Why technology is failing to change the face of education
This article was written as an assignment for the course “History of Technology Revolution” taught at Sciences Po Paris as part of the master’s program Digital, New Technology and Public Policy.
$6 billion dollars: that’s the global projected investment in ed-tech for 2018, up by about 70% from 2017. With the rapidly increasing number of startups entering the education market, and the amount of venture capital injected in the sector higher than ever, it would seem ed-tech is booming. In a 2016 article, TechCrunch went as far as claiming that “edtech is the next fintech”.
That’s an overstatement to say the least. Ed-tech investments may be growing, but are they really bringing significant changes in education? While higher-ed may have benefited from a real and impactful technology penetration, the K-12 market lags behind.
Is K-12 education tech-phobic? Is the tech industry education-phobic?
How can we explain that entrepreneurs face much greater barriers when trying to enter K-12 education than they do for other sectors?
Taking a look at the history of ed-tech can help us understand the dynamics the education ecosystem to try to answer the more important question: how can ed-tech catch up?
Historical perspective
The beginning of the 20th century saw the development of new instructional materials which relied on new technologies. As part of what is now referred to as the “Visual Instruction Movement”, films started being used for educational purposes, with motion picture projectors making their way into schools. With the advent of the radio in the 1920s, Visual became Audiovisual and the practice of relying on broadcasting media for education received increasing support as it allowed to present content in a concise and more realistic manner. Many saw the radio as the medium that would revolutionize education (indicating the inclination to over-enthusiasm for ed tech is nothing new, either…)
The first uses of computers in education date back to the 1950s with the development of Computer-Assisted Instruction programs (mostly by researchers at IBM). It wasn’t until the 80s, with the arrival of the microcomputers and their integration into education that we began to see a difference. Schools started engaging in pilot programs to create computer labs and teach students basic programing. At the time, Apple and Microsoft saw an opportunity to jump into the market, by providing schools with free devices (the Apple II) or software (Microsoft Office). By the mid-90s, most schools were equipped with computers, although their usage usually remained confined to drill and practice exercises or IT-related skills.
Looking back at the history of educational technology, it’s interesting (and pretty revealing) to see that some technologies that are currently being used in schools and seen as ‘innovative’ have actually been on the market for over two decades. Smart Boards, for instance, arrived in 1991. But it took years for them to penetrate schools — and much longer for them to actually be used efficiently. I remember when my high school started installing them in some classrooms, approximately in 2010: most of the time, they only served decoration purposes as teachers had no idea how to use them — and it’s probably not that different today. It seems the ed-tech movement progresses at two different paces: the ‘tech’ pace, i.e. the pace of development of new technologies, and the ‘ed’ pace, i.e. the pace at which these technologies are embraced by education. And the latter is much slower than the former. The issue here is not the lack of technology, but rather the lag between the advances happening in educational technology (softwares and solutions) and the adoption of these solutions by the education sector.
What can we learn from the history of educational technology? On the one hand, we’re witnessing a rapid development of new technologies and a massive growth in the number of entrepreneurs entering the K-12 market. It seems like when a cool technology arrives, there’s always a will to apply it in education. On the other hand, despite this increasing penetration of tech in the education market, it seems that the phenomenal transformation that the arrival of tech has brought about in other sectors was not mirrored in the K-12 education sector.
That said, the real question is: why has technology managed to revolutionize the way we do business, the way we communicate, the way we run electoral campaigns, and even the way we eat (with the development of food delivery apps for instance), but not the way we teach and learn?
Is the education system too rigid to allow the capitalization of tech?
