The decisionmakers who pay the money (school beauracracy) and the actual customers who use the software (students and teachers) are different people for the LARGEST MARKETS, and therefore you get the worst incentives.
But when a supermarket chain decides which software to use for point-of-sale machines, the chain's bottom line directly depends on how well that software fits the task. Even if the top brass never operates these machines, their bonuses directly depend on that software working well.
The disconnect between boards of education and teachers and students is much larger. There is no easy way to measure the efficiency, it's hard to ascribe the influence of the software choice to the educational outcomes, and the outcomes themselves are years apart from the point of choice. The best the system us capable of weeding of is outrageously bad software, such that induces mass protests from teachers, students, and parents, media coverage, etc. Choosing between barely satisfactory and outstandingly excellent, hardly.
Additionally, what makes it SO BAD for us (I work in higher ed) is the "bundling."
It would have been madness to be like, your chalkboards and gradebooks and chairs all must be approved by and come from ONE company, and so you have to do everything their way. But that's where we are now.
The decision makers are bureaucrats but "the people who pay" is the government, through grants and as underwriters of student loans, and parents through tuition.
And then, the product "sold" in return to students/parents is not mainly education ("learning things") but instead something like a "trademark of eligibility" for employment into jobs where competence doesn't measurably affect performance anyway.
This was written with regard to academic education, but it's interesting when viewed from developer education.
I think Pluralsight had pretty good quality content for devs. Yet "Vista Equity Partners has written off the entire equity value of its investment in tech learning platform Pluralsight, three years after taking it private" https://www.axios.com/2024/05/31/vista-equity-pluralsight
> You know what happens when someone pays you a nontrivial sum of money? They hold you accountable for results.
Did Pluralsight not deliver results? Or are there other forces at play, e.g. devEd is distinct from academicEd? (Genuine question, no subtext here.)
> To some extent, I think we can trace the softness back to the expectation that online learning should be free or ridiculously cheap.
This is true on an individual scale, and often (sadly) on the scale of individual teachers, but it’s wildly incorrect on a statewide scale. For example, California spends a lot of money, on a recurring basis, for educational material.
I would love to see this money spent intelligently. At this scale, CA could choose a license, commission educational material, and require or favor use of that license, and making a derivative work of someone else’s work would be okay. AGPL3 might be a good start.
After a couple years, this might result in a strong base of open-source material that could be iterated on.
> Generally, I love one-time payments for information products.
Math academy is definitely not what I'd call an information product.
Most of the difficulty in learning math is going through enough problem sets and getting feedback that you can use to iterate on your understanding. Mathacademy does this VERY well. I think one of the challenges of being an autodidect is in plotting the course of what you want to learn and then assembling the materials. Tnen you need a large amount of worked problems to test your understanding. I've taught myself a lot of subjects and there's a lot of time investment in just getting the lay of the land.
With mathacademy, I don't have to do any of that. I just sit down and do the problems. I don't think about the end goal. if I get it right, I do the next one. if I get it wrong, I read the feedback. figure out where I messed up and go to the next problem. Just the fact that those hours I would have spent figuing out what to learn before I could start actually drilling into the subject is worth the $50/month.
> And I don't think that comparing it to a personal tutor is fair.
agreed. they are not the same thing and they have different value propositions. a tutor's value will be listening to your understanding of the problem and explaining it to you in a way that might make more sense. It would be exorbitantly expensive to expect a tutor to generate problem set after problem set every day for you to go through and provide instant feedback while iterating on the problems presented to you based on how you're doing.
> Math Academy's pricing is obscene
Its higher than competing offerrings like Brilliant. but I've used Brilliant and I think mathacademy's approach is more effective.
Without office hours and lectures, I would be completely lost. Math texts are a great starting point, but if you are of average or even above-average intelligence, you still need a qualified guide to navigate the textbook.
There are even many good books free-as-in-beer online; the issue there is that in order to use them one has to already have learned how to learn from books.
They aren't a book; they're a tutor. Tutors cost recurring money. A brief google search shows that in my area, 1 hour of math tutoring goes for $50 / hour.
Can they achieve equal or better results than a tutor? That's a separate question, but that's the market they're in.
It sounds like you're comparing the pricing to that of a textbook or collection of video lectures, whereas a better comparison is 1-on-1 coaching from a personal trainer who is developing your mathematical talent.
Normally you'd have to pay a tutor $50/hour. Multiply by 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, you're at $13,000/year. Bringing that down to $499/year (26x cheaper) makes mathematical talent development accessible to many, many more people. Sure, that's not everyone, and there are still people who are priced out. But to me at least, providing a 26x cheaper option feels like a good starting point towards a goal of making mathematical talent development accessible to more and more people.
Of course, the following question still remains: "Why do you even need the learning experience to feel like working with a personal trainer? What is the benefit over a textbook, Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, etc.?"
The answer to that question: learning efficiency.
