I’d want to see extensive research on the benefits of Ed-Tech products before they are unleashed on classrooms full of actual students.
“Making things easier for teachers” is often not the case and simultaneously creates costs for training and support at these institutions along with the exponential growth required to administer these new roles.
And then of course are the students themselves. How do iPads compare to textbooks? Do we trust LLMs to grade essays? How effective has multiple choice testing ever been?
There is surprisingly little thought put into bringing tech into the classroom. Most of the drive seems to come from a fear of being left behind, as if learning to use a consumer electronic device is somehow synonymous with learning how to maximize productivity with a computing device.
Yah. I am a teacher and I'm deeply skeptical of ed-tech. There is no substitute for doing the work (as the teacher or as the student).
I like that I have an automated gradebook and communications tool. I like that I can e-mail students and accept work done outside the room via Google Docs. And it's pretty great to be able to present slides from me or students, or occasionally look at a Desmos or Jupyter notebook. Khan is neat to get an instant read or to allow students to hear a topic explained a different way than I do. Playing a game in Gimkit is a way to break up the monotony of a class. I privately advise students they might want to consider Anki as a way to increase their long term retention of information.
Even though I've named a lot of technology, these things are about 10% of what we do. Even when I'm teaching about technology, a huge portion we do is pen, paper, careful thought, and discussion. I know students aren't trying to game; I know they've produced their own work; I know they've not become over-reliant on a crutch. And beyond this, the fundamental reason why a classroom works is not some assumption of my authority or my use of grades for leverage: it works based on the social connections formed in a classroom between the teacher and students, and between students with each other. Too much time on screens interrupts this.
Of course, I'd love high quality research to help guide me in making better choices in the room, but actionable educational research that has good enough methodology to be believed is rare.
I hear a lot of complaints about edtech from the teacher I’m married to, and this is a common thread in how it fails: it tries to automate away the classroom experience rather than empower the instructor. Most teachers, good ones anyway, don’t want to spend less time teaching, they want to spend less time fussing around with bullshit like marking late assignments complete in two different systems and responding to irate parent emails to reassure them that the assignment actually is marked complete where it matters, just not in the system they’re looking at. Not only do a lot of these systems try to automate the wrong thing — instruction — they totally fail where it counts by making more work for the teacher.
I worked with a lot of schools in my last company and unfortunately I don't think extensive research is the best road either. While I totally understand your position, this excuse is also used for only allowing pen and paper for math in highschool by teachers.
It takes a crazy amount of time to extensively research and prove things in education for a few reasons:
There is opposition to doing the research because teachers/parents don't want their students to be the first.
It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers.
It's expensive and mostly controlled by the big granters (ex. Gates Foundation).
Results are often looked at via testing measures (which if you look at assessments, sometimes they were proven by having 400 white kids in an affluent school use, aka not representative).
And so, we have a bit of an issue.
Almost no one teaches math via a spreadsheet even though most adults do. It isn't researched on the implications.
Data science as a class to qualify for credit to get into college is greatly contentious because it isn't proven. Even though it is clearly important to our current era.
In addition, teachers are human and so they don't necessarily teach with the 100% best proven methodologies day in and day out.
So I think it's important to realize that education is human. It's flawed and messy and isn't aligned to the best methods already. Sometimes you get lucky with a teacher that works for you and sometimes not.
My wife is an active, publishing education researcher who is currently doing in-classroom research related to technology.
It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers.
IRBs won't let this happen in actual classrooms. The allowed approach is typically extracurricular summer schools where everyone is aware of the research component. But this is only for a certain kind of quantitative research. Qualitative research doesn't necessarily need nor benefit from a control group as it can be carried out in situ.
Isn't it worth the effort to do the research instead of just seeing what happens when venture-backed companies introduce their for-profit wares into the classroom?
Certainly computers/calculators are useful sometimes (in particular when analyzing measured data), but for say 95% of mathematics, pen+paper seems appropriate? Taught properly, it's a highly pictorial subject and pen+paper is an extremely flexible medium.
One of the schools near us gives an ipad to every children from 1st grqde. Needless to say this instantly disqualified the school in my mind.
I’m not anti-screen, I think it’s good if my son uses a computer at home with things like kidpix, scratch, castle of dr brain, etc… But I think devices at school at that age are a potent distraction and I do not trust a school to be thoughtful about the usage of tech (the school I mentioned thinks it’s also a good idea to have some instant messaging app in grade 1 betweeen all the kids).
