Teachers recognize four persistent challenges that prevent platforms from solving at scale the problem of the absence of a professional memory for the field of education:
- Platforms are hard to use (Design)
- The content is unreliable (Quality)
- Resources cost money to teachers (Business Model)
- Teachers don’t have time (Habituation)
Poor design and inconsistent quality keep teachers from returning to any site. And paywalls and other closed business models keep intellectual property from circulating, aggregating and evolving, thus precluding a shared professional knowledge. Further, teachers’ busy days prevent habits of connectivity. Here we explore the these four persistent challenges:
DESIGN
“Pretty much all edtech sucks. And machine learning is not going to improve edtech… The reason why this technology sucks is because we don’t do good design. We need good design people to understand how this works.”
Al Essa, VP of Learning Analytics and R&D, McGraw-Hill Education (Johnson, 2018)
Key Principle
Discoverability: teachers should be able to find what they need in three clicks or fewer.
Key Challenges
Design is the most overlooked barrier to the success of teacher sharing platforms. Platforms for sharing are often filled with hundreds of thousands of haphazardly organized documents, usually simply collected in a traditionally structured database that relies on filters to narrow results. And, these documents frequently end up being a collection of inconsistent file types. The result is a messy search experience. This disorder in format and in organization inhibits discoverability in almost every large scale platform. It is a significant, industry-wide design failure, like mp3 players before the iPod, or social networks before Facebook.
Three known reasons lead to this disorder, and they are the least satisfactorily addressed of all of the persistent challenges in teacher resource platforms. They are:
- Curriculum doesn’t compile. Education researcher Justin Reich articulated a key complication in 2012: while code compiles in platforms like GitHub, and while knowledge aggregates and compiles in Wikipedia, curriculum only fragments as teachers adjust and adapt it to the unique circumstances of their classrooms (bjfr, 2012). It never merges back to a singular authoritative version. This is appropriate, especially as teachers increasingly personalize the learning experience for students. However, this divergence creates an exponential problem as thousands or millions of teachers add, copy, revise, and share more and more content. How does one navigate this growing sea of resources?
- The search paradigm is now near-inescapable. The near universal approach to this problem is the search paradigm: a search bar, a list of results, a column of filters. The problem is that the search bar and list of results doesn’t work in the context of education. Search results are thin or disorganized, filtering processes are crude and cumbersome, and finding something both useful and inspiring when there is no singular or authoritative best result is a function of luck or extraordinary diligence. This is only slightly an exaggeration. Either every organization believes that teachers will find the right materials in the top five results, or they haven’t interrogated whether the search paradigm is the right approach to organizing or retrieving information. So how else can one organize information for effective discoverability? The next section of this prospectus — “Fulfilling the Need: Platform” — explores information architecture paradigms that better suit teachers’ needs.
- Document intermediation crushes ease of use. Lastly, the very texture of most teacher platforms is determined by documents. Teachers generally create materials and lesson plans on their laptops, and save their work in files, sometimes in collaborative files on Google Docs, for example. So, when resource sharing platforms invite teachers to share their work, they upload the documents they have created. The result is digital file cabinet. While the past decade has seen platforms develop ways for teachers to rename these documents so resource titles aren’t wildly inconsistent and opaque, the experience of searching, filtering through results, finding a document, downloading it, opening it, scanning it, and returning to a web browser is extraordinarily cumbersome. Even when platforms enable previews, the experience is clumsy. When content requires document intermediation, the experience simply isn’t sustainable.
QUALITY
“We don’t care about OER for the sake of OER. We care about quality. If that comes from OER, great. If not, we’ll use something else. It’s about the quality.”
Rebecca Kockler (Belardi, 2018)
Key Principle
Quality equals relevance; relevance equals quality.
Key Challenges
When I lived in New York City, as a practicing musician, I would tell visitors that anyone can find inexpensive food in New York, and anyone can find excellent food in New York, but it takes a New Yorker to know where to find inexpensive, excellent food. It is similar for teachers. Any teacher can find free materials online, and many teachers can find high quality materials online, but it is extraordinarily difficult to find free, high quality materials. What impedes success are two factors:
- Different stakeholders define quality differently. Between state leaders and teachers often lies a gulf when it comes to defining quality. For some school, district, and state leaders, quality is only and ever only will be defined as a standards-aligned, integrated, differentiated curriculum. For some teachers, quality means being engaging; it must be relevant to the lives of students. This makes sense: leaders often (and ought to) focus primarily on system inputs and outputs, while teachers often (and ought to) focus primarily on whether the students before them are being moved by classroom experiences. Some discussions I have been a part of even point to these different stakeholders claiming the priority of their definition of quality at the expense of the other. Which curricular object is more relevant: the aligned one or the engaging one? Different definitions of quality lead to demand for different kinds of materials.
- Inverse utility: individual lessons don’t scale easily (see Wiley’s Reusability Paradox). A corollary of the recognition that curriculum doesn’t compile is the recognition that what is more and more relevant to one specific classroom is less and less relevant to another. As teaching is increasingly personalized and effective, drawing on local knowledge and local student experiences, it becomes less transferable or effective in other contexts. OER figurehead David Wiley describes this paradox of utility in regards to automated applications, but it applies just as well to teaching (Wiley, 2018b). How can a system provide high quality materials (read: highly relevant materials) to teachers when relevance shifts by context?
