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Why Is the EdTech Industry So Damn Soft?
- tobr 2y agoInteresting dynamics explained here. The second section of this post would be a very persuasive pitch for an expensive online course.
- madmod 2y agoI am interested in math academy but want some kind of trial. Such a new way of learning demands a trial period so I can determine if it works for me and if I can stick with it.
- cultofmetatron 2y agoIve been using mathacademy for the last month and a half. so far I've been extremely satisfied. I've been progressing pretty rapidly and can feel my old university days coming back as I practice math. if anything, I'd say my base algebra skills have gotten stronger as it identified several weak areas that I never resolved when I was in a classroom. Just try it. for what it offers, $50 is a steal. my only caveat would be to make sure you're dedicated enough to commit the time. I'm putting in around 1hr minimum a day at the moment with weekends plugging in an entire afternoon.
- kiba 2y agoAgreed. 50 bucks is not expensive for what could be a valuable investment. It's on my TODO list. If it works well to teaching me mathematics, then I'll keep using it. That said, I think it's also important to be able to learn from books, which is a useful skill in my opinion.
- titanomachy 2y agoI can’t find information on what subjects they teach. I don’t really need to rehash basic calc and algebra but I’d be pretty interested to learn discrete math properly. I also never really grokked differential geometry, but I doubt they cover that.
- JustinSkycak 2y ago> I can’t find information on what subjects they teach. See mathacademy.com/courses
- titanomachy 2y agoThanks Justin! I’ll make a note to check back in November for those discrete and abstract algebra courses.
- JustinSkycak 2y agoWe have a 30-day money back guarantee. I'll copy/paste from the bottom of mathacademy.com: > 30-Day Money Back Guarantee. We're so confident that Math Academy will help you or your child master advanced math concepts faster than any other method on the planet that if you find it doesn't suit your needs within the first month, we will refund your payment. There are no long term contracts, no additional textbooks to buy, and you may cancel your membership at anytime in the future.
- JustinSkycak 2y agoBy the way, I know it sounds like a "new way of learning," but most of the learning-enhancing practice strategies that we use have been known for many decades – it's just that they're not widely known / circulated outside the niche fields of cognitive science & talent development. If you'd like to know more info about this, I went into depth in a StackExchange answer that blew up on HN a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40348986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40348986
- Scaevolus 2y agoYou might find a 30 day free trial has more sign-ups and conversions, but could entail more support costs ("I forgot to cancel") than the 30-day money back guarantee.
- JustinSkycak 2y agoYeah, support is a big source of friction for us right now. The money-back guarantee serves as a filtering mechanism so that we focus on people who evidence some degree of seriousness. But you're right that a free trial would produce more sign-ups and conversions, potentially enough to offset the additional support costs once we're in a better position to handle them (or once the product is better at preventing the need for them). Definitely something to think about in the future.
- dvfjsdhgfv 2y agoMany companies use snow white patterns for this. Email one week before: attention, your trial will end soon. Same 3 days before. An SMS message a day before. All with precise instructions and links to one-click unsubscribe/cancel pages. I admire these companies. They know they have excellent products and the user can get back to them anytime they want. I support them and give them positive reviews. But they are rare - most use the old bag of trick to "increase conversions" whereas they just cause a lot of frustration (and increased support cost).
- next_xibalba 2y agoThe relative failure of edutech is, to me, the biggest disappointment of the Internet age. I remember the hope and buzz around MOOCs circa 2010 being very exciting. From my personal experience with online learning, I mostly agree with the author. No degree gamification or cheapness of distribution will overcome a lack of effort and commitment. I also think this explains the state of education in the U.S. generally. Teachers are hamstrung in holding students (and especially parents) accountable for doing the hard work. As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water…”
- apwell23 2y agoLots of these ppl now think Gen AI is going to save their apps.
- 082349872349872 2y agoA couple* of game reviews for high-tech LARPs earlier today on HN got me thinking in the opposite direction: they had several comments about the "minigames" that both offerings used to keep the guests feeling like protagonists who aren't just on rails in between plot points, and it had occurred to me that any reasonably deep hobby (those where mastery occurs over decades to lifetimes) naturally presents many minigame equivalents that are much better motivated, and hence probably also more satisfying. Rather than gamifying education, maybe (even at the risk of offending Our Ford) we ought to try learnifying pasttimes? * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41152238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41152238 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41152771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41152771
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- jrm4 2y agoThe decisionmakers who pay the money (school beauracracy) and the actual customers who use the software (students and teachers) are different people for the LARGEST MARKETS, and therefore you get the worst incentives.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoI mean in most cases of every industry the people who pay the money and the actual people who use the software are different people.
- nine_k 2y agoThis is correct. But when a supermarket chain decides which software to use for point-of-sale machines, the chain's bottom line directly depends on how well that software fits the task. Even if the top brass never operates these machines, their bonuses directly depend on that software working well. The disconnect between boards of education and teachers and students is much larger. There is no easy way to measure the efficiency, it's hard to ascribe the influence of the software choice to the educational outcomes, and the outcomes themselves are years apart from the point of choice. The best the system us capable of weeding of is outrageously bad software, such that induces mass protests from teachers, students, and parents, media coverage, etc. Choosing between barely satisfactory and outstandingly excellent, hardly.
- jrm4 2y agoSpot on. Additionally, what makes it SO BAD for us (I work in higher ed) is the "bundling." It would have been madness to be like, your chalkboards and gradebooks and chairs all must be approved by and come from ONE company, and so you have to do everything their way. But that's where we are now.
