What is EDU/X?
The short version and the long version of the framework, and where the idea came from.
Great plans in education don't make an impact if they fall apart when people come into contact with them.
That sentence is the whole idea. Every decision we make in a school or a district is eventually experienced by a person — a student, a teacher, a family — and most of those decisions get made in rooms that don't contain them.
EDU/X is a way of designing around that. This is where I work it out in public.
The idea
The plan is usually fine. The experience of it isn't.
After years in classrooms, district offices, and the edtech industry, I kept watching the same three steps repeat.
Smart people make a well-intentioned decision. The rollout looks good on paper. Then it meets a real person on a real Tuesday and misses.
In user experience design, this would be unthinkable. You would never ship a product without testing how it feels to use, how it flows, whether it supports what someone is actually trying to do. You design with intention, and you design for a specific human being.
Education almost never gets that treatment. We measure what is easy to measure, we optimize the plan rather than the encounter, and we call the gap between them an implementation problem.
EDU/X is that same design discipline, pointed at school.
Not what we built. What it was like to be there.
The model
Five places experience is built or broken.
The framework maps the domains where design decisions actually land on people. Each one has intangibles you can feel and measures you can track, and none of them work in isolation.
PedagogyHow we teach — not how it's described in the adoption rubric.
ContentWhat we teach. Consumption or creation, artificial or authentic.
Technology & toolsWhether the tool serves the work or the work bends to serve the tool.
CommunityWho we involve, who is known, and who gets left outside the room.
Learning environmentWhere and how learning happens, and what the room signals before anyone speaks.
The model is deliberately flexible rather than one-size-fits-all, and it's still being worked out — across roughly twenty-five published articles, forty-plus conference sessions, and a book in progress.
Writing
EDU/X Field Notes.
Most of the thinking happens here first — usually one idea at a time, often before it's fully resolved. A few places to start:
A Man Called Craig
A GED lab, a man in his fifties, and the clearest lesson I ever got about designing an environment where someone can do their best work.
Live Sports
Watching football on TV is objectively better than being there. Why that's wrong, and why the same mistake shows up in every decision we make about school.
Signal to Noise Ratio
Three students in one classroom having three completely different experiences of the same lesson, decided entirely by where they sit.
A Bullseye on the Wrong Dartboard
I built something clear and well-designed, and never asked whether the system it explained should exist.
Paint Around the Edges
The broad strokes are easy. The work around the edges is where quality actually shows.
How I got here
Twelve years inside schools. Seven building for them.
The slash in EDU/X isn't decoration. It's the divide between how education gets designed and how it gets experienced, and I've spent my career on both sides of it.
Inside the district
- 2007–2009Adult education instructorGED lab, Indian River State College
- 2009–2014High school science teacherBiology, Earth Science, Chemistry — Martin & Palm Beach County
- 2014–2015Assistant principalTesting, technology, and professional development — St. Lucie County
- 2015–2019Coordinator of Digital LearningMartin County School District — 19,000 students, 1,300+ classrooms, 26 sites
- President, FCITLFlorida Council of Instructional Technology Leaders
Inside the company
- 2019–2021Education Strategist, SoutheastCDW — 61 focus districts across 8 states
- 2021–2023Manager, Education Business DevelopmentCDW — built the scholastic esports practice from scratch
- 2023–2025Senior Manager, Education ImpactCDW — four national teams: strategy, communities, ambassadors, esports
- 2025–presentDirector, Channel & Strategic PartnershipsGoGuardian / Pear Deck Learning
The framework came out of sitting in both chairs.
Speaking
Rooms where this gets argued out loud.
Speaking is the one thing I take on outside of work. Roughly forty conference sessions to date, including ISTE, FETC, TCEA, CoSN, Bett, and the Global Sources Summit in Hong Kong.
The topics I get asked about most are education experience design, what the K–12 buyer actually experiences, scholastic esports, and game-based learning. Conferences, kickoffs, and leadership sessions all work.
About
Doug Konopelko
I started in education at five in the evening, in a GED lab, working with adults who had decided they wanted a second chance or a first one. Since then I've been a teacher, a team lead, an assistant principal, and the person responsible for digital learning across a 19,000-student district. Then I crossed over and spent years helping education companies understand the districts I used to sit in.
Along the way I've written for EdTech Magazine, Edutopia, and ASCD, hosted a podcast on the education experience, founded a statewide educator chat community, and received the ISTE Making IT Happen Award. I hold a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Virginia, an M.Ed. in Educational Leadership from Florida Atlantic University, and an MBA from the University of Arizona Global Campus.
I currently lead Channel & Strategic Partnerships at GoGuardian. EDU/X is my own writing and speaking — everything here is my thinking and doesn't represent my employer.
Recognition
- ISTE Making IT Happen Award, 2019
- President, Florida Council of Instructional Technology Leaders
- Founder, #FLEdChat
Published
- EdTech Magazine, Edutopia, ASCD
- District Administration, eSchool News
- Host, Focus on EDU
Stages
- ISTE, FETC, TCEA
- CoSN, Bett, MassCUE
- Global Sources Summit, Hong Kong
Questions
The things people ask first.
What exactly is EDU/X?
An education experience design framework that borrows from user experience design and points it at school. Five domains — pedagogy, content, technology and tools, community, and learning environment — each with things you can measure and things you can only feel.
Are you a consultant?
No. I'm full time at GoGuardian. This site is where the framework and the writing live. Speaking is the one thing I take on outside of that.
Who is this for?
Teachers, school and district leaders, and the people inside education companies trying to build something that actually lands. The ideas came out of sitting in both chairs, so they tend to be useful from either one.
Is there a book?
In progress. More on that when it's closer.
Where should I start?
The writing. If you only read one, make it A Man Called Craig.
Get in touch
Say hello.
Questions about the framework, a speaking inquiry, or an argument with something I've written — all welcome. I read everything that comes through here.
- Email · dkonopelko@gmail.com
- LinkedIn · linkedin.com/in/dkonopelko
- Writing · EDU/X Field Notes