The need for a better online education platform.

Education Technology (EdTech) has produced some amazing online teaching and learning platforms. Many of them have great solutions to difficult questions, but there seems to be a lack of connectivity between teaching and the teachers themselves.

“Students learn better when the teacher is fully committed and involved.”

Teachers seemingly get the butt-end of the deal when it comes to teaching online (some exceptions apply). From discounting and having to give away courses for free, to creating great courses and not having very much student interest. How do I know this? Several years of research, several years of listening to teachers complain about problems that can be easily solved, oh, and I’ve taught a few online courses myself.

Discounting

Discounting comes with benefits and a lot of pain. A company can grow their service rapidly using a discounting model, such as a Groupon, and that’s a huge benefit to businesses like Groupon. But in education, it’s not quite that simple. We need to take into account the fact that people value purchases less if they cost less. Think of buying a low end Nissan vs. buying a high end Lexus. We all immediately feel there’s more value with the Lexus, even if it’s out of our price range. Comparing the car metaphor to online learning and teaching, the equivalent would be buying a $200 course for $9. Students value it less the lower the price goes. That means they’ll complete less of the course (or not even start it), and the value of the teacher is less, too. If you’re teaching a course on applied mathematics, you don’t want your knowledge to be valued at $9. While I don’t believe paying in the thousands for a particular subject through a traditional post secondary education system is a great way to promote education across the globe, I also don’t believe that a $9 course on a subject from an expert is the correct answer either.

Free Courses

Free courses have their place. Knowledge considered “common” or is common enough that it can be learned for free anyway can certainly be free (unless you want teacher access, community, certificates, etc.) but, unfortunately, the very nature of the internet has forced prices to drop and marketing great content that can improve your life isn’t easy anymore. There’s a lot of noise and you need to distinguish you and your course from everyone else. Naturally, the first thing we all think of is price. If we price a course for free, people will flock to it. That’s not a wrong assumption, it often does work that way. But that also means you are giving away your time for free and time is a resource you will never ever be able to get back. It’s worth something.

While free courses have their place, often teachers aren’t actually benefiting from them. It’s nice to say you’ve been able to teach thousands of people across the world, but you should be rewarded for your hard work, too.

There are some platforms that give away education, and that’s outstanding! But education comes from people who dedicate a piece of their life. Similar to buying art, you’re not just buying a painting, you’re buying the time the artist put into that painting. We all love free art! But how much art can a great artist create if their economic situation makes them worry about paying their next mortgage payment. If teachers are reimbursed for their time to create and maintain courses, they can focus on helping students, improving their courses, creating supplemental resources and create additional courses.

Lack of Interest

This is a massive problem. I’ve seen numerous EdTech platforms spin up and then quietly wind down. This is a market problem. Are the price of your courses too high? Do you have what people really want to learn? Is your platform mobile ready? There are hundreds of questions to ask, excluding considering competitors. For education technology it’s not as simple as “do people want this and what will they pay for it? And a lot of that responsibility comes down to the teachers, whereas other platforms in other industries have a general pricing structure (hourly, project based payment, payment on milestones, etc.).

In EdTech, the teachers have to figure out most of the market on their own. And a lot of platforms don’t help. Lack of analytics, student insight and not being able to physically see their classes makes it hard for an online teacher to adjust their teaching strategies. Online teachers will create a course with very little validation, and hope for the best. It’s been this way for a long time time.

So when a teacher creates a course and allows another platform to host and potentially market their material, all they have is optimism — hope for the best. And in a lot of cases, they don’t break 100 students. Why don’t they break 100 students? It could be any number of things: wrong audience, wrong price, lack of student interest or maybe the students they are targeting just haven’t discovered the platform yet. At the very least teachers should be able to get direct insight into their courses.

A Solution

I’m not saying there’s a one-size fits all solution to online teaching. Education is an industry that’s own name holds a broader meaning than most other industries. Education can mean: corporate, personal, hobby, professional or others, and each one of those categories has every subject under it, and each subject has sub-studies and so on. But I have an idea for a great start: a teaching/learning platform that focuses on the teacher first. For any students reading this, you’re probably thinking, “If I’m paying, put me first”. Typically, you’d be right about that. But consider this: we’ve all had bad teachers — how much do you remember from a course with a teacher that sucked? Probably not very much. And if you had an informed teacher who knew what it took to help their education sink and stay in your brain, you would have enjoyed the class more and the information would have been retained for a longer period of time.

“What if we focused on empowering the teachers, could it change how students learn online?”

Whether you want to accept it or not, the answer is yes. Empower the teachers and the student will learn better and, ideally, outgrow the course content and move on to more advanced education, or apply their education to something constructive.

I’ve talked a lot about problems with online education and I’ve barely scratched the surface of solution. Well, I’ve been working on a solution. A solution that empowers teachers and employs technology to help teachers achieve more with less, and to help students learn more without needing to do more. This solution is called Arkmont. We use technology and psychology to empower teachers and help students learn more by doing less. Teachers are some of the most important people on the planet and we’re giving them the respect they deserve by: giving them a fair share of their revenue, helping them get their courses out to the world, supporting them throughout their teaching career and handling all the administration frustration so they can focus on creating the best courses — which means students can learn online, in a convenient yet powerful manner.

If you are currently teaching online, or have been considering teaching online for a little while, join us at Arkmont.com — we’re building the future of education and invite you to be a part of something big.