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*Photo courtesy of Alex Colby
Today I would like to talk about the outdoor classroom. The start of the school year has come with a lot of conversations around pods, and remote learning, but what about the outdoor classrooms that are popping up? From elementary schools to university campuses, outdoor classrooms have been constructed under tents and trees. Reopening policies in most states call for at least six feet between students or fewer than 11 persons in a classroom. With an average K-12 class size in America of 31, to make reopening work, most schools have taken to outside.
Yesterday in a conversation with a growth investor who focuses on edtech we talked about the trends responding to COVID that have lasting power and which will go away after we go back to traditional models of instruction. Even though building outdoor classrooms seems like a temporary thing that we will do while we wait for the virus to pass, I believe there is actually going to be a huge investment in them and their infrastructure for at least the next few years.
Why?
Well, clearly schools and students want to meet IRL badly. So badly they have jumped the gun many times to do so.
But, the reason I think that schools, and specifically universities, are about to spend big on outdoor classrooms is because schools can’t justify charging full tuition rates for remote learning. The market no longer will allow it. Colleges and universities will be willing to pay to roll out outdoor classrooms because it helps them charge full tuition prices, and gives students the on-campus experience they have been waiting for.
So, what is the tech stack for an outdoor classroom?
Structure A Google search for outdoor classrooms immediately results in a list of tent and modular structure companies who have skinned their homepages to be the “Outdoor Classroom Solutions.” Tents and canopy structures run around $7,500 each.
Audio and visual Most university professors are used to auditoriums giving them the ability to project to a large group of students. With classrooms moving outside, professors and teachers have to compete with a lot more noise. All these classrooms thus need audio equipment and visual solutions for projecting slides or video. Essentially everything that conference organizers pop up to put on an event can be repurposed for the outdoor classroom and seeing as how every conference everywhere has been canceled, this is a great opportunity for event vendors to pivot to a new target audience.
Distance Learning Platforms At the end of the day weather is going to get in the way and not all students are going to feel comfortable coming back to in-person learning, so every class that meets outside, also has to be fully accessible via remote learning tools.
To be clear, the $$$ opportunity here for vendors is B2I - selling directly into the institutions willing to make an upfront investment to preserve their schools community and their full tuition fees. Beyond this market opportunity, outdoor classrooms can be a great equalizer for K-12 students who don’t have access to the internet. Because of bureaucratic restrictions, it’s very hard for public schools to make the switch to outdoor learning, so interested tech solutions should focus their efforts on the private and higher-ed spaces.