It seems that most education systems in the developed world still lag in innovation and continue to resist change. Picture a classroom in the 50s: a blackboard, a teacher standing at the front talking to a group of students sitting in rows with their notebooks opened on their desks. Now picture a classroom today: replace the blackboard by a Smart Board, notebooks by laptops, and you’ve got what the education sector sees as ‘innovation’ and ‘change’. The issue here is a failure to understand that innovation doesn’t come from simply integrating gadgets in the traditional way of teaching, but leveraging the pedagogical opportunities brought about by new technologies. As Nicola Yelland, professor at Victoria University, puts it, technology integration does not come from simply providing students and teachers with computers, but from “creating contexts for authentic learning that use new technologies in integrated and meaningful ways to enhance the production of knowledge and the communication and dissemination of ideas”[1]. In other words, what matters is not just spending in technology but investing in technology. And it appears that most schools just spend, while most products offered by ed-tech companies require them to invest.
This could be attributed to a lack of investment culture in school administrations. While benefits of technology adoption are usually linked to increasing productivity, education doesn’t think in terms of productivity when it comes to teacher time. Larry Berger and David Stevenson, in their 2007 paper, explain that in education, “teacher time is viewed as a sunk cost (a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered) and therefore saving teacher time does not ‘count’ in economic terms”[2]. But saving teacher time, by leading to an increase in their instructional output, is expected to have effects on students’ performance, which should count for something.
It seems that the KPIs of ed-tech are defined in terms of obtaining technology for the sake of technology. They’re generally around the lines of “Percentage of classes using technology”, “Student to computer ratio”, etc. But what about KPIs that measure the impact of ed-tech on teachers’ instructional output, on how it is increasing students’ responsiveness and attention in class; on improving students’ understanding of class content; on catering for bespoke learning paths for each student to progress at their own pace?
Imagine introducing a technology based on natural language processing that is trained to correct tests or essays. To leverage the benefits of this technology, the freed-up teacher time should be dedicated to tasks with more added value, i.e. analyzing the tests results as opposed to simply correcting them. Teachers could then increase their instructional outputs by gaining a better understanding of students’ needs and finding ways to address them.
Today, it seems that many schools end up investing in some sort of technology just to tick a box, somehow succumbing to peer pressure. However, the real question of why invest in technology remains unanswered. There needs to be an upstream reflection on what the purpose of technology in education is. Investments need to be tied to an enhanced instructional or student output as well as to “teacher productivity”. Only with this change of mindset will schools be able to make impactful investments in technology.
Another factor that further impedes investment in innovative educational technologies is the presence of a “groove-in effect” inherent to technologies. This effect is simple, yet powerful — it’s one of the ways certain technologies manage to lock in a market. The idea is that once one adopts a specific product/solution and starts using it, they get familiar with it and eventually come to master it, making the switching cost to another solution very heavy (even if the other solution is better). Such groove-in effects appear to be particularly strong in the education sector. Adopting a new solution means that the whole school ecosystem (teachers, students, the administration) has to re-adapt. This represents substantial cost, both psychological (convincing reluctant teachers of the need to change their habits and get accustomed to a new product) and financial (providing training, maintenance, etc.). Hence locking schools into specific technology contracts and deterring them from switching to better technologies.
It would seem that the current culture in the education sector is not really compatible with the disruptive, innovative, tech world. But let’s dig deeper.
Sales cycles in the education sector are much longer than in other sectors, mainly due to complex decision-making processes with a large number of stakeholders involved (and I’m not even talking about the potential political tensions that can delay a purchase decision). The structure of sales cycles in education is such that even the best products can take years to sell. And return on investment can take much longer, making it hard for ed-tech entrepreneurs to attract funding. Venture capital funds being measured by their internal return rate, the time it takes to start seeing returns matters — and with ed-tech, it’s hard for venture capitalists to see how they can flip their investment. The promise of (rapid) profitability in education is pretty low, which results in ed-tech being considerably under-invested.
Some striking figures from QS’ whitepaper on ed-tech investment: in 2016, “EdTech received less investment from venture capital than the gaming industry… Yet education is 60 times the size of gaming”.
Basically, despite a considerable market opportunity, ed-tech as an investment is still seen as too risky, or not interesting enough. Even huge tech companies are investing in education as part of their CSR initiatives rather than as real investments — i.e. Google giving out ChromeBooks for free.
