The Future of EdTech

I believe that if someone doesn’t understand something — an idea or a concept — that they are being told, then it is the responsibility of the communicator to explain it differently rather than the receiver to try harder. Yes, one could argue that it is the responsibility of both. But if you take into consideration where both the communicator and the receiver are with respect to the idea, the communicator understands the idea, they are in a better position to tailor it and communicate it differently rather than expect the receiver to use one of the many million ways of thinking about an idea. In other words, the communicator — if they understand the idea well enough — has to go through an extremely small subset of the ways of thinking while the receiver has to go through all possible.

How is this related to EdTech you might ask? Well, for the longest time, I have believed (and still do) that if a student fails a subject, it is the responsibility of the teacher. That somehow, they aren’t tailoring their communication to each student in the classroom. Well, how could they? They are teaching ~40 students at a time usually, sometimes more. And they are human after all, they probably don’t know all the ways of thinking themselves, so even if they understand the concept well, they probably haven’t understood how each student thinks to be able to realize that there is a need to tailor the idea in a particular way.

This is where the future of EdTech comes in. We have built language translators using human-assisted AI. Now we have to build idea translators and incorporate them in education. The basic concept of the idea translator is that it will be fed an idea or a concept by a teacher and then the AI will take the concept and process it. When a student logs in to understand that concept, the AI will first understand the “way of thinking” of the student and then present the new concept in a way that is most comprehensible for the student. We can get into the details of how each step will work, but this is broadly it.

These idea translators will probably need to be built on top of the language translators (they will use the language parsing capabilities of the translators) to comprehend the ideas fed in by teachers. They could also simply read/watch the trove of information already present on the collective database we call the internet. And we could explore the possibility of democratizing the “human-assistance” side of it by getting different teachers to present the same idea in different ways.

To understand how the students think, we could base it on past videos they have watched or articles they have preferred to read. But over time, I wouldn’t be surprised if devices come up that scan brains and figure out how they’re wired to best deliver the concepts.

Just another random idea I thought I’ll share.