This is a fantastic list, but having experienced many interactions with districts and schools that wanted free pilots over the last 15 years, I would strongly encourage any company to insist on some fee associated with the pilot, even if discounted (assuming you are not doing a freemium model). Pilots don't succeed unless district and school staff are committed and provide the necessary implementation support. In Edtech, your success is critically dependent on effectively engaging with the people using your technology. In many cases, there are people you need to engage who were not part of the decision making process and may even be annoyed that they have to squeeze in yet another one of a zillion initiatives on their plate (perhaps true in any B2B but 10X true in Education). Charging money increases the likelihood that district staff will take your product seriously and put the resources and time behind it that will greatly increase the odds of success. Free pilots are especially tempting in the early days when you are trying to prove yourself, but if your product is truly valuable, a couple successful reference implementations will far outweigh a bunch of fizzled pilots with ambiguous outcomes. Charging for the pilot also helps you weed out schools and districts that are not really serious about solving the problem you solve. Especially in the early days, you want to find those evangelists that will go to bat for you within their bureaucracy and with their more risk averse peers in the market. The serious ones will find the money if you're product is the real deal. Just my two cents based on what I've seen. Never had a single free pilot turn into a school or district sale. For my company, a strong full-price implementation at one or two schools in the district laid solid groundwork for a full-price district deal down the road.
Guidelines for Edtech Products
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products
#32Weird, 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 cases these features are not sufficient—or don't even work in the app/platform.
Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products
#33I'm CTO of an edtech company and I'm quite excited to see this list- outside of specialist VCs like Reach and Learn Capital, the typical level of understanding of these nuances by investors is shallow. This will up the game. However there is one glaring absence: I don't see a recommendation to show provable academic results. You could follow all of these snd still have an ineffective product that doesn't actually adv…
Yeah, I was surprised when I talked with the CTO of a large (raised tens of millions) edtech company and learned that they had done zero work on measuring efficacy for their adaptive learning solution. They literally had no evidence that their platform increased student learning in any way.
To their credit, they were thinking about creating a team to look into this.
Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products
#34Are 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.)
Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products
#35This is fantastic. But this sounds like it's mostly intended for startups at an early/mid stage. What I mean is companies who already run a monopoly are more likely, in my opinion, to overlook these guidelines.
Those companies are likely not applying to YC.
Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products
#36Are 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 they're probably much less relevant.
Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
YC won't do your homework for you. There's great resources out there tho - start by spending a few hours on EdSurge. I literally started the company to inform folks like you entering the space to learn what's going on, who's doing what, and how ed is different from other industries being impacted by tech. It's the best resource out there. The main takeaway I have after seeing so many enter this space in the past 7+ y…
With all due respect, it's a total fallacy that edtech has to be different from other industries. There's no physical force in the universe forcing education to be any certain way. So if one way is provably better, we should just build it, and deal with the obstacles when they come up later. Kids, both privileged and not, have been dropping out for years because they're tired of things. I'm building this for them. To…
Re:industries, you don't think that the fact that education is about humans, rather than say.. power grids, or financial instruments, or mines, or laundry detergents.. makes it at least somewhat different from other industries? Or that those being served (children) are often not in a position to be the sole determinants of what's best for them, and thus your buyers may not be your users (and all that entails)?
Re:physical forces, there's actually several that have defined why education is a certain way today, and that will shape it in the future. Probably the most powerful is that it's first and foremost about human relationships - foundations of values, trust, physical presence, belonging, etc. And the second most powerful is that poverty is a physical context that shapes outcomes in the most profound of ways. I only bring these up because a) they're taken for granted by many tech entrepreneurs who did not have to worry about them in their own lives, and b) they're the reality tech entrepreneurs grapple with when they focus on the core of education problems, rather than the periphery where most wind up.
You sound pretty dead set in thinking you've got this though, so I wish you the best of luck.
Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products
#38As someone whose career has revolved around education, I have to say I'm a bit disappointed with these guidelines. The focus is entirely on formal schooling as opposed to education.
The problem is that "widely accepted standards", especially in the US are sub-optimal in terms of educational outcome. Even if Common Core were great (which is not the case), continuing to improve pedagogy and curriculum should be ongoing goals. Similarly, why push people to use a closed system such as Lexile® for rating the difficulty of reading material instead of something open?
On an even more basic level, should edtech offerings be limited to children living in the US at all? I would say no. Most Americans aren't children and most humans aren't Americans.
Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products
#39This is fantastic. But this sounds like it's mostly intended for startups at an early/mid stage. What I mean is companies who already run a monopoly are more likely, in my opinion, to overlook these guidelines.
Those companies are likely not applying to YC.
Does it matter? The purpose of these guidelines IMO is to improve the standards of EdTech products and perhaps the value they create for education as a whole.
Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products
#40As someone whose career has revolved around education, I have to say I'm a bit disappointed with these guidelines. The focus is entirely on formal schooling as opposed to education. The problem is that "widely accepted standards", especially in the US are sub-optimal in terms of educational outcome. Even if Common Core were great (which is not the case), continuing to improve pedagogy and curriculum should be ongoing…
Agreed. And I would even go a step further. Most often ed (tech) companies focus on education as opposed to learning. It is all about efficiency, organization, administration, and improving conventional education or schooling processes rather than improving the learning processes of the student.