Popular lesson-sharing website Teachers Pay Teachers first landed on Jenny Kay Dupuis' radar a little over a year ago. Friends and social media users brought to her attention that images and footage were taken from one of her children's books, I Am Not a Number, about a young Indigenous girl who was sent to boarding school in Canada and was based on her grandmother's experience were making their way into paid tuition on the side they had never seen before.
Teachers Pay Teachers
Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT) offers the world's largest marketplace for teachers Share teaching materials and access easy-to-use digital tools. Today TpT is over 7 million users create and host more than 5 million teacher-created educational offerings Resources. When looking for a resource, 50% of teachers look for it online website directly. With such a large proportion of users searching, TpT has an urgent need for a high-performing search engine on its website.
Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT), the platform used by 85% of US teachers to access millions of teacher-created learning resources, today announced its acquisition of Bakpax, a tool that reads students' handwriting and text input and Tasks graded in seconds.
The Bakpax technology and the team that developed it will power Easel by TPT, which enables educators to deliver engaging lessons using interactive, digital resources from TPT's community of teacher authors. Launched in Spring 2021, Easel by TPT makes it simple and easy for busy educators to prepare, teach, assign and assess students in today's modern classroom.
Does The End Justify The Means?
Earlier this week I sat down at the gym to catch up on one of my favorite podcasts. I hadn't heard from the last guest, but part of the description focused on teacher resources and "fairness in sharing". I noticed that, so I turned it on and got on the treadmill.
To my dismay, the podcast took a turn that caused me to pause for a minute. The speaker was what some refer to as an edu CEO — a person who left the classroom to start a business with the goal of supporting teachers. This special guest sang the praises of the Teachers Pay Teachers education marketplace.
Having listened to this podcast series before, and knowing that many of the previous guests had been victims of copyright infringement that Teachers Pay Teachers so often seem to miss about the products they benefit from, I expected that the host would give a clue question or two for this TPT champion. But the challenge never came.
As the podcast continued, topics such as promoting your business, dealing with the "echo chamber" of negativity, and how paying teachers by teachers is a tool for justice (I pulled an eye muscle on this one) were addressed.
As a recovering TPT seller, I know how rampant intellectual property abuse is on the platform, so I was shocked by this clear tendency to encourage resource creation using the intellectual work of others without permission.
As a simple example of what I mean, I just searched The 40 Book Challenge on Teachers Pay Teachers. This is an idea, for those who don't know, introduced by Donalyn Miller in her fantastic book, The Book Whisperer. The search returned over 1000 hits selling various graphic organizers and other creations, all bearing the 40 Book Challenge name. They often cite Donalyn herself as the creator (one even called her "Carolyn" Miller).
Sharing Our Work Is Good
The concept of teachers pay teachers isn't all bad. The argument that teachers need ways to share resources and perhaps even benefit from the work they CREATE is credible, even valuable.
The concern I have is that educators are looking for Teachers Pay Teachers and the reasonably affordable products they offer without giving much thought to who created the original work - whether someone else's genius made it possible for these TPT sellers to create packages, Handouts and super cute to create worksheets.
And what it means when we don't support the writers and thought leaders who have taken the time -- in the classroom and at the desk -- to figure out and share what's working.
In this discussion it is often pointed out that teachers need support, they need resources and not enough time to do everything they need. I agree, and never more than this year. I'm pretty skinny myself, and I'm tempted sometimes.
I've stumbled upon Teachers Pay Teachers in the past for some quick ideas to just get started tomorrow. What I haven't done is pretend that this is what's best for my students or my practice.
The Heinemann blog post on copyrighted language revisions mentioned in Donalyn Miller's tweet above specifically cites "teachers pay teachers" as a concern.
The Challenge
Demanding users of TpT must quickly find the needle in the haystack. Demanding users, large catalog, better filters and facets. As a marketplace with a wide catalogue, TpT's biggest challenge is connecting users to the right content. User queries usually return thousands of results, especially since TpT users are very experienced and looking for very specific resources.
TpT's teams must ensure that users have all the facets and filters they need to refine their search and get relevant results in a few clicks. The team at TpT used Sphinx, an open source solution that has been backed by a full-fledged search team for the last 5-7 years. The company had to switch to a more modern search engine.
In addition to the above requirements for a new search solution, scalability and performance were critical as Sphinx had already proven unreliable during peak sales periods. Merely improving the user experience was also key to ensuring smooth interactions with buyers.
The Results
After implementing Algolia, Teachers Pay Teachers was happy that their efforts were rewarded. They saw a 2% increase in conversion rate - which is very significant in their case - as well as an increase in click through rate. They also measured improvement in search efficiency — the time it takes a user from initial search to checkout: more users were able to get what they wanted in 5 minutes or 5 queries or less.
As a result, TpT sellers were happier and their buyers were able to see more relevant resources. Perhaps most importantly, Algolia has helped improve the user experience by allowing engineering teams to focus on the user rather than search systems. Engineers can make changes quickly and iterate their future strategy faster (faceting, indexing, and synonyms, to name a few).