From Passengers to Explorers: Rethinking CTE with Edmentum at ISTE 2026

Jeffrey Bradbury (00:01)

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Teacher Cast Educational Network. My name is Jeff Bradbury. Thank you so much for joining us today and making Teacher Cast your home for professional development.

On today's episode of Digital Learning Today, we're gonna be talking all about career and technical education and wrestling with the question that is on the minds of school districts

All around the world. How do we support our kids not only through grades 12, but past those graduation years? How do we get them ready for their careers? So stick around. We have a fantastic episode for you guys today, right here on Teacher Cast.

Jeffrey Bradbury (00:35)

My guest today is the Senior Vice President of Courses and Career at Edmentum. It is a pleasure to bring on today Mr. Jason Bass. Jason, how are you today? Welcome to Teacher Cast.

Jason Bass (00:44)

I am great, I am so happy to be here. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Jeffrey Bradbury (00:48)

I am so excited that you are here. It is always great to have Edmentum featured on the program. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what is happening these days at Edmentum.

Jason Bass (00:58)

I've ⁓ been in ed tech for quite a while. I started my career about twenty, thirty years ago. ⁓ that that makes me sound really old, but at Gale Publishing at Sengage and where I built products for school libraries. And my career has led me to some interesting places, ⁓ like Amazon and Wiley Publishing, where I've had some experiences in ed tech and big tech, and I'm really happy to be at Edmentum now, bringing all of my learnings back into ed tech.

to make sure that we can build and deliver on some really cool things that we're building for students and teacher say teacher time saving tools as well in our career and courseware products. It's been a really, really busy year at Edmentum. just seven, eight months ago we purchased a product called Major Clarity.

and integr been integrating that into our courseware platform, which is what we're here to talk about today, our CT our new CTE program. We've also built some new relationships that we're gonna be announcing at ISTE, one with Road Trip Nation that we're super excited about. So we've got some really cool innovations happening in EdTech on behalf of students and teachers that I think will be really interesting to your viewers.

Jeffrey Bradbury (02:08)

Now you mentioned that EdTech is doing some pretty neat things this year in that college and career readiness space. Talk to us a little bit about it and and really what is the vision for a program like this?

Jason Bass (02:19)

If you think about ⁓ one of the pain points that a student goes through, I have children, and part of the pain points as a parent, as a teacher that we go through is how do we inspire kids? How do we take the scary out of what's what happens after high school? Am I gonna go to college? How am I gonna support my family? how am I gonna support myself? Parents are thinking, how do I get my kid off the couch, or how do I make sure they're gonna be successful? The ⁓ and and we want to be able to answer those questions through our product. We want to be able to help teach.

Guide students, we want to help inspire students about what they could be doing after school. So that is the reason why we purchased Major Clarity, and that's the reason we're integrating it into our systems. We have a career planning tool in Major Clarity, we have a learning tool with our courseware platform, and we also have a partnership with a company called Interplay that provides trade prep.

And we want to take the ambiguity out of that journey for school for students to be able to give them choice about what kind of career pathway that they might want to go down, always staying within the Edmentum ecosystem and being able to provide them with other options in case they change their minds and highlight to them that this is the time that you can experiment. We want to turn them from passengers into explorers. And that's the th the threadline, the through line that you'll see through the Edmentum career products.

Jeffrey Bradbury (03:41)

I love how you're looking forward with this solution that it's built on these three different pillars. How does it translate into the classrooms? What does a teacher see? What does a student see? What can a school district expect when they're partnering with Edmentum for CTE?

Jason Bass (03:55)

So if you think about the kinds of things that a student needs for choice, if I if I think about what the tools that we have in major clarity, there are career assessment tools, there are test drives, there are work-based learning ⁓ opportunities, there are post-secondary and scholarship.

tool ⁓ search tools to be able to figure out what to do next and where to go what schools to kinda go what schools to go to. Within Courseware, we have an award winning system that has courses that can support those pathways. So if I'm thinking about becoming an emerge EMT, ⁓

In the emergency medical respond ⁓ responder. I can take a career assessment, identify what my interests are. I highlighted that I wanted to go into the medical field. I can take a test drive ⁓ in major clarity. I can watch interviews from a student interviewing someone in that position within the major clarity product. Within the courseware product, you can now connect that to learning. So within the courseware product, we'll have courses like Principles of Health Science.