The exit valuation of ed-tech companies has historically been less than what they entered at, and even with this overvaluation, the exit valuation for ed-tech companies is still much lower than that for tech companies in general.
The Hack Education project has been tracking ed-tech funding since 2015. Two interesting trends come out of the 2017 edition:
- While the amount of worldwide investment made in ed-tech companies has increased, the number of deals and acquisitions has declined. This means the trend is moving towards bigger investments in a smaller number of companies, and less big companies buying small companies.
- The three areas that received most funding are: tutoring, student loans, and online education — in other words, areas that have nothing to do with K-12 education. Tutoring companies target not schools but parents, moving from a B2B to a B2C model. Online education firms target higher education students. It seems entrepreneurs need to pivot from the institutional K-12 target and adopt more opportunistic models to manage to attract funding.
All this brings us to a simple observation: ed-tech is not fulfilling its potential in K-12 education. Partly because schools haven’t defined what they really expect from technology integration, and partly because the business case for K-12 ed-tech cannot be measured on profitability. Two pretty hindering factors, and it doesn’t look like they’re changing anytime soon.
Can ed-tech catch up in the K-12 market ?
The only way ed-tech can catch up is through a true paradigm shift that needs to be mandated by the government. The specificities of the education sector are such that we can’t expect the private sector to carry this shift alone. Although all companies would most definitely benefit from the increase in productivity that would stem from redefining the way we teach with technologies, this benefit is too vague and long-term for them to take seriously. There needs to be investment on the part of the government. Today, the lack of public funding for R&D in education is striking. In France, for instance, the budget invested for research in education is 20 to 30 times less than that allocated for the health-care sector, although public spending in both sectors is equivalent.[3]
Innovation doesn’t create itself, it needs opportunity — and there’s no opportunity without money.
It’s funny how everyone agrees to say that there’s a problem with our education systems, and that technology should (or not, depending on which side of the debate you’re on) solve this problem, yet no one is willing to take that responsibility. Technology integration needs to be a shared responsibility between ed-tech companies and stakeholders within the education sector. Because appropriate integration requires identifying a purpose and role for technology in education. And we can’t expect the private sector to define that purpose alone. We need to build collaborative ecosystems in education where different stakeholders work together to understand needs, identify expected outcomes, and design tools that support these outcomes. Governments need to provide the means for such ecosystems to arise, for instance through funds created by public-private partnerships.
This implies redefining KPIs in schools to answer the bigger question, the “Why”: why do we need technology in schools? The whole purpose of education needs to be re-examined in light of the digital age, in order to understand the real value technology can create. Our economy is going through a paradigm shift that is radically impacting our societies and lives — what about education? Sir Ken Robinson provides some good insights as to how we can change education paradigms. He explains that our current education system is modeled on the interests of the industrialization era, with teaching methods following a production-line mentality with conformity and standardization at the heart of it. But we’re not in the industrial age anymore. And the shift our society is going through calls for changing the way we think about human capacity and skills, and consequently, changing the way we educate children.
Take a look at the impressive transformation companies have undergone over the past 60 years. In Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy, William Lazonick describes how the development of new technologies, which greatly disrupted the traditional model of the workplace, brought companies to move from the ‘OEBM’ (Old Economy Business Model) to a ‘NEBM’ (New Economy Business Model) whose characteristics were more in line with the digital age.
It’s time for this shift to happen in education. What should the ‘New Economy Education Model’ look like? That’s what we need to be defining as a society. And as long as governments don’t answer this question, technology won’t succeed in transforming education.
[1] Nicolas Yelland, “Changing worlds and new curricula in the knowledge era”, Education Media International, vol.43, n°2, June 2006, p.122.
[2] Larry Berger, David Stevenson, “K-12 entrepreneurship: slow entry, distant exit”, 2007.
[3] François Taddéi, “Vers une société apprenante : rapport sur la recherche et développement de l’éducation tout au long de la vie”, March 2017, p.15
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