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.
