By Stella Lee

Education Technology (edtech) has the potential to transform the way we design, deliver, and track learning, improve learning and performance outcomes, and support overarching business goals. With the rich variety of edtech products available in the marketplace from virtual reality platforms to the more recent generative AI applications, there is no better time than now to implement. However, edtech procurement is an expensive endeavor, and its adoption is full of challenges and stumbling blocks. To help you navigate this process, I suggest the following five guiding principles:

1. Start with Why – If your edtech product doesn’t add value to the users and to the business, it will fail miserably. Start your project by examining the “why” – define the problem you are attempting to solve. Is the problem crucial to the business’s missions and strategies? How does the introduction of the edtech product help solve the problem? Not only are there times when technology is not a solution to the problem, it might even exacerbate the problem or address the wrong problem (imagine having to participate in online training to use a new expense system when the usability of the system itself is the problem).

2. Ethics Needs to be in the Forefront - How does this product collect, process, analyze, and store data? What assumptions is the product making about the users? Do users have consent about how their data is being used? If you are implementing AI-powered edtech products, how do you detect and mitigate biases, and to ensure transparency in the system? These and many other related ethical questions and safeguarding practices need to be considered at the start of your project.  If you wait to address ethics half-way through implementation or post-launch, chances are that it will be costly because you may have to reconfigure the product to be compliant with your data privacy policies and ethical guidelines. Worse yet, you might find the product does not adhere to ethical standards and have to forgo the product altogether.

3. Technology is Pedagogy – We need to ensure that edtech is implemented for a specific purpose and not for the sake of the latest and greatest technology itself.  However, the type of technology you choose will inevitably shape the pedagogy you use. For example, chatbots are used as a conversational agent in interacting with learners. Learners ask chatbots questions, get responses, and in turn learners can probe deeper to spark more detailed and divergent responses, as well as get individualized help. This form of technology assumes the framework of active and self-regulated learning (SRL) in which learners take on a central role of shaping their learning journey (as opposed to accessing learning content from an LMS where the content is doled out to the users in a didactic format).

4. Engage Your Target Users – Never implement an edtech product without knowing and listening to your intended users. First of all, do you know who they are? Is this intended for internal users (staff-facing) or external users (customer-facing)? For internal users, are there multiple targets such as learning designers, content experts, managers, learners, etc. Their needs and interaction with the product might be vastly different. Similarly, with external users, you also need to know the different segments – new clients, channel partners, returning customers, and so on. Presuming that you have access to your users, include them in the loop before you implement your edtech solution. Ideally, they should form part of your stakeholder group during the product selection and procurement process. Get them to test the product and provide feedback. You want to make sure that you are solving the right problem for the right target users.

5. Change management methodology needs to be integrated - Finally, the last principle concerns the nature of change. As a general rule, people resist change. This is particularly true now when digital transformation projects are a dime a dozen and people are suffering from “change fatigue”. The adoption of any technology at the enterprise level will impact the workflow and the culture of an organization. What change management strategies have you put in place? How do you communicate this to your end users so they will care? Remember that edtech is just a tool, and a tool alone cannot remediate or impact learning. You need the buy-in and the ongoing adoption of your target users to make lasting improvements to the learning experience.

Implementing the right edtech solution can have tremendous payoff to the organization and positive learning impact to the end users. It is worth investing the time and resources to consider the above principles as a starting point