2 EdTech Wrong-Turns we should Immediately Stop Taking
Educational technology (EdTech) is one of the most fulfilling areas one can work in, but it can sometimes feel like driving in a crowded new city. You’re trying to reach an unknown destination (there’s no Google Maps for EdTech yet, but wouldn’t that be cool?), and you need to make fast lane changes and take sudden turns. But the street around you is crowded, and not everyone is going your same way. Others are not letting you change lanes. So, you’re missing turns, and you feel like never getting there. You feel that you want to get somewhere, but others do not really care.
This problem is as true in the Middle East as it is in other parts of the world. Whenever I speak with someone who aspires to change how people teach or learn, there’s always deep enthusiasm and an eye-glow at the start! Months later, you hear what you fear: “No one cares about what I’m doing!”
How can experts and bigger EdTech organizations, the busses and trucks on the street, help rising EdTech enthusiasts take the right turns and get somewhere? There are many ways to support, but I want to focus on one: openly sharing EdTech lessons-learned. What have we done that has worked or not worked? If it worked, how? If no, why? In our crowded city, these lessons would be like traffic signs leading fresh EdTech developers to success, and warning them of dead-ends not to turn into.
At Edraak إدراك, we have been developing EdTech in the Middle East since 2014. We built features that worked, and others that didn’t. We learned a lot from our experience, and from others. We want to share 2 particular street turns we learned to try to avoid.
Warning — Steep Road: Learning Tools that are Difficult to Adopt
Learners are pragmatic … in a good way. They learn to achieve a certain goal, as small as passing a test or writing an email, or as big as graduating with honors or making impact where they live. However, they have limited time and resources to spend on learning. Design your ed-tech product to integrate with learners’ goals as easily as possible. Help them fulfill their goals with minimum setup and effort. For example, a success factor in writing tools like Grammarly is that you learn to write better, while you are writing your emails and getting your actual work done. You don’t need to set time aside to learn. Learning is happening on-the-go.
Not everything integrates as seamlessly. Nonetheless, the principle continues to hold strongly. Delivering educational content? Think about how discoverable your content is. Can learners learn the exact bit they need using a single Google search, for example, that takes them to your product? Minimize the time your learner needs to understand your product and access it. Your content builds good reputation fast this way.
This lesson is not black-or-white, though. Products that need reasonably steep onboarding, or even learners to change their routines to use your product, do exist. Sometimes people spend months learning a tool! But they do it when there is clear proportional value to them. Road incline is not always a bad thing. It’s sometimes what people have to go through to get that amazing view of the city from up above. So make sure your users know what awaits them at the end of the road.
Warning — Dead-end: Fancy Learning Tools with little End-Value
Have you built an AI-based learning tool? Not yet?! You’re the only person I know who hasn’t! The EdTech community sources a lot of its excitement (and funding) from playing with new advances in other technologies, such as AI.
The excitement around building fancy tools using shiny technologies is both passion and poison in EdTech. Sometimes the desire to use a particular shiny technology steers the product in a way that makes it deliver little to no end-value. Think, building an AI product just to build an AI product.
When choosing new technologies to solve a problem, we learned to ask the following 2 questions in this exact order:
- Is this problem important to solve? Is there enough end-value in solving it, or are there work-arounds?
- Is the new technology we’re considering the best tool to solve it? Or is there something simpler that can do as good, or even better?
Oftentimes, we see new developers excited about the technology tool itself, that they invest in learning and using it, and actually in building a semi-finished product around it sometimes, without validating the value of this product. User testing is as critical in EdTech as potentially saving learners years of wasted time and efforts, and channeling millions of dollars of investment in better directions. Check out our post on “Usability Testing”, and imagine testing educational content and software this way to confirm that they drive learning gain, iterating until we get a version that works, and only then investing big sums into implementing the full product.
We can user-test educational content or tools using methods as simple as a paper-drawing or a quick digital mock-up. This leaves us some manual work to do, but it is super-easy and quick to iterate on until we reach the right design. Results of such simple testing can help us decide to go forward, change something early enough, or abandon our current direction completely. There are hundreds of ways we can think of applying AI in a certain EdTech product. How many work? Maybe one, maybe none. Maybe a non-AI approach is better after all. This is what’s important to learn fast and cheap.
The problem is that hype around fancy technologies makes us look for problems that fit the technology tool and run fast to use them, rather than starting by asking: what is the most pressing problem I should solve now, and what’s the easiest way to solve it?
This, definitely, shouldn’t be mistaken with the value of learning new technology tools and what they can do. Knowing and mastering more tools helps us solve more and tougher problems.
So all we intend to say is: Fancy but useless product: Bad! Useful product: Good, regardless of how fancy it is. It’s an easy lesson to learn, but also an easy lesson to overlook.
There’s no Google Maps for EdTech yet, but wouldn’t that be cool? Well, why wait? We’re building an EdTech “city map” to share with the World and help EdTech enthusiasts navigate what’s unknown to them through the experience of others. Do you have an EdTech (or software product) experience you think can help? Anything that drove more end-user value? Anything you tried that didn’t work? Please comment below. Know someone who can contribute valuable experience? Please mention them and share this post with them. We’ll compile and structure your contributions and publish the “EdTech City Map — V1.0” once we hit 20 contributions, and publish periodic expanded versions afterwards.
There’s no Google Maps for EdTech yet, but why not build something quick together?
