“If you build it, they will not come.”
Edward Hertzman, Entrepreneur magazine (2015)
A platform does not guarantee an audience. Design is the first obstacle to sustaining engagement, but it is not the last. Absence of a meaningful, habit-forming cycle of engagement is next.
In education, the traffic itself is not an end-goal. Plenty of effective business have been made by designing education platforms that draw students and teachers back in, and much has been written about the increasing sense that education technology is turning teachers and students into button pushers.
Instead, a meaningful professional development experience is the goal. Providing a well-designed platform, stocked full of effective teaching practices, and developing a strategy to bring it to market will likely lead to a high-traffic resource, and it will likely make an impact. But in order to solve the larger, systemic problem of a professional memory for the field of education — a knowledge base that must be constantly evolving — a platform must have a program at its heart as well. What this program looks like and how it makes effective growth practices attractive is the key challenge.
HABITUATION
“But the commons isn’t a thing, it’s a process that involves everyone in the community working to share and distribute it fairly. People continually and diligently build and sustain a commons by negotiating how best to distribute the commons, creating the rules they need to manage the commons together, and building the infrastructure needed to keep the commons thriving for generations to come.”
David Bollier (Next System Project, 2016)
User generated content platforms do not fill without a strategy. If the industry rule of thumb is that 90-95% of visitors on a user generated content platform will only consume content, and 5-10% of visitors will contribute content, then a teacher platform faces an uphill battle in accumulating a critical mass of both people and content.
Engagement and/or incentive structures are necessary to facilitate content entry. Athena was intentionally designed with small hurdles to content entry, and the result is that manually copying and pasting assignments and lesson plans takes time. As a result, these processes are built into the cycles of engagement described below, thus embedding the content sharing experience into high-return-value professional development experiences.
Habituation Solution 1: Provide sound professional development
“I haven’t had a more authentic and rewarding professional development experience as a teacher.”
Eric LaForest, History Teacher, about the Athena Summer Fellowship
We know students learn best when they are active participants in their learning and when their learning is connected to the world, either through real-world applications or through social, collaborative engagement in school. Teacher learning ought to be the same: collaborative, tied directly to practice, actively engaging. A comprehensive professional memory for educators must be tied to this kind of teacher learning; it must be part of professional development experiences that actively engage teachers, focus directly on their practice, and bring them together with colleagues.
Helpfully, what makes for valuable professional development is not a mystery. The principles of how students learn best apply to teachers, too. These practices above are some of the cornerstones of what decades of research have revealed about effective professional development (Darling-Hammond et al, 2009)
On principle, a program for professional development should follow proven practices. Starting from a place of providing quality experiences ensures that a platform approach thinks first and foremost about improving the lives and practices of educators. In the habit formation cycle, sound professional development is the routine and the reward.
Habituation Solution 2: Let the medium be the message
“The assumption that teachers can create and maintain those conditions which make school learning and school living stimulating for children, without those same conditions existing for teachers, has no warrant in the history of man.”
Seymour Sarason (1972) The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies
Use of the platform ought to be a learning experience in itself. If simply browsing a dynamic library of practices provides opportunities to see different ways of teaching, then it is a light — if sometimes seismic — first layer of professional development. If engaging in feedback cycles with other teachers and their work brings educators into more frequent contact with questions about what makes good teaching, then professional development grows richer — and incrementally. If typing activities and prompts into a public space pushes teachers to reflect on and improve the work they produce, then their experience is increasingly robust. And if participating in formal lesson study has been shown to improve practice, and if this can be hosted on a collaborative, dynamic platform, then teacher experiences will align with research-backed practices.
In fact, these are the experiences teachers have reported with our MVP. In our summer fellowships, in graduate classes, in school year browsing and interaction, teachers have reported a variety of kinds of growth through even the foundational forms of interaction we have provided so far.
Habituation Solution 3: Build a variety of programs for engagement
“Educators at all levels need just-in-time, job-embedded assistance as they struggle to adapt new curricula and new instructional practices to their unique classroom contexts.”
Thomas Guskey and Kwang Suk Yoon (2009) “What works in Professional Development”
Teachers seek differentiated professional development. The needs of a first year teacher are different from the needs of a twenty year veteran. Some teachers seek support on lesson design. Others seek to revise their assessments. Yet others are interested in leading effective discussions. Successful professional development for a full community of teachers requires a range of offerings.
Our research into teacher needs has surfaced five core profiles in regards to summer professional development and sharing. In surveys at the end of our fellowships, we’ve seen teachers identify several key motivations for sharing, browsing, and connecting with materials and people:
- First is the teacher who is writing new curriculum for their schools, such as those reinvigorating a world history curriculum or shifting a math class to a problem-based approach. These teachers seek both structure and feedback: structure for developing a schedule of work over the summer and feedback from other teachers on how they can improve the materials they are collecting and designing.
- Next is the teacher who seeks to refresh their teaching. These are mid or late career teachers who seek new approaches or materials to bring fresh life to their work. They have often been isolated and are looking for new or up to date resources.
- Third is the new teacher who seeks contact with curriculum that they will be using in their first years of teaching. Their goal is to discover and engage, to deeply understand what they’ll be doing since it is early still in their careers, and curriculum is new.. They seek a collaborative space in which to do this. This group also overlaps with teachers who have been assigned a new curriculum and are looking for ways to familiarize themselves with it.