There have been many startups that have been just this. They all have died except for a very few.
Most of my edtech founder friends were motivated to serve and transform education because it didn’t work for them and they realized it didn’t work for most students.
Codeacademy is a good example of a successful one.
Companies that succeeded, in some cases enabling inner city school children to perform on at a college level, died. CiteLighter is a good example. There have been countless ones in math.
The reason the bad edtech products win is because they are built to survive the incredibly disjointed buying groups who all have, explicitly, their own agendas when it comes to anything in the classroom.
If students & teachers could decide where their classroom’s tech budget went, there would be a revolution in education in half a generation.
I've worked briefly in school where kids had iPads since 1st grade and in my opinion it was a catastrophe. Most obvious problem is simple – it's very difficult to get kids concentrated on anything. Tiny working memory and control over cognitive load makes it especially hard for kids to learn and no distraction helps. And iPad with especially funny, "engaged" and other material meant to be helpful created a tons on these – "Look, how colors change in the animation!", "I wonder what I can do with fingers on screen?", "Can I scroll slower and faster?", "Copmetition! Who is the fastest scroller!", "What math?".
do you also demand extensive academic research for benefits of tools for developers, business etc? Yes, there is an issue with tools and software that creates more problems that they solve (just as in business) but that doesnt mean all technology is bad.
The environment of a school is much more rigid and authoritarian than many workplaces (e.g. everyone must use this exact thing in this exact way all together right now), and students don't usually have much choice in their school. The tools are often taxpayer funded as well. Not to mention the fact that those affected by ed-tech are often minors. So I think it's reasonable for there to be some extra scrutiny surrounding a lot of ed-tech.
Maybe as a venture funded startup they don’t. I run a modestly successful edtech business that I have line of sight to making my full time gig in a few years if growth continues.
www.reportcardcomments.com
I think consumer edtech that makes products focused on making individual teachers’ lives easier has a niche. Maybe not as a 100x unicorn, but as a one person business, there’s plenty of opportunity yet out there.
Originally we were targeting schools as our main customers but found it incredible difficult to sell too.
The main reason probably that the beneficiaries (the students) are not the decision makers (the school admin) and that our product (air quality) is also not a core aspect of a school.
There also seems to be a run to the bottom regarding quality of products in many schools and no appreciation for sustainable and long lasting products.
We moved on in the meantime which is a pity because we would have loved to work more with students on air pollution and climate change.
Is this perhaps a general failure mode of private investment into civic institutions? Centralized decision-making has inevitable blind-spots and, as a general rule, doesn't work well for larger scale resource distribution problems.
Hey, but I got a great pricing deal to run our apps at this cloud provider no one uses and we have no experience with so you’ll have to migrate everything there!
I think this really depends on your definition of EdTech. I don’t think anyone would contend that turnitin or Ellucian haven’t scaled well.
Tools that cater to the organisations that have money can absolutely do well, but trying to sell to people without the means to buy your stuff will always be unsuccessful.
Yeah canvas and blackboard were are one point startups, I'm sure there's some products that can scale, but the market is probably driven by bureaucratic compliance more than a genuine desire to improve the quality of education for students
I only have experience of the university side of EdTech, but in my experience people were extremely interested in anything that would make it easier for lecturers to do their jobs, improve student experience, etc.
What they weren’t interested in was anything that changed the general dynamic of the university or replaced their core business.
Marking tools, stuff that helps deliver lectures, anything of that variety was all in-bounds, and lots of departments were happy to explore new things.
What would not sell was anything that required selling directly to students, because they simply won’t spend the money.
I'm surprised it didn't do more than touch on probably the biggest reason: we already pay a huge amount for education out of taxes, so the educational budgets are allocated by bureaucrats, and not by education consumers (or their parents).
I think you're missing the fundamental mechanic here.
Spence signalling[1] won the econ Nobel back in 2001. It says that the cost of signalling in a market for imperfect information ends on the one emitting the signal.
For education and jobs, the signal is your degree (hence the huge career difference between dropping out one week before getting a degree and completing). The cost of the degree will fall on the student.
The employer can easily diminish the hiring problem by pre-sorting applicants by education. Students know there is a large difference in career outcomes between university education required jobs and the ones below that.
