Is research simply the pursuit of knowledge, or is there more to it? How does funding shape its priorities? How might different cultural contexts shape our understanding of its purpose, and how is AI changing the way we approach it? What does all this mean for the edtech industry? In this article, Prof. John Traxler explores the purpose of research, questioning how knowledge is created, whose interests it serves and what it means for the future of education and educational technology.
What’s the Purpose of Research?
Author: Prof John Traxler, UNESCO Chair, Commonwealth of Learning Chair and Academic Director of the Avallain Lab
St. Gallen, September 25, 2026 – This blog echoes our earlier one titled ‘What’s the Purpose of Education?’, adopting similar perspectives and raising similar questions about the role and impact of AI. Education and research might both be understood as the pursuit of knowledge, though in both cases this is not quite the case, even if there were any clear consensus about what actually constituted ‘knowledge’.
For many people, research is often assumed to mean the gathering of information, facts and data. It does, however, also embrace something more theoretical, abstract or conceptual, something else that might constitute knowledge; not merely observing and recording the falling of apples from trees but reflecting on what these observations might mean, developing an understanding of gravity and using that understanding to predict the behaviour of other material bodies.
Defining Research
Several ideas spring from this more abstract or conceptual view of research. One is that the conclusions are somehow durable and general; it is not just about apples, and it is not just today. Another is that research implies re-search, searching again, for findings that will challenge or refine or refute earlier conclusions, as illustrated by Eddington’s observations of the 1919 solar eclipse, which provided evidence supporting Einstein’s refinement of Newtonian gravity. In that sense, the knowledge generated by research is only ever provisional; good until there’s better, durable but not permanent.
Research in this conceptual or abstract sense, however, embraces research on research itself, not just a search for better data and better theories but also a search for a better understanding of theories themselves, of concepts, of abstractions, of knowledge, questioning the questions.
This is sometimes portrayed as a greater criticality, questioning the meanings, language and methods of research, as well as the wider context in which it takes place. It also means considering researchers themselves; their motives, their options, their beliefs, their personalities, their backgrounds and their communities. We might ask, for example, why Newton had so much free time for speculation while so many of his contemporaries had so little, labouring perhaps as gardeners. Had their positions been reversed, what might their contributions to knowledge have been? Perhaps advances in fructivorous arboriculture rather than celestial mechanics.
The Modern Funding Landscape
Some of the more critical and contemporary questions about research continue to concern this wider context: who is funding it, and why are they funding it? Who benefits from it? Who loses from it? What is making it happen, or not happen? These questions bring us to the present day, prompting us to consider the arms trade, big pharma, market research and AI techbros; each funds vast amounts of research and raises questions about its purpose and motives.
Alongside this corporate research, there is also public funding for research, mostly in our universities. In our previous blog, we explored the ideal of education as a means of developing well-rounded individuals, drawing on the concepts of Bildung and the ‘renaissance man’. A similar ideal might once have been associated with university research: well-spoken, well-educated middle-class white men pursuing what we now call ‘blue skies’ or ‘curiosity-driven’ research. But if there was ever such a golden age, those days are over.
Public funding of research in many countries is now about national competitiveness, accounting for public money, bibliometric data such as citations, ‘taking ideas to market ’, and producing measurable ‘impact’. It is also about competition between individual researchers and their universities, encapsulated, for example, in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework.
These days, the purpose of research is whatever the funder says it is. As has been frequently remarked, we live in an era of ‘policy-based evidence formulation’, not ‘evidence-based policy formulation’, in which ‘curiosity-driven’ or ‘blue-sky’ research has no purpose.
One consequence of this research environment is that no one wants to back losers; funders do not want to be responsible for wasting public money, so riskier research questions struggle to get answered, and so do the uncomfortable ones. Whilst a complementary perspective holds that, in large commercially funded research projects, ‘these are doomed to succeed’; they can’t go wrong because of the prestige invested in them.
Utopian, Dystopian and Different Cultural Perspectives
These depictions lead to competing utopian and dystopian views of the purposes of research, comparable to those earlier ones of the purposes of education. The utopian may be the Olympian pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the greater good of humanity, undertaken by some noble elite. The dystopian, by contrast, is more likely the rush to fund any question that leads to some market advantage.
This, though, should encourage us to ask whether these perspectives are universal, or are they shaped by particular cultural and intellectual traditions? Equally, we should not assume that other traditions and cultures don’t share these ideas. Do these purposes look different elsewhere, away from globalised universities, organisations and institutions? Does the question of purpose take on a different meaning or is it even relevant in every context? Are ideas such as pursuing, questioning and extending knowledge shared?
Communities may understand, create, develop and share knowledge in different ways, encompassing the physical and social worlds as well as, in some traditions, the natural and spiritual. Rather than attempting to characterise these knowledge systems collectively, we might ask how different traditions broaden or challenge our understanding of what research is and what purposes it serves.
We might also consider what happens when knowledge traditions with different levels of institutional, economic or political power encounter one another. This raises questions about who benefits from knowledge and research, who controls it and how knowledge originating within particular communities is recognised and used.
The Role and Impact of AI in Research
So what is AI’s impact on research? Decades ago, I was told that exploiting a technical innovation happens in three phases: firstly, it is used to solve existing previously difficult problems; then to solve previously impossible ones; and finally to solve previously inconceivable ones. Recent workshops on the impact of AI on research suggest that we are mostly at the first stage, merely making existing research procedures and practices happen quicker, bigger, sooner and cheaper. Researchers are mostly just reacting to stay in the game and exploiting these new tools, though, of course, ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’, the boats being researchers’ competitors.
With tools like Anthropic’s Interviewer, which can interview thousands of people in days more competently than many human social scientists can in months, we are clearly entering the second phase. So how should researchers be addressing the third phase? When this happens, will it be changing the nature of knowledge, not merely rendering some of it obsolete but changing something fundamental? At this stage, it is, of course, impossible to conceive of the inconceivable, bringing to mind the Rumsfeld Matrix with its ‘unknown unknowns’.
Finally, what is the purpose of research for the edtech industry? It sits at the intersection of the purpose of education and the purpose of research and is a fluid and unstable compound of all the features of both, utopian and dystopian.
About Avallain
For more than two decades, Avallain has enabled publishers, institutions and educators to create and deliver world-class digital education products and programmes. Our award-winning solutions include Avallain Author, an AI-powered authoring tool, Avallain Magnet, a peerless LMS with integrated AI, and TeacherMatic, a ready-to-use AI toolkit created for and refined by educators.
Our technology meets the highest standards with accessibility and human-centred design at its core. Through Avallain Intelligence, our framework for the responsible use of AI in education, we empower our clients to unlock AI’s full potential, applied ethically and safely. Avallain is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type 2 certified and a participant in the United Nations Global Compact.
Find out more at avallain.com
_
Contact:
Daniel Seuling
VP Client Relations & Marketing
