’s a good one because I feel like AI touches on all the parts of the design process now. ⁓ I think for me, I do really like creating visuals. Like I said, it’s very relaxing. ⁓ So I find that when I have to do a task like that, I generally don’t offload that or delegate it to AI. You know, I don’t even have it generate images. ⁓
Jason Gorman (12:33)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm. Yeah.
Andrea Flores (12:53)
I might go online, go and look at Google, look for examples, and then see if I can get inspiration. The other piece is ⁓ there’s a lot of talk about using synthetic personas and using AI to kind of take on different perspectives. ⁓ But I think that’s good for a lot of reasons. I think you can use it in lots of really helpful ways. But I think the other piece is that I don’t want it to replace.
the voices and the perspective of learners and really learn from the actual learners themselves. Because I don’t know if AI can capture their entire, you know, all the nuance and their lived experience in the same way. So I think that is something ⁓ that I wouldn’t want to change, but I could see that in the name of efficiency or cost cutting that people might decide to go the way of just using synthetic personas. So.
Jason Gorman (13:48)
All right, last lightning round question. What’s a skill you’re trying to pick up right now?
Andrea Flores (13:52)
I’m always trying to pick up lots and lots of skills, but with the least amount of time required. ⁓ So I think for right now, I’m just expanding on my general design skill sets. So branching out from just learning design, I love ⁓ going into the other fields of design and just kind of seeing how they do things, their workflow. So I just signed up actually, and I’m just taking some self-paced courses through the Interaction Design Foundation.
And it’s really great. They’ve got a lot of really inexpensive courses. They’ve got master classes. Because I feel like oftentimes the work that learning designers do can really ⁓ bridge a lot of different design fields just depending on the project and the organization that you’re working at. So I think it’s helpful to have a more generalized design skill set as well as expertise in learning. And then the other one that I’m trying is building AI agents. ⁓
Yes, so we use Stack AI at work. And so I wanted to experiment with it because obviously agents are all the rage right now. So ⁓ Stack AI makes it really easy to build your own AI agents. And so I thought ⁓ that might be just a useful thing to learn because once you learn it, you start to get all kinds of ideas for how you could use it in other ⁓ areas. Yeah, so and it’s fun because they make it’s got like a user, like a visual user interface. You can connect.
different nodes so you can kind of see the workflow and see how the information is flowing. So it’s actually quite ⁓ user friendly, I think.
Jason Gorman (15:29)
Great. I’m going to check that out. Thank you. Alright. Let’s get into our other questions now. So, I have not asked anybody else this question, but this is a question that I know is something that I struggle with. So, I’m just going to ask, ⁓ let’s say you’re at a party and you meet somebody you don’t know and they do something that has nothing to do with what you do, and they’re kind of like asking you what you do to be polite.
Andrea Flores (15:35)
Okay.
Thank you.
Jason Gorman (15:58)
They’re kind of… You’re kind of… They’re kind of bored, and you know that you probably have, 30 seconds to tell them what you do. What do you… What do you tell them? What do you say?
Andrea Flores (16:11)
You know, this one is actually one that has me stuck as well. I just say I do design and then I see what kinds of questions they come up with because you should be like, like I’ll say I’m a designer and they’ll say, like what kind of design, know, like interior design or graphic design, you know, and then I say learning design and then that starts the whole, like, is it curriculum? Is it, and I say, hmm, sometimes.
Jason Gorman (16:21)
good.
You
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (16:38)
Yeah, and I get very confused. And when I used to say I was an education designer, that got people really confused. So.
Jason Gorman (16:45)
Yeah, all right, well,
if either of us hears a great way of doing this, or if anyone listening hears a great way of doing this, please let us know, because I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I haven’t figured it out, but I appreciate you giving it a shot. All right, all right, same question, but let’s say you’re at an industry conference, right, full of learning people, so how would you describe what you do to somebody who does this?
