The Third Wave of Education
It is a gross over-simplification to compress the history of education into three waves, but I’m going to do it anyway.
In the first wave, education was cloistered and hard to access, because it required you to be born in the right physical place to the right family. The first wave continued with cosmetic enhancements like free public schools, but in fact your zip code continued to matter more than anything.
In the second wave, technology started to make itself a part of education. A lot of people produced tools to try to make cloistered education better, but they largely failed because that was not the priority for physical schools. Schools have a lot of problems related to all of the teachers, kids, and physical space that will always take priority. At the same time, we saw the first wave of consumer education companies. Probably the most important was Khan Academy, because it was free and provided access to solid teaching for anyone with an internet connection. Lots of other companies tried to build good consumer education products — Udacity, Udemy, Coursera, Byju’s, Western Governor’s, Southern New Hampshire. They all deserve credit for developing interesting models with more scalability than before, but all of these services were self-study, something a strongly motivated student could use to learn, much like a textbook. Unfortunately, that left 90% of students behind. I believe this second wave will ultimately be forgotten as a transition period to the third wave.
In the third wave, online schools will be deeply immersive places where students and teachers actually interact more and build deeper bonds with each other than in physical space. The first of these was Lambda School, in the coding space. Lambda students work in small groups with a TA on coding projects for almost a year. The number of peer and TA interactions they have during that time dwarfs any traditional university Computer Science major. These immersive online schools will ultimately replace cloistered physical schools as the main way that students learn.
Over the past year, I have seen immersive online school ideas in almost every sector of education — k12, university, and most every stripe of vocational school. Since this is such a new era, I thought I would write down some of the things for founders to think about if they are trying to build this type of deep experience:
1.Replace, don’t supplement. You want to go after the core activity of the student. Usually if this is important to them, they were doing something before, and you want to replace that, because they already spend there and its an established behavior.
2. Build schools, not textbooks. Textbooks are things you can study yourself when you have the time. They augment something else you are doing. Schools on the other hand are core, this is something students do often, they are accountable and they pay for.
3. Focus on culture, and add curriculum later. Schools are about human relationships, social emotional skills, motivation, and a lot of squishy stuff. This is what matters to people and this is where your student engagement, loyalty, referrals, and evangelism will come from. At my second company, Rocketship Education, we had the best academic results for low income students in California. We believed that culture was responsible for 80% of our success and we designed it intentionally to help our students believe and have the support to outperform students in wealthy districts.
4. Your school must be better than the equivalent physical school experience, ideally 10x better. For example, when I was getting my CS degree, my interactions with my peers, TAs, and professors was ad hoc. I would sometimes do problem sets with my friends or get help from an instructor but most of my learning time was independent. To be sure, independent learning is a very important way to learn hard things because you need to push yourself to the edge of frustration. People learn by doing.
But a ton of research has been done that deliberate practice with an expert coach who can help you through hurdles is much more effective than pure self-learning. In the cloistered school model, this was impossible because having an instructor at your beck and call was physically impossible. But at Lambda, your TA is always there and you are working both independently and with a small cohort at all times. It is frankly far superior to the way I had to learn.
5.Your school should be much less expensive than the equivalent physical experience. But why? If it’s much better, shouldn’t it be at least the same price? No, we are trying to create a major behavior change (convincing people that online is better than offline) and price is an incredibly important part of that. For example, the number of people who will switch from their private high school to your online high school at the same price is small. But if you charge much less, you will get early adopters, maybe people who believe in your vision or others who couldn’t afford a private school. If those early adopters come away with an amazing experience, they will tell their friends and now you are off to the races. For example, Prenda, the leader in k12 micro-schools, can offer a great education at 10% of the cost of elite private schools, that’s a big lever for change.
6. Figure our how every student can take their own path to get to the goal. One of the biggest advantages of online over physical schools is that you can handle thousands of variations in how students learn, when they need to relearn, when they need more practice. Truly, no two students know the same things or learn exactly the same way. In the cloistered model, it was impossible for every student to take a different path with the same of depth of support as every other. Programs like Montessori which built learning directly into the projects went a long way in the right direction, but because you can build up a detailed profile on every student, you can do even better online. The thing about this is that you need to think about this up front because retrofitting personalized learning later on is really difficult.
If you are a founder and education has always been in the back of your mind, the time is right to start something. Education has twenty five years of catching up to do, the tools to allow it to replace physical schools are in place to now, and the incumbents have virtually no chance to make the transition. Truly, I think you can innovate in any of early childhood, k12 or higher ed/vocational and there are big open markets.
