Why I’m Optimistic About the Next Wave of Education Technology
Over the past 25 years, multiple waves of education technology and innovation have slowly washed into America’s schools and colleges. Along the way, innovators have often over-promised and under-delivered, causing many smart people to wonder if we’re now in a frothy bubble of irrational exuberance, most eloquently summarized by Audrey Watters in Hack Education, who worries that “education technology [merely] serves as a ‘Trojan Horse’ of sorts, carrying… the ideology of Silicon Valley [into public schools].”
Working as an entrepreneur, executive, philanthropist and investor over the past few decades, at some of the very organizations Watters bemoans, I’ve had a unique vantage point for observing numerous successes, failures and — most importantly — long-term trends that make me optimistic about the next wave of education innovation. Although the pessimists correctly observe that many questionable edtech startups have been over-funded and over-hyped these past few years (and some of the biggest are likely to crash to Earth in the near future), it’s simultaneously true that the next decade is likely to see the birth and growth of some of the most transformative education companies of this century.
My bet is that by 2040, our children will look back on this period between 2015 and 2030 in education technology much the same way internet historians look to the period 1995 to 2010 as the birth of the commercial web. The new millennium started with the dot-com crash which decimated 78 percent of the value of the NASDAQ and hundreds of first-wave internet startups went bankrupt. But during that same fifteen-year period, we also witnessed the birth and growth of highly influential firms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba.
Edtech, I believe, is going through a similar rebuilding moment powered by three trends: widely available infrastructure, the catalytic impact of spending by both the government and philanthropy in education, and — finally — the embrace of edtech by educational institutions and educators themselves. Not yet convinced? Join me on a quick tour of the past quarter century in education technology history.
1993–2004: Building the Infrastructure
Working closely with partners, I spent the years from 1993 to 2004 starting and leading a handful of technology startups. The first online class we launched in 1998 was little more than flat text on webpages, and we closely followed the birth of learning management systems, meeting with both Blackboard and WebCT before they achieved their first $1 million in revenue. In 2002, our team at Microsoft Education created an LMS for a world where every teacher and student had a tablet computer.
The only problem was that that world didn’t yet exist. Tablet computers didn’t take off until a decade later. The web was increasing its use of graphics, but had barely adopted video. Although we were convinced that technology could transform education, simple internet access was patchy at best. As recently as 1997, only 27 percent of America’s K-12 school had internet access — a number that skyrocketed to 92 percent by 2003. But visions of a world where every teacher and every student had an internet-connected device, and every student would get personalized assessments for learning, were still just that — visions. The infrastructure just wasn’t ready.
Nowadays, 99 percent of classrooms are wired with high-speed internet (which is very different than schools being “wired”), more than half of schools have wireless capability, hundreds of school districts have 1:1 devices and the U.S. Department of Education has researched and published an excellent National Education Technology Plan (PDF). The infrastructure challenges of that first wave aren’t completely solved, but they are mostly solved — and today’s challenges have little to do with lack of wires, routers or devices.
2004–2011: Washington Leans In
Between 2004 and 2011, I worked as an executive in SchoolNet and Kaplan, both of which grew into successful and innovative education companies. This was the era of No Child Left Behind, when America’s K-12 districts got religious about regularly measuring student and teacher results and when test prep and online colleges became thriving businesses. And behind the scenes, the federal government played a critical role in driving these trends.
SchoolNet built and marketed an “instructional management system” that aimed to deliver useful data about student progress to teachers and administrators. Our system was user friendly, allowing educators to see student grades, benchmark assessments and progress against standards on student dashboards. But the bigger driver of our success was new government policies; specifically, No Child Left Behind and specific funding under the Enhancing Education Through Technology program — and our focus on selling multi-year enterprise contracts to large districts. (To this day, too many entrepreneurs try to sell to schools, teachers or parents, when 90 percent of the budget and decisions in K-12 are made at the district level).
The edtech industry made big strides during this era. School districts developed IT departments, even creating and hiring for the title “CTO/CIO.” Internet ubiquity in the classroom led teachers to adopt email and experiment with other technologies. Summative and formative assessments, powered by technology, became much more commonplace and almost every school district developed a strategy around using data to measure school, teacher and student performance. Many districts analyzed their performance and implemented reforms that led to higher student achievement and graduation rates. (I wish everyone knew that our nation’s high school graduation rate reached a record high 83 percent in 2016, probably about nine percentage points higher than 2002 when NCLB was passed and we couldn’t even agree upon or calculate the rate!)
SchoolNet helped many of these districts — and benefitted as well. As a result of solid leadership, great product, friendly government policies and large enterprise contracts, SchoolNet rode the accountability and assessment wave to almost $40 million of annual revenue and a $230 million acquisition by Pearson in 2011.
At Kaplan, I came to see even more clearly how government policy drives some of the biggest successes in education technology — and exactly how policy’s invisible hand can be 10 to 100 times more powerful than Adam Smith’s free market when it comes to education. Kaplan thrived during the decade, growing to more than $2.8 billion in global annual revenue by 2010, helped immeasurably by hard work and acquisitions.
Click here to read the rest of this article on EdSurge
Note: This article was initially published on LinkedIn on May 21, 2017, then updated and republished on Edsurge on June 18, 2017, then republished in part on Medium on June 24, 2017 with the author’s and publishers’ permissions.