Andrea Flores (17:15)
Yeah, so I think there you don’t have to do the whole build up to like you’re being a designer. So then I might talk about, ⁓ know, I work on designing better educational systems or this depending on my organization. So at the education design lab, I said I’m the AI lead and I’m really focused on how we can integrate AI into the work that we do, right, to work with our partners at the systems level. And then if I’m doing more of a learning design, learning experience design, then I might say,
⁓ what specific projects I’m working on at the organization, which usually gets people pretty excited.
Jason Gorman (17:52)
Yeah, and so just to be clear, this is at MIT, the Education Design Lab at MIT.
Andrea Flores (17:56)
No, the Education Design Lab is a place in Washington, DC. And then I just switched over to ⁓ MIT Sloan. so yeah. So because there, it was education designer, but it was more of a human-centered design focus and less of learning design. And then at Sloan, this is more of.
Jason Gorman (18:04)
got it all right
Andrea Flores (18:18)
It’s in the educational technology space, but it’s also a unique role because it’s more user experience ⁓ focused than your typical course development.
Jason Gorman (18:27)
Got it. think I’m confused. think I got a little confused. MIT has some kind of design. It has a design lab. So I think that’s where I got tangled up. We’ve had this conversation. I know the answer to this, but thank you for bearing with me. That’s right. People are always confused. All right. So you talked about ⁓ wanting to be an engineer initially and then ⁓ kind of the things that made you pivot into what you do now.
Andrea Flores (18:38)
See, now you see what I mean, people are always confused.
Jason Gorman (18:57)
And I’m curious if you could just take us through the major stops in your career and just name some one enduring skill or mindset or process or something that you really grabbed onto and that stop that you learned and that you kind of carried forward into the rest of your career that you still use. The reason I ask this,
is I’m just very curious about these kind of skills, attitudes, mindsets, processes, because I think we’re in a place where these things are kind of reconsidered in major ways. ⁓ And so I’m really curious about the ones that to you feel enduring.
Andrea Flores (19:40)
Yeah, so I think actually, if I look at the through line in terms of a skill set, ⁓ having that engineering mindset, so not so much the math and the things that people talk about, but it’s the systems thinking and thinking about interdependencies within a system and being able to look at a whole system as well as that kind of ⁓ troubleshooting and problem solving mindset. That ⁓ I think
Jason Gorman (19:56)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (20:09)
depending on someone’s background, I don’t find it as common amongst educators unless they’ve had a background in STEM or math or something like that. ⁓ So that is definitely something. And also ⁓ just kind of being open to learning new technology. ⁓ I sometimes find that people get really intimidated by learning ⁓ new technology. ⁓ And so I think just trying to be open, getting past those kind of initial hurdles of like,
⁓ I have to learn like a new UI or something. And then you start to see that actually it has similar patterns and similar ways of operating behind the scenes. So it makes it easier and faster to learn. ⁓ So I think those have been kind of some of the skill sets as well as like a organizational skill set project management. I think that has been extremely.
Jason Gorman (20:59)
Where
did you pick up the project management?
Andrea Flores (21:04)
actually as a learning designer because the project management plays very heavily into the work that we do. And so I really honed those skills and they’ve proven to be useful in lots of different areas. The coordination, ⁓ the listening, ⁓ kind of really listening to lots of different perspectives and really trying to distill what is important and what’s really being said. ⁓ So that kind of ties into another skill set, which is listening.
listening skills. ⁓ I find that in our work we have to do a lot of deep listening ⁓ because it’s the field of design. So sometimes people have, can’t articulate always exactly what it, they want, so you kind of have to really listen between the lines. And that’s actually something I developed as an English language teacher because my students obviously they were not fluent English speakers. You had to develop a lot of patience and just really listening to what they were trying to say without talking over them all the time.
So I think I really learned that. And then in terms of mindset, ⁓ I think curiosity, adaptability, and humility. One, just being open to learning new things. We’re constantly having to adapt, especially as learning designers. Project things change constantly. You have different stakeholder needs. ⁓ And then just kind of really being humble in the process.
