Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade
hackeducation.com
hackeducation.com
I interviewed at Coursera in 2012, and much of the interview focused on my academic background. Every round I'd sit down with an interviewer and they'd look at my transcript and say, "hmm what happened here!?" as they would point to my C+, the only grade that was below a B on an overall 3.7GPA history. Every one of them had a Stanford-or-similar background. The juxtaposition of cliche-academics telling me they were disrupting academia was really something to behold.
Man that would be an instant turn off for me.
Having said that I'm unlikely to end up in a room with folks who would say something like that anyway, mostly because I wouldn't make it past the resume filter... for good reason, and a good outcome for everyone involved probabbly.
I was a terrible college student and worked my way through PC support drone, some proprietary mainframe networking stuff, traditional networking, data center networking...to web development.
That and sometimes the folks who really just grok something...are terrible at teaching and advice. I'm really wary when highly successful traditional learners tell me how or even what to learn, not because I think they're wrong, but their path is likely not best for me.
Too much of my schoolwork was hypotheticals that were questions no one would need to ask (and obviously so to me at the time), or by rote memorization of facts and figures, without teaching much understanding of why those things are important to know.
Shamr it didn't take off but then there was no business model AFAICT
The certs were never really worth much and, without the certs being valuable, not many people were willing to pay.
Some of the videos were good. But there's no shortage of videos online. Mostly for programming specifically, autograding had some value--when it worked. Discussion forums were mostly worthless and any meaningful interactions with the people teaching the courses were limited at best.
There are plenty of relatively inexpensive options for motivated people who don't care about a piece of paper to learn about stuff. Some MOOCs did a bit better than OCW or iTunes University sort of things. But there wasn't a business model for anything beyond Lynda type of instruction.
No business model you say?
https://www.classcentral.com/report/coursera-2018-revenue-14...
Like one or two other of these firms, they basically pivoted to corporate training which has long been a reasonable if hardly breakout business. That's where Coursera (and I believe Udemy is) is today. It's not the disrupt education MOOC idea that was the original plan though.
And as the name suggests before this people would get degrees via mail with known examples going back to 1728. Though coupling this with formal degrees only dates back to the 1840s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_education
Yup. My grandfather got his college degree via correspondence classes around 1910.
Anyway, I was looking to get an online masters in 2000 and there where several to choose from. On the other hand Coursera was founded in 2012 so I fail to see the disruption. Better marketing?
I do think popularity and marketing both matter. Amazon was not the first online store. Linux wasn't the first or only OS. Neither was Microsoft the first windowing OS, not even close.
Does popularity / marketing matter for education? It might. When someone says they took a course on Coursera, or at Oxford that means something to almost everyone. Very often education serves a dual purpose: 1. Actually learning the thing. 2. Being able to put a signal on your resume that gets you past certain barriers.
It's free if you don't have a degree and you meet the means test. In 2000 they had virtual courses on Second Life. Since 2006 they joined the Open educational resources movement and begun offering courses that are free for everyone via the inernet.
It's a waste of time, and thus unreasonable thing to ask about, wasting a candidate's time and the interviewer's time in revealing how little the interviewer knows about effective interviewing.
My technique was to learn the material :-)
I made the right decision, it worked for me. I didn't do any begging or ass kissing, and still had time to enjoy the other pursuits being in college afforded.
I see the same from some new graduates, begging their managers to sign off on something, they don’t seem to understand the difference between an academic grade and work being of a standard to show a customer.
Was it a bad teacher? A bad class? Someone in the family died? Bad breakup with girlfriend?
What business is it of yours? And, even worse, if I lie to you about why, can you verify it? And, even worse, I'm probably expecting you to ask me about it, so I'm completely prepared to snow you on that subject. Not only is asking me about it useless, it's a negative amount of information since you could have asked me about something else.
I'll go further, we had one professor at my alma mater that was well known to be a jerk. If your interviewer was from that school, passing this class was considered godly and failing it was considered a rite of passage.
