There is more education innovation happening at my local YMCA than in this class of YC edsurge.com/news/2019-03-2…

The education community needs to make a “call for startups” that articulates the many real problems that need solving. Who will join me in co-creating this?

Ok, since you asked, here are my current top 10 #edtech problems awaiting solutions. Please amend!

(1/10) There is no “middleware” to make the thousands of edtech applications interoperable and usable together. LTI necessary but insufficient. Higher ed needs a @clever, which solved rostering for K12. At @DukeU we gave up and built open source Kits: learnwithkits.com

(2/10) Cost of content is a big driver of total edu cost, esp in community colleges. It’s gone up faster than tuition (!). We need to drive costs down. Idea: build a multi-publisher subscription service like @Cengage Unlimited but with content from Pearson, McGraw-Hill, etc.

(3/10) Student information systems are where good #highered ideas go to die. At @UTAustin an outdated SIS blocked the effort to build short “fractional credit” courses. Make a more flexible SIS that supports experimentation.
chronicle.com/interactives/P…

(4/10) Undergraduate research is an @AACU “High-Impact Educational Practice” (aacu.org/leap/hips). But there’s no good matching/training solution to make it easy to implement. So my colleague Prof. Sheila Patek gave up and built Muser: muser.biology.duke.edu

(5/10) Campus recruiting is broken and @joinHandshake hasn’t fixed it. Students hear from the small fraction of employers who can afford to send teams to campus. They’re pressured to accept roles in fall, but the distinctive one-off opportunities don’t get posted til spring.

(6/10) The way students select majors needs a revamp. Tech majors are not the robot-proof panacea: hybrid jobs require tech + data + human skills. Help student make more informed decisions about career paths.
economist.com/special-report….

(7/10) The way students register for courses needs a revamp. RateMyProfessors is hopelessly biased. Registration is transactional like online banking, disconnected from planning, goal-setting, even degree requirements. The result: “empty credits,” esp for transfer students.

(8/10) The way schools launch new programs needs a revamp. Most data sources (EMSI, @Burning_Glass ) are snapshots of today’s labor market and demand for skills. But the lead time for a new program is 2 years! We need workflow to accelerate launch, and better data to reduce risk.

(9/10) A majority of low income high achieving hs students never apply to selective colleges. If they did, they’d receive generous fin. aid. Most advanced current intervention is a mailed packet to the home. What not more sophisticated online targeting? brookings.edu/wp-content/upl…

(10/10) And finally, a root cause of the mismatch between what #edtech builds and what #highered most needs: procurement. RFPs favor connected incumbents. Deals rarely won on the basis of evidence/efficacy. Help us allocate precious tech/$ resources more rationally.

Appendix: I don’t think tech alone is the solution to any meaningful problem. But the educators and administrators who are working on these issues could sure benefit from tools that help, don’t hurt.