Is Educational Technology Innovation Really Possible?

For as long as I have been building educational technology products, and that’s over 20 years now, I have been hearing claims about how technology is going to revolutionize education. But, it doesn’t really happen.

The latest new technology has resurfaced these claims - “AI will revolutionize education!” Call me skeptical and naive, but I suspect many of the structural issues with innovation in education will continue to undermine significant changes in education.

That’s not to say AI won’t have an impact on education. It absolutely will have an impact in many ways, and they won’t all be positive. To create the kind of positive transformational change with any technology, including AI, models and incentives for developing, selling, and delivering EdTech products must also change.

There are two primary models for new technology products to get developed:

1. Investment backing
2. Grant funding

Yes, there are a few bootstrapped enterprises and a couple of the big EdTech companies dabble in new development, but they mostly grow by acquisition. So I’m focusing on what I keep seeing for those that are investment backed or grant funded. I’m also focusing on K12 because there are significant differences between HE and K12 that would make it challenging to cover both in one article.?

Investors seem to want to apply proven business models from other sectors to education. On the surface, this makes sense. If it worked in healthcare or some other industry that crosses into public good, then why wouldn’t it work for education??

This results in many emerging companies focusing on either a B2B big school or district level adoption, or a B2C type of model to sign up teachers or parents directly and then trying to expand into larger district adoptions from there. Both of these models may get you some early traction, depending on the type of product solution, but they eventually hit a wall.?

The B2B model ends up focusing the solution on the needs of decision makers at the superintendent and school board levels. The end user experience for educators, students and their families is deprioritized in favor of what the district level says they need to get the sale. Then a year or two into implementation, district leaders notice the product isn’t getting adopted by end users in their district. At this point, the EdTech company may or may not have already noticed the lack of adoption and tries to get more end users onboard, but it's already set up as a product being pushed by administration. This creates a high perceptions hurdle for the EdTech company to overcome and quickly do development to make the product more seamlessly fit into the day-to-day of the classroom. Eventually, it gets canceled due to lack of use unless it’s required for compliance...?

The B2C model benefits from end users who are often champions of the product and will share it with others in their organization to encourage growth and adoption, but eventually the administration notices. The product gets a closer evaluation where it may not pass the district’s requirements for data privacy, security, or accessibility. Or they discover the district has already purchased a site-wide license for a product that does something similar, and so the discretionary budget that was used to pay for it by individual teachers gets cut. Or the district discovers it doesn’t align to state standards or that it can’t back up a research claim that was marketed. There are a lot of reasons why the district may ultimately say no to the product.

But let’s say the product passes all these potential barriers, and they are interested in expanding use across the district. Goal met, right?!? Not so fast -- now there are a bunch of administrative requirements that will become mandatory from reporting to single-sign-on to user management to interoperability that probably won’t be supported by the current product architecture. It will require an investment and trade-offs that may or may not be financially possible for the product to pivot and support. At this point, they may look to get acquired so that the acquiring company can figure out all this complexity -- but it’s even more complex in a larger product suite because now there are also integrations between products to address and pressure put on the big company from customers who expect everything to just work.

In both models, the product doesn’t meet the entire needs of the educational environment that it operates in and it hits a wall. Even companies that looked to be successful and went public, like Instructure and PowerSchool , have since gone back to private equity and are likely re-evaluating their strategies to figure out continued growth.

And then there are the grant funded products. These are often amazing, purpose built products, like Slooh and Alchemie , with research backed efficacy data to prove that they work, but then they struggle to get sales and adoption in the market. Why would a product that is proven struggle to get traction??

Purpose-built solutions are often niche and fall under budget categories of supplemental. Districts need an entire science (or history or ELA, etc) curriculum, not a specific sub-discipline within it. There’s often a real need for an awareness campaign ahead of the product launch to get the market ready for this new innovation and ensure there's a budget for district adoptions, but the grant funders typically limit use of funds to building the product and conducting the research. Preparing the market is left to the company to figure out, and they often don’t have the additional funding or expertise to ensure people will be there, ready to adopt this new innovation.?

Without a budget line item, things that are really innovative struggle to get traction. And those products built for existing budget line items are often only incremental variations of what is already being done in order to get sales.?

For really innovative, transformational products, we need new incentives. Education isn’t the same as other sectors.?

What other sector has end-users that must use technology solutions that are purpose built for seven or more different purposes? That’s what you get in education. Students, their families, many educators, principals, counselors, etc must cover ELA, Social Studies, Math, Science, College & Career Readiness, Wellbeing, Arts, and more. Within each of these are specialized topics that often need unique learning solutions to be effective.?

Years ago when I built products at Pearson, we had a platform, Mastering, to handle sciences and then another platform, MyLabs, for math, and another platform solution was needed for languages and so on. If we tried to make everything work on one platform, everything would have been mediocre. For truly innovative learning, purpose-built makes sense.

But then all our investment incentives fail to recognize the context that these products come to market in. Students and educators have to be able to easily transition from one subject to the next throughout the day while handling administrative tasks and communications with coaches, mentors and family.?

Throwing a ton of individual solutions at them with different logins and browser optimization and navigation models and communication methods and reporting approaches is just overwhelming and confusing. Yet that is exactly what we are doing when we tell every solution they need to sell directly to schools or educators or parents.

The big companies out there are all under the illusion that if they solve this problem internally, then educational customers will adopt all their products and ignore everything else out there on the market. I’ve seen that strategy for almost as long as I’ve been hearing this or that technology is going to revolutionize education. Pearson still needed all those platforms to be available from a single catalog and for them to integrate with Pearson’s LMS when a customer didn’t have one, and with the customer’s LMS when they did have one. Other publishers have taken similar approaches, but it’s still a partial solution.

There is very little incentive for integrating and streamlining an experience that spans many products. Non-profit organizations like 1EdTech Consortium and Ed-Fi Alliance have done what they can to build communities to tackle some of these integration challenges, but that only goes so far.?

As an EdTech company, you need to be learning how your educators and students transition into and out of your product to accomplish everything they do in a day. What is being done online, offline, in the classroom, at home, or on a bus ride to a school activity? What can you do to make those transitions easier?

As an investor or grant funder, ask how well the companies you are funding know those things. What is their strategy to fit into these larger ecosystems? Encourage partnerships. Make introductions. Put pressure on the big companies to be integration friendly. Are there other sectors that flourish with multi-player ecosystems? I know education - not other industries, so I’m curious if this exists elsewhere and what incentivizes those organizations to create great experiences.

As an educational organization, don’t settle for good enough. Continue to push the big providers to be friendly to integrations. Make introductions between your selected tool providers and ask them to work together to improve experiences. Require certifications from the non-profits that facilitate interoperable experiences, and participate in those organizations yourself.

If any new technology has any chance to make an innovative impact in education, it must recognize and build for the variety of learning and whole child experiences that everyone in education operates in. This is especially true for AI driven solutions because AI can only function within the context of what it knows and has been trained on. If all the AI knows is your product’s individual slice of a student’s experience, it doesn’t know enough to do anything more than make that product incrementally better than it was before.