Because I think that kind of keeps you open to learning.
Jason Gorman (22:37)
I’m curious with that adaptability piece, was there a job where you felt like you had to really stretch to build that? And what was that? What were you doing in that job?
Andrea Flores (22:50)
Yeah, so I think what like built my adaptability was actually again teaching overseas. I had some very interesting teaching setups. ⁓ So some in some countries I would have to run and catch public transportation, right? Or I have to be teaching in a classroom where there was no central heat and so you’d be freezing and in a jacket, right? It would be changing like daily some, you know, like your classroom context would change sometimes.
Jason Gorman (23:07)
Hmph.
my god.
Hmm.
Andrea Flores (23:20)
you might not get paid because cash flow wasn’t good or something like that. So you were, you know, and then not only that, but you’re operating in a different culture, right? In different countries. ⁓ And so I thought, I think that taught me to be adaptable. And then coming into the learning design space, ⁓ usually at the start of projects, they’re very, very ambiguous. It’s what is it? The fuzzy front end or the messy front end, right? ⁓ And so things are changing really quickly. And so I often kind of feel like a ninja.
Like I’m a ninja in the middle of a fight and all of these things are coming at me and I’m just like dancing and kind of nimbly kind of responding to whatever’s happening, but always with the goal of gently trying to shape it into, know, whatever it is we’re aiming for, whatever that vision is for the experience.
Jason Gorman (24:10)
That’s wonderful. You mentioned specifically the systems thinking piece. so this is my, I don’t know how many of these I’ve done now, eight, nine of them maybe. And one other person has mentioned systems thinking and it was Jen Briselli. And Jen was a physics teacher. So that kind of lines up with what you were saying. It’s that science background.
Andrea Flores (24:28)
⁓
Mm-hmm.
Jason Gorman (24:37)
fascinating. All right, the three of us have to get together clearly, we will make that happen. ⁓ So you have all these skills. And now, as we’ve said, the world is just changing really fast. And of course, that means that how we do the things that we do also needs to evolve really quickly. And recently, I asked you about what challenges you have in your work, but then you
Andrea Flores (24:41)
Yes.
Jason Gorman (25:05)
went bigger than my question. ⁓ so the question that you’ve been wrestling with that you talked about is like, what would a redesign of our entire learn to work system, is that word again? What would that look like? ⁓ So I’m curious, can you name the problem and the challenges kind of that we need to solve for and your thoughts on that?
Andrea Flores (25:31)
Yeah, I mean, that is a big one because it’s a big ecosystem, right? There’s a lot of players. There’s a lot of pieces. I mean, I think if you break it down to its simplest pieces, right, you’ve got the learners, you’ve got your training institutions or your higher education institutions, and then you’ve got employers. And then you’ve got all of the connecting pieces, the infrastructure that supports someone’s movement through that pipeline. ⁓
But in the US, that system is fragmented. ⁓ If you’re looking at higher education, particularly community colleges, it’s under-resourced. It’s siloed. You’ve got a lot of different players. then things aren’t centralized in the US. So each state and each region have their own ⁓ nuances. And then the other thing is, and this is well known, right?
Higher education is typically not, it’s slow moving and it’s not very responsive to industry typically. And that’s something that’s been a real struggle. And then now all of a sudden adding to that picture is that ⁓ AI has come into the picture ⁓ and entry level jobs are changing or disappearing, right? So now what jobs are our students actually going into? Where’s that pipeline ending? And then if these jobs are changing,
Jason Gorman (26:30)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (26:55)
And typically education, right, you design backwards. So you know what the end goal is and you work backwards. But if you don’t know what the end goal is, it’s going to change and you can’t respond fast enough to that change, then what does that do to your business model? What does that do for the students that are coming in? You know, by the time they get to be a senior, may already be outdated what they’ve learned. So that’s kind of really scary. And then, ⁓
Jason Gorman (27:03)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (27:22)
I think now at the federal level, there’s lots of resources that are being taken away from higher education that are being taken away from education in general that could potentially support people rethinking what this could look like. ⁓ And then of course, you’ve got all the access issues. So a lot, lots of the problems, the equity issues that come with education. ⁓ But that was like some of the, those are some of the challenges that I encountered when I was kind of working at that system level.
