Teaching Lessons From Facebook, PayPal & Sony (Seriously, these businesses could improve teaching…)
Educators are forced to teach to the “middle” of the classroom. You can’t just target the advanced students and alienate the rest, nor can you put all your energy into the struggling ones — so you may as well try and catch as many as you can in your wide-ranging net, hence going for the middle makes sense. Right? That’s what educators have been doing for hundreds of years.
Looking closer at it — there may be a smarter approach that can be taken. Facebook, PayPal and Sony can teach us, unexpected, but valuable lessons.
There is a common rule in product design and business strategy.
Which goes something like this:
— When you design a product for everyone, you are designing it for no one.
— When you sell to everyone, you actually sell to no one.
….and same for marketing, writing, presenting, knitting (okay maybe not the last one).
The best way to put this in perspective and make it easy to follow, is to look at businesses we are all familiar with -
Facebook, PayPal and Sony.
BTW — if you are not familiar with all of these businesses, please Google their names…actually you may not be familiar with what Google is then either?
I digress.
When Facebook was first developed back in 2004 (then known as thefacebook.com) — it was clear Mark Zuckerberg’s intention wasn’t to appeal to, or attract, the entire market that it currently captures today.
A majority of people would have never used Facebook when it was first developed (including me) — yet here we are now.
Excuse me one second while I update my status.
Facebook was a highly relevant, nonetheless a rather clunky solution, that solved an immediate problem for college students to connect with one another.
Within a year and a half, it had already reached 21 universities…
…with more than a 100M users.
The trick was — it was always highly relevant to everyone that ever used it. A big reason for its success.
Relevant to:
- College students (when the solution was a lot simpler than it is today, not the easiest to use, and even rather clunky),
- Mainstream younger generation (once all their friends were using it and it allowed them to share photos and communicate with each other), and,
- Older generation (joining in at a later stage to connect with family, relatives, and their buddies who were all on this service as opposed to any other).
And so on.
PayPal went through a similar journey.
This is the largest online payment platform.
It again didn’t start off hoping to replace credit cards as the most commonly used method of transferring money online, worldwide.
PayPal initially solved a very niche problem for the crazy eBay power users that needed a way to make it easier to facilitate payments, instead of constantly keying in their credit card information.
PayPal was it.
Thereafter its relevance started to spread to more and more users, and so on.
Ditto with Sony.
Now ranked 105th on the Fortune Global 500.
It started off with Masaru Ibuka’s team releasing a crummy sounding transistor radio which appealed to a highly motivated segment of the market because it was the first portable solution of its kind.
NONE of these companies (and 100s of other examples) created a solution for everyone.
Which is virtually who they appeal to today — everyone.
So,
Understandably education and business aren’t the same thing.
But there is a powerful hidden lesson here.
Why should we try to design a lesson that appeals to everyone?
Especially when we know that by trying to appeal to everyone, we push a majority to lose interest.
BUT is there anything else can we really do?
The education system is structured in such a way where X number of students must be in each lesson run by 1 teacher.
An educator can’t change that.
He/she can’t suddenly break up the class and start to create some segments, with targeted teaching, or go against the norm at his/her particular school.
SO.
When you have a classroom full of students ranging from
- Struggling
- Average
- Advanced
- Just way too enthusiastic
The logical approach seems to be to teach in the “middle”, which will hopefully overlap most of these people.
However,
The advanced students want to be challenged.
The struggling students are looking to learn the basics so they can gather some momentum and make a start.
And everyone else is either split between both spectrums, depending on the particular topic.
So, as you can see, a lesson in the “middle” is likely to serve the needs, or engage, pretty much no one.
Because it isn’t really relevant to anyone.
And that may be what we are starting to see now.
The major disrupters of education are all making things more and more relevant.
The two digital education platforms I’ve linked to above, with millions of users each, allow students to learn what’s relevant to them, at their pace, and under their control.
Teachers are then able to monitor their progress.
Videos are available for each particular topic, and grow in complexity.
Thousands of schools worldwide use these tools to help with teaching, where teachers delegate parts of their lessons to these online schools.
Full Circle Back
I’m not saying that every classroom should start to employ this approach, or implement a Flipped Classroom model.
It is a difficult change to make, and it is something that needs to be done collectively as a school, or even an entire state.
But taking these lessons from Facebook, PayPal & Sony don’t have to be difficult.
It is about making a small and easy change.
Solving a problem for some can solve the problem for many.
You never know.
That by being relevant to the struggling students, they may no longer be in the struggling category.
And by moving up the range, they may start to work alongside the more motivated students.
This may increase their motivation even more, wanting to learn more, and participate more.
Advanced students may then help them.
They may help the advanced.
When the others see it, they may follow suit.
Before you know it, collaboration could take over. The educator then plays a more passive role.
This is the story with these businesses — maybe this can be the story in the classroom?
Seems idealised, but is it not more likely to have an affect than a “middle” lesson?
Sometimes solving the problem of an extremely small group can solve the problems of many others.
Take a time when you were the student.
A student at a particular PD or workshop you had to attend recently. Instead of listening to the presenter, you may have actually been spending time on Facebook instead.
Maybe it was doing a better job of being relevant?
