Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Stephen Laster: When disruptive ways of doing a job are introduced via technology, you
have to create the conditions, number one, for people to learn.
So how are we educating our instructional designers? How are we educating our facilitators, our
faculty?
And then, number two, you have to create the conditions where smart failures are rewarded.
Right. Otherwise you end up being very brittle and very risk averse.
[00:00:32] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to another episode of the EdTech Connect podcast. If you've
been following the evolution of digital learning, chances are you've seen the influence of today's
guest, Stephen Laster. Stephen is currently the CEO of panopto, where he's leading the charge
to transform learning through an AI first video platform. With a career spanning executive roles
at McGraw Hill, Education, D2L, Ellucian and Harvard Business School, Stephen has
consistently been at the forefront of digital transformation in education.
From helping scale McGraw Hill's digital learning platform to reinventing project strategies at
D2L and Ellucian, he shaped how millions of learners engage with content. His leadership
blends technical expertise with a passion for accessible, impactful learning. Whether serving
adult learners or pioneering simulation tech at Harvard, Steven's work is about breaking barriers
and unlocking potential.
[00:01:35] Jeff Dillon: Well, welcome to the show, Stephen. I'm happy to have you today.
[00:01:38] Stephen Laster: Thank you. It's great to be here with you.
[00:01:40] Jeff Dillon: Well, let's start off and talk about your background a little bit. I saw you've
held a Merchant Mariner master certification.
How does that adventurous side of your life intersect with your leadership style in edtech?
[00:01:55] Stephen Laster: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I did start out at a very young age
working around boats and boatyards. I started in boatyards when I was age 13 and I do hold my
Coast Guard license, 50 ton license.
I would say, you know, everything that I've learned out at sea really has helped my leadership
style in terms of being a really master problem solver, in terms of helping people work together
to bring the best out of teams. And I think it's given me the ability to stay calm and stay cool as
we navigate edtech, universities and companies.
[00:02:32] Jeff Dillon: Through transformation, you've led digital transformation at some of the
biggest names in education. Parker Business School, McGraw Hill, D2L, now Canopto. What
has drawn you consistently to this intersection of education and technology?
[00:02:52] Stephen Laster: Yeah, you know, it's very personal for me. I am very dyslexic and I grew
up in a K12 environment in the late 70s and early 80s where that wasn't well understood.
So I was known as lazy, sloppy, making silly math mistakes. If I just Rolled down my shirts and
sit up sitting straight. I would do better at school. Obviously all of that was nonsense.
I was very lucky. My father, through happenstance, brought home an Apple II in about 1981.
And I took to it like unbelievably, to the point where I wrote a spell checker and a word processor
for it and was one of the first kids in my high school to turn in papers on a dot matrix printer and
really went from being a failing student to a student because I was able to get my ideas out
through technology.
And I think that was what has drawn me into the power of technology for teaching and learning
and guided a lot of my career.
[00:03:54] Jeff Dillon: Wow, there's a lot there. Well, during that time at McGraw Hill, you really
helped build large scale digital learning ecosystems right at really a moment when digital was
becoming core, not optional. And I think you've also been open about like, being dyslexic gives
you a very personal lens on how people actually experience learning tools. Looking back, how
has that combination shaped the way you're thinking about digital education has evolved since
then. What do you see differently now that you may have missed at the time?
[00:04:29] Stephen Laster: I don't know if it's so much missing. I think some of the themes are
consistent. I think now the state of the art gives us even more opportunity to create agency for
students and for instructors. It's become even more easy to really look. Learning is innately a
human endeavor, and most of us are inspired by mentors and teachers and others in our
learning journey. But we also need to be able to succeed and struggle on our own to scale it.
And I think over the past 20 years, digital technologies have continued to evolve such that doing
that in ways that make the technology transparent, in ways that make the learning more efficient,
has only become easier. And that's what continues to excite me today.
[00:05:17] Jeff Dillon: You've led technology from the inside of a complex institution as CIO at
Harvard Business School, and now you're applying those lessons in a product role at panopto.
What leadership lessons carried over and what surprised you once you cross from campus
leadership into building tools for campuses at scale?
[00:05:41] Stephen Laster: You know, my time at HBS and my time at Babson were invaluable, I
think, in terms of really making sure whether it was at McGraw D2L or an Alpineopto, that we
really, really, really put the customer at the center of what we do. I think my time on campus
helped me understand how precious that teaching moment is, how little room for error there is.
The academic calendar doesn't have slack time in it. And few people get an education to be
technologists. Right? They get an education to make an impact.