And those are not easy problems to fix. ⁓ And they’re huge. Like the scale of it is huge ⁓ to try to fix all of that at once or quickly to respond to some of these changes that are happening.
Jason Gorman (28:08)
Mm-hmm.
Even so, I know you’re a problem solver at heart, you’re a designer at heart, I know you have ideas. I would love, I’d love you to share some of those ideas, if you would, about what we might think about doing.
Andrea Flores (28:28)
Yeah, so I can talk about some of the work that the lab was doing, the education design lab, and then also some of the other ones that I’ve been thinking about. ⁓ So at the lab, because the system was fragmented, they focused a lot on convening. So convening the stakeholders and then using human-centered design, like I said, as a vehicle to ⁓ get alignment amongst the stakeholders, to get buy-in, and then also to kind of…
start to ideate and prototype on what type of solutions they were looking for. So that was a really useful tool to bring people together. The other piece that the lab was working on was ⁓ breaking down this idea of a degree and thinking more about stackable credentials, which is something that we’ve all talked about in this space. And so it wouldn’t be that you’d have to dedicate a big chunk of time, but you could kind of break your learning into more digestible pieces that could fit into a working life.
they were creating the digital infrastructure to support that. So ⁓ what do you call it? Like badges, digital wallets, things that you could bring with you, things that you could assert, ⁓ having more of a focus on skills rather than ⁓ degree, so that those skills could be ⁓ communicated in such a way to an employer that they were transferable, ⁓ or that you might be able to fit into a job role that
didn’t seem obvious at first, but you actually have the skills for that particular role. Now, the other piece that I was also thinking about was, OK, this has already existed. This is what people are working on. But I do wonder now with AI in the picture, there’s a lot of different ways that we could think about it. So one, we could look at AI across our design process. And what are some of the ways that we could augment our design process that we use, either internally preparing
Jason Gorman (30:10)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (30:18)
for work with partners and then also working with partners using AI, right? So that’s one part, one piece of it. And then the other piece of it is maybe even rethinking, like, I think the thing about a designer is you’re always gonna ask why, like why does this thing exist the way it exists? And does it need to exist this way still? And so that’s the question that I’ve been thinking about, right? Which is,
Jason Gorman (30:43)
Hmm.
Andrea Flores (30:47)
Well, we have expertise sitting in the palm of our hand.
Do we really still need to go to a classroom and have a lecture? Do we still even really need to learn in these like modules and online modules with video and talking heads and things like that? Right? Is that, do we still need to do that? Is that necessary? Or could learning look completely different? So for example, could…
⁓ When you go to a higher education, part of it is about developing yourself as an adult, but the other part of it is maybe developing or starting to develop expertise in a specific domain. Could some of that expertise development be pushed down to K-12? Assuming that K-12 gets augmented by AI, so we can accelerate that process. Then as somebody shifts out of K-12 into higher education, could higher education then be more ⁓
Jason Gorman (31:28)
Hmm.
Andrea Flores (31:42)
application focused. So kind of like a problem solving accelerator, right? Where students can then come together and tackle real world interdisciplinary problems that are gonna take a lot of people to solve. Climate change is a big one, right? Some of the geopolitical tensions that are coming up. Like, so all of these things, ⁓ energy.
Jason Gorman (31:50)
Hmm.
