Why Is the EdTech Industry So Damn Soft?
justinmath.com
justinmath.com
But when a supermarket chain decides which software to use for point-of-sale machines, the chain's bottom line directly depends on how well that software fits the task. Even if the top brass never operates these machines, their bonuses directly depend on that software working well.
The disconnect between boards of education and teachers and students is much larger. There is no easy way to measure the efficiency, it's hard to ascribe the influence of the software choice to the educational outcomes, and the outcomes themselves are years apart from the point of choice. The best the system us capable of weeding of is outrageously bad software, such that induces mass protests from teachers, students, and parents, media coverage, etc. Choosing between barely satisfactory and outstandingly excellent, hardly.
Additionally, what makes it SO BAD for us (I work in higher ed) is the "bundling."
It would have been madness to be like, your chalkboards and gradebooks and chairs all must be approved by and come from ONE company, and so you have to do everything their way. But that's where we are now.
And then, the product "sold" in return to students/parents is not mainly education ("learning things") but instead something like a "trademark of eligibility" for employment into jobs where competence doesn't measurably affect performance anyway.
I think Pluralsight had pretty good quality content for devs. Yet "Vista Equity Partners has written off the entire equity value of its investment in tech learning platform Pluralsight, three years after taking it private" https://www.axios.com/2024/05/31/vista-equity-pluralsight
> You know what happens when someone pays you a nontrivial sum of money? They hold you accountable for results.
Did Pluralsight not deliver results? Or are there other forces at play, e.g. devEd is distinct from academicEd? (Genuine question, no subtext here.)
https://www.ft.com/content/5d1da427-d74f-427f-94e7-32aa4b169...
This is true on an individual scale, and often (sadly) on the scale of individual teachers, but it’s wildly incorrect on a statewide scale. For example, California spends a lot of money, on a recurring basis, for educational material.
I would love to see this money spent intelligently. At this scale, CA could choose a license, commission educational material, and require or favor use of that license, and making a derivative work of someone else’s work would be okay. AGPL3 might be a good start.
After a couple years, this might result in a strong base of open-source material that could be iterated on.
High-cost monthly recurring fees is not right. Compare this with buying a book. You get a high-quality resource which you own, forever.
Generally, I love one-time payments for information products.
Can they achieve equal or better results than a tutor? That's a separate question, but that's the market they're in.
Math academy is definitely not what I'd call an information product.
Most of the difficulty in learning math is going through enough problem sets and getting feedback that you can use to iterate on your understanding. Mathacademy does this VERY well. I think one of the challenges of being an autodidect is in plotting the course of what you want to learn and then assembling the materials. Tnen you need a large amount of worked problems to test your understanding. I've taught myself a lot of subjects and there's a lot of time investment in just getting the lay of the land.
With mathacademy, I don't have to do any of that. I just sit down and do the problems. I don't think about the end goal. if I get it right, I do the next one. if I get it wrong, I read the feedback. figure out where I messed up and go to the next problem. Just the fact that those hours I would have spent figuing out what to learn before I could start actually drilling into the subject is worth the $50/month.
> And I don't think that comparing it to a personal tutor is fair.
agreed. they are not the same thing and they have different value propositions. a tutor's value will be listening to your understanding of the problem and explaining it to you in a way that might make more sense. It would be exorbitantly expensive to expect a tutor to generate problem set after problem set every day for you to go through and provide instant feedback while iterating on the problems presented to you based on how you're doing.
> Math Academy's pricing is obscene
Its higher than competing offerrings like Brilliant. but I've used Brilliant and I think mathacademy's approach is more effective.
Normally you'd have to pay a tutor $50/hour. Multiply by 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, you're at $13,000/year. Bringing that down to $499/year (26x cheaper) makes mathematical talent development accessible to many, many more people. Sure, that's not everyone, and there are still people who are priced out. But to me at least, providing a 26x cheaper option feels like a good starting point towards a goal of making mathematical talent development accessible to more and more people.
Of course, the following question still remains: "Why do you even need the learning experience to feel like working with a personal trainer? What is the benefit over a textbook, Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, etc.?"
The answer to that question: learning efficiency.
Let me tell you about my own experience. I self-studied a bunch of math subjects on MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) when I was in high school. OCW is a good resource and I came a long way with it, but for the amount of effort that I put into learning on OCW, I could have gone a lot further if my time were used more efficiently. Just to name a handful of inefficiencies in OCW:
- not super scaffolded → you periodically run into situations where you bang your head on a wall thinking "how the heck did they get from here to there?" and it takes a long time to figure out what kind of logical leap is happening (if you figure it out at all)
- doesn't track your knowledge / make sure you've mastered the prerequisites for anything new you're supposed to learn → you often feel a large gap between your level of knowledge and the new material, which leads to more banging your head on a wall trying to figure out what prerequisite knowledge you're missing and how to learn it
- no spaced review → you quickly get rusty on a lot of what you learn, which not only means you come out of the course having forgotten a lot of content, but even during the course, you're constantly forgetting prerequisites
- doesn't adapt to your level of performance → you waste a lot of your time doing the wrong amount of work. Sometimes you grasp a topic quickly and end up doing way more practice problems than you need; other times you struggle with a topic and don't do enough practice problems to reach mastery
- leaves the definition of "mastery" open to interpretation by the learner → as a learner, it's hard to know when you've mastered something well enough to continue moving forward. You often think you've learned something well enough, when you actually haven't -- but you won't know unless there's an expert who is evaluating your knowledge. On the flipside, you can also take things too far being a perfectionist, spinning your wheels on the same topic for a week over some minor point that doesn't make perfect intuitive sense to you, when it would be more productive to just keep moving forward and solidify your understanding by building on top of it.