- academic institutions generally have leadership inept at understanding technology
- when academics try to make decisions by committee about technology when they are not competent in tech, it rarely works out
- few academics actually learn how to teach, let alone how to learn. But a degree will make someone an expert, I suppose.
- Education for hundreds of years has been linear, to match the linear nature of the factory floor and professional careers. Math hasn’t changed in 500 years. But, the world is no longer linear and the linear lenses that attempt to put tech, innovation in to linear paths will fail.
- The world is changing faster than any curriculum can keep up. Courses can take 1 to 3 years to update once, and in the meantime, entire industries are upended by Uber and Airbnb.
There are, many smart academics who understand this, but too many academic environments are far too toxic because they run like small countries who don’t answer or listen to their founders, students.
The gates and metrics being used to assess those capable of innovation in education, when the decision makers might be the ones most standing to be supplanted will be a large barrier.
If you’re interested to learn more about one academic has found ails academia, Tony Bates is worth a read.
What do you mean? Almost all math you learn in college were invented in the last 500 years. I think the last big things in math which they teach in undergrad were invented 50 years ago, so it is still a bit stale, but not that stale.
There were two overarching lessons I took from my experience.
The first is that a successful educational product needs to deeply and intimately understand pedagogy and materials -- teaching and learning techniques and how they vary between students, and what kinds of materials are suitable -- deeply, I mean like at a postdoc level.
I've seen so many products fail because the engineers and designers didn't have the slightest idea how students actually learn, think that algorithms could make up for crappy materials, or have zero understanding of what teachers actually do.
And creating good teaching materials with good pedagogy is very expensive. You have to hire educational+domain experts. They don't come cheap. There just aren't that many people who can clearly explain complex concepts gradually, relatably, and accurately in a simple manner.
For some reason, because we all went to school, so many of us think we understand teaching and learning. It's pretty humbling to discover you don't at all.
The second lesson is that education software isn't sold to the kind of market you're probably familiar with. It's not bought by consumers, or even the kinds of enterprises you might be familiar with. It's bought by school districts (or universities), each of whom have incredibly extensive needs for customization -- for interoperability, for the curriculum, for whatever -- and each of whom expect to be given lots of individual attention for a long time before they sign.
Your company will be primarily salespeople, not engineers.
But because there is a ton of money in EDU, you actually only need a handful of school districts or universities to sustain your company. Which then turns into a problem, because it means everyone is using different products, and so much is custom-built. So standards and interoperability don't emerge -- or when they do, they're just, well, really bad.
It's a complicated space. The only other space that feels similarly insanely complicated to me is healthcare.
The real problem to be solved is LEARNING. The goals of teaching and learning are not the same.
Focusing on efficient learning means getting away from outdated methodology like tests, long-winded lectures, and more.
Tests and lectures aren’t outdated, nor even particularly ineffective compared to anything else. I don’t know when it became popular to hate the way school is run, but it usually traces back to the mistaken belief that school should predict professional performance (which is not now—nor ever was—the primary purpose of school).
In both cases, my work with Ed tech has convinced me that the key problems are _social_, not technical.
I wouldn't invest in an ed-tech company whose product depends on learners changing their behavior (e.g., any of the platform companies like Udacity, Coursera, Pluralsight, etc.) unless it was a bet on their enterprise product.
In Rhode Island, for instance, about 34% of students meet or exceed the expectations of English language arts and 27% for math. These students have been set up for a very difficult future.
Rhode Island is about as nice, safe, and quiet as a large human settlement has ever been (obviously not without social problems).
We're not going to solve the human condition, and I just wonder how best to move forward given that (in RI specifically one might start by fixing the buildings, but that's another story: https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20191215/providence-s...)
RI education data, for the curious: https://lms.backpack.education/public/ride
Online teaching should have more focus on analysis of student data, more direct student interaction, more customized tools to help students learn and so on.
I think efficient learning would need to be always in the sweet spot - not too difficult and not too easy. Most courses have accessible first few lessons and then suddenly ramp up the difficulty without proper support.
Imagine you want to climb down a building. If you take the stairs, it might take you a few minutes but you reliably get to the bottom. If you try to escalate the wall, or do it in a few large jumps, you might never make it. The next step should always be the size you can handle.
... who are willing to attack their own profession.
The academic job market is absolutely brutal. Ever more administrators are being hired, and (in some disciplines anyway) fewer and fewer tenure-track professors.
As a result, there are tons of experts, with traditional academic training in spades, who are eager to work in their domain of expertise, and who might be well inclined to engage in some "disruption".
My personal opinion is that for some sort of meaningful disruption to happen, ed tech entrepreneurs will have to craft their tools such that they are focused on the end user being the student and what their ultimate needs are. I would also say that the company/idea would need some way to start attacking credentialism and challenge the status quo (university degrees) which also mean you have to factor in the needs of employers.
The truth is most people won't bother with learning much of anything unless they are monetarily incentivized by employment prospects or outright money of some sort.
I would also say it is probably better to craft your product/service on third world countries like India or China which might have easier barriers to crack and at the same time these countries might be responsive to a disruptive ed tech idea as these emerging powers seek to compete with the USA's education dominance.
That means poverty, bullying, abuse, anxiety, undiagnosed illnesses... all of that shows up in the classroom. Teachers know this, and continually deal with it when they recognize it and have the opportunity to deal with it. This simple fact informs everything about education, and no reform is possible without understanding and accounting for it.
And anything any disruptor attempts to do will be deeply, pervasively affected by this fact. And none of them seem to give a fuck, though they would if they spent 10 minutes talking to a teacher about it.
Do you have any resource suggestions for moving the needle towards the goal of learning pedagogy and materials deeply and intimately?
Today, I can learn almost anything I want for free on the internet.
- I can get a world class mathematical education from 3Blue1Brown (seriously this guy's videos are just out of this world good).
- I can get incredible guitar lessons on any song I want from youtube (I've taught myself guitar this year through it!).
- I can find scores of language education podcasts to help me learn Spanish (I use coffee break spanish).
- I can get world class SAT prep from Khan Academy (for free!).
- I can get awesome yoga classes online for free (did this also this year).
Seriously the wealth and quality of information available to us today is insane - it's the Library of Alexandria a search bar away.
As someone who enjoys learning, there's no way I would ever go back 10 years in time.
* Case in point there is a popular ML guy on youtube who is also considered a bit of a hack.
* When Khan was starting out some of his original videos were also critiqued when they were out of his area of expertise.
* My friend learned Spanish from a teacher from Basque area. He has an intriguing accent now...
* There are zillion Python videos on Youtube and many are not quite good.
The problem was pointed out in 1970 Future Shock by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler .
It is much easier to spend time choosing an authoritative educational institution(online or offline) than individually choosing each teacher.
You let the school do the curating for you.
There will be bad teachers even at good schools but your meta cognitive load is lessened.
PS I am a bit biased since I teach at various non-profit and profit institutions (I also stream on youtube but privately)
EDIT: I found her work on the incestuous world of edtech funding and media (e.g., EdSurge) to be especially illuminating. Because she is not an edtech founder, she was able to point out these relationships/issues without worrying that she was going to anger VCs on whom she might someday seek funding.
Oh yes, I’m sure you can come up with some rousing successes and some triumphant moments that made you thrilled about the 2010s and that give you hope for “the future of education.” Good for you. But that’s not my job. (And honestly, it’s probably not your job either.)
I started my career in K-12 education, first in the classroom, then as an administrator, and thanks to a coding bootcamp, am happily pursuing another career as a software developer. I have plenty of friends who've done the same. Will it be a long-lasting model? I don't know, some are clearly already out of business (the one I did, Hack Reactor, is still going though). But it may be the first wave of upending having to spend six figures on accreditation / skill acquisition.
And while a lot of the flipped / personalized tools never panned out specifically, a lot of the concepts were helpful in bringing in new structures to instruction. The ideas helped us move away from simply "I do, we do, you do" lessons to units where students could get some material up front and then do more exploratory or self guided lessons, and teachers could work with individual students who needed attention.
Education needs innovation. Instructionally, the major changes won't come from software but from restructuring how school operates at different grade levels. Given the different needs of 7th graders from 3rd graders, it's interesting that their days are still structured so similarly, not to mention that we're still not really developing skills that are useful for the kinds of jobs that exist today.
That said, there is a place where there's a desperate need for high quality software in education: operations. Follow a school office manager for a day and you'll see exactly what I mean. The number of systems that are still either paper-based or involve manual processes that can quickly be automated are incredible. As with any public enterprise, there are lots of reasons that these systems haven't been updated, but streamlining operations for schools will actually make much bigger impacts for student outcomes than almost all the edtech software out there.
Initially, I agreed with most of the failures Audrey listed. Though I started wondering if such a lengthy list could be sustained, and lo and behold, about halfway through the article I sensed a large drop in quality, with the author seeming more focused on rhetoric and being "right about others being wrong" instead of providing an objective and insightful perspective.
Some examples: #52. Virtual Reality - I think her gripe is with VR being hyped too early, but from her writing, it sounds like she thinks the entire field is already dead and buried for education. Which would be ridiculous. The friction with VR right now is the technology; it is too physically limiting for the benefits > the cost of change. For anyone with an open mind who has tried VR, however, I think it's obvious that it will be the future in some shape or form. Whether it's this decade, or the next, or in 2040 who knows but dismissing an entire field like this really reduced the author's credibility in my eyes.
#49. Yik Yak - Never used it myself, but from what I've heard it was anything BUT an ed-tech app..?! It's listed as a defunct social media and chat app... Guess the author was clutching at straws here.
#48, #38, #6, etc. - Author seems to have a completely unjustified pessimism toward any sort of coding that isn't related to the traditional CS pathway. I can only speak for myself, but as someone who made poor decisions out of high school and is now a (pretty decent) self-taught developer, I find the author's conclusions totally wrong. Learning to code was the single good adult decision I've made - I've found a lasting passion, and I can make positive contributions to society. Without it, I'd still be sitting around depressed all day.
#25. Thiel Foundation - FWIW, I'm not a fan of Thiel at all but I do agree that we are in a college bubble. Audrey's snarky comment "Here’s one look at what some of the past Thiel Fellowship recipients are up to. Yawn" seems totally unjustified here. I haven't been through the list, but IIRC Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum) was a recipient of the Thiel Foundation. Regardless what you think of crypto, Ethereum has had an enormous impact on the blockchain landscape. Whether or not Eth itself is successful, it's unjustified to write it off as "meh" if only for the downstream effect it has on other areas of innovation. I think money is a terrible indicator of "success", but if we're going down that route, Eth currently has a market cap of $14.5 mil+, which would make Thiel's investment a good one (though I don't believe he had a stake).
#13. Blockchain Anything - It's sad to see the author's piece decline from what were some really valuable insights earlier in the article down to this Buzzfeed-esque drivel again dismissing an entire field. I'm not saying blockchain will or won't be successful. However, for any new & poorly understood technology, it's easy to just google "reasons why technology X sucks", link to the first 5 articles, and win over readers who don't know better.
Again - it's a shame the author appeared desparate for filler material as the list grew longer. It's particularly a disservice to herself because she made some great points at times. Adopting a more balanced tone would have been desirable. This way it'd be clearer to see that EdTech really does have huge potential for an industry that desparately needs a total remake; it's just been executed very poorly for the most part. P.S. Lol at the author downplaying the impact of YouTube on EdTech. I'm not a huge fan but half the material for my course these days are links to YouTube videos. There is a slow but clear shift to tertiary education that is 100% online.
I just don't feel like I have problems which I'm itching to have solved by technology.
As an example of this, I've graded thousands of calculus exams in my career. It's time consuming, it's painful, and it's unpleasant. But it's also inevitable. Looking at my students' work, engaging with their mistakes, seeing what they do and don't understand -- helps to build the connection between myself and my students, helps me understand what is going on in my classroom.
You can't automate that away.
