The education software industry today can roughly be divided into two camps:
- Software that enables the delivery of educational material over the internet (e.g. Coursera, Skillshare).
- Software that enables the operation of schools and universities (e.g. Tophat).
Put even more critically, both camps fall into the category of software that recreates in-person educational experiences. Software is a perfect innovation space for rapid experimentation, and it has been underleveraged for education.
I’m interested in what happens when we approach this problem from first principles - breaking things down to their essential truths and building upwards. In this case, the essential truths are students desire to learn and achieve a specific outcome.
Everything else can and probably should change.
I think we still have a ways to go to create software native educational experiences - ones have no physical equivalents at all and simply cannot exist without software itself.