Meet the Team: Ethan, Director of Analytics

We believe that true innovation happens when passionate people come together to collaborate, share ideas, and challenge the status quo of education technology.

Much of the best edtech gets built by people who've actually sat on both sides of the desk. People who've graded the papers, watched a student finally get it, and also stayed up wondering whether a tool is helping or just getting in the way.

So we're introducing the people behind Nectir: what they taught, what they struggled with, and what they're trying to fix. First up, our Director of Analytics, Ethan.

Meet Ethan!

1. Can you share a brief introduction to who you are, your background, and your role at Nectir?

Hey, so I'm Ethan. I am the Director of Analytics at Nectir, or functionally the benevolent data czar of the company. In my past life, I was a high school math and statistics teacher. I've taught AP Calculus and AP Statistics, as well as honors and remedial Math 2. I originally went to school to be a teacher and then, after only a single year of public school teaching, transitioned into data science. I've worked across telecommunications, smart home technology, and logistics, but I always wanted to work in educational technology and to combine my educational and analytical interests.

My work at Nectir is really quite broad. I function as the data engineer, the data scientist, in some ways a data product lead, as well as our lead researcher. My day-to-day might include building and maintaining data pipelines to connect various tools we use, running analytics, or producing predictions or plots for various people across the team. I also think about data privacy, personally identifiable information, how to manage it, as well as our research initiatives and attempting to understand the benefits and risk of AI in the classroom.

2. What were you like as a student? Was there a key moment in your educational journey that shaped how you think about learning?

I was a good student. I got good grades my entire time in school. Education was always important to my family. My parents come from fairly lower-class backgrounds and used education as a tool to propel themselves forward in life. There was never an option for me not to do well in school.

I was in 10th-grade Algebra 2, taught by Mr. Scott, and we were working on parabolas. We were discussing a problem about a rocket going to Mars. He was working through this problem with multiple lines of the equation. Eventually, the large constant at the very end - the c in the quadratic equation - he got tired of writing this seven- or eight-digit number and replaced it with BFN for "big f-ing number". He just kept writing BFN instead of the long number.

It was a really influential moment in my thinking about the softness of learning and the ability to push and pull on the learner's experience and to have fun with what you're doing. It relaxed my thinking of learning and my thinking of instructing learning experiences for students.

3. What pulled you toward edtech specifically, and what made Nectir the right place for you?

I love teaching. I loved the day-to-day act of being in the classroom, working with students. It was really fun, but public school teaching is also a grind. I was stressed and anxious and not sleeping well, so I had to make a change. I left teaching and got into analytics and data science.

Throughout this transition, I always wanted to work in educational technology. I really wanted to combine my love for teaching and education — and the change I believe it can bring — with my interest and skill in mathematics, statistics, data science, and systems thinking. I would work my data science job for a year, and then get the inspiration again to go out and seek an edtech job, would apply and apply and apply, and would get denied and denied and denied. I just kept trying. I sensed that my life's purpose, one thing that I really should pursue in my life, was to work at the intersection of education and technology and analytics.

In December of 2023, I made the decision to quit my job (with no job lined up) and go get an ed tech position over hell or high water. I cold emailed some companies, including Nectir, and it worked out.

Nectir was a great land for me because of a few reasons:

1. The company really wants to do well, to do right by the learner. The company really wants to have a positive impact on the learner, the instructor, and the learning environment. We're not here just to grab some cash and run; we really want to make a difference in the world.
2. They believed in me, frankly, and it was an early-stage company. Just the autonomy to go out and explore and build and kind of work across teams across the organization was just so exciting.

4. What's a problem in education you're genuinely excited to help solve?

More broadly, the question that everyone is thinking is, "How do we use this technology — both today and as well as where we can reasonably predict it will be in 2027 and 2028 — to improve the learning experience and construct meaningful, helpful, data-backed educational environments for the learner?”

That's a big question, and the honest answer is no one knows. We have ideas, and the learning sciences have come a long way in the past 20 or 30 years. But we can't just throw theory and evidence-based practice at the 60 or 70 million students in America and at the 1 billion or so across the world. It's a whole different ball game to distribute and operationalize those findings.

So the problem statement is: 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?

To break that down, the day-to-day problems we have to think about are:

• How do we integrate generative AI into an LMS course in 2026?
• How do we align it with constructivist educational theories?
• How do we empower the teacher to use their domain expertise while also guiding them through the technology and its appropriate applications? We can't expect them to be absolute experts.
• What are appropriate uses of AI in the classroom, and how much is too much?

A specific problem that Nectir and the wider community can tackle soon is nailing down some guidelines. When in the learning process is AI actually useful? And when is it just in the way, or even circumnavigating productive struggle?

Think back to before generative AI. If you're stuck on a chemistry problem, you work with a teacher, a peer, or a tutor. And a good tutor knows when to walk away. They give you 20 minutes, an hour, to just sit with it. They've read where you are, what you're crushing and what's a little outside your comfort zone, and they make a bet: if I back off, this student figures it out, struggles productively, and comes back a little more confident. Next time they need me less. And that's an awesome thing. We should absolutely push students to do that.

We haven't solved that in the AI chat paradigm. Maybe chat isn't even the right paradigm. How do we build in that time to let a student struggle, then re-engage them once they've pushed through a challenging stretch of material? This is a problem that good teachers have solved. This is not a problem that has currently been solved in the AI conversation paradigm that we live in. But it is a problem that we need to solve soon. More AI thrown at the classroom isn't the answer. More, more, more is not the answer. There's a nuanced balance that we should strive for, just like a tutor or skilled teacher.

5. What topic are you showing up to a PowerPoint party with?

I'd do a presentation on the flow arts, and in particular, poi. If you're unfamiliar, the flow arts are a collection of body-based movement arts, similar to juggling or color guard in marching band, but way cooler. There are a number of different props that people use. Example props are poi, rope dart, dragon staff, fans, or hula hoops.

I've been spinning poi now for about four or five years. It kind of came into my life at a moment where I needed to get out of my head and into my body, and I just fell in love. It is something I do when I just need to step away from things and just breathe. It's also a hobby I can take with me, and it's infinitely complex.

There's a bunch of fun YouTube videos about poi that you should explore, but in this PowerPoint presentation I would probably give you a rundown of a bit of history, a bit of flow grammar, and then maybe a live demo or two if you're lucky.

Come work with us

Ethan joined Nectir because he wanted to ask the hard questions and combine his interests with something bigger. If that sounds like you, we're hiring. Check out our open positions, follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest.