The promise and perils of education technology.

Technology is a great gift. Our life is significantly different today than it was in the early nineties. The advent of the world wide web and the growth of online interactions has created tremendous opportunities for the world of education. The old educational model of an in-person teacher and printed materials has now been upended.

This technological revolution has opened up the promise of universal access to quality education. The barriers of distance have been eradicated. The in-person teacher has given way to teachers who can be online and reach significant numbers of students regardless of where they are. And printed materials ( like the old printed media) is increasingly available online.

The promise of personalized, digital learning experience is very enticing. The democratization of education has opened up tremendous avenues for students to access material and teachers from anywhere in the world.

But have these great advancements resulted in better learning outcomes? Just because a technology can do something, it does not mean it should be used to do it. Often technologists will come up with great new concepts and educators will be enticed by these new technologies. However the central question is always … is the student learning ? That is the ultimate test. Technology is an enabler and can be leveraged smartly to help educators improve learning outcomes.

Right during and after the dotcom boom, several EdTech ventures were formed and access and scale were the holy grails of this effort. I was fortunate to have worked in this industry at that time and like everyone else was excited about this promise. However, learner attrition was high, especially in self directed eLearning. Self-directed learning requires tremendous motivation on the part of the student and an ability to figure out learning strategies without the help of a mentor or coach. Yes it is cheaper and often more engaging than traditional methods, but does it work?

Many of the consumer models in the EdTech world are mostly created for self-directed learning as this offers tremendous scale. However, all these models suffer from tremendous churn. The churn is caused by a lack of true learning outcomes. Learners are hungry to learn and they get excited when they see new methods that harness today’s great technology. But are often disappointed when learning outcomes are not what they thought they would be. The subscription length of an EdTech consumer is very short, often less than four months. Many of these EdTech ventures are therefore not profitable. Ultimately like all business, customers will pay you a good price if you deliver value. Often that is not the case with many EdTech ventures.

The solution lies in a laser focus on student learning outcomes. Measuring these outcomes and adjusting learning programs to obtain better results. Offering gradations of human touch depending on the task at hand and the learning objectives to be achieved. At my company we rarely sell a subscription without some human touch. Human touch can start with a companion coach we call the dynamizer and can be more intensive with teacher-led group or 1:1 classes. We harness technology to provide online human touch. We let the technology do what it does best - remember the student’s progress, grade students by providing self-checks and provide ability to do homework or personalized drills. But let the teacher do what they do best. Use technology to take away the drudgery from teaching, but enhance teaching by enabling them to focus on things that technology cannot do.

This laser focus on learning outcomes and adjusting solutions to enable better outcomes is the only way to fulfill the amazing promise of educational technology. Not easy to do, but extremely fulfilling when we can achieve such outcomes and change the lives of our students.