r/edtech • u/Temporary-Truth2159 • 10d ago
is edtech over saturated?
edtech is oversaturated. because we are looking at the wrong aspects, big ass corporations try to sell medicine, not a cure.
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u/Dr0110111001101111 10d ago
Saturation isn’t the problem. It’s that almost none of the people making these tools have any business in education and they’re too cheap/greedy to pay experienced teachers to consult in the development process. This is just as true about the indie developers as it is for the big traditional textbook publishers like pearson and HMH.
The best tools have come from teacher’s or serious collaboration with teachers. Deltamath was initially made by a high school teacher for his own classes. Desmos activity builder was developed with a team of teachers including Dan Meyer, one of the biggest names in advancing math education beyond the use of Ed tech
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u/koinoniaweb 10d ago
I work for Kami, where about a third of our entire workforce are former educators.
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u/Temporary-Truth2159 10d ago
That makes sense honestly, hut where im from even the teachers arent as expiernced so we are left off to rely on YouTube or softwares
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u/Dr0110111001101111 10d ago
What do you mean “the teachers aren’t as experienced”? Is the life expectancy in your country 35?
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u/Temporary-Truth2159 10d ago
Its about 78, but wou are thinking about it the wrong way, expiernce isnt if you know the subject, its if you can explain it in a way others can understand (like a teacher) I have met alot of teachers that half ass the teaching part, which is why studying at home often takes long than actual school, and teachers often find better job, like teaching at collages or pristine school and shit when they get the experience, so that leaves us with the half baked ones, understand it?
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u/cram213 10d ago
I disagree with this.
I am a third grade teacher. I know where the pain points are in my class. So I know what problems need to be addressed.
That comes from the experience of teaching a class. That comes from feeling the air and flow of each day and interact with the students and having them do things.
If your teachers do not have that kind of “experience”, then there’s something wrong.
Or you aren’t actually talking to the teachers to ask them about this
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u/Visual-Reserve-2800 10d ago
What should be happening is that teachers should be looking into making tools for themselves and if someone has a particularly good tool that can be sold.
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u/ExtensionExercise513 10d ago
That isn’t really scalable. It’s great in small pockets but asking teachers to take time to dev all their tooling and then maintain that tooling and ensure it’s compliant with privacy and accessibility changes is a lot.
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u/Visual-Reserve-2800 10d ago
That would be the great part of having some sort of guild.
I am sure that there would also be independent people to help with privacy and accessibility consulting.
I'm thinking balkanization of the process, rather than one company owning the whole thing. Teachers would be the best for r and d.
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u/ExtensionExercise513 10d ago
Making it a public project is a great idea and would likely aide in a chunk of things.
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u/usbetween 2d ago
I'm trying to do this right now... I'm a teacher who built something in the summer. I want teachers to use it because I think it is an anti-edtech edtech tool that can add some sanity back to classrooms riddled with extraneous chromebook usage. but I'm not a salesperson, I don't know how to reach out to enough people, I'm just a teacher.. 🪦
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u/Babayaga1664 10d ago
Parent and engineer managing a team of over 300 engineers in a highly regulated market.
Allow teachers to build their own stuff is worrying because….
1. They vibe code stuff up without any regard for where student data could end up
2. Homegrown stuff bypasses all the checks and balances that schools, districts and trusts put in place
3. I’ve seen some terrifying examples where teachers build something, put it in front of children and then they realise they’ve been allowing student data to flow freely to multiple organisations without knowing what the data was, who has the data and for how long.1
u/Visual-Reserve-2800 10d ago
That's why they need to have trained staff to vet the vibe coded stuff.
Pii is extremely important for safety and liability reasons.
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u/cram213 10d ago
I think the fear of a student name flowing to some unknown boogeyman is oversaturated.
If my Thai students’ English nicknames are shared through some app….and someone gets ahold of it…then what? Walk me through the horror of this.
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u/Babayaga1664 10d ago
It’s not just a name and it’s not just 1 organisation.
Let’s say a teacher vibe codes a AI Tutor and they use 3rd party components for hosting data, perhaps a router for cheap ai calls, a logging provider for error handling and perhaps a camera for homework….Let’s take an example of a student who is feeling sad perhaps they went to instagram and worried about how they look.
