Smart Buy: The Good, Bad, and Ugly in Edtech Selection

Nicole Langford serves as the Research Associate, Project Manager at the International Society for Technology in Education with the Learning Partnerships team. Nicole comes to ISTE with 7+ years of research administration experience and 3+ years of qualitative research experience. Nicole’s research experience was centered around studying the career decisions of Ph.D. STEM candidates from underrepresented groups, focusing on what drove them towards or away from careers in academia. Through that work, Nicole developed a passion for listening to people talk about their experiences and storytelling through research – a passion she brings to ISTE.

Brandon Olszewski, Ph.D., ISTE’s director of research, leads many of the organization’s program evaluation and research efforts, as well as projects that focus on educational technology, product usability and design, the learning sciences and adult learning. He’s passionate about making research and science practical. Olszewski has over 15 years of experience in program evaluation and applied social science, and specializes in edtech and digital age skills, STEM instruction, social psychology and mixed-methods evaluations that leverage quantitative and qualitative methods. He has managed the implementation and evaluation of innovative projects funded by the National Science Foundation (including ITEST, Cyberlearning, IEECI and Noyce), the U.S. Department of Education, state departments of education (including Oregon’s Earning for a Lifetime program and Alabama’s ACCESS), and private foundations (HP, the Verizon Foundation, Walmart Giving, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative). He has published on topics including program evaluation, educational technology, sociology, special education, workforce development, and social science methodology and psychometrics. His dissertation focused on the relationship between the politics of small schools reform and changes to teachers’ work. He has also been an adjunct instructor in the University of Oregon Department of Sociology.