Guidelines for Edtech Products
ycombinator.com
ycombinator.com
The problem is that "widely accepted standards", especially in the US are sub-optimal in terms of educational outcome. Even if Common Core were great (which is not the case), continuing to improve pedagogy and curriculum should be ongoing goals. Similarly, why push people to use a closed system such as Lexile® for rating the difficulty of reading material instead of something open?
On an even more basic level, should edtech offerings be limited to children living in the US at all? I would say no. Most Americans aren't children and most humans aren't Americans.
However there is one glaring absence: I don't see a recommendation to show provable academic results. You could follow all of these snd still have an ineffective product that doesn't actually advance student learning. Hopefully that will change as schools demand more data driven results from their vendors.
To their credit, they were thinking about creating a team to look into this.
I think this company's strategy was to grab market share with a free product, then start charging for more and more features. By the time people go to pay, they forget that they never actually checked to see if the free product was actually effective in any way.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_206.10.a...
There is certainly space for companies who want to sell educational products and there are companies already doing so. What that means though is that you already have quite a bit of competition in a market that you're not going to completely capture. If this is your target audience you have a relatively low ceiling and you won't be able to push past it.
Additionally you can't scale to different countries or even states that easily. You need different materials to account for different languages, cultures and curricula. You need to account for regulation and a sales teams to approach the various homeschooling groups.
I would say this is a great market to focus on as a startup. Get into a fast growing market while there is still little competition.
I was home-schooled for a year as a kid, and we used to get catalogs of specialty curriculum (classical education in greek, latin, religious books, etc). Perhaps not material for a "start-up", but there is definitely a very enthusiastic customer base.
I'd say this is a stellar business opportunity, especially for a company that is mission-driven, transparent, and possibly even partially crowd-funded.
Many readers of this message may feel a lifetime away from questions of childhood education, but today more than ever parents are realizing the insanity of letting school districting determine where they work and live. And millions of parents want to give their children a better education than their district offers, but can't move or afford private school.
I suspect non-traditional schooling will be as common as remote working in a decade or so.
My parents have a beekeeping business, and the homeschooling set seems to have been great for them. A lot of people are interested in alternative food/medicine stuff, as well as educational 4H type demos of honey extraction, and the homeschooling groups seem to have referred a lot of people to them.
I suspect there would be a bit of culture clash with ycombinator though.
I've taught in inner-city high schools and I'm positive that a single person (parent or otherwise) with the right motivation and tools can better educate a child than a failing system.
In many cases, I think the devs figure they'll rely on whatever accessibility features are enabled by the device (TTS, zoom, etc.), but in many cases these features are not sufficient—or don't even work in the app/platform.
I know there are a few products oriented around specific accessibility features that would be sold directly to the people who need them (e.g. tty devices), but it seems the only progress I've seen in this area in software projects was for §508 compliance.
I think some edtech companies improperly equate accessibility with special education and write it off as a separate (smaller) market. But the point of accommodations, in many cases, is that many kids can be taught alongside their peers in general ed classes—if they get the right accommodations.
For example, a kid with bad eyesight has an accessibility need (glasses, or if he can't afford them large text). He is not someone who needs to go to a separate special education class. Unfortunately, the lack of accessibility in popular edtech solutions means that kids like this are not able to be served in a gen-ed classroom. This leads to stigmatization and lower achievement.
What. What on earth is this set of "guidelines". Is there a color scheme recommendation somewhere in here, too?
(We work with local governments, including libraries.)
Disclaimer: I just submitted a YC W2017 nonprofit application as the solo-founder of Bloom, a new education system powered by software. I'm not sure if this comment will help or hurt me if I get responses, but I think something needs to be said. I put my app up on Dropbox for you to check out if interested. Still searching for a great cofounder. If this is an issue you really care about, feel free to DM me on Twitter. I'll fly out anywhere. Bloom YC W2017 application: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1szvs6o4qs15djj/KD%20%26%20Bloom%2...
