Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade • Hacker News Board

Re: Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

#91

Post by seattle_spring » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:47 AM UTC

droithomme wrote: post #67

axbytg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, unless you are hiring straight out of college and the C+ is in an immediately relevant or "red flag" class. I can't imagine being asked this. I studied philosophy, I'm interviewing to write software, who cares about my grades?

You submitted your transcripts. I am going to ask about your C+. It's a reasonable thing for me to ask you about, don't you agree?

I only submitted them because the recruiter required I submit them, which was dumb in the first place.

Re: Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

#92

Post by fatbird » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:48 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #20

I spent years working in ed-tech, at more than one company on this list, and know people at many others. There were two overarching lessons I took from my experience. The first is that a successful educational product needs to deeply and intimately understand pedagogy and materials -- teaching and learning techniques and how they vary between students, and what kinds of materials are suitable -- deeply , I mean like…

I've had this discussion before with ed-tech disruptors, and beyond the points you mention, is another more subtle but more important one: every problem a child has outside of the classroom presents itself as a barrier to learning inside the classroom.

That means poverty, bullying, abuse, anxiety, undiagnosed illnesses... all of that shows up in the classroom. Teachers know this, and continually deal with it when they recognize it and have the opportunity to deal with it. This simple fact informs everything about education, and no reform is possible without understanding and accounting for it.

And anything any disruptor attempts to do will be deeply, pervasively affected by this fact. And none of them seem to give a fuck, though they would if they spent 10 minutes talking to a teacher about it.

Re: Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

#93

Post by cgearhart » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:57 AM UTC

newguy1234 wrote: post #52

cgearhart wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning isn’t really something that the provider can force on the student. Learning is like weight loss-there isn’t a trivial one-size-fits-all solution, and it requires a ton of work that no one else can do for you. Tests and lectures aren’t outdated, nor even particularly ineffective compared to anything else. I don’t know when it became popular to hate the way school is run, but it usually traces back to the mist…

Technology can help reduce the impact of those social problems....for example make college courses cheaper to deliver and so on.

Sure, but I'm arguing that the things technology can influence are very limited vs the core social problems that are the primary inhibitors of learning. Making it cheaper to deliver lectures or easier to deliver them is less important than making sure that the people receiving them are well fed, well rested, want to be there, etc.

I wouldn't invest in an ed-tech company whose product depends on learners changing their behavior (e.g., any of the platform companies like Udacity, Coursera, Pluralsight, etc.) unless it was a bet on their enterprise product.

Re: Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

#94

Post by bane » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 6:09 AM UTC

seattle_spring wrote: post #3

While I understand I only met a small fraction of the people trying to "disrupt" education, my experience with Ed-Tech was that the absolute wrong people were behind it. I interviewed at Coursera in 2012, and much of the interview focused on my academic background. Every round I'd sit down with an interviewer and they'd look at my transcript and say, "hmm what happened here!?" as they would point to my C+, the only g…

Why for goodness sakes would a job interview need your college transcripts?

Re: Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

#95

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 6:18 AM UTC

seattle_spring wrote: post #90

WalterBright wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The kind of ass kissing and begging that I saw among my peers that got all A's My technique was to learn the material :-)

If it was like the other students I knew who got 4.0s, the time it took them to go from 3.6 to 4.0 was at the expense of other much more enriching opportunities in life. There's hugely diminishing returns in perfecting ones report card, with regard to actual personal educational growth.

I decided early on that my goal was to graduate with honors. I knew how much work that entailed, did that, got the grades, and graduated with honors.

I made the right decision, it worked for me. I didn't do any begging or ass kissing, and still had time to enjoy the other pursuits being in college afforded.

Re: Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

#96

Post by mncharity » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 6:38 AM UTC

Off topic, but... Does anyone know of a community exploring transformative improvements in science education content?

Perhaps discussing topics like: Using pre-K content to inoculate against misconceptions, instead of engendering them.[1] Using industry-derived orthogonal sets of adjectives for describing perceptual properties of materials, instead of the usual adhocery. Rough quantitative description. Teaching scale down to atoms in early primary. Teaching atoms emphasizing quasi-classical nuclei balls, instead of wacky electrons. Atoms-up introduction to materials, and nanoscale emergence of bulk properties. Rough-quantitative introductory biology... in primary. The Sun is too hot, deep space is too cold, and the Earth is doing a BBQ roll between them (the space and roll bits are generally neglected).