Andrea Flores (32:05)
So you’re going to need multiple minds, multiple disciplines. And so what better way to learn your discipline and to really build that, ⁓ you and I talked about that structural knowledge that comes from some of that tacit knowledge through the application, which you’re not just going to get through lectures and knowledge transfer, but bringing those minds to solve these real world problems and having them develop the expertise from there.
Jason Gorman (32:08)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (32:31)
or potentially even partnering with employers, right? If it’s not solving like a scientific problem or something like that, maybe it’s having the employers directly so that you can solve like business problems that are starting to come up. ⁓ So I feel like that would be, I think students would love that because they can see the direct relevance.
Right? It’s perfect. You can really kind of close that employer engagement gap that exists right now. And I think that the learning and the understanding would be deeper for students because they’re now getting to really apply that in a very real world context, which is, think, why a lot of students want to go into startups, right? Because all of a sudden now they can apply this stuff in a real world context for business and possibly make a lot of money doing it.
Jason Gorman (33:10)
Yeah.
I am curious in hearing your answer just about the things that you, what are some examples of skills that you would push into high school? What would that look like? How would you imagine that sets the stage for problem solving? And is there any room for some of that problem solving approach in higher education, do you think? Or in high school, I mean. Yeah.
Andrea Flores (33:41)
in high school. Yeah, definitely.
I actually did a podcast with some high school students like maybe a few weeks ago and I was really, yeah, I was really impressed with just their communication skills, their thinking skills. They told me they had like a pretty rigorous, it was a public school, but they said they had a very rigorous academic program. And so they were already studying and doing business cases. And yeah, and thinking through business cases because
Jason Gorman (33:48)
I love that.
Wow.
Wow.
Andrea Flores (34:09)
Sometimes when I was talking to them, felt like was talking to a colleague at work, right? So I’ve just been, yeah. So that’s why I was thinking, I think some of this could be accelerated and pushed down. And then, and then also the younger generation is getting information at a speed that we never had it available, right? So they are really current on a lot of things, which I was also very surprised about. So I think, I think some of that can be pushed down. And obviously I know there’s lots of talk around.
Jason Gorman (34:13)
Hmm, that’s incredible.
That’s true.
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (34:38)
problem-based and project-based learning in high schools. So I think that could also be done at the high school level. ⁓ And then just really ⁓ refined and maybe made a little bit more intense as they get up into the higher education. Because I think right now you kind of do higher ed, you build up your expertise, and then you do like a master’s program or PhD to do research, right? But maybe you just step into that program from the start.
Jason Gorman (35:01)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (35:08)
if you can accelerate and or maybe you tie, maybe you redesign because I don’t know if you can push everything down to K-12, but I think ⁓ some of the the knowledge transfer that might have to happen in higher ed could be interspersed more directly with the applied activities that actually work towards solving real world.
Jason Gorman (35:29)
This is the most designerly vision of education. I love it so much. And I want to redo my high school and college education with that model, please. Yeah, yeah. That is incredible. mean, what would you make? How do we? It’s a tough, tough question. I always try to include a question about about measurement or ROI or because this is
Andrea Flores (35:39)
that
Jason Gorman (35:58)
a tough question for people who do what we do. In some ways, it always feels like an unfair question to ask because I know there’s no great answer for these things. So I’ll just say that. Nobody’s on the hook for anything here, but I am curious, how should we measure our progress?
Towards a better future. What do you think is a fair? I we have all of these new things coming at us all the time and I think about something like social media 20 years ago 15 years ago We had no idea what the effects were gonna be on us as a society Now we have a better idea and they’re not good as it turns out and I
with just how is it that we might be able to take stock of where things are in our education system? I’m gonna go back to that word, and I do mean that kind of cradle to grave, like lifelong learning. How do we measure whether that’s working? What are your thoughts on that?
