Our story

We have been laying the groundwork for nearly a decade to tackle the collective action problem of low-information edtech purchasing and implementation.

2015

Inspiring change: The Education Accelerator

The University of Virginia and Bart Epstein launch the first ever edtech accelerator focused on conducting efficacy research on participating companies’ products. The initiative evolves into its rebranded nonprofit form following the realization that third-party research isn’t materially influencing edtech decision-makers. Rather, decision-makers value the insights from their contextual peers, and would re-examine their processes and decisions if they could access these insights.

2017

Identifying the problem: EdTech Efficacy Academic Research Symposium

After activating more than 10 working groups and 300 stakeholders, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Symposium convenes at Gallup World Headquarters in Washington, DC. The upshot is overwhelming agreement on three fronts: context matters in edtech implementation; the current chaotic state of edtech is no single actor’s fault; and somebody needs to lead a broad research effort to understand and share what works where, and why.

2018

Taking ideas to action: founding The Exchange

CEO Bart Epstein and founding partners, University of Virginia and Strada Education Network, pivot away from the for profit Accelerator and launch a nonprofit whose mission is to address the research and development needs identified at the Symposium. As of August 2020, the Jefferson Education Exchange changed its name to the EdTech Evidence Exchange. The new name more accurately reflects the work being done: gather, analyze, and make available evidence of how education technology is used across the country.

2019-2020

Learning via the EdTech Genome Project

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Carnegie Corporation of New York sign on as funding partners. The EdTech Evidence Exchange leads, coordinates, and convenes a diverse technical working network of more than 140 researchers, practitioners, experts, system leaders, and industry representatives and sought feedback from thousands of educators at multiple stages in the three-year research initiative. The outcome: a common language for describing, defining, and measuring education contexts so that we can understand what makes any two districts or schools “similar” in the ways that matter most to the implementation of education technology.

2021

Collecting data: the EdTech Evidence Exchange Platform

Through partnerships with several states, we begin to unlock the wisdom otherwise trapped in the heads of K-8 math educators about what edtech works where, and why, and populate the EdTech Evidence Exchange Platform. Once filled with data, the Exchange Platform is a place where educators across the country can access relevant research evidence from their contextual peers. The EdTech Context Framework and EdTech Context Inventory, which are two key contributions to the field produced by the EdTech Genome Project, form the backbone of the data collection process.

2023

EdTech Evidence Exchange joins InnovateEDU

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