Whither Technology In Education: A Christmas Tale For Education Policymakers

? December 2022

“The contents in this article are my personal opinions and may not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues at Tablet Academy, nor of our partners, all of whom are working tirelessly to improve the use of technology to transform education for all.”?

Introduction

Talented students, whatever age or background, are the key to successful educational institutions, but how can this be achieved when the institution may be woefully lacking in the use of the technology it has deployed by a lack of training of teachers and students in its use for the benefit of all stakeholders?

On the advice of consultants or others, many institutions purchase copious amounts of technology, assuming that providing every student and teacher with an iPad, Android, or Windows device will significantly impact academic achievements. Through this article, I hope to share my opinion on what I believe to be one of the most catastrophic falsehoods in education. Having been involved commercially and academically in the technology field to support education for almost 45 years in the UK and other countries, I have witnessed many headteachers, multi-academy trust CEOs, education departments, and other advocates adopt these strategies without providing the key stakeholders of teachers, administrators and students the necessary skills to use the technology effectively, and in doing so have achieved nothing more than an Emperor’s New Clothes look to their school.

To date, I have found NO reputable empirical evidence proving that financial spending by a government or institution to purchase and deploy technology alone has made one iota of difference to students’ academic achievements.

Take, for example, the government’s reaction to supporting education during lockdowns. Laptops were given to vulnerable students with potentially little thought given to safeguarding; teachers were left to perform remote teaching, some without the necessary training to do this effectively; lessons were planned, in many instances, with little thought given to the psychological differences between remote and face-to-face teaching; millions of taxpayers money spent on creating even more online resources when excellent sufficient free resources from the BBC, Kahn Academy, and many other providers already existed; and government wasting ￡43m of contingency money to form a new education quango, Oak National Academy, with Michael Gove as an adviser to the board.?https://schoolsweek.co.uk/ministers-set-aside-43m-for-oak-national-academy/

Like many, the UK government supported getting primary and secondary schools into the cloud, with assistance from Microsoft and Google jointly, but again with minimum government training for teachers on how to teach and none for students on how to learn effectively in a remote environment.

Across the world, the outcome of such ill-thought-out strategies has been disastrous, not just for one but two generations of young people who lost an entire year of learning by relevant stakeholders simply not providing them, nor their educators, with the necessary skills to learn and teach remotely using the tools that the new technology offers. In higher education, some students even went so far as looking to claim compensation or refunds of tuition fees for lost learning support.

If evidence is required, look at the numbers. During COVID, Tablet Academy, as one of many education technology providers, trained more than 45,000 teachers in England on effectively teaching using Teams or Google Classroom, with some funding from the government initiative, but mostly from Microsoft and Google who throughout the pandemic supported education with masses of free training sessions given by experienced educators.

But enough of the doom and gloom. After all, it is Christmas with the New Year approaching.?

So, what is the way forward?

The issue is not whether we use technology but how we use it. A debate indeed that has been ongoing, and in my view distorted, since the invention of the printing press, and possibly even before that. Surely, it is time to reach beyond such debates and focus on the deeper social issues underlying our technological choices and the implementation strategies our educational institutions deploy. We need to frame the use of educational technology in a much broader context because such issues are primarily not technical ones. They are linked to the very core of why education systems exist.

They should reflect the changing relationship between society and the life skills required to compete in an economy that is becoming ever-dependent on its relationship with, and dependency on, technology to survive and grow. Such changes also have a broader impact equally on academic and vocational career paths. The resolution of these issues and the evolution of educational technology, and its use, go hand in hand.?

One way to ensure that we support our young people through this 4th industrial revolution, and a revolution it is, not any form of evolution as some may think, is to provide them, and the professionals that teach them, with the necessary 21st-century digital life skills to navigate and exploit the metaverse, in all its guises, as skillfully as possible.

In the words of Henrik von Scheel, noted as one of the fathers of the 4th industrial revolution, “It’s the biggest structural change of the past 250 years — a transformation of scale, scope and complexity, unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”

The face of the 4th Industrial Revolution has been taking place since the start of the 21st century. As Nokia puts it, ¨Its transformational power comes from marrying advanced production and operations techniques with digital technologies to create connected enterprises that use data to drive intelligent actions in the physical world. ¨

Many organisations, including education institutions, see the promise of Industry 4.0 to become: faster, smarter, more sustainable, cheaper, and more productive - with its staff altering their work/life balance for the better. What’s hard is making that promise a reality - a promise that, without a revolution in education, is impossible. It will require new ways of delivering how we support a student′s learning journey. How we teach, how our students learn, and how we measure the attainment of knowledge and skills. I believe such changes will include the use of new deep pedagogic and didactic models whose execution would be unimaginable without the use of technology.

How do we ensure successful teaching and learning in the 4th industrial age?

Take, for example, our reliance on examinations to measure success and aptitude. This model of gaining an insight into choosing the right person for a job based on their knowledge and skills has changed little since 605 CE when the ancient Chinese government organised an ‘Imperial Examination’ which was offered nationwide to select the right people for government positions.

In the era of Artificial Intelligence, albeit still in its infancy yet immensely powerful, why are we still reliant on external human examiners reading through scrawled text, to extract the fundamental concepts explained by a student, and assess its level of accuracy???Even worse, why do we have valuable teachers spend their time putting their students through the tortuous activity of sitting down with pen and past examination papers practising to pass the ‘actual’ one, whilst they invigilate the examination like a latter-day Mr. Bumble during mealtime.

In today′s age, technology such as AI should be used to deliver, proctor, and grade examinations. Freeing teachers and other invigilators to focus their precious time on students who are most in need.

There are many such systems already in existence and are being used in education worldwide by institutions that understand the importance of preparing young people, be they destined for the world of academia or work, to become productive members of society whilst also using technology to free up educators.

