
Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade - danso
http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow
======
seattle_spring
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_ grade that was below a B on an overall 3.7GPA history.
Every one of them had a Stanford-or-similar background. The juxtaposition of
cliche-academics telling me they were disrupting academia was really something
to behold.

~~~
droithomme
A C+ is a reasonable thing to ask about.

~~~
pretendscholar
Maybe im just mediocre but it doesnt seem like a big deal. Sometimes you get a
shit teacher and check out. The kind of ass kissing and begging that I saw
among my peers that got all A's is real alarming

~~~
WalterBright
> 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 :-)

~~~
seattle_spring
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.

~~~
WalterBright
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.

------
crazygringo
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 at a postdoc level.

I've seen so many products fail because the engineers and designers didn't
have the slightest idea how students actually learn, think that algorithms
could make up for crappy materials, or have zero understanding of what
teachers actually do.

And creating good teaching materials with good pedagogy is _very_ expensive.
You have to hire educational+domain experts. They don't come cheap. There just
aren't that many people who can clearly explain complex concepts gradually,
relatably, and accurately in a simple manner.

For some reason, because we all went to school, so many of us think we
understand teaching and learning. It's pretty humbling to discover you don't
_at all_.

The second lesson is that education software isn't sold to the kind of market
you're probably familiar with. It's not bought by consumers, or even the kinds
of enterprises you might be familiar with. It's bought by school districts (or
universities), _each_ of whom have _incredibly_ extensive needs for
customization -- for interoperability, for the curriculum, for whatever -- and
each of whom expect to be given _lots_ of individual attention for a long time
before they sign.

Your company will be primarily salespeople, not engineers.

But because there is a _ton_ of money in EDU, you actually only need a handful
of school districts or universities to sustain your company. Which then turns
into a problem, because it means _everyone_ is using different products, and
so much is custom-built. So standards and interoperability don't emerge -- or
when they do, they're just, well, really bad.

It's a complicated space. The only other space that feels similarly insanely
complicated to me is healthcare.

~~~
fouc
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.

~~~
cgearhart
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 mistaken belief that school should
predict professional performance (which is not now—nor ever was—the primary
purpose of school).

In both cases, my work with Ed tech has convinced me that the key problems are
_social_, not technical.

~~~
newguy1234
Technology can help reduce the impact of those social problems....for example
make college courses cheaper to deliver and so on.

~~~
cgearhart
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.

------
dhruvp
This article does point out a lot of things that have failed this decade - all
fair points. But in focusing on failures it fails to capture that casual
education (not formal, school education) has fundamentally shifted this
decade.

Today, I can learn almost anything I want for free on the internet.

\- I can get a world class mathematical education from 3Blue1Brown (seriously
this guy's videos are just out of this world good).

\- I can get incredible guitar lessons on any song I want from youtube (I've
taught myself guitar this year through it!).

\- I can find scores of language education podcasts to help me learn Spanish
(I use coffee break spanish).

\- I can get world class SAT prep from Khan Academy (for free!).

\- I can get awesome yoga classes online for free (did this also this year).

Seriously the wealth and quality of information available to us today is
insane - it's the Library of Alexandria a search bar away.

As someone who enjoys learning, there's no way I would ever go back 10 years
in time.

~~~
sireat
How do you decide which of the free resources are authorative? Maybe you learn
some bad habits from that popular youtube video?

* Case in point there is a popular ML guy on youtube who is also considered a bit of a hack.

* When Khan was starting out some of his original videos were also critiqued when they were out of his area of expertise.

* My friend learned Spanish from a teacher from Basque area. He has an intriguing accent now...

* There are zillion Python videos on Youtube and many are not quite good.

The problem was pointed out in 1970 Future Shock by
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler)
.

It is much easier to spend time choosing an authoritative educational
institution(online or offline) than individually choosing each teacher.

You let the school do the curating for you.

There will be bad teachers even at good schools but your meta cognitive load
is lessened.

PS I am a bit biased since I teach at various non-profit and profit
institutions (I also stream on youtube but privately)

------
gnicholas
The author (Audrey Watters) is a truly great journalist, and her work provides
a candid — and harsh, if needed — look at the education world. She's a must-
read for anyone working in edtech.

