Ed Tech Purchasers Prefer Independently Researched Products | Teachers College Columbia University

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TC’s Hollands: Ed Tech Purchasers Prefer Independently Researched Products

Fiona Hollands, Associate Director and Senior Researcher at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education (CBCSE)
Fiona Hollands, Associate Director and Senior Researcher at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education (CBCSE)
How universities manage relationships with ed tech vendors is absolutely critical to their being able to get quality products effectively and efficiently, explains Fiona Hollands, Associate Director and Senior Researcher at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education (CBCSE) at Teachers College, in an opinion piece in EdSurge.

Hollands writes about a study of education technology purchasing decisions in higher education which she led and presented at an Ed Tech Efficacy Research Symposium in Washington, D.C. in early May. The study, Ed Tech Decisionmaking in Higher Education, finds that buyers of higher education technology prefer making purchasing decisions based on independent research. But, the study notes, “many interviewees pointed out that there is a dearth of rigorous research on EdTech products and strategies.” Hollands and her team also found that institutions of higher education that do their own studies to evaluate education technology rarely share the results outside their own organization unless they are asked by another higher-education institution to do so.

Read Hollands’s opinion piece at TC EdTech here. Read the piece on EdSurge here. Read a story on Education Dive about the study here. Read the full study here.

Published Tuesday, Jun 13, 2017