Can technology really help students learn? Founders have tried to apply new technologies to scale the teaching process—$100 laptops, massive open online courses, and AI-generated coursework—only to fall short of lofty ambitions to make education institutions obsolete.
Yet the director of a design team that works in perhaps the world’s toughest teaching environment—war zones—argues there’s nothing “special” about edtech. “It’s time on task and good learning content and a decent pedagogy. It’s not magic,” argued Luke Stannard, program director at the War Child Alliance’s “Can’t Wait to Learn” initiative, in an interview with Fortune earlier this year.
The “Can’t Wait to Learn” project is an education technology initiative from the War Child Alliance, an NGO focused on providing teaching resources in conflict zones, like Ukraine and Lebanon. It’s also the recipient of this year’s Yidan Prize, a yearly award focused on education. (Stannard, alongside director of research Mark Jordans and practitioner lead Marwa Zahr, received the prize.)
“Edtech is a big baggy monster of a phrase,” Stannard said. “There’s a lot of snake oil in education technology, and we should push back against that.
“There is a commercialized, marketized space for education technology, which is largely around attention [and] making parents feel better about themselves,” he continued. But “educationalists,” like Stannard and other people focused on learning outcomes, want to move education technology “out of that marketized approach and into an education tool that can support teachers and systems in times of crisis.“
War Child Alliance
War Child was founded in 1993 after Dutch social entrepreneur Willemijn Verloop and British filmmakers David Wilson and Bill Leeson visited Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War. Grassroots efforts by those on the ground to provide education, like musical workshops held in bomb shelters, inspired the three of them to start raising money for workshops and education initiatives in war zones.
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In January 2024, five different fundraising hubs reorganized themselves into the War Child Alliance.
It’s one thing to adapt solutions on the cutting-edge for less privileged communities. But War Child’s work goes beyond that to focus on users living in environments with severely degraded, if not destroyed, infrastructure.
That requires a different approach to design. War Child’s edtech projects “need to work offline, need to not require a server every 30 minutes,” Stannard said. Safety is also a concern, to ensure edtech projects aren’t putting student data at risk in a war zone.
Lucy Lake, director of global engagement for the Yidan Prize, agreed that edtech projects in marginalized communities need a different design approach. “We see curricular learning resources designed with a certain spectrum of the population in mind—usually better off, urban kids,” she explained. Instead, educators working in marginalized communities need to design materials that are drawn from their own experiences.
Other design-led organizations are thinking about how to adapt design techniques to tackle social problems. The Design for Good alliance runs two-year programs where designers from member companies like Microsoft and Nestlé work with development organizations to solve real-world social issues. Cofounder Ben Sheppard, at Fortune’s Brainstorm Design event in December, noted that the alliance gives its designers the time to put their ideas into practice in the real world, and then offers the results for free to ensure widespread use.
The Yidan Prize
Each year, the Yidan Prize celebrates two nominees—one for “education research,” the other for “education development”—and rewards them with a 15 million Hong Kong dollar ($1.9 million) cash prize and an additional 15 million Hong Kong dollar project grant. Previous laureates include professor Carol Dweck, who developed the idea of “fixed” and “growth” mindsets, and Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, the online education platform.
Winners need to be “transformative,” Lake explained. She’s also a laureate of the prize, winning in 2020 for her work with the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED), a nongovernment organization that educates girls and young women in African countries like Zimbabwe and Zambia. The prize money allows education researchers and organizations to do some “risk taking … in education areas that are relatively underexplored, high-risk things like edtech.”
Asian philanthropy
The Yidan Prize is an initiative by the Yidan Prize Foundation, backed by Tencent cofounder Chen Yidan. The billionaire has longtime experience in philanthropy, helping run Tencent’s charitable foundation during his time as the tech company’s chief administrative officer.
Even as Asian wealth grows, Asian philanthropy still lags behind the U.S. and Europe. Just one Asian organization—the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust—ranks among the top 20 philanthropic organizations in the world, according to a report released earlier this year by nonprofit consultancy Bridgespan Group.
Asian philanthropic organizations tend to donate toward issues at home, in part owing to greater awareness and the difficulty of moving money across borders. But an Asian philanthropic organization with a global remit could have advantages. The Yidan Prize has a Chinese founding donor and is based in Hong Kong, though it relies on judges from around the world and donates globally.
Lake sees that as an asset. Being Asian “offers up a greater interest globally in seeing the relevance of the prize, and not seeing it as anchored in the Global North,” she said.
On Dec. 5, Fortune held its Brainstorm Design conference at the MGM Cotai in Macau, where panelists and attendees debated “Experiments in Experience”: designs that blur the line between the physical and digital worlds to captivate users and foster lasting connections. Catch up with what speakers shared onstage, and follow all our design coverage here.
Update, Dec. 30, 2024: An earlier version of this article did not give the full name of the Yidan Prize Foundation.
