WK 5

The Conference

Featuring educators from school districts, tech companies like Google, academics from Harvard, and high school students who are focusing on AI, the conference provided a very diverse mix of interesting perspectives.

What was most interesting (and caused me a bit of depression!) was to hear so many people talking about how they "no longer needed" to learn things anymore since there would be an AI solution that would just "do" it for them soon.

Is that what I would be competing against as a learning designer, I wondered. Would I end up spending all my energy designing a solution that is optimized to help users learn only for them to balk at it if there are alternatives that make ZERO demands on their cognitive resources to use?

Jonathan Harber

Background: EdTech entrepreneur

Jonathan was a former professor of mine in the EdTech Entrepreneurship course as well as the founder and chairman of the accelerator StartEd. He also founded one of the first EdTech companies in the 90s that provided educational management tools and services. After running into him at the event, I got him to share some of his thoughts:

Don't be afraid to raise the bar.

• The pandemic certainly caused a lot of learning milestones to be missed, which made Jonathan wonder aloud: "Do we necessarily still have to follow a standardized system?"
• He encouraged me to "raise the bar" and think about innovative solutions outside of what we conventionally think.
• Is a certain subject content necessarily a "5th-grade" level? What if you could learn it in 2nd-grade? Why do we still have those barriers in place? What kinds of EdTech solutions could potentially work around this?

I didn't have time to ask other questions, unfortunately, but the sense I got from him was that he was rather unimpressed with some of the startups he was seeing in the EdTech space currently.

Next Steps

As my exploration of the Opportunity space came to an end, I looked back through my talks with industry professionals and professors to see what kinds of insights I could draw from it all.

The interviews with my professors were profoundly helpful, particularly in helping me see and understand what issues mattered to them. This was helpful because it allowed me to see from a more high-level perspective than what I would have been able to see on my own. And industry professionals were very helpful in letting me see what some of the most pressing pain points were right now.

So what did this mean for my own project, then? After reflecting on what I had learned and gathered, I decided on the following next steps:

Learn more about GenAI

• Before one can build a solution using it, one should first attempt to understand it at a deeper-than-superficial level. Doing so would help later with the creative process of knowing how to manipulate and leverage it in unique ways.

Focus on Innovating on Old Problems

• The issues plaguing education today are not new. They are very real pain points that are still demanding attention. Instead of trying to innovate on future pain points (or "tension points" that don't exist yet), listen to the very real pain points that exist today and use what you learn about GenAI and your own background to innovate on those issues.

Talk to more People

• The benefit of desk research is that there is information on literally anything you could think of. The drawback of desk research? There is information on literally anything you can think of. What makes a resource great for exploration can ironically make it difficult for filtering down to a single thing. Talking to people, however, is what seems to help me filter. Unlike desk research, people can use context (my background, their experiences dealing with me and knowing my interests, etc) to provide specific (and targeted) advice.

‍

- Iron