Can we Uber-ize education?
Exploring an on-demand model for one of the world’s most stagnant institutions
30 seconds. Maybe a little longer if you mistype your password.
That’s how long it takes to call an Uber.
While you’re waiting for your ride, you can see your driver’s name and rating; you can see the make and model of the car and track its approach; and you can even call if one of you gets lost. After the ride, payment is handled automatically and you can leave a review that helps decide whether the driver gets to continue working with Uber. And all this at a fraction of the cost of taking a taxi.
If you’re reading this post, you’ve likely already used Uber. Since its founding in 2009, Uber has grown into a $70B behemoth that offers its services in over 600 cities across 6 continents (and I’m sure Antarctica isn’t far behind).
Given its tremendous valuation, it’s no surprise that entrepreneurs and investors alike have rushed to support Uber-like models in other industries.
Need an on-demand dog walker? Meet Wag.
How about a mover? Try Lugg.
Left your plane at home? There’s even an Uber for private jets.
For now, many of the above services are only relevant for narrow segments of the population — sorry, Glamsquad, but the average American doesn’t need on-demand hair styling. But could an “Uber for X” startup work in a different industry, perhaps one which affects every individual in the world?
As an education entrepreneur, I’m excited about the impact that Uber-like services (often labeled “on-demand mobile services” or ODMS) could have on the way we learn, from early childhood education to professional development. Despite technology being in our classrooms for decades, education technology is still in its nascent stages, partly due to how slowly the industry has adopted changes seen in other verticals. Students don’t have individual learner profiles which follow them around from school to school and capture their strengths, weaknesses, and learning preferences (like electronic medical records in healthcare). We don’t really have a great sense of how to collect, analyze, and interpret student data (like we do for consumer data in e-commerce). Most learning management systems don’t have robust predictive algorithms to truly personalize learning (like the ones powering Netflix or Amazon’s recommendation engines).
Can we change education as swiftly and extensively as Uber is changing transportation? To figure this out, let’s:
- Break down Uber into its component parts
- Imagine what these components would look like when applied to education
- Identify education-specific challenges and ways to overcome them
Two-sided platform which matches latent supply with unmet demand
A two-sided platform in education would connect educators who have excess capacity, with students who have unmet demand. Educators wouldn’t need to be teachers, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, they could be anyone with the ability and interest in helping others develop a specific skillset. They may themselves be experts in the particular area they are teaching, or simply know how to help others become experts in that area.
This looser definition of an educator is especially relevant as the US comes to grips with a nationwide teacher shortage, so latent supply for an “Uber for education” would need to come from professionals in other industries (e.g., engineers, writers, musicians). For starters, the platform could focus on the areas of education with the greatest supply-demand mismatch. Given the increased emphasis on STEM in everywhere from elementary schools to coding bootcamps, and the increasing number of workers moving to the tech industry, matching experienced tech professionals with students interested in technology could be one option.
Of course, non-traditional teachers may not know how to teach — the world’s foremost molecular biologist isn’t necessarily any more qualified to teach middle school biology than a college bio major. Teaching requires more than just subject knowledge . It requires an ability to connect with students, an understanding of pedagogy, and unbelievable patience, among other skills. Any two-sided platform in education would need to either properly train the supply side in effective teaching methods, or pair non-teachers with traditional teachers to give students a solution that combines content and teaching expertise.
Additionally, a platform that redefines what it means to be an educator would need to consider how to deal with teacher unions, which have immense political clout in the US. It could potentially position itself as a supplement, not replacement, for teachers, or perhaps imitate Uber’s approach of lobbying for regulations that fight against incumbents.
On-demand, mobile access
This actually has a few sub-components, so let’s examine each individually.
- Exactly what you need — Uber’s interface is dead-simple — you just type where you want to go (and confirm where you are). Just like Uber is great at getting you from point A to point B, an Uber for education should deliver exactly the educational content you need in bite-sized chunks. The best way to do this is to tie the content to specific, action-oriented outcomes. In other words, you want to learn how to do X? Let’s match you with someone who can teach you how to do X. No more, no less.
