By Natalia Ingebretsen Kucirkova, Professor of Early Childhood Development at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and The Open University, UK
The 2023 GEM Report on technology and education will address a new frontier in EdTech: educational technology that is based on scientific evidence and is designed with equitable principles of participation. As we work towards this vision, however, and build concrete actions on digital education at the Transforming Education Summit this September, it is worth reminding ourselves of some common misconceptions.
Measuring and documenting evidence
Educational researchers know that evidence of learning does not equal evidence of curriculum delivery. It follows that evidence of learning achievement does not equal evidence of learning access. And yet, when we look at how EdTech successes have been conceptualized and EdTech investments justified, we see these misconceptions embraced by many EdTech popularisers. For example, in the current discourse of COVID-19 learning loss, lack of access to online learning is used synonymously with lack of learning progress.
Another misconception concerns what researchers call hierarchies of evidence. In a traditional hierarchy of evidence, quantifiable and experimental effects, especially those delivered through randomised controlled trials, count as the golden standard of evidence. Over the past years, however, interdisciplinary research groups have developed integrated levels of evidence models that include qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods evidence levels. It follows that evidence of EdTech’s impact needs to include more than a calculation of effect sizes. For starters, it needs to account for teachers’ and children’s socio-cultural identities as they embed the technology in their communities. Given the massive scale and long-term presence of EdTech in global learning environments (the EdTech market worth is projected to be $404bn by 2025), a scrutiny of the ethical practices followed by EdTech businesses also warrants a consideration.
Equitable by design
The pandemic years showed that accelerated prototype development and global scale-up of EdTech failed to support all children equally. During COVID-19 lockdowns, EdTech use dramatically intensified inequality among students. Another misconception is that EdTech can be successfully rolled out using top-down approaches. Equity can be only achieved if the voices of all community members are included. In the case of EdTech it means that children’s views need to be actively incorporated into EdTech design discussions. The examples in the Kids Included Report illustrate the many inspiring ways in which some creative EdTech companies involve children into design decision-making. The EdTech industry should treat these examples as standard, not as exceptions.
Furthermore, equitable EdTech models do not selectively recruit individual teachers as tech ambassadors but rather honour the voices of all educators. The past decade of many failed EdTech interventions has spread an analogue nostalgia among educators. Teachers want a more diverse ecosystem that relies on tried-and-tested EdTech services (e.g. learning management and videoconferencing systems) rather than single products (e.g. state-level rollout of Chromebooks). Informational asymmetries between school leaders and EdTech producers (especially within the AI EdTech sector), make it hard for schools to critically evaluate EdTech’s value propositions. To address the asymmetries, EdTech should include teachers as genuine partners who can authentically adjust EdTech to their classroom needs.
A new decade of EdTech
As highlighted in the recent reports by Nesta UK, the Brookings Institute and UNICEF Innocenti and the LEGO Foundation, EdTech requires a culture change if it is to truly deliver equitable and evidence-based education. The vision embedded in the reports makes it clear that the past decade was not a lost decade. It put us on a better footing for funding EdTech that is driven by evidence and co-developed by people on the ground. The silver lining of the sobering accounting of the pandemic is that it has motivated governments, teachers and EdTech developers to commit to new habits necessary for an EdTech culture change. Hopefully this will be reflected in the outcomes of Action Track 4 on digital education being looked at this September at the Transforming Education Summit. The culture change becomes real when evidence and equity move beyond buzzwords to concrete requirements for action.