EDIT: I found her work on the incestuous world of edtech funding and media
(e.g., EdSurge) to be especially illuminating. Because she is not an edtech
founder, she was able to point out these relationships/issues without worrying
that she was going to anger VCs on whom she might someday seek funding.

~~~
qntmfred
I worked in edtech for many years and read her work regularly for most of
those years. At a certain point though she started to feel more like a
restaurant critic who took too much pleasure in roasting whoever the latest
target was. Did she write a Best Ed-Tech Success Stories of the Decade? Cus
that I'd be interested in.

~~~
oob205
Also worked in edtech for many years and while I understand Audrey got the
reputation for saying the negative, someone had to do it. The general media is
so uncritically positive (for example of Knewton which was always snake oil).
She had to be the voice of reason.

------
adpirz
Overall, I agree that the promise of tech in education never manifested, or at
least hasn't yet, and the last decade was full of half-baked or poorly
conceived ideas. But I'm worried there's some baby in that bathwater...

I started my career in K-12 education, first in the classroom, then as an
administrator, and thanks to a coding bootcamp, am happily pursuing another
career as a software developer. I have plenty of friends who've done the same.
Will it be a long-lasting model? I don't know, some are clearly already out of
business (the one I did, Hack Reactor, is still going though). But it may be
the first wave of upending having to spend six figures on accreditation /
skill acquisition.

And while a lot of the flipped / personalized tools never panned out
specifically, a lot of the concepts were helpful in bringing in new structures
to instruction. The ideas helped us move away from simply "I do, we do, you
do" lessons to units where students could get some material up front and then
do more exploratory or self guided lessons, and teachers could work with
individual students who needed attention.

Education needs innovation. Instructionally, the major changes won't come from
software but from restructuring how school operates at different grade levels.
Given the different needs of 7th graders from 3rd graders, it's interesting
that their days are still structured so similarly, not to mention that we're
still not really developing skills that are useful for the kinds of jobs that
exist today.

That said, there is a place where there's a desperate need for high quality
software in education: operations. Follow a school office manager for a day
and you'll see exactly what I mean. The number of systems that are still
either paper-based or involve manual processes that can quickly be automated
are incredible. As with any public enterprise, there are lots of reasons that
these systems haven't been updated, but streamlining operations for schools
will actually make much bigger impacts for student outcomes than almost all
the edtech software out there.

~~~
jkhaui
As someone who is heavily interested in the EdTech space (I've had the
unfortunate luck of being a student for far too long and experienced how
woefully inadequate the education system is), I was thinking pretty much the
same sentiments.

Initially, I agreed with most of the failures Audrey listed. Though I started
wondering if such a lengthy list could be sustained, and lo and behold, about
halfway through the article I sensed a large drop in quality, with the author
seeming more focused on rhetoric and being "right about others being wrong"
instead of providing an objective and insightful perspective.

Some examples: #52. Virtual Reality - I think her gripe is with VR being hyped
too early, but from her writing, it sounds like she thinks the entire field is
already dead and buried for education. Which would be ridiculous. The friction
with VR right now is the technology; it is too physically limiting for the
benefits > the cost of change. For anyone with an open mind who has tried VR,
however, I think it's obvious that it will be the future in some shape or
form. Whether it's this decade, or the next, or in 2040 who knows but
dismissing an entire field like this really reduced the author's credibility
in my eyes.

#49. Yik Yak - Never used it myself, but from what I've heard it was anything
BUT an ed-tech app..?! It's listed as a defunct social media and chat app...
Guess the author was clutching at straws here.

#48, #38, #6, etc. - Author seems to have a completely unjustified pessimism
toward any sort of coding that isn't related to the traditional CS pathway. I
can only speak for myself, but as someone who made poor decisions out of high
school and is now a (pretty decent) self-taught developer, I find the author's
conclusions totally wrong. Learning to code was the single good adult decision
I've made - I've found a lasting passion, and I can make positive
contributions to society. Without it, I'd still be sitting around depressed
all day.

#25. Thiel Foundation - FWIW, I'm not a fan of Thiel at all but I do agree
that we are in a college bubble. Audrey's snarky comment "Here’s one look at
what some of the past Thiel Fellowship recipients are up to. Yawn" seems
totally unjustified here. I haven't been through the list, but IIRC Vitalik
Buterin (creator of Ethereum) was a recipient of the Thiel Foundation.
Regardless what you think of crypto, Ethereum has had an enormous impact on
the blockchain landscape. Whether or not Eth itself is successful, it's
unjustified to write it off as "meh" if only for the downstream effect it has
on other areas of innovation. I think money is a terrible indicator of
"success", but if we're going down that route, Eth currently has a market cap
of $14.5 mil+, which would make Thiel's investment a good one (though I don't
believe he had a stake).

#13. Blockchain Anything - It's sad to see the author's piece decline from
what were some really valuable insights earlier in the article down to this
Buzzfeed-esque drivel again dismissing an entire field. I'm not saying
blockchain will or won't be successful. However, for any new & poorly
understood technology, it's easy to just google "reasons why technology X
sucks", link to the first 5 articles, and win over readers who don't know
better.

Again - it's a shame the author appeared desparate for filler material as the
list grew longer. It's particularly a disservice to herself because she made
some great points at times. Adopting a more balanced tone would have been
desirable. This way it'd be clearer to see that EdTech really does have huge
potential for an industry that desparately needs a total remake; it's just
been executed very poorly for the most part. P.S. Lol at the author
downplaying the impact of YouTube on EdTech. I'm not a huge fan but half the
material for my course these days are links to YouTube videos. There is a slow
but clear shift to tertiary education that is 100% online.

------
impendia
As a university professor, I'm struck at how few of these I've heard of --
and, of those which I've heard of, how little I care.

I just don't feel like I have problems which I'm itching to have solved by
technology.

As an example of this, I've graded thousands of calculus exams in my career.
It's time consuming, it's painful, and it's unpleasant. But it's also
inevitable. Looking at my students' work, engaging with their mistakes, seeing
what they do and don't understand -- helps to build the connection between
myself and my students, helps me understand what is going on in my classroom.

You can't automate that away.

