Nectir

When generative AI first landed in teachers' inboxes, a lot of places felt pressure to ban it or embrace it. The Maine Department of Education approached AI calmly and thoughtfully. At this month's Education Commission of the States National Forum, their leaders shared how they built an AI approach that starts from what already works. A few things that stood out to us: → They didn't start from scratch. Maine grounded its AI work in existing computer science and digital literacy education. As coordinator Emma-Marie Banks put it, "without computer science, you don't actually have AI.” → They built for change, not permanence. A traditional policy cycle would be outdated before it finished, so they created a living toolkit that keeps student success as the goal → They designed for everyone in the room. Their professional development has multiple entry points, meeting both the AI-skeptical and the AI-fluent where they are. This is the work we care about: AI in education that's student-centered, equitable, and honest about the fact that nobody has all the answers yet. Read the full article on K-12 Dive: https://lnkd.in/g-i9cftP

For the last couple of years, the default response to AI in the classroom has been to try to keep it out. Ban it, run papers through detectors, and hope the detectors are right. Most faculty have realized by now that this doesn't really work, and it leaves them policing their students instead of teaching them. Behind the instinct to police AI is a worry for learning: can students still learn with AI in the picture, or does it just give them a way out? Our answer: make using AI and doing the learning the same act in an assignment. At the Online Teaching Conference, our Head of Customer Success Jaime Moquin and Eric Wilson, Ph.D. walked through what it actually looks like to redesign the assignment itself for a world where students have AI within reach. Learn more about how instructors have integrated AI into their learning process: https://lnkd.in/gCKB_zRr.

"Will this AI contradict what we teach?" is the first question most faith-based schools ask. A new peer-reviewed study from Los Angeles Pacific University researched exactly what happens when AI is grounded in your curriculum and values. Researchers at Los Angeles Pacific University compared students who used its Nectir AI Course Assistant with students who didn't. What they found? Grounded, guardrailed AI gave students more structured ways to engage with their faith, and the data backed it up. Full study by George Hanshaw and Todd Pheifer: https://lnkd.in/gpN5QBt9

When students ask an older AI model for a source, it’ll often hand them a URL that looks real but goes nowhere. That's a hallucination. It happens because the model is guessing from everything it read across the internet, with no view into students’ actual courses or their institution's data. A generic answer can sound completely right and be completely wrong. That's a risk for students, faculty, and schools when what's on the line is a grade, a financial aid deadline, or a policy question. The fix is grounding AI in your syllabi, your readings, and your policies, so its answers stop drifting toward generic and start reflecting your institution. Grounding is where control lives. Your data stays yours, and you can see exactly what the AI is working from.

Sat down with Mary McCall Leland at the ASU+GSV Summit to talk about what we're building at Nectir: AI that schools actually control, and that teachers and students actually trust. We got into the stuff I care most about: why the real risk isn't AI in schools, it's ungoverned AI in schools, and why the professional development side (actually showing educators how to use this tech well) is the half everyone skips. It's been a big year for us. $12.5M Series A, live across the California Community Colleges' 2.2M students, and the GSV Cup Fan Favorite in higher ed. Grateful to Mary and the GSV Ventures team for having me on! Full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gw7BDQ3M

What does personalized learning look like? The better question is, what can it look like? Our CEO Kavitta Ghai joined GSV Ventures's Mary McCall Leland at the ASU+GSV Summit to answer exactly that. Nectir was built for entire school systems to support a school’s entire AI infrastructure needs. It was also built for one student. Whoever they are. Everyone has struggled at some point in their educational journey, whether that was understanding a new concept in class, studying for an exam, writing an essay, or just feeling unsupported and alone in the learning process. That’s who Nectir AI shows up for. It lives right in the LMS and is grounded in the course materials with guardrails so it can’t do the work for a student, only help them get there themselves. AI can deliver unmatched personalized learning assistance, because the more a student uses it, the more the AI understands who that student is and exactly how their brain works. Building accessible, personalized education is a team effort, and we're lucky to do it alongside partners and institutions who care as much as we do.