- When you need it — In order for Uber to match every rider with a driver within minutes of opening the app, and to keep drivers close to full utilization, it needs to carefully match supply with demand and ensure neither side completely outgrows the other. After all, instruction is most effective when it is delivered when students need it most. Thankfully, our education system is great at teaching to scale — we could easily expand the capacity of individual educators and make it easier for them to serve multiple students at the same time, without significant drops in quality (uberPOOL for education!). And if we assume that educator-student interactions with UberEdu can take place online, a supply of teachers located across multiple time zones can support 24/7 coverage.
- Where and how you need it — True on-demand learning means that students are taught wherever they are most comfortable, whether that’s at the library, in the classroom, or from home. They also need to be able to choose from multiple teaching styles (e.g., video lectures, problem sets, group projects) in order to learn in a way that best suits them. A service could either match specific teaching styles (e.g., expert video lectures) with specific learning preferences (e.g., student wants watch videos on the subway), or make it easy for an educator to convert a lesson into multiple formats.
Any viable service would most likely need to focus on specific, manageable chunks of education, either in the form of specific homework questions, learning objectives, or even tasks at hand (i.e., professional development). Given that, this style of education may not inherently work for students who can’t articulate their specific learning needs . What if a student doesn’t feel they need help with a specific algebra problem and instead just feels they need help with math? Well, just like you couldn’t order an Uber without having a single, imminent destination in mind, an Uber for education may not be right for students who can’t pinpoint exactly what they need to learn. However, there are certainly ways that the service could cover that gap (e.g., diagnostic assessments), and it could still serve as a valuable complement to other forms of education for such students.
High-quality, community-rated suppliers
Just like with Uber drivers, any educator on the platform should be continuously rated and dismissed if their rating falls below a predetermined threshold.
It could be difficult for a student to gauge a teacher’s quality. It is arguably easier to assess the quality of an Uber experience than an educational experience, partly because preferred learning styles and speeds vary vastly among individuals. So instead of giving a rating on a single dimension, an educational Uber could ask for teacher ratings on multiple dimensions like content knowledge, patience, enthusiasm, etc., like AirBnB does by asking guests to rate accuracy, cleanliness, location, etc. The service could also periodically match teachers with “master teachers” and have them be rated more formally, much like they would be rated by an observer in a school.
Additionally, digital lessons aren’t (yet) as effective as in-person ones. As anyone who has taken an online course can confirm, learning over your computer or phone isn’t always as engaging, and thus less effective, than learning in an actual classroom. An Uber-like service can mitigate this decrease in quality by focusing on subjects where learning can be augmented with technology, not ones where technology is simply the medium. For example, a physics teacher can easily send over computerized simulations to students to help them understand tough concepts, or a programming teacher can do a quick code review with any number of digital tools — activities which wouldn’t be as seamless in-person.
There is definitely opportunity in creating low-cost, on-demand learning experiences, especially in disciplines where there is a growing demand for teachers and flexible supply (e.g., technology professionals to supplement the learn-to-code movement).
However, it is important to consider the effect such a disruption would have on the broader education system. Many students would not benefit from an educational Uber, from reasons ranging from being unable to pay for a premium educational service, to not being engaged by a digital teacher (and perhaps no in-person teachers are nearby). As a result, the service may miss the students who need it the most, entrenching inequity issues that we’ve been trying to resolve for decades. And just like the success of Uber may leave the lowest-quality drivers left in the traditional taxi industry, we should worry if on-demand education gives wealthier students a monopoly on the best educators.
Several players are well-positioned to move into fully on-demand education, and some of their recent offerings are strong steps in that direction. In the past few years, online course provider pivoted from offering full-scale university courses to bite-sized “nanodegrees” which are proctored by their global network of 300 code reviewers. Startups like Sesh, Yup, and Kram offer alternatives to traditional in-school support and are in the process of rapidly scaling. Who knows, maybe even Uber, who partnered with Levo League in early 2015 to offer brief “mentorship rides”, can themselves make a play in the market.
Regardless of where it comes from — and I’m sure that it will come from multiple directions — an “Uber for Education” has the potential to create immense social value. If you have thoughts on the topic, please share them below!
(Note: I wrote an early draft of this post for an HBS class with Professor Ben Edelman in 2015.)
