Over the last decade, technology has become the default answer to almost every educational problem – access, scale, engagement, quality, even equity. New platforms are launched with the promise of personalization, efficiency, and transformation, often framed as inevitable progress.
This has not happened because educators stopped caring about learning. It has happened because educational decision-making has quietly shifted – from professional judgment to incentives, optics, and convenience.
My concern is not that education uses technology. It must.
My concern is that learning outcomes are increasingly being shaped by what scales, sells, or signals innovation, rather than by how learning actually works.
When promises outrun learning
Most EdTech products promise to make learning faster, easier, more engaging, or more measurable. These promises are especially attractive to institutions under pressure — to modernize, to grow, to demonstrate results.
But learning itself does not behave this way.
Learning is slow, effortful, and deeply human. It depends on struggle, feedback, trust, context, and professional judgment — knowing when to intervene, when to wait, when to challenge, and when to support. These elements do not scale neatly, nor do they fit comfortably into dashboards.
Many EdTech solutions are not designed around these realities. They are designed around what can be standardized, automated, tracked, and expanded. The growing gap between what learning requires and what technology optimizes for is where the real harm begins.
The distortion we rarely name
The core problem is not technological. It is decisional.
Too often, success is defined by adoption rather than understanding, dashboards rather than development, and engagement metrics rather than cognitive growth. What is easiest to measure gradually replaces what is most important to nurture.
Over time, this changes behavior. Teachers are nudged to follow workflows instead of exercising discretion. Learners are encouraged to complete tasks rather than build understanding. Institutions begin to value visible activity over invisible growth.
This does not happen because individuals are careless. It happens because systems reward the wrong outcomes — and punish hesitation, reflection, or resistance.
Incentives that quietly reshape education
These outcomes are not accidental. They are the predictable result of how educational technology is funded, procured, and scaled.
Procurement cycles favor ready-made solutions over context-specific judgment. Funding models reward growth, reach, and revenue over durability and depth. Leadership is often encouraged — implicitly or explicitly — to signal innovation rather than defend professional discretion.
In recent years, this distortion has deepened as many EdTech companies have shifted their primary focus from learners to institutional clients — particularly private colleges and training institutes. As partnerships and tie-ups become central to revenue models, educational technology is no longer neutral infrastructure.
It carries the interests, constraints, and priorities of its clients.
In such arrangements, learning outcomes risk becoming secondary to enrolment targets, retention metrics, or institutional optics. This does not require bad intent — only misaligned incentives.
When revenue logic reaches the classroom
The same logic plays out internally.
As revenue becomes the dominant measure of success, investment in professional development quietly declines. Content creators, counsellors, and academic staff are expected to produce more, guide faster, and convert better — often without corresponding investment in training, pedagogical grounding, or reflective practice.
Over time, roles that should require judgment begin to rely on scripts, targets, and standardized workflows. Educators are turned into operators. Counsellors into funnels. Content into output.
The result is not just staff burnout. It is the erosion of educational judgment at the point where learning is supposed to happen.
The hidden cost we rarely calculate
The real harm of poorly judged EdTech adoption is not that a product underperforms.
The deeper harm is cumulative:
- Teachers lose confidence in their professional discretion.
- Learners experience education as fragmented, transactional, and shallow.
- Institutions lose the habit of asking difficult, learning-centred questions.
Once judgment erodes, even good tools are used badly. And when judgment disappears entirely, innovation becomes indistinguishable from noise.
At this point, an uncomfortable question becomes unavoidable: how different is much of today’s EdTech from the coaching institutes it once claimed to disrupt?
Coaching, for all its scale and visibility, has rarely improved the education landscape. It optimizes for narrow, short-term outcomes — often at the cost of deeper understanding. When educational technology begins to mirror the same logic — volume over depth, conversion over comprehension — the distinction becomes cosmetic rather than substantive.
Where leadership faltered
In many cases, educational leaders did not choose badly.
They stopped choosing altogether.
Judgment was outsourced — to vendors, frameworks, trends, or consensus — because exercising it became politically inconvenient, operationally slow, or reputationally risky. Technology filled the vacuum left behind.
This is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of leadership responsibility.
Leadership in education is not about selecting the most popular or most advanced tool. It is about deciding what should not be automated, accelerated, or standardized — even when doing so is uncomfortable.
What better judgment would look like
A learning-first approach would ask different questions before adopting technology:
- What specific aspect of learning does this strengthen?
- What professional judgment does this replace — and at what cost?
- What will teachers have to stop doing well for this to work?
- Who benefits if this succeeds, and who bears the cost if it fails?
- What will this look like in five years, not just the next reporting cycle?
These questions are slower. They resist easy answers.
But they are precisely the questions leadership exists to ask.
Reframing the role of EdTech
Technology is not the enemy of learning. Poor judgment is.
EdTech works best when it supports professional discretion rather than substituting for it; when it deepens learning rather than accelerating activity; when it respects context instead of flattening it.
Used well, technology can extend human capacity.
Used poorly, it narrows it.
The difference lies not in the tool — but in the decisions surrounding it.
Reclaiming responsibility
If education is to benefit meaningfully from technology, leadership will need to remain closely involved in how decisions are made and justified.
Not every problem requires a platform, and not every solution is improved by scale.
What matters is that decisions remain accountable to learning — even when that accountability complicates timelines, metrics, or expectations.