- Fourth is the teacher who wants to share their innovative work. Over the years, teachers create particular activities and lessons that have propelled student learning, that are particularly innovative, or that they’re particularly proud of. Teachers often want to share these approaches, and a summer fellowship becomes a sound platform for doing this.
- Last, but among the largest critical masses, is the teacher who seeks communities of interest. These might teachers passionate about social justice, or about problem-based learning, or 17th century Renaissance poetry. Teachers seek others with similar interests, and this typically means making connections outside of individual schools.
Summer professional development experiences built around areas of interest like these are fertile grounds for growth. With these profiles in mind, we shaped summer opportunities to enable teachers and schools to set more focused goals that align with professional interests. Notably, in Guskey and Yoon’s literature review of teacher professional development that had a measurable impact on student achievement, summer work was critical: “all of the studies that showed a positive relationship between professional development and improvement in student learning involved workshops or summer institutes. These workshops focused on the implementation of research-based instructional practices, involved active-learning experiences for participants, and provided teachers with opportunities to adapt the practices to their unique classroom situations” (Guskey & Yoon, 2009). This identifies three components at the heart of our design: research-based instructional practices, active learning for teachers during pd, and customization of materials for individual classrooms.
Similarly, during the school year, interests vary. Teachers who participated in summer fellowships have returned during the school year to revisit materials gathered or reviewed during the summer. Teachers in professional learning groups during the school year have congregated to revise or review materials they plan to use. And other teachers during the school year have sought out communities of interest during the school year to broaden their knowledge on how to teach certain content and skills. These various stakeholders and partner organizations are driving a variety of programmatic offerings during the school year.
In summer and school year settings, small group, online learning can be self directed, scalable, and effective. Increasingly, organizations are arriving at models of self-directed in-person and online engagement that yield both persistence and results (Verstegen et al, 2018). P2PU has developed in-person programs that show a dramatic increase in persistence in online courses, across socio-economic demographics. And other research sought insight on what leads to effective online collaboration. These models, built around professional development structures, have shaped summer and school-year engagement cycles we’ve prototyped. (NOTE: Interestingly, while academically-focused organizations like MOOC providers and nonprofit organizations like P2PU are beginning to codify principles of effective online collaboration, we’ve seen, as is often the case, successful remote collaboration for years in the gaming industry. The principles identified by Verstegen et al could just as easily describe successful Guilds or Dungeon Finder teams in multi-user online gaming environments like World of Warcraft. Research in education is finding that successful online collaboration includes: “1) consistent communication through multiple channels, 2) adjusted workload based on member needs, 3) ongoing explicit discussion of the workflow and/or a strong leader organizing group process and task division, 4) acceptance of different abilities and skillsets of members, and 5) stimulation and assistance of team members when needed.” Each of these conclusions has an analog in the gaming world.)
A variety or programs offering a variety of areas of professional interest can yield flexible, effective professional development. The recent rise of edcamp conferences (conferences without a predetermined agenda, but in which groups of educators convene, suggest, and converge around topics of interest) demonstrate the growing desire teachers have for self-directed professional development. This kind of collaboration can and ought to happen at scale in the online space, and its effectiveness can expand greatly when it happens in a range of formats selected by communities of interest focused on concrete practices in the classroom.
BUSINESS MODELS
“You’re fucked.”
Steve Blank (2012)
In the early 2010s, capital flowed heavily into education technology. From 2010 to 2015, according to a research report by EdSurge, venture capital jumped from under $200M to over $1.4B. But successful, scalable revenue models remained elusive — or at least flew under the radar while MOOCs and other learning platforms without clear business models dominated the headlines. Meanwhile, philanthropy similarly bloomed — also to organizations without clear business models, many remaining dependent on philanthropic support today, including such significant players as Khan Academy.
Today, business models remain diversified as the market continues to find itself. By 2016, according EdSurge’s investor panel, the predominant business model was sales directly to institutions (~45%). Institutional Freemium models followed shortly after (~25%), and sales to individual consumers trailed (~20%), with freemium consumer models next (~7%) and others following (EdSurge, 2016).
Much of the challenge in education is that the adoption cycle in education is slow. Unlike typical consumer products, which can grow at any time of year, institutionally purchased education products generally have one window per year for adoption: teachers simply can’t change teaching tools mid-year very easily, particularly platforms used with students.
Initial steps into the market have been deliberately slow as we both validate the user experience and explore where value is best added on top of open content. Example after example of prematurely scaled edtech startups have demonstrated the risk of rushing to market without a clear path to sustainability and without a clear validation of product-market fit (Marmer, 2011b).
There isn’t a solution here, but thoughts are below:
Business Solution: Institutional and Individual Freemium
Balancing open content with the need for a sustainable revenue stream, might best work through experimenting with a multi-layered freemium model. Layered on top of the core of open, easily navigable and usable resources are premium features directed both at individuals and institutions. These include group networking functions, closed topic construction, and content analytics. This initial set of services is software driven and scalable in theory. In addition, recent work includes developing and testing a variety of professional development cycles that are facilitated both by people and by software. Some of these are more scalable than others, but all aim to satisfy daily needs of teachers and annual needs of both teachers and institutions.
Ultimately, a solution will likely include sustainable revenue streams from a variety of sources. We have begun testing models that operate both business-to-consumer and business-to-business, with business-to-business revenue streams entering from multiple points in the platform engagement stream.
The (Unrealized) Promise of the Internet
Fulfilling the Need: Program Design
Appendix A — Mission: Improvement
Athena: A Prospectus 
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