Engineering in Ed-Tech

While at Cornell, I worked part-time at AI-Learners, a company that develops games for students with disabilities. My first new-grad role was at Longtail Education, an early-stage ed-tech startup. Taken together I have almost 5 years of experience of engineering for ed-tech products, here are some insights that I've gathered along the way.

1. Expect skepticism and overcome it

Teachers and administrators have seen scores of tools come and go. I can name a plethora from just my experience going to school: Achieve3000, STMath, StudyIsland, IXL, Kahoot, Quizlet, Google Classroom, Canvas, Blackboard, Edmodo— and again, that is just from when I was a student. School staff members have already seen everything under the sun and will be going into any demos with a healthy dose of skepticism. To put it in other words, their BS detectors are incredibly accurate. You need to show that your platform has a real use case in or out of the classroom.

There are some strategies that you can use to overcome this and establish some goodwill before your first meeting with a school district. At both AI-Learners and Longtail, we developed alongside certain school districts that volunteered to be design partners. As an engineer, I would hop on demo calls with real teachers and students and listen to real feedback. When we would hop back on another demo call two weeks later with their feedback implemented, that goes a long way in establishing goodwill towards your brand and generating some positive traction.

While influencers might have a reputation of only being used to sell tech or beauty products, establishing a design partnership with ed-tech influencers is another great way to give your brand some positive traction. These are usually current or former educators who have branched out into making content geared at teachers with classroom tips, upcoming conferences, or most relevant: new products that might be useful. Collaborating with an ed-tech influencer to strengthen both your product and its image is yet another way to overcome this ingrained skepticism.

2. Accessibility is everything

At AI-Learners, accessibility was a main focus of our product, but I've heard accessibility come up in every ed-tech conversation I've had with a teacher. If your product is unusable to a number of students because it is inaccessible, it's harder for a teacher or administration to find budget for it. To that end, make sure to follow WCAG guidelines on accessibility and test your product with popular assistive technologies— screenreaders, Dynavox, etc.

Additionally, schools are not going to be handing out shiny new Mac M4's to students to use your product. Make sure that your product can run on almost any hardware. If it's on the web, almost any browser. If it's for mobile, test on Android and iOS. I'm sure all those animations look nice, but if it makes a Chromebook from 2011 as hot as an oven, it's going to cause some friction.

3. Design needs to be pick-up-and-play

As mentioned above, teachers have enough software to need to worry about how to use. They also have to worry about school supplies, seven other trainings from admin, grading papers, and not to mention tracking down the pizza guy for the end of semester party. The point being: their plates are perpetually asymptotically approaching full.

Teachers have some time to learn your product, but it really needs to be intuitive. If there is some aspects of your design that are unclear to someone that's been left out of modern design trends, it's going to cause frustration and lead to lower adoption. Tech for tech's sake here is not going to cut it. Listen, I love a tooltip as much as the next guy, but if it has some load-bearing information don't assume that they are going to hover over what you need to to get it to show up, even if it's in bright red text that says HOVER OVER ME.

and more...

There are a host of other fun quirks that come with working at an ed-tech company: brutal seasonal sales cycles, pushbacks against AI, the right amount of gamification, and more. But ultimately, the work that you are doing has a much more tangible value, at least in my mind, than B2B SaaS products. That's how I found meaning in the work, despite the above.