Lifting the veil on TeachersPayTeachers.com: An investigation of educational marketplace offerings and downloads

TeachersPayTeachers.com (TpT) has emerged as an alternative to traditional curricular publishing houses; however, the critical investigation into this for-profit platform is limited. The aggregate content offered and downloaded from the platform through 2019 was Web-scraped, enabling us to construct a content model of TpT and provide descriptive results regarding the interactions between content, technology, and users/usage on TpT. We find TpT’s content model implicitly redefines what constitutes an education, elevating holiday activities and classroom decor to the same level as established curriculum. In terms of content, learning standards were largely absent and user ratings were uniformly high, casting doubt upon the validity of these technological features. 87.9% of resources were under $5, however, many small sales add up across users, indicating the platform extracts significant value from educators and schools. We discuss how the online educational marketplace phenomenon stands to impact the future of curriculum production and the teaching profession.

Shelton, C. C., Koehler, M. J., Greenhalgh, S. P., & Carpenter, J. P. (2022). Lifting the veil on TeachersPayTeachers.com: An investigation of educational marketplace offerings and downloads. Learning, Media and Technology, 47(2), 268-287. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1961148