The EdTech Chicken and Egg Problem
I've worked in edtech for almost 10 years now in B2B, B2C, and nonprofit contexts. I've seen real product market fit, and a lot of poor product market fit.
Edtech has been one of the largest tech disappointments of the internet era. The internet has transformed everything about how people learn. I always joke that Youtube is actually the best edtech product. And now, I guess chatGPT and other LLMs. But these products have a lot of problems, specifically around accuracy, pedagogy and lack of assessment. (Research shows low-stakes assessment is when the moment of learning often happens.)
Within the "Ed tech space", a lot of products have failed in my view. The best product I built was free online science simulations (virtual labs).
I've worked on products that were financially successful but its debatable if they helped helped users learn much.
Edtech companies that sell to parents are making a product for parents. The goal is often to make parents feel good about the choices they are making for their kids. For example, give your kids an ipad with Educational games, and now you're a better parent.
Edtech products that sell to business are making a product for employers. Much of these products end up being about tracking employees rather than real skill development.
The reason making a product for educators ends up being more effective in terms of learning outcomes is because most teachers have their incentives aligned - they want their students to learn more and be able to apply that learning.
Which leads me to this chicken and egg problem - because education is a system, technology either has to fit into that system or break the system. Breaking the system can be costly and have lots of undesirable side effects. I imagine this is a lot like healthcare / healthtech - you can't just move fast and break things.
Adoption of products in EdTech (via educators) is more involved than pure B2C but less profitable than B2B, making it costly and painful.
From both a product/context and business model perspective, it's hard. This is partly why I think the non profit model has worked the best in education (Khan academy, Phet, etc). Without having to optimize for profit, you have the freedom to build products that fit better into the existing system. You can serve people who can't afford to pay you, nor do they have the power to convince their administrations to pay you.
However - I still think we haven't done enough - what is the next step?
I think if someone asked me where the next 2B in edtech funding should go, I would suggest highly specialized nonprofits each with a focused goal like teaching meaningful reading skill at the late elementary level or getting kids excited about math at the middle school level. Focus these nonprofits to have educator obsession - the educators trying to solve these problems in the real world.
Ultimately, for real outcomes, all these products need to be free or sponsored. I do think paid products selling to school districts work (these businesses do exist) but this adds a lot of friction that slows product development down, and of course, mucks up the incentives. These paid products often want strong moats - so they lock districts into multi-year contracts and then stop improving the product. They generate metrics administrators like, with products educators are forced to use but aren't improving. Nonprofits have a magical freedom to be "moat-less."
Thanks for articulating this problem so well. I have dabbled in EdTech ideas as side projects but have always faced the dilemma you mentioned -- if you build it for schools districts, parents, you could make money but then you loose the purpose of teaching.
Technologies like ChatGPT etc. promised to revolutionized Ed-Tech but in my opinion have miserably failed (except if you count getting answers to your homework problems without trying revolutionary)
I also think that a lot of EdTech products and a lot of Youtube channels are also catering to "pop science" with videos on diverse topics. But we still lack a product that could teach someone say Calculus or Kinematics
Another area where technology has failed is the ability to understand where the student is struggling. And I don't mean evaluating them and putting them on basic, advanced, etc. levels. But say you are stuck on a Calculus problems and have made some progress, a teacher would be able to look at your solution and guide you effectively. Even current AI solutions will give you a generic hint (at best).
So your thoughts totally resonate -- EdTech truly is a tech disappointment. I am beginning to think that it is maybe not Tech but perhaps we do not fully understand the idea of learning OR maybe the current technologies are not built for learning.
I would love to hear thoughts from this community.
I really think Mathacademy has kinda cracked the pedagogy problem in the math space. I've been following Justin Skycak on X and love how they approach the perennial problem of learning outcomes in edtech . Check this out: https://www.justinmath.com/books/#the-math-academy-way
I spent a decade in edtech. It's an area where I have much passion, but it's not something I can do if money is my goal.
True! Unless you consider Duolingo.
> Research shows low-stakes assessment is when the moment of learning often happens
Okay, but psychology research like this needs to be taken with context on long term behavior. Is this advice practical? No, not in this case. The problem is that very few people can actively learn that way for multiple hours in one day, let alone be motivated for studying in that intense way for subjects they do not like. Any barrier will stop them. That research applies to cramming for exams, when stressed, which most EdTech isn't really useful for (at that point, people are learning intensely anyway). This human nature has not changed.
And your suggestions (not to be rude) are to excite kids about the subjects they find least motivating. But the problem is already motivation.
Youtube is motivating because it is fun. It might not work, but it fits the motivation level you have.
Why not forget about the strong moats/tendencies of EdTech projects to fail to revolutionise, forget them targetting parents, and either pick a subgroup of learners who actively do want to change how they learn, or work on the motivation problem? Why are some kids so much less motivated to learn Math than others? Should we change that and how can we?##
Here's an example I find interesting: The western world accomplished bringing Biology from dominantly male to an equally balanced subject. How did that change happen? We benefit from all these women researching in Biology. Could it happen to other sciences? Or the reverse? These kind of questions interest me.
Actually, people learn for hours this way. It just needs to be tempered with support. This is literally what a teacher does when they give you an assignment, give you feedback on it, then give you another activity. You're thinking of hard testing - where you get a lot of things wrong. I did research on how to keep learners engaged, and as long as they were getting over 50-60 precent of the problems/activities "right" they kept going - so we actually built an adaptive system that optimized for this type of growth, which means throwing them an easier question every now and then so that they have some confidence to go with the knowledge.
The reason some kids are not motivated to do math is because they believe they are bad at it, and nobody likes to do something that makes them feel dumb or not good. The kids that love math (like myself - I remember I was SO excited about math as a kid) are good at it, and teachers are constantly complimenting them.
You can hack the brain to feeling good while learning. I just need like 200M but I might be able to do it without.