Industry Critique Posts

I've written previously about the technical definition of adaptive learning and about why most platforms don't meet it. This post applies that framework to the three biggest brands in the space — Pearson, Coursera, and Khan Academy — and looks at what each actually ships in production. The conclusion isn't subtle. None of them clears the technical bar. The reasons are different in each case, and they're worth understanding because they predict where the category goes next.

The single largest cost line for traditional edtech companies is content production. Kaplan, Princeton Review, Wiley, Pearson, Cengage, McGraw-Hill, ETS — all spend roughly the same amount per training module, and have for decades. The number is between $10,000 and $50,000 per domain (where "domain" means a single certification exam, a single textbook chapter, or a single training course), and it covers a subject-matter expert's time, an editorial pass, accuracy review, item-writer effort, multimedia production, and platform integration.

I want to spend a few thousand words pulling the word "adaptive" apart, because it's been so thoroughly abused by edtech marketing that the category has become functionally meaningless. Every platform with a quiz engine and a question bank now claims to be adaptive. Some of them have a difficulty slider that nudges easier or harder based on recent correctness. A handful do a little Bayesian Knowledge Tracing under the hood. One or two have actually built something that meets the technical definition. The rest are autocomplete with confetti animations.