Why EdTechs end up building ineffective products
There are thousands of online platforms and apps for learning. We can learn almost anything by simply signing up for a course on Udemy or Coursera. We can learn from some of the most prominent thought leaders and storied entrepreneurs on platforms like Masterclass.
However, most educational products fall short and fail to keep their promises. Some of the biggest platforms, such as Coursera, have meager completion rates. Just think about all the courses you started or just bought and never completed. Different sources report
And to be fair, many try to remedy that — from gamification to bite-sizing, EdTechs try to find a coveted key to users' lasting and consistent motivation and engagement! However, the paradox is that this quest for student engagement leads to impairment and reduction of the effectiveness of most educational products.
Passive vs. Active Learning
Learning science and educational psychology differentiate between passive and active learning. Passive learning is when learning happens to us. All of us have 100% experienced that. It's a pervasive and traditional way of teaching across offline and online learning experiences.
If you attended a university, your teachers probably ran lectures where they professed a topic, and you passively consumed those nuggets of knowledge. Most online courses and learning apps also use passive learning as the critical learning method, even when they don't have teachers in the loop. Here is how Wikipedia defines passive learning:
Passive learning is a method of learning or instruction where students receive information from the instructor and internalize it. It is a method “where the learner receives no feedback from the instructor”. This style of learning is teacher-centered and contrasts to active learning, which is student-centered, whereby students take an active or participatory role in the learning process, and to the Socratic method where students and instructors engage in cooperative argumentative dialogue.
Wikipedia
In contrast, active learning is when learners are in the driver's seat and get directly involved in the learning process. For instance, active learning is actively producing new ideas, doing research, actively speaking the language, discussion, mind-mapping, and group work.
Education experts have been advocating for adopting active learning techniques for decades. Studies repeatedly prove that active learning is superior in learning effectiveness and efficiency. Experiments across physics, chemistry, math, languages, medicine, and others consistently demonstrate that student-centered learning works. Take a look at this remark by Peter Volpe, American Zoologist, from an article that he published back in 1984:
Public understanding of science is appalling. The major contributor to society’s stunning ignorance of science has been our educational system. The inability of students to appreciate the scope, meaning, and limitations of science reflects our conventional lecture-oriented curriculum with its emphasis on passive learning. The student’s traditional role is that of a passive note-taker and regurgitator of factual information. What is urgently needed is an educational program in which students become interested in actively knowing, rather than passively believing.
Peter Volpe, 1984
If it's so powerful, why aren't we using it everywhere?
Active learning is more effective, but it's also more effortful. That's why many intuitively prefer passive learning to active learning, even if, in reality, that leads to no tangible progress.
A study led by Louis Deslauriers from Harvard's Department of Physics tried to measure how effective students find active learning. They wanted to get to the bottom of educational institutions' slow adoption of active learning. A surprising (and not so much once you think about it) finding is that most STEM students who took part in research learned measurably more when professors used active learning techniques but felt that they learned less when surveyed. The majority stated that they learned more with the traditional way of teaching!
And you know what was one of the reasons why students felt that way? Effort! Active learning is effortful as you need to engage your cognitive and emotional resources actively. Students interpreted more effort as less progress. Deslauriers clarifies:
Deep learning is hard work. The effort involved in active learning can be misinterpreted as a sign of poor learning. On the other hand, a superstar lecturer can explain things in such a way as to make students feel like they are learning more than they actually are.
Actual learning and feeling of learning were strongly anticorrelated, as shown through the robust statistical analysis by co-author Kelly Miller, who is an expert in educational statistics and active learning.
Louis Deslauriers
Passive learning as an engagement hack
You can already answer the core question of this post — how come so many EdTech products are so facepalmingly ineffective? Along with some technological challenges, it's also mainly because that's not what most learners want (at least at first 😉).
Passive learning done right makes us feel successful without putting in much work. It's a temporary high, but it's enough for a course creator to sell a bundle or an app to upsell a subscription.
Here is an ugly truth about EdTech businesses today — many companies are more like marketing technology companies than educational technology businesses. It's true for most consumer-oriented companies. They are user acquisition machines optimized for quick monetization.
Apply enough gamification, more multiple-choice quizzes, progress bars, bite-sized learning, and voila. You have an app that sells and a business that might be highly successful from a traditional business standpoint. But it's likely fraught with high user churn and doesn't ensure learning outcomes.
Ahm, so can you be an effective education product and a successful business simultaneously?
I do believe so.
First, technology is advancing rapidly, and now hyper-personalization at scale is possible. We wouldn't be able to design student-centric learning at scale without tailoring education to each student's needs, goals, and preferences.
Second, the same study quoted above found out that active learning grows on students after some time as they start seeing tangible progress. So it's all about figuring out how to keep learners engaged up to that moment. Not impossible.
Third, EdTech businesses shouldn't just look at the psychology of engagement but also actively utilize insights from the learning science. There is so much potential in innovation on social engagement, affective learning, learner autonomy, and other concepts.
I'm personally incredibly excited about the next generation of EdTech products and experiences, the ones that will stop digitizing content but start ensuring effective learning.
Cheers,
Sherzod
