Assessing the potential for a gig economy in education

Rish JoshiContributorRish is an entrepreneur and investor. Previously, he was a VC at Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund), co-founded a fintech startup building an analytics platform for SEC filings and worked on deep-learning research as a graduate student in computer science at MIT.More posts by this contributor

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Over the past few years, personalized learning has established itself as a focal point of innovation in education. Despite the focus, the rate of progress in establishing personalized learning practices in both K-12 school systems and online learning has been slower than expected.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have together invested millions of dollars in support of it, and educators such as Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, have spoken extensively about its importance in education.

Personalized learning comprises many aspects of learning: letting students master topics before they move on to higher level ones, giving them agency over their learning based on their interests and goals and using teacher-aided instruction and interactivity, to name a few.

Much of the focus on implementing personalized learning practices has revolved around K-12 school systems, where new initiatives have been met with mixed results, and these efforts will continue.

Beyond the K-12 school systems however, online education platforms present a large opportunity for delivering personalized learning experiences to students worldwide, and the level of innovation here has lagged expectations.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) such as Udacity, Coursera and edX emerged in the early 2010s and helped bring quality content online and make it accessible around the globe. However, they haven't innovated much when it comes to personalized learning, and studies have shown that they have in fact seen declines in completion rate of courses.

In recent years, startups have built platforms that are powering a gig economy for teachers, enabling them to give live lectures in small-group, highly interactive settings. Apps focused on providing personalized learning experiences for users learning domain-specific skills such as math or languages have shown promise, but there's room for a lot more innovation on this front.

These newer approaches have the potential to democratize personalized learning by innovating on the software teaching platform, enabling better teacher-aided instruction online, and helping students better understand their mastery of topics.