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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

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Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#401

Post by consteval »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #308
consteval wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These industries, more or less, need to be highly regulated because we've faced the alternative and it's worse. The quality of education went up SIGNFICANTLY when the state took more control over it.

Part of that is questionable, because the state gets to set the means by which the quality of education is measured. However, a more objective measure is the extent of education; certainly, the introduction of national education has always produced a much greater literacy rate.

The thing is extent and execution are intrinsically linked. Meaning, unregulated markets mean the extent will be limited because people will just choose not to get educated. Which makes sense, if they themselves are uneducated they don't have perfect reasoning skills or future outlook.

A market relies on the participants having visibility and ability. They need to see the alternatives, understand them deeply, and have access to them. Turns out you can't do that in a bunch of markets, education being one of them. So, it can never be a true free market.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#402

Post by insane_dreamer »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #351
insane_dreamer wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in 3rd grade, he does math with the 4th grade class (which is currently working through the Singapore Math 4A book). Coincidentally, my son is also in 3rd grade and also on Singapore 4A book at home :) He can't do math with the 4th grade class (not really an option at our school) but does 5th grade level with the apps they use in class (DreamBox, not sure which others). > But usually he's just been too aggressive a…

If someone's only exposure to math edtech tools is Dreambox, IXL, Prodigy etc., they would be right to be skeptical. Math Academy is great (4th grade onward). Beast Academy online is also very good (up to 5th grade only).

We did Beast Academy for a couple of years with my older boy but he grew tired of it so we switched to Singapore Math books.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#403

Post by somethingsome »

donatj wrote: post #10

I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level. The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured. We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaint…

I'm just very curious as I'm passionate about teaching, how do you evaluate 'their level'?

I my experience, I can give material that is way out of their comfort zone, but it's my job to make it interesting enough and make enough bridges so that everyone can learn the material well, no matter the starting point.

(note: university level, but I also teached numerous times for schools)

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#404

Post by DiggyJohnson »

tombert wrote: post #354
corytheboyd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dropped out around the same time, and one other key thing I’ve noticed is the tech bootcamps hadn’t completely taken over yet, so there was less of a flood of other entry level people to fight for every single opening. You would even get a call back sometimes applying cold (no internal referral). I tend to throw “lucky” in there too when telling the tale of how I got my foot in the door— it’s hard not to, consideri…

I got kind of double-lucky in my case too. When I dropped out, I assumed that my job options were limited to minimum wage work, so I applied to McDonald's, Lowes, Target, Walmart (as a cashier), Aldi, and a few other places in one day (driving around the Orlando area). When I got home, sort of on a whim I applied to junior-level Coldfusion+Flash job I saw on Craigslist, thinking that there's no chance but it also did…

Thanks for sharing all of this Tom. It's always cool to learn the various backstories behind mainstay HN contributors. Hope the rest of your career is going as well as that first day!

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#405

Post by shortrounddev2 »

AdamN wrote: post #118
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that the kids were learning ahead of the rest of the class and it made the teacher's life harder to keep track of where each kid is, or had to field questions outside of her expertise since often elementary school teachers only know enough to teach elementary school

Yeah - this is on OP if that is the case. No teacher wants that and it's annoying for the ahead kids and the behind kids. Better to give them something tangential to keep them engaged but still gate on moving ahead with the mainline curriculum.

I think it would be better to have a system where teachers aren't required to synchronize knowledge between 30 kids and some source material; where each kid can excel at their own pace and the teacher helps them manage their goals rather than being the primary source of information

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#406

Post by shortrounddev2 »

oytis wrote: post #232
AdamN wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - this is on OP if that is the case. No teacher wants that and it's annoying for the ahead kids and the behind kids. Better to give them something tangential to keep them engaged but still gate on moving ahead with the mainline curriculum.

To be fair - maybe that's what the product mentioned should have been doing? You can focus on general problem-solving ability by giving talented kids hard problems with the amount of knowledge adequate for their level rather giving them more an more material and making the whole learning process less manageable.

"general problem solving ability" isn't a real thing. Proficiency in solving, for example, math problems, does not confer the ability to draw conclusions based on evidence in history class. If you require a kid who's already mastered fractions to simply do harder and harder fractions rather than allowing them to continue onward, they will become bored and distracted, and ultimately burned out or resentful of the education system

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#407

Post by tombert »

marssaxman wrote: post #348
tombert wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few reasons. For the most part, my career was fine. I had a job at Apple as a senior software engineer at the time (though I didn't really enjoy the job itself). Part of it was just a bit of an inferiority complex over insecurity of not having a degree. People were generally very polite about it, but internally it felt like every bad thing happened to me in my career was because of the lack of a degree; every comme…

Thank you for sharing your story. I, too, dropped out of college, but finding employment as a programmer back in the mid-90s required very little luck. It became difficult to justify the time and expense of further education when my career already seemed to be launching, ready or not. Funny that you mention MSR - I also applied there, back in 2007, and they are also the only people who have ever turned me down for la…

I'm a little jealous that they passed your information along devdiv, I would have liked to work on something like the TypeScript compiler; I just got an unceremonious form letter.

I obviously don't blame them for declining me, they don't owe me a job, but I still find it a bit amusing that in my entire career exactly one entity has declined me for that reason, or at least only one has been brave enough to state that that was the reason why. I'm sure a lot of the places that never got back to me might have declined me for a lack of a degree behind the scenes, but I was never made aware of it.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#408

Post by tombert »

sourcepluck wrote: post #205
tombert wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit tangential but related. I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1]. I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel l…

> "It wasn't until I found out about WGU" Could I politely suggest writing out the full acronym the first time, and then using WGU subsequently? It'd be a good deal more considerate of non-U.S. readers.

You're absolutely right, apologies for that. It can be easy for me to forget that people don't have every acronym that I know implanted into their head.

Sibling comment already stated this, but I'll just say I was referring to Western Governors University. I have added an edit to the post to clarify.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#409

Post by tombert »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #404
tombert wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got kind of double-lucky in my case too. When I dropped out, I assumed that my job options were limited to minimum wage work, so I applied to McDonald's, Lowes, Target, Walmart (as a cashier), Aldi, and a few other places in one day (driving around the Orlando area). When I got home, sort of on a whim I applied to junior-level Coldfusion+Flash job I saw on Craigslist, thinking that there's no chance but it also did…

Thanks for sharing all of this Tom. It's always cool to learn the various backstories behind mainstay HN contributors. Hope the rest of your career is going as well as that first day!

Ha! Never really thought of myself as a "mainstay" contributor, but I'll take it.

I mean, like most careers its had its ups and downs. 2023 was an exceptionally awful year for me (like many, many people in tech), but this year has been pretty alright.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#410

Post by somethingsome »

donatj wrote: post #10

I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level. The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured. We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaint…

Personally I have bad experience with edTech because when a student is young, he is not disciplined enough to do hard things alone or even just annoying things, and studying can be both.

So when they have an app with for example a qcm in front of them, the first times they try to do well, then they learn that if they randomely click buttons, at some point the app validate the answer, even if they didn't read the questions/answers.

So you get a group of young people that after school, just spend 10min randomely clicking on a app without any purpose, and after that they can go play.

I've got students that were from a private school, everyone was doing that, and their level was extremely bad.

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