Or applied medical terminology. We even have an EMT Emergency Medical Responder Certification Prep course there as well. And if I combine that with our Interplay partnership, you can also take a course on Interplay, which is virtual ⁓ courses to help ⁓ help students figure out how to work in the trades, like becoming an electrician or an HVAC. But we also have Bloodborne Pathogens courses.

Pathogen courses there, first aid courses there, incident management r courses there, all being able to walk in the day of the life in someone in that career. So we'll be able to tie all of those together through that journey through school. That's how practically it works. Each product has a different component for the teacher to guide the student through and for the student to make choices about how they're going to pursue their career.

Jeffrey Bradbury (05:51)

You know, I love the fact that everything is laid out for the school, for the students, and especially for the educators. What happens when a school district decides to partner with Edmontum? Talk to us a little bit about maybe the professional development. How do you implement a system like this? Is it a one year roll off? Many years. How do you get started with this program?

Jason Bass (06:11)

Well, we would assign a customer success person to the account

And that person would then work with the school district to marry together what the outcomes that you would want. And we would design the a four-year plan or a six through twelve plan to implement to make sure that we were meeting the requirements that you had throughout that journey. We would highlight or suggest different things that you can implement throughout the throughout each from each product, whether there are courses, how to integrate that into the learning plan, how to connect the counselors to the teachers. All of those things will be laid out in an implementation.

plan that our that our reps would be able to work with the ⁓ with the school districts that they're working with to make sure that they're building that out properly.

Jeffrey Bradbury (06:56)

Now I'm excited because this year at ISTE, you guys have something pretty neat happening. Talk to us a little bit about what's going on between Edmontum and Road Trip Nation.

Jason Bass (07:05)

This is one of the really cool innovative things that we're doing this year. If you're not familiar with Road Trip Nation, they're an Emmy Award-winning TV show. They have I think they've been on PBS now for about 20 seasons. And they have ⁓ taken students out on road trips in their green RVs, and the students interview people in their careers to figure out how did you get to where you are in the career. It's an exploration exercise and it's an inspirational exercise. Students that go and go on a road trip are way more engaged in what they want to do in

their career and they've had tremendous success in really inspiring a whole new generation of students to go into careers that they may never have been exposed to and ⁓ to give bring awareness to them of. What we're doing is we're integrating hundreds of those courses of those interviews directly embedded within our courseware system. But we're not doing it just to have a a video in a course

We're doing it to inspire the why. Why am I taking this course? So we have curriculum experts that have been married together with Road Trip Nation experts to take a look at the metadata that connects the courseware and the video together. So that when a student before they start taking the course, they'll see a Road Trip Nation video. They'll see a couple of examples of how a student interviewed another professional in that career to explain why English is important or why algebra is important. And then before the student even takes the course,

They've answered the question, why should I be t why should I be taking this in the first place? And that's where we've believed that it's the beginning of inspiring students to understand and bring a a reality as as to what they're learning. That's the innovative thing that we're doing with Road Trip Nation this year, and that's what we're announcing at IST.

Jeffrey Bradbury (08:45)

There's so many different things that you guys have going on this year from the road trip nation to bringing out a brand new CTE curriculum. I I want to bring up one more subject here, which is I know gonna be on the forefront of everybody's conversations, artificial intelligence. Where do you see AI in CTE work? Where do you see AI in the work that Ed Mentum is doing to support students in classrooms?

Jason Bass (09:09)

This is ⁓ this is a really important question and one we take very, very seriously at Edmentum. ⁓ we all know that AI can generate content. It's very, very good at generating content. We've generated so much content, we can't keep up with the content that we're generating. But I think it's ⁓ it's a fantastic tool that we should be able to utilize, but we also have to be very, very careful about how we how we use it in education. I think that the

We we don't want to turn over students to AI. The the principles that we have at Edmentum is that there should always be a human element in in how we use AI. So whether we use AI on the back end to figure out how we can simplify our workflows or generate content that is ⁓ used in the classroom, ⁓

