What would an Edtech arms race look like?
This week’s Human Learning issue saw a number of product enhancements announced; 2U acquired the annotation company Critiqueit, Coursera added A/B testing as well as an ML driven prompted and in the past we’ve seen Udacity acquire to enhance their learning experience. My question is whether any of these could be leveraged to generate a competitive advantage among the major Edtech platforms e.g. Coursera, edX, FutureLearn, 2U etc.
It’s an interesting question not least because there hasn’t really been noticeable innovation among the major platforms — at least none since their initial designs — they look and function fairly similar with the possible exception of Udacity who have innovated in this space and necessarily so — they compete with specialist coding providers who tend to innovate faster. That’s an important distinction because one credible reason why Edtech platforms have been slow to innovate in learning (apart from the fact it is very hard) is whether that innovation would be scalable across different subjects. For Nanodegrees or the likes of Treehouse — they have largely fixed curriculums based around a single or narrow subject areas. Generalists don’t have that option and in their bid to become financially sustainable haven’t — reasonably — prioritised product development in that direction.
However we may (slowly one suspects) see that change as the financial position of some Edtech players consolidates. Coursera, Udacity and 2U are among the three most financially successful Edtech platforms with relatively consolidated business models and arguably have the most leeway to augment their platforms through development or acquisition.
What would that look like? The major excitement is around adaptive learning — whereby algorithms adjust the exercises you do based on how you performed in your previous exercises but other contenders include chatbots (either course specific like Georgia Tech’s FAQs or designed for study support — as Coursera’s appears to be) you could also have exercise tools such as coding consoles, annotation etc.
What advantage would these yield? Slightly counter-intuitively the competitive advantage would more likely be in the innovations that aid the teaching staff rather than the students. Georgia Tech’s Jill Watson answers questions based on questions from the previous year — saving the teaching stuff from the drudgery of repeating answers and freeing them — either to provide more support or do other things they care about. Given the teaching staff’s time is a bottleneck this could be a significant advantage for the Edtech platform wooing the University.
That’s not to say a consumer innovations wouldn’t be a factor both for user enjoyment and retention and also for universities putting degrees online — where student retention metrics are critical. Adaptive learning could be among the more exciting in that case — at the moment its specialised and expensive to create but were the development time to be reduced then that could significantly bolster STEM teaching (more amenable to adaptive) by creating personalised learning curves to guide students through.
Alas the arms race is probably not around the corner, rather we are in the gentle foothills but when it happens Edtech will be the better for it.