They ask the AI “am I ugly” use the homework cam to share a pic of themselves express how they are feeling.On the other side let’s say there is a bad actor who is looking for vulnerable children.
The vibe coding app has just shared data unknowingly to multiple organisations.
There are many more examples but the point being they there is a reason they GDPR or PDPA in your case exists.
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u/dank_summers 10d ago
That's what I've been doing from the IT side, built a few internal products and now trying to sell the best one, an accessibility scanner.
As a solo devoloper B2G sales have been brutal to even get it in front of anyone. Even though it's solving a huge problem for cheap in my opinion
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u/Temporary-Truth2159 10d ago
What would you suggest?
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u/Visual-Reserve-2800 10d ago
Basically a teachers pay teachers for online tools and apps.
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u/Temporary-Truth2159 10d ago
I have a little side project but its jorfan based so it only works with jordanian books, I built it for my self but I feel like it would help alot of people in my region because the education system is so corrupt
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u/Visual-Reserve-2800 10d ago
Well, are there any Ed tech companies in Jordan?
I know that in the Palestinian territories, especially Gaza, due to the butter destruction, there are a lot of students in need of education and materials
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u/Temporary-Truth2159 10d ago
I would've gone with Palestine but I think they have more worrying matters rn, ilmak isnt a substitute to teachers/schools, its supposed to fill the gaps in at home studying, but yes there is edtech in jordan Jo acadamy (basically youtube but about the books and some half asked Quizes) There's siraj which I heard was good but I have little faith in it because it was built by the very education system that screwed us over all these years And there's Alfredo, which I heard about recently from a friend of the founder, I like that one but its for college not school And I will network with him soon, I got his contacts
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u/Visual-Reserve-2800 10d ago
I get that there is worrying things happening. However, one thing to remember is that when there is war, there is a generation of people not getting an education.
South africa has a generation of people who lost out on their education due to everything happening in the 80s with apartheid.
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u/Temporary-Truth2159 10d ago
And I deeply feel for them, and I wish I had the resources to fix that, and when I get those resources I will fix it, education is a human right. And it shouldn't be gate kept by a pay wall.
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u/Opposite_Display_644 8d ago
I agree, the tools created FOR teachers should be created with teacher's involvement. I work for Schooly, and that's exactly what happened. The founder and CEO himself IS a teacher. And still is, he's a math and English teacher. So his input in our work, matters a lot.
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u/ScratchJolly3213 10d ago
No I think if it’s a good enough tool we should give it away for free and make it open source so everyone can contribute and we can have maximum transparency. There’s already open source edtech better than anything on the market, just very few have heard about it because big companies’ biggest asset and focus is marketing not quality.
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u/Dr0110111001101111 10d ago
Of all people, hard working teachers making meaningful contributions to their field should be allowed to profit from their efforts.
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u/ScratchJolly3213 10d ago
Agreed, through professional development training people to use their tools. The problem is that right now we are investing in software and not human capacity to integrate AI and edtech in meaningful and evidence-based ways. Edtech SAAS as a whole needs to be dismantled. It is brutal but necessary for us to reconceptualize high quality software as a public good.
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u/mysteryv 10d ago
I think the trouble is too many company starting with the question "what can we make" and then moving to "how can we sell it" without the messy "what do schools need help with" first. No one is asking for one more app that makes pretty slide decks.
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u/horsegal301 10d ago
That's because the people who start companies are thinking purely of money, not about solving problems
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u/edfluency 10d ago
Yet we are still using “state of the art” tools like canvas or moodle which are behind consumer or enterprise tech for years.
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u/horsegal301 10d ago
yeah it's oversaturated with people who think they can "code" with AI because they have one semi-not-terrible idea
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u/fiftymeancats 9d ago
It's worse than "selling medicine, not a cure." You are "selling medicine for a water main burst." Or "selling fentanyl to a heroin addict." Computer technology simply does not help solve the difficulties our students are facing and frequently makes the problems worse.
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u/HominidSimilies 10d ago
Is anything wildly effective and successful for learners in EdTech? :)
I would say not often enough relative to all the people discovering EdTech and takes that are new to them
But might not be new.
It’s still a wide open ocean.
EdTech like a lot of industries has always been more about talk. Solutions are talked up but the outcome isn’t there quite enough.