Or whether it's actually customer-facing, a student-facing AI, there will always be a human element involved when Edmentum uses AI as part of ⁓ the feature, the product feature. So for example, when we're when we're generating content, we might use AI to help us align to a standard or to make sure that we're getting the rubrics right or and so on. But we'll always have a curriculum expert inspect the content to make sure that whatever we're releasing is sound, sound from an

educational perspective so that when a student is using the content, it won't be just computer generated, AI generated content. Similarly, with ⁓ things that we might want to release in the future, like an AI career coach, we're not going to turn over students just to an A AI career coach to let the AI tell them what they should be doing. There'll always be a an element of human touch

in there to make sure that whatever the AI is suggesting is actually real, it's not made up that students can't get around it, students you can't ask it three times the same question and get a different response, that kind of thing. So we're being very careful around how we use AI, especially when it comes to the AI with the interfaces with students and teachers.

Jeffrey Bradbury (11:14)

You

know, Jason, there's a lot of things that I'm excited about with this year at ISTE. For anybody that's gonna be down in Orlando over the next couple of days, what can they expect when they visit the Edmonton booth?

Jason Bass (11:24)

you can expect to learn a lot more about what we're doing outside of the couple of features that we've been discussing here. We're innovating a lot ⁓ at the Edmentum. We've ⁓ we've invested a lot ⁓ of time and effort into building out our career connected learning ⁓ system. Can learn about our i our ⁓ excuse me, our road trip nation relationship. We're doing a block party.

With Road Trip Nation, come visit the booth. come see, come see what we're doing. Come learn about come come actually look and see how Road Trip Nation videos are integrated into our courseware system. And I think that you'll learn a lot about the innovation and the cool tools that we're doing to also save teachers time within our products. We have a new grading workflow system that we'll be releasing soon that will save teachers a lot of time. And we're very excited about those kinds of things as well.

Jeffrey Bradbury (12:16)

Talking today to Jason Bass, the Senior Vice President of Courses and Career at Ed Mentum. And Jason, first of all, thank you so much for being with us on the program today. I'm looking forward to seeing you in just a few short days in Orlando. It's going to be hot. It's going to be wonderful. 20,000 educators approximately are going to be there, soaking in every single thing that they can. I'm going to give you the last word here. When a teacher comes to the Edmentum booth, what do you want them to walk away with?

What do you want them to be talking about? And most importantly, what would you love to see them turnkey into their school districts?

Jason Bass (12:50)

I would want a teacher to come to our booth and realize how we can help engage the students with them. That we're a partner with the teacher. We don't want to replace the teacher. We want to help provide the tools to the teacher to help engage students. You'll see that throughout the through through line from all everything that we're doing at at Edmentum

I would want teachers to walk away understanding that the platform is the platform of the future, that it's a platform that can save them time, and saving time means being able to spend more time with students. That's what I would want to walk away with. Our booth's at 1422, so come visit us at the booth. Come visit us Monday night, ⁓ June twenty-ninth at six PM at

Tafer's Tavern, and we're doing a block party there together with Road Trip Nation. You'll see the big green RV outside. ⁓ come check us out, come learn about the Road Trip Nation's origin story, and come learn about Edmentum.

Jeffrey Bradbury (13:43)

I'm certainly looking forward to checking it out. We're going to be doing a lot of coverage with Edmentum over the next couple of days. So stick around to Teacher Cast. You can find out everything over at teachercast.net forward slash edmentum. We're going have all of our shows and coverage on that page. And of course, if you like, like and subscribe us to all of our channels, we're going to be making sure our YouTube channel and all of our social medias are up. And of course, we're going to be putting everything out on our newsletter. Jason, for those who can't make it Tour Orlando, where can we go to learn more information about these great new products?

Jason Bass (14:11)

Best place is edmentum dot com. ⁓ take a look. Where all of our announcements are there. ⁓ best place to learn about edmentum.

Jeffrey Bradbury (14:19)

We've been talking today all about CTE and how you can bring a great career in technical education into your school district. I highly recommend you guys check out all the great stuff that's happening at Edmentum over at Edmentum.com today. And that wraps up our episode here featuring Edmentum. Looking forward to the next couple of days. If you guys are going to be down at Izti, stop on by, find me in the hallways, take a selfie. Would love to meet you guys. And of course, would love to see you guys having fun at the Edmentum booth. On behalf of Jason and everybody here on the Edmentum team, my name is Jeff Bradbury.

Reminding you guys to keep up the great work in your classrooms and continue sharing your passions with your students.