Given how much people spend on education, there’s no reason AI education software wont be a huge market.
And there’s few people better suited than Andrew Ng to execute this
My wife has been a high school math teacher for 25 years and has seen waves of tech luminaries give their visions of how tech will radically improve education and learning. She can’t point to any startup that has had a major impact in improving outcomes. I wish I could point her to something that really will have an impact in, or even out, of the classroom for her students.
At that point they had ~24 employees. He said his interest was crowdsourcing and thought most of the engineering effort would go toward the crowdsourced translation, but at that time, it was being handled by just two employees.
They brought on two prominent consultant researchers, leaders in the field of language learning and linguistics. The first question they asked the consultants was which part of speech should they present to the learner first. The consultants didn't have an answer. They decided to dedicate engineers to collecting data in order to answer that question.
A big problem with edTech is that we don't know.
The best teachers seem to combine deep thinking about how to teach with intuition and charisma. The ingredients are hard to replicate.
I do think that this is a nut that we will eventually crack, but it is proving to be a very tough nut.
We know that mild stress can narrow focus and help learning. "Neural connections do form when you struggle." [0] A little stress is not only good but necessary for learning while a lot of stress causes a breakdown. The trick is being able to judge the stress level of the student and every person is different.
The idea of using some type of bio metric data from EEG or blood pressure sensors will help determine a little struggle from a lot of struggle in formative assessment.
It doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about “ed tech” - popularity of apps seems disconnected to popularity