Moving into 2023, it’s expected that the industry will double-down on lifelong learning set against a backdrop of the changing nature of work and increasing global demand for problem solvers.
This newsletter excerpt also asks whether large capitalization of EdTech has led to a change of focus from educational goals to profit goals. One might presume it has, but to what extent?
That question looms large in any discussion of third party education vectors vis a vie Public School Systems; are we serving Mr. Profit, or Mr. Bureaucracy, or Ms. Union, or Mr. Learning?
On-demand tutoring services are profitable, but are they effective?
Of course, Public Schools are fueled by huge amounts of capital, which is funneled from taxes to various educational endeavors through a mostly opaque process in which parents don’t seem to have meaningful ways to participate.
There is some input via elections of school boards, but basically it’s the bureaucrats and the teacher’s unions fighting it out, with parents up in the bleachers watching the game.
Is venture cap or really BIG EDTECH a better bet for meeting students and parent’s needs? As noted above that’s an assumption we can’t make without deep deep analysis: it also depends somewhat on the impact of “the market” on ed tech spending.
Can parent’s vote with their feet? And would that be a good idea? Probably some form of private/public partnership is what we might strive for to reach towards educational goals. (Community Schools?)
Some might say we already have that, because with EdTech, it’s not something that Public Schools create, it’s something they buy from Big EdTech. But that process doesn’t seem to work well…technology changes too fast for bureaucratic derived funding to keep up. What to do?
One hoped for result is a reduced cost for US education, whose “costs per outcome” seems poorly correlated.
Online learning tools can be created as “Very high Production Value incorporated into Very High Quality Teaching.” Those costs can be distributed across the vast per/student US landscape, which offers some hope of lowering costs at the same time as bringing higher quality learning options to disadvantaged schools, students, parents, and communities.