Increasing Parents’ Engagement on EdTech Platforms: Evidence from the Field

Ensuring universal access to quality education remains a formidable challenge in developing countries. A key issue affecting educational outcomes among low-income households is limited parental involvement in their children’s education. Educational technology (EdTech) platforms can help build cost-effective and impactful solutions to address this problem. In collaboration with Rocket Learning, one of India’s leading nonprofit EdTech organizations, we design, implement, and optimize nudges to increase parent engagement in digital educational communities. We conduct a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) with nearly 154,000 parents to investigate the effectiveness of peer-comparison and self-comparison nudges in improving engagement. Our results demonstrate that nudges can significantly increase the number of engaged users by 8%–13.5%. We find heterogeneous effects influenced by teachers’ activity levels, parents’ pretreatment engagement, and potential benefits from targeted nudging. Leveraging RCT data, we develop machine learning (ML)–based targeting policies to optimize nudge assignments. A second RCT with 122,000 parents reveals that, whereas targeted nudging performs comparably to the best uniform policy on average, it identifies a substantial subpopulation (8.8% of parents) for whom targeted nudges improve engagement by 5.4% over the uniform policy. These findings have significant implications for policymakers and nonprofits focused on improving educational outcomes in low and middle-income countries, demonstrating the effectiveness of nudges in increasing parental engagement, revealing significant heterogeneity in their impact, and highlighting the nuanced benefits and challenges of ML-based targeting strategies in educational interventions.

Funding: We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Institute for Outlier Research in Business at the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business, the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the USC Marshall School of Business, and the New York University Stern Center for Sustainable Business Research Grant Program.

Supplemental Material: All supplemental materials, including the code, data, and files required to reproduce the results, are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2024.1250.