Humanitarian EdTech Innovation Toolkit
Tools and insights for innovating with technology-based education in a humanitarian context
The toolkit is developed for organizations in the humanitarian sector seeking to improve the education access and quality for crisis-affected communities via technology-enhanced solutions.
Humanitarian EdTech Innovation Toolkit: Tools and insights for innovating with technology-based education in a humanitarian context
Who is the Toolkit for?
The toolkit is developed for organizations in the humanitarian sector seeking to improve the education access and quality for crisis-affected communities via technology-enhanced solutions.
Purpose of Toolkit
This toolkit is designed to help a team make decisions about how to invest in education technology (EdTech) innovation. To invest in an EdTech innovation means to commit organizational time and financial resources towards implementing a solution strategy. Such solutions can be as diverse as the problems education in crisis face, but in many cases involve introducing a new technology into the pedagogy.
Here, we provide a tool with which an organization implementing an education innovation can decide how to select or invest in EdTech innovation to solve specific education barriers. The toolkit is specifically designed for testing the merits and scaling an existing innovation, not for inventing a solution from scratch. This selection and decision-making process is what is called a pilot - a small scale test-run of a program to assess its effectiveness in addressing a pre-defined problem.
These existing innovations are expected to be identified among innovators from outside the organization, so a major focus of the toolkit is on ways for identifying and building partnerships with companies who have a promising solution on hand. Note that this toolkit is intended as an aid and guide, not as a prescriptive determinant of a team’s decisions.
Deliverables:
The IRC Toolkit delivers the following value in effective innovation strategy:
- Provides a methodology for testing and implementing an existing EdTech innovation towards meeting the goals of your organization
- Describes a process for identifying EdTech interventions that can bring significant improvements to the learning process at an appropriate cost
- Offers prompts and procedures for developing partnerships with for-profit EdTech companies offering an innovative application
- Provides guidelines for incubating and piloting an EdTech intervention through iterative scaling stages with graduation criteria for continuing to the next stage
- Identifies the latest EdTech trends as an example of innovation landscaping practice
- Suggests best practices in piloting courses, including engaging with stakeholders, onboarding schools for initiative, content refinement and documentation of impact