That challenge was a main topic of discussion Tuesday at the annual ASU+GSV Summit, in a seminar led by Amira Learning CEO Mark Angel, Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) President Paul LeBlanc, Edmentum President and CEO Jamie Candee, Rochester Public Schools Superintendent Kent Pekel and Tyton Partners Managing Director Kristen Fox. The discussion, titled “Has EdTech Really Changed Anything? Can EdTech Drive Results in a Brave New World?” centered on the latest capabilities of new ed-tech tools and how those new tools have changed the way educators approach instruction.
According to LeBlanc, efforts to digitize instruction and make schools and universities more tech-integrated could allow educators to “fundamentally rethink the system.” He said that advances in AI technologies like ChatGPT and other similar generative AI tools may play a key role in providing students with more personalized one-on-one academic support, among other uses. Another major shift has been an increased emphasis on using data to drive instructional design and student academic support services, he said.
“You have to change the system to unleash the technology. Technology by itself can’t change the system,” he said. “We spend enormous amounts of time talking about content and curriculum and delivery systems, but I don’t know that we talk enough about the ways we have to center critical human relationships in the work, and then use the technology to scale [up] everything else.”
Fox agreed that one of the most notable changes made to education to come out of COVID-19 and the mass adoption of new ed-tech tools for online learning has been an increased focus on using data to drive instruction. She said this can help meet one of the biggest challenges for teachers with large class sizes: addressing performance gaps without much information on each new cohort of students, such as which ones are first-generation college students or whether they need additional support.
“One of the things I think is an amazing evolution is that access to more data about [students] lets instructors in K-12 or higher ed intervene at scale,” she said.
According to Candee, schools and universities could not have predicted recent tech advances 15 years ago, nor the role that ed-tech tools would eventually play in enhancing instruction to make learning more personalized and immersive. She said the pandemic compelled education policymakers on the local, state and federal levels to embrace ed-tech adoption and investments in closing the digital divide for students without Internet access or devices for online learning.
However, she said, “we still have a long way to go” when it comes to harnessing the full potential of emerging ed-tech tools. Pekel agreed, adding that recent investments in K-12 and higher ed digital learning could enable educators and officials to “begin to talk about fundamental changes in the learning process.”
“We still have a lot of opportunity,” Candee said. “Now it’s about how we continue to focus on educators and help them realize the promise of using technology as their teaching assistant.”
But in order to see what ed-tech tools work best for a variety of functions, Angel said the education system will need to be more open to trying new things. He said schools, universities and ed-tech developers “need to accept the fact that success is driven by failure.”
“What I’ve seen over many, many years is that people tend to underestimate technology until the moment arrives when it finds its destiny in a particular place. We saw this with speech recognition. For years and years, speech recognition didn’t work, and we got to a tipping point and now it’s pretty ubiquitous,” he said, adding that he believes we have reached a threshold in the development of AI and its ed-tech applications. “You look at the phone with 5G networks and aircraft fighter jets in their fifth generation, but the truth is, ed tech is still in its early days of those generational shifts.”