The link you posted to Khan does not automate that delicate balance between teacher and student. It's a bunch of videos of Khan describing the Chain Rule. The "practice" sections are mundane - multiple choice questions or fill in the blanks. You simply cannot (as an educator) see the (mis)understandings of students like this. You need to pour over their work. Take note of where patterns occur and address them next class. Iterative. Do you honestly think Khan has "automated" that?
This thread is full of asinine comments like yours that demonstrate just how much people in tech _don't_ understand what it's like to teach. Hence the original link to 100 fuck ups by engineers, product people, and VCs.
Bank street writer. It kept nascent computer classes from killing typing and made grading so much easier, saving the writing careers of many with poor handwriting.
Logo: tens of millions of people have a lever to learn functional abstraction from “repeat 360 [fd 1 rt 1]”
Project Athena. Frankly, I still want that ability to log in anywhere and have my setup ready to go. Project Andrew, too!
1:1 programs. For all the reasons we want a workstation per engineer, a workstation per student makes a qualitative difference in how it can be used.
Wikipedia. It’s safe for my children to use unsupervised and amazingly comprehensive.
What else?
Or is that not considered Ed-Tech?
Getting an employee or hobbyist to pay even $100 of their own money for a course. Or making them jump through reimbursement hoops? Not so much.
Actually reminds me I should map out some Lynda courses to take in the new year.
I learn more by reading, and the ubiquitous PDF of course notes findable by DDGo is really something. Ubiquitous preprinted are amazing.
But YouTube’s videos have helped me fix home appliances, fuse PVC, and pick up all sorts of practical skills. Lynda could be in the same avenue for work skills.
My middle kid just did two years of math in 4-5 weeks. Now we're free to talk about fun math stuff.
The classroom management stuff is OK.
A whole lot of resource is going into localizing the content for different languages.
They're also running a model school and ran a big pilot study about how to integrate the content at the district level. Research about how to best use the content and its efficacy is a logical next step in deciding where to go..
I don't think my kids would have progressed as quickly with just me teaching them, and as a bonus it's taken less of my time. But they still need teaching.
This. I've been pitched by teacher-influencers and librarian-influencers who want to do sponsored posts about my edtech startup. Such posts are generally not marked as sponsored, and I have always declined their offers.
I understand teachers need to make ends meet (my wife, mother, and grandmother work/worked in education), but that doesn't justify this sort of business practice. It's unethical and also pretty clearly illegal per FTC regulations.
Education is broken, but going this route won't fix much. Fixing standardized tests, or scrapping them, along with eliminating things like the SAT would go a long ways is creating better learners, instead of better test takers.
... you'd also need that last bit to be true.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/541132.Punished_by_Rewar...
But for complex skills, e.g. learning, they decrease intrinsic motivation, and thus performance.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/4/13/students-result...
"Although critics have long argued that paying students for results can lead to a decreased interest in learning, Fryer’s new results show no evidence to justify or support these claims."
That said, the researcher found that while paying students for results didn't cause harm, they did find that what worked even better (that is, worked at all) was "when they were paid to perform specific actions, such as reading books or wearing their uniforms."
“When you are paid to do something you may not know exactly how to accomplish, it’s not clear how you respond. But if you are being offered money to do something very concrete...then that might be easier to respond to.”
Not a silver bullet as the researcher notes:
“I’m interested in what are the four or five investments that, when put together, have the potential to close the achievement gap,” Fryer said. “Incentives could be one of [them], I don’t know yet. This is the first kind of large scale experiment in urban schools on incentives, and I hope it’s not the last.”
But also I hope people don't just dismiss the idea of monetarily incentivizing children out of hand.
It's interesting to think about what implications this might have for our own, grown up adult incentive mechanisms. Is it such a great idea to gate pretty much everything on results, when a) this is at least partially subject to chance and b) workers might not quite know what to do to achieve those results.
Chores are about responsibility and being a contributing part of the family. Not about drawing a salary. I suspect those people would give the same advice for education.