~~~
newguy1234
Khan Academy already automated that. I know their math curriculum is pretty
decent.

[https://www.khanacademy.org/math/ap-calculus-
ab](https://www.khanacademy.org/math/ap-calculus-ab)

~~~
a_geeky_bro
Did you even read OP's comment? They specifically mentioned the need to engage
with students' work to survey their (mis)understandings.

The link you posted to Khan does not automate that delicate balance between
teacher and student. It's a bunch of videos of Khan describing the Chain Rule.
The "practice" sections are mundane - multiple choice questions or fill in the
blanks. You simply cannot (as an educator) see the (mis)understandings of
students like this. You need to pour over their work. Take note of where
patterns occur and address them next class. Iterative. Do you honestly think
Khan has "automated" that?

This thread is full of asinine comments like yours that demonstrate just how
much people in tech _don't_ understand what it's like to teach. Hence the
original link to 100 fuck ups by engineers, product people, and VCs.

------
brians
What’s worked in Ed-tech—ever?

Bank street writer. It kept nascent computer classes from killing typing and
made grading _so much easier_ , saving the writing careers of many with poor
handwriting.

Logo: tens of millions of people have a lever to learn functional abstraction
from “repeat 360 [fd 1 rt 1]”

Project Athena. Frankly, I still want that ability to log in anywhere and have
my setup ready to go. Project Andrew, too!

1:1 programs. For all the reasons we want a workstation per engineer, a
workstation per student makes a qualitative difference in how it can be used.

Wikipedia. It’s safe for my children to use unsupervised and amazingly
comprehensive.

What else?

~~~
unreal37
I'd say Lynda.com was hugely successful.

Or is that not considered Ed-Tech?

~~~
ghaff
I suspect vocational training is considered old hat and boring. I get Lynda
through my company and it can be pretty good. But it's not really _that_
different from the sort of online training courses I've had access to in one
form or another for ages.