Andrea Flores (37:13)
is a very hard question to answer because I think a lot of the results that you see from education are not always immediate. They happen much further down the line. So I think that’s harder when you’re like, what’s the ROI on this for all this money that is being invested? I think you can do maybe some of those ⁓ shorter term gains, Like, you know, are we looking at number of new models developed, number of programs, you know,
Jason Gorman (37:21)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Andrea Flores (37:42)
a number of people kind of going through those programs. You can measure it against your outcomes, right? Like are students actually able to produce those outcomes? But maybe at a societal level, we could see like maybe there are measures at a societal level. Like are we improving our mortality rates? Are we reducing the burden of disease, right? Are we… ⁓
Jason Gorman (38:06)
Hmm.
Andrea Flores (38:07)
Are we coming up with better solutions for climate change? Are we reducing conflict? Because those would be the ultimate outcomes. Are more people having better access to ⁓ careers and to, what is it, like economic mobility? Are they able to progress? Are they able to make more money? Are they able to have a better quality of life? And are we actually able to bring
Jason Gorman (38:27)
Yeah.
Andrea Flores (38:33)
solutions into the world to actually impact us at that societal level. ⁓ I guess if you want to get a little bit more, like come down a little bit more, you could also look at if you’re working with particular institutions, you could use qualitative data, so interviews, and really kind of looking at ⁓ what kind of mindset shifts. Are there actually changes in behaviors after you’ve worked with a particular group or institution?
⁓ One that’s easier to measure is are there any changes in workflow? Because changes in workflow, that means there’s changes in behavior and ultimately changes in thinking, right? Because you’ve actually changed how people are going to do something. ⁓ The other thing you could look at is are institutions more responsive? For example, does industry feel like they can go to a higher education? Is that a trusted partner where when they need something done, that’s the first place that they would turn to or do they?
Jason Gorman (39:06)
Hmm. Hmm.
Andrea Flores (39:30)
do it internally, right? So that’s maybe some kind of like a responsiveness score or something. And then I, yeah, and so then you could also measure maybe the depth of engagement and connection that could be, you know, maybe that would be more of like a qualitative type of data point with interviews and things like that. So I think, you know, just to kind of depending on what problem you’re working on, if it’s at this level versus, you know,
a more like a learning experience level. I think a lot of times in workplace, often look at like, can somebody transfer that information and what they’ve learned and actually make a shift to the work they’re doing so that it helps the business meet whatever their business goals are, right? And so that would be at least for business context, a better way to measure the impact of a learning experience.
Jason Gorman (40:23)
Your answer just hit like all of the bases just at once. It’s, you one of the things that I, just, you just solved all the problems. One of the things that I really do want to do in these conversations is to bring people from lots of different kinds of backgrounds that are working on different kinds of problems to just shed light on how they see the world, how they think about things. But I really appreciate the,
Andrea Flores (40:29)
swear to God, I
you
Jason Gorman (40:52)
that you’re the way you think naturally and the way that you answer that question, you’re talking about traditional school, higher education, People early in a career, people during a career, and then bigger societal impacts. The thing that you said at the very beginning, though, I just wanna underscore. What we do is really important. And I think that too often we…
Too often education in general is kind of disregarded It is it is not held at the level of esteem that that it is in other places And the reality is that what we do really matters and if we’re doing it well, it does change people’s lives It does create impact. It makes the makes the earth healthier Right. It solves real problems. It improves. Well, right all of those things. They’re real impacts. They’re not
Did I learn how to this date that I have to recite or this fact that I need to regurgitate? There are real stakes and I appreciate the fact that you front loaded that in your answer. I really do. So, all right, I’m off my soapbox now. ⁓ You kind of answered this next one a few times already, but I’m going to ask it and just in case there’s anything else you want to add, where do you see things headed in our field?
in the next few years.
