Scaling EdTech: A Business Development Perspective
For institutional EdTech businesses to scale, business development must revolve around proving efficacy as a large-scale intervention. The key here is that any government-led regional instalment of EdTech products will be a policy decision and not a purely pedagogical one.
One reason pedagogy seems very fragmented and teaching methods differ greatly from teacher to teacher is in academia’s pursuit of novelty — particularly in learning/teaching methodology. When your goal is inventing a new method that is more effective than the baseline method, your research project will need to ensure that the methodology is strictly enforced. For that, you likely need someone who’s already very invested in understanding the methodology — a colleague, or even the very author of the research project. This level of methodological enforcement is very difficult to achieve in the real world, unless you have the budget for extensive training as well as in-term audit. It is also likely that teachers participating in the study exhibit a bias in terms of their general passion in improving their teaching. Simply put, it’s all far too optimistic.
If you want a real impact on the education of a generation, you can’t simply target the best and most passionate teachers. Your product needs to be used by the average teacher, and still prove effective in improving students’ outcome even with less-than-ideal usage pattern. Your product is going to be a catalyst in the classroom chemistry, but it can’t be the chemical reaction.
This approach has a lot of implications in product management. Usability and accessibility will have to be prioritised over strict adherence to the latest advancement in pedagogical science. Mental model and working routine of the average teacher takes the front seat, with novel inspirations at the back. This is all due to the fact that you can’t enforce usage in real life scenario, which you might be able to do in your lab. There’s always the default alternative, that is, to teach the old way without using your product. It’s been tried and tested. Teachers will feel more confident and less vulnerable in class. It’s so tempting to stay in the comfort zone, exactly because teaching is important in shaping students’ future. Usage is everything.
That is not to say that your product should ignore pedagogy. Rather, your product should be the glue that binds reality to the ideal. Great software can subtly guide people towards best practices — sometimes without even noticing. If you want to change the world, you have to recognise the status quo.
