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As far as I've seen, educational tech products are mostly garbage. It might be that the worst players are sucking up the most money and attention via marketing

As far as I've seen, educational tech products are mostly garbage. It might be that the worst players are sucking up the most money and attention via marketing and political shenanigans, but I honestly don't get the impression that anyone is even trying to genuinely execute well in this area. It basically feels like stuff made solely to tick boxes and not actually empower users.

yorwba 7y ago
There are several factors that I think contribute to this: 1. Education takes time. Therefore, evaluating whether an intervention actually improves education outcomes also takes time. 2. Decision makers both in companies and in schools buying their products are not end users, so their interaction with the product is limited. 3. Most learners hate the work it takes to actually learn something, so they'll prefer technology that helps them avoid that work. In the end you get products that look good in a short demo and are well-received by students, but that don't really help in the long term.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > Most learners hate the work it takes to actually learn something This is nowhere close to true. People love learning things and exploring new ideas, in a context where they have autonomy. Essentially every human learns a tremendous amount about a wide range of topics and skills between age 5–20 years, with or without any explicit external instruction. What they hate is being forced by someone else to do (what seems to them to be) pointless busywork. Products which are marketed to schools as “educational technology” often seem especially pointless from a student perspective.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    > This is nowhere close to true. People love learning things and exploring new ideas, in a context where they have autonomy. There are many people who say they want to learn a foreign language or an instrument or some other skill and many free resources for self-study are available. Yet, most of those people either never start or give up halfway. Either they do not want what they say they want, or they're too lazy to put in the necessary work. I'm a self-taught developer and learned a few languages on my own, but there's still a lot I wanted to learn but never did simply because I didn't feel like practicing and stopped.
    - jacobolus 7y ago
      That does not demonstrate that people “hate the work it takes to learn”. It only demonstrates that someone’s passively stated desire to learn some particular thing does not immediately grant them the intrinsic motivation, time, and external support to follow through. Just because someone doesn’t spend every waking moment on deliberately practicing specific new skills does not mean that they hate putting effort into anything. Most “free resources for self-study” are crap, and only work for people with unusual amounts of motivation and focus. This doesn’t mean that everyone else is just lazy. People lead busy lives and have many distractions competing for their attention. If you just said “many people claim they want to learn various specific skills and subjects but then never make time for it”, that would be an uncontroversial and easily factually supported claim. * * * Motivation is pretty tricky. It would be beneficial to everyone if society spent more effort on teaching meta-skills like how to break large goals into small manageable chunks, how to manage time and focus, how to seek out resources, how to evaluate progress, etc., and more effort on offering people meaningful support for achieving their own goals. From what I have seen most “educational software”, testing-focused pedagogy, de-professionalization of teachers, etc. are harming rather than helping.
- thundergolfer 7y ago
  I'm building something to change this. I'm addressing 1 by building time into the core of the product. I have a first-class 'timeline' model, and they span multiple years. I'm addressing 2 by selling direct to consumers. This will be hard but I agree that 2 is a big problem and so I must start by avoiding it. 3 I'm not really solving. I'm just going to initially target highly motivated people where there's a clear reward for their hard work. Eg. tech students and med students.
sidlls 7y ago
Aside from the political nature of the procurement process that gives the advantage to connected indivduals, educational technology is basically a confluence of the worst kinds of conditions to build a business: low-budget clients (school districts), high-maintenance users (kids and their parents), and burdensome (in my opinion, legitimate and necessary) regulatory concerns around data integrity and protection.
thundergolfer 7y ago
> I honestly don't get the impression that anyone is even trying to genuinely execute well in this area. It basically feels like stuff made solely to tick boxes and not actually empower users. I am. I think I have a decent chance at success because I'm building it for myself first, to improve my own knowledge and skills. I'm a motivated learner and I care about having something that respects the hard work and time it takes to educate oneself; most ed-tech feels like fairy-floss instead of porridge. Whether or not it ever succeeds commercially, it hope to get it to a point where it's a properly good tool to accompany a student going through higher-education and continued professional learning.

yorwba 7y ago

There are several factors that I think contribute to this: 1. Education takes time. Therefore, evaluating whether an intervention actually improves education outcomes also takes time. 2. Decision makers both in companies and in schools buying their products are not end users, so their interaction with the product is limited. 3. Most learners hate the work it takes to actually learn something, so they'll prefer technology that helps them avoid that work. In the end you get products that look good in a short demo and are well-received by students, but that don't really help in the long term.

jacobolus 7y ago
> Most learners hate the work it takes to actually learn something This is nowhere close to true. People love learning things and exploring new ideas, in a context where they have autonomy. Essentially every human learns a tremendous amount about a wide range of topics and skills between age 5–20 years, with or without any explicit external instruction. What they hate is being forced by someone else to do (what seems to them to be) pointless busywork. Products which are marketed to schools as “educational technology” often seem especially pointless from a student perspective.
- yorwba 7y ago
  > This is nowhere close to true. People love learning things and exploring new ideas, in a context where they have autonomy. There are many people who say they want to learn a foreign language or an instrument or some other skill and many free resources for self-study are available. Yet, most of those people either never start or give up halfway. Either they do not want what they say they want, or they're too lazy to put in the necessary work. I'm a self-taught developer and learned a few languages on my own, but there's still a lot I wanted to learn but never did simply because I didn't feel like practicing and stopped.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    That does not demonstrate that people “hate the work it takes to learn”. It only demonstrates that someone’s passively stated desire to learn some particular thing does not immediately grant them the intrinsic motivation, time, and external support to follow through. Just because someone doesn’t spend every waking moment on deliberately practicing specific new skills does not mean that they hate putting effort into anything. Most “free resources for self-study” are crap, and only work for people with unusual amounts of motivation and focus. This doesn’t mean that everyone else is just lazy. People lead busy lives and have many distractions competing for their attention. If you just said “many people claim they want to learn various specific skills and subjects but then never make time for it”, that would be an uncontroversial and easily factually supported claim. * * * Motivation is pretty tricky. It would be beneficial to everyone if society spent more effort on teaching meta-skills like how to break large goals into small manageable chunks, how to manage time and focus, how to seek out resources, how to evaluate progress, etc., and more effort on offering people meaningful support for achieving their own goals. From what I have seen most “educational software”, testing-focused pedagogy, de-professionalization of teachers, etc. are harming rather than helping.
thundergolfer 7y ago
I'm building something to change this. I'm addressing 1 by building time into the core of the product. I have a first-class 'timeline' model, and they span multiple years. I'm addressing 2 by selling direct to consumers. This will be hard but I agree that 2 is a big problem and so I must start by avoiding it. 3 I'm not really solving. I'm just going to initially target highly motivated people where there's a clear reward for their hard work. Eg. tech students and med students.

sidlls 7y ago

Aside from the political nature of the procurement process that gives the advantage to connected indivduals, educational technology is basically a confluence of the worst kinds of conditions to build a business: low-budget clients (school districts), high-maintenance users (kids and their parents), and burdensome (in my opinion, legitimate and necessary) regulatory concerns around data integrity and protection.

thundergolfer 7y ago

> I honestly don't get the impression that anyone is even trying to genuinely execute well in this area. It basically feels like stuff made solely to tick boxes and not actually empower users. I am. I think I have a decent chance at success because I'm building it for myself first, to improve my own knowledge and skills. I'm a motivated learner and I care about having something that respects the hard work and time it takes to educate oneself; most ed-tech feels like fairy-floss instead of porridge. Whether or not it ever succeeds commercially, it hope to get it to a point where it's a properly good tool to accompany a student going through higher-education and continued professional learning.