Andrea Flores (42:21)
I think maybe if we’re just looking short term, ⁓ it may be that with AI in the picture, we’ll probably be looking at our design processes and kind of rethinking how we do those designs, most likely augmenting what we do. Can we do it faster? Can we do it better? I think longer term, it’s more transformative, right? Like if we have this technology.
how do we design AI native learning experiences? So we kind of like, you start with accessibility at the front of the design process. You just start with the fact that students are going to be using AI. It’s going to be part of the outcomes and also that maybe how they interact with the content and how they learn is also going to be AI enabled. And so, yeah, like sometimes I thought, do I need all these modules and videos? What if I just gave students like, here is a problem that you need to solve. Here are some questions.
here’s a chat bot, you know, and maybe provide some guidance as we go. And you have like maybe a cohort of friends that are also trying to solve something similar and you guys talk about it and figure it out. And then there’ll be some type of assessment or something at the end, right? Or maybe they have to produce some type of artifact. ⁓ And then maybe you can look at the analytics or something behind the scene to understand like, how is a student thinking about it? What questions are they asking the AI?
⁓ And then from there you can gauge like are they really understanding? You know, where are the gaps in their thinking and then maybe use that to kind of come in and ⁓ you know, do some further human facilitation, right? Sometimes I do think that like I was like, do I really need to watch another video?
Jason Gorman (44:00)
Yeah. Yep.
Andrea Flores (44:02)
So
yeah.
Jason Gorman (44:07)
Well, like I said, sign me up for Flores University. I like this idea, I love this design, I wanna do it. I wanna do it. ⁓ Okay, one last question. And this comes from, so every person who comes on the show, I ask them a question that the last person gave me. ⁓ This one comes from Mariana Ganapini, who you.
Andrea Flores (44:10)
yes.
Yes.
Jason Gorman (44:36)
You know, I think I might have even introduced you to each other. That’s wonderful. All right, so her question is, what role do you think AI will play in teaching and delivering content in your industry over the next three to five years?
Andrea Flores (44:37)
Hi Mariana!
Wow. So I think a little bit of what I said, right? I don’t know yet. I don’t think higher ed will do something as extreme as, know, just giving students a chat bot ⁓ and some questions. But ⁓ I think within the higher education industry, ⁓ you know, most likely what will happen is, again, people will see how it can augment what is currently being done. So there’s a lot of ⁓ talk around like chat bots or, you know, ⁓
Jason Gorman (44:55)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (45:21)
for learning, chat bots for doing various, you know, first, what do call it? Like administrative tasks. There’s ⁓ maybe bots that can provide coaching, ⁓ career coaching. ⁓ So that’s, that’s definitely something that I’m seeing. ⁓ The other piece is maybe there might be some new ed tech platforms that come out, right? That are taking advantage of AI agents and AI.
Jason Gorman (45:32)
Hmm.
Andrea Flores (45:50)
⁓ so I’m currently doing just some advisory work with a group called, ⁓ Clara learn. And what they’re trying to do is to create a platform that really sits across the higher education or the learning and the workforce space. And so what they’ve done is they’ve, they, think they have six different AI agents. And, ⁓ at the start of the journey, right, you can come in and they’ve got an agent pulling in real time labor market data that gives you.
Jason Gorman (46:04)
⁓ wow.
Wow.
Andrea Flores (46:18)
Here are the top 10 jobs that are going away and here are the top 10 jobs that are emerging. So if you’re like somebody who’s looking to reskill or up skill, you can kind of take a look and say, okay, like my job is going away. Maybe I need to start pivoting and moving into this direction. Right. And then they’ve got another AI agent that will do like a skills profile. Right. So here, you know, give me your resume and take a look at your resume. I see what skill sets you have. I can identify where the gaps are. Right. And then kind of
Then there’s like one that kind of provides career navigation and advice, right? So kind of guide you on like what might your learning pathway look like. And then they kind of go through a learning experience and what they’re looking at is can we use learning science principles? Can we use AI to really have a more robust learning experience? So something that they told me about was, for example, could we identify where students have high cognitive load as they interact with specific types of content?
