Why tech has failed to innovate in education?

#1

Post by shishircc » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 5:17 AM UTC

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 ?

Re: Why tech has failed to innovate in education?

#2

Post by billconan » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:49 AM UTC

so does this match what you describe?

https://epiphany.pub/@shi-yan/introduction

(A github for learning materials that allows people to collaboratively create content. )

Re: Why tech has failed to innovate in education?

#3

Post by shishircc » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 9:26 AM UTC

billconan wrote: post #2

so does this match what you describe? https://epiphany.pub/@shi-yan/introduction (A github for learning materials that allows people to collaboratively create content. )

Awesome, thats a step in right direction i believe

Re: Why tech has failed to innovate in education?

#4

Post by buboard » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

The 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.

Re: Why tech has failed to innovate in education?

#5

Post by billconan » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

shishircc wrote: post #3

billconan wrote: post #2

so does this match what you describe? https://epiphany.pub/@shi-yan/introduction (A github for learning materials that allows people to collaboratively create content. )

Awesome, thats a step in right direction i believe

Why do you think user generated content is important? Why shouldn't the content be made by a platform, like Coursera?

Re: Why tech has failed to innovate in education?

#6

Post by billconan » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #4

The 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/reinforcemen…

I don't understand what unbundling means?

Re: Why tech has failed to innovate in education?

#7

Post by gt2 » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

billconan wrote: post #6

buboard wrote: post #4

The 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/reinforcemen…

I don't understand what unbundling means?

Maybe 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.

Re: Why tech has failed to innovate in education?

#8

Post by maxharris » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

You 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.

Re: Why tech has failed to innovate in education?

#9

Post by buboard » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:44 PM UTC

billconan wrote: post #6

buboard wrote: post #4

The 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/reinforcemen…

I don't understand what unbundling means?

just 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-bundli...

Re: Why tech has failed to innovate in education?

#10

Post by idoh » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

@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.