~~~
newguy1234
Lynda became successful because companies gave it to their employees to boost
up their skills...which I think might be an untapped potential market for ed
tech. How about making very high quality courses that aren't sold to students.
They're sold to companies which in turn make their employees take the courses
and so on.

~~~
ghaff
A lot of these companies are realizing that _is_ the market. A lot of
companies put a lot of money into their internal ed programs and, in the
scheme of things, adding some more general purpose ed to flesh out their
offerings is cheap.

Getting an employee or hobbyist to pay even $100 of their own money for a
course. Or making them jump through reimbursement hoops? Not so much.

Actually reminds me I should map out some Lynda courses to take in the new
year.

------
gnicholas
> _85\. The Teacher Influencer Hustle_

This. I've been pitched by teacher-influencers and librarian-influencers who
want to do sponsored posts about my edtech startup. Such posts are generally
not marked as sponsored, and I have always declined their offers.

I understand teachers need to make ends meet (my wife, mother, and grandmother
work/worked in education), but that doesn't justify this sort of business
practice. It's unethical and also pretty clearly illegal per FTC regulations.

------
pg_bot
Instead of buying more/better equipment, teachers, or technology why hasn't
anyone tried to buy a better student? I'm fairly certain that if you paid
elementary students cash for better grades you would see a huge jump in
achievement for the average student. A small amount of money to us feels like
a huge amount to a kid, and there are plenty of studies showing that rewards
increase performance for basic and mechanical skills.

~~~
kilroy_jones
The question then becomes is that the type of student you want to create? Any
elementary school teacher who frequently rewards students with candy can tell
you horror stories of what this sort of system leads to. Every task becomes a
bargain of 'what will I get for doing this?' as opposed to building an innate
desire to learn.

Education is broken, but going this route won't fix much. Fixing standardized
tests, or scrapping them, along with eliminating things like the SAT would go
a long ways is creating better learners, instead of better test takers.

~~~
naniwaduni
You just need to bootstrap the learning far enough for them to see the big
picture where the learning provides concrete value to the student!

... you'd also need that last bit to be true.

------
loteck
Glad to see LA Unified's iPad disaster as #8 on the list. Tablets in general
have been a... fiasco? disaster? Catastrophe? Especially for younger learners.

~~~
newguy1234
Tablet is useful but the problem is there is not enough ed tech software out
there that really takes advantage of its potential. Best use I've seen is
interactive kid's reading books. Teaches the kid to learn how to read and
makes it fun.

------
mncharity
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud1Q_q4f-hQ)

------
throw7
Honestly, I just briefly skimmed the list. I thought OLPC was too low and
there was some politics thrown in there at the top... anyway...

Personally, the greatest ed-tech was when my parents bought me a C-128 which
came with thick manuals, one of which was a Commodore BASIC programming
manual.

IMHO, education is throwing a wide and open experience to a kid and guiding
and helping them learn to learn. Everyone is different in what they like and
enjoy, and that's a very good thing.

------
jcranmer
The interactive whiteboard story I have:

My school system decided to introduce those interactive whiteboards into every
classroom. Including the computer room. Where all the computers ran Linux or
Solaris [1], which operating systems the software couldn't support. Without
the computer to run it on, those things are worse than regular whiteboards
since you can't even draw on them with real markers.

[1] Sun had yet to be bought by Oracle at that time.

------
shafyy
I don't understand, what's the point of writing such an article? It doesn't
seem to add any value, it might even contribute negative value with spreading
cynism and pessimism.

A lot of things have been tried in education, and although some of them were
probably just people trying to make a quick buck, I believe that most of them
did it to genuinely improve something for others.

~~~
billsmithaustin
That was my reaction too. Is there a different market where the ratio of bad
ideas to good ideas is better than in education?

------
iruby
It’s truly fascinating how people quickly join echo chambers and often neglect
thinking critically about the opinions they propagate. In computer
programming, as an example, 1970s and 80s research points to many problems and
dangers of wishful thinking guiding the inclusion of programming on early
stages of the school curriculum. To this day, many efforts bypass these alerts
and focus on engagement rather than learning or facilitating learning - while
claiming benefits in learning

~~~
geomark
I'd like to hear more about dangers of including programming in early stages.
Can you comment or link to something about it?

------
jshaqaw
I agree that smart boards are a joke. They suck down scarce dollars and add de
minimis educational value. Then they break and become really really expensive
whiteboards.

------
duxup
It's interesting to read some of the companies and initiatives (ignoring the
story lines) and see how many seem to be linked to a sort of random pitch or
anecdote that ... solves nothing ... or if it does is hardly the basis for a
business or changing any given approach.