And could we pause right there? Or could we have an AI come in? Or could we ask them some questions or something to reduce the cognitive load? So those were some of the ideas that they were playing with. And then the only other piece was they didn’t have the piece that connected them. Once you come out of the learning experience, how do you then plug in to that new job? So that’s, think, some of the things that I was talking to them about. So I can already see that those
those types of ⁓ innovations are going to start to happen in this space. And I think they actually might be really helpful because if things are going to be changing that quickly, I think you will have to rely on some of ⁓ using technology to help you be more responsive to the changes that are happening.
Jason Gorman (48:03)
It’s gonna be a busy three to five years.
Andrea Flores (48:05)
Yeah, very busy, but I think it’ll be good for us to be honest. I really think there’s going to be more of a demand for designers. I know there’s some worry in our field that AI could do all the things that learning designers could do. And I think if you just think of a learning designer as content development, yes. But if you think about learning designers as designing robust experiences that build real world skills that someone can apply very quickly.
Jason Gorman (48:25)
Mm-hmm, right.
Andrea Flores (48:34)
then I think there will be a big opportunity there.
Jason Gorman (48:37)
We’ve really kind of touched both poles today, right? One end of the extreme is the existential threat of AI and what we have, like what is going to happen to us? We don’t know what is going to happen to us. But the other end of that spectrum, I find myself at both ends of the spectrum on a regular basis. The other end of the spectrum is, no, there’s gonna be so much more that the world needs. mean, just as we just think about,
Andrea Flores (48:56)
Which is
Jason Gorman (49:07)
what we have been, we’ve, we’re able to get to as designers is quite small, right? In the, the vast lake of, of human need for learning. It’s really just the general learning stuff that we’re able to work on. too expensive to get down to the, little niche cases and the organization specific things. It’s impossible. There’s no way, but now it is becoming possible. And, and to me, it feels like it does open up this
this incredible opportunity for us. I think about this sort of like web design, like when web design, when everybody was hand coding websites, it was expensive to have a website, but as soon as you started getting these tools that allowed you to do them really quickly, everybody in the world could have a website in a couple of hours using sometimes their own skills, but there still is room for a person who understands a website and how it works. I wonder, I don’t know, but I wonder.
Andrea Flores (49:43)
Yeah.
Jason Gorman (50:04)
if we’ll see something similar in what we do.
Andrea Flores (50:07)
That’s really kind of exciting. Maybe it’s all down to a prompt.
Jason Gorman (50:12)
my gosh,
hopefully it’s not all down to a prompt.
Andrea Flores (50:16)
Yeah,
this was one of the things that I thought about. I think like a lot of people talk about AI kind of replacing the jobs. And even if you think like, that’s just cognitive skills, but then you’ve got robotics coming into the picture. But I don’t think AI, even with robotics, can bring a vision to life. Right. At least not the way it exists currently. It just exists currently to carry out tasks in service of vision. That’s humans. We have the vision.
Jason Gorman (50:35)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Andrea Flores (50:45)
And we need other humans with AI and robots to help us execute on that vision and bring it to life. And I think that’s always, I think that’s really where, that’s where our greatest strength is ⁓ in terms of what all of this is gonna look like. I just can’t imagine AI going out and dragging this person, talking to this person, grabbing them, then bringing them all together, coordinating all of that. That’s not gonna happen.
quite yet.
Jason Gorman (51:16)
I have loved this conversation. I have so appreciated your vision in this conversation. You really unpacking kind of where you come from, where your ideas came from, how you think about the future. You’ve been so generous with your ideas and your time. Thank you for joining. ⁓
Andrea Flores (51:35)
Yeah, thank you, Jason. I have really enjoyed the conversation. I always love having a chat with you. And like you said, just having these conversations gives me a different way of thinking about it. Maybe it sparks new ideas. And I think that’s really important right now is to just keep that ⁓ generative energy alive.
Jason Gorman (51:56)
I love it. Thanks again for joining.
Andrea Flores (51:58)
All right, thanks Jason, bye.