Let me tell you about my own experience. I self-studied a bunch of math subjects on MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) when I was in high school. OCW is a good resource and I came a long way with it, but for the amount of effort that I put into learning on OCW, I could have gone a lot further if my time were used more efficiently. Just to name a handful of inefficiencies in OCW:
- not super scaffolded → you periodically run into situations where you bang your head on a wall thinking "how the heck did they get from here to there?" and it takes a long time to figure out what kind of logical leap is happening (if you figure it out at all)
- doesn't track your knowledge / make sure you've mastered the prerequisites for anything new you're supposed to learn → you often feel a large gap between your level of knowledge and the new material, which leads to more banging your head on a wall trying to figure out what prerequisite knowledge you're missing and how to learn it
- no spaced review → you quickly get rusty on a lot of what you learn, which not only means you come out of the course having forgotten a lot of content, but even during the course, you're constantly forgetting prerequisites
- doesn't adapt to your level of performance → you waste a lot of your time doing the wrong amount of work. Sometimes you grasp a topic quickly and end up doing way more practice problems than you need; other times you struggle with a topic and don't do enough practice problems to reach mastery
- leaves the definition of "mastery" open to interpretation by the learner → as a learner, it's hard to know when you've mastered something well enough to continue moving forward. You often think you've learned something well enough, when you actually haven't -- but you won't know unless there's an expert who is evaluating your knowledge. On the flipside, you can also take things too far being a perfectionist, spinning your wheels on the same topic for a week over some minor point that doesn't make perfect intuitive sense to you, when it would be more productive to just keep moving forward and solidify your understanding by building on top of it.
I could keep going with this list (happy to do so if you're interested, just let me know), but by now you probably get the point: all of these things introduce unproductive friction into the learning process, leading you to make less educational progress per unit time/effort that you put towards learning.
That's one reason why I've been so motivated to help build Math Academy. We take away as much of this learning friction as possible and maximize your learning efficiency. We address all the above issues and more.
That's our main value proposition: sure, it's possible to learn math elsewhere, but it's way more efficient with us.
Efficiency is important not only because you make faster progress, but also because you're less likely to quit.
In practice, people get off the train and stop learning math once it begins to feel too inefficient. In anything you do, once the progress-to-work ratio gets too low, you're going to lose interest and focus on other endeavors where your progress-to-work ratio is higher.
Efficiency keeps that progress-to-work ratio as high as possible, keeping you on the math learning train as long as possible.
I am happy Math Academy customer. Agree with most what you wrote above.
Except for the pricing estimate for the private tutor and related 26x cheaper comparison.
People generally don't hire private tutors to have lessons every workday of the week. No I think it would make sense for do so even leaving out financial cost.
It is more like once a week session with take away homework (maybe twice a week for a quite intense level). This brings cost comparison down to the 5x time (10x for twice a week). Still quite impressive.
Oh cool, always happy to run into MA customers! I see your point -- however, in my comparison, what I'm trying to get at is this: imagine that when a student goes to school each weekday, instead of spending an hour in a traditional class that is not personalized to their needs, they spend an hour with a 1-on-1 tutor who engages the student in personalized training exercises. This is essentially what Math Academy is.
I realize that tutoring is typically done at a lower frequency, but I don't agree that the lower frequency is ideal. At least in my mind, when I imagine the Platonic ideal of an education, there is no real difference between "lesson" and "homework" -- minimum effective doses of instruction are interspersed with minimum effective doses of active problem-solving, where every single problem is carefully selected in response to the learner's performance on the previous problem(s).
If this characterization of the Platonic ideal accurate, then achieving it would require a tutor continually sitting next to the student, analyzing their performance on every single problem that they do, and deciding the exact moment to move the student on to a new topic or problem type. Of course, that is infeasible with human tutors, so we settle for one or two days per week where the tutor tries to get the student prepared enough to tackle the homework without being completely overwhelmed.
I would argue that, while 1-2 tutoring sessions per week can really make a difference in a student's education, a lot of learning efficiency is still left unrealized (compared to 5 tutoring sessions per week).
I am interested in math academy but want some kind of trial. Such a new way of learning demands a trial period so I can determine if it works for me and if I can stick with it.
Ive been using mathacademy for the last month and a half. so far I've been extremely satisfied. I've been progressing pretty rapidly and can feel my old university days coming back as I practice math. if anything, I'd say my base algebra skills have gotten stronger as it identified several weak areas that I never resolved when I was in a classroom.
Just try it. for what it offers, $50 is a steal. my only caveat would be to make sure you're dedicated enough to commit the time. I'm putting in around 1hr minimum a day at the moment with weekends plugging in an entire afternoon.
Agreed. 50 bucks is not expensive for what could be a valuable investment. It's on my TODO list. If it works well to teaching me mathematics, then I'll keep using it.
That said, I think it's also important to be able to learn from books, which is a useful skill in my opinion.
I can’t find information on what subjects they teach. I don’t really need to rehash basic calc and algebra but I’d be pretty interested to learn discrete math properly. I also never really grokked differential geometry, but I doubt they cover that.