Colleges want to extract as close to 100% of this lifetime earning difference as they can.
The main question at this point in education research is "how much" signalling is a component of education versus actually teaching skills.
For tech, almost no certificate provides a comparable signal to a real degree.
I think another huge factor is that you are making a prediction on the future value of your degree over the next 40-50 years as a 17 year old who is probably more focused on succeeding socially and sexually. You add in the student loans that may or may not be forgiven at some time in the future and the free market is not in play. Same with Healthcare, insurance clouds all free market mechanics.
I'm a huge capitalist and I think we need to be honest about where capitalism isn't working. It's always due to free market mechanics being removed from the equation by layers of obscurity. I don't know the right answer but this shit is not working
Yes, in particular for PreK-12 schools here in the States. Here in NJ nearly all board members know little or nothing about education, but are elected as popularity contest. Superintendents get paid big salaries and are often severely under qualified. There is a lot of bureaucracy created by this.
Many companies that target PreK-12 also know there is a lot of incompetent admins with boat loads of cash. Pricing gouging is very common.
People are shocked when they learn about 70% of property tax bills goes to the school district, not the municipality or county.
> See, when you build an education product, you’re competing against two massive institutions: the formal education system (schools, colleges, state universities, etc.), and the laws and cultural expectations around that system.
What you’re competing against is the natural tension between these things and the demands of the market.
You get a good sense of this after 5 years at a math tutoring startup that’s always grappling with the dual expectation that you give the kid the answer quickly (“the customer is always right”) vs. you patiently sit with them until they learn (the goal of formal education).
"See, when you build an education product, you’re competing against two massive institutions: the formal education system (schools, colleges, state universities, etc.), and the laws and cultural expectations around that system."
Well, there's your problem. I worked for years in those markets, cooperating with their needs, not fighting them. You succeed in such markets by helping them do what they already do... just better. Disruption happens at a procedural level, not by changing what they do. So does the monetization: "We just saved you $20K per year, and only charge $10K - everyone wins."
The UK had a number of competitive and teacher-led EdTech AI startups delivering lesson planning, like briskteaching.com & teachematic. They have some inroads with schools and colleges now. And probably would have disrupted up into the procedural level naturally.
However the government decided to give £2m without any open procedure to a new company to build similar tech from scratch, and their PR acted as if this was groundbreaking, while the tech they promised, largely already existed and was in use by many teachers: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-support-for-teachers-...
Who wants to invest in teachematic or brisk teaching, when your competition can get millions from the government without process and launch the same ideas over a time frame to starve you out? With the market overcrowded, prices are forced to lower, and many companies will now go bust because of this kind of unnecessary government intervention. Brisk Teaching has already had to make most things free. You cannot really be more cooperative with the system than that, but tough luck they still won't get the £2m despite proving out the idea before those funded.
Shortly we will likely see the institutions in control of education like Ofsted mandate, approve or limit the tooling used, and most startups will die out. Rather than several low cost startups bringing high amounts of value, tax payers have spent millions on salaries for people with no AI background to create duplicate products, and the net value to education for actual students is therefore lowered as a result. So you can't disrupt this procedural level very effectively when the government intervenes early on.
Another way to make money in education is to make life easier for the teacher and have the students pay for the privilege. Automated grading with online quizzes and tests is an example of this phenomenon in higher education.
> Disruption happens at a procedural level, not by changing what they do
I love everything about this statement. I've seen this from both sides, as a seller of software and buyer/user of software. All of the stickiest changes happen procedural level, usually not through full-blown change but instead moderate tweaks and improvements.
One way I like to think about it is this: if my software is all of the sudden unavailable, what will users do? Can they keep working? Will they keep working?
Specific to education, I would hope that many core school functions like teaching would simply revert to simpler methods or alternatives rather than grind to a halt.
But I assume that the process of convincing the buyers to use your software runs headfirst into confusion over how much work it will be to learn something new rather than stick with (mostly) status quo.
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“Making things easier for teachers” is often not the case and simultaneously creates costs for training and support at these institutions along with the exponential growth required to administer these new roles.
And then of course are the students themselves. How do iPads compare to textbooks? Do we trust LLMs to grade essays? How effective has multiple choice testing ever been?
