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. ...