We have a 30-day money back guarantee. I'll copy/paste from the bottom of mathacademy.com:
> 30-Day Money Back Guarantee. We're so confident that Math Academy will help you or your child master advanced math concepts faster than any other method on the planet that if you find it doesn't suit your needs within the first month, we will refund your payment. There are no long term contracts, no additional textbooks to buy, and you may cancel your membership at anytime in the future.
By the way, I know it sounds like a "new way of learning," but most of the learning-enhancing practice strategies that we use have been known for many decades – it's just that they're not widely known / circulated outside the niche fields of cognitive science & talent development.
You got it backwards. I'm exactly your customer type - I'm subscribing to Brilliant an several other services, both for myself and members of my family. However, I will not give my CC number to a random company without at least having some 5-minute taste of what it's like to use it. Don't take it personally - it's a general rule that served me well in the last years.
Yes, I know many companies operate in this way - and I perfectly understand their choice.
You might find a 30 day free trial has more sign-ups and conversions, but could entail more support costs ("I forgot to cancel") than the 30-day money back guarantee.
Many companies use snow white patterns for this. Email one week before: attention, your trial will end soon. Same 3 days before. An SMS message a day before. All with precise instructions and links to one-click unsubscribe/cancel pages.
I admire these companies. They know they have excellent products and the user can get back to them anytime they want. I support them and give them positive reviews. But they are rare - most use the old bag of trick to "increase conversions" whereas they just cause a lot of frustration (and increased support cost).
Yeah, support is a big source of friction for us right now. The money-back guarantee serves as a filtering mechanism so that we focus on people who evidence some degree of seriousness.
But you're right that a free trial would produce more sign-ups and conversions, potentially enough to offset the additional support costs once we're in a better position to handle them (or once the product is better at preventing the need for them). Definitely something to think about in the future.
EdTech is a cursed problem (https://youtu.be/8uE6-vIi1rQ?si=660l-bO9hrtGhQ_D). What do companies want? Retention. What hurts retention? Friction. And friction is precisely what you need to teach someone something. I even think this article is a bit overly simplistic, paying money will not change the equation that much.
The relative failure of edutech is, to me, the biggest disappointment of the Internet age. I remember the hope and buzz around MOOCs circa 2010 being very exciting. From my personal experience with online learning, I mostly agree with the author. No degree gamification or cheapness of distribution will overcome a lack of effort and commitment. I also think this explains the state of education in the U.S. generally. Teachers are hamstrung in holding students (and especially parents) accountable for doing the hard work. As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water…”
>I also think this explains the state of education in the U.S. generally. Teachers are hamstrung in holding students (and especially parents) accountable for doing the hard work. As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water…”
Many times, I've heard people focus on how the failures of large numbers of individuals are a cause of a problem: education, retirement savings, the effectiveness of propaganda. Whether or not it's true, I don't think there's a possible solution in trying to change the values of millions of unrelated individuals you have no control over. It'd be better to create "happy paths" that make it easier stumble into success.
It's like digging more wells for the horses from the pithy adage. You still can't make them drink, but fewer horses will be too far from water when they finally get thirsty.
A couple* of game reviews for high-tech LARPs earlier today on HN got me thinking in the opposite direction: they had several comments about the "minigames" that both offerings used to keep the guests feeling like protagonists who aren't just on rails in between plot points, and it had occurred to me that any reasonably deep hobby (those where mastery occurs over decades to lifetimes) naturally presents many minigame equivalents that are much better motivated, and hence probably also more satisfying.
Rather than gamifying education, maybe (even at the risk of offending Our Ford) we ought to try learnifying pasttimes?
I'd be careful of ascribing too much to intrinsic moods and behaviors there: Imagine how different it could be if passing the National Prosperous Job Exam gave one a metaphorical license to print money and the alternative was family farm labor.
I'm not saying that situation is superior by any means, but you can see it in some countries, and I think it highlights how some attitudes are culturally and economically bound.
It's and interesting article, but I can't help but wonder: isn't there a way out of this? Because "users are lazy" seems like an unsolvable problem. Duolingo is very efficient at keeping users motivated, even though they can't teach them anything remotely useful. With math I Imagine this is even more difficult. What I found working for me is a physical tutor, i.e. another person that I meet with every week, who is efficient, who correctly assesses and praises my results if they're good enough, and to whom I would feel a bit stupid saying "I'm a quitter".
>Yeah, everybody wants to learn, but only a small fraction of people are willing put in the work.
Laziness/unwilling to put in the work <= This is wrong. It's more so a human trait of energy conservation. As humans, some are more prone while others less. Coming from someone with adhd.
Different people different environemnts genetics etc => I guess its a bell curve where most people are average mediocre lazy etc They can or can't get out of this trap. It's upto their luck.
There are lots of problems with ed tech and the education industry but one thing it has helped is to democratized education. This is a deeply unfair/imbalanced world. Not everyone has access to the best resources for them.
Imagine the progress of humanity if
all educational material and reasearch were to be locked up somewhere with very limited access.
There are no easy solutions to these problems but what we can do is to make the world a better place so that wars, injustice, inequality can be reduced as much as possible.