What can the future offer institutions today?

We have known for many years that technology has so much to offer education if only politicians and government departments took it seriously. I am not just talking about the delivery of teaching by 25-year-old VLE/LMS technology or the automatic/semi-automatic marking of assessments and examinations. I am talking about using technology to revolutionise and transform the entire education system in a similar way that other sectors harness it. To free up teacher’s time, allowing them to focus on providing much-needed care, both pastoral and academic, to those students that need it;??to increase the productivity of all staff by automating mundane tasks, allowing for more cost-efficient institutions to free up finances that can be deployed elsewhere and to readjust the work/life balance of our teachers and administration staff; to connect and communicate with parents, carers, and other key stakeholders; to use AI systems to provide?‘intelligence’ on how well each student, department, and institutions is faring in the delivery of outcomes, using early warning systems that can indicate when intervention is required and at what level; and most importantly to give students not only access to technology, but the skills to use it wisely, ethically, and socially responsibly.?

Across the ages, such futures have been the goal of many of us in the world of educational technology; academics, technologists, and educators alike. Unlike the enormous advances that technology has brought us in the way we shop; the way goods are manufactured; the way we manage our finances; the advances in medicine and medical procedures; the way we communicate; even the way we quench our thirst for knowledge, no matter how mundane the question; one of the main barriers to making learning in the 4th industrial age a reality is just one immovable force, the constantly changing policy of successive governments and the fear of change by politicians. Something that must change if we are to move ahead.

In conclusion, let me leave you with two things to reflect upon.

Firstly, an image of how things could be, and secondly, an example of how government policy can consign to the archives the very best of intentions.

Firstly: A tale of two cities

Conjure up in your mind’s eye, if you will, a picture of an operating theatre in any modern hospital. Look around at the amount of technology available and how our dedicated medical professionals use it to save or extend our lives. Now compare this with an image of a classroom in even the most modern school, looking also at the technology and how it is used to prepare our young people for the world of academia or work in the next 10-20 years of the 21st?Century. The differences are striking.

Secondly: Maybe a step too far

This is a personal reflection of my experience of working with a government to transform education using technology. Twenty years ago, in early 2002, the then UK Education Secretary Estelle Morris (now Baroness Morris of Yardley), herself a former teacher and like her predecessor David Blunkett (now Baron Blunkett) looking to change the face of UK education, brought together a group of leading thinkers in the field of technology to support education, including, I am proud to say, myself.??The aim of this ‘Post 16 e-Learning Strategy?Task Force’ was to examine how e-Learning could enhance and improve learning opportunities for people in colleges and participating in lifelong learning.

Its brief was not to cover schools nor higher education but to focus on the following:

• Ways of increasing participation using technology and e-Learning
• The potential for a personalised e-Learning curriculum
• Flexible access and delivery to reflect individual choices and diverse patterns of learning
• Progression routes to further study using lifelong learning skills and attainment measurement support tools
• The potential for work-based learning
• The training and development of tutors in new ways to teach using technology

The task force set to work and consulted with many individuals from the technology industry, colleges, employers, and quangos. It published its findings and recommendation in July 2002 under the title ‘Getting on with IT – The Post 16 E-Learning Strategy Taskforce Report” and contained, in brief, the following recommendations:

1. By 2010, ALL citizens should have basic ICT skills as an entitlement, including a component on achieving more using technology and lifelong e-Learning.
2. That the government expand the concept of Curriculum Online for Schools into post-16 learning, i.e., A College Online, to provide access to high-quality and relevant online learning content.
3. That the quality, relevance, and accessibility of learning materials available to employers be developed and supported, and that government financial incentives be available for individuals to take up online work-based learning.
4. That funding is provided to develop a national tutor mentoring network to act as a flexible and responsive support system for those working with e-learners and these mentors act as champions of the digital world and share best practices with colleagues through professional development.

Interestingly, if one were to read the report today, not much has changed since its publication 20 years ago. In particular, with respect to my comments that technology alone is not the solution but needs to be supplemented with the training of educators on how to transform their teaching, and the training of students on how to use technology to support their learning journey through the education system and beyond.

Politicians should take note of these statistics, copied from our 20-year-old report in terms of funding allocation, and reflect on your current budget allocation:

• 74% of funding was devoted to infrastructure
• 23% of funding was devoted to content.
• 3% was devoted to skills development and training of educators.?

For those who wish to read a copy of the full report and see how little has improved in the past 20 years, you will have great difficulty in finding a copy. The recommendations may have been too radical at the time. However, I found a copy in the VOCEDplus research library in Australia: https://www.voced.edu.au/content/ngv%3A28086 for those interested.

My final plea

Having seen that some challenges still existed 10 years after the publication of ¨Getting On With IT¨, I decided to act and am now privileged to be working with like-minded individuals who not only see the potential of technology to change education, but actively work to support its implementation, with a 4th industrial age ethos and educator training at its heart. These individuals include industrialists, technologists, former teachers, headteachers, and other stakeholders responsible for managing our schools. But sadly, no politicians.

Alongside partners and colleagues, I now assist Multi-Academy Trusts, schools of all sizes, regional education authorities, and Ministries of Education across the globe in understanding the possibilities and assisting them in creating a Digital Transformation Strategy for their organisations or countries.

In summary, my plea to current and future politicians on all sides of the divide is that after 20 years, it is time to listen to and act upon recommendations from experts in the field who have a vision for the future that focuses on using technology to revolutionise education, and implement it to provide a society of global economic growth, diversity, opportunities for all, and is fit for the current and future generation of 21st-century learners so desperately needed to lead the 4th Industrial Age.

Professor Steve Molyneux, Fuerteventura, 26 Dec 2022.