And so those lessons that I brought now to the provider side I think have really allowed me to
understand what it means to have a great product and a great offering. And I would not have
been successful but for the experiences at Babson and.
[00:06:32] Jeff Dillon: At HBS and for anyone who may not be as close to the space, panopto
often shows up quietly but sits right at the center of teaching, learning institutional knowledge at
a high level. What is panopto? What role does it play inside the broader edtech?
[00:06:49] Stephen Laster: Yeah, you know, panopto was incubated and created at Carnegie Mellon
University. Forever grateful for that. But I think it really shows our authentic focus.
It was born to solve a really interesting problem and that is how do you extend through time and
boundary? List the notion of what happened in the classroom and what panopto is able to do is
capture classroom lectures and activities. It's also able to ingest curriculum materials and
whether it's materials or a live lecture, turn that into video or avatar driven video.
It's able to chunk that up into learning objectives. It's able to infuse checks for knowledge and
feedback into it and organize it in a portal where it's findable and addressable and integrated into
the course via the LMS.
So that for the 60% of us who are primary visual and auditory learners, we're able to take what
happens in the classroom, review it, reflect on it and learn from it on our own time, in our own
place.
And whether it's on ground or online, that modality of learning is just adds to the richness of an
experience for a student.
[00:08:00] Jeff Dillon: You've described panopto as an AI first platform and that phrase gets
thrown around a lot right now.
[00:08:07] Stephen Laster: It does.
[00:08:08] Jeff Dillon: What I'm curious about is what it really means in day to day use. How are
you applying AI in ways that actually make learning easier, more accessible or more effective?
And where do you think AI is already delivering real value versus just being aspirational?
[00:08:24] Stephen Laster: Sure. Really good questions and I would actually like to refine that. I
believe we're a human centered AI first platform.
So what we're not doing and what I don't believe in is AI is a substitute for learning community.
What I do believe is AI in core workflows expands the reach and breadth and access to that
community.
So what we're doing is we're letting AI do a job that's meaningful and useful, that Gives back
time to learner or instructor to drive community. So what does that mean?
We're using AI, as I said, to take your flat materials and turn them into avatar based video.
We're using AI to generate checks for knowledge and feedbacks and interactions so that we
drive learner engagement and help them understand where to spend their time and give
instructor feedback either by student or by class or by group of classes who's understanding
what and where things aren't succeeding. We're using AI for things like summarization, for
translation.
All activities that used to get in the way of broadening our learning community or were too
expensive frankly to pay people to do at scale.
So we're a big believer in holding pedagogy at the core of everything we do.
We know teaching and learning are innately human, but we also know that technology can help
scale it. And it's at that apex that we infuse our AI into those workflows.
[00:09:56] Jeff Dillon: As institutions head into 2026, the challenge I think isn't going to be how
to create more content. It's really making knowledge findable and reusable. With panopto sitting
at the intersection of teaching and training and really institutional memory, how are you helping
organizations scale knowledge sharing in a way that really works?
[00:10:24] Stephen Laster: Yeah, it's a really good question. If you had looked at panopto a few years
ago, our primary goal, and we still, this is still a significant goal and we do it with excellence, was
to integrate with the lms. And we do that with all the major LMS providers. We want the
technology to fade into the background. We believe in interoperability and we think that's critical.
More recently, we've also extended that through our panopto connect to get to alumni, to get to
prospects, to get to influencers, to make this institutional knowledge available to all the
institutions, constituencies and bodies. So that's one thing that we're doing to extend the
boundary and drive the connectedness over the lifetime of the individual to the institution.
The other thing that we're doing in partnership with Anthropic is really moving from search as
finding something to really allowing the institution to leverage their repository of visual
information and learning pathways. And so using that with AI to have an agent help you and to
make more of a recommendation approach so you can achieve your knowledge objectives, but
using content that you know is correct and you know is valuable because it's been curated by
the university.
And so those are two examples of what we're doing in 2026.
[00:11:50] Jeff Dillon: You're describing a world where knowledge has to move faster, be more
searchable and work across far more contexts than it's used to. And it puts a lot of pressure on
product design and long term thinking. Given your background building platforms and leading
product teams, what excites you the most about the current wave of ed tech innovation? And
where do you think we're finally getting things right?
[00:12:19] Stephen Laster: I think it's a few things. I think it's a great question.
