PILOTed

Education Business Forum 2018

This week was the Education Business Forum in NY, the conference where we learn about how to run and grow an education technology business.

There were sessions on funding, investing, marketing, selling, hiring and managing, and transforming businesses. Here is a short summary of two of the sessions. And if you are hungry for more, well, I guess you should attend the Education Industry Summit in June.

Finding the right people

We are all called upon to either hire people or at some point look for a job ourselves. Here are resume and interview tips for you if you find yourself in either role.

What companies look for in employees

• Employees who will be good ambassadors
• People who are looking to learn and seek out opportunities
• People who attract other competent people
• People who demonstrate values and integrity
• A person who shows a good balance of humility and self-confidence

What companies look to avoid in employees

• Candidates who cannot give examples of success or failure
• Candidates who focus on the short term
• People who say they are ready for the next step in their career (because at some point soon they will likely be saying that to another company)
• People who give “there was too much change” as their reason for leaving
• Someone who doesn’t ask questions or doesn’t ask good questions during the interview

Privacy

While Europe passed their continent-wide privacy law, in the US, it’s been up to each state, and states often model their laws on California. This year, California passed its CCPA privacy law, which, according to one policy wonk at the conference is “the worst written statute I’ve ever seen” with ambiguities, contradictions, and even plenty of typos.

The law applies to any business that reaches 50,000 devices, people, or households. It does not apply to nonprofits. If you expect to do business in California you need to comply by January 2020 or risk $7500 per instance (per person or device) in fines.

In oversimplified terms, the law requires companies to provide

1. Clear notice that you are collecting information
2. Transparency in disclosing what data you have and are collecting, and you must provide a copy of the information you have on a person upon request.
3. Opt-out capabilities that are easily accessible and obvious, and once opting out you cannot contact that person again, sell that person’s information, and an individual can authorize another individual to make that request for them
4. Deletion, the ability for someone to request you delete all the information you have on them
5. Non-discrimination, you cannot provide the same services at different prices to different people or groups of people, or different services at the same price to different people.

While the law is a clear attempt to reign in Facebook and Google, one of the ambiguous areas is education. If a student or parent requests deletion, but if your agreement with a school or district requires you to track student achievement, which of those two takes precedence?

The SIIA is monitoring this and trying to get the state to clarify how it applies to education technology. If you are a member of the SIIA, you can contact SIIA Public Policy for clarification.

Lessons from SETDA’s Leadership Summit 2018

Just finished two days with state education technology directors at the SETDA Fall Leadership Summit in Arlington, VA.

 

Probably the most important take-away from the meeting is what is happening at the FCC.

 

First, schools and libraries receive about $2.5Billion a year to build and maintain their Internet and WiFi connections from the FCC. This money comes through the telecom companies and is called eRate funding. It’s technically not a tax, it’s a fee paid to the telecom companies by businesses and consumers, and it’s what has allowed schools to build and grow the infrastructure they need to incorporate digital tools into the schools. 

 

Second, there is a band of wireless access that has been allocated to education called education broadband services (EBS). The FCC originally set aside these bands for educational television programming, but it was never used for that purpose. A few large districts are using it for broadband, but because of the cost of setting up and maintaining a broadband service, it has not been universally adopted. Since we are still in the early stages of adoptions of digital learning, no one really knows the best use of this bandwidth, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out potential uses of it for schools and districts. Because of the imminent introduction of 5G, this bandwidth has become incredibly valuable, and many telecom companies would love to get their hands on it.

 

Ajit Pai, Chairman of the FCC, has forcefully come out on both issues. On eRate, that schools and libraries do not need funding at anywhere near current levels for their Internet and WiFi connections. And on EBS that the government should hold an auction on the EBS bandwidth to give it to the telecom companies.

 

Cuts in eRate could have a disastrous effect on schools trying to provide digital resources to their students. Every school I know still faces bandwidth issues, and eRate is what has allowed them to approach levels that allow teachers to use interactive applications to engage students. If Pai is able to eviscerate eRate, it will have a profound impact on the way schools are able to use digital devices and content. 

 

While EBS usage is currently being envisioned and not actuated, once schools lose the bandwidth, it will never be available again. If you have a strong opinion on these, write to your Senators and Congress.

