
Guidelines for Edtech Products - dwynings
http://www.ycombinator.com/guidelines-for-edtech-products/
======
xiaoma
As someone whose career has revolved around education, I have to say I'm a bit
disappointed with these guidelines. The focus is entirely on formal
_schooling_ as opposed to education.

The problem is that "widely accepted standards", especially in the US are sub-
optimal in terms of educational outcome. Even if Common Core were great (which
is not the case), continuing to improve pedagogy and curriculum should be
ongoing goals. Similarly, why push people to use a closed system such as
Lexile® for rating the difficulty of reading material instead of something
open?

On an even more basic level, should edtech offerings be limited to children
living in the US at all? I would say no. Most Americans aren't children and
most humans aren't Americans.

~~~
ht_th
Agreed. And I would even go a step further. Most often ed (tech) companies
focus on education as opposed to learning. It is all about efficiency,
organization, administration, and improving conventional education or
schooling processes rather than improving the learning processes of the
student.

------
Fanndango
This is a fantastic list, but having experienced many interactions with
districts and schools that wanted free pilots over the last 15 years, I would
strongly encourage any company to insist on some fee associated with the
pilot, even if discounted (assuming you are not doing a freemium model).
Pilots don't succeed unless district and school staff are committed and
provide the necessary implementation support. In Edtech, your success is
critically dependent on effectively engaging with the people using your
technology. In many cases, there are people you need to engage who were not
part of the decision making process and may even be annoyed that they have to
squeeze in yet another one of a zillion initiatives on their plate (perhaps
true in any B2B but 10X true in Education). Charging money increases the
likelihood that district staff will take your product seriously and put the
resources and time behind it that will greatly increase the odds of success.
Free pilots are especially tempting in the early days when you are trying to
prove yourself, but if your product is truly valuable, a couple successful
reference implementations will far outweigh a bunch of fizzled pilots with
ambiguous outcomes. Charging for the pilot also helps you weed out schools and
districts that are not really serious about solving the problem you solve.
Especially in the early days, you want to find those evangelists that will go
to bat for you within their bureaucracy and with their more risk averse peers
in the market. The serious ones will find the money if you're product is the
real deal. Just my two cents based on what I've seen. Never had a single free
pilot turn into a school or district sale. For my company, a strong full-price
implementation at one or two schools in the district laid solid groundwork for
a full-price district deal down the road.

------
educationcto
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 advance student learning. Hopefully
that will change as schools demand more data driven results from their
vendors.

~~~
gnicholas
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

~~~
gnicholas
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.

------
dasmoth
This doesn't really seem to cover products aimed at homeschoolers or
independent learners at all -- are those considered a separate field from
"edtech"? And/or are these things YC aren't terribly interested in?

~~~
DasIch
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.

~~~
dasmoth
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...](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_206.10.asp?current=yes)

~~~
DasIch
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.

------
ayushgta
Weird, I don't see any mention of accessibility.

~~~
gnicholas
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 cases these
features are not sufficient—or don't even work in the app/platform.

~~~
garysieling
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.

~~~
gnicholas
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.

------
revelation
_When exporting grade level data, denote kindergarten with a number 0 (zero),
not a letter K, and denote transitional kindergarten with -1 (negative one)._

What. What on earth is this set of "guidelines". Is there a color scheme
recommendation somewhere in here, too?

------
protomyth
As to data privacy, if one of your customers is on a reservation then you
really should check to see what the data rules are for that reservation.
Making an assumption that only the state and/or federal rules are in effect
could be costly.

------
kylelibra
Seems like there is an opportunity for a company to be the certification layer
verifying companies do these things and do them in a consistent way.

------
garysieling
Are products used by public libraries considered "edtech", or is there a
separate set of terminology?

~~~
gnicholas
There's overlap, at least in CA. My company has a license with the CA public
library system, which includes some educational libraries. Libraries also
perform educational functions—our tools are used by literacy tutors in
libraries, in much the same way that they are used by teachers/students in
classrooms. So for some products, these guidelines are probably relevant, but
for other (e.g., infrastructure) products they're probably much less relevant.

~~~
garysieling
That helps, thanks!

------
arsalanb
This is fantastic. But this sounds like it's mostly intended for startups at
an early/mid stage. What I mean is companies who already run a monopoly are
more likely, in my opinion, to overlook these guidelines.