Meanwhile traditional educational research continues, but doesn't get the same
attention / doesn't turn into an online product.

~~~
lazyasciiart
If you're just skimming the titles, you should know that occasionally the
title is not actually the bad thing, it's something about/from/done with that
thing: e.g 32 "Common Core State Standards" isn't saying the standards are
bad, but the rollout of them.

------
axbytg
The author seems to miss the boat super hard on

> 6\. "Everyone Should Learn to Code"

Her argument seems to be that teaching more kids to code, will result in more
people ending up in a toxic tech industry. This may be true. But the tech
industry will never, ever change until we expose more kids to engineering as a
choice. If we can cause a greater number and diversity of children and young
adults to consider engineering as a career, the industry will be more diverse.
this seems like a bit of a no-brainer.

Also the reaction to the Hour of Code makes me question whether or not the
author has every lead or observed one in a meaningful way. Having led
literally hundreds, almost every single one that I was involved with resulted
in at least one student saying "I didn't think that this was for me / for
people like me, but I really liked it". That makes it worth it. Hearing that
one single time, makes every single HoC ever worth it in my opinion. I know a
lot of teachers that would agree. Nobody on earth thinks kids are making
significant progress towards mastery of programming from an hour of code --
it's about exposing every child and letting them know that they are capable of
a career that is often, for a variety of reasons, seen as "not for them".

~~~
jkhaui
Completely agree. The author glosses over the fact that half of coding is just
pattern recognition derived from seeing something written a certain way many,
many, many times over.

It's not far-fetched to consider that exposing kids to an hour of code daily
could make transitioning to a programming career much more feasible in their
later life (whereas without this exposure, programming might seem like
untouchable black magic). Heck, I think the reason my own transition to being
a dev was relatively smooth is because I was obsessed making HTML websites as
a kid. Despite not touching it for ~15 years, even that exposure proved
invaluable in picking up the skills relatively fast

~~~
geomark
I think it is broader than that. Maybe it is becoming a cliche already, but I
think being able to code is a new literacy that everyone should learn even if
they are not going to become software engineers or computer scientists. It's
just such a useful skill now and more so in the future. I think the author
doesn't get that.

------
mettamage
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.

------
swiley
Ed tech is mostly a set of tools for administers and banks to get between
teachers and students. Often they charge the students (or their parents) for
it too!

Anything more than sftp, a spreadsheet calculator a pdf reader and something
to do basic word processing with is probably ”Ed tech” you don’t want.

------
king_magic
I spent several years working on one of the top-10 issues in that list. I
won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say: the responsible party deserved
every bit of criticism that came it’s way.

------
MCablestudent
The focus should be to find a proven curriculum that fits the Ed-Tech format
and experienced educators to adapted it.

------
lazyasciiart
66\. "Someone made an educational video game called “Slave Trade”." Wow.

------
eqvinox
#0: the fact that a significant percentage of people, including myself,
doesn't have the attention span to read a 100-item list of debacles anymore.

(yes that's not Ed-Tech, but it's a huge Ed debacle and possibly Tech
related...)

------
HarryHirsch
_animations and lessons about “growth mindsets,” “grit,” and “mindfulness.”_

Dear God. We have growth mindset and grit here at this regional institution.
There are students who take General Chemistry 1 (read: 10-th grade chemistry)
three times with three different instructors, everyone with a different
teaching philosophy, and they still don't give up. Wow. That's some grit
there. This time they failed, but they can always pay more tuition, and try
again.

Now if their schoolteachers actually exposed them to difficult material and
let them experience that with some effort they could overcome those
difficulties, that would foster "growth mindset" and "grit". But instead the
students want solution strategies and problem classification that takes away
all the joy of discovery, and their teachers indulge them. Once I got bad
student evaluation for handing out word problems with more than one step and
having them figure out the solution themselves. The poor things.

We'll have to wait for different teachers and especially different students.

~~~
userbinator
I've been a CS course instructor and you brought up a great point. There is
always a balance between not to discourage students who could achieve, and the
reality that there are those would be much better off doing something they can
actually succeed in and feel much better about themselves as a result, instead
of repeatedly trying and failing. I stopped teaching a while ago but I heard
that this has become more prevalent ever since the "everyone can code"
propaganda.

