Edmodo, an education social network that boasts 14 million connections, and Quizlet, an online flashcard tool, which claimed more than 62 million visitors last year. It’s notable that Edmodo has raised more than $30 million as it builds a complex product, while Quizlet hasn’t raised any outside money at all.
In Boston, Socrative is pursuing this approach with its student polling system that uses existing devices.
Trap 2: Selling complex software to school districts.
Not everyone aims to change education from inside the classroom. If you’re like many of my business school classmates with an education background, you’ve witnessed how old, siloed information systems limit school administrators from harnessing the fully power of technology. Poorly designed and integrated software does more to keep teachers from useful data than empower them with it.
While many entrepreneurs hope to empower schools by building education-specific versions of corporate software systems (CRMs, ERPs, HRMs). The solution to overly complex software isn’t more complex software. It’s difficult to sell anything to school districts that spans more than one department, and the intersection of teaching with all technology means that almost everything of value touches more than one department.
Opportunity 2: Selling software that reduces complexity and only needs one buyer.
When someone does solve the problem of data complexity across multiple legacy systems, many of the other traps I write about may go away. It’s similar to how open source standards (and fully integrated ERPs) finally allowed corporations in the 1990s and 2000s to see some of the productivity gains technology had promised since the ‘70s.
Right now the most touted startup doing this is Clever. This company has focused solely on integrating data from legacy educational software systems and built it in such a way that it can be useful if no one other than the IT department interacts with it.
Trap 3: Selling technologies to consumers for problems with no clear outcomes.
One model of educational reform says, let’s improve our classrooms. Another model says, let’s blow them up. For those inclined toward empowering learners to find their own way, it’s appealing to develop software and solutions that disintermediate schools and put learning tools in the hands of students.
Just like making the classroom an incrementally better experience doesn’t justify the risks or the costs for most teachers, helping people learn slightly more effectively doesn’t justify the risks or the costs for most students (and their families) unless the rewards are measurable and obvious.
Opportunity 3: Selling to consumers when there are clear outcomes.
This is where for-profit education has always made its money. Test preparation, which my company, Testive, focuses on, is a good example of this. There is a clear measure of success (your score on a test) and clear benefits to achieving that goal (access to better schools and the measurable financial gains that come with that).
Educational and business opportunities exist in any situation where you have to demonstrate competence (such as on a test) in order to get access to something of value (such as certification in a certain industry). Since the value of education is already clear, in most cases these markets already exist. That means the winners have to disrupt the model somehow.
In the case of Testive, our SAT prep product, SAT Habit, uses adaptive algorithms to bring some of the benefits of in-person tutoring to the online experience. And we do our best to put that in the context of an online experience that doesn’t suck.
There’s a related consumer opportunity here for “edutainment.” Most educational toys and enrichment classes are really entertainment and diversion merged with education. As with all entertainment industries, there’s massive potential in this space and correspondingly high risk.