PierreAntoine Ullmo

Tag: teacher

  • Monopsony in Blue: Is there a market for Edtech?

    Is there a market for Edtech?

    Education is one of the favoured market for a new generation of entrepreneurs. Edtech’s ambition is to rhyme with Fintech, Healthtech, Cleantech… and Edtech funds ambition to transform into billions the Edtech magic.

    Counting by the number of startups or application apps, this new eldorado is already there.

    But a paradox remains: “why is it so hard for Edtech startups to sell to schools?”. In a recent article, there was an attempt to give some explanations:

    • It is not easy to reach the people who make the decisions.
    • There is fear of change and new things.
    • There are many stakeholders.
    • The market is overcrowded.
    • Products lack validation.

    In fact, they are all part of the same story: all innovations target the same decision makers. When it comes to innovation in the classroom, nothing can be done without the teacher’s asentment (even if the intention would be to substitute him or her!) and the head master’s agreement.

    The Edtech market has therefore a unique characteristic: it is a one-buyer market or better said, a monopsony. Only one buyer (the school) interacts with many potential sellers (the Edtech entrepreneurs) and has therefore almost absolute market power.

    In this monopsony, there is no other alternative than to convince, seduce, attract the teacher. New strategies could be designed and joining forces may be desirable: why should entrepreneurs struggle desperately and separately to capture teachers’ attention. Joint offers could be made. New forms of distribution could be envisaged.

    Monopsony in Blue
    Monopsony in Blue

     

    But to start with, there is a core issue to take into consideration: teacher’s risk preference. In other words, are teachers ready to take risks to change their practices and innovate in the classroom?

    Intuition often says no and research evidences seem to confirm it.  Bowen analyses Teacher Risk Preferences  and by comparing preferences of new teachers with those entering other professions, he finds that individuals choosing to teach are significantly more risk averse.

    He also suggests that new policies introducing for instance performance incentives for teachers (performance pay programs) could attract less risk-averse individuals into the teaching profession. In the meanwhile the Edtech entrepreneurs should invest time and money to train a new generation of teachers into innovation.

  • Technology in the classroom: lessons learnt from a mountain bike ride

    laptop
    Technology in the classroom.

    What is the relationship between a marathon mountain bike ride and a classroom experience?

    Last weekend, I spent the whole day mountain biking in the country side near Barcelona. For 120 km, our group of 14 bikers rode through small trails, many of them hard to find, and we came back at night using headlamps to find our way through the woods. Another rider and I had brought a GPS. We started following our tracks, sharing indications that appeared on our screens, looking for consensus each time we had doubts or different interpretations. Following GPS indications is not as simple as it may seem, especially in a group. It requires technology understanding, interpretation skills and consensus. Working with technology in the classroom requires the same ingredients, and consensus is hard to reach. Students using tablets in the classroom may be tempted to “follow their own track”, i.e. make individual use of technology. The teacher in the classroom is, like any GPS holder, challenged by another GPS holder to find the right trail.

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  • Open education: “c’est du bricolage”

      Teachers’ workshop, Hanoch Piven

    Last week, I was invited to a vision workshop where experts gathered from all over Europe, organised by the European Commission’s prospective think tank – Institute for Prospective Technological Studies. It addressed the issue of school education and Open Education Resources (OER) at the horizon of 2030.

    One of the participants – Alex Beard – argued in his intervention that “teachers will be bricoleurs” and that by 2030 “adaptations, mash-ups and bricolages will be the norm”. It helped me to understand OER in a different way than its usual technology-oriented definition. I was challenged by Alex’s description of the teachers-bricoleurs “continuously using, adding to or adapting new resources for new learning needs, inviting peer-review and providing evidence of learning results”.

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