“The EdTech market is completely opaque”

Despite explosive growth in edtech spending, there’s still very little that’s known about which educational products actually work. “The market is completely opaque,” says Sierra Noakes, project director of the marketplace initiative at the nonprofit Digital Promise.

 

Several nonprofits including Digital Promise have tried to collect data about edtech products to provide educators a way to make smart decisions regarding tech. Without it, they’re worried that the billions of dollars flowing into edtech may be creating a dysfunctional marketplace where schools don’t know the effectiveness or usefulness of the products they’re buying.

As has long been the case, EdTech clearly offers the promise of advanced digital tools to supply, support, and enhance learning. But somehow the promise seems to involve a very broad market or field, with multitudes of separate solutions unable to find a center or hub or connecting point to “bring them all together”. And while, as this article notes, EdTech venture cap funding has increased, the really big players have yet to “step up” with standards and some form of “universal platform”.

With no center to define systems and products, the school boards across the nation are not able to move ahead with the sort of investment they are capable of, even when LFH experiments during the pandemic have seemingly required it. If a business model that offered a relatively secure ROI was possible, BigTech, and school districts in partnerships would have abundant capital to create a new EdTech world.

However, we aren’t there, and it’s hard to imagine the way to get there, partly because learning is so complex, and has so many “components” that need to work together, and partly because the technology itself is part of the ongoing communications revolution where change is so very rapid and comprehensive.

How to keep up, or get ahead of the waves of change? It would certainly be good for the future of education if a way can be found to enable “the players” to do that. If that’s not doable, then some form of “let a thousand edtech startups bloom” might be the necessary approach.

PSA sees the concepts and practice of “community schools” as one way for “local lean startups” experiments to develop, that at least would be well adapted to specific local environments. No doubt efficiencies of scale are also involved in optimal futures of EdTech and learning, but exactly how to go from the locally embedded MO of learning to the state and national scale, is, as the article states, currently opaque.