Free as a matter of course

Flip was an incredible learning tool until it wasn't. We should consider what its fate says about the implications of "free" in K12 edtech.

I loved Flip. Like, seriously. I wrote a 30-page paper in grad school about why it’s an amazing learning tool. I used it regularly when I taught (see image below). So it was with sadness and anger that I read Microsoft’s announcement this week that Flip would be sunsetted and rolled into Microsoft Teams. It joins Google Jamboard as yet another amazing learning tool that will no longer be available to educators. Not because educators didn’t love and use the platform, but because it didn’t serve the strategic goals of a large corporation. This lack of alignment deserves to be considered by K12 educators and edtech creators.

My students loved flip. They were making a team video in this pic using “recording boxes” I built so we could use Flip in a large group setting.

After all, it’s been a big month for “free” K12 edtech. Khan Academy announced that Khanmigo, their flagship AI tool, will now be free for educators through a new tranche of funding and compute offered by (wouldn’t you know it!) Microsoft. The same Microsoft that just gutted Flip. So all those administrative tasks you’ve been able to dramatically speed up through amazing 3rd party tools like MagicSchool, Eduaide, Diffit, etc? Those are now fully free. And, oh by the way, because Microsoft/OpenAI is giving funding AND compute, Khan Academy is able to offer all this tooling on GPT4. So not only is it free, it will likely offer better outputs for educators when compared to 3rd party alternatives

The teacher side of me was excited by this news (as was reflected in my Twitter feed). An amazing learning tool was being made available to schools for free! What’s not to like?! The founder side of me was (and is) nervous. But maybe not for the reason you might expect: “Free” comes with a cost in K12.

I’m not talking about the maxim that “when it’s free, you’re the product.” That is mostly true in consumer and B2B markets, but it’s somewhat less true in K12 edtech where strict data privacy laws and agreements ensure that schools own their data. I’m also not talking about the administrative annoyance and opportunity costs of having to manage hundreds of free platforms in a district. Rather, I’m talking about a concept that Ben Kornell and the team at Edtech Insiders wrote about last month: Market distortions:

“Free access to some level of AI will be an ongoing element of BigTech education offerings. This should worry entrepreneurs, investors, and even educators. We have seen this movie before with Learning Management Systems: the entire LMS market of the 2000s sagged under the weight of Google Classroom’s $0 price tag. The result was one-size-fits-all, relatively low-quality LMS offerings all selling for $4-8/student. At this low customer lifetime value, all growth strategies skewed to high volume and limited features….the pattern we have often seen is that a free B- rated product often beats a paid A+ rated product in the education space.  Even if buyers are willing to pay a premium for a “better” offering, how much more than free?”

Put another way, “Free” products propped up by large corporations to serve strategic business interests can put smaller, sometimes better products out of business. With competition stifled, mediocrity follows. Notice that, since Microsoft made Flip free, few other K12 video discussion tools have stood up. This was true even as Flip skyrocketed to become one of the most used K12 edtech tools. Usually, rapidly growing products invite fast followers. As an example, I LOVE my Hokas….and now almost every other major shoe brand has their own version of them. This same dynamic hasn’t played out in the K12 video discussion platform market because competitors can’t compete with free. And, as an executive at a major K12 edtech company responded when I suggested someone should build a new Flip: “After 12 years of giving it away, I'd be afraid that MSFT has trained the market not to value this kind of product.”

You may be thinking to yourself: “That’s fine, we’re getting great products for free, who cares if there’s competition! I’m a teacher, I’m resource-strapped!” That’s a fair reaction. I still have that reaction. But that laissez-faire attitude can come back to bite us when the people actually funding the tools decide it’s no longer in their interest to do so. They’re offering the service to serve their interests, not yours. And when they pull the plug, there may not be many great alternatives for a while because they were all put out of business by “free.”

It seems we may be headed in this direction with K12 Administrative AI tools. The offerings of Eduaide, MagicSchool, Diffit, etc are incredible. They’re made by current and former educators dedicated to building incredible learning products to serve teachers. But in the short term, their intentions of serving teachers may be no match for the market share, data collection, social good marketing spin, or myriad of other intentions of BigTech like Microsoft that can casually throw millions of dollars and compute at a free version of all of these tools. At the risk of throwing stones in a glass house, I don’t see how the new startups (who actually are dedicated to serving teachers) compete with a completely free version of their product. In the meantime, I find bravery in their bravado.

Again, teachers and schools may not care. Those tools are now free and, arguably, better because they’re running on more advanced foundation models. But in 10 years, if and when Microsoft or the foundations funding Khan Academy decide that offering this free product no longer serves their purposes, they might decide to stop funding Khamigo. And all the sudden, educators may be left out to dry with few suitable alternatives because they were all put out of business by "free.” Good luck getting schools to care about that, though, when that might be 10 years off (if ever) and budgets are tight now. 

Maybe when free products are discontinued, the free market will ride in to save the day. This happened when the Gates Foundation spent $100M to build InBloom in 2013, a free single sign-on and edtech administrative hub for districts. Like many free, foundation-driven offerings, it failed. And in its place swooped Clever, one of the most successful and beloved platforms in K12. It’s telling that the day Flip announced it was being sunsetted, Padlet announced they would be adding new Flip-like features soon. Maybe this is just the ebb-and-flow of the completely bonkers K12 edtech market. Maybe it’s proof that free products suppress competition and lead to lower-quality offerings for teachers (why didn’t Padlet have these features before?) Who knows.

The insight here, at least for me, is that products serve the people that fund them. If schools are the primary folks funding a product, that's who the product will serve. If venture capitalists or philanthropic foundations or large corporations and shareholders are the primary funders…well, then that's who the products will serve. Sometimes their interests might align with teachers and schools. And when they do, magic can happen. But as we saw with Flip this week and other products before it, they often don’t. And when they don’t, educators are the ones left out to dry.

As K12 edtech creators, I think the best way for us to align with schools is to be primarily funded by them through a paid product. But that’s incredibly difficult to pull off when “free” is taken as a matter of course.