There is surprisingly little thought put into bringing tech into the classroom. Most of the drive seems to come from a fear of being left behind, as if learning to use a consumer electronic device is somehow synonymous with learning how to maximize productivity with a computing device.
I like that I have an automated gradebook and communications tool. I like that I can e-mail students and accept work done outside the room via Google Docs. And it's pretty great to be able to present slides from me or students, or occasionally look at a Desmos or Jupyter notebook. Khan is neat to get an instant read or to allow students to hear a topic explained a different way than I do. Playing a game in Gimkit is a way to break up the monotony of a class. I privately advise students they might want to consider Anki as a way to increase their long term retention of information.
Even though I've named a lot of technology, these things are about 10% of what we do. Even when I'm teaching about technology, a huge portion we do is pen, paper, careful thought, and discussion. I know students aren't trying to game; I know they've produced their own work; I know they've not become over-reliant on a crutch. And beyond this, the fundamental reason why a classroom works is not some assumption of my authority or my use of grades for leverage: it works based on the social connections formed in a classroom between the teacher and students, and between students with each other. Too much time on screens interrupts this.
Of course, I'd love high quality research to help guide me in making better choices in the room, but actionable educational research that has good enough methodology to be believed is rare.
It takes a crazy amount of time to extensively research and prove things in education for a few reasons:
There is opposition to doing the research because teachers/parents don't want their students to be the first.
It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers.
It's expensive and mostly controlled by the big granters (ex. Gates Foundation).
Results are often looked at via testing measures (which if you look at assessments, sometimes they were proven by having 400 white kids in an affluent school use, aka not representative).
And so, we have a bit of an issue.
Almost no one teaches math via a spreadsheet even though most adults do. It isn't researched on the implications.
Data science as a class to qualify for credit to get into college is greatly contentious because it isn't proven. Even though it is clearly important to our current era.
In addition, teachers are human and so they don't necessarily teach with the 100% best proven methodologies day in and day out.
So I think it's important to realize that education is human. It's flawed and messy and isn't aligned to the best methods already. Sometimes you get lucky with a teacher that works for you and sometimes not.
It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers.
IRBs won't let this happen in actual classrooms. The allowed approach is typically extracurricular summer schools where everyone is aware of the research component. But this is only for a certain kind of quantitative research. Qualitative research doesn't necessarily need nor benefit from a control group as it can be carried out in situ.
Isn't it worth the effort to do the research instead of just seeing what happens when venture-backed companies introduce their for-profit wares into the classroom?
I’m not anti-screen, I think it’s good if my son uses a computer at home with things like kidpix, scratch, castle of dr brain, etc… But I think devices at school at that age are a potent distraction and I do not trust a school to be thoughtful about the usage of tech (the school I mentioned thinks it’s also a good idea to have some instant messaging app in grade 1 betweeen all the kids).
Most of my edtech founder friends were motivated to serve and transform education because it didn’t work for them and they realized it didn’t work for most students.
Codeacademy is a good example of a successful one.
Companies that succeeded, in some cases enabling inner city school children to perform on at a college level, died. CiteLighter is a good example. There have been countless ones in math.
The reason the bad edtech products win is because they are built to survive the incredibly disjointed buying groups who all have, explicitly, their own agendas when it comes to anything in the classroom.
If students & teachers could decide where their classroom’s tech budget went, there would be a revolution in education in half a generation.
But they are dead last on the list today.
I've worked briefly in school where kids had iPads since 1st grade and in my opinion it was a catastrophe. Most obvious problem is simple – it's very difficult to get kids concentrated on anything. Tiny working memory and control over cognitive load makes it especially hard for kids to learn and no distraction helps. And iPad with especially funny, "engaged" and other material meant to be helpful created a tons on these – "Look, how colors change in the animation!", "I wonder what I can do with fingers on screen?", "Can I scroll slower and faster?", "Copmetition! Who is the fastest scroller!", "What math?".
www.reportcardcomments.com
I think consumer edtech that makes products focused on making individual teachers’ lives easier has a niche. Maybe not as a 100x unicorn, but as a one person business, there’s plenty of opportunity yet out there.
Originally we were targeting schools as our main customers but found it incredible difficult to sell too.
The main reason probably that the beneficiaries (the students) are not the decision makers (the school admin) and that our product (air quality) is also not a core aspect of a school.
There also seems to be a run to the bottom regarding quality of products in many schools and no appreciation for sustainable and long lasting products.
