What does EdTech really need?
We need more tools to build with.
Learning for its own sake rarely works out. Why? Because it ends up being performative. The fruits of learning are so that you are enabling yourself to do things. Learning for its own sake is usually done so that you can show off social status or to satisfy the internal need to feel productive; it gives people a false sense of meaning. You see it often in people who end up buying courses but never actually finish them, which is over 90%. The only courses that usually actually work are the coding ones where you learn while doing a project at the same time. The people who end up learning usually use the course as a bridge that allows them to get started. Therefore, once they start, they don’t find the need to finish the course itself because the learning that happens when they are tinkering is faster than that of purely watching educational content.
Mitchel Resnick says it best: Learning happens with peers while working on a project with purpose in a playful manner. You need the act of play. Why? Because play boosts your learning rate by x10. It reduces friction when it comes down to learning things. But it has to be real play, not just “gamified learning.”
What constitutes “real play?”
It’s characterized by a playful environment which involves:
- Tinkering with materials
- Trying new things
- Testing boundaries
- Taking risks
- Iterating again and again.
Why has coding been the most successful skill to learn over the years? Because the barrier from learning to testing is so small. Therefore, what we need are tools to build with. Photoshop is teaching you more about design than any design course. DaVinci or Premier Pro has produced way more video editors than any filmmaking school.
So, if you’re an edtech founder, please stop thinking of gamified learning, and start thinking of how you can build more products for people to build with.
This is also more economically viable, simply because you can then monetize on people’s use of the tools, which, if it helps them become productive and build real things of economical value, allows you to capture a share of that added value.
I’ll leave you with one question to ask yourselves: “What are the tools that would enable people to become creators?”