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Guidelines for Edtech Products

ycombinator.com

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Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#51
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That market is small to non-existent. If you're creating a startup that doesn't seem like the audience you want to focus on, at least not at first.

Aren't there specialty publishers for home schooling? I was home-schooled for a year as a kid, and we used to get catalogs of specialty curriculum (classical education in greek, latin, religious books, etc). Perhaps not material for a "start-up", but there is definitely a very enthusiastic customer base.

I have a homeschooling family member and her behavior closely resembles that of early Ravelry/Etsy/Meetup adopters: she's finding fellow travelers online, meeting up in person, collaborating on events (co-teaching, field trips), and she feels likes she's at the vanguard of a movement.

I'd say this is a stellar business opportunity, especially for a company that is mission-driven, transparent, and possibly even partially crowd-funded.

Many readers of this message may feel a lifetime away from questions of childhood education, but today more than ever parents are realizing the insanity of letting school districting determine where they work and live. And millions of parents want to give their children a better education than their district offers, but can't move or afford private school.

I suspect non-traditional schooling will be as common as remote working in a decade or so.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there specialty publishers for home schooling? I was home-schooled for a year as a kid, and we used to get catalogs of specialty curriculum (classical education in greek, latin, religious books, etc). Perhaps not material for a "start-up", but there is definitely a very enthusiastic customer base.

I have a homeschooling family member and her behavior closely resembles that of early Ravelry/Etsy/Meetup adopters: she's finding fellow travelers online, meeting up in person, collaborating on events (co-teaching, field trips), and she feels likes she's at the vanguard of a movement. I'd say this is a stellar business opportunity, especially for a company that is mission-driven, transparent, and possibly even partia…

That's an interesting set of observations.

My parents have a beekeeping business, and the homeschooling set seems to have been great for them. A lot of people are interested in alternative food/medicine stuff, as well as educational 4H type demos of honey extraction, and the homeschooling groups seem to have referred a lot of people to them.

I suspect there would be a bit of culture clash with ycombinator though.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#53
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make some good points and I appreciate the links. The one thing you're leaving off that public and private schools teach are the lessons learned from face-to-face social interactions with peers, bullies, and authority figures. Public schools largely held be back as a savant where I had to learn most shit on my own. Some teachers were great enough to try to help me on the side. Nonetheless, the basic principles on…

>>> Nonetheless, the basic principles on human behavior I've encountered in various workplaces were the same as I dealt with in public schooling. Other people good at balancing various tradeoffs in the schools did well in the workplaces I've been in. Among the worst were the homeschoolers with one or two exceptions. Especially when they were trying to change things with resisting authority figures before getting slap…

"I get what you're saying here, but if the chief virtue of the educational system is that it beats people into submission ready to face life in authoritarian (or micromanagement-disguised-as-teamwork) workplaces, I'm not entirely convinced that it's something worth protecting."

I'm against the public school system. So, we agree with each other. Yet, I'm for putting them in situations where some aspect of what they have to do is dictated so they learn respond to that properly. Some of them will allow a clever response to succeed while others will not. Just like in real world.

They need to expect and be ready for this as the authoritarianism is dominant in workplace and government.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a homeschooling family member and her behavior closely resembles that of early Ravelry/Etsy/Meetup adopters: she's finding fellow travelers online, meeting up in person, collaborating on events (co-teaching, field trips), and she feels likes she's at the vanguard of a movement. I'd say this is a stellar business opportunity, especially for a company that is mission-driven, transparent, and possibly even partia…

That's an interesting set of observations. My parents have a beekeeping business, and the homeschooling set seems to have been great for them. A lot of people are interested in alternative food/medicine stuff, as well as educational 4H type demos of honey extraction, and the homeschooling groups seem to have referred a lot of people to them. I suspect there would be a bit of culture clash with ycombinator though.

Not to get all wiseacre but the real culture clash is when primary education amounts to almost nothing.

I've taught in inner-city high schools and I'm positive that a single person (parent or otherwise) with the right motivation and tools can better educate a child than a failing system.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make some good points and I appreciate the links. The one thing you're leaving off that public and private schools teach are the lessons learned from face-to-face social interactions with peers, bullies, and authority figures. Public schools largely held be back as a savant where I had to learn most shit on my own. Some teachers were great enough to try to help me on the side. Nonetheless, the basic principles on…

If you look over my application linked in the OC, you'll see our number one design goal is to connect users physically. There's something incredibly powerful about the social experience that school provides like you're describing that no big edtech platform today has made an explicit design goal. In short, we'll have to "design for trust" a lot like Airbnb did (see Joe Gebbia's TED talk). The locations could be anywh…

Your application is very interesting but it looks like you're trying to do too much at once. Especially with the AI part haha. I think a subset of it is achievable by one, focused person for a limited set of students and topics. As another said, the crap people deal with today is mandated by law and policy under a regime that won't buy into what you're proposing. Further, many places require by law that the kids are in what educational system considers a school rather than your app. So, you might want to prove the idea by hitting the market for workforce training and personal improvement then pivot into general education as both will use similar resources.

Another problem with your proposal, a huge one, is that there's nothing in it about countering spread of misinformation. Quick link to give an idea of how easy invalid information spreads and persists across social media:

http://www.iflscience.com/technology/facebook-echo-chambers-...

