Picture this: Your student just binged three episodes of their favorite show, completely absorbed for hours. Then they try to start their math homework…and immediately start scrolling TikTok.
This isn’t a story about short attention spans or lazy kids. This is about what students have learned to expect from their screen time—and we’ve been setting them up for disappointment.
Before joining Subject as our Senior Accreditation Manager, Sarah Vargas spent ten years in classrooms, followed by leadership roles across four different education technology companies. She’s watched this transformation happen in real time, and she knows what works to respond to it.
Online multimedia courses have historically been lower-quality because of lack of production budget, technical limitations, and the need to serve core standards above all else. Video courses simply haven’t kept pace with online entertainment or social media, so student attention goes elsewhere.
Vargas strongly believes that online courseware can and should be as exciting as the latest Netflix drop (minus the cliffhangers that leave you questioning your life choices at 2 AM). She knows what is important about designing for educators: courses that earn student attention instead of demanding it.
Think about that for a second. Students judge educational content using the exact same mental framework they use for everything else they watch.
If it looks boring or feels outdated, it won’t work for today’s students. It’s like showing up to a job interview in sweatpants—you might be brilliant, but nobody’s sticking around to find out.
The Production Gap That’s Losing Students
Students spend hours consuming incredibly sophisticated content on their phones. Then they click into school courses that are either text-based or look like they were filmed in a cement room circa 2014. The disconnect is jarring.
“Some competitors are still offering courses that they offered a decade ago,” Vargas explains with frustration. “Students don’t learn the same way. The content from 10 years ago looks old.”
Teachers are always looking for ways to supplement core curricula and drive active engagement in the classroom. When online courseware gets involved, the content delivery approach should not assume students will pay attention just because they’re supposed to. Today’s students have been trained by TikTok, YouTube, and Netflix to expect content that grabs their attention through compelling stories, quality visuals, and interactive elements—not PowerPoints that look like they survived Y2K.
Schools are in a tough spot. Content that satisfies state standards and compliance is always going to be top priority. Yet anyone who has been forced to deliver dry lectures at the front of a classroom knows how presentation affects learning outcomes. Perfect curriculum becomes worthless if students tune out after thirty seconds.
The Three Questions For Assessing New Educational Content
The educators with the best curriculum have figured out how to make the classroom as exciting as pure online entertainment. They know learning happens when engagement meets instruction. This requires serving three groups at once: students, teachers, and administrators.
But how do you actually get that magic combination? Educators make changes on their own, field multiple “revolutionary” technology pitches per week (usually from companies that think gamification means adding confetti animations), and also have to integrate new processes into their schools. When thinking about these changes, educators can and should take a step back to ask a few questions:
1. Would kids actually choose to watch this?
This is your Netflix test. Strip away the “because it’s required” factor. Would students voluntarily engage with this lesson, online or in-person, the same way they choose TikTok videos?
At Subject, Vargas explains how they design courses to feel like streaming shows: “Our courses aren’t broken down by the year they were released. Ours are seasons like Netflix.”
This turns individual lessons into episodes of a larger adventure. Students want to know what happens next. A math course might follow detectives solving cases that require algebra. Science becomes exploration stories where students discover concepts through adventure rather than explanation.
“These videos are really entertaining, and they’re short. Kids don’t get bored,” Vargas says, since it’s all professional content with storylines that students would watch even when they don’t have to.
2. Does this make the teacher’s job easier?
This is where a lot of “engaging” content falls apart. It looks great but creates a nightmare for teachers to actually use. You need content that captures attention without requiring a computer science degree.
Teachers have reported spending 57 hours a week working, with more than half that time devoted to administrative duties that take away from crucial teaching time. The teacher shouldn’t have to suffer from a new technology, process, or curriculum that even Indiana Jones would find tricky. In fact, new content should work seamlessly within existing classroom workflows and ease a teacher’s administrative burden.
3. Can the school principal prove this works?
School administrators live and die by data. They need proof that engaging content actually improves learning outcomes, not just entertainment value.
Media-quality curriculum—think professionally produced video content with Hollywood-level production values instead of someone’s basement webcam setup— provides detailed analytics about student interaction, completion rates, and comprehension that traditional textbooks simply can’t match. Districts can demonstrate return on investment through both engagement metrics and actual learning results.
When you feel new curriculum satisfies these three crucial questions, you’ll have aligned incentives. Student engagement actually improves teacher satisfaction and administrative outcomes.
Everyone wins.
(Except maybe the companies still selling courses that look like they were made when we all collected Beanie Babies and Tamagotchis).
New Technologies Raise Personalization Bar
In the past, teachers worked through the same curriculum every year because it was what worked and it was too much to re-design lesson plans every summer—plus, we all need some time to work on our sun tans. However, students now expect algorithmically customized content. (Thanks a lot, Netflix!) Educational providers need to deliver similar personalization while maintaining core standards.
“Things are developing into something very student driven,” Vargas says. “We’ll see a time when we don’t have static courses like we’ve had before.” This evolution requires that curriculum providers maintain engaging curriculum while adapting content difficulty and pacing to individual student needs—basically becoming the Spotify of education without the monthly subscription drama.
AI integration will enable real-time content customization based on how students interact and learn, and teachers are working to keep up with new AI technologies and pedagogy. The challenge lies in integrating AI without over-relying on it. (we’re not ready for our robot overlords to teach fractions just yet!) Though AI can help with content differentiation for individual student needs, the curriculum itself still needs to be strong.
Academic integrity becomes more complex as AI tools become ubiquitous. The challenge lies in distinguishing between students using AI as a learning aid versus having AI do the work entirely—it’s like trying to figure out if they actually understand photosynthesis or just asked ChatGPT to explain it while they grabbed a PopTart.
Meeting Attention Shift Alongside Core Standards
Students evaluate educational content using the same rubric they apply to everything else they watch. Stop assuming they’ll pay attention because they have to.
State standards and compliance requirements are always top of mind, but any curriculum provider should see them as an opportunity. “States want to see new creative ways to meet their educational requirements,” Vargas observes. The best new classroom content emerges from solving both entertainment and education challenges simultaneously.
Content that engages students should simultaneously make teachers more effective and give administrators measurable results. This creates a virtuous cycle where everyone benefits from the same improvements.
For educators, it may feel daunting to tackle major technological changes in your curriculum planning. High-quality video production in online courses only matters when student engagement, efficiency for teachers, and measurable outcomes are top of mind. Curriculum providers make promises, but educators are still the experts on what works best in the classroom.
No matter how many buzzword bingo cards vendors bring to meetings.