Today’s Feature Friday is not about a single feature but rather about initially prioritizing user engagement and growth over other features and in particular over discovery and analytics.  The idea here is simple but still often ignored. If you have engaged users then their activity will generate the data you need for discovery and analytics.  In some ways this is a corollary to the idea that lots of data combined with simple algorithms tends to beat more sophisticated algorithms run over less data.

A company in our portfolio that has done this particularly well is Edmodo.  Their early focus was entirely on solving a seemingly teacher-student communication problem by giving teachers an easy way to share content with their classroom.  They added other features to that to ensure that teachers and students had a reason to come back to Edmodo frequently.  The result of this utilitarian focus has has been rapid growth and increased engagement.

With its latest release, Edmodo is now unleashing the discovery and analytics that flow from their massive overall usage.  They are calling these features Connections and Insights.  Connections uses the data on what teachers are sharing with their students to make it easier to discover high quality content and other teachers.  The beauty here is that any act of sharing by a teacher provides an implicit recommendation for that piece of content.  Having access to many millions of shares means that Edmodo doesn’t need to ask teachers to explicitly rate pieces of content.  Insights on the other hand does rely on explicit feedback from students (and teachers) to provide a kind of “pulse” for the classroom.  Here too engagement is a critically important enabler: it is easy to ask a student to provide an emotional reaction if all it takes is one click or touch after an action they have already taken. Asking for feedback in the absence of engagement would lead to a much smaller and more likely biased response.

Both content discovery and classroom analytics have been the goals of a lot of prior technology efforts in education.  Most of these have fallen flat because they were premised on static content repositories and on feedback disconnected from action.  I am excited to see Edmodo approach these problems in a net native way.  If they succeed here then I believe it will form the foundation for tackling the holy grails of education: measuring effectiveness and powering adaptive learning.