Perhaps discussing topics like: Using pre-K content to inoculate against misconceptions, instead of engendering them.[1] Using industry-derived orthogonal sets of adjectives for describing perceptual properties of materials, instead of the usual adhocery. Rough quantitative description. Teaching scale down to atoms in early primary. Teaching atoms emphasizing quasi-classical nuclei balls, instead of wacky electrons. Atoms-up introduction to materials, and nanoscale emergence of bulk properties. Rough-quantitative introductory biology... in primary. The Sun is too hot, deep space is too cold, and the Earth is doing a BBQ roll between them (the space and roll bits are generally neglected).
Discussions bottlenecked as much on science expertise as educational expertise.
In some sense it's unhelpful discussion. Many ideas are currently undeployable, or their value is uninterestingly limited without the synergy of implausible dependencies.
But personalized AR education seemingly has the potential to alter the constraint space. With a lot of work to be done, if it isn't to be merely "the usual wretchedness, now in AR".
Personally, the greatest ed-tech was when my parents bought me a C-128 which came with thick manuals, one of which was a Commodore BASIC programming manual.
IMHO, education is throwing a wide and open experience to a kid and guiding and helping them learn to learn. Everyone is different in what they like and enjoy, and that's a very good thing.
My school system decided to introduce those interactive whiteboards into every classroom. Including the computer room. Where all the computers ran Linux or Solaris [1], which operating systems the software couldn't support. Without the computer to run it on, those things are worse than regular whiteboards since you can't even draw on them with real markers.
[1] Sun had yet to be bought by Oracle at that time.
A lot of things have been tried in education, and although some of them were probably just people trying to make a quick buck, I believe that most of them did it to genuinely improve something for others.
Meanwhile traditional educational research continues, but doesn't get the same attention / doesn't turn into an online product.
> 6. "Everyone Should Learn to Code"
Her argument seems to be that teaching more kids to code, will result in more people ending up in a toxic tech industry. This may be true. But the tech industry will never, ever change until we expose more kids to engineering as a choice. If we can cause a greater number and diversity of children and young adults to consider engineering as a career, the industry will be more diverse. this seems like a bit of a no-brainer.
Also the reaction to the Hour of Code makes me question whether or not the author has every lead or observed one in a meaningful way. Having led literally hundreds, almost every single one that I was involved with resulted in at least one student saying "I didn't think that this was for me / for people like me, but I really liked it". That makes it worth it. Hearing that one single time, makes every single HoC ever worth it in my opinion. I know a lot of teachers that would agree. Nobody on earth thinks kids are making significant progress towards mastery of programming from an hour of code -- it's about exposing every child and letting them know that they are capable of a career that is often, for a variety of reasons, seen as "not for them".
It's not far-fetched to consider that exposing kids to an hour of code daily could make transitioning to a programming career much more feasible in their later life (whereas without this exposure, programming might seem like untouchable black magic). Heck, I think the reason my own transition to being a dev was relatively smooth is because I was obsessed making HTML websites as a kid. Despite not touching it for ~15 years, even that exposure proved invaluable in picking up the skills relatively fast
I am for hire in the ed-tech space. My background as a teacher+psychology / programmer+cs hybrid is highly relevant.
My focus is on people who want to learn at university and coding bootcamp level.
My profile has a bit more (perhaps outdated) info.
I will be reading this topic intently for side project idea inspiration.
Anything more than sftp, a spreadsheet calculator a pdf reader and something to do basic word processing with is probably ”Ed tech” you don’t want.
(yes that's not Ed-Tech, but it's a huge Ed debacle and possibly Tech related...)
Dear God. We have growth mindset and grit here at this regional institution. There are students who take General Chemistry 1 (read: 10-th grade chemistry) three times with three different instructors, everyone with a different teaching philosophy, and they still don't give up. Wow. That's some grit there. This time they failed, but they can always pay more tuition, and try again.
Now if their schoolteachers actually exposed them to difficult material and let them experience that with some effort they could overcome those difficulties, that would foster "growth mindset" and "grit". But instead the students want solution strategies and problem classification that takes away all the joy of discovery, and their teachers indulge them. Once I got bad student evaluation for handing out word problems with more than one step and having them figure out the solution themselves. The poor things.
We'll have to wait for different teachers and especially different students.
Current paradigm for students: joy of discovery < joy of submission.