Carin Nuernberg and I first met years ago at an UPCEA event. When I saw on LinkedIn that Carin has taken on a new role as head of academic strategy and partnerships at Collage AI, I knew I wanted to learn more. Carin graciously agreed to answer my questions.
Q: Let’s start with Collage AI and your new role. Tell us about the company and what you will be doing as head of academic strategy and partnerships.
A: First off, thank you very much for asking me these questions, Josh!
Collage AI is a new public benefit corporation focused on improving student learning outcomes in higher education. To help do this, we have created a platform with a scaffolded environment that allows faculty to quickly create and refine educational materials, provide formative exercises and summative assessment for students, integrate contextual tutoring capabilities, and gain insights into student engagement and performance, all enhanced by AI.
Our early work has been guided by the research of Harvard physics professor and Collage AI Chief Learning Officer Kelly Miller, who has spent over 15 years studying effective uses of technology to improve educational outcomes for students. With Collage AI, she was able to achieve a 62 percent knowledge gain in one of her courses this past spring, which was incredibly exciting for us.
I see my role as head of academic strategy and partnerships first and foremost as building a community of faculty and instructional innovators vested in learning together and discovering ways to improve teaching and learning through meaningful and measured uses of AI. I was drawn to Collage AI because, from the start, it is putting evidence-based pedagogy at the center of design and doing the hard work to embed research in product experimentation. An important challenge as we grow is to stay true to these values. We recently held a symposium with thought leaders across more than 20 institutions of all types to learn how faculty are working with AI and gain important feedback that shapes our direction—and it is this kind of collaboration that will be our North Star.
My first goal is to help broaden the work Kelly has done so that we can understand best practices and uses of AI in other disciplines. My work involves a tremendous amount of listening and learning and then bringing what I hear to the Collage AI team to continually improve our platform so that it is truly something that faculty see benefit in using. Taking a step further, if we get the platform right, faculty and students should see tangible increases in learning, and in a way that incentivizes and improves interaction between them.
Because we are a PBC, by design, our work needs to have a tangibly positive impact on society, and that is extremely motivating for our team. We are all passionate about education and want to be on the side of creating possible solutions that improve outcomes for students. I think a lot about the six-year college graduation rate at roughly 60 percent and how we can collectively devise ways to get that higher.
Q: When we first met, you were serving in a leadership role in online education at Berklee College of Music. You started your career as an instructional designer. Would you take us through your career and educational progression, drawing the threads together that led you to your current new leadership role?
A: My path to education was likely preordained, with a mom who was an elementary school teacher and a dad who spent his career in the Army and civil service and said that he could have easily seen himself as a history teacher. Not long after grad school at the University of Washington, I began a contract position as part of the editorial team for Microsoft Encarta (a digital encyclopedia). That was my first foray into ed tech, working in a start-up environment committed to leveraging technology for educational innovation. I was also doing some freelance web design on the side.
That led to a position as an editor and instructional designer with the University of Washington’s distance learning program, which is now UW Professional and Continuing Education, just as online learning was emerging. I benefited greatly from colleagues who were steeped in instructional design and were kind enough to mentor me. I liked to think I helped them, too, with technical aspects of what was possible at that time, such as using SMIL to sync audio with visuals (I am dating myself!).
Originally from the East Coast, I increasingly felt the pull to be closer to family and went to work for a start-up called SmartPlanet in Cambridge, [Mass.], an idea ahead of its time—that you could create a learning ecosystem online with a combination of courses that we designed and were designed by users on the platform on a host of subjects, from the life of Anne Boleyn to programming in C. After a couple of years and successive acquisitions, I pondered what was next and found an ad for a position that felt like a dream job: to join a founding team creating an online school for Berklee College of Music. They needed help figuring out the online learning experience and working with faculty to create it … in music!
I absolutely love music (and the arts in general), and it felt like such an amazing challenge. That fueled a 20-year journey that involved launching and growing the online school to include hundreds of courses, certificate programs and degree programs, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, in addition to partnerships with Southern New Hampshire University, Coursera and edX. Berklee has a culture of innovation, and I was fortunate to work with many wonderful faculty and other colleagues who took a leap of faith to develop online programs that met a true need with learners around the world, and our work was recognized by UPCEA, including receiving the Strategic Innovation in Online Education award.
After Berklee, I spent several years at Interlochen Center for the Arts, building their online arts education platform, Interlochen Online, and working on their residential continuing education programs. I was drawn by Interlochen’s mission and the chance to have a blank canvas of sorts to create something hopefully impactful to learners of all ages and arts disciplines. It is probably clear that mission matters a great deal to me. Ultimately, I believe in the transformative aspects of education and in using technology to help increase access and connect faculty and students in impactful ways. And it’s thrilling and fulfilling to have a complex problem to solve with those goals in mind.
The explosive growth of AI reminds me a lot of when online education began to take root, that there was a lot of healthy skepticism alongside deep work to question, experiment, iterate and improve our use of it. The scale and stakes may be much bigger, but the opportunity to do good work in the space in service to faculty and students feels incredibly meaningful … and that led me to Collage AI. Ed tech can also overindex on certain fields and application spaces, so I was excited that the Collage AI team saw important value in my experience in the arts and humanities as we look to support experiences that strengthen human connection in an AI era.
Q: What advice do you have for our colleagues working in and around the world of learning design and educational technology who are interested in exploring strategic leadership opportunities within our ecosystem?
A: Create AI agents to clear the administrative trees to see through the forest. I’m kidding—I wish it could be that simple! The opportunities I’ve had came less from having a master plan than from saying yes to interesting problems and being willing to listen and learn continuously. Whether you’re an instructional designer or technologist, spend time with faculty and students and listen carefully to the challenges they’re trying to solve beyond the single project you may be working with them on. How do they spend their time, and what do they think about related to teaching and learning?
I’d also encourage people to build experience across different parts of the ecosystem. Some of the most valuable perspectives I’ve gained came from moving between higher education institutions and mission-driven organizations. Those experiences taught me to appreciate both the realities faculty face and the complexity of building technology that truly supports them. And I would say it’s great to get outside your own institution or organization to test assumptions and gain different perspectives.
Last year, I enrolled in a part-time executive doctoral program at Boston University in higher education leadership, and it has given me tremendous insight across the higher education landscape and allowed me not only to learn from great faculty and fellow students whose work spans all areas of higher education, but from experts who are brought in regularly to share their work and insights. It has exceeded my expectations in many ways and given me space to reflect and connect dots in incredibly helpful ways that inform my work. Organizations like UPCEA are also great channels.
Lastly, this is definitely a moment to stay curious. Patrick Mullane at Harvard Business School Online talks a lot about this. AI is creating extraordinary opportunities, but it’s also raising important questions that deserve thoughtful exploration. The leaders who will have the greatest impact won’t necessarily be the ones with the deepest technical expertise. They’ll be the people who can bring together faculty, researchers, technologists and institutional leaders to ask good questions, evaluate evidence and keep student learning at the center of every decision. I hope that is helpful. Thank you again, Josh!
