Insights from Our Sandbox Portfolio

Meeting people’s needs with EdTech requires a rich understanding of their context and whole experience.

It’s vital to build up a good understanding of people’s lives and circumstances before designing an intervention for them or their children. Find out what people are already dealing with before giving them a new thing to deal with on top.

The more you involve users and participants in the design of an intervention, the more successful it’s likely to be.

When communities are directly involved and engaged in designing and iterating an intervention, they’re more likely to value its success, and it’s more likely to get results. Setting up simple feedback loops about what’s working and what’s not makes it easier to iterate as the work continues. Making use of existing community connections and relationships is particularly helpful.

EdTech enables, connects, and works alongside people: it doesn’t replace them.

EdTech is an excellent catalyst for human interaction. Technology is important, but it’s not necessarily the most important thing. It enables input from teachers, parents, caregivers, family members, and peers that can make a positive difference to learning outcomes.

Technology is never enough on its own; design the service and human interactions that wrap around it.

Consider the ‘end-to-end’ user experience, from the users’ perspective. In most cases, this will mean thinking beyond a particular technology and its initial deployment. It will mean thinking about everything else that users encounter alongside and as part of using the technology.

When working with the lowest-income groups, ensuring equitable access to technology is crucial.

We can’t assume that people have access to the devices or technology they need. We know that the best technology is the technology that people already have, and that introducing new technologies or devices often causes more problems. That said, in low-income communities, “”the tech people already have”” might be very little or none at all. Sometimes it’s essential to provide something new.

Instruction should adapt to make the most of the unique advantages technology can offer.

The Covid-19 pandemic caused problems, but it also created opportunities for new ideas and new thinking. Several sandboxes made it possible to experiment with interactive teaching methods that didn’t simply try to re-create the traditional face-to-face classroom on the internet.

Education provision needs to meet students where they are, sometimes filling non-academic needs first.

Some students, especially those in low-wealth communities, find learning harder simply because they have other things on their minds. Any EdTech intervention should be planned with children’ s social and emotional needs in mind, as much as their academic needs.

Governments are important for scaling good ideas, but get them involved as early as possible.

Scaling up ideas requires scaled-up planning, processes, and budgets, and governments are almost always the best equipped to make that happen. Our experience shows that it’s better to get government representatives involved early and keep them consistently informed of progress. The more familiar they are with small-scale intervention, the easier it is for them to scale it up.

Ideas seeded in an emergency response can be pivoted to long-term integration with the existing system.

There’s no reason that successful interventions should stop when a pandemic or other crisis is brought under control. Many of our sandboxes have inspired fresh thinking on how to provide education all the time, not just when schools are forced to close.

Adapt your intervention based on the resources and infrastructure that exist from place to place.

People’s circumstances vary. Infrastructure, such as phone networks or internet connections, also varies. It’s rare for a single intervention design to meet all the needs of all the participants — unless it has been designed from the start to be adaptable, flexible, and capable of coping with the variety.

Physical environments will have an impact on learning, so it’s important to design for them.

There are as many different home environments as there are homes. EdTech interventions for home learners must consider the variable circumstances and conditions in which children may have to learn. Parents and caregivers, while usually supportive, might need additional support to enable learning at home. People designing interventions should think about physical limitations, such as the space available for children to learn in and how many other people will be using the space and for what purpose.

What combination of funding models would enable sustainable interventions to reach the most marginalised?

Our final insight is a question. One that needs asking, because we still don’t know the answer. The question itself became clear during work on several sandboxes. It is evident some other funding mechanism will be needed to support interventions like these in the longer term. But who is best placed to provide that funding? What will deliver the most sustainable results? There’s more work to do here. We will continue to ask the sector — and beyond — to participate in this exploration with us.