BMO's Back to School Conference is always one of my favorite places to hear about potential disruptions, new trends, and investment information in education. This year did not disappoint.
There are 5300 colleges and universities in the US; 20% of them are going to disappear in the next ten years.
We’ve known for years that one-on-one instruction (tutoring) has a two sigma advantage over group instruction, meaning that an average tutored student performs about as well as a top ten percent student who learns in a classroom. Technology should be able to allow us to make group instruction as effective as tutoring.
What once worked in selling to schools no longer works. Some of the factors changing the way schools make purchasing decisions today include:
- Districts are focusing more on student outcomes which requires a different way to sell.
- No one takes marketing calls anymore, or answers emails.
- Decision makers do research online.
- You’ve got about 15 seconds online to make your value proposition clear.
- Buyers want to easily see the impact you have had with other schools and districts.
- When they meet with you, districts want to know how you’ll work with them to get value from the data you can provide.
- Buyers need an easy way to try a product before buying it, and know there is an easy way to disengage.
- More decisions are being pushed down: from the state to the district, from the district to the school, and some even to the teacher or groups of teachers.
- Buying decisions can be made annually when materials are online, as opposed to once every 5-7 years when materials are in textbooks, which also means sales are smaller.
- The sales person who shows up with the best donuts is not necessarily the one who is going to get the deal.
The best uses of AI haven’t been invented yet.
It’s just a matter of time before Gaming is predominant in education; high engagement along with assessment and adaptation. Kids are happy to sit on social media and take the silly tests that often pop up, but the testing in school doesn’t engage them.
In the short term, immersive technologies like virtual reality will have more success in corporate training than in education: corporations are more able to make decisions based on expected results. But if you are not in immersive technologies now, when it does hit, you will be too late.
Districts are becoming concerned that they are losing students to online providers, home schoolers, and charter school. This means a loss of state and federal money, so they are more willing to look for solutions that retain students they might lose or get the ones who have left to return.
There are going to be 80 million jobs needed in middle skills occupations; these do not require a four-year degree but do require different skills than we currently teach in high school.
There is a shift in IT skills requirements. It’s not just IT departments, but jobs are increasingly requiring IT skills.
Organizations are starting to care about reskilling their workers instead of just focusing on hiring for needs. This is partly the result of a tight job market.
The focus of K12 should be to prepare each generation to think and operate as adults. If we continue to test the way we do, that won’t happen. No employer has ever said, “I need someone who scored high on their Algebra 2 test.”