It’s All About the Benjamins

I was forwarded this article today on The Largest EdTech Opportunity No One is Tackling, talking about the problem of adult literacy and the new $7M Barbara Bush Foundation Adult Literacy XPRIZE presented by Dollar General Literacy Foundation.

I’ve been working on this problem for the last couple years (published one paper a year or so ago, and finished another bigger, better study this year). I’ve been talking about how adult literacy is an important edtech problem for for years now, so I’m glad this X-Prize will bring focus and resources to the problem.

Adult literacy is a huge problem for employment and health, and mobile devices hold great potential to help adults improve their literacy skills. Low literacy skills negatively impacts a large portion of the population, and the ROI to society is huge if this problem can be alleviated.

I feel like this point may essentially just be whiney nerd rage (maybe mixed with nerd indignation?) so I kinda cringe when I write this…

But sometimes it drives me crazy how the problems I feel are the most important to be solved, not from a wishy washy touchy feely perspective, but from a hard numerical ROI-to-society perspective, aren’t solvable because there’s no business model. The adult literacy and skills centres where a lot of this education takes place generally aren’t well funded at all, especially when compared to post-secondary institutions. Adult literacy clients generally aren’t in a position to pay for software individually.

In contrast, there’s no lack of literacy and numeracy software available in the app stores aimed at children, because some parents (and school boards) have money to shell out.

Startups are an excellent model for doing great stuff in the world, don’t get me wrong. But they rely on successfully searching for a business model. Business models require a customer, with money, in order to work. It’s really tough to make money off of individuals and organizations that don’t have much money to spare. And if we’re limiting ourselves to solving problems with paying customers, we’re leaving a lot of important problems unsolved.

As a result, particularly in the edtech space, there’s a lot of great innovations that people aren’t investing time and resources into because there’s no money to be made. Hopefully this X-Prize helps to change that for adult literacy applications, but I wish it didn’t have to be that way. Whether it’s governments stepping up as a customer, or groups of people conducting massive open source projects, or some kind of PBS-type donation model, I wish that somehow problems like these got more resources.