EdTech Partnerships Need Evidence-Informed Governance: Where do we start?
The key questions shaping the MOOC "Governing Education in the Age of AI"
Education technology has entered a more demanding phase for policy-making. The stakes are high: many education systems are still grappling with persistent learning crises, widening inequalities, and acute teacher shortages. Digital tools and AI are often positioned as part of the response, and their promise is real. There are important pockets of evidence showing that well-designed and well-implemented EdTech can address some educational challenges. Yet rigorous, context-sensitive evidence of impact remains uneven and too often disconnected from procurement and implementation decisions. The question, therefore, is no longer whether digital tools or AI will shape education systems, but whether governments, funders, schools, and providers have the governance capacity to decide which technologies should be used, under what conditions, for which learners, and with what accountability.
A snippet from opening video in the HP-ICEI MOOC, featuring David Dockterman
For policymakers, EdTech does not work in the abstract. It works, or fails to work, in specific contexts, with specific learners, teachers, languages, infrastructure, incentives, and institutional constraints. Therefore, many policymakers are asking three key questions.
1. What would need to be true for this technology to work in this context?
A tool that appears promising in a well-supported pilot may produce very different results in multilingual classrooms, low-connectivity schools, or systems where teachers are already overstretched.
This question shifts attention away from product features and headline impact claims, and toward the conditions that make implementation possible: curriculum alignment, teacher preparation, infrastructure, language, inclusion, data protection, affordability, long-term system capacity, to name a few.
The UNESCO’s Digital Transformation Collaborative (DTC) offers a practical toolkit for building equitable and sustainable digital learning ecosystems. Rather than treating EdTech as a single procurement decision, the DTC frames digital transformation as a system-wide process organised around six pillars: coordination, connectivity, cost, capacity, content, and data. Its Maturity Assessment Tool helps countries diagnose where they currently stand, from “emerging” to “excelling,” while the Financing Toolkit provides financial models, case studies, and factsheets to support long-term planning. Together, these resources help shift EdTech decision-making from isolated technology adoption toward coordinated, evidence-informed system transformation.
2. What evidence do we need before, during, and after implementation?
Too often, evidence is treated as something that arrives at the end of a project: a trial is completed, data are analysed, and a report is produced. But by then, many consequential decisions have already been made.
Which schools were included? Which learners were excluded? How was the tool implemented? Were teachers trained? Did providers collect their own data? Were there activities outside the agreed intervention conditions? Were outcome measures aligned to the curriculum, or too closely aligned to the tool itself?
Such questions shape what “impact” means and ensure that evidence is not treated as a compliance exercise at the end of an EdTech project but as governance infrastructure throughout the life of a partnership, informing procurement, implementation, adaptation, evaluation, reporting, and decisions about scale. It is evidence based on a holistic understanding of impact.
3. How can EdTech partnerships build infrastructure for evidence?
EdTech partnerships bring together actors with different incentives. Governments need solutions that can scale. Funders need credible evidence of value. Providers need adoption and product validation. Researchers need methodological independence. Schools need tools that fit the realities of teaching and learning.
These incentives can align, but they do not align automatically: Everyone Agrees That Limited Evidence in EdTech Is Not Their Fault: EdTech partnerships often struggle not because stakeholders disagree that evidence matters, but because the system gives each actor different incentives. Companies may not invest in rigorous research if investors and customers do not demand it; researchers may avoid product evaluations if they do not advance academic careers; and districts may want evidence-based decisions but lack trustworthy, context-relevant studies when procurement decisions need to be made.
The result is a collective-action problem: everyone sees the evidence gap, but no single actor feels responsible for fixing it. Better EdTech governance therefore requires shifting to shared infrastructure with clearer evidence standards, funding mechanisms for evaluation, practical “just-right” evidence guidance, and systems that help decision-makers understand which tools work and at what level of risk or certainty of impact.
These are some of the questions that the course Governing Education in the Age of AI: Evidence, Impact, and Implementation of EdTech deals with. Developed by ICEI (WiKIT) with contributors from Harvard Graduate School of Education, EdTech East Africa, and Leading Educators, it offers frameworks for policymakers and education leaders working across evidence, procurement, implementation, AI, and future skills.
Did you take the course and have feedback to share? Let us know in comments below or by email to info@foreduimpact.org.