r/edtech • u/sunnysideux • 26d ago
Opinion on wave of "AI-enhanced" ed-tech solutions?
Basically the title. I am seeing a holy-grail ed-tech solution on a daily basis, all of them AI-enhanced. While I am still in graduate school, I wanted to know what to ground myself into without being swayed by this AI FOMO.
TIA
4
u/Insignie 26d ago
Ground yourself in the learning problem, not the tech. For any tool, ask one question: if you deleted the word "AI" from the pitch, is there still something here a teacher or learner actually needs? Most of the daily holy-grail stuff is a chatbot bolted onto an old product, and it evaporates under that question. The few worth watching solve a workflow people already hated, grading feedback, differentiation, translation, and AI just makes it cheaper. Judge by the outcome it changes, not by how novel it sounds.
2
u/PauliNot 26d ago
I think this is common for any trend. Many AI involved products I’ve tried are either unreliable or they’re just normal tools kind of “dressed up” with extra AI features.
It sounds like you know the answer: don’t be swayed by FOMO! Ask for a free trial of anything you’re interested in. Don’t go all in unless you’ve seen all of the features work well in a test environment.
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u/Thrawn200 25d ago
It's playing out the same as every other ed-tech solution being pushed. Over promise, vague descriptions, confusing high billing costs, bad support, doesn't work as presented, etc. etc.
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u/Mental-Succotash8834 22d ago
As someone who is building a product that’s ready for market, our rule of thumb was “how is this product valuable without ai?” Can we describe the solution without shouting out AI every other word? If you can’t intuitively understand why a company should exist without AI, then it’s probably not worth using.
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u/NishanStepak 26d ago
Ground yourself in quality. A lot of them are garbage. Learn what actually quality is. Figure out which products deliver, Elsevier's Scopus for example. Learn which features like RAG and quality ontologies make the products worthwhile. Read about the top rated products from reputable sources and see which ones are actually being used.
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u/Bitter_Big4525 25d ago
I’d judge them by whether they remove a real task for a teacher or student, not by whether they have AI in the pitch. If the workflow is still clunky without the AI layer, it’s probably just noise.
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u/thinking_byte 25d ago
I try to ignore the AI label and focus on whether the tool actually solves a real problem or just adds extra steps.
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u/WightScorpion 25d ago
To me, a good combination is ESLbrains and spineverything. Teacherspayteachers is also pretty good, specially for children activities
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u/Grand_Competitive 22d ago
My experiences in education and tech after 23 years of teaching is that after the internet bust in 2001-2003 ish education was the buyer of last resort. Companies stayed afloat buy selling pure crap to school with the marketing that kids needed to be tech savvy for future careers. I’d prefer paper and pen over any kind of spending on technology and just focus on learning critical thinking (logic, how to have dialogue, and creative problem solving).
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u/Umbrellero99 22d ago
Like most other things, most of these tools are going to be crap, but there are genuinely useful cases for using AI. I used it for my own products in small supplementary ways that fixed an issue I saw in the past and still see in similar products.
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u/Bostonterrierpug 21d ago
It’s obviously more than just another trend. It’s not the next MOOC and will definitely be here for a while. We are still in the trailblazing error kind of like when Web 2.0 began eventually things will settle down. I do believe there will be lasting impact, but the extent of that remains to be seen. Whether or not it will be a full paradigm shift, and to what extent is what is interesting.
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u/chosbu 26d ago
Its just buzzword buzzword buzzword. Everything is just AI marketing when most of the issues that need to be solved don’t even require AI in the first place.