What teachers need that EdTech companies aren't building

We've spent the last year talking to teachers — in schools, at conferences, over coffee, and in way too many Zoom calls. We asked them a simple question: "What do you wish edtech companies would build?"

The answers were consistent, surprising, and mostly not about technology at all. They were about trust, time, and being treated like professionals.

"Stop giving me more dashboards"

This was the most common complaint, almost word for word. Teachers don't need more data. They need less, better-presented data that actually informs a decision.

Most edtech analytics dashboards present dozens of metrics with no clear hierarchy. Completion rates. Time-on-task. Score distributions. Login frequency. Click patterns. The teacher's job is supposedly to look at all of this and figure out which students need help.

But teachers already know which students need help. They can see it in the classroom every day. What they need from technology isn't identification — it's specific, actionable information about what each struggling student is stuck on and what to try next.

The difference is between "Student A completed 34% of assignments" and "Student A consistently struggles with algebraic fractions and might benefit from reviewing equivalent fraction concepts." One creates work. The other saves it.

"Let me customize without becoming an IT administrator"

Teachers want to adapt materials to their students. But most platforms offer a binary choice: use our content exactly as-is, or build everything from scratch using our "powerful content creation tools" that require a PhD in UX design to navigate.

What teachers actually want is to take good existing content and make small adjustments. Add an example that's relevant to their specific class. Remove a section that their curriculum doesn't cover. Reorder topics to match how they actually teach. Adjust difficulty for their specific students.

This is a design problem, not a technology problem. The technology to support this exists. The interfaces just aren't built for people who have five minutes between classes to make a change.

"Respect my expertise"

Too many edtech products treat teachers as executors of a prescribed curriculum rather than professionals with deep pedagogical knowledge. The product decides the sequence of topics, the pacing, the assessment strategy — the teacher just presses play.

Good teachers have reasons for their choices. They know that this class needs more time on this topic. They know that this particular group responds better to collaborative work than individual practice. They know that the standard sequence doesn't work for students who missed a foundational concept in Year 8.

EdTech should amplify teacher expertise, not override it. The best tools give teachers more control, not less.

"Don't make me learn your platform"

Every new edtech product comes with onboarding videos, training sessions, and certification programs. Teachers are already drowning in professional development requirements. Adding "learn to use yet another platform" to their plate is not a benefit — it's a cost.

If your product needs extensive training, that's a design failure, not a training opportunity. The best edtech products are the ones teachers can figure out in ten minutes and become proficient with in a week, without watching a single tutorial video.

What we're doing about it

These conversations directly shaped how we're building Virtusmento, our teacher training platform. And they've influenced how we think about the teacher experience across all our products.

Our principles:

• Surface only the information that changes what a teacher does next
• Make customization a one-click adjustment, not a content creation project
• Default to giving teachers control, not removing it
• If it takes more than ten minutes to learn, redesign it

Teachers are the most important variable in education. Building technology that makes their job harder — even with good intentions — is worse than building nothing at all. We'd rather build less and get it right.

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