Education Trends 2020: Part 4/4

This is the final piece on the trends I am seeing with new pitches and my own portfolio of edtech and future of work startups. Here are parts 1, 2, and 3. My hope with all of these posts is to provide food for thought for founders thinking about starting something in this space and to provide a few trends that funders can use to judge how much wind a potential startup investment has at its back. On with the trends:

1. Kids spend more time on roblox than everything else combined and many teenagers spend every spare moment playing video games or watching streams of video games.

While this is obvious to all parents, it’s always striking to me how little advantage we have taken of this in the k12 education system. More or less anything you do which ties to a platform like roblox or Fortnite is going to have a much higher chance of success than starting your own thing and competing for attention.

2. Twitch has 18 million hours of streamed games (and a few other things) in the last week.

It has created a new behavior with teens and tweens to go watch and participate with others. Companies like Study Stream have done the same for studying! Yes, this is all mind blowing to me as a non-teen, but when you have this type of live stream consumption happening in one place, it’s a lot easier to get it to happen somewhere else.

3. Tik tok is crushing it, likely will cement its place as the top app for teens in the next twelve months.

Don’t fight it! If short form user-generated videos are a behavior, what can you build like it? Your whole app doesn’t have to be like tok tok, but what can you do that creates this same kind of addictive feed for your users. Primer has a very cool tool for their community which shows all of the projects students have done, that feels very much like Tik Tok.

4. In the wake of covid, it may be possible to start for-profit public schools.

This is a very hard statement for me to write, because my second company, Rocketship Education, was so much work politically even as a non-profit. And the first generation of for-profit public schools got slaughtered or at least maimed. But it is possible that parent awareness and urgency has grown to the point that they can be effective advocates for more options for their children. Prenda is doing this very well in Arizona. Offering a free-to-consumer school is an amazing thing, and the more people trying different approaches, the better. Unions and districts are very potent advocates for limiting free schools to ones that the government runs, but if enough parents get active on the issue of what’s best for their children, this could change.

5. Outschool has worked very well in the US but no significant competitors have been developed in China, SE Asia, India, LatAm, Europe, MENA, or Africa.

It may be that Outschool becomes the Outschool of China, but that would be an unusual outcome both for the Internet in general (look at all of the uber competitors) and especially in a very culture-sensitive area like education.