The cost efficiencies of conventional public and private education today are abysmal. Teachers don't scale. Campuses don't either and are physically isolating. And Common Core, courses, grades, tests, and degrees are arbitrary practices that could by replaced by something completely different, something designed for the digital age. Something not only better than public schools, the most prestigious private prep schools and the Harvards and Stanfords, but something that could scale to everyone in the best and worst of areas of the world. Education is a lifelong right that everyone clearly needs and deserves as technology continues to advance exponentially.
Yet for some reason, edtech hasn't been able to look beyond the current state of things and build something completely new. There isn't an "Uber" or "Bitcoin" of edtech. And I believe the reason why is solely because of posts like this: advice that places too much importance on working with inefficient systems, industry best practices, laws and trying to fix a broken system instead of ignoring all of that unimportant stuff to just focus on users and build a new one from scratch through software. As a result, current edtech solutions are fragmented, inflexible, slow, general and boring, just like physical schools.
So what will education look like in the future? In my opinion, it will be a cohesive system that’s modular, peer-to-peer and mobile. That’s the only way an edtech platform can both scale to ->7.5 billion users and support arbitrary specializations adaptable to the future.
I think a good parallel to the approach I'm talking about is what Urbit has been trying to do to re-decentralize the Internet. Instead of trying to solve each problem one at a time, they've built a cohesive system from scratch on top of the old, broken Internet, which solves all of its problems in one go. This is the approach I think edtech needs to take, and ignore everything else.
Yes, clear product vision and implementation ease are important for edtech startups. But you could say the same about Uber and Airbnb. Yes, viral current content is important. But you could say the same about Netflix and Twitch. Yes, flexible, optimized pricing is important. But that can be solved in other creative ways. Yes, exceptional customer support, respect for privacy and organization transparency are vital, but that's expected of any great YC startup.
I'm just shocked software hasn't eaten the education system yet, because ultimately the quality of kids' entire lives are on the line. I would know.
The number one obstacle quite frankly is law and accreditation. They force the certain basic foundation that hinders a revolutionary startup from inventing a different modality.
The saddest part is that a large number of young techies (you are 19) feel like you. Nevertheless, I want to empathize with you, and suggest that you step away from your computer and spend just any small amount of time within our public education system to see the challenges and complexities of serving our students. It is a complex problem and you are grossly understating and trivializing the importance and purpose of existing institutions. The founders of Uber and Bitcoin and Airbnb got nothing on education. Serve even 10 underserved students and drive them to prolonged success, and then come back and talk.
I don't take offense as much as someone running an edtech company, as much as I take for being a part of an outstanding community of people improving education.
It's a system that works through sheer force of will, and squanders the efforts of educators and students alike. The ambition of education technology shouldn't be to rehabilitate 10 underserved students, no matter how noble of a goal that is. It should be to make sure they aren't ever underserved. The current system can't do that period.
By the time you have fixed the issues that prevent it from doing that, you've ripped out and replaced 90% of it. The way class progression works. Automating lecture components. The testing components. How responsibility over students is handed from teacher to teacher. Assuring best practices are used, both by students and teachers. The curricula and how they feed into each other. Tracking student progress. Negotiation of homework quantity between teachers. Enabling broad collaboration between teachers in matters of teaching materials. Quality assurance.
The rage is not against the fact that there is an education system. It's that it could be so much better. It's against the waste of youth. A class of 30 with only half of it engaged wastes 180 childyears over their K-12s. That's 2 long lifetimes, in the years when their minds are the most malleable.
I care as much about solving education as they do. I think the basis of my argument is factually correct. Just look at the data.
Why not treat education like any other disruptable industry?