We moved on in the meantime which is a pity because we would have loved to work more with students on air pollution and climate change.
This is an example of a standard problem in enterprise computing where the people with purchasing authority are far removed from the actual users.
Tools that cater to the organisations that have money can absolutely do well, but trying to sell to people without the means to buy your stuff will always be unsuccessful.
What they weren’t interested in was anything that changed the general dynamic of the university or replaced their core business.
Marking tools, stuff that helps deliver lectures, anything of that variety was all in-bounds, and lots of departments were happy to explore new things.
What would not sell was anything that required selling directly to students, because they simply won’t spend the money.
Spence signalling[1] won the econ Nobel back in 2001. It says that the cost of signalling in a market for imperfect information ends on the one emitting the signal.
For education and jobs, the signal is your degree (hence the huge career difference between dropping out one week before getting a degree and completing). The cost of the degree will fall on the student.
The employer can easily diminish the hiring problem by pre-sorting applicants by education. Students know there is a large difference in career outcomes between university education required jobs and the ones below that.
Colleges want to extract as close to 100% of this lifetime earning difference as they can.
The main question at this point in education research is "how much" signalling is a component of education versus actually teaching skills.
For tech, almost no certificate provides a comparable signal to a real degree.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
I work in higher ed and have used this stuff forever. What OP said is simpler and closer to the easier answer.
The person PAYING isn't the consumer; the actual consumer (me and the students) have very little say or influence in how these things work.
If you wanted to make effective, I don't know, mops, you'd INTERVIEW JANITORS AND GET THEIR FEEDBACK, and somehow make that feedback actually matter.
This industry DOESNT DO THAT.
I'm a huge capitalist and I think we need to be honest about where capitalism isn't working. It's always due to free market mechanics being removed from the equation by layers of obscurity. I don't know the right answer but this shit is not working
Many companies that target PreK-12 also know there is a lot of incompetent admins with boat loads of cash. Pricing gouging is very common.
People are shocked when they learn about 70% of property tax bills goes to the school district, not the municipality or county.
What you’re competing against is the natural tension between these things and the demands of the market.
You get a good sense of this after 5 years at a math tutoring startup that’s always grappling with the dual expectation that you give the kid the answer quickly (“the customer is always right”) vs. you patiently sit with them until they learn (the goal of formal education).
Well, there's your problem. I worked for years in those markets, cooperating with their needs, not fighting them. You succeed in such markets by helping them do what they already do... just better. Disruption happens at a procedural level, not by changing what they do. So does the monetization: "We just saved you $20K per year, and only charge $10K - everyone wins."
The UK had a number of competitive and teacher-led EdTech AI startups delivering lesson planning, like briskteaching.com & teachematic. They have some inroads with schools and colleges now. And probably would have disrupted up into the procedural level naturally.
However the government decided to give £2m without any open procedure to a new company to build similar tech from scratch, and their PR acted as if this was groundbreaking, while the tech they promised, largely already existed and was in use by many teachers: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-support-for-teachers-...
Who wants to invest in teachematic or brisk teaching, when your competition can get millions from the government without process and launch the same ideas over a time frame to starve you out? With the market overcrowded, prices are forced to lower, and many companies will now go bust because of this kind of unnecessary government intervention. Brisk Teaching has already had to make most things free. You cannot really be more cooperative with the system than that, but tough luck they still won't get the £2m despite proving out the idea before those funded.
Shortly we will likely see the institutions in control of education like Ofsted mandate, approve or limit the tooling used, and most startups will die out. Rather than several low cost startups bringing high amounts of value, tax payers have spent millions on salaries for people with no AI background to create duplicate products, and the net value to education for actual students is therefore lowered as a result. So you can't disrupt this procedural level very effectively when the government intervenes early on.
I love everything about this statement. I've seen this from both sides, as a seller of software and buyer/user of software. All of the stickiest changes happen procedural level, usually not through full-blown change but instead moderate tweaks and improvements.
One way I like to think about it is this: if my software is all of the sudden unavailable, what will users do? Can they keep working? Will they keep working?
Specific to education, I would hope that many core school functions like teaching would simply revert to simpler methods or alternatives rather than grind to a halt.
But I assume that the process of convincing the buyers to use your software runs headfirst into confusion over how much work it will be to learn something new rather than stick with (mostly) status quo.