With 90 per cent of the world’s learners recently missing out on face-to-face lessons, understanding how best to educate children online is crucial. Can behavioural insights improve outcomes for children using EdTech platforms?

Behavioural insights are ideas from psychology and economics that explain why people behave the way they do and help encourage positive behaviours. These ideas have been used to tackle problems ranging from tax collection to increasing the number of disadvantaged students attending top universities.

In this how-to talk, we will explore how a behavioural insights approach could be applied to EdTech platforms. We will introduce you to the Behavioural Insights Team’s ‘EAST’ framework: if you want to encourage a behaviour, make it easy, attractive, social, and timely. You will also see results from Nesta and BIT’s recent experiment where we applied behavioural insights to HegartyMaths to support remote learning whilst schools were closed to the majority of pupils in the UK. The event follows our report of the same name, in partnership with BIT and Hegarty Maths.

We will aim to provide you with practical examples and spark your own ideas for how behavioural insights can be applied to EdTech platforms.

This event is open to all that might be interested. However, it will be of particular interest to the following groups:

• Professionals working in EdTech. Whether you’re the CEO, a developer or a customer support officer, we think that a behavioural insights approach has significant potential application to all aspects of EdTech. The session will provide concrete examples and ideas to apply to your organisation immediately.
• Teachers and school leaders. Are you interested in improving your students’ engagement with online learning? Is motivation an issue for some of your students? Hear practical tips on how to implement EdTech more effectively, from social cues to well-timed nudges. While the focus will be online learning, lots of ideas will have relevance in the classroom too.
• Education policy professionals. Well-designed, accessible EdTech has huge potential to help close the attainment gap. In this session, learn how a behavioural insights approach could improve outcomes for remote learners.