Why Is the EdTech Industry So Damn Soft?

The decisionmakers who pay the money (school beauracracy) and the actual customers who use the software (students and teachers) are different people for the LARGEST MARKETS, and therefore you get the worst incentives.

This was written with regard to academic education, but it's interesting when viewed from developer education.

I think Pluralsight had pretty good quality content for devs. Yet "Vista Equity Partners has written off the entire equity value of its investment in tech learning platform Pluralsight, three years after taking it private" https://www.axios.com/2024/05/31/vista-equity-pluralsight

> You know what happens when someone pays you a nontrivial sum of money? They hold you accountable for results.

Did Pluralsight not deliver results? Or are there other forces at play, e.g. devEd is distinct from academicEd? (Genuine question, no subtext here.)

> To some extent, I think we can trace the softness back to the expectation that online learning should be free or ridiculously cheap.

This is true on an individual scale, and often (sadly) on the scale of individual teachers, but it’s wildly incorrect on a statewide scale. For example, California spends a lot of money, on a recurring basis, for educational material.

I would love to see this money spent intelligently. At this scale, CA could choose a license, commission educational material, and require or favor use of that license, and making a derivative work of someone else’s work would be okay. AGPL3 might be a good start.

After a couple years, this might result in a strong base of open-source material that could be iterated on.

Math Academy's pricing is obscene. I don't think it's justified. And I don't think that comparing it to a personal tutor is fair.

High-cost monthly recurring fees is not right. Compare this with buying a book. You get a high-quality resource which you own, forever.

Generally, I love one-time payments for information products.

I am interested in math academy but want some kind of trial. Such a new way of learning demands a trial period so I can determine if it works for me and if I can stick with it.

EdTech is a cursed problem (https://youtu.be/8uE6-vIi1rQ?si=660l-bO9hrtGhQ_D). What do companies want? Retention. What hurts retention? Friction. And friction is precisely what you need to teach someone something. I even think this article is a bit overly simplistic, paying money will not change the equation that much.

The relative failure of edutech is, to me, the biggest disappointment of the Internet age. I remember the hope and buzz around MOOCs circa 2010 being very exciting. From my personal experience with online learning, I mostly agree with the author. No degree gamification or cheapness of distribution will overcome a lack of effort and commitment. I also think this explains the state of education in the U.S. generally. Teachers are hamstrung in holding students (and especially parents) accountable for doing the hard work. As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water…”

Interesting dynamics explained here. The second section of this post would be a very persuasive pitch for an expensive online course.

It's and interesting article, but I can't help but wonder: isn't there a way out of this? Because "users are lazy" seems like an unsolvable problem. Duolingo is very efficient at keeping users motivated, even though they can't teach them anything remotely useful. With math I Imagine this is even more difficult. What I found working for me is a physical tutor, i.e. another person that I meet with every week, who is efficient, who correctly assesses and praises my results if they're good enough, and to whom I would feel a bit stupid saying "I'm a quitter".

patents owned by Blackboard, such as https://patents.justia.com/patent/9053500

>Yeah, everybody wants to learn, but only a small fraction of people are willing put in the work.

Laziness/unwilling to put in the work <= This is wrong. It's more so a human trait of energy conservation. As humans, some are more prone while others less. Coming from someone with adhd.

Different people different environemnts genetics etc => I guess its a bell curve where most people are average mediocre lazy etc They can or can't get out of this trap. It's upto their luck.

There are lots of problems with ed tech and the education industry but one thing it has helped is to democratized education. This is a deeply unfair/imbalanced world. Not everyone has access to the best resources for them.

Imagine the progress of humanity if all educational material and reasearch were to be locked up somewhere with very limited access.

There are no easy solutions to these problems but what we can do is to make the world a better place so that wars, injustice, inequality can be reduced as much as possible.