Discussions bottlenecked as much on science expertise as educational expertise.

In some sense it's unhelpful discussion. Many ideas are currently undeployable, or their value is uninterestingly limited without the synergy of implausible dependencies.

But personalized AR education seemingly has the potential to alter the constraint space. With a lot of work to be done, if it isn't to be merely "the usual wretchedness, now in AR".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud1Q_q4f-hQ

Re: Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

#97

Post by j45 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 6:50 AM UTC

seattle_spring wrote: post #3

While I understand I only met a small fraction of the people trying to "disrupt" education, my experience with Ed-Tech was that the absolute wrong people were behind it. I interviewed at Coursera in 2012, and much of the interview focused on my academic background. Every round I'd sit down with an interviewer and they'd look at my transcript and say, "hmm what happened here!?" as they would point to my C+, the only g…

Having worked in and around EdTech in both industry for longer than most I meet.. a few themes seem to arise regularly that explain why so much of EdTech is stuck in the past., including hiring:

- academic institutions generally have leadership inept at understanding technology

- when academics try to make decisions by committee about technology when they are not competent in tech, it rarely works out

- few academics actually learn how to teach, let alone how to learn. But a degree will make someone an expert, I suppose.

- Education for hundreds of years has been linear, to match the linear nature of the factory floor and professional careers. Math hasn’t changed in 500 years. But, the world is no longer linear and the linear lenses that attempt to put tech, innovation in to linear paths will fail.

- The world is changing faster than any curriculum can keep up. Courses can take 1 to 3 years to update once, and in the meantime, entire industries are upended by Uber and Airbnb.

There are, many smart academics who understand this, but too many academic environments are far too toxic because they run like small countries who don’t answer or listen to their founders, students.

The gates and metrics being used to assess those capable of innovation in education, when the decision makers might be the ones most standing to be supplanted will be a large barrier.

If you’re interested to learn more about one academic has found ails academia, Tony Bates is worth a read.

Re: Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

#98

Post by rasz » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 7:16 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #21

Nursie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did one of their early courses, crypto 1, which I found useful and enlightening. Shamr it didn't take off but then there was no business model AFAICT

I took a few courses. The certs were never really worth much and, without the certs being valuable, not many people were willing to pay. Some of the videos were good. But there's no shortage of videos online. Mostly for programming specifically, autograding had some value--when it worked. Discussion forums were mostly worthless and any meaningful interactions with the people teaching the courses were limited at best.…

I did a bunch of courses too, mainly so my mum could parade Certs with Stanford stamped all over them in front of our family ;-). Other than that 100.0% grade in online machine learning or cryptography course is pretty useless.

Re: Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

#99

Post by visarga » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 7:59 AM UTC

fouc wrote: post #25

crazygringo wrote: post #20

I spent years working in ed-tech, at more than one company on this list, and know people at many others. There were two overarching lessons I took from my experience. The first is that a successful educational product needs to deeply and intimately understand pedagogy and materials -- teaching and learning techniques and how they vary between students, and what kinds of materials are suitable -- deeply , I mean like…

In my opinion.. Ed-tech will never truly be successful if it is B2B and focused on teaching. The real problem to be solved is LEARNING. The goals of teaching and learning are not the same. Focusing on efficient learning means getting away from outdated methodology like tests, long-winded lectures, and more.

> Focusing on efficient learning means getting away from outdated methodology like tests, long-winded lectures, and more.

I think efficient learning would need to be always in the sweet spot - not too difficult and not too easy. Most courses have accessible first few lessons and then suddenly ramp up the difficulty without proper support.

Imagine you want to climb down a building. If you take the stairs, it might take you a few minutes but you reliably get to the bottom. If you try to escalate the wall, or do it in a few large jumps, you might never make it. The next step should always be the size you can handle.

Re: Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

#100

Post by mettamage » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 8:12 AM UTC

One time offer here (@dang and co, if it isn’t relevant enough my apologies):

I am for hire in the ed-tech space. My background as a teacher+psychology / programmer+cs hybrid is highly relevant.

My focus is on people who want to learn at university and coding bootcamp level.

My profile has a bit more (perhaps outdated) info.

I will be reading this topic intently for side project idea inspiration.