- yobbo 2y agoThe decision makers are bureaucrats but "the people who pay" is the government, through grants and as underwriters of student loans, and parents through tuition. And then, the product "sold" in return to students/parents is not mainly education ("learning things") but instead something like a "trademark of eligibility" for employment into jobs where competence doesn't measurably affect performance anyway.
- alabhyajindal 2y agoMath Academy's pricing is obscene. I don't think it's justified. And I don't think that comparing it to a personal tutor is fair. High-cost monthly recurring fees is not right. Compare this with buying a book. You get a high-quality resource which you own, forever. Generally, I love one-time payments for information products.
- archgoon 2y agoThey aren't a book; they're a tutor. Tutors cost recurring money. A brief google search shows that in my area, 1 hour of math tutoring goes for $50 / hour. Can they achieve equal or better results than a tutor? That's a separate question, but that's the market they're in.
- 082349872349872 2y agoThere are even many good books free-as-in-beer online; the issue there is that in order to use them one has to already have learned how to learn from books.
- cultofmetatron 2y ago> Generally, I love one-time payments for information products. Math academy is definitely not what I'd call an information product. Most of the difficulty in learning math is going through enough problem sets and getting feedback that you can use to iterate on your understanding. Mathacademy does this VERY well. I think one of the challenges of being an autodidect is in plotting the course of what you want to learn and then assembling the materials. Tnen you need a large amount of worked problems to test your understanding. I've taught myself a lot of subjects and there's a lot of time investment in just getting the lay of the land. With mathacademy, I don't have to do any of that. I just sit down and do the problems. I don't think about the end goal. if I get it right, I do the next one. if I get it wrong, I read the feedback. figure out where I messed up and go to the next problem. Just the fact that those hours I would have spent figuing out what to learn before I could start actually drilling into the subject is worth the $50/month. > And I don't think that comparing it to a personal tutor is fair. agreed. they are not the same thing and they have different value propositions. a tutor's value will be listening to your understanding of the problem and explaining it to you in a way that might make more sense. It would be exorbitantly expensive to expect a tutor to generate problem set after problem set every day for you to go through and provide instant feedback while iterating on the problems presented to you based on how you're doing. > Math Academy's pricing is obscene Its higher than competing offerrings like Brilliant. but I've used Brilliant and I think mathacademy's approach is more effective.
- evilfred 2y agopatents owned by Blackboard, such as https://patents.justia.com/patent/9053500 https://patents.justia.com/patent/9053500
- AlexErrant 2y agoThis was written with regard to academic education, but it's interesting when viewed from developer education. I think Pluralsight had pretty good quality content for devs. Yet "Vista Equity Partners has written off the entire equity value of its investment in tech learning platform Pluralsight, three years after taking it private" https://www.axios.com/2024/05/31/vista-equity-pluralsight https://www.axios.com/2024/05/31/vista-equity-pluralsight > You know what happens when someone pays you a nontrivial sum of money? They hold you accountable for results. Did Pluralsight not deliver results? Or are there other forces at play, e.g. devEd is distinct from academicEd? (Genuine question, no subtext here.)
- awat 2y agoOther forces at play Vista bought out Pluralsight using a financial vehicle that really only made sense due to low interest rates. https://www.ft.com/content/5d1da427-d74f-427f-94e7-32aa4b169d75 https://www.ft.com/content/5d1da427-d74f-427f-94e7-32aa4b169...
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- throwawayhn1277 2y ago>Yeah, everybody wants to learn, but only a small fraction of people are willing put in the work. Laziness/unwilling to put in the work <= This is wrong. It's more so a human trait of energy conservation. As humans, some are more prone while others less. Coming from someone with adhd. Different people different environemnts genetics etc => I guess its a bell curve where most people are average mediocre lazy etc They can or can't get out of this trap. It's upto their luck. There are lots of problems with ed tech and the education industry but one thing it has helped is to democratized education. This is a deeply unfair/imbalanced world. Not everyone has access to the best resources for them. Imagine the progress of humanity if all educational material and reasearch were to be locked up somewhere with very limited access. There are no easy solutions to these problems but what we can do is to make the world a better place so that wars, injustice, inequality can be reduced as much as possible.
- amluto 2y ago> To some extent, I think we can trace the softness back to the expectation that online learning should be free or ridiculously cheap. This is true on an individual scale, and often (sadly) on the scale of individual teachers, but it’s wildly incorrect on a statewide scale. For example, California spends a lot of money, on a recurring basis, for educational material. I would love to see this money spent intelligently. At this scale, CA could choose a license, commission educational material, and require or favor use of that license, and making a derivative work of someone else’s work would be okay. AGPL3 might be a good start. After a couple years, this might result in a strong base of open-source material that could be iterated on.
- impure 2y agoEdTech is a cursed problem (https://youtu.be/8uE6-vIi1rQ?si=660l-bO9hrtGhQ_D https://youtu.be/8uE6-vIi1rQ?si=660l-bO9hrtGhQ_D). What do companies want? Retention. What hurts retention? Friction. And friction is precisely what you need to teach someone something. I even think this article is a bit overly simplistic, paying money will not change the equation that much.
- dvfjsdhgfv 2y agoIt's and interesting article, but I can't help but wonder: isn't there a way out of this? Because "users are lazy" seems like an unsolvable problem. Duolingo is very efficient at keeping users motivated, even though they can't teach them anything remotely useful. With math I Imagine this is even more difficult. What I found working for me is a physical tutor, i.e. another person that I meet with every week, who is efficient, who correctly assesses and praises my results if they're good enough, and to whom I would feel a bit stupid saying "I'm a quitter".