Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

The academic job market is absolutely brutal. Ever more administrators are being hired, and (in some disciplines anyway) fewer and fewer tenure-track professors.

As a result, there are tons of experts, with traditional academic training in spades, who are eager to work in their domain of expertise, and who might be well inclined to engage in some "disruption".

I learn more by reading, and the ubiquitous PDF of course notes findable by DDGo is really something. Ubiquitous preprinted are amazing.

But YouTube’s videos have helped me fix home appliances, fuse PVC, and pick up all sorts of practical skills. Lynda could be in the same avenue for work skills.

I just don't feel like I have problems which I'm itching to have solved by technology.

As an example of this, I've graded thousands of calculus exams in my career. It's time consuming, it's painful, and it's unpleasant. But it's also inevitable. Looking at my students' work, engaging with their mistakes, seeing what they do and don't understand -- helps to build the connection between myself and my students, helps me understand what is going on in my classroom.

You can't automate that away.

My personal opinion is that for some sort of meaningful disruption to happen, ed tech entrepreneurs will have to craft their tools such that they are focused on the end user being the student and what their ultimate needs are. I would also say that the company/idea would need some way to start attacking credentialism and challenge the status quo (university degrees) which also mean you have to factor in the needs of employers.

The truth is most people won't bother with learning much of anything unless they are monetarily incentivized by employment prospects or outright money of some sort.

I would also say it is probably better to craft your product/service on third world countries like India or China which might have easier barriers to crack and at the same time these countries might be responsive to a disruptive ed tech idea as these emerging powers seek to compete with the USA's education dominance.

"Although critics have long argued that paying students for results can lead to a decreased interest in learning, Fryer’s new results show no evidence to justify or support these claims."

That said, the researcher found that while paying students for results didn't cause harm, they did find that what worked even better (that is, worked at all) was "when they were paid to perform specific actions, such as reading books or wearing their uniforms."

“When you are paid to do something you may not know exactly how to accomplish, it’s not clear how you respond. But if you are being offered money to do something very concrete...then that might be easier to respond to.”

Not a silver bullet as the researcher notes:

“I’m interested in what are the four or five investments that, when put together, have the potential to close the achievement gap,” Fryer said. “Incentives could be one of [them], I don’t know yet. This is the first kind of large scale experiment in urban schools on incentives, and I hope it’s not the last.”

But also I hope people don't just dismiss the idea of monetarily incentivizing children out of hand.