Learning is the Product 1/5: Nobody waited for you to “disrupt” education
This is the first of a serie based on my Edtech Next Summit 2023 Talk in Germany. I talked about what makes our Learning products unique and shared some insights I gathered from my times as a teacher, then Head of Learning Content at OpenClassrooms and finally as Head of Learning & Community at Tomorrow University.
Let me tell you about my mama
My mum was — until this fall — working as a dedicated primary teacher. She spent her last +40 years teaching 4 and 5 year-old kiddos. And I’m pretty sure she was doing it with all her heart and soul up to the very last day (she just then retired- don’t worry!).
When it came to building worksheet for her classroom — let’s say to learn how to count up to 10 with some snails — she would do the most efficient way she knew. She would take a pen and paper, draw the snails, write by hand the instructions and use our printer at home to craft a nicer version of her worksheet. Yep, you read me right.
Your reaction might be: “Wait a minute — what? She would not use MidJourney to get the most creative snails drawn by AI? She would not even use a Google Docs or a Figma File to provide an “OK” layout to her worksheet?”
Nope, she would not. And you know what? Because it was the most efficient way for her.
For the purpose she had — i.e. supporting the kids in the classrooms to count and recognize numbers — it was probably more than enough.
Of course, you might object that her proposed illustration might be too restrictive compared to all the different sizes and characteristics of snails in the real gardens ; or that her work practice was neither scalable, nor easily shareable to other teachers. And you would not be wrong about it. Yet, in some extent, it was working.
Your users are already doing it…somehow
Without judging my mum’s work too much, I want to emphasize the main idea I’m trying to convey here:
It might be imperfect and inadequate, yet educators and learners did not wait for us and our magic solution to start attempting and somehow succeeding to do what they needed to do.
As much as Edtech Founders want to “revolutionize/disrupt/rebuild education”, claiming that “education is broken” (heard in dozens of pitch decks this last 5 years), reality is that our users are already trying something.
May it be by wannabe developers watching hours of Youtube tutorials without ever practicing coding on their own projects ; educators attempting to individualize learning for their students based on learning styles (which is a myth, as a reminder!),…or spending nights preparing uniquely crafted sessions that probably no other teachers would be able to reuse — they are trying hard!
Take some field trips
Learners, educators, Ed Staff,… none of them are blank pages. They are already trying. And trying hard. The problems we are looking to solve lie exactly in that fact: they are trying hard but it’s not (really) working.
And if the result ain’t as excellent as we envision it as a Product Leader — looking at it from far away in our cozy flex offices — it’s for a complex set of reasons that we are responsible of discovering.
May it be by lack of knowledge, time constraints, lack of methodology or guidance, resources pressure or inadequate priorization, we have the duty to look for the root causes, sit in the classrooms, talk to our users- and find the right problem to solve.
This is our responsibility as product leaders to observe, question and experience their struggles, their frustrations, their limitations and constraints to solve the right problem.
🧐 A few questions to ask ourselves as part of our continuous discovery of the right problem to solve:
- How are our users already attempting/succeeding to do what our product does?
- What are their struggles and frustrations?
- What are the existing knowledge and skills they can already leverage?
- Where/how else are our learners learning and how can we leverage it?
Please let me know what you think about these thoughts and how you put them in place already in your current organisation or product!
Wondering who I am? Check out my site or connect on LinkedIn!
