Beyond Silver Bullets
Former teacher’s advice for being an edtech gamechanger
Like many of us who are now playing somewhere in the world of edtech, I got into education as a teacher. This was in 2006, (just barely) before smart phones. Since then, I have been in edtech in various capacities, and its growth over the last ten years has been fascinating, in both breadth and depth of products available. This was welcomed by a lot of us; as we all know, the way learning happened hadn’t really changed since this country was founded and the space provided just as much opportunity for constructive disruption as anywhere else.
However, as much as we were encouraged by the disruptive abilities of new technologies, disruption for disruption sake and silver bullet solutions have proven themselves as something to be weary of across sectors. And some edtech companies have hit a lot of walls recently as investment and the fervor over this space has slightly subsided (although through all this some real gamechangers evolved and rose up; more on these in a moment).
I observed two big causes of this:
1. Not all, but many of these companies were providing solutions for a problem in a market they didn’t fully understand.
They analyzed market trends from their desks, talked on the supply side to developers at Apple and Google and Microsoft but were removed enough from the industry and demand side that they made really complex things that didn’t totally solve customers’ problems in a scalable way. They didn’t understand the risks present and constraints of decision makers in the entirety of their market chains (like how volatile education budgets can be, or how what districts or universities say they want may not work for educators or students, or vice versa, and how that relationship looks different everywhere).
2. Founders and funders didn’t fully appreciate the macro trends in education and how those change cyclically.
Ten years ago, K12 education was still knee deep in basing many decisions around standardized testing and the tenets of No Child Left Behind. Today, there is a lot of focus on retention, career readiness, and non-cognitive development — stuff like grit — from buyers and decision makers. This has changed what problems (and therefore what solutions) are priority.
That said, there were and are still major problems to solve in education. The public education system in both the United States and globally still perpetuates societal inequity, despite many passionate and brilliant educators and policymakers and social entrepreneurs creating pockets of high impact classrooms and outcomes. So if you’re an edtech entrepreneur, how should you become a high impact gamechanger? Here’s how the companies who have rocked out have approached things:
Use the best practices of human centered design and make sure you gain an intimate understanding of your customers and their problems
(if you don’t know what human centered design is, IDEO.org has a fantastic toolkit). Customers include your end users and buyers, which oftentimes in edtech are different entities or groups. Really get to know them. Go talk to them and observe them — their frustrations in their respective roles as well as what provides them joy and satisfaction. Undercover their motivations. Figure out what other problems they have and what solutions have worked and why. Come to them first with an open notebook, not with a solution or prototype.
Really figure out your market
Identify not just the problems your customers face, but whether these problems sustain despite trend shifts in the industry. The map of who has influence, who pays, who benefits, and who wants your product or service is complex, varies drastically between early childhood, K12, and higher ed, and and is ever changing. Understand its volatility and what may influence that. Was this a problem last year? Does your customer anticipate it being a problem next year? Why is it a problem? Will that underlying cause stick around even if the other tides in the industry shift?
I always like to use Clever as an example of a badass gamechanger in edtech here, not just because (full disclosure) one of my good friends and former colleagues was a founder. He was a teacher turned school tech guy back in 2010, and was starting to go crazy trying to analyze student data from various disparate systems; none of them easily sat on a single line so educators could easily say for Sara “here are all her scores over time on everything.” This drove a lot of other educators crazy too, and whatever the trends happening in education were, student data from apps and websites wasn’t going away. Clever provides a single-roster syncing solution to solve this, so now all Sara’s data is on one line — as is the rest of her classmates’. It’s not shiny, it’s not particularly sexy, but it’s incredibly problem solving for all customer segments and it’s sustainable.
I have a lot of other examples of success across the edtech sector, and am happy to talk through. Reach out anytime, and until then, go kick some ass and change the world. Technology can be incredibly powerful, and I can’t wait to see what problem solving y’all come up with next.
Hannah Gay is a consultant, speaker, and advisor in the social impact space. She is the founder of malinaSI social Impact Design, which maximizes social impact in mission driven organizations through the lenses of impact metrics and business design.
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