KEY INFORMATION
| Location | Remote/ Event in Rome |
| Start date | September 2022 |
| Status | In progress |
| Client | Jacobs Foundation |
| Partners | University College London, Leanlab Education and Itec KU Leuven. |
BACKGROUND
Although the education sector has been designing and evaluating educational technologies (EdTechs) since the 1970s, there are no systematic studies that have documented and evaluated the different methodologies for EdTech “testbed” design. Consequently, EdTech testbeds operate as “black boxes” with many of the processes and products rendered invisible to external audiences. Alongside, the diverse and sometimes competing goals for EdTech testbeds leads to varying metrics for their evaluation. Most are rightly concerned with evaluating the impacts of the particular EdTech on its beneficiaries, rather than evaluating the EdTech testbed approach adopted. However, there is a growing body of expertise and interest to unlock this black box as a means to better understand the diversity of goals, testbed design methods, stakeholders, funding models, timelines, and timescales etc.
AIM OF THE PROJECT
The symposium convenes an invited group of EdTech researchers, CSOs, policy leaders and practitioners to synthesise existing models for EdTech Testbeds in high, medium, and low resource contexts. A structured set of workshops, discussions and invited inputs will be designed and offered by the project management team and a final report that both maps the landscape and summarises key features of different Testbed models will be produced, alongside the specification for an EdTech Testbed Design Toolkit for Global Stakeholders.
RESOURCES
- Report:
- The report is a collaboration between authors from:
– Itec, imec research group at KU Leuven, Belgium
– Open Development & Education (UK and Sierra Leone)
– Swiss EdTech Collinder, Switzerland
– UCL IOE Faculty of Education and Society, University College University College London, UK
– Leanlab Education, USA - The organisers
- Global EdTech website
