#002 Beyond Product-Market Fit in Education

Part 1/3: The Market-Pedagogy-Fit Gap

Every now and again, new research findings reach their way to the world. Sometimes, they translate into new practices relatively smoothly and without resistance, if the evidence is strong and appealing enough for a wide crowd to let itself be convinced. Sometimes, no matter how strong the research evidence is, there’s resistance, or rather, antagonistic forces that try to hide or work against the clear evidence, creating fake evidence for special interests and causing confusion about otherwise quite clear facts. So has it been with the food industry, the drug industry and the health industry. And also with the education industry. References to the other industries would be in order, but simple googling would lead the reader far enough, and here, I’ll only concentrate on the education industry, and, more specifically, the edtech industry.

Pedagogical research around education and technology could in my mind be considered modern and relevant, when carried out after the arrival and early boom of YouTube and Facebook, the iPhone, modern social media and mobile applications. These Internet-based phenomena pretty much enabled learning of anything at anytime and anywhere, especially outside of school, which rapidly changed the need for the teacher role to shift from an instructive provider of information to a facilitator of learning. This was in theory true since after the industrialization age and known by mainstream researchers since the arrival of the Internet and Web 1.0, with Education 1.0 and knowledge-acquisition models driven by ready-made content to be learnt. In the best cases, learners learnt how to use the new technology for the consumption of information from outside the classroom and beyond the knowledge of any single teacher or textbook.

Web 2.0 enabled interaction with the content and publishing of own content by any user, e.g. in the form of blogs and videos created and published by the users themselves. Pedagogically speaking, researchers talked about Education 2.0 as a metaphor for how the learners could interact with and even create their own learning material.

With Web 3.0, the creators’ role becomes central and democratized for all users of the technology, and, along these lines, researchers started talking about Education 3.0 regarding innovative pedagogic models, where the learner becomes the creator of the learning content with all kinds of visual media. Here, the roles of teachers and students and content producers and content consumers reach a true paradigm shift, and a critical gap in understanding between how to use the technology of the time productively and how adequate learning and development actually happens gets exposed completely.

The resistance among educators to adopt modern technology based on Web 1.0 or 2.0 in the beginning of the 21st century served, in the best cases, as a healthy filter against an explosion of ”toxic technology”, i.e. technology that causes more harm than good. When there is doubt, there are reasons to be doubtful. So is the case with pure implementation of technology and digital learning solutions just for the sake of applying the latest technology. This became more than evident during the Covid-19 pandemic. Before having a chance of applying latest technology successfully, an understanding of latest pedagogy has to be in place first. Otherwise, it becomes like following the fashion industry, whatever is popular for the season will do.?However, since the globalization of YouTube and Facebook, Smartphones, modern social media and mobile applications, there is no justification to continue with Education 1.0 models any more. This is especially true, where the technology available is approaching Web 3.0, AI and Metaverse solutions.

For these reasons, it becomes obvious that the products developed for the education market should not follow the present readiness state of the market, and thus “fit” the market as it is. We need to go beyond product-market fit in education, if we really want the market to develop.

Part 2/3 coming soon…

Published by Joni AlWindi

First published at?edtechjourneys.substack.com

The EdTech Journeys Column?draws on my experiences, assumed insights and sometimes pure opinions and thoughts expressed in article format. Disturbing developments have for too long called for more public sharing from those, where I include myself, who really have experience from education and technology since long before any boom or hype that has made it trendy to join the industry, many times at the cost of a healthy digital development and positive impact in the education industry. Go to?edtechjourneys.substack.com for more information.