With the exception of a few incredible teachers and mentors out there (I myself had several), education today isn't genuinely exciting for most students. Many teachers are truly great people and are valuable to students. But are they a necessity, or a luxury? Either way, in order for educational content to stay current in today's system, teachers need to be taught new information first before they can then teach their students. Physical teacher-to-student teaching is an O(n^k+1) solution that will never be in every city let alone the developing world. If -- and that's a big "if" -- learning could come from a single software-based source of information in a way that was just as good or better than physical teaching today, a world-class education and credit for it could be accessible everywhere. All a student would need is a smartphone, which is relatively nothing compared to the current cost of education. Look at Duolingo as a great example of this for language learning and language-fluency credentialing. And on top of that, is the role of the teacher to in fact teach, or to guide and mentor? Great mentorship is invaluble, but that can also come from anybody great even if they're not in a formal teaching role.
Most learning today, whether technology, science or art, happens through books and YouTube videos and students teaching each other anyways. This peer-to-peer model works. And because through this model, young, radiant students are the primary source of content delivery, this model is also addictively social and exciting. All you have to do is remove the system and let kids do their thing. There's a reason products like Reddit are so popular -- it's an Internet ecosystem for youth all over the world.
Almost everyone who's been largely successful in any field has been self-taught. This isn't a coincidence. Those who truly love what they do enough to commit themselves to becoming world class by definition transcend the limits imposed by conventional educational standards. The problem, then, is not a teaching problem, but an exposure problem and an excitement problem to help kids find their passions and solve problems with friends in person who they love. Could an edtech platform be as viral as a Snapchat, Twitter, Netflix, Twitch Reddit, Buzzfeed? That's what I'm set to find out.
Edit: For context:
Harkness table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harkness_table
Sugata Mitra: Kids can teach themselves https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_...
The best prep school in the world Phillips Exeter Academy, where I went, ironically is designed around kids teaching themselves. And parents pay $40,000+ per year for it.
So, if kids left the normal educational system for your app, how would you replicate that experience gained in soft skills when most of their learning is just watching videos or messaging/talking to people through a phone? Or are you going to push it off to parents hoping they just all change in terms of how they facilitate training in social interaction? Remember that many students being held back by poor education are in the hood, rural areas, homes with apathetic parents, etc. The schools might be the closest thing they get to learning from some decent or just diverse people. Plus, there's the side benefit that they're like a day care allowing parents to go to work or have a mental break at least until summer. ;)
I get what you're saying here, but if the chief virtue of the educational system is that it beats people into submission ready to face life in authoritarian (or micromanagement-disguised-as-teamwork) workplaces, I'm not entirely convinced that it's something worth protecting.
I'd be more interested in thinking about what a workplace should be like to get the best out of people who haven't been taught the kind of deference that seems to be expected.
I'm against the public school system. So, we agree with each other. Yet, I'm for putting them in situations where some aspect of what they have to do is dictated so they learn respond to that properly. Some of them will allow a clever response to succeed while others will not. Just like in real world.
They need to expect and be ready for this as the authoritarianism is dominant in workplace and government.
This is going to be a really hard problem to solve overall from a design perspective. And like you hinted, it will be even harder for us to do this for kids in poor or rural areas in contrast to rich kids in urban areas. But we're going to figure it out somehow. If the timing is right, self-driving cars and improved cheap public transportation will help this tremendously. Our app could then in theory automate the entire process of getting a group of kids connected somewhere safe and public. The value and safety of those kinds of experiences could be built upon even further if you add in a kind of crowdsourced mentorship experience on top of that, like Uber for chaperones in a way. If you're a local software engineer or cinematographer or biophysics researcher, you could give back to your local community by helping out local kids who want to contribute in your field. Now all the sudden everybody can become a teacher, which feels really good. Like Quora answers, but in person.
Another problem with your proposal, a huge one, is that there's nothing in it about countering spread of misinformation. Quick link to give an idea of how easy invalid information spreads and persists across social media:
http://www.iflscience.com/technology/facebook-echo-chambers-...