I think we are driving down the cost of creating engaging digital learning experiences, which is
phenomenal because that increases access and it increases opportunity to innovate on the part
of course developers and instructors. And so that benefits learners. Frankly, I think the continued
drive towards interoperability as sort of stewarded by one EdTech, formerly IMS Global, is
paying incredible dividends. I think it is an ecosystem and so we're seeing the complexity of
putting together really powerful learning experiences continue to go down and they're easier to
put together.
And then I think thirdly, we are making it easier to deliver ideas visually and through audio and in
smaller chunks so that we're able to drive more informal learning or just in time learning. And I
think as jobs change, as the state of the art of the possible continues to change, I think that just
in time is really important and I think we're seeing that happen.
[00:13:31] Jeff Dillon: As much progress as we're seeing, I still feel like parts of digital learning
haven't really caught up to how people actually teach and learn and share knowledge. Where do
you see the biggest gaps that remain? And how do you see Panopto helping push the space
forward over the next few years?
[00:13:50] Stephen Laster: Yeah, I think the way panopto helps is we are laser focused on what we
do and we're very open and so we are big believers in being a good actor in an ecosystem.
What we do really well is that visual and audio learning moment. So steeped in feedback,
steeped in engagement and put in the context of a scope and sequence or a set of skills that
people need to learn. And we're passionate about ease of use and we're passionate about
partnerships and that's why we have 1600 incredibly happy university customers whose growth
and usage of us is increasing every day. I think if you look across the globe, you can find
evidence of folks who are using technology in incredible ways to deliver teaching and learning.
I think if I had any critique of us as a segment or an industry, it's we need to continue to have
space and time for faculty development and for supporting faculty and innovation. This is not A
technology issue. I think this is a time issue, frankly.
You're right. How we teach is changing. The question is, are we given the people that we charge
with delivering the education enough breathing room and time to innovate to be the best that
they can be?
[00:15:09] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. I think closing these gaps often sounds straightforward in theory,
but in practice it runs straight into governance and budgets and legacy systems and change
management.
You've seen that from both the campus side and the product side. How do you balance pushing
meaningful innovation forward with what's really implementable or inside large, complex
institutions?
[00:15:38] Stephen Laster: So I've always taken an approach of deliberate experimentation. I mean, I
was hired at Babson 25 years ago to start one of the country's first online MBA programs.
And at that time, you know, if you had walked onto Babson's campus, they would have told you
we are an in classroom, on ground and that's who we are.
But we had a provost and a president and a dean who sponsored Taking a Risk.
And we had a board, chuda Babson Spirit of Entrepreneurship, who was willing to fund the risk.
We didn't know how it was going to end up. It ended up succeeding beyond our expectations.
But we also did other experiments with technology that same time of Epson that frankly we
shelved that didn't have the impact that we wanted. And so I think it's about smart risk taking.
And I think number two, it's being very clear on the goals.
You know, I was fortunate to be at HBS at the very dawn of HBS Online as an example. Who
would have thought that HBS would have created an online offering that today is scaled beyond
their wildest dreams? And again, you had administrators and dean who saw the potential of the
future and were willing to take a smart risk.
In the center of all of that work was a focus on quality and being very clear about the outcomes
that we wanted to drive. And I think those ingredients should be celebrated and we need more of
that.
[00:17:06] Jeff Dillon: When you spend your time navigating execution and sveail and long term
decisions, you start seeing patterns beyond any single product or institution. From your seat as a
CEO, what macro trends are emerging across higher education and corporate learning that
institutions can't really afford to ignore?
[00:17:31] Stephen Laster: Yeah, I think so. In corporate learning, where we're growing incredibly
quickly and having major impacts.
I mean, to sound trite, jobs are changing faster than ever. And look, we all know that hiring and
retaining great people is at the core of any corporation's success.
And so the contract has to be to create opportunities to Quickly, reskill, retrain and continue to
grow people if we're going to have successful companies. That's the heart of everything we do at
Team Panopto. It's about the people and it's about giving them opportunities to grow and learn.
And I think we play, I know we play a big part of that with our customers as well. And so that's
critical in this moment of success.
And I would say the same thing is true in higher ed. I mean, particularly us. Higher ed is going
through a real period of uncertainty, as we know. And the only thing that I know is we need to
work in short iterations of experimentation, learn from them, adjust and move forward.
And that's also very has been true and is very true for business today.
So I celebrate teams and lead teams that take big complicated ideas, turn them into smaller
parts, sequence them, focus, get stuff done, learn and repeat.
[00:18:58] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, that's a repeatable cycle for sure. When new digital tools enter an
institution, the tech is often the easy part.
