People spend their days monitoring how the world learns in a building at Tecnológico de Monterrey. Not in a dramatic, attention-grabbing manner. Silently. methodically. with a level of patience that is uncomfortable for most institutions. The team there started the Observatory of Educational Innovation seven years ago. At first, it was merely a weekly report designed to keep their own academic community focused in a changing global environment. No one could have imagined it would develop into what it is today.
It turned out to be more important than anyone could have predicted that early instinct to share, to open the gates and offer their curation work to educators worldwide. A community that started out with a few hundred social media followers has grown to over 755,000 people worldwide, according to the numbers alone. It’s not marketing. That’s trust that has been gradually built up via reliable and truly beneficial work.
The Observatory’s ability to stay ahead of the curve without seeming to chase it is intriguing and worth considering. Before newsletters had their cultural moment, they were distributing them. Before the pandemic, they conducted webinars that made everyone proficient in virtual programming. Trend reports were not the driving force behind these strategic changes. Perhaps they just focused on what educators truly needed and took action before the rest of the world did.
When the Observatory officially joined the recently established Institute for the Future of Education in the middle of 2021, it underwent an evolution that gave what had been, in some respects, a sophisticated content operation a stronger institutional foundation. The Institute was founded by David Garza, president of Tec de Monterrey, at a significant international education conference. Its goal is to generate and disseminate useful knowledge on educational innovation in an interdisciplinary, experimental, and publicly accessible manner. This goal sounds lofty but is also remarkably grounded. In that sentence, the word “applicable” does a lot of work, and it’s intentional.
It seems that this observatory’s refusal to remain abstract sets it apart from other academic endeavors of a similar nature. Education research has a long and sometimes frustrating history of yielding insights that are buried in conference proceedings that only experts ever read, inside journals, or behind paywalls. Since its founding, the Observatory has resisted this trend by prioritizing reach over exclusivity.
It’s difficult to ignore how important the timing is when observing this from the outside. Demographic changes, generational skepticism about the worth of degrees, the introduction of generative AI into classrooms and curricula, and persistent funding constraints are all putting pressure on higher education in the Americas at the same time. Maps are necessary for institutions. They require frank analysis from non-selling sources. The Observatory has established itself as one of those sources, despite the fact that it is still developing and occasionally faltering by its own admission.
It’s still not flawless. The website has undergone arduous reconstructions. The branding has changed. Presumably, some reports had less of an impact than anticipated. However, that readiness to change and evolve without giving up on the original goal serves as a sort of template for what education research could look like if it takes its own lessons seriously. It is genuinely unclear whether the Observatory can continue on this course as the Institute expands its goals. However, 755,000 people appear to believe that something worthwhile is taking place there for the time being.