 

While we are on Washington, the budget is looming. The good news, albeit short term and temporary, is that for the first time since the mid-1990’s, education funding was decided before the fiscal year was up, and it was increased by 3-5% (over the objections of the administrations and the US Department of Education). But with deficits ballooning to unprecedented levels, the administration has asked all departments for at least 10% cutbacks or next year’s budgets. Look for a very contentious budget process; it’s hard to picture the federal education budget even maintaining current levels. 

 

With all this doom and gloom on the national level, it was great to hear about the progress that states are making to transform education from the factory model to one that honors all students and prepares them to lead productive adult lives.

 

Schools are moving from talking about digital citizenship as a separate domain, and shifting to what citizenship means in this digital age. And states are working on leading the way. Many of the sessions were on leadership and change management:

• Developing a vision and planning rather than merely reacting or fulfilling compliance needs
• Building on what’s working in classrooms and schools already, finding the stars of education and then figuring out how to replicate and scale what they are doing
• Adopting education practices from those of a world where there was a shortage of information to one where you can find information on any topic at any time, but where a good portion of that information is often unreliable, false, or useless
• Protecting students and systems without preventing appropriate use of electronic resources
• Reimagining teaching and learning to incorporate student ownership, where students know why they are learning, flexible activities are based on student needs, and students proceed on their own pace.

 

As SETDA’s Christine Fox summarized, What we most want is for kids to exceed our expectations, and their own expectations, regardless of where they come from, who their parents are, or what abilities they bring to the table.

 

Thank you state EdTech directors and SETDA for taking that leadership.

More Unsafe Thinking

A few weeks ago, I published a post based on Jonah Sachs's book Unsafe Thinking: Can You Know Too Much?

Here are some more tidbits on stress, motivation, and flow.

Stress

Stress, or fear, focuses us. When we experience stress, fear, or anxiety, our levels of the hormone cortisol increase, and this often results in our taking action.

The increased cortisol also tampers down our ability to be creative, to look at situations with detachment, and to consider different possible courses of action, or even to delay action. If we feel fear, we are more likely to only react with the most obvious path, or paths, in front of us. In fact, we all can be manipulated by those who are able to raise our levels of stress and anxiety, because we lose the ability to look for alternatives. Once anxiety triggers cortical arousal, we are at a tremendous disadvantage.

Many of us think that we can solve this by avoiding stress. That's completely wrong.

When we avoid stressful and potentially anxiety-producing situations, we pretty much ensure that those situations and feelings will come back and we subject ourselves to living increasingly narrow lives.

What we can do is to change how we think of anxiety. We can coach ourselves to think positively about the situation and the sensations we feel; to perceive them as chances to grow. We can choose to tackle them while acknowledging that the feeling of anxiety is just part of the process of growth and success. This is tremendously powerful.

Motivation

There is this myth that if we love what we do, it will be easy to be successful. But success is never easy.

And we've all heard about all the studies showing that extrinsic motivations, like rewards or punishments, may, in some cases be short term motivators, but in the long run, they actually reduce our ability to achieve.

Sachs points to research that shows that competence, expertise, and accomplishment are all primarily driven by internal motivation. And also, that external motivation can actually provide a boost to internal motivation.

When rewards (or penalties) make us feel manipulated, coerced, or controlled, they hurt our performance. But when 1) we understand our motivation, 2) when the task is motivating, and 3) when we feel the reward is offered in an upfront way that is not manipulative (possibly when we ourselves have helped design the rewards), rewards can be motivating. We treat them as fun bonuses rather than as tools of control. They are especially helpful during the long "slogs" or boring parts of a project, when motivation tends to get bogged down.

Flow

Most of us have heard of flow, it's those moments of peak performance where we are immersed in what we are doing and we are operating at a high level.

Flow is a balance of difficulty and skill. Too much difficulty for our level of skill and we become anxious or lose the belief we can succeed. Too little difficulty (too easy) and we become bored and lose persistence of effort. This band of optimal performance, and learning, is right in line with Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. Video game developers have become experts in constructing their games to keep you in flow:

1. There are tangible goals
2. You get valuable and quick feedback
3. The challenges are just above your current skill levels

In real life, though, we don't have the luxury of game developers setting this up for us; we have to do this for ourselves with our own minds. Once we are familiar with setting goals, figuring out how to get the right feedback, and accepting challenges above our current skill levels, we can apply it to the most mundane or even challenging tasks to drive our own motivation and performance. What Jane McGonigal calls gamifying our lives.

I wonder how we would ever apply these to students and education. Maybe a future Edchat Interactive event could help here.