That or another Facebook study also pointed out that retractions (eg a Snopes article) only slowed misinformation in the 30-40% range IIRC. The bad info spreads more and lasts longer in your model. It has to be detected somehow with official counters on any topics where there's a consensus that they need to know. That means your model, like the others, needs human beings that act as sort of teachers and moderators. This is even true for a high-quality forum of smart people like Hacker News. Alternative is some AI that knows everything about how people speak, these topics, how to explain them... artificial teachers of nearly human intelligence that nobody has built yet. Since you lack that and need humans, your model can't scale for general population at the rate of technology scaling. Instead, it's something like N teachers per M groups where the N to M ratio is however much stuff the teachers can follow and moderate. You then modify this somehow with the fact that specific people or groups vetted by teachers as knowing the material can be rated among the N as their input is trustworthy. Might even compensate volunteers somehow a la StackOverflow or Quora if they contribute a certain amount.

Far as full experience regardless of bandwidth, do look up the concept of progressive enhancement as illustrated with this project:

https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-prog...

That thing even works on Lynx. Now, you want images, video, interactivity. The images can be compressed quite a bit while still being clear. Same with video. More compression for lower bandwidth links. Animated GIF's done well can illustrate in a few images what otherwise takes a video. Still popular on many sites. Use straight-up text where you can as my old text & RTF files were way smaller than Word or Web files. :) Support for distributed, file sharing within group if on Wifi. Alternatively, on SDcards where they could just buy one, have one person who affords Internet pull the data, and pass the shared card(s) along to group members.

I like how you mix it being a paid service with tax deductions and donations. I predict you'll probably put most or all of the services on the same infrastructure. What you can do is use the money that comes in for business or professional courses to cover creation of general ed material. The cash flow is split to cover each. The people making general ed material should have a track record of writing books or doing online courses that actually worked. They'll adapt it to your model. They'll have to change it for increased effectiveness as user feedback comes in like any other marketing. The cash flow also expands the distribution network so people with low income or poverty can access the material without overloading organization. A number of them might become contributors or paying users later.

So, those are some ideas I got as I read your application.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#56

I'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.

I've seen something like this in the marketing industry. I think it happens when success of a company depends not on the efficacy of their solution, but their ability to convince people it works. When customers can't tell whether the solution works or not (or when they can't tell if the metrics you present them are reliable or relevant in any way), efficacy stops being a variable in the business.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting set of observations. My parents have a beekeeping business, and the homeschooling set seems to have been great for them. A lot of people are interested in alternative food/medicine stuff, as well as educational 4H type demos of honey extraction, and the homeschooling groups seem to have referred a lot of people to them. I suspect there would be a bit of culture clash with ycombinator though.

Not to get all wiseacre but the real culture clash is when primary education amounts to almost nothing. I've taught in inner-city high schools and I'm positive that a single person (parent or otherwise) with the right motivation and tools can better educate a child than a failing system.

Fair enough, I appreciate hearing your experience!

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen something like this in the marketing industry. I think it happens when success of a company depends not on the efficacy of their solution, but their ability to convince people it works. When customers can't tell whether the solution works or not (or when they can't tell if the metrics you present them are reliable or relevant in any way), efficacy stops being a variable in the business.

Exactly, and I think people view any educational system that is adaptive as necessarily effective. It may be that this is often true, but of course it depends on the specifics and the way it's used in the classroom.

I think this company's strategy was to grab market share with a free product, then start charging for more and more features. By the time people go to pay, they forget that they never actually checked to see if the free product was actually effective in any way.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Do you think this is caused by selling directly to institutions, rather than the consumers of the application? I know there are a few products oriented around specific accessibility features that would be sold directly to the people who need them (e.g. tty devices), but it seems the only progress I've seen in this area in software projects was for §508 compliance.

This was a product that is sold largely to institutions, so that could be the issue. Big companies go after big markets, and they tend to view accessibility as niche (and therefore not worth their time). While a particular need might be niche (blindness = .1% of children), when you add up all accessibility needs, it's actually a large chunk of the student population (at least 20%) that gets left out.

I think some edtech companies improperly equate accessibility with special education and write it off as a separate (smaller) market. But the point of accommodations, in many cases, is that many kids can be taught alongside their peers in general ed classes—if they get the right accommodations.

For example, a kid with bad eyesight has an accessibility need (glasses, or if he can't afford them large text). He is not someone who needs to go to a separate special education class. Unfortunately, the lack of accessibility in popular edtech solutions means that kids like this are not able to be served in a gen-ed classroom. This leads to stigmatization and lower achievement.

Re: Guidelines for Edtech Products

#60
post #45
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That market is small to non-existent. If you're creating a startup that doesn't seem like the audience you want to focus on, at least not at first.

Government stats [1] suggest well over a million homeschooled children in the US. This is towards the low end of various estimates out there. Certainly not non-existent. It varies a lot from country to country, but the YC guidelines are clearly US-centric, and I don't think you can write homeschooling off there. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_206.10.a...

This is still not that many compared to the children going to school. Additionally that's a very heterogenous group, homeschooling their children for a variety of different reasons, using different approaches following different curricula.

There is certainly space for companies who want to sell educational products and there are companies already doing so. What that means though is that you already have quite a bit of competition in a market that you're not going to completely capture. If this is your target audience you have a relatively low ceiling and you won't be able to push past it.

Additionally you can't scale to different countries or even states that easily. You need different materials to account for different languages, cultures and curricula. You need to account for regulation and a sales teams to approach the various homeschooling groups.

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