Can Technology Ameliorate Education Inequality?

Education has long been a major stumbling block of developing nations' ambitions to create sustainable economic growth and lift their people to higher standards of living. I have written before about the clear links between educational attainment and poverty, as well as on which national models of education have proven most effective over the long-term at creating well-rounded and productive graduates. What I haven't touched on though is how developing nations can go about cultivating such educational success. The reason for this is that the answers to this question are complex and multifaceted, and thus I haven't always had a simple answer. However, what I have always posited is that technology is – given prevailing socio-economic challenges – the only feasible means for such countries to bridge the gap. So how exactly can education technology help ameliorate education inequality? And where might even the best solutions still fall short?

Let me start with the first question: education technology solutions – or edtech for short – are first and foremost more cost efficient at scale than traditional learning resources. High-quality educational resources could be distributed uniformly across a given national or regional system like never before. For instance, say a country has a shortage of qualified teachers, an efficient learning management solution could allow an entire class or even multiple schools to be taught by the same teacher, who has the proven credentials needed to impart the core curriculum successfully. An illustration where this may be applicable is in my home nation of South Africa, where it has been revealed that 79% of the country's year 6 mathematics teachers were classified as possessing knowledge levels below the evaluation level at which they were teaching. Evidently this results in a system where our young scholars fall far behind their wealthier (private school) peers in standardized-assessments and holistic academic achievement – perpetuating the cycle of inequality. While virtual teaching for primary concepts may arguably not be an ideal pedagogy, it may be necessary to bridge the student to qualified-teacher gap.

Another significant issue in developing nations is that of access to learning materials. Fortunately this is a problem that lends itself perfectly to edtech solutions, and thus, understandably, was one of the first edtech tools to gain traction. Yet, even in a country like South Africa – which certainly has an above average education budget for a developing nation – many students are left without access to textbooks. According to South Africa's Department of Basic Education, there are provinces in South Africa where 30% of year 6 learners do not have any access to the respective home language or mathematics textbooks. E-textbooks platforms provide a simple solution to this. Digital textbooks can be allocated far cheaper than traditional hardcopies (including the amortized capital expenditure of tablet devices for students without adequate smartphones). For instance, e-textbooks eliminate the delivery costs of new textbooks each year, which account for a large percentage of the overall expenditure of textbooks – particularly in rural areas. One South African edtech startup in particular, Snapplify, has tackled this exact issue with great success. The startup was founded in 2011 and has since grown into Africa’s largest e-book aggregator and distributor, with over 350,000 titles from over 250 publishers on their platform. Furthermore, during the early stages of the pandemic, the company launched 'Free Access,' a program allowing any student complimentary access to thousands of ebooks until the end of 2020 – an initiative that illustrated the potential of edtech solutions to solve education inequality.

Moving into tertiary education, universities and technical colleges have arguably embraced digital transformation the most out of any tier of education. This may be in large part down to the age of their scholars, who tend to be in the 18 to 25 year old range and consequently have the diligence to complete their courses remotely. Furthermore, such scholars often have other responsibilities, such as work or young families, and thus are also more suited to part-time, often asynchronous online course schedules. For me the most famous example of this is Lambda School, the online coding college that condenses a 4 year computer science degree into a 1 year virtual program that has sent countless graduates to work at Fortune 100 companies thanks to the edtech's respected approach. Even more impressively, Lambda students don't pay anything upfront to attend. Instead, the company has popularized the Income Share Agreement (ISA) approach, whereby students only start paying Lambda back once they begin their first job, often over 900 hours in full-time training later! This model is gaining popularity in emerging markets too, with a nascent South Africa startup like Zaio, aiming to implement a similar concept in Africa, where the demand for digital skills is growing at an exponential rate due to the dearth of trained graduates.

While these developments undeniably support edtech's ability to foster greater equality in education, it would be remiss of me to not also highlight the components of effective education where even the most innovative of technologies may always fall short. These components include the vital support systems and environments that exist outside of the school, such as role models, family assistance with homework, and access to basic necessities such as shelter, food, and electricity. In The costs of inequality: Education’s the one key that rules them all, Ronald Ferguson, a faculty co-chair at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has spent his career studying every major facet contributing to the educational achievement gap, argues that “unequal outcomes,” “are from, to a large degree, inequality in life experiences.” Effectively, studies have shown that the multitude of factors that influence a child's upbringing at home, ultimately, plays a significant role in their educational success, regardless of the quality of their school or the educational resources at their disposal. Many nonprofit organizations have identified this systematic driver of educational inequity too; for instance, a Massachusetts based nonprofit called the Family Dinner Project facilitates families to come together around the dinner table, with such interactions proving to develop better reading skills, contribute to higher grade-point averages, and – amongst other things – cultivate improved resilience and self-esteem. Similarly, an educational nonprofit that I form a part of, the Litoro Foundation, equips each of its scholarship recipients with both an academic tutor and career mentor to help them adapt to the rigors of their improved educational environments in the hours outside of school, where such support structures may not exist.

Pictured from left to right: Caroline (tutor), Michael (mentor), Frank (Litoro scholar) and Thato (tutor)

All these factors considered, I do believe that education technology can provide a significantly better foundation with which to tackle education inequality. Furthermore, the pandemic induced shift this past year towards accelerated technology adoption has served as a much-needed catalyst for the sector, with PitchBook data reporting that edtech startups globally raised over $10 billion in 2020, up substantially from the $4.7 billion raised in 2019. With this in mind though, as touched on, technology may never truly facilitate educational equality (and to an even larger degree educational equity) given the holistic demands of education outside of the ordered confines of the classroom. This dilemma was summed up aptly by Adam Ryan on a tweet when he said that "the future of education will have an equal emphasis on convenience and community" – and encouragingly, there are more solutions than ever working towards this.