Guidelines for Edtech Products • Hacker News Board

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#41

Post by dasmoth » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 10:36 AM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #21

KeatonDunsford wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be right. But if I'm right, I'll help more kids faster. And that's what I care about. And I think I am right, because I see what I'm talking about every day. With the exception of a few incredible teachers and mentors out there (I myself had several), education today isn't genuinely exciting for most students. Many teachers are truly great people and are valuable to students. But are they a necessity, or a lu…

You make some good points and I appreciate the links. The one thing you're leaving off that public and private schools teach are the lessons learned from face-to-face social interactions with peers, bullies, and authority figures. Public schools largely held be back as a savant where I had to learn most shit on my own. Some teachers were great enough to try to help me on the side. Nonetheless, the basic principles on…

>>> Nonetheless, the basic principles on human behavior I've encountered in various workplaces were the same as I dealt with in public schooling. Other people good at balancing various tradeoffs in the schools did well in the workplaces I've been in. Among the worst were the homeschoolers with one or two exceptions. Especially when they were trying to change things with resisting authority figures before getting slapped in the face with constant expectation to do what you're told. If anything, those of us from public school experience more freedom going into average workplace than we had then.

I get what you're saying here, but if the chief virtue of the educational system is that it beats people into submission ready to face life in authoritarian (or micromanagement-disguised-as-teamwork) workplaces, I'm not entirely convinced that it's something worth protecting.

I'd be more interested in thinking about what a workplace should be like to get the best out of people who haven't been taught the kind of deference that seems to be expected.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#42

Post by dasmoth » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 10:41 AM UTC

This doesn't really seem to cover products aimed at homeschoolers or independent learners at all -- are those considered a separate field from "edtech"? And/or are these things YC aren't terribly interested in?

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#43

Post by DasIch » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:18 PM UTC

dasmoth wrote: post #42

This doesn't really seem to cover products aimed at homeschoolers or independent learners at all -- are those considered a separate field from "edtech"? And/or are these things YC aren't terribly interested in?

That market is small to non-existent. If you're creating a startup that doesn't seem like the audience you want to focus on, at least not at first.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#44

Post by DasIch » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:24 PM UTC

KeatonDunsford wrote: post #12

snomad wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet for some reason, edtech hasn't been able to look beyond the current state of things and build something completely new. There isn't an "Uber" or "Bitcoin" of edtech. And I believe the reason why is solely because of posts like this: advice that places too much importance on working with inefficient systems, industry best practices, laws and trying to fix a broken system instead of ignoring all of that unimporta…

But that's my point. Uber and Airbnb and Bitcoin didn't confine themselves to laws in the beginning. They just built something that worked. Yes, now that they are big they are hitting legal obstacles (like NYC's ruling on Airbnb rentals today, a top HN post). But they are also now known, and so users are aware of the potential innovation that the current state of law is inhibiting. And that increased demand for these…

Uber and Airbnb don't have the government as a customer. You can't both ignore the government and sell it stuff at the same time.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#45

Post by dasmoth » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 12:38 PM UTC

DasIch wrote: post #43

dasmoth wrote: post #42

This doesn't really seem to cover products aimed at homeschoolers or independent learners at all -- are those considered a separate field from "edtech"? And/or are these things YC aren't terribly interested in?

That market is small to non-existent. If you're creating a startup that doesn't seem like the audience you want to focus on, at least not at first.

Government stats [1] suggest well over a million homeschooled children in the US. This is towards the low end of various estimates out there. Certainly not non-existent. It varies a lot from country to country, but the YC guidelines are clearly US-centric, and I don't think you can write homeschooling off there.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_206.10.a...

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#46

Post by garysieling » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 1:31 PM UTC

tyre wrote: post #34

garysieling wrote: post #28

Are products used by public libraries considered "edtech", or is there a separate set of terminology?

Not edtech, govtech. Public libraries are run by local government municipalities and are generally a department (Libraries, not each individual library) within a city. (We work with local governments, including libraries.)

Awesome, thanks. I've seen a couple articles that referenced librarians and edtech together, but this gives me something else to look for.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#47

Post by garysieling » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 1:33 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #36

garysieling wrote: post #28

Are products used by public libraries considered "edtech", or is there a separate set of terminology?

There's overlap, at least in CA. My company has a license with the CA public library system, which includes some educational libraries. Libraries also perform educational functions—our tools are used by literacy tutors in libraries, in much the same way that they are used by teachers/students in classrooms. So for some products, these guidelines are probably relevant, but for other (e.g., infrastructure) products the…

That helps, thanks!

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#48

Post by garysieling » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 1:37 PM UTC

DasIch wrote: post #43

dasmoth wrote: post #42

This doesn't really seem to cover products aimed at homeschoolers or independent learners at all -- are those considered a separate field from "edtech"? And/or are these things YC aren't terribly interested in?

That market is small to non-existent. If you're creating a startup that doesn't seem like the audience you want to focus on, at least not at first.

Aren't there specialty publishers for home schooling?

I was home-schooled for a year as a kid, and we used to get catalogs of specialty curriculum (classical education in greek, latin, religious books, etc). Perhaps not material for a "start-up", but there is definitely a very enthusiastic customer base.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#49

Post by 20years » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 1:51 PM UTC

DasIch wrote: post #43

dasmoth wrote: post #42

This doesn't really seem to cover products aimed at homeschoolers or independent learners at all -- are those considered a separate field from "edtech"? And/or are these things YC aren't terribly interested in?

That market is small to non-existent. If you're creating a startup that doesn't seem like the audience you want to focus on, at least not at first.

Not so small or non-existent anymore and growing fast http://thefederalist.com/2015/09/01/why-homeschooling-is-gro...

I would say this is a great market to focus on as a startup. Get into a fast growing market while there is still little competition.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#50

Post by garysieling » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 1:53 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #32

ayushgta wrote: post #2

Weird, I don't see any mention of accessibility.

Yep, even well-known (and extraordinarily well-funded) edtech companies have zero accessibility features in their products. For example, there is a popular ELA app that offer a single (small) font size, and that ignores the iOS accessibility setting for increased font size. In many cases, I think the devs figure they'll rely on whatever accessibility features are enabled by the device (TTS, zoom, etc.), but in many c…

Do you think this is caused by selling directly to institutions, rather than the consumers of the application?

I know there are a few products oriented around specific accessibility features that would be sold directly to the people who need them (e.g. tty devices), but it seems the only progress I've seen in this area in software projects was for §508 compliance.