That or another Facebook study also pointed out that retractions (eg a Snopes article) only slowed misinformation in the 30-40% range IIRC. The bad info spreads more and lasts longer in your model. It has to be detected somehow with official counters on any topics where there's a consensus that they need to know. That means your model, like the others, needs human beings that act as sort of teachers and moderators. This is even true for a high-quality forum of smart people like Hacker News. Alternative is some AI that knows everything about how people speak, these topics, how to explain them... artificial teachers of nearly human intelligence that nobody has built yet. Since you lack that and need humans, your model can't scale for general population at the rate of technology scaling. Instead, it's something like N teachers per M groups where the N to M ratio is however much stuff the teachers can follow and moderate. You then modify this somehow with the fact that specific people or groups vetted by teachers as knowing the material can be rated among the N as their input is trustworthy. Might even compensate volunteers somehow a la StackOverflow or Quora if they contribute a certain amount.
Far as full experience regardless of bandwidth, do look up the concept of progressive enhancement as illustrated with this project:
https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-prog...
That thing even works on Lynx. Now, you want images, video, interactivity. The images can be compressed quite a bit while still being clear. Same with video. More compression for lower bandwidth links. Animated GIF's done well can illustrate in a few images what otherwise takes a video. Still popular on many sites. Use straight-up text where you can as my old text & RTF files were way smaller than Word or Web files. :) Support for distributed, file sharing within group if on Wifi. Alternatively, on SDcards where they could just buy one, have one person who affords Internet pull the data, and pass the shared card(s) along to group members.
I like how you mix it being a paid service with tax deductions and donations. I predict you'll probably put most or all of the services on the same infrastructure. What you can do is use the money that comes in for business or professional courses to cover creation of general ed material. The cash flow is split to cover each. The people making general ed material should have a track record of writing books or doing online courses that actually worked. They'll adapt it to your model. They'll have to change it for increased effectiveness as user feedback comes in like any other marketing. The cash flow also expands the distribution network so people with low income or poverty can access the material without overloading organization. A number of them might become contributors or paying users later.
So, those are some ideas I got as I read your application.
I am convinced that software tutors that are based on AI research which was primarily done in the 1970s and 1980s will form the core of these new software education systems. For the past few years I have been working on an AI tutor for solving elementary algebra equations that can already teach parts of this subject better than a human can. If you are interested in discussing how AI tutors like this can be used to help realize the vision you have for Bloom, contact me using the email address that is in my profile.
BTW, these YC guidelines are built on actual experiences from 100+ companies. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss their hard-earned wisdom.
And I agree in the sense that I believe in YC more than anybody. But I disagree in the sense that no edtech solution to date is dramatically changing the world as much as a Facebook or Uber, so something must not be working. And I'm calling out Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, EdX, Khan Academy, Codecademy, Vidcode, Jumpcut, MakeSchool, AltSchool, HackClub, codings bootcamps and regular school itself. Honestly, the best solutions right now are in fact YouTube, Reddit and Hacker News.
The main takeaway I have after seeing so many enter this space in the past 7+ years is that the incurious never get very far. Be curious and seek to understand the paths of others before you, and you may find your place in it all.
To quote Balaji Srinivasan of 21 & A16z:
"Don't argue about regulation. Build Uber. Don't argue about monetary policy. Build Bitcoin. Don't argue about it. Build the alternative."
Re:physical forces, there's actually several that have defined why education is a certain way today, and that will shape it in the future. Probably the most powerful is that it's first and foremost about human relationships - foundations of values, trust, physical presence, belonging, etc. And the second most powerful is that poverty is a physical context that shapes outcomes in the most profound of ways. I only bring these up because a) they're taken for granted by many tech entrepreneurs who did not have to worry about them in their own lives, and b) they're the reality tech entrepreneurs grapple with when they focus on the core of education problems, rather than the periphery where most wind up.
You sound pretty dead set in thinking you've got this though, so I wish you the best of luck.