An educational model that appropriately values teachers as decision-makers and professionals would confer on them the capacity to assess the quality of what they teach. The key questions teachers ask in this effort are: does this material meet my personal, school, or state standards; and is it relevant to my students? How can a platform provide the most relevant curriculum to teachers when what is considered relevant and high quality differs by context?
HABITUATION
“The enemy of forming new habits is past behaviors, and… old habits die hard.”
Nir Eyal, Hooked (2014)
Key Principle
- Any new platform must make teachers’ work faster, easier, better, or all of the above.
- Social connection improves consistency and self-accountability.
Key Challenges
People in any profession have the capacity for only a limited number of habits and tools in their days. Any tool or system that aims to take up a person’s time must necessarily replace time doing something else. Teachers, like most people, will say that they simply don’t have time in their days for an additional tool or process. Doing so runs up against several challenges:
- Teachers have little to no time for an extra tool or process. According to the National Council for Education Statistics, the average school day runs close to seven hours per day (NCES, 2008). Of this time, in many teaching contexts, 95% of the day is spent on instruction, with the remainder on non-instructional time (NCES, 2011-12). Outside of the regular school day, teachers report spending on average between 7-8 hours of time on school-related work, not including time spent with students outside of the regular school day (NCES, 1994). These non-instructional responsibilities, including providing essential feedback on student work, clearly extends far beyond the school day. Further, time built into the week for professional development is most often below the amount of time needed to make a difference in teaching quality (Kaplan et al, 2015). How can a new tool for teachers fit within the confines of an already overcrowded, underpaid, and under-supported day?
- Teachers are isolated. Measurable improvement requires discipline (accountability to a process) and collaboration (external perspective). Teachers spend the great majority of their hours at school working with students, and a minority of hours working with colleagues—see the data in the previous paragraph about instructional time versus non-instructional time. Coupled with a historical (if changing) culture of territoriality, this professional isolation stifles opportunities for collaboration, which is an essential part of improvement and professional growth. How can a platform and program operate in this context?
When time is at a premium, building new tools or systems into teachers’ lives is increasingly difficult. The costs of adoption can be high in regards to time and cognitive adjustment, and in a setting in which participants are isolated from each other, the social incentive to consistently engage can be low. How can a platform and program address these barriers?
BUSINESS MODELS
“The fact remains, the industry is still searching for sustainable business models.”
(Edsurge, 2016)
Key Principles
- A professional memory for education must be free and open to teachers.
- A dynamic, complex platform requires a scalable revenue model.
Key Challenges
Without a platform that adheres to open principles, the field of education can never amass a usable knowledge base. As Wiley’s Reusability Paradox explains, spreading research and general education principles isn’t enough: high-level, generally applicable principles derived from growth mindset research, cognitive science, and pedagogy provide guidance but not direction for how to teach. Concrete strategies for implementing research in the context of specific lessons on math, language, science, history and more are the tools teachers need to drive ongoing improvement. Given the need for a comprehensive and universally accessible knowledge base, and given the decentralized nature of decision-making in education, a pay-to-play solution is essentially an impossibility. Business models, therefore, must have layers of participation, with a foundational layer of free access for teachers to open content. Sustainable revenue models, therefore, must exist as an additional layer on top of open content.
Further, a complex platform requires not just a sustainable revenue model, but a scalable revenue model. While inexpensive repositories are simple to build and easy to overwhelm, platforms that connect millions of users fluidly and manage content efficiently in a customized environment require greater resources, particularly as they expand. To support and sustain this complexity, a successful platform must drive a scalable revenue model, where the marginal cost of additional revenue sources decreases as the platform grows. These kinds of revenue models flourish in the broader landscape; we see them in the general platforms that inhabit our daily lives, most often in the form of social networks. What might they look like in education? There are some challenges:
- Scalable revenue when providing open content has proven elusive. Textbook companies and marketplaces like Teachers Pay Teachers have shown that scalable revenue is possible in education. These kinds of organizations use a traditional model: charging customers for teaching content. A central principle of the open movement, however, is that teaching content should be free. When it is free, however, what revenue fuels the organization? What is it that schools and teachers have further universal demand for? The increasingly common answer to this question is: professional development. Curriculum and pedagogy training has become the go-to service for organizations that provide open content. This couples a digital product with an interpersonal program, shifting from a business model built on a product to a business model built on a service. The particular challenge here is that professional development is a personnel-intensive service, which means that while it can generate linear returns, it almost certainly cannot generate exponential returns. What revenue model, therefore, will generate the exponential returns necessary to support a scalable platform and program in an area that traditionally requires personnel intensive work?
- Just launching scalable platforms requires significant capital. A decade ago, the shorthand comment from experienced entrepreneurs and funding organizations was that building a platform is a $3M investment. Foundations reasonably recognize the risk of investments of this size, especially when it can create legacy investments that, without a clear path to independence, sap foundation resources over time. This requires platforms to innovate both in growth strategy — to enable incremental (read: lower-risk) philanthropic support early on — and in revenue streams — in order to ensure a transition to a self-sustaining model sooner rather than later. If a platform is a resource-intensive investment, what can be done to reduce risk and build funder confidence that the platform is both driving outcomes and leading towards self-sustainability? See “Fulfilling the Need” for possible solutions.
The (Unrealized) Promise of the Internet
Fulfilling the Need: Program Design
Appendix A — Mission: Improvement
Athena: A Prospectus 
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