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Why tech has failed to innovate in education?
Tech has been a success in e-commerce, social networks, transactional apps like uber or ebay. It has however not made a significant dent in education. Why ? What do you think is the reason ?
I have a hunch why thats the case. The reason is that past success in transactional business has biased tech industry towards solutions that are transactional. Education is anything but transactional, unless you count selling books as education.
The success of past has put a filter which prevents good eductech companies.
Education is a workflow that spans easily months or years to be effective. A good startup in this area would avoid being transactional, instead it would learn from success of another tech process that is long drawn. That is making good software. The kinds of process that helps to make software development more effective are the kinds of process that would make long drawn learning process effective.
This begins with github for learning lessons which allow people to collaboratively create learning lessons. The best ones created by community would float to top based on approaches similar to guthub stars or npm downloads.
So much about learning effectively is about creating and and managing content flow and collaboration.
Today creating and sharing text, photos, videos, audio is extremely simple thanks to advances in tech and mobile.
Today collaboration in real time over internet is increasingly easier to add to any app. And this is not restricted to chat.
Today algorithms can do great job of helping you discover learning content as thousands and millions are created by people.
All this and more would in my view would create an education platform for tomorrow.
Let me know what you think ?
- billconan 7y agoso does this match what you describe? https://epiphany.pub/@shi-yan/introduction https://epiphany.pub/@shi-yan/introduction (A github for learning materials that allows people to collaboratively create content. )
- shishircc 7y agoAwesome, thats a step in right direction i believe
- billconan 7y agoWhy do you think user generated content is important? Why shouldn't the content be made by a platform, like Coursera?
- shishircc 7y agoI think answer is scale. Why should open source software not be created by one company in a closed way ? Both software and learning material are extremely elastic. Once created, they can be used by one person, one million people or hundred million people. This means allowing collaborative creation of it brings best minds together and creates something that no company can afford to create in-house alone.
- shishircc 7y agoThis explains contribution of github in enabling software collaboration. Just change that to education material and it would explain the why https://youtu.be/w3jLJU7DT5E https://youtu.be/w3jLJU7DT5E
- buboard 7y agoThe first wave of "online universities" failed, but that's preobably because instead of trying to copy Education , they should unbundle it first. This is happening now. Things like MOOCs , youtube courses and Lambda school are unbundling the education/learning part. Entities like Ycombinator or tech interviewing is unbundling the competitive admissions/vetting process, Github is unbundling the networking/reinforcement/certification part. There aren't many processes left that are being monopolized by universities. CS shows the way here, and it's nice to see that , for competitive students with a track record to show, a PhD is seen as an accessory, a luxury that they either delay for later or completely forgo.
- billconan 7y agoI don't understand what unbundling means?
- gt2 7y agoMaybe democratizing or liberating. Traditionally those things mentioned required more red tape and buying into a system (usually literally) just to get to the fruit. It's awesome because often it really is just information that while isn't necessarily free to create, once created could be considered to be. And either way, it benefits from more eyes on it/being open source rather than being unavailable to those outside the system.
- buboard 7y agojust the opposite of bundling things together. maybe better "spliting the parts"? it s an idea from business: https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundling-and-unbundling https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...
- maxharris 7y agoYou can't make money in education because public education takes the entire budget via taxes. And after that, you have no access to the customer [i.e., the parent(s) and their child(ren)]. All of that economic power and control is bottled up into school districts, and selling to them is even worse than selling to large businesses. No matter what else you do, if you can't make substantial revenue, you can't pay engineers, and you don't have reliable profit/loss signals to guide your product development efforts. So this is the fundamental problem: anything you do with ed tech is really just a hobby, and this won't change without a massive philosophical and political shift. Why do I think this? Well, I worked doing ed tech stuff for two years and thought, "wow, living on $55k/yr in Orange County really sucks!" That was 2014. Soon thereafter I got a real tech job (that paid roughly double what I was making before, had more serious engineers) and I've never looked back. I'd also like to add that merely creating some new program of one sort or another won't help. The problem is that control over what happens is a political process, full of rules that you have to follow, endless meetings. The result is that you're not free to try new things, not free to iterate quickly.
- shishircc 7y agoMaybe the answer is to create for professionals and adults first. Once its a success there, schools would follow.
- idoh 7y ago@shishircc wish you good luck on this, but your conception as to what's stopping innovation in tech is not correct. I'd advise you to hang out with teachers, administrators, and parents to get a better feel for it. The successes with education tend to sidestep the whole thing and offer an alternative, instead of working with the system, for a reason.
- shishircc 7y agoFor me, schools and universities are not right place to start. Start with working professionals and adults. If a solution there is enormously successful, it would work its way backwards into universities and schools.
- elamje 7y agoIt’s all about money. If the money isn’t there, or it’s hard to get, the innovation will likely not be there.
- muzani 7y agoEducation has lots of money. If there's anything that's overfunded, it's probably education.
- codingdave 7y agoI think people are forgetting what it is like to be a child and learn as a child. Putting words on-screen doesn't matter if children cannot read. And children like to move around and interact with both people and objects in the real world. I found that my kids hated all online learning products until they were at least 10. And then once their reading and writing ability was advanced enough to consume online content, it felt like overnight they loved the ability to research a problem online and learn independently, but they still want someone in the room to answer questions when the online content doesn't make sense. And they still hate most products because now they are too slow, or too inflexible, or something just isn't right for them. In short, the systems that are being designed by adults don't have product/market fit because they aren't doing usability testing with students. They aren't respecting how children develop, how they communicate, how they learn, etc.
- shishircc 7y agoMakes sense Unless one can understand and appreciate how kids feel about the product, product would not work. An education product must have offline, online and human touch for it to succeed, apart from ability to research.