Dear EdTech, College Students Need Something More Social From Their Remote Education
I wanted to talk about something that is important to me as a college student, and something that I’ve thought a lot about in the past 9 months. Student to student interaction in colleges has dramatically changed since the pandemic began, and I think has been somewhat ignored as educators rush to find the best ways to present and structure course material. As a result, I think there’s a massive opportunity for universities and EdTech startups to make remote learning more social and community oriented.
In August 2019, before I was supposed to move-in on campus in NYC, I imagined all the ways that I would make friends and meet new people in school: school clubs, dining halls, classes, social events, sports. Many options were available to me back then, and now they’re all gone. Attempts to compensate for that during remote class, such as Zoom breakout rooms or forum post assignments, feel like ineffective ways to connect with new people.
This semester I also internally transferred from one school in my university to another, so it’s been difficult to meet people in my new school. In the fall of 2019, I never imagined that I would cold-email students in my own grade to chat and meet people, but this year I’ve started to do it. It feels extremely different and very awkward to send that first email, but it’s been somewhat useful. Overall, I’ve felt that being a remote college student makes you feel socially isolated, and it requires a great amount of initiative and effort just to get into contact with people.
Of course, these were all just my own perceptions, and I had no idea how other students were dealing with social isolation in remote learning. So then I started talking to other students.
No, I didn’t do a survey. But this fall semester my final project group for my social entrepreneurship class interviewed NYU students from all grades to learn what their thoughts were on remote education. 100% of students said that engagement was a problem of remote learning, and no one felt that they could truly connect with their classmates or peers. It was great news for my team’s project, but I felt there was something fundamentally wrong about these results as well.
100% of students said that engagement was a problem of remote learning,
I came to college to learn, yes, but I also wanted to go to college to meet brilliant people and form relationships. When you take the “people” part out of the college education, it’s no wonder that college freshmen enrollment dropped by 16% for Fall 2020. The learning aspects are still there, but people felt that they are being robbed of the community that comes with an in-person college experience.
I think colleges should be very concerned about this as well.
Recently I was reading about a company called Sidekick. They’ve gone through Y Combinator and are looking to make remote work more human for remote teams. Initially they were trying to make remote work more efficient, but they were able to pivot after talking to their customers (which are startups) and hearing things like this:
“We’re missionaries, not mercenaries. We’re hiring really smart people, but if they just wanted a 9–5 remote work job, they would have gone to Google. We have to offer more than just a paycheck.”
- Will Kim (Karat, YC W20)
Remote startups need to be able to offer a culture and community to workers, and I think colleges need to be able to offer the same to students.
Why? The value proposition of college is dying. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Since 2013, student debt has grown by around $600 billion,” and enrollment in college has decreased by 2 million since 2010. More people are exploring cheaper alternatives to a four-year degree, like coding bootcamps, Big Tech online certificates, and apprenticeships.
So how can a college provide unique value to its students when it’s trying to compete with other colleges and college alternatives to attract talented students? Well, with in-person learning, it’s by providing students the unique opportunity to meet a bunch of students your age, learn things and have fun on campus in a unique location. With remote learning that is individual, isolating, and not community-oriented, what’s the difference between me attending NYU’s remote classes or Emory’s remote classes? There’s nothing unique about either of those classes that speaks to who Emory and NYU are as universities. Further, if lectures and course content are the only part of my remote college education, then why not just take other online courses that teach me the same thing but for way cheaper? As shown by this pandemic, when college is reduced to just classes, students and their parents are exponentially more annoyed by the high price they are paying for college.
I understand that the first priority of colleges has been to make sure that the course content is properly taught to students. They’ve done a great job. Most of the students we interviewed for my group project said that they were learning the class content well, if not better than when they were in-person. But with the pandemic potentially fueling the shift towards long-term hybrid learning, I believe colleges should work on solutions that build remote communities if they want to differentiate and attract high school seniors to their schools.
Obviously, colleges themselves are not the only ones who can drive change in college environments. Technology startups can also be the ones to make remote learning more social.
