How Can EdTech Plug Gaps In Learning?
By Joash Lee, Forbes Councils Member.
As Published on Forbes: Nov 19, 2024, 10:15am EST (Updated: Apr 17, 2025, 09:53am EDT)
Joash Lee is a Venture Partner at VNTR Capital. He actively invests in emerging technologies like AI, Web3 and ClimateTech.
What do you need to build a house? Hammers, nails and wood? Sure, you’ll get some walls up, but it’ll be a tedious process and you won’t exactly get the most futuristic-looking property. Traditional education is like relying solely on hammers, nails and wood. While it works for some, it can leave others struggling.
But what if I handed you state-of-the-art blueprints and a supercharged brick-laying robot? That’d be a total game changer. Not only would you build more efficiently, but also with greater precision. Likewise, edtech is reshaping education by offering learners a customizable, accessible and dynamic tool kit.
The History Of Education
Let’s take a short trip back in history. It’s been a while since we’ve had any disruption in the education sector. Picture a 19th-century classroom—you’d probably spot a blackboard, some chairs and tables. Now think about the classroom you had as a kid just a few decades back—maybe that blackboard turned into a whiteboard? But otherwise unchanged. However, things have radically advanced over the past decade, and I’ve seen the profound impacts of edtech on students, having previously led products from zero to over a million dollars at an edtech startup.
EdTech Is Breaking Barriers
Today, learning transcends physical borders. From research programs like Indigo Research that pair high school students with Ivy League professors to write publish-worthy research papers from the comforts of their homes to language learning apps like Duolingo that allow learners to pick up additional languages at their own pace, we’re exposed to a unique set of opportunities we could’ve never imagined.
It’s A Game Of The Survival Of The Fittest
Yet the sector doesn’t come without challenges. For a start, edtech investments have fallen over the past year. Though we can attribute this to the economic downturn and increasing capital costs that caused a dip in global venture funding, edtech is still performing worse than other sectors, largely due to the partial reversal of the post-pandemic remote learning boom. In addition, sustainable growth has been a challenge, with skyrocketing customer acquisition costs. An analysis by McKinsey reveals that sales and marketing costs of major edtech firms range from 20% to 60% of their revenues.
To tackle this, firms could turn to strategic mergers and acquisitions (M&As) or partnerships to reach economies of scale. For instance, Anthology’s merger with Blackboard created the world’s largest modern edtech ecosystem, allowing it to combine administrative and learning solutions for over 150 million users. But M&As must be carefully evaluated for strategic alignment to unlock the partnership’s full potential, or they risk having the opposite effect.
Given the ever-changing landscape, it’s survival of the fittest, and edtech startups must differentiate themselves to emerge as champions. As a builder and VC, I’ve experienced both sides of the startup ecosystem and noticed that most successful founders innovate around customer demand. This means observing what customers need before building solutions around those needs, not the other way around. As the age-old saying goes: “The customer is king.” Taking this further, the best founders have the foresight to anticipate customer needs and the agility to evolve with them.
How could this play out in practice? New founders should seek to understand the use case of their solution and could do so through extensive research even before building something. On the other hand, established startups could implement feedback loops by engaging with their users to understand their evolving challenges and preferences.
Emerging Technologies Have Catalyzed EdTech
The integrations of emerging technologies such as AI and Web3 have been a game changer. For instance, Pedagoal is developing proprietary question generation and auto-marking systems powered by AI that enable teachers to generate practice problems and mark students’ work. This liberates teachers from the most dreaded part of the job and enables them to do what they love and do best: teach. But to address the elephant in the room, I don’t think that emerging AI will replace teachers. Rather, it’ll complement their work to automate mundane tasks. After all, which student would ever want to be taught by a faceless, emotionless robot?
Likewise, Web3 has enabled startups such as Oakchain to develop “earn-and-learn” models to incentivize learning through rewards and decentralized autonomous universities (DAUs), such as Bittopia University, which are community-driven learning environments.
The pertinent question remains: What defines a winner? As noted in a previous piece (paywall), I believe that the fight for AI supremacy is fundamentally a fight for data, so access to proprietary data is key, and “ChatGPT wrappers” are unlikely to succeed. Those employing “earn-and-learn” models should focus on the educational value of the content, instead of optimizing around rewards, as the main purpose of education is, well, to learn, not make money. This closely parallels how successful gaming studios in GameFi design games that are fun to play instead of obsessing over tokenomics. Lastly, similar to community managers building decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), DAUs must thoroughly understand and engage their community to grow, as I shared here.
Despite Hurdles In EdTech, It’s Here To Stay
Though edtech has faced its fair share of challenges, I’m optimistic about its recovery as the broader market bounces back, and projections for the next decade remain strong. In fact, the edtech market is expected to double over the next six years and capital inflows have increased by 40 times from 2010 to 2021. As founders continue to differentiate themselves and capitalize on emerging technologies, I believe the market is poised to thrive.
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