Why EdTech is Dead

I hate the idea of following a conventional path… It’s not that I would entirely hate going to a good university, learning physics, partying a bit, and experiencing life as a student in university; but it seems a bit boring, and worst of all, it seems as if someone else is controlling my life more than me.

A lack of agency will eventually lead to feelings of depression and uselessness, and that’s exactly what schools all around the world are doing to young people. Schools are cool if you like what you’re learning and you know why you’re learning it in the first place; but most kids can't respond to either of these questions, and neither can most adults.

The whole speech on how the educational system was made simply to indoctrinate kids and to make better factory workers has already been debunked, romanticized, and recycled so many times that it's become a cliché. Nonetheless, the educational system is very dysfunctional, and the core problems haven’t been addressed.

One might say that the way the educational system is right now cannot be improved further; that it’s not perfect, but it’s the best we can come up with. It seems compelling to say that we should keep on learning in the same way because it takes away from our sense of responsibility. We no longer feel we should be coming up with solutions because we’ve tried everything and nothing seems to work.

While it’s true that EdTech is dead, and none of the startups in educational technology have changed anything in the past 25 years, it’s not something intrinsically wrong with learning. It just has to do with the method we’ve been using for coming up with solutions for education in the past couple of years. Raising VC pushes EdTech startups to exit, and trying to raise profits while targeting students with little money to their name is seen as a suicide strategy. Therefore, a majority of the products are made for the “real buyers” (who usually happen to be schools, universities, etc.) rather than the real user—the student.

If it were not obvious until now, this way of solving issues in EdTech doesn’t work, but VCs and founders alike seem to keep investing time and money as if this alone was going to change and shape the way we’ve been learning for hundreds of years.

The way we understand EdTech in itself is a bit wrong. When working on a venture in educational technologies, we focus way too much on the “tech” aspect, thinking that there’s some missing piece to how we learn that we must develop in order to make learners more engaged. The truth is that the issue doesn’t lie in the lack of enough gamification, tablets, apps, or what have you. All of these things provide external stimuli, but education is one of those fields that is hard to tackle because we don’t understand it ourselves, and so we keep on trying to find a solution without really knowing what this solution is really going to solve.

A NEW WAY TO THINK ABOUT EDUCATIONAL STARTUPS

I think there are certain core beliefs we have to change in the way we view EdTech.

First, always know that your end user is the learner. If your startup helps schools organize information about students and teachers in the cloud, that’s not an EdTech startup; it’s simply a SaaS tool that happens to be used by educational administration. True EdTech begins and ends with learning outcomes.

Second, learning happens within the brain, when we change our parameters to adapt and react better to certain external factors. Motivation has to come from within; the learner has to be intrinsically motivated, rather than extrinsically through gamification or other such techniques.

All issues within the educational system arise from design problems rather than technological ones. Technology simply amplifies that which we already have.

Learning is a means to an end, not an end in itself. While intellectual curiosity should be encouraged, the brain rarely learns something for the sake of it. We might think we’re learning purely out of curiosity, but there’s almost always an ulterior motive.

Based on all these assumptions, we should mainly come up with startups that try out different design techniques and then integrate technology rather than vice versa. As Steve Jobs famously put it: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

The best thing of all is that we don’t even need to think of design from scratch, since we’ve been gifted with the likes of Seymour Papert, who has been known for his constructionist theory of learning. The core issue isn’t the lack of resources that made EdTech a failure, but the misalignment of the true goals of those involved in EdTech.