Is it worth creating your own education technology software?
Is there a market and, if there is, can they afford to pay you?
“Don’t go into education technology, no one makes any money,” was the advice I once got from an early founder of an edtech startup that failed.
It used to be an all too common sentiment that once deterred many prospective investors from backing some of the most promising edtech ventures conceived.
Previously considered risky investments, it’s true that many edtech startups — commonly founded by “teacherpreneurs” hell-bent on mending the broken social and cultural framework of education through tech innovation — either tank or fail to achieve true scale.Why is this the case, when basic reasoning leads us to believe there is no other professional better placed to address the issues facing education than an actual teacher?
The broken ecosystem of selling to schools educational software rather than the actual technology is what often consigns many edtech ventures to the dustbin.
Of the few teacher-entrepreneurs who do succeed in the startup world to become true scale-up businesses, these mold-breakers are developing solutions to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in education — challenges that are leading many of the industry’s talent to leave the profession completely and a disproportionate number of children to underachieve.
In a digitized world where tech innovation has revolutionized nearly every corner of our life, the negligible impact it has made in our classrooms is woeful.
Source: The broken edtech ecosystem investors once avoided is changing | TechCrunch