There has been an insure of basic digital literacy and now it’s changing societally to be much worse and not keep up with what AI or tech can do.
Pockets of good activity need to find a way together.
Yes the existing software with featuritis will largely deflate since the cost of features alone will drop to zero.
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u/JunketAccurate9323 9d ago
In my time in edtech as a seller, the only platforms I saw teachers be wildly excited about were Everyday Speech, Seesaw and Class Dojo. Not to say teachers or staff didn't like anything else, but those were the tools I really saw them be extremely territorial over. I didn't deal with any math teachers so I'm not sure if there's a tool out there that they feel the same about.
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u/HominidSimilies 9d ago
Thanks. Your comment made me consider the impact on learners can be completely different as an outcome than teachers or staff being excited.
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u/derganove 10d ago
“It depends” is always the fun answer. People think content hosting a a block based web editor is an LMS. Those concepts are oversaturated.
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u/Grandmaster_P 9d ago
In a word, yes. I am the curriculum and tech ditector for a small school district now and the sheer number of emails and phone calls I get since COVID about ed tech is off the charts. Compounding this is the tenacity. Depending on the vendor I will get either three or four contacts within a six week period that just "want to make sure their mail is getting through" or some will have multiple different sales people contact. The most common verbiage is that they have something vague in the email that makes it sound like it could have come from a publishes district document. This is then followed by a plea to learn more about our goals and initiatives in a call that would take no more than 15 minutes. If I gave every vendor that asks for it their 15 minutes I would lose an entire day each week to this. And this is coming just from the vendors who are not going straight to spam.
As for my phone? Don't bother calling. If my caller ID does not show you as someone I know or if I am not expecting a call then it goes to voicemail. And even there my message has in it instrutions that if you are a vendor making a sales call to please use email and I will respond if interested. Do I listen to the voicemail? Yes until I see it is a vendor. Then I do no listen to the rest of it. I wait for the email. Why? Time. I can read your email in 15 seconds but to listen to your voicemail will take 60. I can also save that email for later reference. Will I actually read your email? Yes.... once. The likelihood that i will ever contact your company will be inversely proportional though to the frequency with which you send follow ups. But yes. I DO read them. I understand it is part of my job to find out what is available and to look into if it fits our needs.
So yeah there is saturation. Even with me screening things there was a lot of creep in ed tech since COVID and I am still trying to back it off. Not incuding the online components of our adopted curriculum we have about 30 or 40 ed tech tools in use. There is no way this is good for kids and teachers since there simply isn't enough time in the week to use each product as the vendors ask (typical dosage is 20 to 30 minutes weekly per product) nor is there enought to to adequately train teachers on the appropriate use of all those products.
Frankly I am at the point in ed tech I want to reduce our usage 50 percent. Since California is going to start taxing all software in January, I finally have some leverage to start cutting. Even for our small district that tax liability alone I expect to be about 50,000 dollars annually at present usage of software. Something has gotta give.
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u/HarryBrit40 8d ago
There is certainly lots to choose from out there, but isn't this a positive? Schools provided with great choice is an opportunity.
If you're a Teacher and feel 'saturated', I think this comes more from the decisions made by leadership and overwhelming staff with too many tools.
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u/dshmitch 7d ago
Definitely it is.
The demand is decreasing as people self-educate themselves using AI, at custom pace
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u/No-Consideration1067 10d ago
Yes. And it has done nothing for achieve at scale. So. Visionary leaders will keep what actually gets used — gradebook, one assessment platform, one discipline tracking system, and that’s it.
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u/ExtensionExercise513 10d ago
Edtech isn’t a panacea for all the problems of the world no matter what they market. Good teachers and an engaged community are the secret sauce.
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u/No-Consideration1067 10d ago
Well it could at least produce literally any improvement in learning since the 90s. Not looking for panacea, just basic efficacy
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u/ExtensionExercise513 10d ago
I’ve seen well trained teachers and students do remarkable things with tech tools. This idea it’s offered no value isn’t valid.
Edtech is just the tool.
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u/moss_jimmy 10d ago
Only if you're making yet another dashboard or AI wrapper. Just about everything in edtech is that right now.
The real trick is going to be creating something useful, novel, and something that doesn't look like the DMV website.