Hello guys,
Just to tell you about myself, I am a SharePoint/Power Platform developer and I am currently looking to transition into the EdTech space. I have built solutions for various industries and believe there is a huge potential to streamline processes in education, like course management, student tracking, and digital collaboration.
The reason I posted this is because I would love to hear your thoughts on what challenges EdTech companies face that these tools could help solve, or any specific needs in this space that are currently underserved. Your insights might help me dearly.
I am a former educator and now a consultant in this space. From my experience, I would suggest talking to end users. Teachers, instructors (if in higher ed), administrators, staff, students, etc.
These products are a dime a dozen and often these companies build these things and include them last in user testing and wonder why the solutions aren’t working for them.
Without lying to you, it is a field with a few large players that hold the majority of the market with some open source and smaller players that hold a small portion of the market. For digital collaboration, it is just Google and Microsoft that dominate there as well. Of course, some smaller single-point solutions fill niche needs. Frankly, tend to get bought by Microsoft or Google eventually (that is also a not uncommon play too).
I am in Higher Ed and everyone has an LMS that handles course and student management, and these are typically integrated into the SIS. The guys have invested in setup and training, so that area would be hard to break into.
However, I think the analytics side of assessment for accreditation reports would be easier to get into. All LMS & SIS systems export to CSV so building a tool that can take their exports and find the stories in the data would be of value.
In addition, grant management and reporting would welcome similar tools. Could they use PowerBI themselves? Yes. Will they? No. Wishing you luck in your endeavours.
If you are keen enough, you will have noticed that the future of education is students. As days go by, everything will revolve around students, so I would suggest checking out student AI tools (it could be something different from AI, I just happen to like AI). This is my suggestion though, if you think you can be able to do it, well and good.
I think these guys are doing a great job of explaining how important validating your problems is by talking to your users. You need to find out if they care about the problem you are solving. Once you do then you can build the solution, and start slowly talking about your project on social media to generate user interest. Good luck in your future plans.
Thanks for your input. I am very familiar with Microsoft tools. I am a power platform developer but I assume most schools already have the licenses. But maybe I will figure out what step I need to take.