Meet Ethan, our Director of Analytics. Or, as he puts it, our benevolent data czar. Before the pipelines and the predictions, Ethan taught high school math. He eventually left the classroom for data science, and then spent years quietly trying to find his way back to education. In late 2023, he quit his job with nothing lined up and cold-emailed a handful of edtech companies. We were one of them, and we're glad he took the swing. Ethan does a little bit of everything when it comes to data and analytics: he builds the data pipelines, runs the analytics, leads our research, and spends a lot of time thinking about student privacy and how we handle sensitive data responsibly. But the question underneath all of it is the one he cares about most: "How do we use generative AI technology in a way that maximally benefits the learner and the learning experience across culture, academic subjects, technology, access, and any number of other socio-economic stratums?" Learn more about Ethan, his edtech questions, and his favorite hobby in our full blog! Link in comments.

Excited to share that I’ve joined Nectir as their Founding Head of People! There were a few things that made this opportunity feel like the perfect next step in my career. First, the mission. AI in education is one of the most important conversations happening right now, and Nectir is approaching it with a genuine desire to improve how students and educators learn and work. Second, the leadership team. Every conversation felt grounded, ambitious, and human, a combination that aligns with my own values. And third, I get to work with a former boss and mentor again, Andrew Bauer. The most meaningful growth in my career has come from working alongside people who challenge and support me at the same time, and I’m excited for the chance to do that again. One thing that especially stood out during the interview process was the feeling that I could bring my whole self to the table. In my conversation with Kavitta Ghai, we spent the first 15 minutes on something that almost never comes up in interviews: meditation and lucid dreaming. Rather than treating it as a quirky personal interest, she saw it as a value-add that could genuinely strengthen how culture is built at Nectir. Her curiosity and openness told me a ton about the team I was joining. Although it ended sooner than anticipated, I'm extremely thankful for a highly rewarding past year at Arch, where I received a crash-course in recruiting at a high-volume scale-up. I'm proud to have worked with a fantastic team that scaled the organization from ~150-250 people in less than a year. And I'm grateful to have been able to bring my other interests to the table in delivering a company-wide session on meditation, and organizing an ongoing weekly meditation group with Pete Kadushin, Ph.D., CMPC. Thanks to the team for everything. Now, I’m excited for a different kind of challenge: helping build intentional process and culture at a fully-remote Series-A startup. Looking forward to building with this team!

Adoria Williams is Head Librarian and Department Chair at Merritt College, one of the California Community Colleges. For years, she was the one checking essays for AI-generated text. So when she started piloting Nectir, her worry was the obvious one: how do you bring AI into a research course without gutting the skills the course exists to teach? She built her own Course Assistant, grounded it entirely in her material, and set the guardrails herself. It steers students back to the assignment and the research process, and it never hands over answers. She even wrote her own standards using Nectir's policy templates before her district had an AI policy at all. The students who used to fear getting flagged for cheating were now being encouraged to use Nectir AI to brainstorm and sharpen their own thinking. 86% of her students came back to Nectir AI for ongoing support. It became part of how they study, not just a one-and-done try. Adoption doesn’t just come from access. It comes from faculty who get to decide how AI shows up in their classroom, and students who are supported in using it. Read the full case study: https://lnkd.in/gTWw-JRw

Marketing team: How was the Online Teaching Conference this year? Nectir Customer Success Manager Lindsey Nicholl: It was the most fun conference and probably my favorite ever, so far in life. A lot of that comes down to the people. The community showed up ready to talk, ask hard questions, and share what's really happening in their classrooms. Lindsey Nicholl and Jaime Moquin spent the week deep in conversations about the future of education and how AI fits into the landscape. One of the best parts was reconnecting face-to-face with our Nectir champions from California Community Colleges, all in one place! These are the faculty and staff who believed in Nectir and carried it into their courses fearlessly. Trading stories and sitting all together is something you just can’t get over email. We came home already counting down to the next time we get to do this in person.