On teachers and tech
Part one in a series that aims to answer the question of why edtech is so rubbish
In this series, I interview Sam Bauers, a technology consultant and application developer of over 20 years’ experience. He began his career well before the iPhone existed, and has worked his way from building sites for UNSW to developing for Silicon Valley based Wordpress. He has consulted for brands like Westpac and Transport for NSW, and now brings his breadth and depth of knowledge to Scentre Group, known to us as Westfield. I asked him to explain to my readers, in a nutshell, why tech hasn’t remotely improved the lives of teachers. He missed the memo about the nutshell, but here’s what he had to say:
There is plenty of low-hanging fruit for technology optimisation in education. Outside of universities and education departments – where scale is obviously a factor – there is simply not much money to be made in solving problems in the sector.
There are two lenses to this: private enterprise - for example a startup trying to solve a problem in the sector, and (more often than not) seeking to make a profit; and public investment - like an education department committing to rolling out technology solutions.
On inertia
On the micro level we have all the problems within schools that you are familiar with. Time-poor employees who don’t have the time to commit to comprehensive technology reviews and implementations. There is a lack of funds to commit to expansive technology initiatives that include outside technology solution expertise. Then there’s the incredible inertial power of existing solutions, and the corresponding sunk-cost fallacy. Teacher’s time is also undervalued - they are cheap right? I think a lot would change if teachers weren’t seen as the cheap human plug that fills the technology process gaps (in private, Sam calls us ‘meat-APIs.’) There is a lot more detail in each of these points, including the way that software is sold into schools by incumbent providers, but the general gist is that education is a very poorly optimised product across the board.
On risk
On the macro level there are just so many regulatory differences between the jurisdictions that govern education. So many optimisations could be realised at a scale that could sustain private investment in a solution if it weren’t for the thousands of edge-cases which are introduced by varied approaches to processes, data standards, privacy and the like by different governments. Developing around all those process exceptions is very costly. It impedes development progress and lays a bunch of unwanted risk at the feet of the private enterprise. Data and privacy standards can significantly impact costs. For example, a governing body may demand that data is stored within their jurisdiction, forcing the business to duplicate their hosting environments, doubling or even tripling one of their core costs. Or a unique data standard may specify a certain type of data safety like an encryption standard that requires significant resources to support.
It would be fairly trivial to navigate the specific needs of one jurisdiction, but that is unlikely to bring the “total addressable market” required to make the venture viable, so you need dozens of jurisdictions, but there are diminishing returns for adding more regions and countries. Every time you enter a new jurisdiction you need to adapt to their vagaries, and often these regions are small, making an investor less money but costing the same in overheads.
On return
All of the above pushes the inflection point where a private enterprise can make a profit further and further away, and in the current venture capital climate, expectations on returns are at least 10 times investment. Not all investments will do that of course, but they must at least have a potential and viable path to that return. If the capital isn’t there, then it will rely on people successfully bootstrapping tech businesses in the sector themselves, and those are rare birds to find anywhere. Add to all of this the tech gorillas in the sector already, which have schools locked-up in multi-year contracts and invest heavily in their sales teams to avert schools churning to new products.
Public investment in bespoke tech solutions, for example an LMS commissioned by a big org like the DOE, suffers fewer of these barriers because they have the scale and they don’t need a measurable ROI, but it struggles to advance regardless. Although it is pretty clear that long-term returns on education investment for governments is very high compared to other public investment initiatives like defence, governments tend to look at the (non-tertiary) sector as a cost-centre. That’s a political hurdle, but assuming that can be passed there are other significant factors impeding progress.
On custom-tech
Firstly, technology projects on the scale of a state education department are huge, and it shouldn’t be understated how often large technology projects fail and how terrifying they are to work on - especially those that are trying to transform less agile legacy technology systems into something new. Education departments were early adopters of digitisation, and those early systems aren’t easy to move away from. Again, there is an incredible inertia keeping these systems in place: massive amounts of data to be transformed and migrated, systems which have limited time-windows to be taken down for maintenance and upgrade, a massive install base often consisting of hardware and software clients in schools which need to be transitioned to new solutions, staff retraining and process documentation.
These are massive and demanding projects and departments that don’t have the internal resources to pull it off, so they go to consultancies to do it for them. That’s expensive, like double expensive, and consultancies can run contractual rings around departments which ensure that they aren’t on-the-hook in any meaningful way. Then the consultancy comes in to do the job, but they don’t send their best and brightest talent because they can’t risk losing them. The demands are basically the same as any other client, but the work itself is just kind of boring and mired in frustrating bureaucracy. This is basically the same pattern in universities to an extent, except there is a bit more internal talent in my experience with bigger universities.
Talented people leave these gigs to work on exciting stuff instead. I’m not saying these things don’t get delivered in the end, but it’s a hard, usually multi-year slog with high turnover of talent, and everyone (both client and consultant) ends up with the tech equivalent of PTSD. That makes getting the next (and the next) tech project off the ground progressively harder. When the big department level projects land they are usually about three to four years old compared to user expectations, and leave everyone underwhelmed.
In the next post, Sam will answer the question of whether there is any hope for teachers.
TLDR: No.