Isn't this just a subset of "all educational innovations don't scale". Education is chock-full of things that looked great at small scale and then fail to replicate at large scale. Given that long established reality, which is well known within the education field, the alleged scaling nature of software no longer seems like some great win, since you're likely just quickly scaling out something that doesn't actually work.
Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
21–30 of 74 posts
Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're missing the fundamental mechanic here. Spence signalling[1] won the econ Nobel back in 2001. It says that the cost of signalling in a market for imperfect information ends on the one emitting the signal. For education and jobs, the signal is your degree (hence the huge career difference between dropping out one week before getting a degree and completing). The cost of the degree will fall on the studen…
I think another huge factor is that you are making a prediction on the future value of your degree over the next 40-50 years as a 17 year old who is probably more focused on succeeding socially and sexually. You add in the student loans that may or may not be forgiven at some time in the future and the free market is not in play. Same with Healthcare, insurance clouds all free market mechanics. I'm a huge capitalist…
A 17 year old focusing on succeeding socially and sexually is still really incentivized to go to college! People have tons of friends and sex at even the nerdiest college.
Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think another huge factor is that you are making a prediction on the future value of your degree over the next 40-50 years as a 17 year old who is probably more focused on succeeding socially and sexually. You add in the student loans that may or may not be forgiven at some time in the future and the free market is not in play. Same with Healthcare, insurance clouds all free market mechanics. I'm a huge capitalist…
A 17 year old focusing on succeeding socially and sexually is still really incentivized to go to college! People have tons of friends and sex at even the nerdiest college.
Exactly my point, it's not a purely financial decision. It's barely a financial decision.
Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
#24I’d want to see extensive research on the benefits of Ed-Tech products before they are unleashed on classrooms full of actual students. “Making things easier for teachers” is often not the case and simultaneously creates costs for training and support at these institutions along with the exponential growth required to administer these new roles. And then of course are the students themselves. How do iPads compare to…
One of the schools near us gives an ipad to every children from 1st grqde. Needless to say this instantly disqualified the school in my mind.
I’m not anti-screen, I think it’s good if my son uses a computer at home with things like kidpix, scratch, castle of dr brain, etc… But I think devices at school at that age are a potent distraction and I do not trust a school to be thoughtful about the usage of tech (the school I mentioned thinks it’s also a good idea to have some instant messaging app in grade 1 betweeen all the kids).
Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
#25I'm surprised it didn't do more than touch on probably the biggest reason: we already pay a huge amount for education out of taxes, so the educational budgets are allocated by bureaucrats, and not by education consumers (or their parents).
Yes, in particular for PreK-12 schools here in the States. Here in NJ nearly all board members know little or nothing about education, but are elected as popularity contest. Superintendents get paid big salaries and are often severely under qualified. There is a lot of bureaucracy created by this.
Many companies that target PreK-12 also know there is a lot of incompetent admins with boat loads of cash. Pricing gouging is very common.
People are shocked when they learn about 70% of property tax bills goes to the school district, not the municipality or county.
Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
#26It also doesn't help that there is massive yearly churn.
Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
#27So you want to maximise economic rent on the education of the masses and you wonder why societies are resistant to that, plainly because the outcome is horrendous.
Solving a problem and asking someone to pay for it doesn't have to be "rent seeking". If you want a service to work well and continue to, it's in your best interest to pay for it.
Who is getting the service here the individual or society. A neoliberal world view might assume there is no society but that is patently absurd.
If society wants too have a functioning and prosperous economy it should provide education as a utility not something that's geared towards profit. If anyone thinks neoliberal solutions will bring anything other than economic rent seeking you've been living under a rock for the last 40 years.
Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
#28I’d want to see extensive research on the benefits of Ed-Tech products before they are unleashed on classrooms full of actual students. “Making things easier for teachers” is often not the case and simultaneously creates costs for training and support at these institutions along with the exponential growth required to administer these new roles. And then of course are the students themselves. How do iPads compare to…
I worked with a lot of schools in my last company and unfortunately I don't think extensive research is the best road either. While I totally understand your position, this excuse is also used for only allowing pen and paper for math in highschool by teachers.
It takes a crazy amount of time to extensively research and prove things in education for a few reasons:
There is opposition to doing the research because teachers/parents don't want their students to be the first.
It's really hard to make random control groups because schools want to put kids in classrooms by their process, not the whims of the researchers.
It's expensive and mostly controlled by the big granters (ex. Gates Foundation).
Results are often looked at via testing measures (which if you look at assessments, sometimes they were proven by having 400 white kids in an affluent school use, aka not representative).
And so, we have a bit of an issue.
Almost no one teaches math via a spreadsheet even though most adults do. It isn't researched on the implications.
Data science as a class to qualify for credit to get into college is greatly contentious because it isn't proven. Even though it is clearly important to our current era.
In addition, teachers are human and so they don't necessarily teach with the 100% best proven methodologies day in and day out.
So I think it's important to realize that education is human. It's flawed and messy and isn't aligned to the best methods already. Sometimes you get lucky with a teacher that works for you and sometimes not.
Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
#29I think this really depends on your definition of EdTech. I don’t think anyone would contend that turnitin or Ellucian haven’t scaled well. Tools that cater to the organisations that have money can absolutely do well, but trying to sell to people without the means to buy your stuff will always be unsuccessful.
Yeah canvas and blackboard were are one point startups, I'm sure there's some products that can scale, but the market is probably driven by bureaucratic compliance more than a genuine desire to improve the quality of education for students
I only have experience of the university side of EdTech, but in my experience people were extremely interested in anything that would make it easier for lecturers to do their jobs, improve student experience, etc.
What they weren’t interested in was anything that changed the general dynamic of the university or replaced their core business.
Marking tools, stuff that helps deliver lectures, anything of that variety was all in-bounds, and lots of departments were happy to explore new things.
What would not sell was anything that required selling directly to students, because they simply won’t spend the money.
Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
#30"See, when you build an education product, you’re competing against two massive institutions: the formal education system (schools, colleges, state universities, etc.), and the laws and cultural expectations around that system." Well, there's your problem. I worked for years in those markets, cooperating with their needs, not fighting them. You succeed in such markets by helping them do what they already do... just b…
You are right, institutions dominate EdTech.
The UK had a number of competitive and teacher-led EdTech AI startups delivering lesson planning, like briskteaching.com & teachematic. They have some inroads with schools and colleges now. And probably would have disrupted up into the procedural level naturally.
However the government decided to give £2m without any open procedure to a new company to build similar tech from scratch, and their PR acted as if this was groundbreaking, while the tech they promised, largely already existed and was in use by many teachers: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-support-for-teachers-...
Who wants to invest in teachematic or brisk teaching, when your competition can get millions from the government without process and launch the same ideas over a time frame to starve you out? With the market overcrowded, prices are forced to lower, and many companies will now go bust because of this kind of unnecessary government intervention. Brisk Teaching has already had to make most things free. You cannot really be more cooperative with the system than that, but tough luck they still won't get the £2m despite proving out the idea before those funded.
Shortly we will likely see the institutions in control of education like Ofsted mandate, approve or limit the tooling used, and most startups will die out. Rather than several low cost startups bringing high amounts of value, tax payers have spent millions on salaries for people with no AI background to create duplicate products, and the net value to education for actual students is therefore lowered as a result. So you can't disrupt this procedural level very effectively when the government intervenes early on.