Why Education Technology Is Hard

Education technology sells a promise that is easy to state and hard to keep: that software can do for millions of learners what a good teacher does for a few. The promise is old, the market is enormous, and the record is uneven. A few products have become part of how schools, universities and adults learn. Many more were bought and not used, used and not learned from, or adopted during a funding wave and abandoned when it ended. This chapter explains why the sector is harder than ordinary software and sets out the framework used in the rest of the book.