Most Students Don’t Even Pay Attention During Lectures

by Justin Skycak on February 09, 2024

A startup spent months building a sophisticated lecture tool and raising over half a million dollars in investments -- but after observing students in the lecture hall, they completely abandoned the product and called up their investors to return the money.

This post is part of the book The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning (Working Draft, Jan 2024). Suggested citation: Skycak, J., advised by Roberts, J. (2024). Most Students Don't Even Pay Attention During Lectures. In The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning (Working Draft, Jan 2024). https://justinmath.com/most-students-dont-even-pay-attention-during-lectures/

As he details in a 2018 interview, Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of the customer data platform Segment, learned the hard way that most students aren’t even paying attention during lecture.

According to Reinhardt, Segment’s original product was actually a classroom lecture tool:

"The idea was to give students this button to push to say, "I'm confused." The professor would get this graph over time of how confused the students were. We thought it was a really cool idea. We were college students at the time and we had a bunch of professors who were excited about it at MIT and elsewhere. ... [W]e talked to like 20 other professors and they were all excited about it."

However, despite all the excitement from professors, when testing the tool in an actual classroom at Boston University, it was a total disaster – not because the tool didn’t work, but because the students weren’t even paying attention to what the professor was saying.

Instead, most students were either partially or fully engrossed with scrolling through Facebook. The lecture was, effectively, just a charade: the students weren’t even passively learning; they were just sitting there doing other stuff.

"It was just a total disaster. All the students opened their laptops and they all went straight to Facebook.

The way we discovered this is we were standing in the black of the classroom and just counting laptop screens. We'd be looking over the shoulders of the students and going one, two, three and we discovered at the beginning of class, about 60% of the students were on Facebook and by the end about 80% were on Facebook. Oh my God.
...
Standing in the back of a BU classroom. It was an anthropology class. And I remember arriving at the 60% and the 80% and we went up and apologized to the professor and walked out."

The situation seemed so hopeless that – despite having gone through an months-long startup incubator program, building out a highly sophisticated product consisting of hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and raising over half a million dollars in investments literally a week before – they completely abandoned the product and called up their investors to return the investment money.

"We went through the whole YC [Y Combinator startup incubator] with this idea. Built it out. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Super-complicated classroom lecture tool product. It had presentation view and people could ask questions. It was very complicated. We actually even raised money at Demo Day with this idea. About [$]600K.
...
We had just gotten wires for these checks, for this money, literally a week before. We called back all the investors and we were like, 'Well, it turns out this is a terrible idea. So what do you want us to do with the money?' Almost all of them said, well, we invested for the team so go find something else."

As fate would have it, most of the investors were willing to retain the investment if the team pivoted to solving a more promising problem – so the team pivoted to building a web analytics tool that would help other developers avoid this kind of catastrophe by getting a better understanding of how users were behaving on their apps.

"We realized, we should have been able to figure out some of this analysis by not just standing in the back of the classroom. Like, we should have been able to see some of this digitally. You couldn't see it in the analytics metrics at all. We decided, hey, let's build an analytics tool."

Reference

Y Combinator (2018). Peter Reinhardt on Finding Product Market Fit at Segment.