~~~
tyre
Those companies are likely not applying to YC.

~~~
arsalanb
Does it matter? The purpose of these guidelines IMO is to improve the
standards of EdTech products and perhaps the value they create for education
as a whole.

------
KeatonDunsford
To be honest, I'm extremely disappointed in these guidelines, given that this
is coming from YC. Why? They divert focus away from doing whatever it takes to
make something incredible for users: underserved students in a failing system
that's becoming exponentially costly and disconnected from our modern society.
Even if that means challenging convention and breaking some rules. Think of
where Airbnb, Uber and Bitcoin would be if they had stuck to standards, to
name a few big examples. This post goes completely against the "naughtiness"
YC (PG) has always looked for in founders. For some reason edtech to date has
been an exception to this rule.

 _Disclaimer: I just submitted a YC W2017 nonprofit application as the solo-
founder of Bloom, a new education system powered by software. I 'm not sure if
this comment will help or hurt me if I get responses, but I think something
needs to be said. I put my app up on Dropbox for you to check out if
interested. Still searching for a great cofounder. If this is an issue you
really care about, feel free to DM me on Twitter. I'll fly out anywhere. Bloom
YC W2017 application:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/1szvs6o4qs15djj/KD%20%26%20Bloom%2...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/1szvs6o4qs15djj/KD%20%26%20Bloom%20profiles.pdf?dl=0)
_

The cost efficiencies of conventional public and private education today are
abysmal. Teachers don't scale. Campuses don't either and are physically
isolating. And Common Core, courses, grades, tests, and degrees are arbitrary
practices that could by replaced by something completely different, something
designed for the digital age. Something not only better than public schools,
the most prestigious private prep schools and the Harvards and Stanfords, but
something that could scale to everyone in the best and worst of areas of the
world. Education is a lifelong right that everyone clearly needs and deserves
as technology continues to advance exponentially.

Yet for some reason, edtech hasn't been able to look beyond the current state
of things and build something completely new. There isn't an "Uber" or
"Bitcoin" of edtech. And I believe the reason why is solely because of posts
like this: advice that places too much importance on working with inefficient
systems, industry best practices, laws and trying to fix a broken system
instead of ignoring all of that unimportant stuff to just focus on users and
build a new one from scratch through software. As a result, current edtech
solutions are fragmented, inflexible, slow, general and boring, just like
physical schools.

So what will education look like in the future? In my opinion, it will be a
cohesive system that’s modular, peer-to-peer and mobile. That’s the only way
an edtech platform can both scale to ->7.5 billion users and support arbitrary
specializations adaptable to the future.

I think a good parallel to the approach I'm talking about is what Urbit has
been trying to do to re-decentralize the Internet. Instead of trying to solve
each problem one at a time, they've built a cohesive system from scratch on
top of the old, broken Internet, which solves all of its problems in one go.
This is the approach I think edtech needs to take, and ignore everything else.

Yes, clear product vision and implementation ease are important for edtech
startups. But you could say the same about Uber and Airbnb. Yes, viral current
content is important. But you could say the same about Netflix and Twitch.
Yes, flexible, optimized pricing is important. But that can be solved in other
creative ways. Yes, exceptional customer support, respect for privacy and
organization transparency are vital, but that's expected of any great YC
startup.

I'm just shocked software hasn't eaten the education system yet, because
ultimately the quality of kids' entire lives are on the line. I would know.

~~~
2pointsomone
Keaton, you make it incredibly clear that you have no understanding about how
education works. It's really sad that you criticize YC and our excellent
educator community. Your neglect and lack of respect for teachers and
traditional schooling is appalling and disturbing.

The saddest part is that a large number of young techies (you are 19) feel
like you. Nevertheless, I want to empathize with you, and suggest that you
step away from your computer and spend just any small amount of time within
our public education system to see the challenges and complexities of serving
our students. It is a complex problem and you are grossly understating and
trivializing the importance and purpose of existing institutions. The founders
of Uber and Bitcoin and Airbnb got nothing on education. Serve even 10
underserved students and drive them to prolonged success, and then come back
and talk.

I don't take offense as much as someone running an edtech company, as much as
I take for being a part of an outstanding community of people improving
education.

~~~
50CNT
But the mean in education isn't all that great, is it? There's issues that
stem from assumptions about education that were correct in the 14th century
but have since become a bit dated. You can improve a system built on the wrong
premises, but you can't fix it.

It's a system that works through sheer force of will, and squanders the
efforts of educators and students alike. The ambition of education technology
shouldn't be to rehabilitate 10 underserved students, no matter how noble of a
goal that is. It should be to make sure they aren't ever underserved. The
current system can't do that period.

By the time you have fixed the issues that prevent it from doing that, you've
ripped out and replaced 90% of it. The way class progression works. Automating
lecture components. The testing components. How responsibility over students
is handed from teacher to teacher. Assuring best practices are used, both by
students and teachers. The curricula and how they feed into each other.
Tracking student progress. Negotiation of homework quantity between teachers.
Enabling broad collaboration between teachers in matters of teaching
materials. Quality assurance.

The rage is not against the fact that there is an education system. It's that
it could be so much better. It's against the waste of youth. A class of 30
with only half of it engaged wastes 180 childyears over their K-12s. That's 2
long lifetimes, in the years when their minds are the most malleable.

~~~
KeatonDunsford
I've been incredibly inspired by YC and only mean for my criticism to be
constructive. But by naming their edtech initiative "Imagine K12", they've
already lost.

I care as much about solving education as they do. I think the basis of my
argument is factually correct. Just look at the data.

Why not treat education like any other disruptable industry?

~~~
50CNT
Thinking about similar things, wanna chat?

~~~
KeatonDunsford
Sounds good. Shoot me an email at keaton@bloomv1.org. Other social media info
is in my HN profile page.

------
markjspivey
Would love to see similar for corporate side of learning and development,
rather than just academic side.

