All EdTech market segments are challenging to cost-effectively find and create paying customers. I’m generally not a fan of EdTech vendors creating curricula because it is expensive and most companies don’t have enough capital to build a comprehensive content library. One alternative is to strike a deal with a content provider like a textbook publisher looking to gain traction in the digital world.
The vast majority of EdTech vendors are not considering human interventions. They are trying to create a product that provides all the support a student might need. Generative AI products opens the door to automated assistants, but vendors should consider the role of people — particularly online tutors — in supporting students.
Below is a diagram of how integrating people with EdTech tools could work. Students interact with an EdTech product that collects learning data so that relevant hints can be provided. If the hints aren’t sufficient to help the student, a request is made for assistance. The request could be routed to the student’s teacher or a school/district resource teacher. The request could also be routed to an online tutor with expertise in the curriculum and relevant problem sets. This experience would include understanding common misconceptions. A key to this system is that the human tutor gets a highly contextualized request. The tutor sees the student work and the hints used. This minimizes the time required to understand the problem and provide a response. This would expedite the interaction and enable the human assistant to handle many student requests simultaneously. The result would be a more scalable one-to-one tutoring model.
