By Jeffrey R. Young 

These days there’s a wave of new edtech products hitting the market, and teachers and professors are increasingly making teaching videos and other materials for their classes. But one group is often left out of the design process: students.

“Many educational products are never shown to students until they have already been designed,” said Elliott Hedman, a consultant who works with edtech companies, in a talk this month at the SXSW EDU festival.

These days most major media and consumer tech products undergo extensive testing, he pointed out, but he says that many grown-ups are fine with a much lower standard for anything designed for kids.

“The budget for one episode of Game of Thrones was $15 million. It was probably worth it — it was a very good episode,” he quipped. “I get hired sometimes to write reading stories for kids in classrooms, and I get paid $80. So that’s how much we’re willing to pay for a kid’s experience in the classroom.”

That’s perhaps an extreme example, Hedman admits, but he says that lack of testing really shows when students are given the materials. As he visited school computer labs for one research project, he says, “I found that a lot of the kids, they alt-tab off the education program and start watching YouTube for an hour.”

In an interview after his presentation, Hedman, who has a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab and has been working on design of educational materials for more than a decade, said it’s not that edtech companies don’t do any testing. But he says the testing they do is often ineffective or too limited, such as relying mainly on family members of company employees, who are “way above average in school — and they are very white.”