
Why tech has failed to innovate in education? - shishircc
Tech has been a success in e-commerce, social networks, transactional apps like uber or ebay. It has however not made a significant dent in education. Why ? What do you think is the reason ?<p>I have a hunch why thats the case. The reason is that past success in transactional business has biased tech industry towards solutions that are transactional. Education is anything but transactional, unless you count selling books as education.<p>The success of past has put a filter which prevents good eductech companies.<p>Education is a workflow that spans easily months or years to be effective. A good startup in this area would avoid being transactional, instead it would learn from success of another tech process that is long drawn. That is making good software. The kinds of process that helps to make software development more effective are the kinds of process that would make long drawn learning process effective.<p>This begins with github for learning lessons which allow people to collaboratively create learning lessons. The best ones created by community would float to top based on approaches similar  to guthub stars or npm downloads.<p>So much about learning effectively is about creating and and managing content flow and collaboration.<p>Today creating and sharing text, photos, videos, audio is extremely simple thanks to advances in tech and mobile.<p>Today collaboration in real time over internet is increasingly easier to add to any app. And this is not restricted to chat.<p>Today algorithms can do great job of helping you discover learning content as thousands and millions are created by people.<p>All this and more would in my view would create an education platform for tomorrow.<p>Let me know what you think ?
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codingdave
I think people are forgetting what it is like to be a child and learn as a
child. Putting words on-screen doesn't matter if children cannot read. And
children like to move around and interact with both people and objects in the
real world.

I found that my kids hated all online learning products until they were at
least 10. And then once their reading and writing ability was advanced enough
to consume online content, it felt like overnight they loved the ability to
research a problem online and learn independently, but they still want someone
in the room to answer questions when the online content doesn't make sense.
And they still hate most products because now they are too slow, or too
inflexible, or something just isn't right for them.

In short, the systems that are being designed by adults don't have
product/market fit because they aren't doing usability testing with students.
They aren't respecting how children develop, how they communicate, how they
learn, etc.

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shishircc
Makes sense

Unless one can understand and appreciate how kids feel about the product,
product would not work.

An education product must have offline, online and human touch for it to
succeed, apart from ability to research.

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buboard
The first wave of "online universities" failed, but that's preobably because
instead of trying to copy Education , they should unbundle it first. This is
happening now. Things like MOOCs , youtube courses and Lambda school are
unbundling the education/learning part. Entities like Ycombinator or tech
interviewing is unbundling the competitive admissions/vetting process, Github
is unbundling the networking/reinforcement/certification part. There aren't
many processes left that are being monopolized by universities. CS shows the
way here, and it's nice to see that , for competitive students with a track
record to show, a PhD is seen as an accessory, a luxury that they either delay
for later or completely forgo.

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billconan
I don't understand what unbundling means?

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gt2
Maybe democratizing or liberating. Traditionally those things mentioned
required more red tape and buying into a system (usually literally) just to
get to the fruit.

It's awesome because often it really is just information that while isn't
necessarily free to create, once created could be considered to be. And either
way, it benefits from more eyes on it/being open source rather than being
unavailable to those outside the system.

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maxharris
You can't make money in education because public education takes the entire
budget via taxes. And after that, _you_ have no access to the customer [i.e.,
the parent(s) and their child(ren)]. All of that economic power and control is
bottled up into school districts, and selling to them is even _worse_ than
selling to large businesses.

No matter what else you do, if you can't make substantial revenue, you can't
pay engineers, and you don't have reliable profit/loss signals to guide your
product development efforts. So this is the _fundamental_ problem: anything
you do with ed tech is really just a hobby, and this won't change without a
massive philosophical and political shift.

Why do I think this? Well, I worked doing ed tech stuff for two years and
thought, "wow, living on $55k/yr in Orange County really sucks!" That was
2014. Soon thereafter I got a real tech job (that paid roughly double what I
was making before, had more serious engineers) and I've never looked back.

I'd also like to add that merely creating some new program of one sort or
another won't help. The problem is that _control_ over what happens is a
political process, full of rules that you have to follow, endless meetings.
The result is that you're not free to try new things, not free to iterate
quickly.

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shishircc
Maybe the answer is to create for professionals and adults first.

Once its a success there, schools would follow.

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idoh
@shishircc wish you good luck on this, but your conception as to what's
stopping innovation in tech is not correct. I'd advise you to hang out with
teachers, administrators, and parents to get a better feel for it.

The successes with education tend to sidestep the whole thing and offer an
alternative, instead of working with the system, for a reason.

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shishircc
For me, schools and universities are not right place to start.

Start with working professionals and adults. If a solution there is enormously
successful, it would work its way backwards into universities and schools.

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elamje
It’s all about money. If the money isn’t there, or it’s hard to get, the
innovation will likely not be there.

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muzani
Education has _lots_ of money. If there's anything that's overfunded, it's
probably education.

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billconan
so does this match what you describe?

[https://epiphany.pub/@shi-yan/introduction](https://epiphany.pub/@shi-
yan/introduction)

(A github for learning materials that allows people to collaboratively create
content. )

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shishircc
Awesome, thats a step in right direction i believe

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billconan
Why do you think user generated content is important? Why shouldn't the
content be made by a platform, like Coursera?

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shishircc
I think answer is scale.

Why should open source software not be created by one company in a closed way
?

Both software and learning material are extremely elastic.

Once created, they can be used by one person, one million people or hundred
million people.

This means allowing collaborative creation of it brings best minds together
and creates something that no company can afford to create in-house alone.