I could keep going with this list (happy to do so if you're interested, just let me know), but by now you probably get the point: all of these things introduce unproductive friction into the learning process, leading you to make less educational progress per unit time/effort that you put towards learning.
That's one reason why I've been so motivated to help build Math Academy. We take away as much of this learning friction as possible and maximize your learning efficiency. We address all the above issues and more.
That's our main value proposition: sure, it's possible to learn math elsewhere, but it's way more efficient with us.
Efficiency is important not only because you make faster progress, but also because you're less likely to quit.
In practice, people get off the train and stop learning math once it begins to feel too inefficient. In anything you do, once the progress-to-work ratio gets too low, you're going to lose interest and focus on other endeavors where your progress-to-work ratio is higher.
Efficiency keeps that progress-to-work ratio as high as possible, keeping you on the math learning train as long as possible.
I realize that tutoring is typically done at a lower frequency, but I don't agree that the lower frequency is ideal. At least in my mind, when I imagine the Platonic ideal of an education, there is no real difference between "lesson" and "homework" -- minimum effective doses of instruction are interspersed with minimum effective doses of active problem-solving, where every single problem is carefully selected in response to the learner's performance on the previous problem(s).
If this characterization of the Platonic ideal accurate, then achieving it would require a tutor continually sitting next to the student, analyzing their performance on every single problem that they do, and deciding the exact moment to move the student on to a new topic or problem type. Of course, that is infeasible with human tutors, so we settle for one or two days per week where the tutor tries to get the student prepared enough to tackle the homework without being completely overwhelmed.
I would argue that, while 1-2 tutoring sessions per week can really make a difference in a student's education, a lot of learning efficiency is still left unrealized (compared to 5 tutoring sessions per week).
- A math major
Without office hours and lectures, I would be completely lost. Math texts are a great starting point, but if you are of average or even above-average intelligence, you still need a qualified guide to navigate the textbook.
Just try it. for what it offers, $50 is a steal. my only caveat would be to make sure you're dedicated enough to commit the time. I'm putting in around 1hr minimum a day at the moment with weekends plugging in an entire afternoon.
That said, I think it's also important to be able to learn from books, which is a useful skill in my opinion.
See mathacademy.com/courses
I’ll make a note to check back in November for those discrete and abstract algebra courses.
> 30-Day Money Back Guarantee. We're so confident that Math Academy will help you or your child master advanced math concepts faster than any other method on the planet that if you find it doesn't suit your needs within the first month, we will refund your payment. There are no long term contracts, no additional textbooks to buy, and you may cancel your membership at anytime in the future.
If you'd like to know more info about this, I went into depth in a StackExchange answer that blew up on HN a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40348986
But you're right that a free trial would produce more sign-ups and conversions, potentially enough to offset the additional support costs once we're in a better position to handle them (or once the product is better at preventing the need for them). Definitely something to think about in the future.
I admire these companies. They know they have excellent products and the user can get back to them anytime they want. I support them and give them positive reviews. But they are rare - most use the old bag of trick to "increase conversions" whereas they just cause a lot of frustration (and increased support cost).
Yes, I know many companies operate in this way - and I perfectly understand their choice.
Rather than gamifying education, maybe (even at the risk of offending Our Ford) we ought to try learnifying pasttimes?
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41152238 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41152771
I'm not saying that situation is superior by any means, but you can see it in some countries, and I think it highlights how some attitudes are culturally and economically bound.
Many times, I've heard people focus on how the failures of large numbers of individuals are a cause of a problem: education, retirement savings, the effectiveness of propaganda. Whether or not it's true, I don't think there's a possible solution in trying to change the values of millions of unrelated individuals you have no control over. It'd be better to create "happy paths" that make it easier stumble into success.
It's like digging more wells for the horses from the pithy adage. You still can't make them drink, but fewer horses will be too far from water when they finally get thirsty.
Laziness/unwilling to put in the work <= This is wrong. It's more so a human trait of energy conservation. As humans, some are more prone while others less. Coming from someone with adhd.
Different people different environemnts genetics etc => I guess its a bell curve where most people are average mediocre lazy etc They can or can't get out of this trap. It's upto their luck.
There are lots of problems with ed tech and the education industry but one thing it has helped is to democratized education. This is a deeply unfair/imbalanced world. Not everyone has access to the best resources for them.
Imagine the progress of humanity if all educational material and reasearch were to be locked up somewhere with very limited access.
There are no easy solutions to these problems but what we can do is to make the world a better place so that wars, injustice, inequality can be reduced as much as possible.