Co-Designing for a Healthy Edtech Ecosystem: Lessons from the Tulna Research-Practice Partnership in India

The demand and supply of EdTech products have surged in the past decade and especially post-Covid19. Yet key challenges exist, such as inadequate quality standards and lack of reliable product evaluations. Consequently, stakeholders in the EdTech ecosystem such as schools, teachers, parents, governments, philanthropists, and investors face difficulty in making informed adoption decisions and feel the need for a systematic quality evaluation framework of educational technology (EdTech) products. In such a scenario, we analyze a Research-Practice Partnership between educational researchers, government decision-makers, and a nongovernmental organization working on policy and strategy, who collaborated on designing and implementing EdTech quality standards. We examine the co-design process of the ‘Tulna EdTech evaluation index’ at various stages in the partnership. We adopted the Design-based Implementation Research (DBIR) approach for guiding our partnership. We examine what can be learned from the process of co-design in our RPP that might be useful for our ongoing partnership going forward, as well as for other RPPs. We found that the stakeholders navigated through tensions and iteratively negotiated the design of the evaluation index based on their individual expectations, perspectives, and expertise. Our retrospective, qualitative analysis supports understanding of how researchers and practitioners might engage in co-design and the role co-design might play in establishing a healthy EdTech ecosystem.