Daniel Schwartz is the brand new dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, but he doesn’t really want to talk about it.
“I don’t think I’ll have too much to say on my vision,” he says, when I first contact him. It’s not because he isn’t excited. He’s thrilled. It’s because he sees his role as a facilitator of the visions of others—“students, teachers, people who care deeply about education in school and out of school.”
Fortunately for us, Dr. Schwartz is more than happy to share his personal perspective on education technology.
He brings a wide variety of experiences to this conversation. He’s been a classroom teacher in wildly different places: L.A., rural Alaska, and Kenya. As an academic, he has played a big role in developing open-ended learning platforms, choice-based assessments, and teachable agents. He heads up the Stanford AAALab (short for Awesomely Adaptive and Advanced Learning and Behavior), which bridges cognitive science, classroom experience, and programming skills to build new technologies and theories of learning. And he’s advised several companies including Pearson, Leapfrog and Kidaptive.
In this Q&A, he candidly discusses the opportunities and pitfalls involved when academics and entrepreneurs work together to improve learning.
Note: This Q&A has been lightly edited and condensed for ease of understanding.
Hamburg: How do you see edtech and academia collaborating?
Schwartz: That’s a big question; I know there's a number of people who are thinking about this.
As an academic: I'm a great starter, and I can prove that something works. But my desire to ever have a 1-800-Call-Dan hotline for people who want to know how to use my inventions is like...zero.
Now, if its software, I could put it up on the Internet and let people use it. But I can't market it, and I can't keep maintaining the code. And I need to get a business plan, but I don't know how to do that. What I want is a partner who's willing to take a discovery or an invention and bring it to scale.
On the other hand, in the edtech industry, they come up with ideas that tend not to incorporate the kind of expertise that academics have about learning. And so they go to scale, but they may not have a product that's particularly effective or fresh, or that differentiates itself from the rest of the market.
So we’ve got to solve this problem!
For example, I can imagine making some sort of industrial affiliates program, possibly at Stanford, where there are people who have entrepreneurial talent and can give guidance to faculty who would like to commercialize their products.
So far, though, I haven't seen a lot of things like that that have been effective. Largely because there are there's not enough expertise on learning; there's more expertise on business.
Another approach that the industry has tried is to get academics on their advisory boards. It also doesn't really work, from what I've seen, though it could. The reason is usually that the company has already made a bunch of decisions, and then they want the academics to provide advice on that. But most academics are starters. They'll be invested to the degree to which their ideas are being infused in the product. It makes for a tense relationship. The academics come in and they do what they do very well, which is to criticize, and the companies are like, “Ow, ow. Why do I want you here?” And meanwhile the academics are thinking, “You're not listening to what I’m telling you!” A better model is to get the researchers who have expertise to come in during the early design phase.
Read the entire interview on the EdSurge website.
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