Kahoot! being used on a tablet. Image: © Kahoot!
Edtech is more mainstream now than in pre-pandemic times, says Sean D’Arcy, Kahoot!’s chief solutions officer.
The years-long Covid-19 pandemic relegated the majority of us to screens for work and socialisation. Workplace culture changed significantly as institutions adjusted to the new norm of remote and hybrid working.
During this time, edtech tools became vital for schools as they aimed to maintain the standard and pace of education while making sure class participation was as high as could be.
A recent paper from Stanford University showed that edtech tools had an overall positive impact on the reading skills of primary school students. However, the study also found that the effectiveness of the tools depended on several factors, including the app or platform’s features and the users’ characteristics.
Still, it seems better to have such tools in one’s arsenal than not.
Norway-based Kahoot! – yes, with the exclamation mark – is one of the oldest edtech tools in the market, being prototyped in the late 2000s and launching in markets in 2012. The company, which employs 600 people worldwide, saw immense success in recent years, being valued at more than $6bn during the height of the pandemic in 2021.
In early 2024, the company was acquired by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, General Atlantic – a previous investor in the business, and Kirkbi, the owners of Lego.
The company’s chief solutions officer Sean D’Arcy spoke to SiliconRepublic.com, calling the edtech sector’s sharp rise in pandemic popularity the “Cambrian explosion”, attributing this growth, in part, to one-to-one devices becoming more common for school students.
The sector’s sharp rise was followed by a “lull”, D’Arcy says, as “students and also parents wanted to take a little bit of a step back from all the digital learning – to more traditional types of learning”.
However, since then, growth is returning to pandemic levels according to D’Arcy, who says that Kahoot!, with its footprint in 200 countries, with around 8m teachers using the app in the last 12 months and a total participation of 1.6bn users, is now “growing like wildfire” in Asia.
According to the World Economic Forum, the global education sector will see expenditure of $10trn in the next decade, while the edtech market, valued at more than $144bn in 2023, is expected to grow to nearly $460bn by 2032, owing to the increasing demand for online learning solutions.
The Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is experiencing robust growth in the edtech sector that can be attributed to the increasing adoption of digital technologies in education and wider accessibility of internet connectivity and mobile devices. The APAC edtech market, valued at nearly $130bn in 2022, is estimated to grow to more than $318bn by 2028.
Apparently, Gen Z knows what a Kahoot! is
According to D’Arcy, Kahoot! is popular among younger people. In-house statistics show that Kahoot! is “right up there with GenZ”, D’Arcy says – a group, who would have been in primary or middle school when the platform launched.
The idea behind Kahoot! is to “have fun”, he explains – students and teachers are effectively “in cahoots” with each other. In its early days, the platform was called Lecture Quiz, a name that was, according to D’Arcy, “not so fun and exciting”.
Although, as its old name rightly suggests, the gamified e-learning platform, with free-to-use features, allows users to make their own custom educational tools such as flashcards and quizzes to learn individually or along with a class. D’Arcy says that the main use case of Kahoot! in class is to improve participation.
The platform doesn’t have a “specific bullseye” for age segments, he explains, it is “pre-k to grey”, encompassing all ages, in and outside of educational institutions.
“Kahoot! is used in over 95pc of Fortune 500 companies” for “everything from employee onboarding to compliance”.
A couple of years ago, the platform partnered with Cambridge Assessment English to launch a range of games aimed at helping young language learners practice and build skills.
The platform has shown tangible results, according to D’Arcy, who says that Kahoot! “can drive learning outcomes up by a whole letter grade”, along with helping kids’ stay motivated, reduce their stress and mental load.
The subject of research for years, the platform has been shown to have a positive impact on a wide variety of learners.
A recent study published in BMC Medical Education found that Kahoot! can be used to improve and predict the final grade in medical education subjects, while a 2020 literature review concluded that Kahoot! had a positive effect on learning performance, classroom dynamics, students’ and teachers’ attitudes, and students’ anxiety. However, the review also made note of some studies that suggest Kahoot! had little or no effect on learning performance.
Developing markets
Kahoot!’s growth trajectory is similar to pandemic levels, says D’Arcy, calling the development “exciting”.
According to D’Arcy, the platform is seeing rapid growth in Asia and Latin America, in particular, Brazil and Japan.
“We are just really trying to keep up and we’ll be opening satellite offices here and there,” he says. The platform has already opened new offices in Singapore and Japan.
“Education technology, or you could just call it education now – I think it’s much more mainstream than it was pre-pandemic.”
The sector’s pre-pandemic focus was on user engagement, however, now, it has turned to learning outcomes and efficacy, says D’Arcy, who explains that in recent years there has been a greater emphasis on technology being able to get the curriculum across – not just maintaining participation.
The platform recently launched AI tools that automate the creation of quizzes, significantly reducing the time users, especially teachers, spend preparing material for class.
Ireland is a fertile market for the edtech sector. Even as early as 2017, one in five schools in the country was using technology to supplement learning. Data from Statista shows that revenue from online education platforms in Ireland is estimated to be worth more than $32m in 2024.
Last year, Egypt-based start-up iSchool shifted its headquarters to Ireland after raising $4.5m, as the company expands globally, while more recently, Trinity-based Learnovate secured nearly €10m from Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland to research and develop tech tools to address Ireland’s skills gaps.
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