With my limited knowledge, I haven’t really seen many startups that have done that so far. As D’Arcy Coolican from a16z mentions,
“For many, school is a core pillar of their social network. Yet most of what we’ve seen thus far in online education is passive and single-player.”
Education, during in-person times, is a very social activity for peers and classmates. But how can this transition into remote and online learning? The best examples I’ve seen have actually come from remote work startups.
Sidekick
Going back to Sidekick. The problems they’ve found with remote work are very similar to the problems of remote college learning. Remote startup employees are feeling more isolated than ever, and remote-working startups are unable to create the camaraderie and community that can help them become successful. So, Sidekick created a hardware video device that allows you to work “side by side” with your remote team. Remote employees can collaborate with their team on tasks, have casual conversations, and get to know each other better.
Sure, Sidekick and its features are meant for remote-working startups right now, but its parallels with remote education are spot-on. Students learning remotely don’t have the opportunity to have casual conversations and get to know their classmates better. Whatever opportunity to talk to your classmates is limited to breakout rooms during lectures, where you mostly discuss course content and not things that young adults actually care about when trying to get to know their peers. Moreover, Sidekick also talks about bringing back the serendipity of remote work by just tapping on someone’s video on your Sidekick device and having a direct conversation with them. There’s also a real serendipity of being on campus in college, whether it’s your first day of school as a freshman and the people you sit next to in your first class become your close friends, or you attend a university-hosted social event and meet a bunch of great people there. I believe that serendipity has enormous value for students (including myself), and it’s part of why people love a coming-of-age experience in college.
Cosmos
Founded by former product team leads at Citymapper and Transferwise, Cosmos is trying to bring back the serendipitous interactions of the in-person world to the virtual space. You and your remote team can be in a virtual HQ where you can walk to different areas, go into a meeting room, or just chat with someone across the table, all while hearing background office noises.
Cosmos has actually already outlined its product’s uses cases in the college world. Instead of meeting rooms and desks, virtual university HQ’s could have lecture halls, labs, and common areas.
For college students, something like Cosmos could remove that indescribable weirdness of speaking over Zoom calls, and could make meeting new people a more fun experience. Maybe like Omegle but for a safer, college-friendly, academic environment.
Barriers for Startups
Whether or not these remote work startups actually try to enter the universities space, I think for startups that try to make remote learning more social, their main challenge is going to be convincing students that their platform is not awkward.
You would think that just like how the world is adapting better to the pandemic, students would eventually be able to have better conversations on Zoom and less awkwardness. But nope. That class in March 2020 was just as awkward as the lecture in December 2020. Students have pretty much accepted that it’s impossible to create bonds over Zoom calls, so they’ve given up trying altogether. The alternatives to Zoom (cold email, LinkedIn outreach) all come with their inherent awkwardness as well because it’s just too formal for comfort.
In my opinion, college students are very picky about what makes them feel “awkward,” so startups and universities need to really talk to students and understand what they’re comfortable with using. Perhaps startups and universities can also draw on ideas and features from gaming or social networks to make the platform more appealing to students.
What I would love to have
Finally, there is one idea that I have not seen at all in the startup space that I would love to see in universities:
Some social network not named LinkedIn, University Gmail, or Instagram where I can meet and talk to fellow students, and do academic work with them as well. NYU’s a big school, and I’d love to take advantage of that and meet as many interesting people as possible. I would imagine that transfer students and potentially freshmen could be early adopters for a university social network / collaborative platform. I think that remote transfer students have it the worst because often they literally do not know anybody at the school, and it can be very isolating. Freshmen learning remotely obviously crave the opportunity to meet their lifelong friends in college.
Education is inherently social, and the fact that remote education isn’t presents a major opportunity for EdTech and remote tech. Students want to feel more engaged and more connected in their remote learning experiences. And with the potential long-term permanence of hybrid classes, colleges have to be able to develop their on-campus community and their remote community.
I’m excited for the potential innovation that addresses the engagement and ioslation issues of remote learning, and for the sake of my “college experience,” I hope something does emerge soon.
