by Anton Krotov, Market Researcher at Skyeng company.
I decided to cultivate a useful habit to write more about the EdTech market that I am daily working with. So, here it comes - my DEV.to blog where I will share all cool stories about education and the world around it.
My first short article is about educational services that struggle to enter the space of streaming services.
In the last five years, education has penetrated and firmly rooted on Youtube — today a lecture from TED or educational video from Vsauce can easily get millions of views while previously it was achievable only for musicians, funny kitties or memes. However, despite this successful conquest, educational content could barely get through the various streaming platforms (like Twitch and others) and currently it remains unnoticed by the general public of these services comparing to video games.
Yes, on Twitch you may find some channels where people do not stream their Fortnite or Dota 2 playthroughs but teach how to code or speak another language. But these channels lack followers and cannot compete with popular educational Youtube channels which can gather millions of subscribers. Here are a few most popular educational (more or less) channels that I could find on Twitch:
DevChatter — a guy, who streams C# coding lessons and has 3.5 thousand followers — https://www.twitch.tv/devchatter
CookingForNoobs — a girl, who streams how to cook various meals. She has 24.5 thousand followers (indeed, more people eat food than write code) — https://www.twitch.tv/cookingfornoobs
The_Widdler — a DJ-guy, who shows how to make electronic music. He got 8.5 thousand followers — https://www.twitch.tv/the_widdler
As you may see, all of them have a pretty modest number of subscribers.
Interestingly, but timid attempts to enter the world of streaming can be found even among Russian EdTech companies. For example, EnglishCraft company offers English lessons for kids through playing Minecraft. Unfortunately, I could not find any news about these guys and it seems like that this business model is pretty far from being robust and scalable.
Nonetheless, the first small step into the streaming space that could potentially be a giant leap for education was recently made by Duolingo — creators of famous green owl announced a partnership with 12 multilingual streamers on Twitch who will help their followers to practice languages while playing. In general, the idea to bring language learning on Twitch seems to be so obvious but there is no right business model for that yet. For now, who knows, maybe Duolingo will become the first company who will break the ice between education and streaming platforms.
Top comments (2)
It's fascinating to see how live streaming platforms are transforming the landscape of education. With live streaming, students from around the world can connect with top educators, attend real-time classes, and participate in discussions as if they were physically present in the classroom.
I hope the Live Video Streaming for Education will be very beneficial for students as they could attend the classes as if they used to attend in traditional class rooms.