Edtech brokers and evidence governance: knowledge intermediaries in the education technology market

Abstract

New types of intermediary organisations are creating evidence to guide school practices and shape markets around education technologies. This article focuses on the practices through which edtech brokers–understood here as evidence-making organisations that mediate between the edtech industry, schools, policy and research centres–create edtech knowledge and evidence. When inserted into policy and practice through recommendation systems, platform reviews, rankings and badges, this knowledge has the potential to affect educational practices, policy implementation and investors’ decision-making processes. Based on interviews and documentary sources, we identify three practices through which edtech brokers produce and circulate edtech evidence: (i) participatory processes of evidence-making; (ii) political navigations and (iii) market curation. Ultimately, edtech brokers govern, within and beyond their local contexts, what kinds of edtech evidence is produced and circulated. This evidence is intended to create novel types of consensus between industry, academia, government and schools, redefining the boundaries of public education and the private edtech sector in an increasingly digital age.