Evaluating and Implementing an EdTech Product – Vendors’ Perspective
By Stella Lee
Recently, I had a few enlightening conversations with EdTech vendors on their experiences engaging with prospective and existing clients, what they identified as useful information to know from the organizations, and how to get the most out of an EdTech product. The following is a summary of their collective wisdom about evaluating and implementing EdTech from the suppliers’ perspective.
Understanding the Why – Many vendors spoke about the need to really understand why you need an EdTech product or to switch from your existing one. Finding your strategic pain means that you need to dig deep into your problems and uncover hidden opportunities. Conduct an organization-wide needs assessment, develop a business case and L&D strategy that articulate how the introduction of an EdTech product can support both.
Think beyond the Request for Proposal (RFP) – While an RFP is a requirement by government agencies and public sector organizations, it can become a generic laundry list encompassing far too many functions and features without prioritization. Vendors I spoke to mentioned that a good RFP submission takes time and resources to prepare, and it is challenging to have it stand out amid hundreds of learning solutions. As a result, many good vendors shy away from participating in this process.
If you do go through the RFP evaluation process, consider the inclusion of use cases so that vendors can position their products to be directly aligned with your needs.
Build Relationships with Vendors - It is helpful to establish relationships with a few vendors by having some in-depth conversations prior to product demo sessions. Set up calls to cover the basics such as your organization’s missions and goals, how you envision the EdTech product will support them, what are the current tech stack and infrastructure at your organization, and share any relevant information and use cases if you can. During and post implementation, you should ask for a dedicated account representative who you can communicate with directly, rather than submitting trouble tickets and sending emails to different people in the vendor team.
Plan for Implementation – To plan for implementation means that you are involving the relevant stakeholders and resources to make strategic decisions in your rollout plan. While cloud-based technology means that vendors are doing the heavy lifting, there are many questions that need answers internally. For example, what learning data to migrate (e.g. employee development records, previous training materials and content, competency frameworks), what needs to be configured and customized, what other systems need integration with, how to communicate the change, and what training and support will be provided to end users. If any of these questions are unanswered, it could potentially bottleneck, misguide, or even derail the implementation.
Evaluating Support – How important is support to you and what kind of support do you need during and post implementation? Do you prefer speaking to a human agent over the phone or are you comfortable interacting with a chat bot for troubleshooting? Will you be providing your own help desk or will you rely on the vendor for that? Typically, there are levels of responsiveness for support and you will need to balance the cost with the timeliness of responses. In addition, as part of vendor communication and support, understand how the vendor escalates trouble tickets if they cannot resolve issues quickly and what are the average turnaround times for different levels of support. That way, you can manage your expectations when choosing a support package.
Take a Test Drive – You don’t buy a car without taking it for a test drive. Buying an EdTech product should be no different. You need to actually use the system to get a feel of the user experience - which functions are relevant to your work and how does the system perform to meet your organizations’ needs. Most EdTech vendors provide a “sandbox” (sometimes they are called a trial environment or trial site) for prospective clients to explore. A sandbox is typically a generic instance of a particular system without customization or configuration, allowing you to test the functionalities of the platform. This is also the time and place to apply your use cases and see if the platform will actually meet the requirements. However, keep in mind that sandboxes are often a simplified version of the actual product with some of the functions turned off (or it is simply not possible to use certain functions without populating user data), so manage your expectations about what you can and cannot test in a sandbox.
EdTech is a significant investment that will change your organizational culture and impact your workforce. There are mutual benefits that result from aligning your EdTech selection and implementation with the vendors' perspectives.