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Comment by yuanBuilds | Hacker News Reader

I do think Andrew is the right person doing this. Someone mentioned that the return of financial outcome is not good in edTech, and this is exactly why backing by Coursera is a huge advantage. Education-related product is slow, and it needs patience.

The concern, though, is that how to achieve those 3 thesis. Do they train/fine-turn their own model? according to my own experience, the current models are not well trained in personal education context, and it is either too textbook-like or too task-driven.

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Yes, Andrew Ng is a great educator, well positioned with Coursera to deliver this, and personalized education (with exercises and feedback) is an excellent potential use of AI.

I guess the real challenge would be initial and continual assessment of each student in order to select the next instruction that they are ready for, but with "LLM as judge" that doesn't seem such a problem, and student feedback can be used to continuously improve these recommendations/selections.

Presumably you would still want to have a human designed curriculum, with the AI being used as the teacher - assessing how each individual student is doing and what they need to be taught next.

I remember reading that Education is a trillion dollar market, so i'm not sure about the financial outcome being poor, only the state of how that money is spent and obligated can differ greatly.

There’s a reason services like GitHub Classroom Replit’s education offerings shut down. Serving educators can be very hands-on. Education can have lots of different requirements (every teacher needs this one little feature), often legal issues (student privacy), and dealing with universities and governments is awful and bureaucratic. Most companies will find it easier to make money elsewhere.

The dirty little secret of EdTech is that there is no money in improving learning because there is no way to capture the value. For all but a handful of highly specialized and insular professions, there is no scalable infrastructure for objectively assessing skill mastery. Most learners don’t want to learn for its own sake, they want a credential that proves their value to potential employers. All of the value in learning accrues to the credential, and everyone in the educational establishment is quite happy reserving that privilege for the accredited universities because they can just bundle more and more products and services into the tuition sticker price without ever having to justify it. Oh, and the student loan racket ensures that enough students are price-insensitive that they’ll never look for alternatives.

The solutions exists for skill mastery.

They're just outside of K-12 and Academia, who don't necessarily keep the gap close to the real world and it's needs post-graduation

The value in learning is what you do with it, the credential can be a part of the journey but not always. People were definitely about the brand, and it's value, of the stamp of a piece of paper, however given the experience of recent graduates the past 5 years, it's revealing itself to not be an aberration that's going to give way to the 500-1000 years preceeding it.

The biggest success that people usually point to in EdTech is Duolingo. They were founded in 2011 and IPO’d for about $6.5b in 2021. A big success by any measure. But that’s the pinnacle. Compare that to DoorDash which is an $80b company, let alone the trillion $ AI labs and you’ll see why the largest VCs hardly touch the space.

EdTech is a broad market.

- K-12, Academia/Colleges/Universities, Industry/Training, Adult learning, increasingly experts teaching directly, and more.

Most people aren't aware of the differentiation of the categories because they get to work inside one for the most part.

The learners in each category are different.

Duolingo had it's share of naysayers and doubters, but it did provide it's own take on a learning outcome.

Your post does make me wonder about the existing spend in Education, and how much could/should be EdTech with today's capabilities, or even the capabilities of 10 years ago, and what looking at that with a lens like yours might show, if anything.

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