Postgraduate Course: Educational Technologies (EdTech) and Entrepreneurship (Online) (EFIE11460)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
| Course type | Online Distance Learning |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines key theories, practices, and debates in Educational Technology and Entrepreneurship, with a focus on customers, users, and ethical value creation. Students explore how EdTech ventures are identified, developed, and financed, engaging with challenges such as customer discovery, multi-stakeholder complexity, and the ethical use of learner data. Learning is grounded in real-world EdTech cases, combining critical discussion with hands-on, experiential activities. |
| Course description |
The course explores theories, processes, and critical debates in the domain of Education Technology, with a focus on customers, users, and various other stakeholders. The course aims to provide students with the knowledge and confidence to critically evaluate and potentially start an ethical EdTech venture.
The course is broken into four sections. The first is an intro to the history, context, and theories of Educational Technology, followed by an introduction to Entrepreneurship. The second focuses on the challenges of identifying customer needs. The third examines some of the key complexities/challenges, in particular the use of learner data and the diverse needs of multilevel stakeholders. The fourth and final section looks at the steps of building an ethical EdTech venture (in particular, data-driven entrepreneurship) and introduces the assessment by considering a key step of raising early finance.
Each section will involve an EdTech Case example involving hands-on experience and/or input from an invited/recorded EdTech entrepreneur.
Students will begin by drawing on their own prior experience as well as class materials to identify an unmet need facing learners, parents, and other potential customers. From this, they will come up with a solution which they will develop into a prototype.
Synchronous classroom discussions and workshops will help students understand how to identify entrepreneurial opportunities and gather data to validate business ideas. These discussions will also explore critical areas specific to the EdTech market, such as the morality of education as a business and the ethics of gathering and storing learners' data.
The sessions will provide an emotive experience by moving between intense critical debate to more playful hands-on experiences to help ground discussions.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - Online Hybrid Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute will teach this course in a way that enables online and on-campus students to study together. To enable this, the course will use technologies to record and live-stream student and staff participation during their teaching and learning activities. Students should note that their interactions may be recorded and live-streamed (see the Lecture Recording and Virtual Classroom policies for more details). There will, however, be options to control whether or not your video and audio are enabled.
You will need access to a personal computing device for this course. Most activities will take place in a web browser, unless otherwise stated. We recommend using a device with a screen, a physical keyboard, and internet access.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2026/27, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 10,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 5,
Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 5,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
The course will be assessed by means of the following components:
1) Portfolio Business Pitch (60%) - Group Assignment
This assessment requires students to develop a Portfolio Business Pitch centred on an entrepreneurial opportunity within the context of education and educational futures. Students will design a creative pitch deck (8-10 slides) and may develop supporting artefacts (e.g., physical or digital prototypes) to communicate their value proposition and business model.
Students will first present their pitch in a project fair format, which serves as a formative learning activity that supports experiential and multimodal learning through live demonstrations, discussions, and feedback from peers and instructors.
The summative submission consists of the pitch slides and a recorded video presentation (approximately 8-10 minutes) in which students present and justify their venture. The assessment evaluates students' ability to critically analyse customer needs in educational settings, articulate a viable business model, and deliver an investment-oriented pitch informed by contemporary debates in educational technologies and entrepreneurship.
2) Critical Reflection (40%) - Individual Assignment
Students will also complete an individually produced 1,000-word max critical reflection examining their personal learning experience from the collaborative task and critically engaging with the specific ethical challenges associated with their data-driven innovation in education.
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| Feedback |
Feedback on any formative assessment may be provided in various formats, for example, to include written, oral, video, face-to-face, whole class, or individual. The Course Organiser will decide which format is most appropriate in relation to the nature of the assessment.
Feedback on both formative and summative in-course assessed work will be provided in time to be of use in subsequent assessments within the course.
Feedback on the summative assessment(s) will be provided in written form via Learn, the University of Edinburgh's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Formative Feedback Opportunity:
Formative feedback is ongoing feedback which monitors learning and is intended to improve performance in the same course, in future courses, and also beyond study.
This course will be characterised by ongoing and dialogic feedback from tutors and peers. This will include the use of discussion forums alongside the dialogue that takes place during in-class sessions. Tutors and peers will provide comments on ideas and work in progress.
There will be a more structured formative feedback opportunity in the form of verbal feedback by tutors on a project fair carried out in collaborative groups. Students will have access to formative feedback for their own and other groups. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Identify, define, conceptualise and analyse ethical challenges arising from commercialising education, including those concerned with the use of learner data.
- Demonstrate knowledge of learning debates and processes relevant to educational technologies and entrepreneurship.
- Critically analyse customer interaction to identify an opportunity and develop a business model to pursue it.
- Plan and create an investment-oriented pitch.
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Reading List
Essential Reading:
Blank and Dorf. 2012. The Startup Owners Manual. K&S Ranch Publishers: Pescadero, CA.
Kucirkova, N., Uppstad, P. H., Holeton, R., Lin, D., Clark-Wilson, A., & Chigeda, A. (2025). Evaluating educational technology: Consolidating across multiple impact indicators and rating systems. Computers & Education, 105467.
Ben Williamson (2021) Meta-edtech, Learning, Media and Technology, 46:1, 1-5,
Recommended Reading:
Manches, A., Nygren, M., & Price, S. (2025). Increasing the Impact of Child-Computer Interaction Research: The Translational Research Engagement Framework. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 100798.
Mascheroni G., Holloway D. (2019) Introducing the Internet of Toys. In: Mascheroni G., Holloway D. (eds) The Internet of Toys. Studies in Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Manches, A. (2018). Evaluating technologies for children's learning: The challenges, and steps to address them. In L. Hamilton, & J. Ravenscroft (Eds.), Building Research Design in Education (1 ed., pp. 213-236). Bloomsbury Academic
Osterwalder and Pigneur. 2010. Business Model Generation. Wiley: Hoboken, NJ.
Constable. 2014. Talking to Humans. NYU Entrepreneurial Institute: New York City, NY.
Luckin, R., Bligh, B., Manches, A., Ainsworth, S., Crook, C., & Noss, R. (2012). Decoding learning: The proof, promise and potential of digital education.
Dillenbourg, P. (2016). The evolution of research on digital education. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 26(2), 544-560.
Papert, S. A. (2020). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Basic books.
http://hackeducation.com/2020/05/06/crisis
https://medium.com/@jdunns4/the-history-of-education-technology-in-under-4-minutes-45125c7a7bd0
https://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Play/17772
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | EdTech,Education,Educational Technologies,Technology,Entrepreneurship,Industry,Innovation |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Andrew Manches
Tel: (0131 6)51 6242
Email: A.Manches@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Zoe Hogg
Tel:
Email: Zoe.Hogg@ed.ac.uk |
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