Where do you most often see friction or resistance show up and how do you navigate those
challenges in a way that builds the trust and momentum?
[00:19:18] Stephen Laster: So not just institutions, you know, but more broadly speaking, when
disruptive ways of doing a job are introduced via technology, you have to create the conditions,
number one, for people to learn.
So how are we educating our instructional designers? How are we educating our facilitators, our
faculty?
And then number two, you have to create the conditions where smart failures are rewarded.
Right. Otherwise you end up being very brittle and very risk averse.
In my career, have I built products that didn't go anywhere? Of course I have, but that's part of
innovation. Right. The point is knowing that you're in that modality and having way stations to
benchmark against and taking smart risks. And I think whether it's corporate or higher ed, it's
equally true.
Yeah.
[00:20:11] Jeff Dillon: As institutions or organizations grow, I think there's always tension
between moving fast and staying true to why you exist in the first place.
Processes creep in, priorities multiply, your focus can get fuzzy. How are you thinking about
culture as a way to keep innovation moving forward without losing that mission driven core?
[00:20:36] Stephen Laster: You know that that is a fantastic question and I am a big, big believer in
focus and benefited in my career from having mentors who really taught me the power of focus.
At Panopto we have three north stars. Number one, to be the leader in visual and auditory
learning in an open ecosystem.
Number two, to be the most customer centric edtech provider there is.
And number three, to be the Destination for the brightest and best who can build vibrant careers
at the company.
So those north stars don't change, they drive our decision making.
For Babson, it was being a leader in entrepreneurship. For hbs, it was being a living laboratory
of business.
I think every organization needs to know its birthright and needs to stay true to it, but then adapt
as opportunities and times change. And that's what I believe we're doing at Panopto today.
So it's the combination of agility and the willingness to evaluate how we're operating, but within
the context of durable North Stars, I think is paramount.
[00:21:47] Jeff Dillon: A lot of roadmaps focus on features, but the real question is how learning
changes for people.
[00:21:54] Stephen Laster: Yep.
[00:21:54] Jeff Dillon: Five years from now, how do you hope Naato fits into the daily experience
of learners and institutions? How do you see the edtech industry evolving around that?
[00:22:04] Stephen Laster: So I'm a little snarky on that topic and I'll get to your answer in a second.
But as a 30 year old, I was the guy who would stand up at the conference and challenge the
keynote speaker about their five year vision.
[00:22:18] Jeff Dillon: Right.
[00:22:19] Stephen Laster: And try and call him out on it. So I'm skeptical of futurists.
I will say that out front, especially right now.
[00:22:26] Jeff Dillon: How far out can you.
[00:22:27] Stephen Laster: Especially right now.
[00:22:28] Jeff Dillon: Right.
[00:22:29] Stephen Laster: What I will say is my wish for Panopto and I am leading the company so
that five years from now you still turn to us to really have the best expertise and best solutions
for visual and auditory learners.
And how we do that will be through the state of the art that makes us the most engaging,
efficient and effective for you. What those features look like, I'll tell you in five years.
[00:22:58] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, I love that.
As a final thought for emerging ed tech leaders who want to have the kind of cross sector impact
you've had, what's one piece of advice you wish you had earlier in your career?
[00:23:10] Stephen Laster: Not so much. I wish I had the happenstance that was invaluable. Let me
reframe your question.
So I was hired to Babson, as I said, to be the tech guy starting up this online MBA program.
And it happened that a week before the semester started they had a faculty member take leave
and they needed somebody to come teach problem solving and software design.
And so they just turned to me out of desperation. I didn't know how to teach, but they gave me a
faculty partner, mentor and for the next seven years I taught one or two courses a semester.
That teaching experience made me the ed tech leader that I am today.
So what I would say is, if you're really going to be passionate about anything you're making
technology for. Go do the job right.
It's just there's no substitute for experience of the Persona you're trying to serve.
[00:24:06] Jeff Dillon: I love that. Go do the job, everybody. Well, Stephen, it has been great to
have you on the show. I will put links to Panopto in the show notes. You can visit Panopto and
Anteconnect as well. And also Steven's LinkedIn profile put a link in there as well. So great to
have you on. Thank you, Steven.
[00:24:24] Stephen Laster: Love the conversation. Thank you, Jeff. Take care. Bye.
[00:24:27] Jeff Dillon: Bye.
[00:24:29] Jeff Dillon: As we wrap up this episode, remember EdTech Connect is your trusted
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[00:25:06] Stephen Laster: Reviews, trends and solutions.
[00:25:08] Jeff Dillon: Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
