Leaders in Education & Design Recap
Leaders in Education + Design
Thursday night I was fortunate enough to be able to attend ‘Leaders in Education + Design’, part of San Francisco Design Week. Khan Academy’s Elizabeth Lin helped plan the event that brought together a panel of five designers from different Education Technology companies in SF to talk about education, design, and everything in between.
Moderator and Panelists
The moderator was May-Li, the Director of Design and Co-Director of Long-term Research at Khan Academy. She oversaw the discussion between Alex Hollender (Designer at AltSchool), Jenny Wales (Designer at Desmos), Danny Salvatori (Product Designer at Remind), Chris Palmatier (Senior Product Designer at Coursera), and Tabitha Yong (Senior Product Designer at Khan Academy). These five each brought unique experiences and insight onto the panel that made for an intriguing and powerful discussion about design and the role of Ed Tech in reshaping the way people learn.
Takeaways
Technology can (and should) complement education, not replace it
Around the country, there is growing concern that jobs will be replaced with developing technologies. In relation to education, the overwhelming consensus is that for technology to work most effectively, it has to be complementary to teaching and learning, not a substitute.
When Alex arrived at AltSchool, he was nervous that the CEO would be obsessively tech focused, but was pleasantly surprised to see that he highly valued interaction, a common theme throughout the panel discussion. Each panelist emphasized that human interaction lays at the heart of education, and their tools are working to enhance those interactions, not replace them.
Zuckerberg’s Harvard commencement speech is a good reminder that for all of the technological innovation, at the core, we still care about finding our purpose and connecting with others. Ultimately, that’s why colleges still exist. Chris even admitted that Coursera is thinking about how to replicate the networking effect that universities have online, and in my opinion, it is very difficult to mimic the college experience. An environment with thousands of college kids in the same place lends itself to rapid social development and enhanced educational experiences through conversation and action.
Nonetheless, technology within education can be valuable if implemented well. Using interconnectivity and new technology to help with pain points that students, teachers and parents face can make a big difference. Remind, for example, helps teachers communicate with parents and students, meaning that busy teachers can focus more on education and their students, and less on shoddy communication channels.
The tools and examples of how technology can improve the lives of students, teachers and parents in an educational setting could warrant an article for itself, but the thing I want to emphasize here is the complementary nature of these tools.
Design in education has some stark differences with other industries
In Ed Tech, failure is obvious, harmful, and embarrassing. Jenny emphasized the fact that, in a classroom, if the technology fails, the class fails. I can remember countless times when a teacher tried to use technology in a classroom, and it didn’t work. This was distracting to the class, and lowered my teachers’ willingness to use technology in the future.
From a technical and design standpoint, this means that the tools being used in classrooms must be reliable, useful, and flawless.
Similarly, Danny reminded us that the target audience, students, have a shorter window of attention than the average adult. Stimulation is just a click away, and if Ed Tech design does not capture attention, it cannot be used effectively.
As an example, designers often think about how long someone might be engaging with our content, but Chris brought up a good point that sometimes you want teachers to spend minimum time on a website. That means they found what they were looking for and were able to move on. (If you’re interested in SEO at all, here’s an interesting article that explores that idea).
It stuck out to me that the companies on the panel all engage actively in research by going into classrooms and seeing how students interact with their product. Many even have in-house teachers evaluating and experimenting with new products, which leads to my next point.
Teachers are designers
I love this notion. A big responsibility for a designer is understanding how their audience is going to interact with their product and then building accordingly.
All day long, teachers (at least the good ones) are planning activities and teaching in a way that they hope will interactively engage their students. I’m not sure what the teacher make-up is at Ed Tech companies on the design front, but I can confidently say that it should be significant to help build products that students will enjoy using.
The core of these companies is progress, not money
Of course this is the ideal, but four out of the five companies represented on the panel are venture backed. They need to deliver returns to their investors, and because of that, money can often become the primary goal, pushing more important metrics aside.
It’s worth noting that it was designers talking, not CFOs or CEOs, but it’s still notable that to each of the panelists, the emphasis is on educational progress, not on revenue. They aren’t sitting behind a computer thinking “how can this product make us money.” They’re thinking “how can this improve the educational experience”
My hypothesis is that people don’t enter education to make money (or at least not now). People who care about money go into one of the many other industries that we can imagine that have higher perceived payoffs. This is quite unique because what it means is that the people working in the education space love what they’re doing.
While measuring progress could also warrant a separate article, and that idea came up as often quite difficult (for a lot of reasons), putting a focus on this progress instead of on money translates to better and more meaningful work, something that was reassuring to hear.
Education is a beautiful tool to empower the otherwise unempowered in our society
Tabitha mentioned some powerful stories of how Ed Tech (and Khan Academy, specifically) is being used around the world by people experiencing hardship. The story that moved me most was of Moawia Eldeeb. The details are here, but, to summarize, Moawia’s family moved to New York from Egypt when he was young. He had to drop out of school at age 11 to work and support his family. After their house caught on fire and they were moved to a homeless shelter, he began to learn math on Khan Academy. From there, he got into a high school on a full ride scholarship, went on to Columbia University and, eventually, started a company that was part of Y Combinator. It’s the widespread access to educational resources like Khan Academy that contributed towards his achievements.
Moawia’s story is one of countless others that are we are seeing more and more each day.
It’s the increased accessibility and reach with technology that make working in Ed Tech so rewarding and meaningful.
No single company can solve education
Alex said, “I don’t care if you come join AltSchool as much as I care that you join an education company in general.” The problems being solved are so vast and widespread that having bright people working on any of the issues is the most important piece.
These five companies, which may, in some ways, be considered competitors, are trying to learn from each other and to collaborate. They admit that no single one of them will solve all of the problems. Consequently, they are all learning about Ed Tech’s role in the system and can share lessons about student engagement, fundraising and anything else. This collaboration is a positive for everyone.
Think about self driving cars as a contrast. There are tons of companies trying to build this technology to win the race, but it means that there are significant resources being re-used and wasted. (I’m all for autonomous vehicles, and I understand from a capitalism point of view why it happens this way, but I still don’t love that everyone has to try to build them).
“We need all the help we can get”
This came from Danny. Here were some of the five most renowned companies in education, and they are sitting up front saying “we need more great people.” Of course, everyone is almost always hiring in some sense, but there was much more urgency with the panelists. They are solving really difficult problems and need substantial help working towards those goals. I got the sense that there’s not enough manpower in Ed Tech at the moment.
I wrote a longer piece about this and my thoughts on making it happen, but in short, people need to be more informed about what’s happening in Ed Tech. Young people are looking for purpose, and when talking about making an impact, solving problems in education is towards the top in terms of high leverage. Of course education isn’t for everyone, but there are so many different companies doing exciting things, and if more people my age were aware of that, I think we’d see a larger proportion trying to pursue the issues.
In Summary
To wrap up, this event was intriguing. I’m new to San Francisco, and I’m just getting introduced to the Ed Tech space here, but events like this make me optimistic about the current landscape. Realizing how many other people care about the same problems as I do and are doing everything they can to solve them can be a really motivating thing. Plus, hearing some of the most innovative Ed Tech companies stand up and say that they need more people on board shows that being part of the solution is not just a possibility, it’s a necessity.
Thanks for reading :)
If you ever want to discuss this more or get in touch, don’t hesitate to reach out. My email is noadelstein@gmail.com
