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I'm CTO of an edtech company and I'm quite excited to see this list- outside of specialist VCs like Reach and Learn Capital, the typical level of understanding

I'm CTO of an edtech company and I'm quite excited to see this list- outside of specialist VCs like Reach and Learn Capital, the typical level of understanding of these nuances by investors is shallow. This will up the game. 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.

gnicholas 10y ago
Yeah, I was surprised when I talked with the CTO of a large (raised tens of millions) edtech company and learned that they had done zero work on measuring efficacy for their adaptive learning solution. They literally had no evidence that their platform increased student learning in any way. To their credit, they were thinking about creating a team to look into this.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I've seen something like this in the marketing industry. I think it happens when success of a company depends not on the efficacy of their solution, but their ability to convince people it works. When customers can't tell whether the solution works or not (or when they can't tell if the metrics you present them are reliable or relevant in any way), efficacy stops being a variable in the business.
  - gnicholas 10y ago
    Exactly, and I think people view any educational system that is adaptive as necessarily effective. It may be that this is often true, but of course it depends on the specifics and the way it's used in the classroom. 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.

gnicholas 10y ago

Yeah, I was surprised when I talked with the CTO of a large (raised tens of millions) edtech company and learned that they had done zero work on measuring efficacy for their adaptive learning solution. They literally had no evidence that their platform increased student learning in any way. To their credit, they were thinking about creating a team to look into this.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
I've seen something like this in the marketing industry. I think it happens when success of a company depends not on the efficacy of their solution, but their ability to convince people it works. When customers can't tell whether the solution works or not (or when they can't tell if the metrics you present them are reliable or relevant in any way), efficacy stops being a variable in the business.
- gnicholas 10y ago
  Exactly, and I think people view any educational system that is adaptive as necessarily effective. It may be that this is often true, but of course it depends on the specifics and the way it's used in the classroom. 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.