We began this project in late 2021 because we all care about an equitable future in edtech. After over a year of work, we’re excited to share what we’ve learned and — we hope — be part of carrying this work forward.
Cross-role collaboration is a key to making edtech design more equitable. Too often, folks in edtech are siloed into roles — designers, educators, students, researchers, funders — and don’t have opportunities to connect, share perspectives, and build common language. Great ideas aren’t shared. Folks understandably burn out.
Designers can’t build equitably for students they never see. Folks of color building products for their own communities deserve access to venture funding to launch their ideas. Researchers’ work is less impactful if no one reads or understands it. Educators are the ones who actually implement edtech, but too often don’t have a chance to share their needs and realities.
Our design sprint launched a prototype, a community of practice that brought together these different stakeholders and asked them to address challenges related to equitable edtech design. Folks told us the connection was inspiring. They came up with new ideas (see our other lessons learned below). And some of them have gone on to launch new projects with each other without our involvement — a sign of the success of the community of practice.
That said, we hope to sustain and grow this community of practice over the next couple of years with renewed support, and for the community to guide the additional work we are planning, described below.
Edtech designers need a single, centralized place to find equitable design strategies and resources. This was an idea developed at our design sprint. While useful equitable design principles exist, and while innovative companies of all sizes are finding new ways to design equitably, there is no unified guidebook or resources edtech designers specifically can look to for strategies.
Thus, we hope to develop a “designer toolkit” that lays out criteria for equitable edtech product design and then provides multiple strategies for reaching each criteria based on a company’s size, resources, and experience. Case studies and examples will show how companies have used these strategies and illustrate positive outcomes.
The community of practice will be key to creating and testing this resource.
If companies are going to change, procurement has to change. But right now, school district procurement officers and departments don’t have the tools to know which products are and aren’t equitably designed. Additionally, procurement folks have lots of other criteria to consider, including interoperability, cost, data privacy, and more.
Three things might help here. One is product and company certifications and diagnostics that could signal to buyers which products were designed equitably (using the designer toolkit described above, for example). Diagnostics could also track a company or product’s progress over time, such that even if a product wasn’t perfectly equitable at the time of purchase, districts could watch for improvement over time. Digital Promise is interested in creating equity product certifications, and Goldstar Education is working on diagnostics.
The second is collaboratives. Groups like the Ed Tech JPA have brought together districts who function with the purchasing power and influence of much larger districts. Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools is a collaborative that often pilots innovations in education and technology. Groups like these could help develop and pilot new procurement processes that prioritize equity while taking into account the existing needs and realities of districts and procurement departments.
The third is policy change. Multiple organizations have made policy change on data privacy, and EdReports made policy change with their red/yellow/green rating system. These changes gave procurement folks the backup they needed to make those considerations deciding factors in purchasing. If states or districts changed policy to make equity a key criterion, procurement departments would only be able to purchase equitable products, and companies would have a powerful incentive to make their products equitable.
We hope that, as we create and pilot the designer toolkit, members of the community of practice will take on some of these ideas to help the toolkit have maximum impact.
We could not have done this work without the support of interviewees, design sprint participants, institutional support from Streetcode Academy and the Stanford d.school, and of course funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
While we’re proud of what we accomplished, our only wish is that we could have included and supported more voices. We look forward to doing so in our continuing work on the path toward more equitable edtech for all.
If you’re interested in a summary of our journey, check out our full deck below:
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