Edtech Founders, thank you for improving education

To help you on your journey, we’ve created 14 Edtech Design Guidelines to build a long-lasting, trustworthy business with a perpetual positive effect on public education.

It’s built on the belief that if you design your company to do good for (public) education, eventually public education will do good for your company. We can prove that it’s possible to build a successful EdTech business while making the world a better place.

Edtech Design Guidelines

Trustworthy Business Model

  1. Clear Pricing Structures: No hidden fees or dark-pattern upselling. Provide transparent pricing structures, ensuring that educational institutions understand the costs associated with your products and services. Align your pricing with the success of public education. See Principle.

  2. Revenue model transparency: Basically: No hidden advertising, reselling of (training)data, dark upsell methods, etc. See Principle.

  3. Avoid tie-in terms: A tie-in agreement is when a seller refuses to sell unless the purchaser purchases another product or service tied into the transaction. For the autonomy of education take it or leave it arrangements between stakeholders should be avoided, and a modular approach is required when offering Edtech solutions. See Principle.

Trustworthy Product

  1. Accessibility First: Prioritize the accessibility of your products to ensure equal educational opportunities for all students, regardless of their disabilities or limitations. See Principle.

  2. Data Privacy and Security: Implement robust data privacy measures to safeguard student and institutional data from unauthorized access or breaches. Clearly communicate how student data is collected and used, avoiding invasive or discriminatory practices. Coming soon.

  3. Interoperability and Integration: Enable seamless integration with existing educational systems and tools used by public higher education institutions. See Principle.

  4. Continuous Improvement:  Responsibility to innovate. Coming soon.

  5. User-Centric Design: Design user interfaces that are intuitive, user-friendly, and considerate of diverse user needs and preferences. Coming soon.

  6. Autonomy for the educators: Subject experts should not be forced by technology to change their teaching approach or content. See Principle.


Trustworthy Business Operation

  1. Thought Leadership: Actively contribute to the field of education by sharing insights, best practices, and research through publications, conferences, and webinars. See Principle.

  2. Impact Assessment: Demonstrate your company's alignment with the public sector's educational goals by providing transparency and reporting in how you translate your vision of positive social impact into measurable results. See Principle.

  3. Strong Partnerships: Collaborate with trusted industry partners, educational institutions, and experts to enhance your product offerings and credibility. Coming soon.

  4. Alignment with Regulations: Ensure strict compliance with relevant data protection and privacy regulations, such as FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Coming soon.

  5. Support & service:  Ensuring that human support is reachable in a timely fashion, with expertise that can resolve issues within a useful time window.

Step by Step

We want to keep Guidelines achievable and avoid creating unrealistic barriers to entry for innovators. Therefore, we recommend staffing Guidelines to 4 levels of maturity, corresponding to company impact (i.e. growth) milestones:

  1. Level zero: not following guidelines

  2. Junior level: for 0 - 10.000 active students/year (typically 1-10 FTE)

  3. Medior level: for 10.000 - 100.000 active students/year (typically 11-34 FTE)

  4. Senior level: >100.000 active students/year (typically 35 > FTE)