As part of our ongoing project examining how the use of EdTech in schools can ameliorate or reinforce social and educational inequalities, we secured additional funding to speak directly with EdTech companies. Through this process we have been able to learn more about the motivations, perspectives, and experiences of EdTech developers, including how they approach designing for equity and what kinds of collaboration and evidence they would like from researchers. These conversations have been invaluable as we begin creating Open Educational Resources aimed at supporting the creation of more equity-focused EdTech.
Isabel Goddard and Liam Bekirsky
Having developed a clearer understanding of the UK EdTech market, we recruited 33 EdTech companies to participate in interviews, most of which involved founders or senior developers. The interviews aimed to explore how EdTech companies approach the design of their technologies; from initial ideation through to development, and ongoing adaption and refinement. Our sample broadly reflected our earlier market mapping, with the majority of companies focused on providing curriculum resources.
Participants tended to describe design as an ongoing, iterative process, with three key themes emerging. First, initial design ideas were frequently shaped by perceived gaps or shortcomings in the current educational system. Second, although feedback from schools was considered important for refining and improving products, companies varied significantly in how they collected this feedback and the degree to which they acted on it. Finally, academic research was often framed as not tailored enough to inform on the ground design decisions.
Many participants explained that their products were created to address gaps in existing educational provision, which they often attributed to inadequate school funding and limited resources. For example, one founder described creating pre-recorded maths tutorials to be used in classrooms during periods of teacher shortage—a challenge they perceived to be especially common in rural areas of the UK. Inspiration for EdTech development also stemmed from first-hand experience in the education sector. If the founders themselves did not have a teaching background, other team members typically did. As a result, participants noted that academic research rarely informed their initial design intentions, which was often considered too removed from practice or unhelpful in its focus or the way it is was written up. Instead, the process was largely shaped by the personal knowledge of the founder and their team, supplemented in some cases by input from stakeholders such as investors or business partners. Decisions were carefully balanced against financial and technical feasibility, as well as market demand.
The types of research considered most valuable were those that provided evidence for pedagogic techniques around which the founders had designed the EdTech product, such as retrieval practice, as well as studies that offered broadly generalisable insights. In other words, research that could directly support or justify design choices in a way that was applicable across diverse educational contexts. Many of the founders and developers expressed an interest in collaborating with academic researchers to evaluate the efficacy of their products, but noted that limited funding posed a significant challenge, as explicated by Clark-Wilson et al. (2021):
The problem lies in the fact that those that develop edtech (edtech enterprises), those that research edtech (academia) and those that use edtech (users – teachers/learners/parents) operate in silos, and information regarding how to demonstrate impact, on what to demonstrate the impact, and for whom, is not accessible enough to create truly impactful educational technologies (…) However, the prerequisite is always funding, which either comes from the businesses themselves or from traditional research funding routes, both of which exclude small to medium-sized businesses.
Founders and developers also saw evaluation studies of the products themselves as valuable from a commercial standpoint, serving as a potential means of enhancing credibility and marketability. Several companies conducted internal A/B tests to prove the efficacy of their products to potential customers while others had invested in external evaluations, sometimes from a university team. In addition to tangible metrics, companies also relied heavily on reputation and word of mouth to increase sales. Products were typically marketed directly to schools, with teacher networks and informal recommendations frequently cited as key drivers of adoption. As such, feedback from schools played a crucial role in the design process and was gathered through a range of methods, from ad-hoc conversations with teachers to more systematic approaches such as surveys and workshops. Design iterations were commonly informed by this feedback, although the extent to which companies acted on this information varied. Some noted that they occasionally resisted proposed changes from teachers and students, preferring to rely on other forms of evidence. Others perceived a general consistency in student needs across contexts and concluded that substantial modifications were seldom necessary. Despite these variations, it is noteworthy that these companies were engaged to some degree in obtaining teacher knowledge and experience, something that can often be lacking in discussions around appropriate and useful research evidence for EdTech (Eynon et al., 2025).
The degree to which EdTech companies incorporated feedback into product design was also influenced by financial constraints and market demands. Changes that might appear relatively straightforward – such as editing the wording of a question – were, in some cases, reported as resource-intensive, particularly for small teams that needed to implement updates manually. Where companies emphasised the importance of aligning their products with the curriculum, some adopted processes in which all questions were circulated among a group of teachers for proofreading and evaluation. Some of the most marketable EdTech services directly addressed the pressing demands facing schools in tangible ways. This often included test preparation materials such as GCSE practice questions or maths problems tailored to a student’s particular needs that could be shown to improve average student scores. Overall, the interviews highlighted that for these EdTech companies, the initial design and decisions about the purpose of the technology is largely shaped by practical knowledge and experience and perceived gaps in the education system, rather than formal research. Once built, school feedback is commonly sought, although the ways in which companies collect and engage with this feedback varies. A smaller proportion reported they would like external evaluations, that tend to be quantitative in nature.
Perhaps influenced by voluntary participation in the sample, every company expressed an interest in equity-informed EdTech, stressing the importance of designing fairer technologies for education. This will be the focus of our next post. Supporting collaboration between EdTech developers and researchers, alongside improving access to funding for evidence-informed design, where evidence is appropriately broad, is an important part of this goal.
References:
Clark-Wilson et al. (2021). Supporting small and medium-sized enterprises in the educational technology sector to become more research-minded: Introduction to a small collection, Research for All 5(1), 5–15. https://doi.org/10.14324/RFA.05.1.02
Eynon, R., Couceiro, L. and Hakimi, L. (2025). Reconfiguring EdTech Evidence: Response to the open call for evidence from the EdTech Evidence Board. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/gub9z_v1
Funding acknowledgement:
This research was supported by the University of Oxford’s Social Sciences Division and funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF).
Photo by freepik.com.