Show me the evidence!

By Murray Morrison, founder of Tassomai.

With so many schools investing their resources - and their time - into buying and using Education Technology, it has never been more important for us as an industry to demonstrate our efficacy and impact.

We have always considered our relationships with schools to be collaborative - a partnership - rather than transactional; indeed it is this spirit of partnership with our schools that has allowed Tassomai to learn from our users and develop as a tool over the past few years. And we are proud of the evidence base we have gathered over the years, which allows us not only to measure and communicate the effect we have had in each context, but also to be able to see where the product can be improved and measure the effectiveness of those improvements as we go.

A few months ago, I was discussing the issues around evidence and research in EdTech with some other founders. We all felt that, if the industry did not take steps to set a standard of evidence, transparency and open dialogue with practitioners in the classroom, we risked, as an industry, a damaging loss of faith in edtech as a whole. Unfortunately there are too many examples of products being bought for the wrong reasons or in the wrong contexts; too many cases of companies over-representing the potential of their product; too many unproven claims hiding behind all-too-intoxicating buzzwords.

I am proud to be a founding member of the EdTech Evidence Group - this new initiative seeks to demonstrate by example a new, collegiate, transparent way of discussing what constitutes good evidence, guidelines that might help customers better to evaluate the technology in their schools, and hold ourselves and others to a standard that will see us all - as an industry and as an education nation - benefit.

Click to download a copy of the EdTech Evidence Group’s guide for schools on choosing impactful, evidence based edtech.